Koreth's Blog

Ok, so I finished this series a while back, but I have been a bit busy and a little out of the loop anime wise. I'd also like to say that I'm not going to be blogging for each episode of series' I'm watching weekly. I don't quite have that kind of time at the moment, or the motivation. Instead I'll just be blogging as I finish a series.

sola - 13 episodes. Synopsis: sola is a short, "slice of life" style anime with a few key characters. Slowly over the thirteen episodes, a semi-interesting plot progresses where we find out that Aono and Matsuri (two main females) are both beings called Yaka who have special powers and are hurt by sunlight (or UV rays). Near the end of the series, the true plot is unveiled and we learn that Yorito is actually made of paper and lives thanks to Aono's power, that both Aono and Yorito were humans many years ago, and that Matsuri, a much older Yaka, was befriended by them. When tragedy struck and Yorito and Aono were killed, Matsuri turned Aono into a Yaka, but was unable to find Yorito's body (a necessary part of the process). In their sadness, Aono developed the plan to "rebuild" Yorito, and it is assumed that their lives have followed a pattern for a long time: Aono starts a new life and rebuilds Yorito, when Yorito learns the truth or something goes wrong, she moves and rebuilds Yorito without the new memories since his death. In the end, Matsuri comes up with a plan to "right" things, where she and Yorito cease to be and Aono will be given another chance at a normal life.

My thoughts:  From the very beginning, this series was boring as hell.  Originally, Xinil and I were watching it weekly as part of Sunday Night Anime.  I think we made it to episode 5 or 6 before Xinil had to quit.  I myself thought that there were so few episodes left and there were glimmers of hope near the ends of some of the episodes, so I figured I'd try to finish the series.  God I kinda regret that decision.  The series goes on and on in its boring as hell fashion, never having anything interesting for more than 30 seconds.  Usually each episode had one or two funny moments, and I found this great easter egg for you all to enjoy:

continuing, I think it was episode 10 where it finally became interesting until the end.  In my opinion, sola wasted too much time on the little stuff, stupid things, without getting to the interesting stuff.  Even the action scenes weren't that great.  In these last few episodes, nearly everything important to the series is revealed.  Matsuri reveals her connection to Yorito and Aono, Yorito is informed that he is made of paper, and Yorito and Aono devise and complete their plan for returning Aono to her human existance.  All of this is still done pretty slowly, over the course of four episodes.

 Conclusion: This series is just way too slow and boring.  It probably could've made a pretty good movie, but that's about the entire amount of time I would allot to this story.  I honestly think that this plot could've been made into a pretty interesting story had the action and important parts of the story been highlighted.  Even so, the plot isn't all that great, the characters not that interesting, and the whole Yaka thing is... kind of ridiculous.  The music wasn't that memorable, either.  I gave sola a five out of ten, and that's being pretty generous.  I didn't want to give it anything less only because I thought the plot could've been done in an interesting way, it just... wasn't.  Overall, I wouldn't ever recommend or watch it again, but it wasn't the absolute worst thing I've ever seen.

ok, so I wrote this entry a few days ago and must not have saved it, so here I go again.

This is my first REAL anime blog here, so I'm going to lay some things out first. I will NOT use spoilers here, so if you know you haven't watched the anime I'm discussing, and you know you are the kind of person to get upset at having things "ruined" for you, please do NOT read entries prior to watching the series/episodes. I WILL try to keep things very obvious to spot, so if entries consist of episodes from a few different series, I will try to make it obvious where some start and others end. Also, it won't be all that uncommon for me to not finish a blog in one attempt, so if I have a new blog post that it private, expect that I'll have it posted publicly pretty soon after. So don't freak out, PMing me and posting on my profile "omg your latest blog is private!!" Lastly (for now, more "important notes" might be added later), I will be consistantly speculating on series. That's pretty much why I'm writing these. When I'm writing about an unfinished series, I will be speculating as to why things happen, and trying to read foreshadowing, guessing at motives, things like that. If, in general, you don't like that... please do not read my blog. I know a lot of people in the anime discussion forums weren't too fond of it, so that's part of the reason I've decided to do it here, where you can choose to read it or not.

With all of that cleared up, I'd like to invite you into my thoughts on Death Note. I just recently finished Death Note, but I've been watching it for a long time now, so please, pardon me if my memory of the earlier episodes isn't so great.

Death Note - 37 episodes. Let's start with a synopsis. The quick and dirty version: there are notebooks that exist that have the ability to kill anyone whose name is written in it while the writer is picturing the person's face. The series follows the tale of Yagami Light, the first to find this specific notebook, from the time he finds it until the time it is returned to it's rightful owner, a shinigami named Ryuk. This storyline is then divided into two main plot arcs: Light vs. L and Light vs. N.

My thoughts: When I first started this series, I was EXTREMELY intrigued by the idea. Not just the idea of the Death Notes themselves, but the thought of the main character also being partially evil and quite brilliant. So it's not a far stretch to say that I was hooked on this series from the beginning. After the introduction of L, the series really got intense, finally there was a good challenege for Light. Even so, I felt that many times in the beginning there were times when Light's and L's actions and assumptions were quite far fetched, if not impossible, based on the information they had accumulated. Even with these parts semi-ruining the experience, I was easily able to get past them and believe the story as it was told. When the first arc came to its conclusion, I have to say, I was impressed. Not necessarily surprised, as I had already realized (obviously) one of our "heroes" had to fall. But, as I hadn't had the story ruined for me, I really wasn't sure which one it would be. I'm not sure I remember the events leading up to L's death all too well, but if I recall correctly, his death was quite sudden, but still, the entire thing was exciting.

This is quite to the contrary of the second plot arc. Near (and to some small extent, Mello) becomes Light's new opponent and L's true successor. From here on out, the series just kinda flounders. It isn't awful, but it isn't great like it was in the beginning. I found myself needing to see Light's tale through to the end, but I wasn't really all that interested in what was going on. One issue first was Near's age. C'mon, are you goddamn serious ? There aren't ANY older, smart people who've been trained for this kind of thing beyond L ? Who in their right mind would give a kid of his age that kind of power and give him millions of dollar to use at will. Not only that, while L had "quirks" which made him interesting, Near was merely childish. He hunted Light continually as if he was just playing a game with his toys. I couldn't take the brat seriously. Glossing over some other major issues with this whole arc, let's move on to Light's downfall. Bullshit. We know that Light is brilliant, and I might be led to believe that after basically running the world for a few years, Light may be a little overconfident. But c'mon, let's go back to the beginning. This guy is paranoid as FUCK. There's NO WAY he wouldn't have thought that Near might know his basic as hell scheme. Honestly, his plan WASN'T that well thought out. Seriously, it ended up with him putting himself in harms way, which ended up fucking him over. If you think about the Light of the first arc, there's no way, even when he thought he had won, that he would've put himself out there to be discovered. They turned a brilliant guy with plans to fix the world into a raving lunatic. JUST so that he could be beaten. The consensus is that they only made plot arc two because people couldn't live with Light winning.

Conclusion: Even though the series lacked a lot of it's drive from the first arc in the end, it was still pretty good. I might even go so far as to say that the series would've been best off ending with L's death, explaining a bit about how Light would come to run the world as Kira, and then just stop. This aside, I did enjoy the series, and it was still one of my favorites. Out of ten, I gave it an eight, which is still a very good score. If I could give halves, it'd probably be 8.5, and over time I might look back and remember the good thigns about this series and bump it to a nine, while I see it being very unlikely that I ever bump it down to a seven. I would definitely reccomend this series to avid anime watchers, but for those who are extremely limited in their time, it's not a "must-see," just a "quite good."

Oh yes, I realized I left out a discussion of the music. While I probably won't always discuss the music for a series (as I don't think it's all that important so long as it doesn't ruin the series), arc two had some REALLY cool Japanese screamo type music for its opener and closer. I would highly reccomend checking it out.

In case you didn't read the subject: I am not at AX. I thought I'd take a bit of time to make a blog post about why I'm not there and all. Last I had heard from Xinil, there was going to be a good number of MAL users at AX and that everyone was going to try to meet up there. So for those of you thinking that I am hiding from you all because I hate you, while that is a very likely scenario, it is not the case.

In actuality, I'm at work. But not like normally at work, I'm up in the Bay Area. At Stanford. Using an instrument most of you (if not all) don't even know exists (hell, not even Stanford students we talked to knew about it).

The instrument is called a synchrotron, and the place I'm at is called the SSRL (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Labratory). Although I haven't checked, from what I've heard there are only like four of these instruments in the country. This one (and possibly all of them) is actually run by the government (Dept. of Energy) and just hosted by Stanford.

So you may still be confused by why I am here. Probably a lot of you don't know, but I'm a chemistry major. This summer I'm working as a research assistant for one of my professors. Our major project for the first part of summer was to continue and finish up some of the studies a few of his graduating students had began. We've spent the last 3 weeks synthesizing some nano particles (they are a mineral called goethite), then aggregating the particles in the presence of Zn and Cu under different conditions. Then we would attempt to desorb the metals from the particles, and look at the differences.

Anyway, so this instrument is in such high demand and there are so few of them that in order to get to use it, you have to write up petitions to gain access. My professor has been using the synchrotrons for a long time, so he seems to get about four times a year to come up here, and each is typically 3-5 days. So, with such stringent time restraints, we're pretty much running samples 24/7 while we're up here. And when I found out that our beamtime overlapped with AX, there was little I could do, and I definitely couldn't refuse to go.

So that's the gist of the work we're doing, I don't wanna get into too much detail (although I probably already have) in an effort not to bore too many people. I just thought I'd let everyone know where I was and why I wasn't at AX this year.

So here are some pictures. I'm working on getting more of them, but the only camera anyone brought was my professor's, so I have to steal it from him to transfer pics off of it.

Me helping my friend John load a sample:

Me loading a sample:

John refilling the sensor with Liquid Nitrogen:

Xinil is gay.

That is all.

Or.... maybe I'll update this later to let you all know what I think about series' I'm currently watching and junk.  If you see this and are interested in my opinion (for god knows why), drop me a PM or leave me a message in my profile... the more people who say they might be interested in hearing my thoughts, the more likely it'll be that I do it (seriously, stroke the ego people).