(L) Denno Coil (TV Series!)

[te2rx]

watched 9 translated... regarding 9 I forgot if this was mentioned already, but I liked the little thing about Isako getting some kind of Michiko-induced headache (and Haraken's overwhelming cyberspace trip right after that). Also Isako's vague convulsion when she absorbs The Power. All that seems to tie into the idea of the hidden properties of the dennou glasses like Isako's brain-computer interface and whatnot... i.e. the dennou world (via glasses) can potentially f--k up your brain. IIRC one of the opening episode monologues said something along the lines of "some say dennou glasses have hidden functions which are better left unknown". I wonder if that theme will be explored later.

[wao]

Oh my Yasako, episode 12 was TEH WIN. And it really was a godly episode in many ways...

I don't know where to start, but first:
-I LOL'D
-A LOT
-REALLY

Must be because I'm still a juvenile inside, but honestly I was starting to get stitches near the end.

Also, the reactions were right. Man, this episode did such a genuinely hilarious and yet thought-provoking rendition of nation-building games like Civ that it was awesome. I was seriously grinning away madly the whole time.

Spoiler:

Any of you here play those sort of games? Then you HAVE to watch this episode. And they even used Thus Sprach Zarasthustra at the end! Oh for god's sake. Really! And it was so, so fun seeing everyone's reactions. The way everyone was kinda addicted to it, Yasako even going "Don't worry, just 3 turns more" and then the space colonies and nuclear warfare!!

And yet at the same time when Yasako, being the type of person she is, tells them to stop fighting, they ask her "Well, don't you ever fight with your friends sometimes?" and she replies saying that well... yes, but because they're friends they can make up, but everyone's got that rather uncomfortable look on their face. Now this sort of thing may seem rather annoying and preachy to some but IMO the way they did it in this anime - the lead-up to it, the environment was perfect in that it felt completely natural to me. And then bam, the question. Kids who watch it - if their brain isn't completely dead and they haven't thought of that question much before - would definitely find themselves asking this question too. Way to go for a kid's show! Seriously.

I forgot to mention - NIETZSCHE MAKES A CAMEO. SERIOUSLY. I couldn't stop banging the table...
Man, I can't wait till this gets subbed

Overall it was such a great episode I could rewatch it over and over again. For being a seemingly filler gag episode it went WAY beyond what I'd expect if I had only heard those words (but well, it's Coil, so in a way I expect to be surprised in some situations). I really love this show...


te2rx: Regarding the headaches, not just Haraken and Isako but Denpa had a similar discomfort during the bus tour episode (ep 5) at the abandoned bus graveyard. I'm thinking there's something behind it too... people whose brainwaves or something are more synchronised with the cyberworld will get affected when there's an inconsistency between versions? Remember Denpa, (and Haraken to al esser extent) can hear the sounds metabugs make... that has probably something to do with it. As for Isako, she's got the Imago thing going on.

I think the existence of the Imago's a significant thing, because it signifies a true link between that which is usually not connected to the dennou world - your brain, which is your inner place to think and not something Satchii can do anything about, and the dennou world itself. It's literally a dennou - electric brain.

It's also dangerous in the way that I figure you can't just turn it off and pretend nothing was there at all. And when you have an electronic link between the cyberworld and your brain, when you send information outside it's easy for the outside to jam information to you, or to take information from you (like what Fumie tried to do in ep 4, but Isako has obviously got many measures set up to prevent that.)

[Sonhex]

Ep 12 was just brilliant. When the first rocket launches from Yasako's face I was completely dumbstruck. Amazing. Such ingenuity in such a subtle moral tale. The highlight for me though was Kyoko with her infectious kisses, stalking the gang, picking off the weakest (Denpa).

So I've been wondering why Kyoko is getting a lot of airtime these last few episodes, especially with Daichi. I think I can see a situation where her loyalties would be tested. Perhaps presented with Yasako, Daichi and Isako, she has to make a choice. It would not be easy for her; Yasako (default sibling, but loyalty can be easily swayed if they're not on good terms), Daichi (the current crush) and Isako (she saved her life, that accounts for a lot). I can see how Kyoko, with her dormant skills, could find something key they're all after. Though if Haraken was there, I'm sure she'd pick him as the safest bet...

[wao]

Re: the rocket

But of course! It's a historical moment in (beard) civilisation!!

Here, you can even have a gif of it which I stole off 2ch.

Spoiler:

Let's hope this works, I used a different image host because it's over 2MB.
On second thoughts, because it IS 4MB after all... have a thumbnail


Isn't it fantastic? The way she's just standing there with that pose and her mouth slightly open and the rocket coming off her face.

I couldn't possibly request that *ahem* anyone here make an animated icon or something of it, could I... well, I guess I could but whether anyone replies is another matter entirely.

Another thing about the ep is

Spoiler:

how detailed even the chat windows were. There was a Norman-hige, a German-hige, and I think even a Vulcan-hige! And "stop lazing around! This'll get finished in 3 turns~" really had me laughing like mad.

I do think Kyoko will have more of an important role after all. She'll probably surprise us with something or otherwise just prove to be a very handy plot device I don't think she'll side so easily with Isako though, even though she was saved by her.

[Sonhex]

For historical moments in beard civilisation, animated...

Spoiler for possible beard related spoilers:

They're not that great as the scenes are a tad long for gifs. These are Asuki friendly, so help yourself if you want...

The whole thing looks so surreal taken out of context.

[7Th]

Episode 12 is probably the best and most entretaining comedy episode in the whole year yet, and that's saying a lot.

[wao]

Oh man! Thank you so much for those Sonhex, I can't believe you made them! I can't stop grinning at those The thing is, I wasn't thinking of using it as a Suki avatar (I like to keep one around for a few months first) but it sadly is 6kb over the !@#$ing LJ icon-size limit for .gifs. Bah! I saved both of them anyway. [EDIT: I tweaked around blindly in ImageReady and got it down to exactly 40k so I'm using it now. Many thanks sincerely!]

7th: Surprise surprise, so it isn't some random ep of Gurren Lagann then?


And since Anon(i) has subbed till episode 11 of this series... I sure hope someone has something to say (or something...)

[flick]

Originally Posted by wao

And since Anon(i) has subbed till episode 11 of this series... I sure hope someone has something to say (or something...)

And there I was going to wait for Ureshii >_< I *KNEW* i shouldn't have left my external hard drive at home!

[TinyRedLeaf]

And since Anon(i) has subbed till episode 11 of this series... I sure hope someone has something to say (or something...)

Well...I've been wanting to follow this series more closely, but lacking subs or detailed blogs up till now, I can only begin adding comments now. Thanks to Anonymous for the subs, whoever you are.

I stopped at Ep 7, and only managed to watch up to Ep 9 so far. I like how Denno Coil took on the qualities of an archetypical Japanese ghost story in Ep 9. There are quite a few instances when the stories about Michiko reminded me of Sadako from Ringu or the little girl in Dark Water, for example. I thought that these were nice touches because it seems that illegals and other virtual entities are literally metaphors for spirits/ghosts (as per what Isako alluded to in Ep 7). The metaphor seems even more obvious considering how some of these virtual entities ("boku Sacchi!") are forbidden to trespass on consecrated ground (shrines).

I also liked how Daichi's backstory was fleshed out in Ep 8, and it was quite sweet how the friends got to play together at the summer festival. So far, the story and the characters are shaping out quite nicely, and I'm looking forward to see what else unfolds.

[te2rx]

12 was a testament to how well Dennou Coil understands children. The kid in me was yelling out, SCREAMING out: I WANNA PLAY THAT GAME TOO!! OMG! What would appeal more to a kid than a god game that works through divine chatting and unfolds in the space of your bedroom? I would've been up all night just like Yuuko too. Yet another example of why this show is so very special

[wao]

Everything about Dennou Coil is just so goddamn fun! Man, if I were their age you'd bet I'd be VERY seriously envious of their situation even if they're just anime characters. It's just too awesome...

And speaking of episode 12, this is just one thing that made me think a bit about the features of the cyber world while reading some discussions on it. It's just physics I suppose but seeing that my physics is awful,

Spoiler:

when Daichi notices the Illegal hairs on his face in the mirror, does it mean that digital objects can actually be seen through reflections?

We see things because light reflects off them and this light enters our eyes and we process it (...right? Or maybe I need to go back to primary school again ) Then how do the spectacles work? It's not just superimposition of digital-only objects onto an existing scenery; even the surface and appearance of everything else is digitally simulated (and called "textures").
It's different from a hologram, so what is it exactly... it doesn't emit the appropriate image into your eyes, but then...?

EDIT: Oh YES. Someone on 2ch said someone else said that if you

Spoiler for ep 12:

play the fast-pitched exchanges of the hige after Yasako types in "Konnichiwa" into the game system at a slow pace, you actually hear a bit of Daichi and his dad's exchange! Like kaa-san biiru biiru, and mou sonna toshi janai no, etc... I don't know how on earth the original person who found this out actually knew about it but what a completely pointless yet amusing bit of trivia. Heheh.

[Slice of Life]

I ticked off the inner workings of all things dennou in an anti-Clarke way as "highly advanced magic, indistinguable from technology" quite a while ago. But to answer your question ...

Spoiler for answer:

OK, I haven't seen the raw but the mirror the glasses see is a simulated mirror, a special type of dynamical texture. To work properly, the dennou glasses need to be constantly updated about their virtual surroundings to display everything where it's supposed to be. At the mirrors position, everything is additionally displayed as it should be seen in a mirror. It's not really a different problem.

If you want to discuss the dennou technology seriously, then here are the real hard questions:

1. Why does *everything* seem to have a cyber texture? RL holes in the floor you can't see are obviously dangerous.
2. How is the position of moving things (e.g. the children themselves) updated? The glasses must know their positions to display them properly in front of a wall texture instead of the wall texture in front them. A camera plus highly advanced image recognition software? But then see point one.

(My personal answer is "It's fun, stop thinking too much." if anyone is wondering.)

[te2rx]

I've always suspected that someone has to be wearing glasses in the area for any nearby object to reflect in the virtual world (you can see how Daichi exploits this in ep 11 for instance). There is a constantly updated "scan" of the real world stored in the virtual world. I imagine when (say) virtual pets navigate the streets by themselves outside of the range of any real person wearing dennou glasses, what they see is a static scene with (maybe?) cars frozen in place, but otherwise no active traffic whatsoever, because they're just navigating the last known saved image of the area. Desynchronizations (e.g. the bus floors) can be pretty dangerous for sure... if the glasses were a real-life product that would be bad design, but as you've said this is one of those "don't think too hard about it" things. In a sense though it adds to the "wild west" feel of the emerging technology.

There was something else I saw really recently that was also like that but I can't recall what it was. It may have been something like the kids using their pets to scout areas in advance (in the absence of glasses users), which is useless because the area must first be "seen" by the dennou glasses for the virtual data to be relevant. Oh yeah, also that the futuristic ear monitors (headphones of sorts) had the ability to occlude sounds despite not actually covering the ear canal like a real IEM. Fumie was going "blurb blurb blurb" while virtually "underwater" in ep11, she had to pull her head out of the water cube in order for people to hear what she was saying.

Obviously the answer to all that is just to suspend your disbelief, since that's what you do to watch anything. A lot of the technology presented is kind of a stretch, not only to implement technically but even to implement like legally -- like I mentioned earlier the glasses are practically 24/7 mobile recording devices. Google is getting in trouble with their Google Maps, imagine the legal/privacy nightmare it would take to implement the "Dennou" system of this show, being able to record and upload to a public database the exact layout and contents of everyone's house you walk into and all that.

edit (while at work lol): on the whole however the show has to be commended for making sense most of the time within its own context. While its goals may not be as lofty as, for example, Star Trek and similarly nerdy sci-fi shows, the instances where you have to suspend your disbelief and excuse technical flaws are relatively few. Overall I'm impressed by the level of thought and design put into the sci-fi world of Dennou Coil

[aorta]

You also have the fish casting a shadow in ep 11.

The interaction between Kyoko and Daichi was amusing.

[te2rx]

if the glasses can overlay arbitrary images such as fish and water, there's no reason why the glasses can't also draw a shadow object, if that's what you mean.

Also about mirrors in the dennou world, the glasses need to be able to identify reflective surfaces in order to properly "scan" the real world, or else it'll just get really confused thinking that the reflections represent some kind of real space every time it looks into a shiny piece of plastic, metal, and so on. If it can identify reflective surfaces correctly, then it's not much of a leap from there to have the glasses overlay some virtual reflections from that data.

As for what display technology (e.g. video holography, LCD, etc) is used in the glasses or how that display technology operates, it's obviously something futuristic since it has to be able to occlude light (transparency or "alpha" so to speak) on top of control luminosity (add darkness or brightness). Its effectiveness is not dependent on the distance from the face/eyes (this makes me think it's something holographic rather than stereoscopic). It's also not visible from the front side of the glasses. And it gives off 2D scan lines. Although I think none of those are actually to be "clues" that point to a technology in particular. Reverse-side visibility would just make animaton/design more complicated and cuttered, and scan lines is just the visual language the show chooses to use to highlight virtual objects. Who knows what kind of display technology we'll specifically have for AR goggles in 20 years anyway.

while I'm at it... this is totally off topic but check out this free music album I made. http://www.mono211.com/content/releases/mtkmp187.html

[Vexx]

For some reason, an Arthur C. Clarke book "The Light of Other Days" comes to mind -- a morality tale of the ramifications of wormhole technology on the culture and society of the human race. Not the same technology as the integration of virtual with physical world, but another example of the Clarke quote on magic vs technology.

I'd provide a wiki link but the damned article is full of spoilers in the first paragraph.

Here's an interesting aside. My wife has become president of the high school band booster club (our son is in the band). At our first meeting this week in preparation for marching band camp, we announced that I had put together a new website for the use of news, forms, and information, something the band had never had before. It was *very* interesting watching the parent reaction..... it was almost as if we were "real" now that we had web presence and hadn't been "real" before. It seems to be seeping into even the technologically simple-minded that everything , entities or artifacts, must have a virtual component to be taken seriously.
My wife noticed the group feeling independently of me and it provoked an interesting and unusual philosophical discussion with Miss Usually Practical Minded.

[wao]

Thanks for the discussion I know it's supposed to be fun and not to think too much, but I can't help but wonder about things like that considering how intricate the details of the designs are for this show. te2rx is right that everything is "updated" on the specs... that's the basis of how the kids stumbled into those holes in episode 5 because the information for it was that it still had an intact floor, when in reality it had holes. Of course for it to get that outdated, it would have been unseen by people for a long time and by Satchii as well. Which makes sense because it's an abandoned bus in some godforsaken place.

But I don't know if the information retained in spectacles regarding the textures is something searchable and easily accessible like Google Maps is. They do have access to maps and stuff through their spectacles of course, but isn't the biggest problem with the privacy thing on Google Maps the fact that you don't actually have to be there to see the house? Because really, your house is viewable by anyone who happens to walk past it. I think the textures of the houses themselves are not publicly available in a searchable sense though, it's not like we've seen them display that sort of capability so far... have we?

As for the insides of houses, those are actually in a different domain. It was mentioned in teh show once that aside from places governed by other departments, Satchii and co. cannot enter personal domains - that is within your house and so on. Obviously they can't... I should think the information you get from there is something you can't necessarily upload so easily. Or maybe people haven't tried yet.

For people who are really paranoid, they could always make the dennou image of their building different from real life. Think about government buildings; they could come up as "no data" or show an oudated version on your specs, thus fooling you, unless you had the correct authorisation.

And many thanks to te2rx and Slice of Life regarding the mirror question. It was that simple after all, which is why I shouldn't have asked the question perhaps...

As for ep 13, I just watched it a short while ago. I don't have time to write more on it just yet, but for now I'll just say that while it didn't feel as good as episode 12 and didnt' reveal some huge amount of information, it was a much more 'serious' episode and it actually did make use of the whole idea of light-reflection and shadows in the dennou world. Coincidence?

Also, shock and horror, I might have to kong my head on the table and apologize profusely regarding my assumptions about Haraken's aunt, but

Spoiler for ep 13:

she... might really be 17 after all.

Especially since she's not "at work" because Yasako's dad said she had to go "register at school" and everyone bumps into her wearing a high school uniform.

....:[]

The biggest information though, is a conformation that the next episode of Coil is airing...

...ON THE 25TH!

That's two bloody weeks from now. I read about this on 2ch more than a week back but didn't know whether it would be completely true, but the preview said next episode on the 25th. ANd if I am not wrong, it's because of baseball or something.

Further rumours are that that particular episode - i.e. episode 14, is actually a recap and it has been planned that way since the planning stages of the show. So, barring a Really Creative Recap Ep that is not really so much of a recap as a retelling with Extra Details, that means 3 weeks of no new eps.

I'm gonna shed a few tears in a corner now, k?

Sorry for the tl;dr-ness of this post.

[Risaa]

Originally Posted by wao

...ON THE 25TH!

That's two bloody weeks from now. I read about this on 2ch more than a week back but didn't know whether it would be completely true, but the preview said next episode on the 25th. ANd if I am not wrong, it's because of baseball or something.

Aaah, that's what Kona meant. They sure do take their baseball seriously. It's really a shame that it's just a recap eppy though.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by wao

The biggest information though, is a conformation that the next episode of Coil is airing......ON THE 25TH! That's two bloody weeks from now.

I understand your sadness, wao, but this might be a good thing from the perspective of people participating in this thread. A brief lull might let the subs catch up a bit with the broadcasts and make this thread less of a mine field for us sub viewers.

[Risaa]

Lookie here -- Ureshii released eppy 8 yesterday and 9 today. Woo hoo! Perhaps they will use this as an opportunity to catch up, after all.

Off topic: SeijiSensei, I like your ava. I really like the little guy, even if he does resemble a daikon with legs.