Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [Week 48]

ReluctantZen, 6 months ago

Finally got around to watching the final special of AoT. I was worried due to a lot of negativity surrounding it, but that seemed to be a vocal minority and I loved it. It’s not a perfect ending and I have some gripes, but I am more than satisfied. Feels odd that it ended.

For the complete anime, I think AoT is one of the best, if not the best, long running, completed anime out there.

wjs018, 6 months ago

Now that it is over, I might have to go back and watch AoT. I had watched the first season when it came out along with some friends, but they weren’t really interested in it after that, so I never really carried on from there. It has become such a big touchstone within the community at large though, that I should probably watch it just because at this point.

ReluctantZen, 6 months ago

It’s totally worth it. If you thought S1 was good, the rest is so much better. The story ramps up really hard after that

e0qdk, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I've slowed down in posting a bit lately, but I'm still here!

Started watching Penguindrum (輪るピングドラム) after seeing @cacheson's post over in !anime_irl a few days ago. I watched a lot of it a few years back, but never finished it. Trying this time with the dub; sometimes if I have trouble making it through a show switching from sub to dub (or vice versa) helps. (e.g. Space Dandy and B-Gata H-Kei worked way better for me with the dub). I think a lot of the show is still going to go over my head though given it's connection to certain events from 1995 (apparently), references to Japanese literature, etc. that I am not super familiar with since I am not Japanese. The show does have a lot of strange and amusing imagery including many gags of penguins doing very silly things though -- which I enjoy! I'm grabbing screenshots and will probably post a few in the coming days.

I had some time off recently and used a good chunk of it to work on a custom art tool. I finally got fed up enough with KolourPaint and The GIMP while trying to make some images for the (non-anime) !sockpuppetsociety community to try to write something that's better suited to my own needs. I think it might help me make some anime fan art too eventually. I've got an idea in my head for a really silly bit of fan art that's motivating my choice of what tools to implement. I'll share the resulting image with you all -- if I can figure out how to make it; I'm not particularly great at drawing, so may take me a while, even with computer assistance...

Speaking of fan art, I posted my composite of Mew from Wolf's Rain over in !animepics a while back, but I don't think I linked it here yet. Improving my workflow for making custom composites like that is one of the other things motivating my tool design.

I also noticed yesterday that @MentalEdge made some new "moe" communities including !officemoe. I tossed in a Shirobako office party screenshot to help kick it off. Curious to see what others will post!

One other thing bouncing around my head right now -- people seem to be in a bit of a Sailor Moon parody kick over in the AI gen communities lately. These Sailor Moon Pickle and Sailor Moon/Cthulhu Romance images were the two I found most striking (so far), but there are a bunch more in a variety of styles over in !imageai if you are curious.

wjs018, 6 months ago

That’s an interesting idea to switch from sub to dub. I might have to try that sometime. You mentioning Penguindrum reminds me of when I visited Tokyo. I stayed at a ryokan in Ikebukuro and right down the street was a bar that had live penguins in the bar. So, it was like an aquarium mixed with a bar. I didn’t actually stop by and try anything, but thought it was really random. Here, I found an article about it!

Looking forward to the art submissions!

e0qdk, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

That’s an interesting idea to switch from sub to dub. I might have to try that sometime.

I especially recommend it for comedies. I sometimes rewatch old shows with the dub instead for variety as well. It can be amusing to find recognizable voices from games and things. e.g. I rewatched Scrapped Princess earlier this year and when one particular character showed up, I was like "That's Welkin!" (from Valkyria Chronicles) -- Dave Wittenberg voiced them both in the English version.

I stayed at a ryokan in Ikebukuro and right down the street was a bar that had live penguins in the bar. So, it was like an aquarium mixed with a bar. I didn’t actually stop by and try anything, but thought it was really random. Here, I found an article about it!

Thanks for the link! I'm not quite sure what to make of that. I guess it's kind of like a cat cafe, but more... out there?

g6d3np81, 6 months ago

I have not done anything in Krita/GIMP for a long while now so I am not up to date on their current features. What are you trying to do that is so uncommon that you have to build a custom tool?

On art stuff, I want to see more from community member and not just repost from twitter or pixiv. Only @rem26_art is one I have seen posting their own pieces around here.

e0qdk, 6 months ago

What are you trying to do that is so uncommon that you have to build a custom tool?

It's not so much that I have to as that I'm annoyed enough at all the paper cuts that I'm finally trying to solve them, at least for my own needs -- though, there are some things that are less common (like image alignment) that would be nice to have in the same tool.

Some of the things I want in my tool:

• Easy split screen image manipulation (both linked and unlinked) with trivial pan, zoom, and rotation.
• Manual point correspondence selection for image alignment
• Mixed raster and vector layers (with primary emphasis on vector)
• Measurement of shapes that I can easily fit models to (e.g. curves, ellipses) and then manipulate as vector objects (e.g. affine transform)
• Easier polygon and bezier curve editing (the path editor in the GIMP makes me want to tear my hair out every time I have to use it and I already wrote a bezier curve editor years ago that is -- while still imperfect -- much closer to what I want)
• Easier management of stencils. I like being able to draw within a selection in the GIMP -- it's useful -- but I keep losing my selection accidentally, can't manipulate parts of it in ways that make sense to me, and get bad behavior at the edges of things due to issues with the way the GIMP handles anti-aliasing that are hard to notice while doing it and really, really annoying to try to fix after the fact. (This is the straw that finally broke the camel's back.)

There's other stuff like text manipulation that I'd like to have a better way of dealing with, but is probably not worth the effort of implementing vs just firing up the GIMP for now. (I have written a rich text editor from scratch before -- ASCII only, but capable of supporting multiple fonts with colors, bold/italic, kerning, multi-line text, etc. -- it really fucking sucked to implement, and I don't particularly want to revisit it right now, but maybe someday... I know I can do it...)

For things like split screen and point correspondence, I already wrote that a couple weeks ago in a basic form for the Mew composite. (e.g. here's a screenshot of one point correspondence on a blade of grass -- zoomed out a bit so you can see the images are different) I had a pretty good idea of the numerical model needed to solve the alignment; I thought it was just translation and zooming -- and I was correct. Picking a few corners at sub-pixel resolution and computing a least squares solution for scale, and x/y translation gave a perfect alignment of the image; I thought I'd have to do some clean up of the edges afterwards or get creative with blending, but no -- it was spot on exact with 9 points. Trying to do that in The GIMP manually was a nightmare -- and yes, I tried that first. (There are other tools that can do that already -- e.g. panorama editors -- but most of them either cost money or are annoying to use for other reasons; so, I wrote my own.)

For vector manipulation, it's probably possible to get Inkscape to do a lot of what I want, but I have bounced off that program about two dozen times already.

KolourPaint is basically an MS Paint clone plus or minus a few features. It's great for trivial editing (way simpler than the GIMP) but it doesn't do things like layers, and as soon as I want to do anything moderately complex I either need something more powerful or I will be spending all day doing really, really, really, tedious things over and over. (I did the first pass of Sock Trek in KolourPaint and the mistake with the edge of the shadow on the planet is due to me switching over to the GIMP and being unable to get a perfect alignment of the selection. Likewise the mistake with the pink aurora/cloud on the bottom right is due to KolourPaint not handling curves well at the edges of images and me having to try to patch it up pixel by pixel after I'd finished the overall image and realizing it looked bad there. The whole piece should've taken ~5 minutes but it took more like 2 hours to make. For Sox Headroom, I tried to do the shadows in GIMP but fucked up with the anti-aliasing on the edges and trying to recover from that was such a pain that honestly I should've just started over from scratch.)

I have seen Krita before and I think I tried an old version a few years ago, but I don't currently have it installed. It's neat, but being a digital painting / raster program, it's geared to doing stuff that's different from what I want to do.

I really want something that I can do 2D vector art with.

wjs018, 6 months ago

So, I am not an artist, but I do have to regularly fiddle with vector images for work. I haven’t found anything even close to Illustrator and it is one of the reasons I still regularly have a Windows install around. I work in the sciences and things like graphs and figures for publication are usually vector images (eps or svg). So, my fiddling is usually tweaking things like compositing several graphs into one figure, adding annotations, or moving elements around (like legends). I tried Inkscape a couple times, but like you, could never really get it to do what I wanted in any reasonable amount of time.

rem26_art, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I'd also like to see other artists also post their stuff here. This seems like a very nice community!

Kissaki, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I watched Beast Tamer and it was bad. As average and standard formula as it gets. I feel sorry for the visual artists, animators, and voice actors who did a fine job.

Standard harem tropes, predictable but at the same time inconsistent characters, visual/spacial inconsistencies, predictable standard story and it’s progression.

---

I’ve rated anime I stopped watching higher than this one which I finished watching. I wonder what the difference is.

Maybe this one at least has action, progression, fantasy world - so my preferences in that regard? Or just mood? I’m not sure.

g6d3np81, 6 months ago

Okay-ish as something to put up during a meal and not much else, there is a VA I like so there's that.

wjs018, 6 months ago

I am terrible at dropping shows even when they are terrible. I can’t even begin to list the number of horribly generic shows that I started, almost immediately hated, but watched through the end of the season. I am the same way with manga as well. I usually can’t stop reading until I get to the end of an arc.

Kissaki, 6 months ago

I watched Mardock Scramble last week. An excellent adult (violence, gruesome themes, nudity) 3x1h OVA. I strongly recommend.

wjs018, 6 months ago

That’s a series that I had wanted to watch at one point but never really got around to it until it just kind of faded from my memory. Thanks for reminding me about it. Might try to check it out when I get a chance. The synopsis certainly sounds like it is a dark story.

Kissaki, 6 months ago

The premise, environment, and burden is dark, but the main characters and their supportive behavior in this environment provides positive contrast.

wjs018, 6 months ago

This past week during the holiday I managed to catch up on several shows that I had fallen behind on.

• Frieren and Eminence continue to be my favorites of what I am watching this season. The anime-original fan-service episode of Eminence was interesting, but looking forward to getting back to the actual plot next episode.
• Helck is still going and it has been nice to not be stuck in a flashback any longer (still need to watch episode 20). I am hoping that they can build to a satisfying season conclusion.
• 100GF is an interesting one. I have loved parts of it and others feel too excessive. I appreciate that they really lean into jokes super hard (something I wish Girlfriend, Girlfriend did more of), but I feel they go too far sometimes. That line is going to be different for each person though, so it is hard for me to criticize them too much.
• Girlfriend, Girlfriend is still doing its thing. I think the adaptation has been alright, but I haven’t changed my mind that it just works better in manga form.
• The Family Circumstances of the Irregular Witch has been ok. It has had its ups and downs and I am mainly still watching due to inertia. Probably not one I am going to remember for very long going forward.

Finally, I had some time to start Zombie Land Saga season 2. They wasted no time picking right back up where things left off. There was a bit that happened off screen between seasons, but it isn’t too jarring. The bright spot for me in this show continues to be the voice work of Mamoru Miyano who plays the primary male character, Kotaro. You might recognize his voice from some of his other roles such as Light Yagami (Death Note), Okabe Rintaro (Steins;Gate), or Pandora’s Actor (Overlord). I am only two episodes into the second season and looking forward to the next chance I get to watch more.