Random Saturday Photo

I was being lazy on Saturday =(

Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru

It’s embarrassing and simply unjustifiable that I’d been putting off this anime for so long — “And Yet the Town Moves” is a classic Shaft’s anime and a must watch for any fan of this studio.

It’s pretty much impossible to describe this show. It’s Shaft at its best, “Pani Poni Dash” Shaft, “Mariaholic” Shaft! Okay, maybe it’s one step below the “best”, there’s Monogatari series after all =) We have a few characters doing… things. That’s about it. Yeah, if you squeeze your eyes hard enough it’s possible to make out a love line but let’s be honest, in this anime that line is virtually nonexistent. There’s no heat in the character’s romantic relationships, they are lukewarm, body-temperature nya.

Instead, it’s better to talk about the important stuff. For example, about Chiaki Omigawa, who gave the voice to the main heroine, Arashiyama. Or about the ending!

Or about the countless jokes and puns in the anime. Or awkward and odd situations the characters find themselves in all the time. Or about Arashiyama’s dog, Josephine.

To me, Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru is almost perfect. It’s short, beautifully animated, will give you a few catch phrases (“Grandma is going to hit the slots” is the one I admire the most for no reason) — and it’s weird! In a good sense of this word. A show that kicks off in a maid cafe finishes with scenes of the Japanese (yes, particularly Japanese, don’t mess up the line you’re standing in) afterlife. You know, that ordinary slice-of-life story with aliens. Just a normal Shaft anime =)

Playing with my new shiny toy =) NHL ’20 feels surprisingly different comparing to ’19 and I can’t even point my finger at what’s actually changed.

Usually I post pictures of some amazing new beer I buy but today it’s going to be (tada!) — coffee! I drink crazy amounts of coffee every day, so it’s interesting to check out something new. Next time also going to try out Black Rifle Coffee — it was sold out on amazon and getting it delivered from their site would’ve cost a fortune.

I bet once in a while everyone thinks “I wish I knew how to say something dirty using Scottish expressions”.

So.. there you go — learning English with Alestorm!

Expressions we got acquainted with today: Fannybaw, and Boaby.

It’s probably a sign that my brain has suffered an irreparable damage and its activity is slowly but steadily deteriorating but I recently began watching lots of youtube videos. NHL streamers, bass guitar and guitar players, guys making anime videos, guys making “best 10 hentai anime of 1973” videos and, goddamn, video game streamers! Of course, I also watch videos with cute cats, dogs and otters. Youtube has a surprisingly decent recommendation system (much, much better than netflix, for example) and it’s super easy to get lost in that sea of well and not-so-well done videos.I can even turn off a tab with political videos, which are, apparently, mandatory otherwise.

P.S. The only question is whether I should feel shame watching Japanese tik-tok highlights?

Were playing today a few games and I decided to apply my amazing editing skillz and demonstrate how dominant I am in this game =) Well, sometimes I mess up badly, but mostly I’m super dominant, yeah.

Gundam: The Origin TV

My relationships with the Gundam franchise are relatively long and relatively complicated =)

The first Gundam show I watched was SEED and I still would rank it among the best mecha shows ever created. I got hooked, claimed that I was a Gundam fan and began watching other anime with the same magical word in their title. Pretty quickly though I reached a turning point, Zero =) Honestly, there were just too many Gundam series, they were too long and (surprise!) — not all of them were as awesome as the one I fell in love with. After that I’ve been watching them on and off, liked some — Iron-Blooded Orphans, for instance and disliked some, stuff as usual.

So, with all that enormous experience I have I can say that The Origin is one of the best things that happened with the Gundam universe in a while. It’s beautiful — turned out that the old-school character design and that, you know, 70-80s expressive animation look amazing when done with modern graphics otherwise. It’s about maybe not the most popular but certainly the best-known man of the entire franchise, Red Comet Char, and shows the events which led to his rise as a legend of Zeon. It’s fast and simply interesting to watch! Sometimes even a visually great anime can be an absolute drag, right, Gundam Unicorn? (Well, to be honest, I need to finish it first before making such bold statements, but still)

Of course, it might be a bit funny to listen to Char’s or Amuro’s voice in this show, because their 声優 are the same who voiced the 0079 and, well, it was 40 years ago =) But that even adds up to the warm nostalgic atmosphere of this anime.

So, maybe Gundam The Origin will be become the second turning point for me, after all there are countless shows I haven’t seen yet =)

Steve posted a video of what we’ve been working on recently =)

WIPS test of the new voxel-based unified lighting system. No lightmaps! Characters/Environment/Everything lit from unified voxel values sampled in world-space (jargon party) pic.twitter.com/IL4uNLRpcW

— Steve Sinclair (@sj_sinclair) May 8, 2020

We were heavily inspired by this awesome Josh Hobson’s talk and the first test of this technology was based on pretty much a straightforward implementation of what they did on God of War =)

Minare-san is a godsend!

Even her insults are… something!