Time and weather

Yesterday it was sunny, if breezy, comfortable enough to walk around town with T-shirt and sandals, amongst all the odd folk dressing by the calendar.

Saw the 37 hour old moon, a thin paring of light in the twilight sky, conjunct with Venus, at 5pm (new moon JAN. 19 4h01 UTC)

Is this ridiculous or what?

I mowed the lawn for the first time this year; the strong winds having dried the grass that their mildness has been encouraging to grow.

Admittedly, I would have done it a couple of weeks back, if it hadn't been so wet; but this is just crazy.

The weeds think it's spring already, too.

That new gadget

Everyone's talking about the new phone thing from Apple — whatever it ends up being called after Cisco's trademark suit.

What nobody has yet mused on that I've seen is whether the UK launch will see it co-branded with Orange.

Phenomena

Driving to work this morning, the sun was rising behind me and the moon, full hours before, setting in the pale light ahead of me.

And a double-decker school bus was stuck behind a horse for quite a while, with me a few cars behind that.

Anime — Haibane Renmei

Another anime by Abe, also responsible for Serial Experiments Lain

After a dream of falling, a girl wakes from a cocoon, amongst a community of children and young women with wings and halos; which she soon acquires.

The Haibane, the winged folk, are outsiders in a community that is a small town, in a walled hinterland. Effectively, no-one leaves; except that Haibane depart as mysteriously as they arrive.

A slowly told tale of redemption. But not of the person you first expect.

Not a life-changing anime, but one I'm glad to have seen.

Anime — Black Lagoon, The Second Barrage

Darker than the first season, with depraved goth-loli assassins, chainsaw wielding cleaners, and conflicted loyalties in a return visit to Japan. And thus bloodier too.

None of these people are nice, and we are shown it.

Still a rocking good series.

Anime — Saikano

This was billed as a real weepie, and good with it. So I even ordered it from the States (only to find an R2 release was in the works). And I was prepared to forgive the sketchy animation style.

Alas, this series fails and fails hard. In trying to be tragic, it falls heavily into melodrama, and ham overacting. The subtlety of emotion is akin to that of a flung house brick, so after a few episodes I was sitting there, numbly waiting for something really heart-rending.

Alas, while my eyes might have moistened a bit during the first few episodes, by the time we came to the tragic death of a close friend towards the end, I was thinking "Just get on with it.", and it continued to over-egg the pudding all the way to the very end.

Nowhere near as good as the buzz suggested.