I tweeted :

The only way I can swallow Giant Robo's Tragedy of Bashtarle is tobelieve that Daisaku had the most sheltered childhood ever.

This is the kind of thing that only fits in 140 characters ifyou already know what I'm talking about. So, a blog entry.There are spoilers for the second episode of Giant Robo .

In the first one and a half episodes of Giant Robo , the Tragedy ofBashtarle is presented as a big mystery. Daisaku, our 12 year old

This is much like last year's best N : what I considerto be the best or most enjoyable N anime that I saw in calendar 2011(regardless of when they were released). It is in order for at leastthe first few entries, but after that things start getting fuzzy.

• Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars : This isas good as people say it is. Despite strong competition, it's thebest thing that I saw this year and I'm very happy

Describing what makes UN-GO special is hard, but I'm going to take ashot at it anyways to add to my two brief earlier attempts .

On the surface, UN-GO is a show about a detective solving mysterieswith the help of his magical assistant. There are many ways that thiscould go wrong, but UN-GO avoids them all; it does essentiallyeverything right. In the process the show is not so much about themysteries as about everything that is going on around them,

One of the things I've learned over the time that I've been doingphotography is the importance of watching my exposure. Not in theusual sense of noticing when the camera is putting you at a too lowor absurdly high shutter speed (or ISO, or aperture), although that'simportant too. What I mean is watching your exposure from shot toshot .

Modern cameras in matrix or evaluative metering can and do change howthey decide to expose a scene depending on just how it looks to

As before , here are my early impressions of anotherseason's worth of shows. These are in the order I watched the shows(which is not necessarily the order they aired in).

Shows I've seen:

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear : Without the opening segment, this would beyour typical modern action show with the typical modern amount of'seriousness' (by which we mean people dying). It doesn't have thebest production values (to the extent that I, generally oblivious tosuch things

About a year ago I wrote that Sora no Woto had one moment that made me unable to unreservedlyrecommend it. I've kind of owed my readers (or at least Author ) an explanation of that moment eversince then, so here it is. This is a spoiler in that knowing this maydetract from your enjoyment of the series, which is a pity because it's(otherwise) an excellent series, full of the kind of things that I like.

The one bad moment comes at the end

Primarily due to Author's quiet advocacy ,I've been thinking back about my view of Infinite Stratos for a whilenow. I've come to think that I (and the echo chamber of the animeblogosphere) may have been unduly dismissive, so I've decided to takeanother pass at what I think about it.

Stripped of its particular setting, Infinite Stratos is an oldfashioned harem action/comedy show done pretty much straight, of a kindthat we don't see very much any

Author in reaction to my revisiting IS :

[...] The best shows of the genre have always had quirky,interesting characters injected into their relatively stocksituation ([...]). IS has, well, Charlotte and an honorable mentionin Laura.

It is also curious how our psychopath haremette gets points fromChris. My tastes lay, or actually run at full speed, in the oppositedirection

The short answer is that I differentiate between attractive charactersand interesting ones. I don't think

Ben-To didn't even make my initial list of shows to watch thisseason ; I only looked at a couple of episodes whenI saw a passing mention of it somewhere as the most GAR show of theseason and thought that was interesting enough to take a look at it(at the time I was bored with most of my other options).

(To me, 'GAR' connotes a kind of more or less deliberate over the topnature in the spirit of Gurenn Lagann . This is probably not