Between Linux and Anime

Kind of like Schrodinger's Cat

Category: Anime/Manga (Page 2 of 11)

Kyoukai no Kanata: Balance and Bite

Episodes seen at time of writing: 4

It’s been a while since I’ve watched a show that made me want to keep on watching. The standard twenty plus minutes has always felt like a very comfortable quantum of anime to me, and I’m normally content to watch episodes of the same show one at a time – lighthearted shows so that I can take them in thrifty bite-sized chunks, and heavier content so that I can afford myself some time in musing digestion. Kyoukai no Kanata seems to strike a balance somewhere between both these worlds – serious enough to be exciting, but not quite at the density that makes it straining to keep on watching.

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Hana no Android Gakuen Specials 3 and 4 English Translated

And these are it: the last of the Android Gakuen manga strips freely available online. I originally planned to close the curtains on this whole translation endeavor with the release of these last strips, but it turns out that a friendly neighbourhood reader Elaine Nguygen has volunteered to send me the raw strips in the first Android Gakuen manga volume, and so I now plan to work on those too, which means more Android Gakuen translated strips to come! Of course, those may not stay up as the raws aren’t freely available, so I may have to take them down if the authors/copyright holders complain, but at least for now the plan is to go on with that for as long as I am able.

While I’m at it I’d also like to apologize a little to anyone who may be actively following my translations for being so incredibly slow at the whole thing. Unfortunately this isn’t something I am able to fix, since necessarily this pet project must take lower priority to a lot of the other stuff I’m responsible to. These strips really should have been out two or so weeks ago, but stuff came up and I ended up swamped for quite a while and only managed to put everything together now.

Anyway, I’ll continue to do my best. If I can’t work fast I’ll at least try to ensure my translated strips are as high quality as my inexperienced self can make them :) In the meantime, enjoy Specials 3 and 4! Shoutout to JX for his help with the translation.

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Hit the jump for the translated strip. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.

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Hana no Android Gakuen Special 2 English Translated

It’s been a really long time I know. Unsurprisingly, I got busy, and the knowledge that Android Gakuen will no longer be available as online strips was basically fatal to my motivation for a long time. For those who are not aware: after 13 initial strips plus 4 ‘Specials’ that were made available at the Weekly Ascii website, the rest of Android Gakuen is basically print-only, which means that I can no longer translate and make them available here unless someone could provide scans.

I still however do get a lot of hits from people seeking Android Gakuen translated strips, so I’ve decided that I should at least finish translating everything that is available. So I went to work again, and here’s Special number 2! I’ll try to get Specials 3 and 4 done within the next month, and with that finally bring some deserved closure to this whole endeavor :)

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Hit the jump for the translated strip. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.

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Ayase’s Farewell

Not cool :(

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Give the Time of Eve guys some Love at Kickstarter

So the indie filmmakers behind Time of Eve are apparently thinking about making an international blu-ray release of their excellent animated film, after fans apparently clamored for one. What’s interesting though, is the way they decided to go about this: via a Kickstarter campaign.

Why Kickstarter?

Yes, there are other ways to get a Blu-ray of the movie to fans outside of Japan. But, these involve surrendering rights to the movie for large swaths of the world, for lengthy expanses of time. We looked carefully at the options, and then looked back at the roots of this project. From the very beginning, we booted strapped Time of EVE, episode by episode; and the direct rapport with fans has fueled this project throughout. We decided to hold onto the rights, and see how new distribution technology, and now crowdsourcing, can enable us to stay true to the original vision behind Time of EVE, and reach out to fans directly. Is it the best way? That, we can’t answer. But, it the path we’ve taken from the start.

I think this is really quite cool. We’re living in an interesting period now where a lumbering juggernaut of traditional media creation/publishing/distribution practices is beginning crash violently against the open, increasingly available, and rapidly accelerating Internet. We could well be sitting on the verge of the radical changes it would take for the media industry to fully adapt to an Internet age. This change has to happen, because the most likely alternative is a terrible one: where media cash giants win their war against piracy, almost inevitably at the cost of Internet freedom. What Studio Rikka/Directions Inc is doing here is something I hope more media companies would do: refuse to submit to traditional distribution processes and instead seek new technology/crowdsourced-based methods of getting their work out to their fans. Kickstarter campaigns may not be the final answer, but it is a palatable enough start. One where creation studio and fans have more say and sway over the terms and methods of their trade.

So pop over and give them some love! Go over and read the excitement-suffused fan comments and the wonderstruck updates from the project owners. And if you can and are sufficiently interested – make a pledge and earn a nice reward! We who watch anime know how ineffectual the current ‘standard’ channels of anime distribution are especially for the international audience. This needs to change. The campaign has already doubled its initial goal amount in less than 2 out of its intended 30-day run, but we can make it an even bigger success story. One that other anime studios would hopefully watch and do some serious thinking about.

Edit: “UPDATE: The Blu-ray will be region free” \o/

About Time of Eve
Time of Eve started as a 6-episode ONA that eventually got stitched together with connecting scenes into a single fluid film. If you’ve never seen it before, you really owe it to yourself to check this out, especially if you know ought about Asimov’s Laws of Robotics and some of the philosophical ideas Asimov explored in his robot novels. Time of Eve is this studio’s own vibrantly illustrated, liquidly animated, and vividly musical little twist on that universe, and while it doesn’t try very hard to take its ideas far, compared to Asimov, it nonetheless manages to come off as very immersive, thoughtful, and at many points even endearing. It is perhaps every bit the beautiful, lovingly crafted modern reimagining fans of Asimov’s universe could hope for. I remember being blown away a long time ago by the first ONA episode and subsequently being reduced to a bout of embarrassing incoherence. In short, this is good stuff. Recommended watching.

Have a trailer if you need one

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Kirino, Kyousuke, Kuroneko – the culmination at OreImo 2 ep 7

It’s been a quality spring season despite a somewhat rocky start, and there’s been a lot to think and talk about. Way too much in fact. Even talking generally about singular shows – like about OreImo 2 – seems like such an impossibly colossal task for a single post at this point – halfway across the season. I had to force myself to make a focus, and after reading some conflicting opinion on OreImo 2 ep 7 (and the nth Kirino-hating post), I’ve decided to bring out my own take on the Kirino-Kyousuke-Kuroneko dynamic leading up to, and in the wake of episode 7, and fling it out into the chaos out there.

Hey, it’s good to have opinion variety, no?

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Spring 2013 Brainmarks (Simplified)

The blog is alive again! Wahahahaha

So first of all a mostly unimportant logistic detail: I’m changing the original definition of Brainmarks posts a little to make it easier on myself. The essential difference: I’ll no longer sieve through _everything_ the season has to offer. I’m no longer doing this with my housemate, and while checking out everything was sort of fun while it lasted, it’s also extremely time consuming and more often than not even sort of thankless (watching clearly shit shows just to make doubly sure they really are shit is not the most fun thing in the world). So what I’ll list here are shows that I i) somehow decided to check out, either from recommendations, blogs, or general buzz and ii) have not swiftly chucked aside after one or two episodes because I clearly didn’t like it. I’ll still rank the brainmarks though, because that’s sort of fun.

Spoilered: What are brainmarks? (Revised) Show

Oh, and as a bonus, since I don’t actually check out everything anymore, you get to yell at me in the comments if you think I missed a good show. And with that out of the way, let’s dive in.

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The Clannad Basketball Match: VN vs Anime

So I’m almost desperate to revive this blog after two months of dead-dom ^^; I’d have liked to write something about the stuff in the current season, but I’m not watching a lot, and while I do like what I’m seeing of Tamako Market, I haven’t quite mustered enough thoughts to merit a post quite yet. On the other hand, I just got a nice comment on my old tl;dr Clannad post, and I also happen to have been foraging into the original Clannad Visual Novel, with a fair bit of loose thoughts surfacing along the way. So I think I’m just gonna ease back into this blogging business by musing out loud a bit in that direction

It’s a little hard to evaluate the first season of Clannad. It was kind of all over the place, and while the comedy was epic, the drama was somewhat forced more often than not. You could argue that KyoAni already did a reasonable job considering they had to mush like 10 full arcs worth of parallel storytelling into one linear-ish timeline, but digging into the original VN you’ll find just how much slower the pace is and how verbose every detail ends up being – and, inevitably, how many valuable and tasteful nuances end up being lost in the anime. This scene in particular:

Never struck me as anything particularly evocative or really anything more than the resolution of another brainchild of Key’s peculiar fascination with solving unrelated problems with sports matches. But while playing the VN a curious feeling stole over me as the beautiful BGM rolled in when Tomoya scored the final basket. Unlike the anime, there was no animating. Nothing, in fact, other than a BGM, a single static picture of a basketball court, and text describing the match from Tomoya’s perspective. It’s actually pretty illuminating how incredibly simplistic the Clannad VN engine is – even the simplest renpy games often have more advanced features. Where the anime had Kyoani’s expert animating to give superficial appeal to, the VN was almost wholly reliant on the writing. In the end, the way the story up to this point worked out plus all that additional text detailing Tomoya’s thoughts going through the whole thing gave the conclusion of this random basketball match in the VN an odd sort of radiance quite absent in the adapted version.

In fact, unlike in the anime, the choir club people never even came to the match in the VN. In Fuuko’s arc, there wasn’t even a basketball match in the first place, and the choir club folks had their change of heart about the club advisor dilemma anyway. In the VN more so than in the anime, the basketball match didn’t really have any utility at all towards its original stated purpose: Sunohara’s idea of showing the choir club folks that you can’t use a handicap as an excuse. Instead, it became something of a vindication for the Tomoya-Nagisa-Sunohara trio. It didn’t matter that it was all a random idea and no one else was really invested in it in the first place. They set their sights on something, they worked hard for it, and they made it happen. The aftermath for a moment filled me with the heady feeling of their success – they did it.

An important difference in the story up to the match in the VN versus the anime is that, necessarily, the anime had Tomoya and Nagisa (and Sunohara) get to know plenty of people after having wound their way through Fuuko and Kotomi’s condensed arcs, and so by the time they arrived at the basketball match plot point they had already gathered a sizable circle of friends. In the VN there was no such thing. There was Sunohara and Tomoya, comrade delinquents and commonly regarded bad company, and their not-so-unlikely friendship with Nagisa, who was herself an outcast of sorts, and the entire story revolved around the three of them, united in their exclusion from the rest of respectable society. On how their comradeship inspired Nagisa to strive for a simple dream, on how that striving for that simple dream slowly struck its chord with Sunohara and Tomoya’s own hidden-away desire to transcend their aimless lives, and how that quiet resonance drove the two to help, support and root for her. They goofed around all the time and none of them probably really knew what they were doing, but they strove, they were met with obstacles, and they fought to move on. More so than the anime, Clannad the VN dwelt intensely on the outcast perspective of school life, on how people tend to fall out of respectable and/or cool cliques due to circumstances they cannot control, how debilitating an effect it can have on you to be constantly frowned upon, and how in spite of it all, you can still find your moment. This was that moment for the three of them.

It wasn’t even anything like a planned triumph, it achieved practically nothing in the grand scheme of things, Nagisa’s drama club wish remained in shambles, but these qualities made it all the more fitting somehow. It was a triumph nonetheless, their first after all the setbacks they’ve had. After wandering aimlessly on the edge of respectable society for so long, this was their first full cycle of establishing a common goal, working towards and fighting for it together, and seeing it come to fruition. As Tomoya scored the game-winning basket, his monologue summed it all up perfectly. This symbolized everything: Tomoya with his injured shoulder, shooting for basket in an awkward throw that no proper, self-respecting trained player would ever do, clinching their victory. An awkward, rag-tag, disregarded group, doing things their own clumsy way, could achieve their own triumph as well. “Via different paths… to the same heights”. It was here that the realization hit me that this amazing BGM piece that I had always loved, had been named after this moment all along.

(Of course, they still somewhat cheated by enlisting the help of Kyou-sama, who is obviously omnipotent /Kyoufanboytalk)

Anyway! So that’s that. There are a lot of other minor little nuances and subthemes peppered across the VN that you don’t find in the anime, but at this point I’m not sure that I’m ready to tell you yet that you need to read the VN or you’re missing out. Figuring out the structure of the VN at least has helped me to understand why the earlier parts of Clannad were sort of cluttered compared to the fluent coherence of the After Story parts. Still, let me read further first. I’m only on my second arc – Fuuko’s, after completing Nagisa’s. In contrast with the anime, the individual arcs are actually really long, so it’ll be awhile. I’ll post again if I chance upon something interesting like this one.

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Merry Christmas and Loot!

It’s been sometime since I got back from Japan after watching Eva 3.0, and I sort of promised a loot post so here’s a brief one :) Actually spent quite a bit this time, but the stuff are nice so.. totally worth it? Unsurprisingly, much of the expenditure went to Eva stuff. There were truckloads of em thanks to it being movie season. We found Eva posters, goods, and themed snacks all the way up in the mountains of Hakone – true story. Fear the Eva marketting machine. But yeah, watching the film totally got me into Eva-sucker mode. I bought the guidebook (? of sorts?) at the bottom right from the theater. They had other merchandises on sale there too, but the snaking queue was so frighteningly long I just went with the book (which had a separate, much shorter queue) instead. The rest – the two Rei-Asuka figures, the wall calendar (that’s the tall sheet at the back), the black hoodie jacket (the one with the Rei/Asuka picture print), and the two moonruned T-shirts – were acquired from Akiba. The two figures were from a shop in Akiba called Hobby Tengoku. Some of the (2nd hand?) figures you can get from the plastic box displays there are the cheapest I’ve ever seen anywhere. Both figures here together costed just a little under 1000 yen. The hoodie in contrast is one of the most expensive items in the picture, and it’s even a little tight. L size in Japan is apparently a little on the small side. Thanks to that expenditure, I bought the two moonruned T-shirts because I was feeling too cheapo at that point to buy the more expensive picture-printed ones. The moonrunes are episode titles from the original Eva by the way, the white one reading “The Final Messenger” (Episode 24 I believe) and the black reading “The Beast that shouted I/Love in the Center of the World” (Final episode).

The two little boxes under the white T-shirt and the figures are Idolm@ster stuff. The one on the left is an imas station radio show special disk thing that I bought on impulse and later regretted – a little, haha. Anyway it comes with a CD with some of the seiyuu’s antics and some unusual sounding songs, as well as a DVD recording of more seiyuu antics. The black box on the right is the DVD recording of the 2010 Idolm@ster 5th Anniversary live concert, and is the other most expensive thing in the picture. I’ve always wanted one of these, but I was too cheapo to buy the more recent concerts that were more costly, so I went with this one. It’s still 2 full DVDs though, with some minor extras like a photo booklet. The counter girl even had the nerve to point out that this was the DVD version and ask if I was sure I wasn’t going to get the Bluray. Thanks but no thanks, pretty sure I’m not ready to be a hobo yet.

And finally there is the cascade of cheap doujins in the mid-bottom-left. It was one of those buy 6 for the price of 5 things, so I just went ahead and got 12. All non-erotic because the erotic cheap stuff are almost certainly nothing but porn. The non-erotic ones on the other hand can be pretty cute and interesting. For example, the guy who made Nyoron Churuya-san also made a doujin called “Buu buu Kagabuu” – a 4koma which follows the adventures of Kagami (Lucky Star) who had inexplicably turned into a pig plushy. There’s also “YukinkoSOS” which portrays Yuki Nagato as a secretly super-dere girl constantly terrorized by her scary onee-chans Asakura and Emiri. In general really fun stuff :) There was also an “Azusa After” doujin portraying, I think, YuixAzusa in a Clannad-After like setting that I was considering getting, but that one was pretty darn expensive, so in the end I left it for another day.

And that about covers it! Japan was a pretty awesome place in late fall, cold enough to be fun but not quite enough to freeze, and seeing fall foliage for the first time ever was a huge treat. The people, too, were as nice as ever, and that in particular is something I thought really added to the experience there. I’ve always sought to avoid the weaboo stereotype by focusing on otaku subculture, but I think I’m ready to admit that I really kinda like Japan now. My friend likes the place too, so we might make yet another visit sometime next year.. when our finances recover. We’ll see.

It’s been a long and eventful year for me, where I was able to do a good bit of stuff that I wanted to do, but that left a truckload more stuff in the backburners. I hope to get to them in a timely manner. Thanks to the whole Mayan catastrophe thing being apparently false after all, a whole new year yet stretches ahead of us all. Here’s to it being a good and exciting one.


Merry Christmas from Between Linux and Anime. May your loot be plentiful in the coming year.

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Hana no Android Gakuen 13 + Special 1 English Translated!

Edit: okay, there apparently is a series of ‘Special’ strips, and a series of ‘Summer Special’ strips. This is from the former. To the best of my knowledge, the ‘Summer Special’ strips are not available online beyond some teaser material.

First, an update regarding the status of this manga right now. So far as far as “regular episodes” (the stuff I’ve been translating) goes, only one extra chapter (13) has been released. In the interim, a series of Summer Specials were also released (yes, over the summer. I am aware that it is almost winter now, but it really should be common wisdom by now that I’m an incurable slowpoke. Plus, where I live, it’s still summer, and forever will be). I have decided to just go ahead and translate the specials, so here’s the first one, alongside the strip branded as chapter/episode 13. Note that chapter/episode 13 was published at the end after all of the summer specials. I’ll post the rest of the summer specials once I’m done translating them.

Across November through early December, “vol” 1 through 4 of Hana no Android Gakuen have also apparently been released. If I’m reading the site right, the comics will be available in print in the Japanese “Weekly Ascii” magazines dated 13 Nov, 19 Nov, 27 Nov, and 4 Dec, and are, to the best of my knowledge, not available online (not counting the sneak preview strips the source site publishes), so it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to work on those unless someone could provide scans.

Next, an update on my translating efforts. Some time ago I decided (probably partly from discovering the happily surprising fact that I’m on Baka-Updates) to try an up the quality of my work, so alongside this release I’ve made two changes to the way I work here. Firstly, I’ve outsourced some translating work to my friend JX, so I now have someone with better moonrune training on board as well as an extra pair of eyes on the final result pre-publish. Secondly, I’ve decided to put a little more effort into my cleaning and typesetting, where I actually do try and clean texts not enclosed in speech bubbles instead of just slapping a semi-transparent white box over them. Perhaps most visibly, I have also switched to much more appropriate fonts, and man, it’s amazing how much just a change of font can do. See the results below for yourself! Hopefully these changes improve the reading experience :)

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Hit the jump for the new stuff. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.

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