The first was rather slow paced, but interesting. Seems like it’s potentially a solid series.

Plus the opening (Tabi no Tochuu/Kiyoura Natsumi) is chillingly epic with a haunting chorus.

Awesome opening theme usually translates to awesome series, of course.

Update:

Have finished both the first and second seasons. Epic. Only the Japanese are crazy enough to create a show about economics and pair it with the human incarnation of a wolf deity. Solid story, non-cheesy romance, amusing characters and the right touch of action. There’s just enough asskickery that it causes proper tension.

Characterization this deep and well done tends to be fairly rare. To quote this review, “The series could have no plot whatsoever and could just be the Animated Adventures of Lawrence and Horo As They Ride In Their Wagon and just feature them bouncing lines off one another and it’d still be awesome.”

Also: Translated Novels.

What a wonderful modern age we live in, where I don’t even need to ever finish learning Japanese.

Anyway, A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ would watch again.

Well, I’m disappointed. It cuts out pretty early on in the series. Rather abruptly, even. The ending bit via Misato makes it sound like they’re going to continue releasing discs, however, so meh.

What’s changed? Not much. Seems to be some extra bits of plot fluff thrown in, but not very much.

Worth owning? If like me, you’ve never finished collecting Eva DVDs, sure, why not. If you already own the DVDs (or a boxed set – I’m sure they’ve released one) – you can probably pass, unless you’re a hardcore Evangelion fanperson.

Oh, and Shinji is still just as @($&@$ whiny, proving once and for all that Evangelion is truly a timeless classic; people will be annoyed and screaming at their TV sets due to Shinji for generations to come, no doubt!

So I’ve finally gotten around to finishing off Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino. The first opening, as seen above, is purely epic. It has a nice grounding effect with regard to the ridiculously brutal extreme that GSG took the ‘girls with guns’ theme to – the real-world images merging with the series’ theme is simply delicious. Il Teatrino mainly revolves around Triela, rather than Henrietta. Plot’s fairly decent; the only real hole is how cybernetically enhanced killing machines are capable of having issues dealing with a human assassin. Like the first season, Il Teatrino is filled with plenty of pure WTF moments – this time mostly revolving around the origins of the girls.

All in all a worthy successor to the first season. Then again, I’m a sucker for anything that takes an overly cutesy theme and twists it into something grim and dark. :p

In other news, I’ve gotten around to finishing the conversion from Drupal to WordPress. That was easy(tm). WordPress, frankly, owns the living crap out of Drupal in terms of running a blog. Granted, Drupal can do so much more, but, well – I’m running a blog here. WordPress > Drupal for this use case. The right tool for the job, and all that.

Still have some stuff to work out, mostly revolving around comments and image positioning in posts.