June 25, 2022

Hills of Silver Ruins (3/31)

We first meet Yuushou in chapter 12 (book 2).

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posted by Eugene [8:00 AM]   2 comments   

June 18, 2022

Hills of Silver Ruins (3/30)

Risai confirms that Gyousou left the column in Shikyuu and a platoon of soldiers subsequently went missing in chapter 33 of book 1.

Spirit money or joss paper (紙銭), often resembling money or clothing, is included in ancestral offerings so deceased family members can tend to their needs in the afterlife.

Knapping is the shaping of rocks to manufacture stone tools.

A youjuu (妖獣) is a youma (妖魔) that can be domesticated. Under normal conditions, only a kirin can control youma, though Rousan has a few tricks up her sleeve. This is why Gyousou is so concerned that Ukou and his men appear to be using hinman, youma that can enhance a person's fighting abilities.

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posted by Eugene [8:00 AM]   2 comments   

June 11, 2022

Hills of Silver Ruins (3/29)

I've posted chapter 29 (book 3) of Hills of Silver Ruins, a Pitch Black Moon.

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posted by Eugene [8:00 AM]   2 comments   

June 04, 2022

Tubi (update 3)

A bunch more reasons to like Tubi. GKIDS and streaming service Tubi have entered into a content partnership deal.

GKIDS is probably best known in the anime community for taking over the licensing and distribution of Ghibli productions from Disney. HBO Max paid a king's ransom for exclusive access to the Ghibli catalog, so that content is unlikely to be part of the arrangement.

But GKIDS still has a good deal of high quality content not locked down by exclusives. Tubi has been working with GKIDS for a while and has The Case of Hana & Alice, Genius Party, Genius Party Beyond, Napping Princess, and Summer Days With Coo, along with a half dozen non-anime titles.

Belle just ended its theatrical release so I don't expect it to show up anytime soon, but I'll cross my fingers and hope for good news about Weathering with You, A Letter to Momo, Promare, and Fortune Favors Lady Nikudo. Along with several Masaaki Yuasa films and Goro Miyazaki's Ronja series.

For now, Children of the Sea, Fireworks, Modest Heroes, Lu Over the Wall, and Okko's Inn are on Netflix, but I don't know if those are exclusives.

Alas, the anime licensing gods giveth and they taketh away. A bunch of great Eleven Arts movies left Tubi, including Liz and the Blue Bird, Maquia, Penguin Highway, Sound Euphonium, and The Wonderland.


The silver lining in this latest game of IP musical chairs is that Tubi added to its lineup Shirobako, the 2020 movie sequel to the 2014 series, and a true anime classic, seven seasons of Rumiko Takahashi's gender-bending martial arts comedy, Ranma 1/2.

Related links

Tubi (update 1)
Tubi (update 2)

The Case of Hana & Alice
Genius Party
Genius Party Beyond
Napping Princess
Ranma 1/2
Shirobako (the movie)
Summer Days With Coo

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posted by Eugene [8:00 AM]   0 comments   

June 01, 2022

Tubi (update 2)

I like Tubi, especially with Netflix raising prices again. I like it even more since the Roku 10.5 OS update, which seems to have addressed most of the stability issues that once plagued the Tubi Roku app. But the website needs work.

Like adding some rudimentary filters to its existing genre categories. The best that I can tell, titles in the anime category are displayed according to most viewed status overall. That means everything in the list is constantly floating around without any way to predict what got added when or where.

The list can't be sorted alphabetically, by release or acquisition date, sub-genre or language. There's no language filter for the Foreign Language TV category either. You can search on "Japanese," except the language and genre tags aren't applied consistently enough to make that a reliable tool.

So Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan (live action) initially ended up in Anime, and Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl (anime) ended up in Foreign Language TV.

Tubu has New Release and Recently Added categories, but unlike Netflix, which trickles out new titles at a reasonable rate on a weekly basis and knows my preferences pretty well, Tubi just backs a dump truck up to the loading dock.

The better resource here is Reelgood, which lets you alphabetize, sort by release year, and country. But Reelgood is rarely up to date, so searches will also display titles no longer on the service while missing recent additions.

Still, Tubi has a surprisingly decent selection of anime, including free exclusives like Onihei, Napping Princess, and Hanasaku Iroha: Home Sweet Home, along with a bunch of classic tokusatsu flicks. It's worth searching through the haystack for the needles.

Here are a few more titles to add to my last list.

  • Bunny Drop (A heartwarming entry in the "unexpected fatherhood" genre.)
  • Cats of Japan (A travelogue of sorts that consists entirely of videos about cats pretty much just being cats.)
  • Chronicles of the Going Home Club (The fourth wall breaking antics of the kids who aren't into the after-school club scene and end up creating their own club. The humor can be very topical and culture-specific, such as a whole riff on the cuckoo and the Three Unifiers.)
  • Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl (Tackling the hikikomori problem with weird metaphors, even weirder characters, and a dollop of magical realism sets this sort-of harem comedy apart from most.)
  • Hanasaku Iroha (Mari Okada, reigning queen of the teen melodrama, penned this minor classic about a girl whose mother runs off with her boyfriend and sends her to work at her grandmother's rural inn. The result is a respectable coming-of-age story with unlikable characters who earn their eventual likability.)
  • Space Dandy (This rollicking space opera by Cowboy Bebop director Shin'ichiro Watanabe has the titular character hunting alien species for a kind of galactic Smithsonian. That is, when he's not hanging out at Hooters Boobies, his favorite intergalactic chain restaurant. High brow, it ain't. A total hoot, it is.)
  • Natsume's Book of Friends (Natsume can see dead people. And Shinto spirits. And the occasional Shinto god. And they can interact with him. So he gets stuck with the job of solving their problems, with the help of his guardian spirit cat, who most of the time would rather be quaffing sake at the local bar.)
  • One Punch Man (Saitama can defeat any foe with a single punch, and still gets no respect. So what's the point of being a superhero? He's starting to wonder himself. The result is a hilarious and surprisingly trenchant parody of the genre.)
  • Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan (A three-episode live-action series based on the anime by the creator of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Imagine Fox Mulder as a mangaka on the prowl for new material, except Rohan has his own superpower, the ability to literally read people like a book. And by literally, I mean literally.)

Related posts

Tubi (update 1)
Tubi (update 3)
Streaming Japanese
dLibrary Japan update

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posted by Eugene [8:00 AM]   0 comments