Unlike that honor these do not require a beheading…

With the passing of 2009 we thought that it was time to recognize those who showed individual competence during the course of the year. While it is the habit of many to judge series here we prefer to recognize the characters that made their shows a little bit better even as their series was weighted down by anchors that exceed the weight of Big Zam. While there are many who are worthy we decided to only bestow honors to those who gallantry we have borne witness to so while air dates may vary, they are just as deserving if not more so than some of the scum that crept forth from the dirt this year. After much deliberation and table pounding we have finalized the list for those exceptional few who made 2009 so much more bearable and outright enjoyable. These are but the first in a long list of names that have scrawled their names upon the pages of history with the blood of their enemies.

The Reinhard/Yang Wen-li Distinguished Service Cross

Origins: While Yang Wen-li and Reinhard have long since passed from this world there is still a need to give due recognition to exceptional commanders who rise above their respective series and demonstrate a superior grasp of strategy, operational art, and tactics that would have both Yang and Reinhard eager to recruit them into their personal staffs. Thus was created this award in the 35th Century (1982) to honor superb commanders of formations large and small who display tactical skill and outstanding leadership in times of great crisis.

Brigadier General Katie Colasour – To put it simply Katie was in the wrong series, at the wrong time, and on the fated to lose side. Surely she deserved better than to have her plans thwarted by pixie dust and havoc physics, but at least while she had screen time it felt like it was almost Macross with Patrick trying to show his undying love for her. Unlike most of the cast she had a fully functioning mind in stark contrast to her closest rival who was getting drunk and was refusing to put out for the booze she got. Still, for winning out in the end in life Katie is here by awarded the Reinhard/Yang Wen-li Distinguished Service Cross for conspicuous gallantry in the face of a plot armored foe, and for refusing to surrender in the face of unbeatable odds or worse join them in a idiotic Three Ships Alliance or something to that effect. She demonstrated competent tactical thinking despite having technical inferiority that only grew more disparate with time and managed her men well, under the most horrid of story conditions considering she was saddled with Andrei. On the behalf of mein Kaiser Reinhard-sama and The Honorable Fleet Admiral Wen-li have a wonderful honeymoon, General.

Lt. Arleen Nazon – Having been betrayed by the man who supposedly loved her Nazon was condemned as a criminal for the deed of one dirty Zeke. In her quest for revenge she turned her understrength platoon from a few mechanics to top class pilots that helped make Operation Odessa a resounding success. While often the first to be sent in as cannon fodder they adapted well under the command of Major “Giggles” Colmatta whose leadership is rather suspect. Having accepted that death was a distinct possibility she turned herself and her mild mannered mechanics into berserkers with exceptional cunning that got the better of many a Zeke. While the Zekes already had the data from her beloved RTX-440 that did not deter her in the least as she punched a hole right through Zeke lines to wreak havoc upon their artillery. For demonstrating superior leadership in leading her RTX-440 platoon under the most dire of combat conditions during Operation Odessa and having destroyed 13 Zakus,  6 Magella Attack Tanks, countless Zeke infantry, two Doms, one Gouf, and two Dabudes. Sadly this honor is a posthumous one as Arleen did not live to see the end of the war though her sacrifice and that of her unit resulted in a significant loss of Zeke heavy equipment and personnel.

Grand Duke Jouslain Tytania – The clear successor for the title of Grand Duke of the House of Tytania. Gifted diplomat, generous and kind leader to his fellows, and most dangerous enemy to his foes. He began his rise to distinction with swift political action to end the crisis caused by Ariabart’s unexpected defeat by rebels. Continuing on, he incorporated brilliant minds that were dismissed by his peers into a tight knit group that could act in all manners necessary to the conduct of politics and war. Lord Ariabart, a solid commander that was sneered at by his rivals for one unforeseeable defeat; Princess Lydia, viewed by others as merely a hostage to ensure her planet’s loyalty, but in fact a valuable social asset; and Lord Bal’ami, the son of a traitor who was held in the same contempt as his father by others was turned into a valued source of ideas and shows promise as a future commander and leader. All were brought under Lord Jouslain’s influence and protection, showing his vain and impulsive rivals that it takes a team to run an empire, not just a leader.

Oberstein Order of the Velvet Glove

Origins: Created to honor all those who work indirectly, get inside the heads of their enemies, and manipulate friends and foes alike for the greater good. These skilled men and women often go unrecognized by the nature of their work, but they are often of the highest importance to their causes, whether it be galactic empire management, yuri shipping, pursuit of True Love and Friendship, or many other worthy causes.

Tsumugi – Sometimes your own side needs a little manipulation to make the most of things, and Tsumugi used her gentle facade of an oujousama to quietly steer her friends towards The Yuri. Skillful and elegant, Tsumugi secretly worked to optimize the Light Music Club without ever betraying her intent. Innocent comments such as ‘I think that’s alright’ were used to take conversations in a definite shipping direction without suggesting Tsumugi as the initiator of such thoughts. And her ability to call upon vast resources helped bring the club together and provide them with the training-vacation time necessary to BE FRIENDLY. An outstanding manipulator and schemer if there ever was one, leading to her deserved nickname ‘the Machiavelli of Moe.’

Ayane Yano – One of the best analysists in modern shoujo intelligence, Ayane is currently leading a team that has scored several successes against Ume Kurumizawa and her war on True Love and Friendship. While Sawako is out on the front lines and Chizu itches to escalate the conflict, Yano has quietly worked behind the scenes supporting the effort. She was the first among personnel in the field to warn of the threat posed by the evil Vichy-tan, and the first to take action. Adept at gathering HUMINT, she scoured the area for both friendly and hostile witnesses to Kurumi’s actions to piece together a complete picture of her methods of attack. Her recent actions including [SPECIFICS REDACTED DUE TO SENSITIVE NATURE OF ONGOING OPERATIONS] have earned her this commendation and our gratitude.

Kana Minami – Good supervisors are just as invaluable as the higher profile field agents and analysts, and Kana Minami has demonstrated great skill in managing several covert operations. The continuing Operation Mako-Cakes has been her responsibility since its inception, and she has also overseen liaison efforts with Fujioka and Tomo as well as numerous shorter duration operations and actions during her years of service. To this day Operation Mako-cakes continues with its cover intact, despite extremely difficult situations that would have compromised Makoto’s identity many times over if it had not been for her quick thinking and intimate knowledge of those she handles.

Baron Ashura – Despite being the butt of a long string of jokes Baron Ashura nevertheless got the last laugh with a single act of subtle treachery that led to the demise of Dr. Hell and made all the efforts of the titular heroes all for naught. Baron Ashura was never the strongest and despite numerous attempts at defeating Mazinger Z he inevitably failed each and every time. He was made into a traitor to his own people by Dr. Hell but his love for Mycenae was so deep that he endured every disgrace and beating just to fool his enemies into underestimating him. He fooled the smartest woman in all of Mazinger Z into taking him in and deceived Koji into thinking that he was an ally while he waited for the time to strike back decisively. Baron Ashura not only made up for his past treachery but also brought about an invasion to avenge the loss of Mycenae when the heroes thought that they had finally triumphed. For treacherously ensuring that there will be a sequel, the person we least suspected, Baron Ashura, is hereby awarded the Velvet Glove for manipulating the heroes into destroying all that Zeus had fought and died for.

Roy Focker Cross

Origins: Following the heroic sacrifice of Roy Focker in defense of the SDF Macross on 30 November 2009, UN high command designed and began to award the Roy Focker Cross for service and sacrifice. Sometimes the cause of righteousness must be watered by the blood of brave men and women, and their supreme sacrifices are honored by this most somber of awards.

Prince Ali al-Sarshes – An ace pilot who also took the initiative in rallying forces to fight the terrorist group Celestial Being for many years, he made the ultimate sacrifice for the U.N. during the final battle of the war. He served when called in the service of several of the pre-Federation armies, both in and out of uniform, was instrumental in the destruction of 2/3 of the Gundam Throne forces, and without hesitation joined the forces of the Federation and A-LAWS when they were created. While stalking known Irish Republican Army terrorist Lyle ‘Lockon Stratos’ Dylandy, Ali al-Sarshes was killed by a chance shot, no man ever able to best him in honorable combat. Despite Celestial Being remnant claims to the contrary, his fatal wounds did not match the weapons signatures of any CB weapon used by Dylandy. He is survived by his sister Alphard al-Sarshes.

Kikiyo – A unit commander, superb markswoman, and healer for many years in the fight against Naraku, she ignored her wounds to save Miroku and take the fight to the hated Naraku despite the extreme personal risk. Waging her own personal war against the terrible foe for several years, she was the first to develop the Shikon Purification Strategy and brought others into her plan. Putting aside her rival’s lack of worthiness in both combat and love, she tirelessly worked to assist all who oppose Naraku, even when they did not understand the necessity of her methods. In the end she gave her remaining life force in the operation to purify the Shikon Jewel while Naraku was attempting to inhabit it. The war continues, but her sacrifice will never be forgotten.

Herman Yandell – The age of Zeke ascendancy was a hard one for the poor soldiers who made up the EFGF, they fought against a technically superior enemy that pushed them to their limits of endurance and courage. This long and bitter fight had caused numerous wounds on Lt. Yandell, both psychological and physical, unlike those pretty boy engineers in the Zeke wasted weapons program. Despite the personal hardships, his grief, and his endless nightmares Yandell never backed down from a fight. While the Type 61 was no match for the Zakus they faced, it did not stop Herman Yandell from taking the fight to the enemy and in his final moment of supreme triumph felled the White Ogre. Sadly his victory was cut short by a Zeke RPG team, while Yandell and his beloved Type 61 have gone into the mists of time, his name will forever remain on the honor roll of the honored dead who have gave all they had and more in the fight against the vile Zekes.

Arleen Nazon, Karppi, and Kuzuwayo – Operation Odessa was a hard fought campaign that cost many a Feddie his life to expel the hated Zeke invaders from the Earth, among them were three engineers who were betrayed and had the blame thrust upon them by a traitor they once called friend. Despite having years of work undone by a base act of treachery, and despite being relegated to becoming penal troops neither Nazon, Karppi, nor Kuzuwayo cowered in some jail cell to weep of the injustice that was inflicted upon them. Instead they sallied forth with all the courage they could muster to endure the insults and get back into the fight at a most important hour. None of them had any previous combat experience yet they rose to the challenge and met it tread first and built a fearsome reputation for getting the job done. The swathes of dead and dying Zekes was a testament to their righteous fury. But it was during their first mission with the 44th Independent Composite Brigade that they met a a tragic end, but their deaths were not in vain as they successfully annihilated an entire Zeke Battalion and their supporting heavy artillery in their last charge. Even when confronted by a traitor professing love and friendship they did not heed his lies and blew him straight to hell where all Zekes go when they die. For their tenacious efforts between the time of their sentencing to the their last charge they were granted amnesty and the Focker Cross for performing above and beyond the call of duty and making the supreme sacrifice under conditions that were harder than they needed to be.

Lieutenant Colonel Barack Ginin – The war against GN Terror cost many good men their lives, but one in particular stands out for his sins were few and his conduct noble through and through. Unlike the terrorists he did battle with, Ginin was never the one to moan every other episode about how Kataron had killed his wife in a terror attack, and maintained his composure in front of his subordinates including one very lost Louise. His loyalty was first and foremost to the men who served with him and despite Louise’s lackluster performance early on spared no effort in giving her praise when she did well and never failed to bail her out when the rookie got herself in trouble. While terrorists such as Klaus and Shirin are hailed as heroes for bombing civilians, Ginin was condemned as a criminal for merely killing members of a terrorist movement. While the quality of Ginin’s beloved Federation might have been less than that of the Federation that Yandell, MacKenzie, Nazon, Burning, Monsha, Sanders, Bate, Synapse, Adel, Amada, Joshua, and many others defended, his courage and bearing were equal. To set the record straight and to honor a man who made the supreme sacrifice so that his team might live and Katie’s operation might succeed it is with great pride and sorrow that we are to award the Focker Cross to one of the few true heroes of Gundam 00.

He thought someone was making fun of his weight...

With the balance of power shifting with the new era of peace it seems the Thieves that stole the bald lady have been using them gold bricks they also nabbed to get high positions in the local police. The Boone family is out hunting escapees so that they can’t finger them in court since their corrupt union with the cops has come to an end. Chirico finds himself with three aspiring managers for the battling circuit, its good to see that Chirico is already finding employment rather than going into a breadline or causing trouble. Unfortunately the Boone Family has Chirico as the last person on their hit list. Despite being out numbered Chirico and his new pals fix up a Scopedog for to face the Boone Family, and while Vanilla lacked faith the Scopedog made a glorious slaughter of biker malcontents though the police showed up for some crime fightan. The battle was brief but plenty of criminal scum were killed though the Police helicopters actually contributed a lot to the burning corpse count. Despite having minimal damage the heat seemed to be a greater hazard than in most mecha with Chrico getting roasted alive in the inferno, thankfully Rochina sends a team to put out the fires. Gotho seems to be rather surprised though since Uoodo doesn’t have a fire department, but makes no further inquiries. i really like how despite the fact that Chirico took no damage that he still felt the heat from the fires around him, it’s rare to see that even with no damage there are other ways of killing the pilot. I confess I am loving this gritty feel, even if Chirico is super human this is still very much real robot and has a more hard sci-fi feel to it than most.

Of the three new people in his life, Gotho the oldest seems to have a glimmer of wisdom when he laments how during the war they gave kids guns and only gave them skills relating to killing and now that there is peace they cut loose all the veterans to fend for themselves. I like how they are making a point to discuss the problems of the post war from time to time as Chirico is 18 and has only ever known fighting, but at least now he has an underground sport to participate in. Sadly this sport is pretty much gladiatorial combat though not every fight ends up with someone dead. I think it really says something when the spectators get all excited when one of the stands gets blown to pieces. Chirico really seems to have trouble making friends it seems the only guy who has come close so far was Carson from Roots of Ambition, though perhaps now he can have a friend in Coccona, Gotho, or Vanilla. Being poor and all with unemployment through the roof I can’t really fault them for worrying about money. Gotho seems to be ahead of the curve as he sees some inate talent in Chirico but has doubts that Chirico can take on the established VOTOMS jockeys. Chirico’s instincts seem to have sharpened enough for him to be able to detect that the he was going to fight Conin and not his original opponent. I am surprised though that even these veterans still cling to thier old rank structure and actually defer to Conin despite the fact that none of them are in the military any more. Conin put up a good fight but in the end Chirico only received a glancing blow while Coning got a BIG BANG PUNCH to the face. I have to say that it was much more satisfying than if it had been a projectile kill. Also it seems that the Bald Lady has a local name as well, but I am not sure what the Phantom Lady’s role is in all this given how she has only been rolling around in an armored limo through fire fights. I guess we shall see in good time though.

Oh ho, dealing in arms are we?

That side car could use an MG-34...

Chirico has no need for a drunk lady with Billy Baggage to tell him how to plan an operation.

I like how Chirico can do maintenance on his own machine.

...

Scopedog seems to own insolent biker gangs pretty well...

Man Rochina seems to have all the bases covered...

Even if they are just firemen they still look pretty badass.

Seems Uoodo doesn't even have a fire department.

Man the old dude is pretty wise even if he has a reputation for fleecing people.

LOL you have no idea Gotho...

The Bastard Conin.

I still have no idea how he picks out Scopedogs.

Covering her baldness I see...

Chirico finally repaid Conin for his SUGOI leadership.

Meet the vile traitors of the series, thank goodness none of them are bishie.

So with a little down time due to lack of training M1151s that the Army was willing to let us use I decided to start retroblogging Armored Trooper Votoms after having seen Roots of Ambition and Pailsen Files. I hope to blog it in chronological order instead of order of release just to see how it pans out as a whole. With the end of the 100 Year War at hand and the huge expenditure of men and machines at the end of Pailsen Files the war comes to a negotiated end, but there seems to be a few malcontents who are keen on making it big with peace on the horizon. The stealing of gold I could understand but I wonder what was special about that bald lady, though I have been spoiled as to what Chirico is I am sure that what Bald Lady is will provide enough of a mystery.  So far it seems the thieves are the being set up to be the primary antagonists with Captian Rochina playing a sort of Javert in his pursuit of Chirico. So far with Rochina he seems to pursuing the Bald Lady and the thieves through Chirico rather than simply wanting to beat the information out of him. I have to give Rochina credit for rebounding from his grand fuck up of letting Chirico escape right off the bat. I wonder how long Rochina is going to play guardian angel for Chirico, but I suppose that for now Chirico has a very efficient protector during his stay in Uoodo.

Speaking of Uoodo It is pretty much hell on earth as IKnight had described I am sure ExecutiveOtaku would have delighted in seeing a post war scenario where domestic issues come to a head when the crooks and crooked cops have to deal with the fact that it is harder to hide their crimes when the war is over. Uoodo has acid rain, biker gangs, street vendors who sell interesting sources of protien, and cops who are all in on the cut from the biker gangs. I like how that its very 1980s in that bikers are the cancer that is killing society, it reminds me of GI Joe when Zartan was rolling with a biker gang, but I digress. So far Chirico shows how much of an unnatural survivor he is by wiping out a platoon of guards, though to be fair many of them were caught completely by surprise and Chirico is a Red Shoulder after all… So far the action is plenty good and I like how Chirico is not completely useless out side of his Scopedog but at the same time is only killing off 2-3 guys at a time at most and not whole platoons like these newfangled mecha pilots. I did have a laugh or two when the Boone Family showed up, man they were some hurt ass fat mother fuckers and I could not help but cheer when Chirico turned them into a bloody mess. Despite Chirico being super human I like how he does come close to death but is saved from it by Rochina and his sniper teams. I hope that they continue to show that while Chirico is super human that he is still a mere mortal and needs someone to save his ass from time to time. Also his Unnatural Survivor ability doesn’t tangibly help him in combat, it just makes him insanely lucky like Patrick Colasour though piloting skills and personalities differ greatly. I wonder if the head of the Boone Family was a nod to LOGH since those robes reminded me of the Terraism Cult. All in all I am pretty pumped to be continuing to watch this show, it might not be as pretty and grand as Pailsen Files right now, but I like the post war scenario they have built up here. If nothing else it sure beats “everything ends at peace” theme that is more common these days, hopefully they will make good on showing how the post war period can be just as shitty as the war which preceded it if not worse.

Damn team killers…

Seems Purple Scopedogs lose out to Green Scopedogs, who in turn lose to Green Scopedogs with Red Shoulders…

Chirico smelled something rotten from the start, making him smarter than most of these n00bs who pilot Gundams.

I wonder if Chirico is going to pwn his ass later.

I guess they were keen on getting CASH FOR GOLD.

AHHHHHHH RUN FOR THE HILLS THAT BALD MAN HAS BOSOMS! WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE?!

Man what a mess.

Chirico only lied because he was too embarrassed to admit he likes bald women.

Best part it was that it was a suppository.

OH SHI- its the Earth Cult from LOGH…

LOL putting your money where your mouth is, did he have a jijirium grill to go with that?

BOOM, headshot…

Nothing surpasses the bond between Chirico and his Scopedog.

He’s my new CO I think he has aged pretty well despite being a butter bar…but he is damn good, I mean real good.

It seems that for now I will have a bit of Internet access courtesy of Uncle Sam although the training schedule looks brutal and having to share one washing machine and dryer with a bunch of mud caked sailors with no booze around means I will not have much time to loiter on the interwebs doing whatever I please. This was the first time I spent Thanksgiving away from my folks and while I have much to be thankful for there is much to be bitter about. Dealing with a bunch of whiny sailors is enough to drive me insane and I grow weary of hearing, “I am cold, when will my stuff arrive, can I trade my M-16 for an M-4, and 00bama is killing us all…” So yeah sailors bitching and moaning while in garrison is enough to make my ears bleed, I assume it only gets worse once we really go some where far far away and they’ll still complain about taxes despite paying none… At any rate this change of situation means a few changes are in store on my side of things, some might be big, some might be so small you’d never notice until I tell. So without further ado Prince Ali has called for a Jihad to liberate Kurdistan from the clutches of the insolent Jihad-kun and his Azadistani harlot. As a Crusader ally of the great Prince Ali, 00bama has called upon the Flag Fighters, AEU no Ace, Katie, and Choubu and the rest of the Federation to oppose the hated Azadistani occupiers and end their unjust occupation once and for all. Thankfully I will not be serving under Bushido Bob and Billy Goat but was assigned under a Gary Biaggi. So in preparation for the orbital drop into New Mombasa I need a few things…

So far I have at my disposal three 465 GB encrypted containers that need to be stuffed full of anime, so far I have a few things including Macross 7, VOTOMS, Gundam X, 8th MS Team, Gundam 0083, Canaan, True Tears, Skip Beat!, Shin Mazinger Z etc. I should be able to keep up with some new series but I think it is time to do a bit of retro blogging of stuff I never got around to. So seeing as how time is of the essence I will not have much time to look for stuff to bring with me, thus I need recommendations from all corners of the Federation to give me series to watch and perhaps blog about while killing me some Celestial Being and some Kataron Terrorists. Sadly due to time constraints I doubt I will have limit myself in tossing images of questionable relevance, however I hope to keep it as fun as possible for it will be the only semblance of normalcy I will have for sometime. So comrades who is up for some retro blogging, and what would you have me blindly suffer through? (Note: While I may not be able to respond in a timely manner I will be looking for recommendations periodically.)

Yeah 2LT. Biaggi isn’t one to beat around the bush.

He doesn’t bullshit much either.

He likes to be very honest…

And he so far he hasn’t killed anyone who didn’t deserve it…

2LT likes to use intimidation as well as force to carry the point.

Terrorists seem to bore Mr. Biaggi.

They made him go through the winning hearts and minds class, the results were kind of mixed…

He certainly curses like a sailor.

It’s because of him we have to spend more time at the gym.

Some time the 2LT gets a little creepy, glad he’s on my side.

Yeah I’ll be going along with these guys but at least I get a Scopedog out of the deal!

I cannot wait to start doing this.

Not so fun now is it Zeke? Now the Feddies got GMs you are so FUCKED.

So I was stuck in Virginia until Saturday for another C-School in the same ratty old barracks. At least though I finally got a hold of episode 3 of IGLOO 2 after multiple tries on a slow connection. While IGLOO will never get a grade A story it still matters little as all of them are about the best damn mecha action you will ever see in 30 minutes, the stories are simple and straight forward. This time it was about another crop of lunatics that drive guntanks as part of a penal legion. This time the fucking Zekes are on the run after the humble GM along with they mighty Type 61 with ample Big Tray and air support have been kicking Zeke ass across whole continents.

Ah the RGM-79[G] Ground Type it feels like 8th MS Team again.

No longer does the Zaku hold dominance as Feddie combined arms tactics have been kicking the shit out of the one trick pony Zeke strategy of “Send Zakus There.” While it was about the RTX-440 I was giddy at how much love the GM got, even after all this time I still have a weak spot for the workhorse of the Federation. It was fucking magical to see core fighters downing Zeke transports which hopefully full of Zekes and  badly needed supplies. While Yandell maybe dead the Type 61 soldiered on and helps the new GMs reap a fearsome toll on the hated forces of the corrupt and genocidal forces of the Principality of Zeon.

I like how artillery was critical in this episode as it is about as gritty as you can get for artillery is King of the Battlefield and can knock anything dead. Things like that are all but absent in AU Gundams. That is why UC for me will remain superior to every thing AU except for G Gundam. It is rather sad to see that while Sunrise has a talented team in IGLOO, the IGLOO team along with the Pailsen Files team labor away in obscurity while Jihad-kun gets undue praise as Yandell goes unsung.

Good to see that the Type-61 is still around killing Zekes, Yandell must be happy that his old warhorse is still rolling.

So the lead this time is a technical officer (I’d just call her a warrant officer) Arleen Nazon whose beloved weapons project was scrapped after her former test pilot and lover went traitor she and her team get thrown in the brig while their funding goes away. She swears revenge and is allowed to form a penal unit to avenge her loss, it seems death likes Nazon a lot more than Yandell but it seems that Death is strong with the yuri and starts hitting on Nazon right away.

Major giggles makes a return and constantly gets shown up, at first he is derisive of the Guntank but soon he realizes the error of his ways as the RTX-440 platoon makes a dramatic breakthrough with the help of some GMs and a Big Tray strike group. No Zaku, Gouf, Dom, or any Zeke are a match for their might and they amply prove their superiority over the despicable Zekes. After taking out one Dabude Major Giggles tries to order Nazon to call off her attack but the fires of revenge were burning bright as her anguish over the untimely demise of her beloved RTX-440 program demanded satisfaction. Despite her erstwhile non-mecha lover begging for his life, Nazon loved the RTX-440 more and blew them all to hell.

Hey look no beam spam!

Death in the mean time constructed a wonderful story a out Nazon’s former non-mecha lover was actually a double agent. Certainly it seems quite possible as Major Giggles did order her to back off, but I think it was just a ploy by Death to get Nazon to give up on men so that she could have a night of her and Nazon that went on forever and ever… I have to say it worked perfectly.

Still it’s hard to put into words how awesome this episode was hopefully the screen caps will convince non- believers of how much WIN IGLOO 2 is and why UC is still better than any of that new CE crap.   I hope they will have more Feddie centric IGLOO stuff somewhere down the line, certainly other things could use the same treatment, GM, Guncannon, Magellan, Salamis, and let’s not forget the big boys, Big Tray and Heavy Fork…

In the end I am going to miss this since this is probably the last dose of Real Robot I am going to get for a while since the Gundam Franchise has largely moved away from gritty killing and burning of Zekes to beam spam. Still there is hope once Gundam Unicorn arrives but that is a bit ways off, even if UC is just a faint memory these days at least there is still a team at Sunrise slaving away while their deeds largely go unsung as IGLOO 2 did not get as much love as the accursed Jesus Yamato and Jihad-kun. I liked this episode the most since it had the most combined arms mecha action of the OVA series and it was a rare treat that I can watch ovber and over again. The roster of models taking to the fight was pretty impressive, and even if IGLOO will not be remembered for being the greatest or deepest story told I did like simply because it was about the poor Feddies who died and lived only to kill Zekes, kill Zerkes, and kill more Zekes surely they would have made Halsey proud. Certainly it does reflect the fact that a person can run largely on hatred alone without having to have a shred of sympathy for the other side. As such it avoided the “Let’s All be Friends” bullshit that is spouted out these days and spoon fed to a whole generation that cannot appreciate the whole horror or war and can only see it as a place for moralistic platitudes and soap box preaching of the obvious.

Also this is clear proof that when you have a girl as the main pilot that great things can happen. While it may not tug on heart strings nor impart the treagedy that Gundam 0080 did, at least with Nazon we got the best damn combined arms slug out knock out fight that every mecha fans dream of. My only complaint was that it was not some hours longer…

Your point defense MGs only work in a box formation…Also I hope that Gaw was full of Zeke wounded and badly needed supplies, preferably medical supplies.

Our Core Fighter proves it’s superiority once again.

Zekes have piss poor aim and can’t sight their guns for shit. and how could you miss three GMs coming at you…?

Dang where are the GM Snipers?

Dabudes have broadsides made of weaksauce.

RTX-440s are here at this OK Corral, their names are Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt…

Tank platoons usually come in fours these days but I’ll take what I can get and I guess Nazon here counts as two…

I see Major Giggles is back…

The GM found it so funny that he had to ROFLMAO on Giggles’ ride.

FUCK YEAH Yuri in my IGLOO!

She is Chikane and you are Himeko in this rolepay…hell you already have the corresponding hair colors.

Well a moon shines because of the sun…

A Night of Nazon and Death that went on forever and ever…

Man this is a beautiful sight the only thing missing is the air support…

Land Battleship Squardron FUCK YEAH! Big Tray in the lead and two Heavy Forks bringing up the rear.

But seriously how did they miss that huge defensive ditch?

That one’s for ranging…

This one is for you…

Not that is MOBILE

RTX-440 literally blows the Zaku II away…

Hey look a Norris Packard wannabe…

Shot in the ass by a GM…

Shot in the balls by RTX-440…No Zaku amirte?

The GM is only here to help…

Fixed defenses are a monument to the stupidity of Zeon, what a Zeke can build a Feddie can blow up…

So many Type-61s…if only Yandell were still here to help.

For a moment like this… some people wait a lifetime…for a moment like this…

Because he is a Man of Destiny…and guess what he’s not in love with a Nina Purpleton…

Organic artillery support included!

Stupid Zeke MLRS would have sufficed…we Feddies call it Gird Square Removal System

Now you see them…

Now you don’t…it’s so…magical.

Magella Attack Tanks eh?

Feel the Fires of Retribution Zeke scum! These are the fires that cleanse your souls of your impudence and stupidity. ZEUS AKBAR!

I love the smell of burnt Zeke in the morning…

The Magella Attack Tank is not match for the RTX-440’s might.

Much more effective than a burning bag of dog shit…

How did you like them Valentine’s chocolate motherfucker?

Steven Hawking helped make the the RTX-440 possible, he even voiced the computer…

That is some GLOMP…

And then the Zaku I pilot shat himself…

He’s a Black one eyed Scoittish Cyclops…

Order now and you get this free Itano Circus!

Ima anata no koe ga kikoeru
“Koko ni oide” to
Samishisa ni makesouna watashi ni
Ima anata no sugata ga mieru
Aruite kuru
Me wo tojite matte iru watashi ni
Kinou made namida de kumotteta
Kokora wa ima…

Oboete imasu ka  me to me ga atta toki wo
Oboete imasu ka  te to te ga fureatta toki
Sore wa hajimete no ai no tabidachi deshita
I LOVE YOU SO

The shaft is ray sheilded so you will have to use proton torpedoes…

Nazon trust me…

Oh they brought three Magella Attack Tanks…

This one is for Yandell.

Hey it’s Robosaurus…

Best Monster Tank Rally EVAR!

No Shadow Kick!

Always two there are…

Too Fast, Too Furious, Too Weeabo…

Dom Jedi…?

More lIke Dom the Star Wars Kid…

Here have a can…

…of WHUPASS.

Damn Zekes only coming out when the RTX-440 is wrecked…

Woah there was a big RED BUTTON on this thing?

Arleen will not let him kill her softly with that song.

Zekes have trouble finding the proper words to beg for their lives…

ZEUS AKBAR!

For getting her beloved Nazon to leave her mortal coil I guess that makes Death the Winner of IGLOO 2.

The best thing about episode was the SCALE.

While there are many damsels in distress there are few damsels like Alphard. However any lass can become an ojou-sama from a distinguished family that has been continued for a thousand years, skilled in both literary and military arts,  with wit and beauty, the intensity of summer, the grace of autumn, the pride of winter, and the gentleness of spring…all it takes is effort. (Thanks to Kabitzin for letting me use his photoshops)

So since Hinano raged once again about lasses who could not save themselves I thought it was time to write the manual to help young otome everywhere learn how to look out for themselves. Certainly these days males have increasingly taken the hippie path and cower in fear at the mere thought of being drafted, some go as far as draft dodging before a draft begins, so as the not all males are men, as men do no cower and have a sense of duty to some one or something other than their own personal safety. I suppose with this hippie path that male pissants increasingly take, that it is time to make up for the shortfall and make comrades out of those women who have no desire to be coddled or held back by male puss cakes. While there is much talk of love being the highest relationship between human beings nothing could be further from the truth as comrades are in every way superior to boyfriends or girlfriends (who are by all accounts prone to treachery). The bond between two comrades can only be forged in the fires of battle, sealed through mutual bloodshed, and is guarded by the souls of the dead. Perish the fool who would dare betray such a bond!

The first thing that every lass who wants to be bad ass needs to do is take a bit of advice from the Jackal who once stated that, “You can’t break a man the way you break a dog or a horse. The harder you beat a man the taller he stands. To break a man’s will, to break his spirit, you have to break his mind. You see boys have this idea that we can fight with dignity. That there is a proper way to kill someone, it’s absurd it’s an aesthetic. We need to endure the bloody horror of murder? You must destroy this idea, show them what messy terrible thing it is to kill a man, and show them that you relish in it. Shoot to wound and then execute the wounded, burn them. Take them in close combat, destroy their preconceptions of what a man is and you become their personal monster. When they fear you, you become stronger, you become better, but let’s never forget that it’s just a display, a posture like a lion’s roar or a gorilla thumping at it’s chest. If you lose yourself in the display, if you succumb to the horror you become the monster. You become reduced not more than a man but less and it can be fatal.” If you can accept this much then it is well worth taking notes from the Great Prince Alphard who is pretty much the Queen of Summer as she has no equal. Unlike Hinano I do not discriminate and welcome any lass that is strong with the yuri to become bad ass and beautiful at the same time, only such people can be esteemed comrades.

You don’t have to be a damsel in distress to get BEST END, it’s less about finding some poncy prince than demonstrating your superiority long enough for other people to realize how great you are.

It is indeed a sad state of affairs that the damsel in distress has become so annoyingly common, but until Japanese women decide that enough is enough and they ditch their inferior men it seems that they will continue to fantasize about getting rescued. In truth such people will wait in vain and never know of the proper way of getting a partner. The problem is not only damsels in distress but also the low quality of boys that pass themselves off as men. It is sad that there are so many jack asses in anime and only a few like Patrick. While poor Patrick isn’t the smartest guy out there, only the AEU no Ace happened upon true love. His contemporaries however were very much a Japanese sort in that in order to remain manly they opted to make their women more oppressed to make up for their sissy girly man ways:  Saji downgraded Louise, Anew chose death rather than be with Lyle, and Haptism banished Soma to get his little play thing. If only more guys were like Patrick, who could respect the fact that marrying above them was a good thing, and admit that because they aren’t good at everything they need to find a woman who will make up for their short comings. At least God made it clear that Patrick got it right when poor Patrick got the BEST END and married the only woman of quality left in the series. Not that Kati got the short end of the deal either as she was in the enviable position of having a brave, if a bit dumb, man for a husband, whose loyalty is absolute and has no problem deferring to her judgment. Patrick also treats her like a queen and no matter what she did to him he always loves her and forgives just about everything. So in a sense after having spent most of her time on her illustrious career (Making Brigadier General is no small feat) she got BEST END too as her rival Sumeragi wasted her time chasing boys and got strapped with he stalker Billy. So at least there are instances of women finding guys without having to call out for rescue every five minutes, strangely though it happened in Gundam of all places instead of shoujo.

Never get caught in an alley without a pistol.

To be sure girls needing rescue is a persistent problem, in reality and in fiction, and the same solution comes up every time…weaponry. First thing every lass needs is a pistol, it’s the great equalizer and with proper training and enough range time, accuracy can make up for the small size of the round. Even a big man can be felled with a single accurate shot. However, I advise against simply settling for head shot (because that is just showing off), no instead use the three round rule, one in the head, and two in the heart. It is highly advisable that any aspiring bad ass lass should take a page from the reigning Queen of the Summer Season, Alphard onee-sama. Alphard has excellent choice in weaponry as she started out with the FN P-90 and eventually settled on the FN Five-Seven, every girl who wants to kick ass and take names should take note. Not only did Alphard go with a good reputable manufacturer but in choosing the 5.7×28mm rounds she selected a round with high muzzle velocity and low recoil, which is perfect for her desire to kill her target and have bad ass aim at the same time. The 5.7×28mm was also designed to punch through body armor so if Alphard ever has to fight an armored target at least she has a better chance than if she simply chose a 9mm. Given that the average girl who wants to be bad ass but not be built like a house, a .45 might give a bit too much recoil and Desert Eagle, while great for intimidation, is simply over kill and will probably destroy your accuracy if your intention is to get off as many rounds in the shortest span of time. Those who would do a woman harm often underestimate their targets if you have chosen your weapon well and have diligently gone to the tactical range as often as possible, you can make this their first and last mistake…

While understandably not all women who wish to be bad ass have access to legal weapons, but that is all the more reason to support one’s rights to bear arms. Even if an assailant were to have a weapon of his own so long as you have superior training and more lethal aim and killer intent you will be victorious as little boys often forget to take care of their weapons and usually have shit taste in guns. In any case lack of fire arms is no excuse for defeat, as tazers, pepper spray, Gerber knives, and your fists are usually legal unless your country just flat out sucks that much, in which case you ought to consider moving to a place where you can have an arsenal that can put the fear in any would be attacker.

While the FN Five-Seven is Alphard’s weapon of choice all those 5.7×28mm rounds she has work perfectly well with her FN P-90 when she needs to kill lots of poncy princes on horses.

I’ll be honest women have it hard, if you want to have that nice figure you are going to have to work your ass off in aerobics class. However looking gorgeous, delicious, and deculture, while being able to kick ass are not inherently incompatible. If you are of the opinion that you cannot look good and kick ass at the same time, you have self esteem issues and are fucking lazy and worthless to me and everyone else. In short such people are unwilling to be any comrade of mine and as a result will be dragged off to some loser’s bed in the event of war. No you can look good and kick losers into traffic by simply adding a few things to your daily workout. More likely than not you weren’t born pretty, you had to work for your waist line and as such you are probably more fit than most boys your age, in fact if you are a dancer you are by default more athletic than most people, only American Football players come anywhere near close in overall fitness. In line with this Alphard does have her own womanly charm, but despite her seemingly light build she has a lot of muscle mass behind it. Just like Bruce Lee it is not about how much brute force you can put out, but how good you are at economy of force. Like Alphard Bruce Lee was not built like a house, but he used his knowledge of human physiology to get the most out of every physical action. To be sure if you are capable of two finger push ups and the dreaded one inch punch you are a force to reckoned with, but more than likely you have yet to have such lethal skills, but nevertheless economy of force is important as one smart blow to the right weak point can have catastrophic effects on an opponent. Even in cases of disparity in strength redirection techniques like the ones you see in Aikido should suitably frustrate a single attacker until you can land the final blow. Always remember that Muhammad Ali did not simply say fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee for shits and giggles, even in boxing it’s about economy of force and not wasting your power attacks fruitlessly.

Just because Alphard was ambushed while wearing a dress didn’t mean that she was going to surrender meekly, that is why she is Damsel Dealing Death and not a Damsel in Distress.

Lastly there is the issue of what noble steed you should have. Certainly it seems that losers on horses are a dime a dozen, but fundamentally a horse is just as logistically troublesome as a tank. So instead of having a horse that is to be frank very fragile, it is far better to go with a tank or if technology allows mecha. At no point in time did a horse ever trump a big bad mecha, only in the case of Fuunsaiki, though admittedly the lose of being a horse was negated by being a horse that piloted a horse mecha. Nevertheless a guy on a horse with a lance is not going to do much against anything save for ill-disciplined infantry or unarmed people. Thus one should take up archery not only to look more like a lady, but to also be able to shoot out the horse from under the douche bag that calls himself a prince, that way you can possibly hear the clean snap of his neck as he tumbles to his doom While aesthetically archery seems much more refined and cultured do no skimp on sniper skills either as even a Barrett M82 is only deadly when it actually hits a target and no living animal on land can survive a direct hit with a .50 calibre round for very long. Even if death is not instantaneous you can enjoy watching the would be prince bleed out slowly as he calls for his mommy.

While Alphard has a petite build she has very little body fat and can thus deliver blows with more force than her small frame would suggest as one can see from the state of Canaan’s face.

While your martial prowess can far exceed that of any would be assailant never forget that such people will resort to dirty tricks to incapacitate you, so always have a battle buddy that you can count on when going out, keep positive control of your drink, and if that annoying guy asks one too many times break a few of his fingers as a warning. Remember you are the first line of defense in rescuing yourself, and to be sure if you will not do all you can to save yourself you probably aren’t worth saving and deserve to be a slave to some poncy prince. Never forget that a damsel in distress is probably a damsel deserving of death.

I see shit sucked so hard Steve Jobs wouldn’t let lolikit use the iPhone even if lolikit paid him. Too bad because I think there was an app to fix the fail.

Being bored as all hell I decided to play this lolikit fellow’s game which I have to say sucks…its more of a grind than World of Warcraft and no where near as funny since he goes out of his way to try and top Leeroy Jenkins and FAILS. Still I guess it is to be expected from an arrogant indy studio seeking to charge 60 USD for episodic gaming, no wonder why Gabe Newell told Studio Lolikit to take his shit to elsewhere. So in this game you go back to fucking high school, the paradise of weeabo dipshits who want to make up for their lost four years and yearn to go back to being some prick who could suck off his parents’ money. For a game that is so in love with high schools it certainly leaves out the best thing you can do in High School as an IRL Troll. All in all typical hippie bullshit I have come to expect from denizens of the People’s Republic of Berkeley. Doubly so for a trustafarian like this self proclaimed Dr. Lolikit (must be a lame attempt at riding Dr. Mario’s coattails) who plays himself in the game but was probably too high to do any voice acting for his tweeker looking furry ass.

I liked CJ better when she wasn’t a part of the master race…come to think of it I liked her more in her last game…

So instead of giving you choice you get to be some pink haired scrawny little girly man instead of something cool like a Space Marine or a Master Chief Petty Officer with rebounding health you know something original… I suppose that since this lolikit is a hippie it was too much to hope for some genuine badassery and instead we get a festival of mediocrity of remarks that might seem snide to civilian dipshit but to an enlisted guy like me it seems too fucking polite. Also since the main douche of a protagonist’s name is in red font it is clear that CCY is just a lousy cover for CCP, I bet lolikit thought he was very clever but I have fought the Red Menace since 1989 I know how the enemy works. Hell even the pink hair was a dead give away to lolikit’s allegiance to Code Pink… Despite the sexual spectacles this game is “sexy” like like a prudish fat yaoi fangirl…the sad truth is that there is no sex! Hell there isn’t even any sexy violence! I played for 100% completion in order to be Korean enough for Starcraft 2 when it comes out and still there was hardly any blood spatter to be found…

Hey Owen the scouter only breaks at 9001, it can run negative numbers real well…though I admit penalizing you with a negative for every time you fap is a bit harsh.

Gaming is normally about getting an experience you’d otherwise couldn’t have like blowing up people into little itty bitty pieces while getting Amnesty International crying enough tears to flood the world. Not here though, as it seems to be a game for the auteur, a game not made so much to give a player a good time, but a game made for the creator as a chance to show off how great he is and to wank off to himself. Five minutes in we already see the Marty Stu character of lolikit himself insinuating that he gets to bang one of his students, as usual some big breasted blue eyed blonde haired bimbo, I suppose it is a statement on how much he adores the Master Race (furries in Mein Deutschland indeed). If I wanted to hear about other people having sex I’d watch pr0n instead as at least I can forgo the nasty hairy hippie and have some hawt girl on girl action, but in CCY17 the game doesn’t give you a choice and in order to curry favor with HE WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED cuts out the sex. I would have given lolikit more points for putting in his little fun time in the chem lab, that way he could be where he rightfully belongs…in jail for distributing child pornography like the Jap fag that he is.

I asked Alphard and Liang Qi to pass judgement on this game as well…I was severely punished with airsoft pellets for wasting their time…

Unlike a good game like say Halo 3 or Duke Nukem Forever CCY17 is actually a shitty visual novels made for weeaboo who can’t really play games and can’t beat Nintendogs. As such it’s a boring little game with dialog boxes out the ass and crappy one click combat in which there are no satisfying kills to speak of (Killing this Scott character seemed more like community service since there was no Achievement, come to think of it there were no Achievements period). Instead of a PvP kill count to track how much shit you are not killing you get three numbers which make no sense, I suppose you have to be as high as lolikit to find them funny.

Owen is also the lamest villain ever as he is obviously a lesser version of the famed Jackal from Far Cry 2. Owen is a shirtless hippie while the Jackal is a learned arms dealer, the gulf in evil is quite jarring in that Owen might as well be making friends with furry forest creatures and sing to birds. Speaking of shitty characters while beautifully designed were a blatant attempt to hide the truly hideous visages of almost all of the characters. I may not personally know them (well I do know Impz and they certainly did not even begin to scratch the service in his regard though I suppose the artist was simply too overawed to do a realistic depiction…which is of course forgivable), nor would I want to, but judging from how the Aegis Combat System is always identifying them with transponder code 7700…along with a huge radar cross-section I suppose that they are quite large… Also for a group that would knowingly try to ride Krauser II’s coattails they certainly don’t look the part, and I am sure that a few laws were broken in the process. I can only hope Krauser II rapes lolikit 11 times as recompense for trying to make money without his permission.

Who in their right mind would want to learn how to suck gold balls out of garden hoses? Also flashing gang signs are we now lolikit? The Glee Club isn’t a gang, you don’t even have guns…THUG LIFE indeed.

While one would expect this to be a full game it turns out to more insidious than an EA franchise as at the very end they promise to bring in more sequels and to bring you the shittiest DLC that would make Oblivion’s Horse Armor look like a bargain. The game is a total rip off despite the pretensions to choice it seems that despite going her or there will always lead you along the same dull paths (all paths lead to incomplete). Also for some reason we have to do stupid shit like troll club when there isn’t a manly mecha fighting club, riflery, EOD, or CQC club. At the end of the day CCY17 is not worth 60 USD for the PC, and there is a very good reason why this isn’t on WiiWare, 360 Arcade, or PSN, namely shit sucks. It’s linear, boring, the one click combat has been done better elsewhere, the writing makes Gears of War look like a Pulitzer Prize winner, and it’s over priced for an episodic game. In short Dr. Lolikit is the Uwe Boll of gaming in that his adaptations suck even when he wrote the original, for the self proclaimed “Serial Troll” the game spends an awful lot of time sucking up to people. Although, since he is a hippie he probably thinks that showering his targets with praise and adoration, and giving their egos a blowjob that he’s “trolling them.”

Ugh…do we really have to white knight this chick? Can’t we just strap a bomb to her and let her blow up the principal’s office…

I am being overly mean, the game is quite adequate in it’s beta form and is held back more by restrictions of the visual novel genre than any lack of elan on the part of the developers. Still I hope this actually sees completion as it would be sad if after all those donations it turns out that Studio Lolikit is just another 3-D Realms and takes forever to deliver their game. I suggest playing it for a laugh here or there, but there is still reason to hope that Studio Lolikit will actually survive to complete this project.

In any case the hippie wanted suggestions on how to make the game better so being a veteran gamer I might as well tell the weed smoking hippie how to stop sucking. Well here goes…

To that dirty old hippie in need of a shave and a haircut:

1.    Needs more weapons and dynamic fisticuffs like Fight Night Round 4 (Don’t tell me you suck more than EA, hippie.) because if I am going to kill Scott I want it to be on screen with my fists breaking his fragile face bit by bit.
2.    Needs more mecha, no seriously stop making homage to crappy harem animu and go with the best genre hippie.
3.    Needs more yuri, it’s fine if he wants to fantasize about other men, but if you want more people to play put in something for men, and all men love yuri. Other wise this game is stuck trying to appeal to fat yaoi fan girls with yaoi paddles, and without lurvin scenes Studio Lolikit will be filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy before Christmas.
4.    You’re an asshole until I’m in the game.
5.    You’re an asshole until Calawain, EO, and lelangir are in the game.
6.    Make Impz more trappy, because right now what you have, while splendidly drawn, does not do his trappiness justice.
7.    Needs Achievements.
8.    Liang Qi-sama wants Wii controls and the ability to import her Mii.
9.    Alphard onee-sama thinks your one click combat sucks you need something more FPS, like V.A.T.S.
10.    Music is lacking you need to level up that deaf lazy chimp of a composer to Yoko Kanno level. Also start with using The Winner when turning Scott into a bloody mess and have the ending theme be 10 Years After, trust me it will make your game better.
11.    Needs genderbending.
12.    Less furries.
13.    If IKnight is not mecha, it ain’t IKnight.
14.    MOAR Quicktime events.
15.    Get a better writer, at time of writing Rhianna Pratchett is kicking your ass.
16.    Seriously how could you not go with a beat’em up?
17.    Let us pick from a number of protagonists other than CCY, he’s a commie and boring as hell.
18.    Your M Rating is misleading, it should be rated E for Everyone like your Marty Stu, call ESRB and get it changed.
19.    How dare you insult Impz by implying that this Omo can be anywhere near as trappy, we all know he’s a fat American Pig…
20.    Needs Prince Ali to kill people randomly to keep the excitement going.
21.    Your physics engine sucks more than Havoc, nothing even bounces…

Dude he looks like a terrorist without the rag over his head…not a terrorist straight out of hell.

Killing this fool was oddly unsatisfying, I could not bust a cap in his ass watch his blood spurt out in interesting patterns, worst of all there was no Achievement unlocked…thanks for sucking the fun out of killing people lolikit you fucking hippie.

That hardly does Impz justice…just saying.

Sometimes life can imitate art retroactively….this is the sea story of one such incident.

Well seeing as at the time of writing I have been in ordered into a short exile by my employer I might as well rant about all the bullshit I had to endure at AX from asinine panels to the underwhelming Masquerade since internet is slow here. After doing paper work and pretty much getting some military paper work done, though I need to put an APB on Impz and (I finally burned him out…) Haesslich for one little thing that will bring them great benefit for their rooms (all are at the time of writing frustratingly MIA), I have simply run out of things to do. Still I suppose it is probably best time to get the Morning Musume panel and concert out of the way. To be honest I went into AX ready to hold them in utter contempt since their handler, hence forth known as the Mouth of Sauron, was tossing her weight around the press junket and decided who it was that would get the “honor” of holding an interview with Morning Musume. Being a gaijin barbarian I had severely underestimated them…

Morning Musume when exposed to light…

Morning Musume at night…

For those who don’t know Morning Musume is basically the Menudo of Japan, only instead of boys they recruit girls who are under 23 (though age is not always the reason for “graduating”). The only thing I really knew before being exposed to their black magic was that most were born around 1989, in which case their ascension were heralded by an earthquake that struck San Francisco and split the Berlin Wall asunder. I probably should have read up on them before hand as they were the originators of the theme for AX that year. Perhaps then I would have come across this:

“Those who used the Nine Microphones became mighty in their day, bards, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their undoing. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Tsunku (a.k.a. Sauron). And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the microphone that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron’s. And they became forever invisible save to him that bore the Ruling Microphone, and they entered into the realm of shadows. The Nazgûl were they, Morning Musume, the Ulairi, the Enemy’s most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death.” –Record of the Lodoss War

Morning Musume’s Translator/Handler at AX’09

Their Fanclub HQ…

At the panel the Mouth of Sauron was pwning the noobs who dared to ask questions as not straight answer was given that the ignorance of their orc armies was evident as some did not know that a few of them has been voice actors for some anime series. Still if nothing else the host of Minas Morgul were certainly loud and numerous. Even if I think the Mouth of Sauron was all high and mighty she did have enough skill to shut people up and outright change their questions. Still after the Nine name dropped Pink’s Hotdogs I assume there might have been an even longer line there for some time. Well except Sunday since the Nine were summoned back to Barad-dur.

In any case while they roamed about Los Angeles they did address their infernal host of glow stick wielding Uruk-hai at a concert that I actually got a fairly decent seat for, even if I had to banish a few Mordor trolls to claim it. Like Earnur, 33rd King of Gondor, I was a fool for trying to challenge the Nine and for my impudence I was struck by Koharu “the Shadow of the East” Kusumi, Commander of Dol Guldur, with a Black Dart. It is true that their powers are greatly increased by the darkness, and that their Black Breath is indeed no joke, as I would discover to my utter horror. The only moment the faltered was when they hissed something about global warming, but even then their lethality was scarcely reduced. Such was my horror and subsequent stupor that I forgot to put the rest of my music onto my iPhone and only had their infernal shrieks from which I hoped to gain forbidden knowledge on the mics of power from which to mock them as having no talent. Coupled with the effects of their fell sorcery and my exile to Virginia with agonizingly slow internet meant I would have nothing else to listen to.

Already I can feel the weariness overtake me as their catchy songs become increasingly pleasant. Soon I will become a dwimmerliak in service of the dread captain of Dol Guldur as punishment for my insolence. It was as if I had been cursed by Glaurung himself as the one who bested me was a tall and fair lass of less than 20 winters and was the one who once donned the guise of Kirari from Kirarin Revolution. Oh unhappy fate for me to have been beguiled by a shojo heroine. Forever more, I shall love her and despair…

Kawamori was Right

It was as it were the perfect analogy…

He did it to me again…

I think it was ghostlightning who once mentioned in passing that Macross is full of fanciful BS, a song ending a war after all is rather fantastic. In any case I went into the concert as a man on a mission of malice out of pure fucking meaness, and I was expecting to loathe them (and write a post to incite a huge flood of hits from their white knighting hordes of fans, sadly some one already did something similar and successfully), but I really should have known better as a Macross Lifer. The power of song is certainly not to be underestimated and even if I didn’t understand much of it, their songs were catchy enough that I enjoyed myself. They probably can’t write a much of a song on their own, but still as a soldier who knows how brutal military drill can be (I was in color guard and drum corps when the world was young) I can respect them for working hard enough to do it for years at a time. Given that they never chose to be in the same group and were drafted to work together in a sense their dance routines seem all the more impressive for it since they all have to share the spotlight. I was ready and eager to call them the IRL Sakura-dan of White Album infamy. I was even prepared to go as far as mocking Jun Jun, as having been originally named Chun Li but was so backward they had to change it. Indeed my malice was quite excessive and my haterd unfounded. Nevertheless considering how rigorous their generational drafts (auditions) are and how the producer even went as far as taking no one at all in one audition, they are less like bard conscripts and more like bard commandoes.

I suppose I should have taken more heed of the bards of the Macross Universe. Even if Sheryl was irritating at first she became endearing because she worked hard to get where she was, even if Grace was the undisputed master of propaganda. I do think it was my respect for the great Sheryl-sama that I didn’t dismiss their efforts out of hand and operate under the assumption that their job was easy. Given that the media gives more of shit about them fucking up than me; I suppose not being under an electron microscope makes my job easier in that I can fuck up and not get in too much trouble supposing there is no body count of consequence. In the case of Minmay, she might have been a deplorable woman but she did have talent and the power of song. I suppose it was simply a case of life imitating art as the Zentradi were also laid low by an underage idol. In that sense I probably got what I deserved for walking into one of their concerts with an axe to grind before I even listened to their songs.

Bards like her do exist.

Life is funny, as at the time I just simply went to help cover the event, only to walk out a fan and picking out the 16, now 17, year old (I assumed that since they got graduated at their mid twenties that they ranged 17-22.) as the cutest since she was comparatively tall (which I assumed to be an indicator of age), hardly broke a sweat (Which I assumed was the result of years of strength and endurance training. After all dancers are among the fittest people in the world in terms of overall muscle strength, like a gymnast), and had a pony tail (a fatal weakness of mine in this case). My full horror only came about after reading the wiki article on them (truly ignorance would have been bliss). Ah well even if I can no longer give Char crap about choosing Lala Sune anymore, at least it was a young lass who is living the shojo heroine dream that robbed me of the moral high ground. At least I can give Char crap for having shit taste…

In the end I can see how they managed to sell so many CDs and have a fandom that counts significant numbers outside of Japan.

Her song ended a war.

Her song ended my string of Char likes jailbait jokes…

The Black Captain of the Nine. Do not pursue her! Far off yet is her doom, and not by the hand of man will she fall.

Ai Takahashi, Lord of Carn Dûm, is capable of taking out whole kingdoms as Arthedain, Rhudaur, and Cardolan found to their cost…

Their like I had long assumed was confined to 2D…

Little did I know that such was shojo heroine power that they were capable of becoming 3D; as such IN THE NAME OF THE MOON she punished me.

It was pretty much like having underestimated GARby, the consequences were quite drastic.

Kawamori then sent me this post card with a message, “MERRY CHRISTMAS ZENTRADI SCUM. LISTEN TO THEIR SONG! LOL newfag.”

A Zeon worth fighting for.

Well now that work is out of the way and I am currently waiting for orders during Spring Break I am finally able to fully address IKnight’s “War Sucks!” post in a fuller manner. IKnight raises an important distinction between the war sucks theme and the prevalent misnomer that it essentially means that such a work is by nature anti-war. For the most part Gundam is anything but anti-war and with exception to a few animated works such as Waltz with Bashir and Grave of the Fireflies there aren’t many animated works that are at their core anti-war. For the most part Gundam is not anti-war since all mecha is a glorification of violence on some level and not an out right rejection of violence as a means to an end. In most cases those who do writing probably have never fought a war nor have ever served in uniform, even then there is a great deal of difference between a conscript and a volunteer. The only widely read writer that I can think of (note there are many more that may or may not have seen combat) who actually fought in a modern war was George Orwell, given that anime is done almost exclusively by Japanese writers and given that they hardly talk of the full scope of the last war that they fought it is unlikely that they are capable of fully understanding the great big mess that is war. IKinght is largely correct in deducing that opposition to one war does not automatically mean that such a person is anti-war, the notion that there can be a just war is proof enough that there are few true pacifists.

If there were to be an anti-war Gundam the protagonist would have to be a GM pilot, not some invincible kid.

I’ll be honest I don’t think that most civilian can even begin to understand what war is and how it is possible for decent people to irrationally enlist. Even if IKnight says that all the conflicts he hears about were in far off places he does ignore the situation in Northern Ireland or what it would have been known to him as “the Troubles” thereby demonstrating what I think is a fundamental issue with civilians in general and idealists in particular, willful ignorance. War is at its core death on an industrial scale nothing will ever change that, not the Geneva Convention, weapons bans, or the International Court of Justice. The creation of such institutions is simply a mark of the notion of a just war and a clean war which is in my experience rather prevalent in the     better off places in the world but by no means universally held even there. What mecha, and in keeping with IKnight’s example, such as Gundam does is vindicate acts of war on the part of the titular heroes, with notable exception to UC. In the case of UC it was the chronicle of a long running war with distinctions between good and evil harder to define as it dragged on since both the Federation and Zeon engaged in atrocities of one sort or another at various times. Most importantly of all is that no matter how great a pilot Amuro, Char, or any one for that matter none of them could put an end to it. For all of the heroism, camaraderie, and nobility none of mattered in the grand scheme of things, it was all in vain. More recent Gundams aren’t anti-war as they amount to little more than power fantasies of the lone teenage hero doing superhuman things on par with curing blindness there by dumbing down the issue of war down to moralistic platitudes of little if any value. Nevertheless ‘War Sucks’ is a universal theme in Gundam, along with all the romanticism associated with war adventure, romance, and heroics, and for good reason, since mecha in Gundam are machines of war and not machines that play basketball.

These days it seems child conscripts are quite fashionable, and as such there will be much tomfoolery and SNAFUs.

‘War Sucks’ is common enough sentiment but because morals differ from place to place making moral judgments on war is largely a futile exercise. The idea that there can be a just war ought to confirm to everyone that war will not be going out of fashion anytime soon. In the case of the Neo-Conservatives the 2003 invasion was justified, not every one agreed and heated and ugly arguments were tossed about across the globe largely over the rather pointless issue of whether or not it was right. Herein lies the crucial divergence of how a soldier and a civilian would think, for the civilian having the moral high ground is important, for the soldier the thing he/she cares about most is victory and how to live to see it. I know for me that once the die was cast there would be no take backs and the only thing that really mattered is and always will be victory, since in all honesty I’d rather deal with the consequences of winning than the consequences of losing and like Patton I’d don’t give two shits for some one who lost and laughed. Even if an indeterminate number of servicemen take issue with the dice being tossed in the first place assigning blame doesn’t help me or anyone else who is in country, but for any civilian that cares about politics (which is pretty much everyone) being right helps them in ways I don’t fully understand. The fixation on moral high ground and moral justification plays a large role in Gundam, sure the side they are on can be wrong, but the hero is always right and largely free of any sort of misbehavior and if there is even the slightest bit of ambiguity there is usually an excuse which is harped upon constantly. In addition the in the recent Gundam series there is a distinct lack of death on the hero faction which automatically removes much of the PTSD factor further making war a mere backdrop for mecha beating each other to pieces.

As for the those who actually volunteer there is much less bitching, though a lot more trash talk.

Within the mecha genre the most glamorous of all soldier subtypes is already chosen, the pilot. There is a great difference between a pilot and infantry, after all a pilot will rarely see the first hand the results of his/her handiwork in the same way a ground pounder would, the fact that pilots do put kill markers on their planes is indicative of how each group has different views on killing. Moreover a pilot is usually an officer with better pay and better facilities than the enlisted. Things are easier for a pilot since IFF is usually good and for the most civilians don’t go off getting in the way in fighters or mobile suits, hence by default a mecha pilot will rarely if ever accidentally kill civilians as opposed to the infantry whose environment is far more confused and IFF is depended sole on a snap judgment measured in milliseconds. For the most part if a pilot does pull off a blue on blue it’s because he/she hit a ground target that was misidentified. So by default Gundam and mecha can’t ever really be anti-war because they deal with a sanitized aspect of war the only more sanitized version would be something about sailors on ships bravely swabbing the deck, not to say that their contribution is unimportant (as the Carrier Battle Group is the primary arm of force projection) but rather that they do have a sanitized environment which they swab on a regular basis. Moreover pilots don’t as a rule have it any where near as bad as the infantry since the idea of digging a hole to shit in with toilet paper being a luxury item is often enough to disabuse anyone with a romantic notion of war.

Damn civilians always getting in the way, this is not a photo op people!

While IKnight is right that every serviceman thinks that war sucks, the important difference is that for the most part those who choose to enlist or accept a commission broadly fall into the following categories the guys with no where else to go, mild misanthropes, guys who want the benefits, the guys who believe in their nation, and any combination there of. The guys who only sign for the benefits are often the first to desert and flee to other places seeking asylum and as a result their thought processes are utterly alien to me. Of the remainder for the most part there is the prevailing belief that while killing is bad letting the Jihad-kuns of the world to go about unopposed is far worse and war being war casualties, even collateral ones, are inevitable since fitting everyone with IFF would be impractical not to mention hard to implement on consenting people given potential overtones of Orwellian Dystopia.

As distasteful as civilian casualties are, it is militarily difficult to solve the problem. First off since the advent of fast moving columns in the post blitzkrieg years armies can move faster than civilians can run (also since civilians have more fat people, children, and senior citizens among them speed is further hampered) and even when they can run some for various reasons choose to stay put or are abandoned, speed being a critical to the success of any campaign seizing the objective is going to take precedence over letting every civilian get a good enough head start. Secondly moving all civilians into camps away from the baddies only sounds good in theory even if they don’t die from bullets they can still die from neglect. Thirdly the Jihad-kuns of the world do like to hide out amongst civilians and since Mao wrote the latest best selling book (to get rich is glorious) on guerrilla warfare every revolution in the making makes a point to get civilians involved in a People’s War. You can make a smart bomb but even then it still relies on a kill radius and there is no guarantee that civilians won’t simply get in the way. Then there is the issue of a huge amount of dumb ordinance that militaries all over the world use, and sadly bullets are very democratic in that they generally don’t give a toss about what they pass through or what they end up in. More often than not any killing of civilians is almost always portrayed as a deliberate act, when the reality is that accidents do occur and a slight shift in the wind can result in unintended consequences.

Sure they look magnificent, but we all know how tough they really are…

Then there are the mild misanthropes like me who consider the entire concept of innocent civilian to be a farce, it’s not so much that the civilian label is disagreeable but the notion that humans are in any way innocent is something I for one consider blatantly disingenuous. In Gundam and most series dealing with war there are plenty innocent civilians to be killed by the forces of evil they are little more that objects to be killed and then mourned for so that the forces of evil can be made all the more abhorrent and ultimately easier to kill while remaining “noble” and “just.” Truth is in war civilians will screw each other over to get what they need, crime doesn’t stop, theft goes up during duress, misdemeanors are committed, felonies continue, and for the most part a declaration of war does not put an end to the petty squabbles and crimes of non-combatants. Profiteering also occurs, so I fail to see how every civilian can be considered innocent when you can have Ann Coulters, Al Frankens, Bernard Madoffs, Charles Mansons, and Josef Fritzls amongst the civilian population. You also have the Janjaweed Rifle Association and the Hamas Rocket Society under the aegis of civilian organization, even then even if captured the members of such associations can’t be shot as spies without some controversy. Lastly I am sure most if not all of you have bought stuff with the Made in China sticker and even with Made in USA the truth is perhaps it too was made in a sweatshop, so if you think about it the ubiquitous presence of Chinese goods means that most of us have taken advantage of sweatshop labor at some point. Given the complexity of the civilian label and the general treatment of most civilians as innocent civilians, most shows dumb it down any anti-war message is already compromised.

Freedom means different things to different people.

While the average mecha protagonist in the recent Gundams is an idealist, the prevalent cynicism within most formal all volunteer militaries, is absent. (I’d imagine that it be much worse for a conscript, but I wouldn’t know) It’s fairly easy to become a misanthrope, I used to believe in human decency and the notion of innocent civilian, but 9/11 changed everything (doesn’t it always). I remember clearly, I woke up at about 0630 local time heard about he attack over 106.1 FM, thought it was bullshit, turned on the news to see the second plane go right into the tower, went to school, attended my advanced algebra class, and then the announcement at about 0830 is made to go home. To my shock and surprise I hear the loud cheers of high school students at the early dismissal, only one girl was crying in that class showing any hint of grief her name oddly enough was Mary (who I am sure was a virgin at the time, the Virgin Mary), and it was then I came to the conclusion that humans are savages.

War ages people in unexpected ways.

It’s my belief that decency was only possible when people were given the chance to be decent and if that loud cheer I heard was indicative of anything it was that not all of us even choose to be decent when given the choice. After that I had no doubt in my mind what I was going to do after high school and in 2003 I started the enlistment process. Having venerated Prussians and reading books about war, and now that a war was inevitable, I answered the call that I had felt for most of my life. The question of whether or not I could live with myself after having participated in so cruel (and uniquely human) an endeavor that might harm innocent civilians was answered with a thunderous cheer, which resulted in a general loss of faith in the human species. I think that is something no one else can understand and as a result most character development from civilian to ace is, to me, fanciful. Fundamentally my reasons for enlisting were irrational, and perhaps that is the thing that is glossed over, humans are irrational. While everyone wants peace the caveat is that we all want it on our terms, and that’s the point of violent disagreement across the globe. It’s easy to say you will die to protect your countrymen, but if given the choice to take a bullet for David Duke…I’d rudely decline. Moreover no one ever won a war by dying for his country, he won it by making the other poor bastard die for his, as such the issue is not whether one is willing to die to protect people, but if they are willing to kill to ensure their safety.

Pretty much sums up Pumpkin Scissors, the setting is depressing, but her antics are odd to say the least.

While Gundam and mecha are not anti-war, what does come to mind when I think of anti-war themes is Pumpkin Scissors, though admittedly not the best series in the world, it nonetheless went to a place few anti-war themed works go, the post war period. It’s a romantic notion that once the guns fall silent that the worst is over, on the contrary, the widespread destruction of infrastructure, displaced persons, the break down of order, botched demobilizations, and in the case of the defeated nations that signed a mildly Carthaginian peace, occupation or reparations. Most worryingly of all is the emotional ill will and anger of the populace after a war, if it is long perhaps the feeling of relief will allay the worst of it, but in a short war hatreds persist because the sacrifices more often than not were simply minimal. Unless of course the victor was waging war in someone else’s backyard in which case the post war period needn’t be painful at all. Even if it was not handled superbly Pumpkin Scissors at least covered many aspects of the shitty post war period, wide spread unemployment, loss of infrastructure, meager harvests, continued rationing, banditry, women turning to prostitution, a generation of women who may not even find a husband, disease, illicit drugs, organized crime, etc. Had it been GRIMDARK it certainly could have succeeded in that regard, but a bubbly happy overtone makes it more digestible since the any overly serious treatment of it might have been to depressing to slog through for 24 episodes.

Tl;dr C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. C’est de la folie.

So with convention season reaching a fevered pitch during the spring and summer I thought that it would be fun to introduce the finer points of one of my convention staples, the MRE. Now I know that the thing says COMMERCIAL RESALE IS ILLEGAL, but there is no actual law that I have seen and they sell the things at the Travis AFB commissary anyways so if one wanted to one could get these things, even the manufacturers sell them directly though you have to buy a whole case at a time. Still at about $7.25 (there is a Tailored Operational Training Meal that goes for about $4.22 that has less calories, though is not nearly as impact resistant) a pop it’s not nearly as bad as those hotdogs, hamburgers, and small bowls of chili that the hotel or convention center tries to sell you, I am sure usagijen is going to have a fit at what I am about to say, but there certainly are benefits to having a light weight lunch that is rated to be shoved off C-130s. Besides it tastes just as good if not better than the standard convention food, and at least when you make it is fairly hot and not mildly warm to cold. If you can get a hold of these and your venue won’t have reasonably priced food I’d recommend getting an MRE especially if your schedule is packed, less time spent eating means more time doing other stuff. Besides it’s a better option than eating fast food at every meal or getting that $1.50 1 oz. bag of chips. So yeah I had one that was getting a bit old and decided it would be fun to open it up just for fun.

They call it beef steak, I call it mystery meat…

Despite the jokes of MRE meaning Materials Resembling Edibles, Massive Rectal Expulsions, Meals Rejected by Everyone, etc. it’s sort of like canned food, though the meat patties are often tough there are superior menus like the pot roast, rice, and beef stew. Other than the main course which can really be hit or miss the rest of it is usually good. The cookies are dry but edible and it tastes like a cookie, the pound cake is better, and I personally thing the crackers are okay since they have a high fiber content so that it won’t clog your system, plus they usually give you cheese spread or jam to go with it. I don’t like the wheat snack bread all too much but it does fill in for the crackers. Otherwise the fruit tastes like canned fruit and you do get candy like Skittles and M&Ms. If you are lucky you get one of the prized milk shake powders which are pretty much a meal in and of themselves and are often the most palatable part., otherwise they are excellent trade items in the field. Just be sure to drink plenty of water since you will need it… They also come in vegetarian and have fewer problems than the chicken for the most part.

Yeah my kitchen was a mess that day…

When I first saw these things in high school I though that they were the coolest things since I expected canned spam. That flameless ration heater isn’t much nowadays but back in the late 1990s I thought they were something, the thing relies on the oxidation of magnesium which produces hydrogen gas which you don’t want to get a good whiff of. The water gets really hot and is undrinkable but it gets the job done. The tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce is standard and is a god send if you need to add flavor to something or if you just like spicy foods. Just keep in mind these things really pack the calories averaging about 1200 for a full MRE since soldiers burn more calories running jumping and shooting.. The thing also comes with waterproof matches that usually work when dampened so if you need to burn those loli doujins in a hurry you can do it fairly easily and even in the rain! Still the flameless ration heater really isn’t allowed to go on a plane nakkid so you will need a sealed MRE if you are planning on flying. Otherwise boiling is a good enough method of the heater fails or you lose it. You also need a small knife or some sort of cutting device because the pouched can be really tough and even then you don’t want to peel it at the notches. Better to cut laterally so it’s more accessible and easier to eat.  If nothing else you can laugh at what passes for food for poor bastards like me during the first few weeks of hitting the ground.

More like any beans…at least they got rid of those lima bean dishes.

Opening an MRE is like opening a present, you don’t know what’s in it and even when you open something with a weird name you might find that it is something you normally eat any way, such as the fruit pastry which is really a pop tart. If nothing else get some for the zombie invasion or a natural disaster kit.

Uncle Sam is not bound by advertising laws, because he bought them not you…

The modern hard tack.

These actually taste pretty good.

Though it’s not the healthiest thing in the world…

Yeah those are real tootsie rolls, Uncle Sam like to have fun with words.

Ah it feels like the public school lunch program all over again.

Just make sure not to eat these at before you rack out.

Unlike Akiko’s Jammu it won’t kil you.

Sherry’s got the Gundam, Hughes is in the truck, and if we are lucky the Zeke will take a Kampfer. If not he’s a loser.

Well I am not sure if this is new or not but here’s some pics some gentle/m/en dug up recently. Well I can’t read moon, but judging by the hubbub it seems it will be a UC series or OVA (HELL FUCKING YEAH UC) and will be set between 0080 and 0083 in 0081. I suspect that the girl Sherry Allison will be the pilot for the RX-78-7. At least the characters barring the Zeke look older than 16. Hughes (Feddie Officer) clocks in at a nice 32 years of age, Sherry at 24 (mai hunni!), and the Zeke twat comes in at 20, though it still seems like a far cry from the old looking dudes like South Burning. Still aesthetics aside I hope that because it is the 30th Anniversary Project that it will be great, after all the RX-78-7 looks like it was based off of Alex from 0080, and the tentative pilot seems to be a girl rather than some pretty boy twat, so the stars might be aligned for this one. Let’s not forget how great things were when a woman was allowed to pilot the only Gundam in her series.

Me likes…

Here’s hoping for a cameo…

Soon this will all be behind me.

So I got the news from my university Dean’s office about a week ago, I’ll get my degree early…but the catch is that I will be getting a B.A. in Microbiology with a minor in East Asian Studies and English, instead of the B.S. in Microbiology with a minor in East Asian Studies. Perhaps there is not much of a difference in a B.A. from a BS, but the fact that my degree is going to have Art instead of Science really eats at me. Whether or not that is going to affect my chances for employment remains to be seen but I attach more prestige to the B.S. than the B.A. even if the difference is only going to be two classes. I know that ultimately though I have no one to blame for this other than myself, I transferred with too many credits and took about a quarter’s worth of classes I did not really need that I only took to keep my options open. I had gambled on the idea that the student population would not mushroom the way it did. I already went over the unit cap so it was pretty much a forgone conclusion that they would boot me out with a degree as the Dean’s Office held all the cards and had no incentive to let me petition for excess units once they figured out that went around them the first time and will be 2.5 units over the 225 cap. Certainly if I had been more focused on getting a B.S. I could have gotten it, and the fact that I did better in my minor classes than my major classes did little to help my lost cause. Most of the anger and bitterness has subsided, but in the end I find it mildly irritating all the same.

The Yuri I never saw,

The Muto that I never held,

The bath I never had,

and this University’s lack of Hasegawa speaks for itself. (adapted from an insult to the 1st Cavalry)

I’ll try to keep the bitterness to a minimum but as most of you boys and girls are in college or going to college, don’t make the same mistake I did, plan your course work out like your life depended on it, and try to avoid classes you don’t really need. Also if you are going to transfer do not bet an over achiever in community college and transfer with as many units close to the minimum as you can. I went in with 114 when I only needed 80 right off the bat which they pruned down to 90.5 units. The other issue was that I took a major in which the only interest I had in it was disease causing organisms, the rest did not interest me terribly much and I took it because it seemed more useful and could help me find a job that made decent money. If only it were like Moyashimon in that there was a lab course with instructors like Haruka and Muto, if only… Still it was also around this time when I had my fate handed to me by an enemy that I could not defeat in a civilized non-violent manner that I also finished Fancy Lala. The military teaches you how to roll with punches, but sadly they don’t really teach you how to deal with the bitterness and the anger of defeat.

Remember when you considered your crayon art to be good?

Okay so maybe getting old has some perks.

I am Quattro Bajeena I am looking for a man named Char…Have you seen him?

So before I compare my miserable existence to that of the protagonist of Fancy Lala, the anime was an oldie from 1998 about a girl named Miho who gets the power to magically conjure up clothes she draws and turn into a 15 year old Miho. She starts out as a model and eventually gets to release a single before the magical creatures that granted her mastery over space, time, and matter went on into the next temporal plain. It wasn’t a commercial success but I liked it very much since I like genki never say die characters like Miho, it also helps that she has fantasies that are very similar to Hosaka’s though since Miho predates Hosaka by ten years I think that perhaps Hosaka took a page from Miho-nee when it came to letting his imagination run riot. It’s a good old school anime to watch if you haven’t strangled the child within. Overall it was an experience for Miho that came to an end at which point she was powerless to fully reclaim what she had, though the lesson is probably that she still has time to grow up to be Lala and she needn’t such into it. Funny how kids wish that they could be adults and when they become adults all they want is to be a kid again. I liked it a lot because of the bitter sweet end, Miho, might not see Lala for another six years, but life went on, after her adventure was over life went on there was no need to despair because she still a had a number of years to enjoy being a kid.

Things were so much simpler when I was nine…

Say does that magical pen work backwards?

Whatever happened to see through clothes anyways?

Maybe it was a happy coincidence that I finished Fancy Lala around the same time my plans for the future were rendered moot with one swift stroke from the Dean’s pen in the NO box. Just like how Miho’s stint as Lala ended abruptly and just as she peaked, my college life will soon effectively come to an end and like Miho I will have to figure out what to do from now on. Where as Miho would someday see Lala again on her 15th birthday, I cannot afford to do this college thing over again nor do I have that much time to devote again. Soon I will fully enter the real world instead of residing in the dual existence of college drunkard and GI Joe. Graduating early is both a blessing and a curse it means that I won’t have any civilian employment when I get out, and judging by how dismally everyone else is doing I should be grateful that I have already enlisted and have rank over the new crop of recruits who are signing up now to make ends meet. At this juncture I don’t know what I want to do depending on how the job search thing goes, and as I have mentioned before I can still beg Uncle Sam for a job (which he will surely grant so long as he gets to decide where it is I shall work), just sooner than I had ever intended. One great thing about being shoved out is now the constant pressure of having classes seems to have abated. I hear they call it senioritis and it certainly feels good since I know I can’t alter the fate I was handed. The BA I supposedly get in March (I didn’t file for graduation on time because I did not know I was going to graduate or that IGETC fulfilled the foreign language requirement) represents in many respects a tactical victory in that I am no longer losing money paying tuition, but represents a strategic defeat in that I did not get the degree I wanted. Ah well more time for animu and mango I suppose, I just hope that a B.A. in a science is not totally useless because that would make this a very costly Pyrrhic victory.

Impz is that you?

You’ll see Lala again Miho…

Plus you won’t have to wait the full Ten Years After.

Well in the end I hope you kids learn from this old man’s academic equivalent of Lake Trasimene. Still like Miho I can look off into the setting sun, one chapter of our short existences has closed, we may have tasted bitter defeat, but so long as we have the capacity to endure this glorious struggle is not yet over. I’ll always have Moyashimon to remind me of the lab that never was, and Fancy Lala reminded me that I still have a future. Maybe God is trying to tell me something I have prayed for an end to college and now I got it. I just didn’t expect God to use Fed-ex overnight shipping. So far this year I have been promoted, robbed, and now I am graduating earlier than expected, there is something oddly amusing and mildly miraculous about what has occurred in my ho hum existence in the first part of 2009. Now to pray for Title 10 orders for a billet in Honolulu…I want certainly want Honolulu, but given how God seems to have an odd sense of humor IMHO, I suspect I will get Title 10 orders…to someplace just as sandy but with horrible beaches… I at least have a future being a more active Jolly Green Giant (though more like Disgruntled Tan Dwarf) that gets to stride to the farthest corners of the earth on Uncle Sam’s penny it’s almost like a dream come true.

Still I wonder if every college graduate who got their degree during hard times goes through this. Perhaps there are a few of you who are older than dirt that can attest to Next War-itis What Next-itis?

Skip Beat post later if Impz is still MIA on it.

If only this warhorse had only to fight anything but Zakus…

Well after IKnight posted about MS IGLOO 2 I figured I might as well, for those who don’t know each ep is a 30 min love song to a weapon that took part in the One Year War. As a rule there isn’t much of a plot to speak of and truth is they aren’t going to win any awards for great characterization given the daunting task of introducing some poor guy only kill him off at the end. Still it is gritty even if it is 5,000 leagues away from realism with the shinagami chick. Unlike ghostlightning and IKnight I don’t really care about the shinagami because her name isn’t Sanders and she doesn’t pilot a mobile suit in the 8th MS Team she’s death and that is all there is to it all I care about is that the Type 61 is fight and boy is it FIGHT. I would have posted this earlier but my attempts to watch it in glorious 1080p were all for naught and I just called it quits and got the 720p instead, thanks to the boys and girls at gg for subbing this in HD.

As you can see here this lazy Zeke A Gunner is DOING IT WRONG, hell I operate a M240 and I think little of that drum mag too.

That must have been a bitch to dig.

Unlike the IRL Big Red 1 these guys weren’t nearly as great.

Yandell is very much in the mold of Captain Ahab and the minute you see him with his peg leg and wish to fight the White Ogre, you know he’s not long for the world, even more so when the poor schmuck who gets to be his driver may as well be Ishmael. Still it was a worthy effort to try and give Yandell some personality, it’s rather hard though since it is CG and the predominant face for just about every one but Yandell and the major is abject terror. As I said before it is gritty, but not real the overwhelming Feddie Air Force is no where to be seen, in fact for the most part there are no fighters or aircraft at all. It’s really a wonder that what use to be boscage country turned into a desert with no trees. Had it been like Normandy in 1944 it would have made for an interesting fight, and certainly the Zakus would not have dominated the way they did. Ah well North Africa was the place where there were a good number of tank battles any way though if the wanted a good place to flee to the sea Dunkirk was a few good miles up the coast.

While the turret is placed more towards the back, unlike the Merkava crew survivability was dismally low.

Uh Dunkirk was a bit up North…

The Type 61 frowns upon your shenanigans.

Still that Type 61 was fucking lovely, the twin cannons are excessive and would be a bitch to implement properly. Still they did try to make the Type 61 plausible with the auto loader and having only a crew of two since the Type 61 also had to carry 155mm discarding sabot rounds which aren’t small. Still as a treadhead it was disappointing to see that it was only a crew of two since the inclusion of a gunner would have let Yandell do nothing but command, but to be fair I don’t think Sunrise counts that many treadheads among them. Then again even the Zeke MG A gunner was DOING IT WRONG, so it’s not that big of a deal. It’s rather funny how the Germans were the ones who tried to build the Ratte and yet they share more in common with the Zekes. I like how they tried to explain more about the Type 61 than they did the characters, and in many ways the Type 61 is the real star of the episode, though because realism got kicked in the crotch when Zakus started dodging tank rounds the Type 61’s heyday had already passed. Still it had some fight left in it as Yandell tried to fight it the smart way with numbers and ambushes. Still the Type 61 vs Magella Attack Tanks was welcome if all too brief, I probably would have enjoyed that a more than the training fight they had, but overall the action was great, just not orgasmic to the point where the average mecha fan would be left twitching in his seat. In all the Type 61 is Fight and is worth checking out for treadheads, and those who want half an hour’s worth of mecha action. However if you want a plot and a storyline you better look elsewhere this is a short affair and the story is just something to justify the Type 61 blowing up Zekes.

The Magella Tank is no maatch for the might of the Type 61.

For Fuck’s sake you’re amatuer…

Where’s the air support?

I dub thee Major Giggles.

I continue to FIGHT!

Goodnight.

Avast there be the White Zaku, MAN THE HARPOONS!

My balls are on FIRE!

Looks like you got some explosive diarrhea there, I here they call it the Zaku shits, remeber to use your iodine tablets next time…

I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Lt. Yandell, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt Zakus, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Lt. Yandell? it will not fetch thee much in our Luna market.

I prefer the Type 61 myself.

You mean The Winner.

If Impz thinks he can get all rabu rabu while the rest of us are single he’s got another thing coming… – Lord Kitchener

So once again it is Kimberley Liberation Day, the anniversary of the beginning of then Major General John French’s attempt to relieve the South African town of Kimberley that was the first in a series of British success that rekindled support for the last Imperial War and forced the Boers to resort to guerrilla tactics which were brutally dealt with by Lord Kitchener. So while the uncaring pairs of losers in love across the globe celebrate their so called love that will not last until death do they part I wish to spread the word on another holiday that ought to occur in concert with Adnan bin Saidi Memorial Day. While others deign to celebrate that lesser holiday known as Valentines or Singles Awareness Day, i hope you wall join me in marking this day in an altogether different and far more respectful manner. For on this day in the year 1900 over 100 years ago the British Empire had suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the Boers of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Onto the stage came a polite tea drinking Englishman that led a cavalry attack that broke the 124 day siege of Kimberley that marked a dramatic turn in British fortunes in the Second Boer War. You see those lovey dovey otaku who are going out tonight have had their preconceptions colored by the heirs of a failed imperial power, known today as Akihabara who invented a cheap shoddy imitation empire known as the Britannian Empire that was full of fail and lose as they never drank enough tea. Back then when IKnight’s tea drinking ancestors were sipping tea in their colonies on every continent that mattered, the British did things that would make whiney emo commies (because we all know the people who bitch the most about empire are fucking communists) cry for years to come.

You see when war was war and there was no bullshit called chivalry or bushido malarkey to justify rape, those tea drinking English were ass kickers of the highest order who also hired other ass kickers like Sikhs and Gurkhas. This Second Boer War was the kind of war every peacenik forgets to study despite being a war with no real good guys and puts just about ever fiction writer who writes about war to shame. The cause of this war was really gold and diamonds, and no bullshit story has ever come up with a better awful casus belli than that. While the actions of John French and his men were important even more awful was the crap that followed. The Boers figured that they were better off using guerilla tactics, like those the pussies of the United States of Japan have yet to master, the British were at a loss of what to do until Lord Frederick Roberts devised a strategy of camps, blockhouses, scorched earth, and New Model tactics, which one Lord Herbert Kitchener brutally meted out to the Boers to crush them for good. You see unlike those fictitious Britannians the British understood that merely killing a Boer was not going to do it and by fencing off the land, burning down farms, salting the earth, at first rounding up the women and children, and later letting the women and children roam freely to weigh down the Boer commandoes was going to achieve far better results. It has been alleged that tea drinking Lord Kitchener LOLed at the Liberals who thought that keeping Boer women and children out of the camps was more merciful to leave them out there amongst the blackened ruins of their farms with no food at all. In fact it made perfect military sense as his sweeper groups were more able to run down Boer commandoes who had women and children in tow.

That is how Lord Kitchener became the public face of one of the most brutal and wildly successful anti-guerrilla campaigns ever waged, the combination of blockhouses, sweeper columns, cavalry raiders, scorched earth, and camps that killed not out of malice but out of apathy proved to be a winning formula for victory.  The Federation could learn much from an unprincipled tea drinker like Kitchener to deal with Kataron. While a paltry 1000 dead can now be considered genocide and a raid is now an invasion and occupation, back in ye old days the scale was much greater and those who go out and make toasts this night are toasting to the tune of over 53,000 dead for some gold and diamond mines. The insult does not end there the terms for the Boer surrender were far too friendly and led to Apartheid (because those Boers were racists how’s that for GRIMDARK) which lasted until 1994, the scorched earth policy that resulted in untold devastation of agricultural lands that were rendered useless and made mining the primary basis for the South African economy for the immediate aftermath. The British learned to wear khaki as their bright red coats were bullet magnets, this then led to a few Germans getting really ticked off in 1914 when they found that those tea drinking British were cheating.

Before their defeat at Kimberley the Boers could have snatched victory, but after Kimberley, even with a guerrilla campaign their defeat was inevitable as Lord Kitchener had no problems putting people into camps, burning down farms, and relentlessly harassing the Boer commandos until they accepted his terms. So couples of the world may you enjoy your meals over the anniversary of the Kimberley turning point of the Second Boer War and the beginnings of Apartheid, you sick human beings. Also Adnan bin Saidi is rolling in his grave for giving up his life so that these two can pollute the internets.

My Alto-hime was so Yakk DECULTRE that I simply had to have a Hime-Custom of my own. I blame ghostlightning for this he made me jealous. At least that extra scratch I get for being an E-5 will cover it.

So yeah my VF-25F Hime-Custom arrived earlier this month and given a small sliver of time I can finally post a picture and proudly declare how I broke my first New Year’s resolution to hold off on model kit purchases. If only I had GODLY free hand skills I would paint a pinup based on one of them ero-stickers, but alas my skills are not so great. It was a good start to a new year, and oddly enough January has been a month chock full of pleasant surprises. I made E-5 (Sergeant/Petty Officer 2nd Class/Air Force Staff Sergeant, take a good guess why don’t you) on the first of January and did not find out about it until a drill weekend, I guess I should have checked the promotion lists when they got published, but being a cynic I didn’t even bother. I also get to update all my uniforms with new rank insignia, but hey it’s an expense I’ll gladly pay with that new raise I get by default and through the promotion, I also have to add my first bean stripe for the years I spent eating beans since I enlisted. Seeing as how I am in a fair mood for this month I also wish to ramble about what a good start to this year I have been blessed with.

So yeah Inauguration Day has come and gone and my new boss has already added to the cacophony of pleasant surprises this month. I never did think that I would live to see a person of color (a.k.a. COMBO BREAKER) be elected to the Presidency in my life time. You learn a couple things when you join the military one of them being how Churchill was right when he said, “Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” One of the reasons why I liked LOGH so damn much was because I could appreciate Yang Wenli’s problems. I promised to tell some of you what I thought for all these years, true to my word if you wanted to know here it is.

How I Threw My Vote Away, Twice

I wish, if only more people voted Libertarian…

So the eight years of neo-conservatism have passed, and personally I feel very much relieved, my old boss is a good and decent man as a private citizen, but I confess that I never, rightly or wrongly, voted for him. Patton supposedly once remarked, “I am in the pay of the United States government. If I vote against the administration I am voting against my commander-in-chief. If I vote for the administration in office I am being bought.” I did not like the idea of being bought so I voted Libertarian on both occasions (inb4 I threw my vote away) so that they could get recognition, besides I don’t think much of neo-conservative dogma as it is now. I still wonder about the big “what ifs,” like what if we listened to General Shinseki or what if enough of us doubted Powell on WMDs. I believed in General (retired) Powell and I still believe that he is an honest man. He was an army man and on that alone I did not doubt him even slightly. I still would by the man a drink. I don’t believe that he lied, but even the best of us can get duped by the CIA, hell Kennedy was. On a personal level my biggest regret was that we could not trade the CIA (why Made in USA ain’t all that great) for the Mossad. The only thing I am thankful for after all this time is that with Mr. Gates at the helm things seem to be as they should, it never really seemed like that to me (then again I am so low on the totem pole I probably wasn’t aware of all that was right) when his predecessor got all high and mighty at times. Well farewell and Good Day to them all.

I gots one.

With President Obama it seems that at least now the Army might be issuing less waivers than they used to, maybe this new crop of Born Again Patriots were prompted by Obamania or their pockets. I am a humanist though when it comes to mein kamraden heck we’re all in the same boat now I hope they all work hard and give it their all. My only hope is that no matter what the Military Brass says that they will not pay dearly for going against the highest office in the land, like Shinseki did. I hope this new spirit of public service will prompt the best and brightest to go into government instead of Wall Street for the time being. The overall problem of previous years was that the best and brightest never went into government, instead they chose to make bigger scratch in the private sector, hopefully if public service becomes desirable again then the US will be better off in the future for some time before the tide shifts.

Me and My Circumstances

Like this kid right here, some of us were just born to be Soldaten.

I have been eating general issue chow for over four years and one thing I learned is how to really not give a fuck what other people think especially those over zealous “activists” who are pushier than the guys asking if Jesus is in my life. Hell, there are plenty of professional activists, who just don’t get that I can easily tune their bitches and moans as I am not the complaint box for Executive Branch. I live in and am garrisoned in and around San Francisco right across from the People’s Republic of Berkeley. I’ll be frank its hippie central and a base for Code Pink, really living with such neighbors means learning to live with and protect people who really hate your guts. I even have to deal with the spawn of China’s new rich at family gatherings because one branch wanted to host some exchange students (a.k.a. Beijing University rejects). They give me crap too for not being patriotic about the motherland and signing up for the Imperial Forces, as if these spoiled commie pricks would join the PLA instead of exploiting migrant laborers and polluting the Yangtze for their designer brand jeans like a bunch of Capitalist Roaders. At least on the internet I have a “fuck you too” button at my disposal.

I have a project for every Hammel with an International Studies degree, makes this funny because it is false, not because it’s true.

In real life I get crap from plenty of college educated man children who make pigeon hole me based solely on my occupation after taking a single quiz in a poli-sci or international studies class. According to these people I am “clearly” sexist, anti-abortion, racist, homophobic, uneducated, poor, and Republican. Given this maybe being mature is realizing how man is really nothing more than a glorified ape with illusions of grandeur especially International Studies Majors. I think after four years I finally know how it must feel like being a priest at a confessional. Given my level tree, I guess leveling up in life is putting more stat points into “not giving a shit.” Even if me an my ilk are held in utter contempt for some reason we still don’t mind protecting these people, oh we bitch about them in private, but at the end of the day the job will get done and they will be able to sleep soundly without a violent interruption.

Why I Blog

Ye Guilty.

I’d like to think that given these circumstances that my point of view is significantly different from everyone else’s. My reasons, unlike usagijen’s, are simple I have no where else to go to talk about animu, mecha, yuri, and shoujo. Heck my brand of humor is black as the withered husk of my own heart, I have to learn to laugh at just about everything because in truth people who are well off probably have never seen a real shit hole before. Hence why US Army is really a misspelling and it should have been YMRA SU which is short for “Yes My Retarded Ass Signed Up.” In all honesty otaku are blessed with a stable society and a good chance at carving out a living. In four short years I have found that there are some Robotech fans, Naruto fans, Bleach fans, DBZ fans, and Miyazaki fans, but when it comes to things like yuri or Skip Beat! I have yet to run into another comrade who likes either or both. Even so I’d like to leave something behind in case I expire before the lot of you, so if my life is to be short then why shouldn’t I enjoy it as I see fit? Being a cynic means also being a fatalist; I plan for the worst case scenario and before every field trip I make sure I have my will in order over at Legal. That alone probably makes me the odd one out as most people under 25 don’t have a will or even a life insurance policy worth 100K. Besides my reality of listening to every half wit about how I am pulling the IDF’s strings gets tiresome, I’d rather watch anime about yuri, shoujo, and mecha than get yet another lecture on how I am working for “the man” and how I am keeping people “down.” Another thing that is great about having Obama as my Commander in Chief is that since the election those people have one by one finally learned to shut the fuck up, well except a few of those goddamn Hamas huggers who think I am a Zionist too. I plan on doing this until the day I die, so if God wanted me to stop I’d be dead already. Life is too short to get emo over one’s circumstances, for the rest of you failure is not fatal, but for all of us it is always the courage to continue that counts.

Ain’t Nothing Gonna Break My Stride

Wing Zero Custom frowns upon your trigger discipline.

Winter so far has proved to be a pleasant surprise Maria+holic is turning out to be better than I had anticipated, I splurged on a VF-25, I actually made it to E-5, and with President Obama in charge I am no longer a pin cushion for those on the left. I anticipate more surprises in the coming year, some of them will perhaps be pleasant others probably not, but hey things look okay on my end so far. So really unless something really shitty happens this bout of pleasant surprise is only going to persist, I still have a job, I have some yuri anime this season, leveled up on the enlisted tree, and get some extra shillings here and there because base pay goes up, BAH goes up, etc. I wish President Obama the best so that those posers who assumed I was a complaint box for the Republican Party for the past couple years finally get OFF MY LAWN.

Kanako is on the prowl, all is well.

I hope to make it look decent in final form.