Rubénerd!

What do Merry Nightmare and Homer Simpson have in common, other than being drawn and animated in some fashion? Yumekui Merry #02: "Dreams and Hopes".

We were left last episode (Yumekui Merry first impressions) with Merry passed out on the street after that bizarre daydream with Yumeji who's first name and last name both have "ji". That's pretty cool. But I digress.

After passing out like that, allegedly Yumeji had taken her home to where he lives with his childhood friend Isana and her dad. No kidding, in this series there's actually a parent involved! Oh yeah, and Isana's room has a lot of pink!

While I'm on this cliches-in-anime train of thought, have you ever noticed how often parents are conspicuously absent from stories like this? Obviously they only serve as a distraction when characters want to be close and all that stuff, plus they're not adorable like siblings so they serve no practical purpose. How they get rid of them ranges from elaborate excuses (they're archaeologists or they go on business!) to simply not being there at all. I'm looking at you K-On!

But I digress. Yumeji took this complete stranger home to where he lives which may scare some people in the real world, but here its just a sweet thing to do, so we'll let any lingering creepiness slide ;). Even Isana makes the comment that it would have made more sense to have been taken to a hospital!

Speaking of the cliches-in-anime train (there's a pun about Cat Stevens and Yumeji's dreams there, but I won't make it!) no sooner has Isana consoled Merry after waking up in a complete stranger's house than we're treated to them bathing in a shower together and Yumeji catching them out… which of course necessitated the use of forceful revenge in the form of bottles and whatnot being hurled at his head. Serves him right!

Is that pedobear shampoo?!

At this stage I was mostly into the story even if I did roll my eyes a few times, but the next scene sitting around the dinner table and talking was just adorable. Merry comments that its the happiest meal she's ever had because she's eating food and with friendly people. Awwwww ^^. It's also the first time we meet Isana's dad, who's much more caring and far less creepy than that random screencap I took suggests.

Dream daemons wouldn't need to eat in dreams, would they? Or drink! I suppose you could merely dream stuff into existence. But then again, physical things like that wouldn't be nessisary to sustain you, so there'd be no point!

On Yumeji's balcony we learn a little more about who Merry is and where she comes from, both questions that were left pretty much open in the first episode (though not in the manga!). She's a dream daemon (sorry, I'm a FreeBSD guy and "daemon" somehow just looks cuter than "demon") who for some reason is stuck in "what we call reality". She desperately wants Yumeji to summon John Doe in one of his dreams again (the chainsaw wielding Phantom of The Opera we saw previously) so she can ask him for help in returning. Poor girl.

Just when things seem to be getting a little more serious, Isana appears with… wait for it… donuts! Doughnuts? Donuts? Are they doughnuts or donuts? The anime has them labelled as donuts, so we'll go with that. Suffice to say, Merry's reaction is absolutely priceless (#01, #02) XD. Oh yeah and she didn't like carbonated drinks either… too fizzy!

Despite these friendly exchanges and despite Isana's dad trying to convince her otherwise though, the next day she's back by herself searching for any other daemon who can help her return to her own reality. I'm not too sad because I've read the manga up until this point and know what comes next, but it was still some pretty sombre stuff.

If anything though, it served to show just how gorgeous the art is in this series, JC Staff have really outdone themselves with the colours and scenery. When the Blu-Ray release comes out for this series I will be all over it.

Oh yeah and because this is Yumekui Merry, we needed another shot like this which was justified this time by her being hungry :P. A hint that she'd want to be back with the other again, and/or that she's becoming used to being a physical entity in "reality" perhaps? That reminds me, I haven't had any lunch myself.

This review has already gone on FAR too long and I should be wrapping it up, but we only got into one of the story arcs! Seriously, if this had the pacing of a KyoAni show, we'd be up to episode 10 by now with all this stuff ;).

Another person we're introduced to separately is Yumi (the red head below) who allows a dream daemon to possess her to learn about humanity. She has glorious ambitions of being a registered nurse and is highly cute. Unfortunately her dream daemon friend Serio is killed in a daydream (I believe that's what it was) and poor Yumi leaves us dazed and confused. Clearly in this universe being in a dream doesn't make you invincible.

To end on a higher note though, I want their sensei's clothes! And his glasses! That guy has style! Oh yes and finally… we have an awkward exchange student! Tick another event off the anime-cliche list. At least she's not sitting next to the window ;).

Forgive the hurried ending of this post, but I could have just kept going on and on and on. Obviously I need to learn a thing or two about brevity if I'm going to be talking about each of these episodes!

I don't care whether its cool or not to admit, but I hugely enjoyed Inception and have long been interested in lucid dreaming and the like, so when I read the plot summary for Yumekui Merry it was an instant follow :D

Plot Summary: Ten years ago Fujiwara noticed he had a power to see multicolored auras surrounding the person's body. Ever since then he's been having a weird dream about a war with cats. Then one day a mysterious girl falls on top of him...

And of course they mean that quite literally. Hey, at least they didn't use the bathtub meme :P

Aside from ones that are unabashedly moeblob (and I make no apologies for this fact) and despite being a heathen atheist bastard, I'm also a fan of anime that deal with more unconventional concepts like spirits and perceptions of reality. I'm also a huge sucker for graphics and art. Its why I found Bakemonogatari one of the freshest and most interesting series I've watched so far.

It's almost as if not being bound by the real world gives animation a free pass to be more unpredictable and tackle with issues that would be too hard to film with real actors, or ridiculously expensive to do with CGI. I could go on, but I'm not a media student and am not armed with the vocabulary nor critical expertise to discuss such matters ;).

Okay we get it, what about this series?

As a more casual watching guy, Yumeki Merry is the first second JC Staff anime I've started following, and so far I'm enjoying the art and designs. I'm a sucker for Shaft and KyoAni, so being able to appreciate another house's art is... awesome. That's a technical term, look it up.

I could tell by virtue of the fact I could barely understand the first episode that I think I'm going to enjoy it :). In the space of fourty minutes we had students going through a typical train station, giant swimming fish skeletons, dystopia and utopian scenery, huge guys that looked like the Phantom of the Opera with scary looking serrated weapon things, kick arse high octane fight scenes, and pretty much everything else in between.

We were introduced to the namesake Merī Naitomea (Merry Nightmare) in the opening scene by seeing... her navel. In another scene she walks past and we see... her navel. Another scene still and we see her belly button no less than three times. Some series sell themselves to certain otaku by having women who are particularly "well endowed" or always having opportune upskirt moments; in this case I suppose this studio are targeting the bare tummy crowd. As far as fanservice goes, this is pretty tame XD.

As I said I'm a sucker for art though, and I really love the character designs. Like Hitagi from Bakemonogatari she has purple hair which we all know is the best colour ever, and they really went overboard with her huge flowing clothes and cute matching hat which is even used as a plot device ^___^. Her shirt it patently ridiculous and her skirt far too short for someone who presumably spends much of her time defying gravity with high kicks and other fast paced fighting, but this is anime I suppose ;).

From what I've surmised so far, she's a spirit or entity who's like very much to return to the dream world (as is evidenced after she whoops some serious dream arse) but alas she's stuck in our reality. Is that the opposite of Inception?

The protagonist is an attractive, struggling writer-wannabe called Fujiwara Yumeji who has the unique ability to see the colours of people's dreams. Yes, colours of people's dreams. In the real world even until recently I'd have laughed at such assertions, but the idea that we have senses above the five we do have is deeply fascinating. His fingers turn into kaleidoscopes, and he can even perform it on himself in the mirror. Pretty trippy stuff.

I believe they're already up to episode 6, so I have some catching up to do! I'm also very impressionable when it comes to dreams, I hope mine don't start mimicking his with oddly hilarious but creepy bazooka-brandishing cats.

Now that Ruben has his MacBook Pro back, he decided to try a new "theme" kinda thing.

While he thought Bakemonogatari was an interesting show, what he really did love were the graphics and character designs, and while Sengoku Nadeko wasn't his favourite spirit-possessed character, the colours in this background were too gorgeous to pass up. As a bonus, they match really well with Terminal.app's "Red Sands" theme which he'd never used before. They're all like the colours from Ubuntu... only classy!

As a matter of disclosure, Ruben uses Sabayon and Fedora as his Linux distros of choice, and only talks about himself in the Third Person occasionally. Like a boss.

Stop the presses! Next they'll be telling us DRM doesn't work, and that suing your customers doesn't good sentiment make.

From TorrentFreak, via Slashdot.

A prestigious economics think-tank of the Japanese Government has published a study which concludes that online piracy of anime shows actually increases sales of DVDs.

No, really!? But this this goes against the narrative we've been forced fed!

The conclusion stands in sharp contrast with the entertainment industry’s claims that ‘illicit’ downloading is leading to billions of dollars in losses worldwide. It also puts the increased anti-piracy efforts of the anime industry in doubt.

Theoretically speaking

Not to say I've ever pirated any anime, but if I did, I sure as heck have given them a lot of my time, money and business since. This is how promotion works, and in this case its even better because the producers don't even need to spend money on advertising.

From my perspective [theoretically speaking], had I not downloaded anything from fansubbers, I theoretically wouldn't have got into this incredibly rich world of unconventional storytelling and art anywhere near as much as I have. I [theoretically] would not have bought as many VCDs and DVDs and figures and posters and music and magazines and all the other stuff. Even if a select few do nothing but leech, there are plenty of other people to fill in the gap. Theoretically speaking.

Japan is an interesting case study in that the doujin and fanart communities are another testament to the nurturing rather than parasitic nature of people who take creative works, copy them and expand upon them. They don't leech off the success of creative works, they build an ecosystem around them.

Still, as that example has been in the past, media cartels will no doubt be trying their best to silence and/or discredit these findings. Watch out for it.

The ultimate question now becomes, how do we allow media creators to be compensated for their creativity with a sane, rational copyright framework in place that accepts (or at least tolerates) these activities? Unfortunately, as much as all this will continue despite what any lawmaker or DRM paddler says, and as much sense as all this makes, its still illegal.

Adorable Touhou pirate graphic ID 15309430 from Pixiv.

Its a new month, so its time for a new pointless sidebar picture! This month we have Nozomu Itoshiki from Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei sporting a slightly more optimistic version of his catchphrase and primary hangup during the series. When one is dressed as fabulously as him, I doubt he has anything to worry about anyway. Shaft always has epic graphics :D.

The previous sidebar pictures are located, surprisingly enough, on the Sidebar Pictures page. I was going to call the page something completely different, like "Bird is the word" but I've resigned myself to the fact most people either don't like or don't get my sense of humour, so I'd spare the inevitable groans or questions for clarification ;).

Another long day of doing stuff and not much time for blogging, so instead of regaling you with a tale of yet another new Firefox extension, I thought I'd do something entirely pointless and compare two of the Firefox mascots.

Who do you think does a better job, Firefox-tan herself, or Konata as Konatan? Firefox-tan has the advantage that she already is the de facto Firefox mascot in the hopelessly otaku world, but Konata from Lucky Star cosplaying as the Firefox icon is simply too funny!

In other news, I tried Firefox 4.0 Beta 10 this afternoon. Broke a whole bunch of my plugins, but certainly looks slick. Question is, can it woo back some of the nerds who moved to Chrome?

So it was a sunny afternoon and the writer of Rubenerd needed something to cheer him up after writing about IBMs video thing, and he remembered Sudohbucks!

Toradoradoradora

When I first started watching this anime back in the day, I surmised it was typical harem fare, but I loved the art and graphics and thought I'd give it a shot. Now years later its still one of my favourites not only because I liked the really strong characters (and art!) but for the little things.

One of those little things was Sudohbucks. Over the course of the show the characters often found themselves sitting at this coffee shop which looked eerily similar to Starbucks from the layout of the chairs to the logo. When Ryuuji kinda-sorta broke the fourth wall and asked how they weren't getting sued, I laughed out loud far too loudly!

The name was brilliant and worked on so many levels! Sudohbucks sounded like Starbucks; the "Sudoh" sounds like pseudo which implies its a pseudo-Starbucks; it sounded like sudo-bucks from *nix; and best of all the logo was a guy with sunglasses and a waxed moustache in the exact same style as the Starbucks siren! In case you haven't noticed yet, I'm a bit of a logo nerd. That doesn't mean I can design my own, mind :P.

rubenerd@taiga 1 ~ % bucks
cannot create regular coffee `bucks': \
Permission denied
rubenerd@taiga 2 ~ % sudohbucks
omnomnom!

Sudoh/pseudo sudo

I had a Starbucks thermos in Singapore that had a paper sleeve insert, and one of the first things I did was take the lid off and put in a Sudohbucks logo! I think only two people ever called out to me when they recognised it (in Takashimaya and Kinokuniya respectively!), but it was absolutely worth it :D

One thing I will say that Sudohbucks looks as though they do better than Starbucks is their pan pan pan pan, judging from the numerous shelves of bread in the corner. Aw gosh darn it, now I want to rewatch Yakitate Japan and Shakugan no Shana!

The bread I really like are those little bread rolls with the red bean paste. I forget what they're called. Bread Talk in Singapore sold them, and they were goooooood.

And finally, because I was talking about Toradora, this picture from the infamous Megami is just too adorable to pass up, even though their boots look suspiciously like uggs, which would just be terrible.

It's that Yuletide season thingy, so I'm doing what any self respecting, atheistic, masculine, terribly intelligent 24 year old would do, setting my desktop backgrounds to super cute pictures and all that. 56k warning, run for the 56k hills! Slowly!

iMugi the Mac Pro

K-On! Used it JUST for Mugi's nose and antlers XD. Snow Leopard, 1920x1200

MacTheKnife the MacBook Pro

Suzumiya Haruhi and Co. I like Yuki's hat :). Leopard, 1920x1080

Senjoughara the ThinkPad X40

Toradora. Taiga doesn't look too impressed!. Fedora 14, 1024x768

mikurubeam the Homebrew C2D

Photo from our 2009 winter trip. Germany is so amazing. FreeBSD, 1280x1024

Ami the Libretto

Lucky Star, in honour of their rumoured new season. Warm and happy :). OS/2, 640x480

Ritsu: Know why we're awesome?
Mio: We know Yui and Mugi?
Ritsu: BINGO!

Aside from being entirely pointless, this post serves to test if automagically posting certain entries from WordPress to Tumblr works. We'll see ;).

From the Bureau of Ruben Has Been Blogging Too Much About K-On we have this poll by the Otaku no Podcast folks over who people's favourite characters are.

The results are encouraging, it seems I'm the only one who has voted for Mugi-chan, which means she's mine by default :3! Of course I'm also dismayed at the same time, as this implies she didn't receive any votes before I came along, when the others did! Fight Mugi, fight!