Summary:

It’s the day of the school’s cultural festival and Kyon is relieved that everyone’s doing their own thing such as Haruhi busying herself by handing out flyers for their movie. Yuki has been turned into a fortune teller as she is predicting the future, Itsuki is busy doing his play, and Mikuru is serving fried Soba.

Kyon bumps into his two classmates and they head over to Mikuru’s classroom. There they bump into the always-hyper Tsuruya who’s there queueing people up for the food. The three line up just to see Mikuru. Afterward, Kyon visits the auditorium to relieve his sleep-deprived state from editing the movie.

He dozes in and out and then sees Haruhi and Yuki get on stage with two other people. People are flooding into the auditorium as it starts raining outside. After the instruments are set up, they start playing. Yuki is on the guitar while Haruhi starts singing. (The song is God Knows by Hirano Aya, the seiyuu for Haruhi’s character) The crowd starts enjoying the performance. After the song, she explains that two of the original band members could not perform and she and Yuki are substitutes for the day. She introduces everyone on stage and then plays another song (Lost my Music by Hirano Aya as well).

As it turns out, the lead singer developed tonsilitis and was hospitalized while the guitarist sprained her wrist. Haruhi bumped into the band on her way back to the clubroom and after hearing their situation, she volunteered to help sing for them. She then recruited Yuki to help play the guitar. Yuki, with her powers, had no problem with that.

The next day, the band visits Haruhi and thanks her for her help. They tell her people are flooding them with requests for the song recordings. Haruhi is slightly upset as she realizes that those asking for the recordings wanted to hear the real thing, not her performance as a substitute. At lunch, Kyon finds Haruhi lying in the shade of a tree. She explains her current mood, which suddenly picks up as she gets the idea of forming her own band and drags Kyon with her as she plans to head over to the music club to find a guitar.

Review:

In terms of canonical value, this episode could be considered a filler episode considering for the most part, a good chunk of this episode did not take place in the storyline of the novel. Those events include the music band and the performance as well as what happened the next day. Surprisingly enough, Kyon left out the narration of what happened at the cultural festival since the story at the time was about the making of the film, and not a lot about the cultural festival. Later down in the novels, however, Kyon talks about the cultural festival including Haruhi and Yuki going on stage and playing songs.

Interestingly enough, the episode showed tidbits of the band throughout the episode leading to the performance. You can see them running around school, most likely trying to find replacements. Then there is one scene where you see Haruhi and Yuki running across with guitars on their backs.

As you may or may not know, Hirano Aya (or Aya Hirano in America) is the voice talent for Haruhi. She also happens to be a singer and therefore two of her songs are inserted into this episode. She also happens to be the singer for both the OP and ED songs for this anime. Now that’s awesome. That’s what I would consider a successful self-promotion.

And, of course, they had to provide the fan service in regards to Mikuru and Tsuruya, which I’m sure the production studio spent a little more time and effort in drawing out that particular scene.

For character development, Haruhi displays a softer side to her. We usually don’t see her talk too much about her emotions, especially in a depressed state. There’s quite a bit of humility for Haruhi in this episode. More so than the others.

Finally I’ve got these damn permalinks working. If you don’t know what they are, permalinks are basically the static URL links for the pages and posts that I add to this site. Unfortunately, they are pretty ugly because they leave ‘?’ marks, ‘=’ signs and numbers in the address. And from what I hear, ugly links are what search engines stay away from because they are typically associated with automatically generated pages. So after several hours of researching and tweaking, I’ve cleaned up my page to show clean pages. I’m sure that while you’re reading this, the URL above probably reads /blog/2007/working-permalinks/ which is a lot cleaner than some symbols and numbers. Plus it’s pretty informative before even looking at the content.

Although I’m sure someone’s going to stumble upon this place looking for help, I don’t do well writing long, informative tutorials detailing how I managed to get clean permalinks working here. But I guess I should do a little bit of it. Since I’m running this on Wordpress, I first read up on their documentation, which was very confusing and didn’t really help. Then I searched their support section, and read what others had to say about it. In conclusion, I went with the most common solution. I was doubtful that it would work, but it did. After doing some cleanup work, it’s all good now.

I was afraid that the real links would be all fucked up and all the pages cached in on Google and so forth would be broken. Luckily, the old links still work. These new permalinks are just for show. In reality, people coming here fail to realize that this is just a simple redirection trick generated by Wordpress. Very sneaky.

Summary:

A large space fleet combs through space with Haruhi at the command. She orders for all ships to advance full speed ahead. Kyon jumps in and advises that the leader should not charge in ahead of her group. Haruhi makes a reference to defeating the Computer Society. Kyon thinks they should just admit defeat themselves.

A week ago, the Computer Society pays a visit to the SOS Brigade and hands Kyon a computer game called The Day of Sagittarius III that was developed by the club. The president of the club explains that he wants a contest between the two groups. While screaming contest over and over, Haruhi comes in with a flying dropkick to the president sending him flying. Haruhi immediately accepts the challenge without even knowing what’s going on.

The reason behind the contest is that the president wants the computer that Haruhi practically stole from them. Haruhi protests that she actually uses the computer such as using it for the movie and for their webpage. The president fires back claiming the webpage is never updated. Kyon then realizes that it was the president who’s been racking up the page hits, which explains the incident with the giant cricket. Haruhi agrees to the challenge, but wants to know what the computer president will wager on his end. The president promises to provide four computers to the SOS Brigade if Haruhi and company manages to win.

The game is a 5 on 5 space battle simulation game and the day of the fight begins the next week. On their way home, Kyon requests that they not cheat during the game. Itsuki doesn’t want to lose in fear that Haruhi would create closed space as a result of losing. Kyon trusts that she would not do that which leads to Itsuki giving a rather long explanation of the bond that Kyon and Haruhi shares where they trust each other to do the right thing.

As the group sets up the game, Mikuru is completely confused while Yuki is busy examining the mouse. Haruhi wants complete victory and won’t settle for losing. Kyon is worried about the team, but finds confidence in winning because they can count on Yuki. He immediately retracts that confidence as he sees Yuki waving the optical mouse in the air, thus showing her absolute lack of knowledge of the computer system altogether.

Throughout the week, during their training sessions, Haruhi keeps telling them to charge in with all their ships. Each time resulting in defeat. Haruhi tells Kyon that she’s getting frustrated at the game, while Kyon explains that her strategy of charging in over and over is getting them killed each time.

On the day of the actual game, the SOS Brigade finds themselves on the losing end. While things look grim, suddenly their fog of war is reduced enormously as Yuki uses micromanagement to place scouts all over the playing field. Kyon walks over to Yuki who is hammering at her keyboard, typing at a super fast rate. On her screen, though, is not the game, but various DOS windows with programming code flashing through the screen. Kyon reminds Yuki that she is not to cheat. Yuki tells Kyon that she is not cheating, but the Computer Society is and all she is doing is reprogramming the game to level the playing field. The Computer Society has had their fog of war turned off from the start. Yuki finishes her programming and asks Kyon for permission to apply the changes. Kyon realizes that Yuki actually wants to win and gives her permission. The tides turn immediately and the SOS Brigade makes short work of their opponent.

After the game, the president accepts his defeat. He heads over to Yuki, suspecting that it was she who hacked their game, and invites her to join the Computer Society’s activities when she has time. Haruhi immediately objects to it claiming Yuki for herself. Kyon cuts in and tells Yuki to do whatever she likes. Yuki quietly agrees to do so once in a while. A shocked Haruhi gives in to the proposition seeing how Yuki wants to participate. Haruhi then forces the defeated to swear allegiance to the SOS Brigade.

Review:

For some reason, the summary feels pretty long this time, though I tried my best to cut down on the length. It’s just that every scene in the episode had some value to it and I couldn’t just leave it out.

Anyway, the two settings of the club room and of the space simulation switching back and forth was entertaining. At first, I wondered what was going on with the ships and stuff. Right before the opening credits rolled in though, the scene changed back to a low-resolution, 8-bit sound video game, which immediately signaled what was happening.

This episode had quite a number of hilarious moments and intrigues. The first was the kick Haruhi gave to the club president. The first time I was watching the episode, it completely took me off guard by the ridiculousness of it all. Besides that, there were the scenes with Yuki on the computer. If you watch closely, for each advancing day of training sessions, Yuki would slowly work her way into becoming more and more computer literate. The first day she’s spinning the mouse around and pressing keys with one finger. By the fifth day, she was typing at a good rate. And at the time of the actual game, she was pounding on the keys. That’s probably one of the more memorable scenes in this series.

There was also the reference to the incident where the Computer Society president disappeared. His constant checking on the SOS Brigade website led him to see the SOS logo and the rest is history.

And finally, there was a brief reference to Gundam that Haruhi makes during the game. She cries out something to the tune, “That’s it. Send out the Gundam!” Basically, in the Gundam series, sending one out into the battlefield would pretty much ensure victory. In this show, Gundam is partially bleeped out for legal issues I guess.

In terms of temporality, this episode is massively further ahead in comparison to when Haruhi started the club, the school festival (Which is the next episode), and a bunch of other things.

Summary:

The show starts off with a distant memory of a little girl and a young man with long red hair telling the little “Let’s go, together.” Back to the present, a teenage girl by the name of Kuu is apparently that younger girl in the memory. While on the train to school, her friend strikes up a conversation about a last dance at the university festival taking place the next day. She also mentions a tradition of girls giving a card to a boy they have feelings/fancy for.

At the school, Kuu, who happens to be the narrator, briefly mentions that it’s been ten years since the “destruction” that involved seven days of “hot snow”. (Well, that’s what the fansub says /shrug) Sure, why not? After the brief introduction about her own feelings, we roll the credits. Lots of characters are shown, along with some mecha and a few appearances of Chikane from Kannazuki no Miko, which is what this anime makes references to.

In the hallway, Kuu’s friend Kozue talks about missing students and the Shield of Order whose job is to clear all of this up, with one of the divisions known as The Sevens led by Jin Oogami. While in class, the Shield of Order enters with none other than Jin leading the pack, introducing a transfer student to the room. This transfer student, introduced as Kyoshiro Ayanokoji. Kuu immediately identifies him as the person in her memories from the beginning. The two lock eyes and we’re returned to the setting at the start of the episode.

During lunch, the girls including Kuu flock to watch/listen to Kyoshiro play the violin. When he notices Kuu is there, he stops playing. He approaches her, puts his hands on her shoulders, and then pulls her school uniform apart exposing her chest. At that point, Kyoshiro notices a faint glow coming from her chest. Kuu, embarrassed, pulls away and starts to run for cover. Kyoshiro gives a small smile as if he found something and says to her “Let’s go, together” in the same voice heard at the beginning. Kuu recognizes the voice, but keeps running.

On one of the rooftops of the school, Kuu fixes her uniform, and questions to herself what’s going on. She hears a bell jingle above her. Looking above, there sits a blonde haired girl in a heavy cloak and she suddenly disappears with the wind. Further away, there is an explosion and the same blonde haired girl appears fatigued and injured, claiming to have lost her target.

Walking around campus, Kuu notices Kyoshiro in an old school building and goes to see him. There she finds him kissing the blonde haired girl, now identified as Setsuna. Kuu runs away in tears, not understanding really why she’s crying. While gathering her thoughts and feelings on a flight of stairs, she see her friend Kozue, who apparently has had her energy drained away by some cat-like girl. Kuu runs away, but this cat girl summons an attack and stops Kuu. She approaches Kuu to drain more energy, but backs off after she notices something about Kuu and demands to know who Kuu is. Setsuna, at that moment, busts through the window and flash kicks the cat girl in the face.

From there, a battle ensues between Setsuna and cat girl. Each person summons parts of a mech (arms and legs) and occasionally, the whole thing, to attack for them. Kyoshiro appears on a horse and pulls Kuu out of danger. While the battle continues, the scene changes to a couple standing on a shrine far away. They happen to be Chikane and Himeko. (It’s a lot easier to identify them now, then to consider them as mysterious figures) Back to the fight, the glow that came from Kuu reappears which somehow gives Setsuna the upper hand for a brief moment while Kuu loses consciousness. Kyoshiro and Setsuna combine powers to attack cat girl and defeats her. From another far off point, another girl watches the fight.

As Kuu regains consciousness, she appears disappointed as she sees Kyoshiro and Setsuna on their white horse looking like a perfect couple. Kyoshiro gives her the biggest surprise by holding her up and planting a kiss on her. And afterward, he requests to her again, “Let’s go. Together.”

Review:

All I know about this anime is that it is 12 episodes long and has references to three different anime shows. One of them being Kannazuki no Miko, which is one I’ve seen. Which is also why I keep referring to it. I apologize if it was annoying. Besides that, I have no idea what’s going on. So here I am to provide an unbiased review.

To start off, the animation quality is pretty top notch as the characters are drawn quite well. A slightly older style with the larger eyes as compared to some of the more recent anime shows out there, but I have nothing against it. I happen to like that style.

As for the story, I have a feeling this is going to become a series that squeezes in a whole lot of content, but lacks adequate series length to wrap it all up together; leaving more questions than answers. But we’ll see.

And as for this particular episode, there was a lot of characters introduced. Just thinking about it, I think there were about some nine main characters that had an appearance in the episode. It’s expected, really. The episode came out alright. Some fan service, some romanticism involved, some mysterious people missing, some far off distant memory, explosions, action, and even a cat fight. Well, sorta. It’s too early to tell. I’m going to stick with this one until either I start getting too lazy to download the episodes, or it has made a turn for the worse. If the ending sucks, it would be too late. I would’ve finished the series. Let’s see what happens in 3 months shall we?

This is one of my favorite songs. Translated, it means Cherish These Moments. It’s such a shame that I don’t know who the vocalist is for this song. No matter where I search, the credits point to Perfect Blue, which is just the name of the movie that this song is from. I found this song while listening to internet radio on winamp over 4 years ago, but it has such a timeless feel to it.

I like this song because it’s relaxing plus I’ve seen the movie Perfect Blue. But this post isn’t about the movie. It’s about the song. And it’s a nice song in my opinion. Plus it took quite a bit of effort to find it considering there’s no singer credited to this song.

Summary

Kyon walks into homeroom and finds the class president Ryoko Asakura overlooking Haruhi who was slumped over her desk showing a sense of both boredom and defeat. Haruhi’s “melancholic” state makes her wonder if something troublesome would happen. Ryoko tells Kyon to take care of her.

Earlier that day, Kyon received a note in his locker that told him to come to room 1-5 after everyone has left school. This hasn’t been the first time Kyon has received a note, as flashbacks show Yuki’s note from earlier in the series. Kyon assumed it wasn’t Yuki considering the handwriting, and ruled out Mikuru from the circumstances, and completely ruled out Haruhi and Itsuki.

While Haruhi is at the computer, Kyon screams out as he notices what’s on the computer screen, which are rather revealing images of Mikuru. Haruhi claims it will bring in traffic to the site, but Kyon lectures Haruhi about the dangers of putting personal information on the internet. Haruhi gives in to Kyon’s pleas. While no one is looking, Kyon, instead of deleting the images, quickly creates a new folder, names it Mikuru, and moves the files from the recycle bin to that folder. Haruhi gets up and heads home. Afterward, as the day grows late, Kyon heads over to room 1-5 and finds Ryoko in the room.

Ryoko asks Kyon if the world was getting worse by maintaining the status quo, but no one knew what to do, would any change at all be considered the best option. After some more strange theories, suggestions and questions, Ryoko suddenly tells Kyon that she will kill Kyon and see how Haruhi responds. After that, she rushes at Kyon with a knife in her hand, cutting off Kyon’s tie as he barely dodges the attack. Kyon tries to escape, but suddenly finds himself in a windowless room.

As Ryoko stops Kyon from moving, she charges at him but the nearby wall explodes and as the dust clears, Yuki is in front of Kyon, holding the blade of the knife with her hand. It turns out that Ryoko is similar to Yuki, but serves only as a backup for Yuki, but suddenly turned against her orders. They then start battling. Ryoko on the offense while Yuki is on defense blocking attacks from getting to Kyon. Ryoko manages to impale Yuki with metal sticks and then transforms her arms into tentacles and impales Yuki’s chest once again. At that point, Yuki says “finished”. Ryoko’s arms turns to dust along with the rest of the area. Before she is gone, she warns Kyon that one day, those in control might change their views, so he should enjoy his time with Haruhi while it lasts.

Yuki falls to the ground, as the classroom is reconstructed. Kyon helps Yuki off the floor, but Yuki realizes she rematerialed the room but forgot to material a pair of glasses for herself, since they were knocked off during the battle. Yuki tells Kyon that she has made it so that Ryoko’s character has transferred out of the school. The next day, as the teacher announced the news to the class, Haruhi pops out of her melancholic state and tells Kyon that this sudden transfer needs investigating.

That day, Kyon received another letter in his locker. This time it was from Mikuru telling him to meet her at the clubroom at lunch. As he enters the room, there is an older version of Mikuru. She proves to Kyon that she’s Mikuru by showing him a star shaped mole on her chest. Then she realizes Kyon doesn’t know about it yet. She asks Kyon if he knows what Snow White is. She tells him to remember that in times of trouble. She gives him a hug and heads out. As Kyon returns to the classroom, Haruhi pulls him out and tells him that they are going to investigate Ryoko’s residence.

Review

If the episodes were aired in actual order, I would have been blown away by what happened in this episode. As a matter fact, a good chunk of this episode made quite an impression on me. I knew that Yuki had powers, but the fight was pretty badass. As for Ryoko, I was completely surprised when I first saw this episode when she said she was going to kill Kyon and then all the weird sci-fi stuff started happening. At that point, I thought to myself that this comedy of an anime has just turned very dark. Especially during the fighting as there was quite a bit of blood splattering around.

This episode showed where Yuki lost her glasses. In the earlier episodes, she would have glasses, and then starting with the baseball game episode, she didn’t have glasses. Nor did she have any glasses when they went looking for the computer club president. As for other references, the futuristic Mikuru pretty much foreshadows a situation that Kyon is going to be stuck in and Snow White links back to the baseball game episode where Itsuki asks Kyon about how he got out of his previous predicament. The foreshadowed situation and the predicament refer to the same event that is going to happen later in the last episode.

2006 has been such a fast year. But only in retrospect.

Yesterday, I got my hands on a PS3 finally; after looking for it since it was released in November. Now I have something to occupy my time for years to come, if the PS3 doesn’t flop in everyone’s face. However, I’m sure a company with pockets as deep as Sony should have no problem supporting this system. Well that’s all I want to say about this. And by the way, the graphics are fucking ridiculous. Six more years from now and there will be another generation of consoles, given the world doesn’t end in 2012.

As for the rest of the year, this must be my most important year. College graduation is the big one. That marked the day where school was finally over. Something I’ve been looking forward to ever since I realized the prison that was education. I think it was in second grade. So about 14 years. School has its benefits, but for the most part, it was a monotonous repitition of life. And a good half of the things taught in school are completely useless in life.

The next big thing would be me finding a job and making my own money. Now I don’t have to my parents for monetary support. It’s just a pain that they keep telling me to stop spending so much money when in fact I don’t really spend that much money in the first place. I’m trying to save up to buy a car for fuck’s sake. And speaking of cars.. well I’ll wait some other day to talk about that.

Another big thing is this website. I finally have my own website with a moveable type engine that is fully scalable. Thank you Wordpress and all the great people who design the different layout skins and those who program the addons. If it wasn’t for all that, this place would just not be what it is today.

My last year can be split into two parts. January to June were the last days of school. It was the most kick back time of my life. Two classes and lots and lots of relaxation. July to December were the starting days of a working life. A first hand taste of the daily grind of life. Traffic, deadlines, close calls, missed opportunities, successes, failures, paychecks, etc. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I like to earn what I receive in life. Anything else would be unacceptable.

So what’s in store for this new year? Nothing. There’s no life changing event when it comes to new years or birthdays. It’s all gradual. I guess I can predict what’s in store for this new year though. A lot of PS3, a lot less computing, and more time out in the real world.