Productivity

So, the aforementioned productivity that I, er, mentioned... before.

Er, what?

Oh, yes - productive weekend.

I had a lot to do (chores mainly), and while I still felt a bit tired after the preceding week, I pushed through on Saturday and got it done in an efficient fashion.

One of the things I was pleased I kept on top of was the telly. There was both a MotoGP and a F1 GP to watch, as well as all the usual telly stuff I record and I managed to watch all of it.

I've still only got Red Riding waiting on my PVR and we now seem to be getting into the proper summer schedules. That means there will be far less on that I'll be interested in, which is a good thing.

I also did all the scanning I needed to and watched some fansubs while I worked:

Valkyria Chronicles, my first real show of the new season, was quite good - surprisingly so, actually.

I understand it's based on a game so I wasn't hoping for much and to be fair the plot is a bit on the tried and tested side (if not a bit played out). However, it does have some interesting characters, and they're what really count.

I mean, again, you've probably seen them before, but they're not done badly and are quite likeable. The main guy is especially interesting with a kind of blunt way of looking at things, but disarmingly charming with it.

Charady no Joke na Mainichi was bloody awful.

Well, maybe that's a bit harsh, but if something is called "daily joke" and then basically isn't actually all that funny, it's kinda failing from the get-go, isn't it?

Add into that the use of cheap CG animation and you've got something that's distinctly not my cup of tea.

And speaking of poor CG animation, Macross Fufonfia is right on up there with it. I've not got a link for it, btw, as I'm not sure it really counts as anime.

What they've basically done is take the Macross Frontier girls and put them in office jobs, but chuck in a few jokes relevant to the Macross world too.

It was pretty tedious.

Examurai Sengoku was quite good.

I never know what genre this sort of show falls into, but I tend to call it "hard-boiled samurai" in that it features lots of tough-guy samurais. In fact, I think mostly they're yakuza. At times they border on stereotypes, though I don't think it's being played for laughs (well, I didn't find it funny).

It was enjoyable enough if you didn't think too hard about it and took it just for entertainment value.

Kemono no Souja Erin was quite good. I'm pretty sure it's aimed at kids and has some rather obvious "message" bits, but they aren't too bad - certainly not up to the cringe worthy standards of kids cartoons in my youth.

The setting is also quite nice and there's an interesting conflict in the set up, in that the peaceful and pleasant village the main girl lives in trains fearsome beasts that are then used to fight wars. These wars being nasty, but also presumably why the village itself is so peaceful and pleasant.

One annoying thing I did discover is that GONZO's arrangement with Bost is now defunct. This means that having paid for Strike Witches I now can't watch it there.

I also discovered that the streaming of it on Crunchyroll is coming to an end - you can only get it by paying.

Perhaps I was being dumb, but I'd always assumed that one of the advantages of these download/streaming series is that the shows wouldn't expire in such a fashion. I'm not sure I'm as keen if it's entirely geared to people watching the shows week-on-week.