Squid Girl Episode 11

UPDATE September 4, 2018

More DMCA take downs have hit the blog despite screen captures long being considered fair use. Due to my not being able to afford a lawyer, I have no choice but to remove them or have the blog suspended. Only the words will be left.

TVTokyo is proving to be foolishly draconian in targeting posts meant to get people interested in seeing the Squid Girl anime and perhaps even purchasing it on DVD or Blu-ray. Being anti-piracy myself this is infuriating that they are targeting posts I wrote hoping to encourage people to try out a delightful show.

The anime series proves it can do horror when a creepy doll is found, science fiction when Cindy turns her sights onto a new target, and nature documentary when a mountain hike goes terribly wrong. Laughter keeps on coming no matter what the genre is when Ika Musame invades it!

Proving the quality of the early episodes was no fluke, Squid Girl stays strong in its penultimate installment of the first season. In fact, it is one of the most solid episodes of the entire series.

Why Is This Doll So Fishy?

There are few things creepier than a doll designed to be cute, but that looks disturbing instead. Clowns may be one of those things, but even an evil clown would have trouble competing with the doll that stars in this tale.  Depp is an old toy of Eiko’s that she finds in a storage box in the Aizawa residence. Right away, the thing is unnerving to Squid Girl and most likely anyone watching the show. The animation also takes an unsettling air of a horror movie, which is something the Japanese excel at.

As darkness falls, the atmosphere grows more sinister in Eiko and Ika’s bedroom. Unable to sleep due to the doll looking at her, Ika Musame turns it around so she can get some sleep. It works, but when she awakens the doll has turned back to stare at her with those unfeeling blue eyes.

A mystery has begun, one that digs into Eiko’s forgotten past. Who is Johnny? And what does Johnny have to do with Depp? Only with the help of Sannae will the answer be found and it is not one they want…

Why So Susfishous?

Cindy Campbell is back to investigate a suspected alien, as we find out thanks to hearing her thoughts. After witnessing too many inhuman feats by Chizuru, it has dawned on her and the Three Idiots from MIT that data is needed. Data provided by DNA extracted from her blood!

Harris is the first to try to retrieve a sample, but his invisibility suit causes more problems than it assists him. With the restaurant in an uproar thanks to him, another plan must be enacted. A drone of brilliant design is then employed by Clark with disastrous consequences.

Things quickly spiral out of the control of the mad scientists and a frightened Nagisa can only watch helplessly. The true meaning of fear will be learned.

Want to Gill Up the Mountain?

Nature is a wonderful thing filled with beauty, fresh air, and exercise. Sadly for Squid Girl, she does not appreciate any of those. So when the Aizawa clan go for a mountain hike, Ika is not happy to find out how difficult going up a mountain is. Unable to escape the terrible tag team of Chizuru and Eiko, the miserable fish out of water grits her teeth and endures locomotion using only her legs.

There is another thing about nature that is very appealing and that is observing wildlife in their natural habitat. Here Ika learns about squirrels, monkeys, and other animals on the mountain. It is an up close kind of education; the kind kids enjoy the most. After all, survival skills television shows have been very popular lately.

Greater challenges await the young squid along the way to the summit. Once there she may find the most frightening creature of the them all…

Thoughts

Silly is becoming an inadequate word to describe this series. It takes silly to an exponential degree, then multiplies it by comic madness to achieve its sweet, but warped goals.  For a slice of life show, it is amazing how it spoofed three different genres so effortlessly.

The Three Idiots are particularly amusing in the second segment and a brief cameo in the third. Actually, the supporting cast carries a lot of episode eleven. It is not something you notice right away, but repeated viewings made it stand out to me. That is a good testimony of how well developed they have become by late in the season. No setups are needed, the writers just wind them up and let them go.

Speaking of writing, the stories bounce around from different time periods in the manga, but it all works seamlessly in the adaptation. A lot of credit needs to go to the production crew for I think this is a rare case of an anime being better than the manga it was based on.  I do not think there are any Ika Musame purists out there to complain, so I should be safe in making that statement.

The first story has a rare reference to the missing Aizawa parents who have never been seen. Their absence is something of a mystery.

All in all, this was a great episode and now I am saddened that the season is coming to an end. Only one full episode and two mini Squid Girl videos left to review.

BEWARE! HERE BE SPOILERS!!!

The reveal of Johnny is deftly handled and I loved how the one hand poked out of the packing like a zombie hand from a grave. I admire how they built up the suspense and still managed to be silly at the same time. It was great fun.

The second segment’s best part was Chizuru. I would take her up against any shounen fighting character and bet on her winning. Oh and that innocent face she made at the end, it was even more scary than her opening her eyes.

When the cobra showed up to torment Ika further, I was laughing a little. When she lost to it, I was laughing out loud. The duel with the echo is pure early invasion and still amusing. Sannae’s Marilyn Monroe like summer dress and entrance was kind of strange if not alarming. When it turned out to be an innocent scene, I was relieved.

Rotation

Besides being an awesome tune from Herb Alpert’s amazing Rise album, it is also a word that means going around in circles.

In this case, I am writing about the reviews of series I cycle around. With too many in rotation, it is time to finish out two to streamline things a little. So for the near future, Squid Girl season one and Bleach season one will be fast tracked since they are almost completed. Then the rest will resume their normal places.

The movie reviews will get loose rotation too. Marx Brothers films will be joined by Godzilla movies and Studio Ghibli animes, with other movies slotted in between. A couple of relatively unknown foreign films will be prioritized before I fully start rolling on that rotation.

But before any of that gets posted, I have to put up the 1979 video of the title tune. While Rise is a great tune and made the album a huge hit, this is by far my favorite track from it:

Pure music, late ‘70s style.

Enjoy.

Fractale Episode 4: Departure

Clain reunites with Phryne, but the light hearted adventure is gone when the price paid for the carnage ending the last episode begins to hit home for the Granite clan. While there are comic moments to be found, the series is darkening quickly as the Temple responds to the terrorist attack. Fractale: Reiterated continues with HD screen captures & revised text.

After the shock, if not whiplash, induced by the change in tone at the end of the third episode I had wondered where Fractale was headed.  Departure shows that the change is no fluke and integral to the storyline. More than that, it depicts that there are consequences for what you do in this fictional world. Harsh consequences…

Renovations to the Blog

This summer, I decided to do a little remodeling to the blog. Rather than change the visuals, I decided to change the accessibility of older posts. It has been a work in progress and I will continue to refine the layout as time goes on. One of these days I may even replace the old photo of me with something more recent, which will not be easy since I avoid having my ugly mug photographed.

The latest change involves using Blogger’s pages feature which was introduced last autumn. In keeping with the KISS model, there are now simple indexes to reviews with a new bar near the top allowing easy access. Eventually there may be new pages, but for the moment the categories of Home, Movie Reviews, Anime Series Reviews, and Television Series Reviews will be it in the tabs.

Hopefully, this will help people searching for more content they are interested in, since tags have turned out to be a little messier than I expected. With people clicking in from countries all over the world and from many different languages, simplicity is a must. Enough people have been using the tags for me to realize there might be a better way to go about things. It means a little more work for me, but it it should be worth it.

Comments are not allowed on the index pages in order to keep them neat, but any feedback is appreciated on individual posts, of course.

I never expected to have many hits on this blog, but I passed the 20,000 page view mark a month ago to my amazement. While it started out as a journal of sorts, it has become something more experimental than that. Being in on the Web relatively early, I find myself missing the random surfing of web rings and the excitement of finding something unusual. The Web may be more useful now, but it was a lot more fun back then.

So From the Sidelines is not going to be the usual blog that is purely personal, political, or other niche oriented. It is going to be an  oddball mix of some of my many interests with no apologies for any of it. Much like my DVD/Blu-ray collection has anime sitting next to highly acclaimed films next to cult classics next to box office hits without segregation, the posts here will be the same.

If I have managed to inform, entertain, or intrigue just one person having trouble sleeping or simply surfing the Net, then I am satisfied that I have returned a little of what I got to experience back in the 1990s when the World Wide Web was new.

So I thank all who have visited thereby keeping me intrigued and entertained from showing up in my stats and comments. It adds something to my life here on the sidelines.

Blogger Referral Spam and Twitter

After digging into my monthly stats on Blogger, a pattern emerged of links to apparently legitimate sites that really were not genuine. Instead, they used Twitter’s URL shortening service, T.co, to disguise the page. It turns out that some hits that I thought were real from stumbleupon.com were actually the exact same kind of spam as I previously wrote about here and here. Another falsified website referral using t.co I found was for cultek.com which is a biomedical company.

I have never liked link abbreviating services due to the amount of malicious code, pages, and photos they have been used for. Twitter has launched lawsuits and claim to be filtering how t.co handles links, but so far I am not impressed. It seems like services are always falling behind the black hats in cyberspace, so the moral of the story is for people to be very careful about what they click. Examine the entire link and be reluctant to click on a shortened one.

UPDATE:

Oh the irony. From the time I started writing this post to actually publishing it, another site with referral spam hit me, but not using t.co. This one is ultrafiles . net and is again out of Russia. The title of their website is Linkbucks . com and is another make money off of links site.

UPDATE: A day later, another fake link using devscripts.net and t.co, so the beat goes on.

UPDATE: July 31st brought a new falsified link using the same method, this time posing as myhealthscore.com.

UPDATE: Another one supposedly from filmhill.com that links to a video of how to get “lucky” using a fish. The absurdity is amazing and I am glad I have a little used browser in a sandbox to check these things.

The Dark Knight (2008) Review

After successfully rebooting Batman with a serious origin in Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan had high expectations to meet with both critics and movie goers. Determined to go “bigger” in every way often  and by unleashing an unforgettable version of the Joker, Nolan created a masterpiece. Brilliant, beautiful, thrilling, and contemplative, The Dark Knight is film making at its best. It is also a twisted bromance for the ages.

A sequel to a popular film is a very tricky thing to make for recapturing lightning in a bottle is rare. When successful, it can result in a superior film under the right hands. The Dark Knight is not that. Instead it transcends its predecessor to become a work of art that stands on its own. What is even more amazing is that it became a box office record breaker, which is unusual for such an intellectual film which also turned out to be surprising commentary on the War on Terror.

Let us dig into the film and see how he did it.

Health 7-26-2012

The bout with Lyme Disease took more out of me than I thought and it has been hard to get going this week. Allergies are flaring, so they share at least a little of the blame. What has surprised me is how physically weak I have gotten and it looks like it will be awhile before I get my strength back. My always shaky hands are now erratic at times and I have been accidently knocking things due to the large tremors. Irritating.

On a positive note, I have been hiking up the driveway in hot and humid weather to get the mail with no ill effects. It is strange the stamina is recovering faster than the strength. Headaches are subsiding too, which is good since those combined with allergies is true misery. Still it is not the summer I was hoping for.