Hell yeah.

Shipping took longer than I expected, but I received my 2013 Idolm@ster calendar, err...2013 THE iDOLM@STER c@lendar. The calendar is two months to each single-sided page, and you have to tear them off to change to the next sheet. I'm pretty sure the paper is A2-sized, so it should be pretty easy to get frames. The colors seem a little less saturated than the scans you may have seen, but I'm pretty happy with the calendar as a whole. I probably could have just gotten it from Kinokuniya, but I was ordering something else anyway.

OH, HELL YEAH.

I'm pretty stoked about this, although it's been ages since I put together any sort of model airplane. I'm probably going to practice first on some other kit (maybe a tank!) to get used to it again. I want to be more confident of not messing it up.

Upotte!! should have focused more on the battle rifle high school.

Upotte!! is much less tasteless and much more informative than the first episode and initial viewer impressions might have you believe. In those respects, it's sort of like Chu-Bra!! only with rifles instead of brassieres. Notably, the befuddled human teacher has a much smaller role in the series than I expected.

And the Alpine guns with the way they shoot
They keep their riflemen warm at night.

Overall, Upotte!! is a trite sitcom with anthropomorphic military small arms and several historical and factual capsules interspersed among the action. Some of the stereotyping is heavy-handed, but I'm mostly in agreement with the show's criticism of the British SA80 bullpup and her comical failings. Upotte!! does love the Sig 550 way too much, though. Fanboys.

The moé war has already begun. People simply haven't noticed.

AKB0048 is mostly terrible, but it does have good stuff in it. At a minimum, it gave us NO IDOL! missiles and wota cavalry riding to the rescue in their itasha mecha amidst an Itano Circus swarm of glow-stick missiles. There is that. [P.S. Spoilers.] But aside from the absurd battles, very little of AKB0048 is memorable. In fact, at the moment I can only remember the name of one girl: Cherry, whom I've designated as the the AKB0048 Best Girl mostly by default because she has the best hair.

Actually, maybe they're mechanized infantry and not cavalry.

Aside from that, AKB0048 (properly called A-K-B zero zero forty-eight, as the show constantly reminds us, as opposed to A-K-B double-'aught forty-eight, as I prefer) seems little more than a celebration of the real-word AKB48 idol troop. There are numerous in-show references presumably aimed at AKB48 fans, a collective fanbase which I view as a curious lot, to be quite honest. The impression I get is that AKB48 fans are not fans of the music, nor even necessarily fans of the girls (despite their vocal and occasionally socially inappropriate expressions of devotion), but rather fans of AKB48 as a phenomenon or as an entity, much as rabid sports fans are loyal to their favorite teams despite the regularly changing roster of star players.

I bet Miki could strike out Cherry with just three pitches.

If you think this is a seque to bootstrap an idol-based fantasy league team that I'll match up against The iDOLM@STER 765PROs...you're wrong. I don't know crap about AKB48, and I'm pretty sure the AKB0048 candidates would get shellacked by the 765PROs even with Kotori pitching both ends of a double-header. It might be a different story if the AKB0048 farm team gets to include scenery-chewing Ayako and cyborg Yukarin in the lineup as ringers, though.