Review - Dragonaut: The Resonance

I think the best piece of advice my engineering economics professor gave us about presentations is that the thing most listeners will remember about your presentation is how it starts, and how it ends. With that piece of information in mind…

Dragonaut: The Resonance

Plot Summary

A shuttle bound for the moon is destroyed by “asteroids” upon takeoff. Fast forward 2 years. Kamishina Jin, the lone survivor of the accident, meets a mysterious girl named Toa, a brash introvert Gio, and a cryptic subdivision of the International Solarsystem Development Agency (ISDA) known as the Dragonauts. He learns the truth behind the accident that took his family two years ago, and the potential impending doom to befall humanity. Against the odds, can Jin and Toa set things right and save humanity?

Dual Review - Minami-ke Okawari

Minami-ke Okawari:

Plot Summary

Minami-ke Okawari continues from where its first season left off. More stories about the lives of the three Minami sisters, Haruka, Kana and Chiaki.

Review - H2O ~Footprints in the Sand~

In my honest opinion, I happened to think we were too generous with our reviews in the for the fall 2007 season. There are a lot of rationally justifiable reasons for why that’s the case: we were new to the blog scene, we haven’t done reviews before, etc. So the game plan for winter 2008 was to be a little bit more critical of what we watched. I took on the added initiative to pick a very assorted collection of anime to watch and review this season, including some that I would not normally watch had it not been for this blog. All of this so that I could develop, in some sense, the difference between a good anime, a mediocre anime, and a poor anime. There were some surprises, and some disappointments, but as is lots of forms of art. Anyway, with that preface defined, let’s get started on Winter 2008:

H2O ~Footprints in the Sand~

 

Plot Summary: Takuma Hirose is a high school student who moves into his uncle’s rural village carrying some emotional baggage. Blind for some unknown reason, Takuma begins to interact with the abrasive Hayami Kohinata, the endearing Hinata Kagura, and the mystical Otoha, the latter of the three giving him the gift of sight. With this newly acquired, but temporal, gift, can Takuma right the social injustice carried on from the previous generation to the present?

Review - Kimikiss Pure Rouge

Since I was the only one following this anime, I’ll be reviewing this alone. This is my first time doing a review and I have to do it by myself? Darn it, I never win.

Kimikiss Pure Rouge

Plot Summary

Kimikiss Pure Rouge goes through the lives of three childhood friends, Mao Mizusawa, Kouichi Sanada and Kazuki Aihara, as they help each other throughout their twists and turns of high school romance. It starts off with Mao returning from living in France for a few years. To both Kouichi and Kazuki’s surprise, Mao gained approval from Kouichi’s mother to stay with them since her parents remained overseas.

Winter 2008 Mid-Season Recap - March Madness Edition

Kyou’s stroking it like it’s hot… err… I mean stroking three pointers and not that kind of stroking… you sick freaks…

With March already here, sports fans in the United States are preparing for one of the special multi-week events in sports: The 2008 NCAA Division I Mens Basketball Tournament. 65 college mens basketball teams will face each other in one of the largest single-elimination tournaments in all of sports for the NCAA Division I College Mens Basketball Title. The large event structure draws millions of viewers and office bets each year.

There are two ways a team makes it into the tournament field of 65 teams. The first is the automatic bid where each conference selects one team usually determined by winner of the conference tournament (the Ivy League has no conference tournament so the automatic bid goes to the winner of the regular season). The second method into the tourney is through an at-large bid. The NCAA Selection Committee looks at the remaining spots and selects teams from the remaining field by looking at a team’s key selection items such as record, strength of schedule, quality wins, bad losses and the slightly controversial figure of the RPI. Once the field is filled, the committee seeds them and selects the first round match ups in each region on the Sunday of the end of the conference tournaments (Selection Sunday). The first round games of the tourney usually begin on the Thursday after.

Up until Selection Sunday, a number of sports analysts make projections as to which teams would make the tournament. Since about more than half the field is filled by at-large teams selected by the NCAA Selection Committee, pre-Selection Sunday analysis often becomes an interesting topic on ESPN or for water cooler talk. There are a number of sports analysts who write and discuss solely on the pre-Selection Sunday analysis such as Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology which attempts to predict the entire tournament field, seeds and match ups. Most analysts compile a team’s key tournament selection information into what is usually called a tournament resume and they predict the possible seeding or non-entry for that team.

Below are both mine and bro’s attempts at taking the pre-Selection Sunday analysis idea and combining it with this season’s shows. Now after rethinking a few things (the comments after bro’s Clannad X’s and O’s post, the international nature of anime blogging and the [lack of] athletic ability among anime blog readership), I tried to lay out as much information on this topic as I possibly can. To be honest, analysis about this tournament can be a bit tough for the casual onlooker. Below are some definitions for the terms we plan to use and how we intend to relate them to anime. For more information check out the wikipedia articles on the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship and the NCAA basketball tournament selection process.