Lain ends well, it's all fairly smart and well reasoned. Definitely the kind of thing animation can do that TV can't - long periods of inactivity and strange transitions.

Lain's growing computer is a brilliant bit of Cronenburg style horror, and the penultimate scene where Kami manifests is typical, high detail gross out animation that is missing these days. Extremely pertinent themes to this day too.

Zankyou No Terror is pretty good as well. Just a nice simple crime drama with good production values and a bit of a mystery twist.

Glad you're enjoying it. I dunno, Zankyou is just... a thing. I don't think it's doing anything well or anything poorly, it's just kinda doing.

ROLLING GIRLS has started as well, and that's looking good from the first episode. Like KLK but y'know, not obsessed with skin.

Inuyashiki is the new comic by the Gantz guy. Like Gantz, it's started off really strong. Unlike Gantz, it hopefully won't turn to shit.

An elderly man becomes a robot and has a dog. Novelty abounds, including a daft metapoint of one of the characters being a massive Gantz fanboy which another character straight up disses. I need more contrition than that, probably.

Brooks wrote:

Inuyashiki is the new comic by the Gantz guy. Like Gantz, it's started off really strong. Unlike Gantz, it hopefully won't turn to shit. An elderly man becomes a robot and has a dog. Novelty abounds, including a daft metapoint of one of the characters being a massive Gantz fanboy which another character straight up disses. I need more contrition than that, probably.

It does indeed start off utterly hilariously, although the scanlation i've got is shite.

Read a little bit up on the heavy restructuring of the country the US did during the occupation. Some of what they did to ensure imperialism gets the fuck out and communism stays the fuck away seems just like what most countries need nowadays.

The first few chapters of One-Punch Man are good enough to keep me reading.

I've done me Chinese history some years back. Probably the most ruthlessly mercantile polity that has ever existed. Thousand-year social modes die very hard indeed.

Childintime wrote:

I've never lived in a more shamelessly capitalist country than this one.

Modern China has to be one of the more interesting countries that has ever existed, if purely for the fact it's a capitalist country run by communists.

Talking of your students not realising that Marx is known outside of China/that socialism isn't a purely Chinese phenomenon, it reminds me of the parts of the Japanese population who apparently swear blind that they were tricked into fighting in the Second World War by the Americans. There's a similar hypothesis from some German historians about the invasion of the Soviet Union. Makes me wonder what parts of UK history that the British see differently to the rest of the world - or what parts of our culture stand out as utterly bonkers to a visiting outsider.

Oh, and anime. Manga, etc.

Bollockoff wrote:

I thought the accepted view of the German invasion of sov Russia is that everyone on Hitler's general staff except Hitler himself thought it was a very bad idea.

I think that was the general opinion, but they changed their minds when it initially went very well. They changed again when it stopped going well. Some drank the Hitler Kool-Aid and believed his line that "you only have to kick in the door and the entire rotten structure will come down" so there were some that thought it'd be easy. Heck, no one thought the Soviet army was ready for war, even Churchill is recorded at the time as saying that Germany will stomp all over the USSR. (Stalin executing most of the upper echelons in the 1930s didn't help, nor did the twin command system of having orders from superiors in the army vetted by the political arm first.)

But there are some who think that the Soviets withdrew specifically to draw the Germans in. ("Well, officer, I had to mug them, they ran away, you see.") A lot of Soviet histories paints the mass retreats in the same light in order to make Stalin look like a tactical genius, rather than admit that the entire Soviet system was taken by surprise by an invasion that shouldn't have come as a shock to anyone.

I notice the Jojo adapto's started again, and they've once again knocked it out the park for the outro credit tune licensing. 

Yes's "Roundabout", "Walk Like An Egyptian" and now a fucking Pat Metheny Group number. This people are my kind of people.

Ahahaha it's a 9.5" scale model, bless their little cotton socks.

Fan service filled anime by Trigger. Starts strong, descends into a pile of twaddle by the billionth twist in the thread as it transitions into the second half. Watched all of it but was thoroughly cruise controlling the last 6 or so episodes and actually can't remember how it ended.

PsychoPass, PsychoPass 2, Space Dandy, Death Parade (currently airing)

Futuristic crime show where everyone is monitored by a system that judges the colour of your "PsychoPass" which means that it can tell if you are a latent criminal or if you are lapsing into criminal activity, and squads are sent out with leashed criminals who can use guns that act as the system's eyes to judge people on the spot. Like a cleaner, more futuristic Dredd. But what happens when you throw people into the mix that the system cannot accomodate? Then plot, that's what.

Tempy wrote:

Psycho-Pass Extended  Very good, would recommend. A neat set of characters and a vaguely interesting plot. Lots of stupid psychology/philosophy literature quoting, but weirdly it managed to quote a bunch of stuff I'd recently read so it was pertinent. Although the main character is kinda rendered a bit of an accessory towards the end, she's like... not a stereotype? Or at least she's not enough of one to graet. She doesn't fit any box easily and by the end she's actually a tough cookie, without having the whole femme fatale angle.

That sounds ignominious to an extent, and it's definitely in the "I watched it to enjoy it" vs the "I watched it to fall asleep to camp" and I tore through Season 2 (which is better) 

There's plenty else I'd recommend too because that's a slight list. I'm far more forgiving than Brooks, but still of the school of thought that there is very little good anime out there. An embarrassing paucity.

Yeah the problem with having such high standards is that there's not much you can really enjoy.