She was going so fast that I couldn’t identify all the works that she mentioned past the weaksauce trademark protection . . . 😅 Not surprising, I guess, given that some of them were pretty obscure. (Aura Battler Dunbine? Seriously?)

The odd thing about the world’s dumbest firebomber is, why did he do it? There’s no obvious profit to him in shoring up the curse, since he doesn’t seem to want to charge admission to the cave or anything.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we discovered he was a mook working for someone else. Even then, the ultimate motivation of the person responsible is just as mysterious as why the only modern “spontaneous combustion” case mentioned by the good doctor was the one in which the coroner seems to have been tripping balls. (Well, okay, that isn’t so mysterious—most other cases have been investigated and found to boil down to “cigarette or other obvious ignition source + drugged, drunk, disabled or predeceased victim who couldn’t escape the fire”.)

I’ve seen a lot of bad reviews, though, so maybe it is supposed to be taken seriously and I’m the only one laughing at seeing a man pray to the virgin Mary for the souls of the people who he just killed with a sheet of gold leaf.

I can’t remember whether or not this is the one that got seriously into the opium trade towards the end or whether I’m confusing it with some other semi-historical series set in around that time period, but yeah, I think it was intended to be more serious despite some of the loopier aspects.

The opening theme music is just a new cover of the first OP from the first Aquarion series of twenty years ago, though. In general, I find the soundtrack is weaker than Yoko Kanno’s work on the first two series in the franchise. They do seem to be trying valiantly, but they have a lot to live up to in that department.

(90% certain I’m dropping this in favour of Promise of Wizard.)

Some people feel that getting their entertainment material from the high seas is immoral or just more work than they want to do. That leaves them stuck with whichever monopolist has the rights to whatever it is they want to watch. Doesn’t matter whether the company is any good or not.

And this specifically target AI training web crawlers.

There’s no way to distinguish between an AI training crawler and any other crawler. Per https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/ :

“This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it’s targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM’s - but really, like the plants it is named after, it’ll eat just about anything that finds it’s way inside.”

Emphasis mine. Even the person who coded this thing knows that it can’t tell what a given crawler’s purpose is. They’re just willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater in this case, and mess with legitimate crawlers in order to bog down the ones gathering data for LLM training.

(In general, there is no way to tell for certain what is requesting a webpage. The User-Agent header that (usually) arrives with an HTTP(S) request isn’t regulated and can contain any arbitrary string. Crawlers habitually claim to be old versions of Firefox, and there isn’t much the server can do to identify what they actually are.)

Japan often continues to use tech beyond the point other developed countries consider it obsolete (their government only recently transitioned away from floppy discs). It wouldn’t surprise me if Sony was manufacturing the Mini- formats in small quantities for the Japanese market only.