crammed with stuff

Busy weekend.

I finally got my hair cut, so I no longer look like I've got an unruly mop stuck to my head. And the price has gone up again. When I first came here you used to get change from a tenner for a haircut. Now it costs £12.50. I know that's still not a massive amount, but it's a significant leap in a short period of time - especially when you include a tip.

And the Grand Prix season kicked off this weekend with the Australian Grand Prix. Now it may just be because there have been so many rule changes, rather than the nature of those changes, but it was a really good race - there was loads of overtaking. Hamilton, for example, started off at the back as he had to change his gearbox and ended up third.

Let's hope this bodes well for the season as a whole and is due to the cars now being able to overtake properly. Certainly there seemed ot be a lot of evidence for this with cars getting close behind and getting the traditional 'tow' followed by a burst around to overtake.

I also did some scanning. The main thing I needed to do was scan the covers of the DVD series I've watched recently, since I've had them up on e-bay for sale. I did manage to scan megami (the new one should be with me soon!) and animedia as well.

While I scanned I watched some anime (it's interesting doing it on my widescreen monitor - there's enough desktop real estate that I can have everything open without the windows overlapping).

White Album was distinctly okay. I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting of the show - I'd seen a few visuals and it seemed like it was set in the world of 'idols' which is a bizarre Japanese system, but what I hadn't been expecting was a harem anime.

And that's basically what it is when you decompose it - there's a central guy and lots of cute girls seem to be in love with him for no apparent reason. He's also got a hapless mate who fancies one of the girls.

But here's the thing - I think what they've tried to do is make a more 'adult' harem show. And I mean adult in the sense of a grown up story, rather than pornographic. Indeed, it pretty much lacks anything resembling fan-service, which is technically a core element of a proper harem show.

Now this might be okay, but there's a really weird ambience to the show. It's incredibly miserable all the time for no apparent reason. I mean, it's not like rubbish things actually happen to the characters, they're all just very melancholy. It's odd. And it affects the pacing too, which was very slow.

But then the show looks pretty - it's nicely animated and the character designs are nice. Also the characters seem quite interesting... apart from being miserable. Maybe I'm being too harsh.

Maria + Holic was disappointing. It's by the same studio that did Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei (SHAFT) and more than that it's directed by the same guy. It's also an adaptation of a slightly demented manga. They also appear to have used a lot of the same tricks that they pulled on zetsubo sensei and so visually Maria Holic is absolutely nothing to complain about (it has possibly the greatest opening credit animation ever).

Maybe, therefore, the problem was that I was expecting too much, but overall I found the series flat. I kept waiting for the gags to happen, but it seemed to lack anything resembling punchlines. As I say, maybe a bit of time and distance will make me like it more if I ever get the chance to watch it on DVD or something.

Hetalia - Axis Powers was really quite poor.

Maybe it was another show where I was also hoping for a bit much and maybe my knowledge of world history is a bit lacking, but the show doesn't really make a lot of sense.

It's also kinda offensive, but the problem is it's not wilfully offensive and neither is it being ironic. How can I explain? It's a bit like things like golliwogs and black & white minstrels. Looking back on them they're appallingly offensive and I'm sure to black people at the time they were offensive, but for most white people they just didn't think about it.

It's more like a general ignorance and thoughtlessness, rather than either deliberately being nasty or being ironic.