I am going to keep this post relatively short this week as I have been doing a lot of traveling and am super exhausted. However, there are a couple things I wanted to point out. As for the story, it seems Jolenta is on a collision course with the church now. The point at which Nowak is asked to torture his daughter grows ever closer (I am guessing). However, this episode bears lots of historical parallels that I wanted to draw attention to.

• Venus

This is super quick, but I just like this shot of Jolenta after her conversation with Piast. We can clearly see Venus in the sky above her. We know it’s Venus both because of the color and because of its low position in the sky at dusk. Venus never gets very far from the sun in the sky from Earth’s perspective, so the only time you can see it is either just before the sun rises or just after it sets. Once you know how to spot Venus, it is actually quite bright in the sky. @rikka@ani.social

• Philolaus

This is one of the philosophers with the silly models that Badeni mentioned (the other was Aristarchus, which I discussed in the Episode 1 thread). I wasn’t familiar with this one, so after looking it up, his model is quite silly. It was not based on observational data at all really, but rather just based on philosophical arguments about what is higher up than other things. For instance, Mt. Olympus had a place at the foot of the central fire in his model. It also included a planet that was directly opposite the central fire from the earth called Counter-Earth. This was included simply to make a nice round number of 10 heavenly bodies.

• Piast’s Historical Basis

Piast is clearly heavily influenced by the real life astronomer Tycho Brahe. I have written about Brahe in multiple discussion threads up to this point because it is basically impossible to talk about astronomy of this time period and not mention it. A short summary of Brahe’s bio:

• Brahe was born in a noble house and educated in law. However, while at university, he developed an interest in astronomy and wanted to pursue it.
• Brahe was sent on a trip by his family in order to dispel him of the notion of studying astronomy. This did not work, and he ended up working with a distant relative to pursue astronomy instead.
• As a young man, Brahe observed a Great Conjunction, but the predicted time/date it happened was off by a day using the existing Ptolemaic models. This led him down the path of collecting data to improve the models.
• Brahe collected decades of astronomical observations that were more complete and more precise than anything that had existed before. The finest set of astronomical data that would exist prior to widespread usage of the telescope.
• In the final years of his life, he collaborated with a young, upstart mathematician, Johannes Kepler, who would later go on to provide a much improved model of the cosmos using Brahe’s collected observations…with the sun at the center.

Anything in there sound familiar? Hmm?

You weren’t kidding 🤣. That is like the anime version of Too Many Cooks.

Hmm, I bet it has more to do with brightness and contrast more than anything else. So, in that respect, CRTs are significantly dimmer than modern LCDs. Additionally, CRTs were just much smaller than most people’s living room TVs these days, so it would take up a much smaller portion of somebody’s field of view. It’s an interesting question though.

That’s the exact same comparison that ran through my head.

I really, really like this manga. So, I am very much looking forward to this when it comes out.

When I saw that title, I knew I had to include the whole damn thing. It’s just too ridiculous.

TruckBus-kun claiming victims back then too.

Thanks for sharing!

Really interesting perspective on this issue. Out of curiosity at one point, I got my hands on the porygon episode and the flashing is certainly jarring. It didn’t really bother me, but my wife said it gave her a headache (just a minor one, not a migraine fortunately). I had no idea that there was so much that came out of that incident. Really neat!

Wow, that sent me down a rabbit hole of searching. I am old enough to have messed around with lots of VHS tapes in my day, but I was still too young to know what was going wrong with the picture. Reading how Macrovision screwed up the picture through desyncing the scanning explains why some of the “non-authentic” tapes I got never played right for me.

Yes! It’s the kind of thing that you could only notice on a rewatch.

I try to keep the clips I choose to under two minutes. Sometimes I go a little over (like this), and other times I am way under. The real limit I try to stick to is <100MB to make it not too unreasonable for people on less than stellar connections. I usually just skipped over the clips people posted to the anime subreddit that are 5+ minutes long.

I had similar criticisms of AoT season 1 and dropped it. I might have to find time to pick it back up again sometime in the future.

Hearing a lot of good things about Orb

Give it three episodes and see what you think. The first three episodes provide a nice little arc and set things up for the future. Next to Dan Da Dan, Orb has been my favorite of the season.

Things make so much more sense now. It all kind of lines up with where the shifts happened. Thanks for the explanation! Those old days where anime would blaze ahead of the source material were sure interesting sometimes.

I do think the animation for the Anaak/Ran fight was a step up from some earlier low points, but that is a pretty low bar to clear. I wholeheartedly agree about the rules of these games though. I have stopped trying to keep track of the rules for these things since that team-building game earlier in the season. The rules always end up getting changed, people exploit some loophole, or they are just ignored entirely.

The second half of the episode (post fight) felt like three episodes in one it moved so fast. They literally only showed one panning shot of Endorsi before she was sneaking around again. Like, what is the point of even showing that party if nothing happened there. Then we conveniently have a group of major characters literally run into each other. For elite warriors, they seem to be pretty clumsy.

As for Lero Ro, I was waiting for him to show back up at some point. At the end of last season, he had quit his role of administrator because he knew something wasn’t right with how that last test went down. He took Quant with him and decided to climb the tower to try to find answers. As an aside, what does climbing the tower mean to somebody that is already a ranker? Anyway, after this season got underway and we learned more about FUG, I figured he was going to be investigating them behind the scenes since they are the ones that organized Bam’s apparent death in season 1. So, I am pretty excited to see him return.

For research into this subject, Anime Herald was fortunate enough to interview…prolific anime writer and critic Borealis Capps

Haha, I feel like you posting this article is a bit of a humblebrag.

Thanks for sharing though. I think that Dumbbells was a really fun show and I would love to see newer, better takes on a series like it, since I feel some of the things discussed in this article are totally fair. The one in particular that you brought up is how much the girls don’t want to be too muscular, but rather just slim. This is something that is a recurring joke with Darkness in Konosuba as well. I mean, her role is to absorb damage for the party, muscles are kind of a prerequisite. That hangup of Darkness’s never really made much sense to me.

I think it is interesting to compare Dumbbells to a series like Plus-Sized Elf. They both are ecchi as well as try to be educational, but they take things in very different directions (and not just the body-types). I eventually dropped the manga, but as it went, Plus-Sized Elf seemed to lean more into ecchi and less into education, probably because none of the characters hardly even tried to put those lessons into practice. Also, when the anime adaptation released, it was even more ecchi than the manga was.

Weekly ranking roundup:

1. Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Bleach TYBW
2. Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Dan Da Dan

Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.

Lots of karma drops on the reddit chart this past week. I am glad to see Orb still gaining karma. Hopefully that is a sign that more people are picking up the series and catching up. It also doesn’t surprise me that Villainess in History gained karma this past week as the episode was a lot between the antics of the heroine and the prince.

Some quick thoughts on what I watched this past week:

• Dan Da Dan - Continues to be the standout of the season. Lots of intense and unpredictable fun.
• Orb - More amazing drama this past week. More people should watch this. Hopefully after getting lots of praise in the recent Gigguk Nutshell video, more Western audiences will check it out.
• Tower of God - I am up through episode 18 and it has not been great, even after the start of the workshop battles. Maybe it will get better after the early rounds? Right? Right? Please…
• Appraisal Isekai - I have continued to enjoy my time with this show. It has done enough to keep my attention though I wouldn’t call it a standout in any particular way.
• Loner Isekai - This is my guilty pleasure for the season. It’s pretty dumb and super tropey, but if you turn your brain off, it is fun to laugh along with the stupidness.
• NegaPosi Angler - Really great episode this past week. We seem to be just starting to scratch the surface of the more serious thematic elements of this show.
• Villainess in History - Another stupid fun show. If you are able to either laugh at or look past the skeeviness of the prince courting a child, then this is a pretty humorous villainess series.

Non-seasonals:

• Look Back - A visually beautiful and touching movie that is worth checking out now that it is globally released. At only ~1 hour long, it isn’t too much of a commitment and it justifies every minute of its runtime with beautiful animation and an excellent soundtrack. The story might not connect with everybody, but I enjoyed my time with this movie.
• Trigun (1998) - Just finished the series this past week with my wife. I haven’t read the manga, but based on the show, the end is…alright. Overall, the show is really kind of split into two parts. The first half of it is basically all goofy villain of the week episodes. Then, after we meet the character of Legato, the whole story transitions into a serious sci-fi story about humanity’s role and place as it explores the stars and the human will to survive (trying to avoid spoilers). The two parts of the show just felt disjointed.

The last thing I wanted to write about this week is that there is a new community for sharing anime videos, !avid@ani.social, founded by @kiri@ani.social. There have been a couple videos posted already, so make sure to check them out and contribute if you have anything you want to share. I have added a link to the community in the sidebar of this community as well. In an effort to help out, I will be crossposting at least the next several clips that I make for this community over there as well.

isekai…not being relevant

This happens all the time in the isekai genre and it bugs me too. It’s obviously just so that they can slap the isekai tag on a series to try to get some segment of audience that seeks that out. A lot of isekai series are functionally indistinguishable from a fantasy series once you get past chapter 2.