Time to vote on our Spring season shows and actually build a schedule.
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Notes: We started by voting on shows for next season and…it looked like we had a fairly clear division between shows that were going to make it and those which weren't, with no real need for re-samplers. A complicating factor was the discovery the voting spreadsheet once again didn't have weighted episode calculations set up for every row, but that just meant the 3-vote shows missed out (as usual).
We didn't need any re-samplers, though we're going to start some shows again from the beginning (e.g. Sentenced To Be a Hero episode 1, which neither Adam nor Brian remembered). That freed us up to watch an episode of Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider and sample a bunch of new shows, of which Release that Witch! seemed the most promising (Food Diary of Miss Maid and Go for It, Nakamura-kun! were also fun, but didn't have as much obvious potential to support another 10+ episodes).
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Notes: Guy wasn't feeling well tonight so he decided to stay home. Alan suggested that we not try watching any of our ongoing shows (Slayers Revolution/Evolution-R, Ergo Proxy), instead sampling new shows which would be easy to stream before eventually screening the one (very long) feature we voted in: Cosmic Princess Kaguya.
Regarding those sampler: Mistress Kanan seemed to go over pretty well, while Petals of Reincarnation came across as edgelord Nobunagun. Monster Eater's short runtime meant it didn't really have the breathing room to distinguish itself from other entries in its genre.
Our Spring planning looked a bit like this:
We put together our Spring schedule last week.
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Notes: 1st paragraph sample notes
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Notes: 1st paragraph sample notes.
MediaOCD put up their newest Discotek Deep Dive in the last day or so.
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There's one of those Sentai Filmworks sales going on. They seem to be expanding from just home video into some merchandise for a few of their more popular shows.
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Notes: Guy wasn't feeling well this week, so he missed out on samplers themed for...drinking and getting drunk. Botan Kamina Fully Blossoms When Drunk seemed sort of fun.
We have a bunch of witch and magical girl samplers this weekend because it's Walpurgisnacht, at least through Friday. Even if the actual occasion doesn't ring a bell you might remember Walpurgisnacht as the mega-witch from Madoka Magica, the one that caused Homura to pull out the big guns.
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Notes: In this week's Polar Opposites we got the second clear indication Suzuki reads Shonen Jump with a reference to Hunter x Hunter's Phinks (from the Spiders). The prior reference from a couple weeks ago was to Chainsaw Man.
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Notes: After we sampled LuluttoLily on Youtube, we tried switching over to Crunchyroll, but all attempts to stream our sampler refused to work. So we tried falling back to HiDive for Yowayowa Sensei but it didn't want to stream either. So we watched Ichijyoma Mankitsu Gurashi!, since that was also available for streaming on Youtube.
It turned out NoScript was making CR (and HiDive?) streaming not work, so we were able to watch Ergo Proxy after all. We decided to finish it out tonight instead of waiting until next week for the final episode, so that meant time for only 1 episode of Vigilantes.
Brian brought in his Slayers Evolution-R Blu-rays so we could try to get episode 9 off of them.
Last Saturday night we decided to alter the schedule a bit so we didn't split the final arc of Ergo Proxy across 2 weeks. This Friday we're watching the final episodes of Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider, and on Saturday we'll be starting Fate/strange Fake. Well, actually restarting it with the extended "Whispers of Dawn" prologue we've previously watched...in 2023.
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Notes: Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider brings its first season run to a good, solid ending. Hopefully more can get adapted as well as this part of the manga was, but if not? This season will still live on as a great standalone story.
I wonder how Disney/Hulu handled the R-18 segments of Rooster Fighter?
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Notes: You can't say nothing happens in Ghost Concert. Nothing makes sense, perhaps, but there's a whole lot of nonsense happening at any rate. In contrast, Daemons of the Shadow Realm does a good job playing the viewer (who hasn't read the manga) while still selling the viewer that there's some solid structure underlying all the surprises.
Speaking of not making any sense - Fate/Strong Fake: Whispers of Dawn came across as more...obnoxious? tiresome? overdone? than it did when we first watched it a few years back.
Our Friday schedule's a little weird this week. We're finishing Champignon Witch and Polar Opposites (part 1) with 1 episode each. We could also do that with Golden Kamuy next week - finish by watching just a single episode - but instead I've opted to put the final 3 episodes of the season this week. That still leaves us time for a sampler, the first episode of Dr. Stone's final season/cour/whatever, and another double-length 1st episode as we remind ourselves of everything that happens in the beginning of Sasaki and Peeps. It's a lot.
This Saturday is also kind of unusual. We have an hour-long episode 1 in Sentenced to Be a Hero, which eats up the time we'd normally use for samplers. It also means that something we normally watch after intermission has to come before (we'll also have a bit of that next week), so in both cases I've put Fate/strange Fake before the break.
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Notes: A Hundred Scenes of Awajima didn't make a strong impression with some folks, mostly because it switches from the apparent protagonist to focusing on the emotional history and backstory of another character for the back half of the episode.
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Notes: We decided to finish Slayers Evolution-R tonight, relegating tonight's second episode of Fate/strange Fake to next Saturday.
Quick reminder that this is Memorial Day weekend: Saturday traffic will probably be a bit lighter, but Friday night traffic may be significantly worse.
We'll observe Memorial Day in our own way, commemorating the death of the no-name middle manager who dies to become Tanya the Evil - we're starting our season 1 rewatch of that show this Friday night. We're also starting Dungeon People (from episode 1) on Friday, and on Saturday we're watching the bonus episode of My Hero Academia. We probably don't have the bandwidth to commemorate all the deaths on Saturdays as we resume watching the Dirty Pair TV series.
Aside: one of our Friday samplers is The Ramparts of Ice, an earlier (and tonally distinct) work by the creator of You and I Are Polar Opposites.
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Notes: Need Girl Overdoes seems like it could be interesting, but several of us found it difficult to follow exactly what was happening to whom and at what point in the timeline.
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Notes: Eren the Southpaw had opening and ending animations which seemed like they should have come from a better show.
Our season schedule has stabilized. Meanwhile, we're entering a period of lots anime events: conventions (leading up to Anime Expo) and theatrical screenings of anime movies (most of them re-releases). I've been trying to list them all on our site's calendar. I'm planning to see the Utena movie re-release which screens Sunday June 21 and Monday June 22, though at the rate tickets seem to be going I'm hopeful the showings will be expanded at least a bit.
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Notes: Steve mentioned he wouldn't be around next Friday, might join remotely towards the end of the night. For that reason we'll swap things around so we’re sampling from Crunchyroll that night.
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Notes: Marriagetoxin worked a lot better than it seems like it should.
The System [Was] Down. And by "The System" I mean neocities.org and all websites hosted thereon without their own vanity domain names (which means this hit our own pcas.neocities.org). All this was due to their soon-to-be-former domain name registrar Namecheap being...well, I'd call them bozos, but that would be an insult to clowns everywhere.
MediaOCD posted their most recent batch of Discotek Deep Dive earlier this week.
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Notes: Steve wasn't expected to make it this week, but due to last-minute surprises at work he did after all. In addition, Gene made it for the first time since...last August, perhaps?
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Notes: We bailed on Liar Game maybe 1/3 of the way in. We also bailed on Yowayowa Sensei after about 5 minutes when it became all too clear the show had nothing going for it except the fanservice. That let us slot in another sampler Kujima: Why Sing, When You Can Warble? That one was actually pretty decent as an absurd comedy (though it also benefited by comparison against the two shows immediately prior).
We ditched a couple of samplers last Saturday - that might free up enough time for us to start a bit of next season's samplers early, assuming any are available. If we do that with a few more we might free up enough time for a feature like the Chainsaw Man movie.
Anime Expo's complete programming schedule is online. A lot of other information about AX is also up, including maps that hint at but don't outright state the impact the convention center expansion is going to have on space available, ways into and out of the convention area, the shrinkage of Artist Alley compared to not just last year but even to years prior, etc.
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Notes: 1st paragraph sample notes.
This is Fathers' Day weekend, which means Sentai has an excuse to run another sale. They aren't alone - Crunchyroll is also running a sale (though not really associated with Fathers' Day - it runs through July 6) and is actually offering an almost RightStuf-like 40% off discount...but only on "select in-stock products". And GKids decided that Fathers' Day was the natural time to put the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie back in theaters.
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Notes: We switched from 2 episodes of Dirty Pair to 3, and pushed 1 sampler to next Saturday.