Sunday, September 28, 2008

Serial Experiments Lain



You wanted mindfuck - you get mindfuck. If you do not understand what Lain is about the first time you see it: don't worry. You really have to constantly watch for clues and think about what you have seen or else you won't be able to make any sense out of it - and thus won't be able to enjoy it, because you won't be served cool action scenes to distract you from thinking.

This is - by the way - one of the first animes I have ever seen consciously (seeing Heidi or Captain Future as a kid doesn't count) and thus got a rather warped impression of what anime is about. ^_^

Following are a short plot description and a more elaborate - er - elaboration taken from IMDB and wikipedia.

Enjoy !

PS: Safe for all ages but if your kids understand and like Lain then start worrying.

-------------------------------------------

A week after Chisa committed suicide, her classmates begin to receive emails from her. Hearing rumors fly at school, a quiet withdrawn girl named Lain goes home that day, turns on her dusty Navi computer for the first time and has a conversation with the dead girl. Chisa's message reads that she killed herself because she didn't need her body anymore, and she now exists in The Wired. When Lain asks why someone would do something like that she gets a response: "Because God is here". --- IMDB



Serial Experiments Lain deals directly with the definition of reality, which makes its complex plot difficult to summarize. The story is primarily based on the assumption that everything flows from human thought, memory, and consciousness. Therefore, events on screen can be considered hallucinations of Lain, of other protagonists, or of Lain fabricating the hallucinations of others.  

Story misdirection is central to the plotline;  even the offscreen voices or narrations' information cannot be considered truthful. The series consists of a cross-reflection of philosophical themes instead of the traditional linear events depiction: episodes are called "layers".


Serial Experiments Lain describes "the Wired" as the sum of human communication networks, created with the telegraph and telephone services, and expanded with the Internet and subsequent networks. The anime assumes that the Wired could be linked to a system that enables unconscious communication between people and machines without physical interface. 


The storyline introduces such a system with the Schumann resonance, a property of the Earth's magnetic field that theoretically allows for unhindered long distance communications. If such a link was created, the network would become equivalent to Reality as the general consensus of all perceptions and knowledge (see consensus reality). The thin line between what is real and what is possible would then begin to blur.



Poll results & aftermath

Like I already supected in Fun with site statistics the hentai faction won the day (although I ended the vote prematurately).
  1. Poll results:
  2. Hentai (35%)
  3. Mindfuck (25%)
  4. Comedy (14%)
  5. Serious thematics (10%)
  6. Slice-of-life (7%)
  7. Action (3%)
  8. Romance (3%)
And indeed, the top iPhoneReady downloads have a new entry:

Given that Gattsu is online for less than 3 days we can safely assume that hentai will dominate the download behaviour of the common iPhone user (and those that couldn't figure out that [iPhoneReady] means the release was converted to low-resolution iphone quality). Also note the soft-hearted romantics among you, who leeched Emma to #2.

Anyway, we have the mindfuckers as runner-up, which speaks for the willingness to stimulate your brain beyond the nether reaches of your pants. So the next release will be of exactly that strange genre.

Stay tuned !

Friday, September 26, 2008

Women at Work - The Gattsu [iFap Ready]





Weeeeell, polls are showing hentai in the lead, followed by mindfuck. 
It's tempting to deliver both in one go but I'm not that great a fan of the really sick stuff. So I'll treat you to something that might put you off in a completely different way. ^_^

Enjoy the non-futanari bodybuilder amazon. You'll forgive me for not posting a youtube video preview or writing an elaborate review.





PS: I won't be too surprised if the amount of traffic triples after that ...
PPS: Opps, forgot to place the keywords: hentai anime porn hot muscle babes uncensored pron fuck sex duct-tape hamster
PPPS: Don't watch while commuting. Not workplace safe (at least in those work environments I know).

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Help seeding

Some of the old releases lack seeders and need charitable people who are willing to spend some time and bandwidth for your fellow iphone fans.
Of course, that people could be me, but I sometimes don't even have the original files, nor can I keep every single release online. 

So please help out by keeping the torrents alive if possible by checking this list for zero-see-torrents: Seed Status

Update: oops, wrong link. Try again now. :)

Fun with site statistics

I felt lonely and unapreceated, so I went and searched for myself. With google.
Because I wanted to see how awesome my blog is (yeah, I know, you want the torrents, not my wisdom), I subscribed to the google analytics service, mainly to check out google analytics but also to see how popular my site is: not very.

Anyway, there are still some funny facts:
  • google-search for "iphone ready" lists me as #54. I guess I have to be grateful even for that, since apparently even Tom Cruise is iphone ready. XENU, DELIVER US FROM EVIL !!
  • google-search for "iphone ready anime" get's me the #1 spot, yay!
  • google-search for "iphone anime" dumps me at #18, right behind lots of anime wallpaper sites. Hmpf.
  • google-search for "iComics" lists me as #1. I wonder what the iComics author thinks about that. The iComics guide is the most popular page, too, according to google analytics.
  • google-analytics says that you spend an average 1:02 minutes on my blog each visit. I'll have to check how long it takes to read the crap I write, but it sounds about right. But apparently no one bothers to view the embedded youtube vids, eh ?
  • google-analytics says that you read fastest when visiting me on sundays. You manage reading in about half the time you usually need.
  • Country ranking:
    1. USA
    2. Canada
    3. Germany (we are so polyglot)
    4. Great Britain
    5. Japan (enjoying the english subs, eh ?)
  • Number 1 means of finding my blog: google. The most popular search term is not "iComics", "iphone ready" or even "iphone anime" btw... no, it's "iphone hentai" !
    So, can I triple my site popularity by releasing iphone anime porn, can't I? I guess i'll have to try in a scientific experiment how comfortable it is watching iPorn one-handed.
  • The estimated advertising worth of my blog is 0.00$ . I'll have to start the iPorn thingy ...
Cheers! ^_^

Berserk



Description taken from wikipedia: 
"Berserk (ベルセルク Beruseruku?) is a long-running dark fantasy manga by mangaka Kentarō Miura.
Berserk\'s setting is inspired by medieval Europe. It centers around the life of Guts, an orphaned mercenary warrior, and Griffith, the leader of a mercenary band called the Band of the Hawk (鷹の団 Taka no Dan?). As he ages, Guts changes from a solitary boy to a man who realizes the value of comradeship. The story contains elements of both fantasy and horror, as it explores both the best and worst of human nature. Both the manga and anime are noted for their heavy violence."

Oh boy, wiki got that last part right. Remember the second iPhoneReady release, Claymore ? This is it's daddy. If you know what Bukake is (follow link at own risk) then just imagine swapping out the naughty parts with blood'n'guts. 

The manga is still ongoing and boy, it's even more violent than the anime. I heard the author had to take some serious sessions with a psychiatrist because of his - er - let's say negative view on life in general. Since his negative views and his subsequent cure reflect in his works it's somewhat interesting to know. However, even in his better, improved mood the manga shows a dystopian reflection of hell on earth. 

Anyway, what you get is monsters, sword fights, death, destruction, death, killings, murders, massacres, blodshed, war, death, more massacres, demons, evil gods and death.
Safe for all ages, provided you're living in a country constantly at war with someone or another.

Enjoy !


Thursday, September 18, 2008

Download link not working ?

If you try to follow the "Download here" links right now, you'll land nowhere.

Don't Panic !!!

Anirena.com is undergoing a major site overhaul and the old download-links are invalid. And the new ones don't work like they should, but that's going to change soon.

If you really really need one of the older torrents right now, just try to search for it at http://www.tokyotosho.com.

Cheers!

Update: The tokyotosho links were not working for a short time. This problem has been fixed.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Air Master



Air Master is your typical schoolgirl-martial-artist-fights-while-showing-off-panties anime. Our heroine Maki - called Air Master because of her aerial fighting style (incluenced by her past as elite gymnast - no kidding) - is distinguished by her read hair and her outstanding size (body size - not chest size, although that one is impressive, too). She towers over the midget japanese like a - er - european in asia. Sorry midgets. 

She befriends a couple of high school girls that include a midget among midgets that annoys viewers by screaming, crying and being annoying in general - and girl best described as a pair of tits on legs who immediatly falls in love with Maki (although she is - of course - not the only one. Her other one-sided love interests range from bland to weird to creepy). They follow Maki around when she fights it out with various streetfighters in the city. 

So much for the setup and the basic character cast, which isn't much to look at. Consequently this series received lots of bad reviews, strangely quite often by the same reviewers that rather fancy brutal, misogynic Panties-R-Us series like Ikki Tousen. True, Air Master is not a particulary intelligent series, but once you detach yourself enough from reality and expectations of intellectual stimuli, you'll be rewarded with strong and fluid action, cool choreographed martial art battles, and funny situational comedy that wouldn't be possible in any other series than Air Master.


And regarding the showing-panties part: These are not the point of this series at all. They just tend to show up when you do those strange moves while wearing those stupid school girl outfits. Personally I dislike series that think the pinacle of humor is a well-lifted skirt followed by an exaggerated reaction. And no scene in this anime feels like it has been created solely to bless us with this kind of standard japanese humor.

Anyway, this series is fun, full of action and has undeserved bad ratings. Enjoy!


Sunday, September 7, 2008

Video encoding for the iPhone

Since people have asked repeatedly AND I finally got off my lazy ass I decided to give a short little tutorial on video encoding light.

I won't suffer you to learn MEncoder, even though this tool might be your last resort in case standard methods won't do. No, the software of my choice is the popular MediaCoder, which conveniently also has a special iPhone Edition. You can just get the standard version and make iPhone movies, too, but trust me when I say that you don't want to.

So, before you do anything else: 



You might also want to install the latest Firefox browser since some advanced settings (which you probably won't need) rely on the Gecko engine that comes with it.

Install and start and you will see this:

The user interface is pretty much intuitive and the part that will give you occasional problems lies withing the source files you wish to encode. But more of that later. Find some videos and drag them into the work are and you're ready to go. 

There are several possible kinds of source files which each provide you with a different problem. I'll start with some easy ones and will add others at a later time. For now, let's start with:

AVI videos with hardcoded subtitles
The avi-format is a simple container that usually contains a video and audio stream and nothing else. Subtitles are inseperable from the video stream, which is why it's called hardcoded. This is a problem if the video resolution does not match your display resolutions (480x320).
This is nearly always the case, so you have to both resize the video and crop the parts you don't want. Happily the encoding software does the resize job automatically. The job left to do is choosing the target resolution and the cropping.



You'll mostly encounter videos that are far wider than what your iphone can display (after resizing), so snipping the sides is tempting. Howeverm the problem with hardcoded subtitles is that you can't crop the sides of the video because you'll very likely eliminate some parts of the subs. In that case I usually change the target resolution to 576x320, which allows you to zoom between fullscreen and "cinematic borders" on the fly.

Press the crop button and select Manual Cropping. 


Using the left mouse button you can drag the running movie inside the frame until you are satisfied with the placement. You'll figure it out faster than I'll figure out how to explain to you how to figure it out. The border represents your ipod screen dimension, btw., so choosing a different target resolution in the main window will give you a larger window. Use the forward/backward buttons to navigate the playing movie.
Small note: This is pretty damn comfortable. You don't want to know how awkward this part can - all too often - get. 
Press done when you are done.

Beneath all those buttons you see a couple of select-boxes. You can play with them if you want or just leave them on default, wich should usually suffice. 

Press the start-button and wait for it to process your movie. After a short while it will finish (ok, it's a long while). 
Congratulations! Your first self-encoded iphone video.

In case you have several movies you wish to convert: Make sure you select all videos BEFORE you start the cropping-tool. Or else only one item in the list will get cropped as wanted.



So, that's it for today. I'll write something about the more advanced containers with multiple streams (mkv, ogm) later, although I'm sure you will figure that out by yourself.

By the way: You'll encounter numerous releases that simply won't encode like you want to. There are some workarounds for that (some involving MEncoder) but this is stuff for headaches. And some videos just won't work, no matter what you do. So don't get too worked up if that happens - it seems to be the norm. ^_^