adorable rockets

Yes, yes Bakamonogatari was the knock-out hit of last season and quite possibly the last five years. So why am I wasting my time on what I should be bemoaning as typical J.C. Staff dreck, instead of waxing rhapsodic?

Two simple reasons:

1. Bakamonogatari deserves more than a quickie post dashed off from the hip.
2. A contrast between Railgun and A Certain Magical Index provides a unique opportunity, unparalleled in the annals of anime, to contrast two shows with near identical moétic goals but very different moétic results.

I dare say that even after only one episode Railgun is an almost unqualified moétic success, while Index failed to retain my interest for even ten episodes. Of course what’s most fascinating about this comparison is that we have not only similar goals, with contrasting results – we also have the same source material, the same studio producing the show, even many of the same characters. It is a near ideal laboratory to study the success and failure of moétic technique, and even to gain some insight into the evolution of this genre/school of art. Yes my dear readers, this is once again an entry in the service of moé.
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If you’re not already familiar with Cave Story, it’s a Japanese freeware platformer, a 5 year labor of love by one man, and possibly the finest example of that 8-bit genre.

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Behold, the Beast!
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So the way I heard it was that Yoshida, Reiko, one of the script writers at Kyoto Animation got Rock Band(tm) last Christmas because she was such a big fan of Karaoke and Western music. This inevitably led to the entire animation department spending time in the break room endlessly trying to master Maps on expert mode instead of working on their next heartful anime. When the producer caught them at it, all they could do was mutter some half-hearted excuses about doing ‘research’ for a new show… and so K-ON! was born. Well, maybe it didn’t exactly happen like that, but you have to admit the timing does fit!

In any case there’s a few shows I was eagerly awaiting this season. K-ON had huge potential because, well rock bands are awesome (and they are more so now that we play entirely too much Rock Band(tm)), Japanese highschool girls are awesome (and they are more so when uber moé), so it could be two great tastes and all that… Of course it also had the potential to be utter dreck since an all-too clever concept can easily be a crutch that replaces the more important things like plot, and characterization.

So how did it turn out? Read on…
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After doing copious researching for my Lego mico projects I was shocked to the discover that the Internets were sorely lacking in this.

This is much harder than you would think due to the total lack of official information on the ships. There is huge difference of opinion about the actual scales of these ships and the battlestar wiki unfortunately is home to some of the most outlandish theories (and is not even internally consistent across it’s articles).

For this posting I started with this awesome Star Trek comparison chart as the basis, then matched the scale based on two observable features: the main gun batteries and the Viper launch tube opening/hatches. Both of these match in scale, giving a reasonable confirmation to the idea that Pegasus is ~1600 meters long.

What’s smaller than Lego minis? Lego micros of course!

Another shot after the break…
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A rough Raptor and a pretty decent Viper MkII (if I do say so myself)!

Lego Digital Designer where have you been all my life?!

In honor of Battlestar’s climax, I’ve designed some Lego minis!

Meet the new hero, Same as… er… no, wait…

Ep 2 of Ga-Rei Zero gives us more of the same over the top supernatural combat action that made the first episode so gleefully delightful, and somehow doesn’t collapse under the weight of it’s own weird.

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