telly, telly, telly

As I suspected on Friday I didn't manage to watch all of the telly I had recorded. I got further than I thought I would, but part of that was because I dumped a good half-dozen things. What I've basically got left is the last episode of Wallander and now all 3 parts of the Great Rift wildlife series.

Crucially what I've also done is heavily prune my recording schedule as well. There's still quite a bit of stuff, but then it's that time of year when telly is quite good. However, what I'm hoping is that if I don't get distracted during the week I'll be able to watch a good chunk of it as I go and then next weekend I'll have a much smaller list of stuff.

My plan is to then turn my attention to putting a big tick in the box of stuff I've been really crap at addressing. By that I mainly mean watching some anime and doing some scanning, but also updating my site - I've got a few reviews written (and many more pending), but I need to scan in DVD covers and then make them into actual pages for my site.

I'd actually been hoping I'd pull my finger out and do some scanning this last weekend, but instead I played quite a lot of Anno 1404. The problem is I'm so close to 'completing' the map (by which I mean filling it with inhabitants and stuff to support them) that I keep thinking "just a few more hours and I'll be there".

The problem is that actually deep down I know it's going to take a hell of a long time for me to actually get to that stage. I'm close, but also a long way off. I'm also rather aware that at the end of the month the expansion comes out. I don't know whether to play with reckless abandon or to pray I exercise some sell control with the expansion.

Anyway, last week I got the chance to sample a few more anime shows:

Nyan Koi

I actually kinda enjoyed this. Maybe I really have lost my resistance to the repetitious nature of a lot of anime shows, because this is basically a high-school romantic comedy, harem-esque show and I've seen millions of those.

In my defence, in this series the main guy is not a total douche bag. Often the protagonist of these is a pain in the arse or a complete loser, or, even worse, downright unpleasant. Here, although he's shy around the girl he loves, that's about as far as it goes - he's not unpleasant, as such.

The twist of the show is also quite a nice one - he's cursed by a cat god and must perform 100 nice deeds for cats to lift it, but he's also allergic to cats. It's daft, but it kinda works.


Ladies versus Butlers

This appears to be a kind of 'sequel' to Kanokon. By that I mean it's by the same team/studio and is very ecchi and even appears to also be based on a Light Novel.

I've not got a very high opinion of light novels. They seem to either be really very good (Baccano is based on a light novel) or they seem to basically be the worst kind of cliché/trope ridden pap (Asura Cryin, for example).

Kanokon pretty much fell in the later camp, but because it took the ecchi right up to the line of very nearly being pr0n and had some good gags, I actually quite liked it. LvB tries to do the same basic trick, but this time I'm not so sure.

I dunno, I think it's because it's doing the light novel thing of ladling in as many of the typical and clichéd characters as possible that it gives a bit of a nasty taste in the mouth. Which isn't to say I didn't kinda like some of it, just that it didn't work for me quite as well as kanokon did.