Kudos to bakaMX, who are now fansubbing Haibane-Renmei aka “Charcoal Feather Federation”; and it is just soooo good. clean art, nice music and tons of cute fluffy wings. created by Yoshitoshi ABe (lain, niea_7) and Tokoro Tomokazu (niea_7). I don’t have a clue where it’s going, but it doesn’t seem too happy (rather “subdued happy”): I really, really like it!
Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai (up to ep11) is another GAINAX show which transports a boy + girl (just friends ;)) to alternate realities making parodies of just about anything (SF, Jurassic Park, Film Noir, Romance Games / High School Anime, Kung-Fu Films, …). After #6, I was quite sick of it, but just then they story returned to its core and dealt w/ the construction of the “Magical Shopping District”, which was an excellent move. I hope it manages to continue like that…
Mahoromatic (up to ep3, but 2nd half of ep1 was broken 🙁 ) OTOH I really, really like. GAINAX style, cute maid, some nice action / humor, tons of fan-service (nudity)… I just checked, Pioneer will start releasing that in January 2003, and knowing Pioneer it’ll most likely be on 4 discs.
Now and Then, Here and There (up to ep2) is done by Akitaroh Daichi, and heally, really hard to watch (because it’s so mean / brutal to basically nice people). Basically, boy transported into different world / universe / dimension and dropped inbetween two faction at war. Thinking hard about the box-set (which is $70).
RahXephon (up to ep13) still doesn’t grab me and seems even more Evangelion-like than it did after episode 3, i.e. Mecha controlled by boy who doesn’t / didn’t want to fight, female supervisor, odd / nearly emotionless comrade, … it’s all there.
Witch Hunter Robin (up to ep5) has a really nice, semi-Victorian darkish, angular style, very nice character design. Organisation (STN-J) hunting out so called witches with magical powers. Little humor, no fan-service (which is fine ;)), lots of ambience and interesting CG-backgrounds. Don’t know whether it’ll be interesting in the long run, but so far it’s been good.
Current (from this list, except #1 ;)) favourites:
Managed to recompile the kernel (knowing about mkinitrd helps… thanks, mandrake-manual… not!) w/ ACPI and w/o framebuffer-support (as that supposedly breaks the nvidia X-driver). i still can’t switch to a full-screen terminal from X, though (and neither exit…). grmbl!
installed linux (mandrake 9). works fine. had a bit of trouble getting the audigy digital-out to work. also nvidia drivers make me loose the console (w/ blank screen) after exiting X / switching to consoles… (problem w/ smp & missing APM maybe?)
JList will sell the Japanese Saikano DVDs (which supposedly have English subtitles) as special order…. ^_^
Got over the initial bout of lectures… Seems I’ll be busy.
‘nother Mini-Review: Whasango aka Volcano High. Live-Action Korean film, and way over the top. Does not take itself seriously at all, but looks good enough that it could… Student w/ mystical powers has been expelled one too many times (six or seven) and moves on to Volcano High, where after seeing his impressive powers all of the sports clubs try to get him to join… Headmaster falls ill, magical scrolls are missing, falls in love w/ school beauty (and head of the Kendo-club), fights w/ the “Dark Oxen” weight-lifting club, evil teachers arrive and take over order, big showdown at the end. not terribly clever, but very funny and definitely worth watching! Live-action Dragonball Z is as close a description is you can find (but w/ more humour). ^_^