hitagi
@hitagi@ani.social
howdy
- Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 15] 2 days ago:
I watched two movies the past few weeks:
- Genius Party
This is a collection of animated short films from different directors. The two notable ones here for me were Masaaki Yuasa and Shinichirou Watanabe. Happy Machine (Masaaki) was my favorite! The little baby character (and the overall vibe of it) reminded me of Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time.
There were other really quirky ones in the collection too. Deathtic 4 was different from the rest. It was 3DCG and I don’t know the language (it sounds European). Interestingly, there’s a scene there where the zombies said they were fighting “injustices” and it shows them trying to pick a fight with two girls wearing a US flag and USSR flag suits (it was funny). Genius Party (same title as the collection) was chaotic and fun while Limit Cycle was really (intentionally) boring (it’s about a salaryman).
The more “normal” ones were Shanghai Dragon, Doorbell, and Baby Blue (Shinichirou). Shanghai Dragon was partly in Chinese because it’s set in China. I think anyone familiar with Japan-China relations will raise eyebrows here because it portays a poor China and a technologically advanced Japan, but at the end it was the Chinese boy who saved everyone through his imagination as opposed to the technology of Japan. Doorbell reminded me of Satoshi Kon, and Baby Blue was maybe my favorite for the “normal” shorts.
- Ghost in the Shell (1995 movie)
I had this in my watchlist for a looong time (because it’s a certified classic) and I’m happy that I did not watch it earlier. I don’t think I would have appreciated this at a young age. I think this is the second Oshii Mamoru movie I watched. The first was Angel’s Egg which was pretty much the ending of GITS. There’s already a wealth of information and reviews on GITS especially by Western writers so I don’t really have to say much here.
But I noticed how spirituality or religion always ties with technology in anime. People who’ve seen Serial Experiments Lain probably know what I mean. It’s very similar to GITS. Evangelion is another example. Also, it might sound a bit odd but it reminds me a bit of the “programming” in Angel Beats too which I complete last month.
(Also Major Kusanagi is very beautiful. Holy shit.)
This week I might watch Genius Party 2 and maybe look for an older series to finish (maybe more Masaaki Yuasa stuff).
- Comment on Having trouble with my caddy congif for my lemmy instance 5 days ago:
Have you tried looking at the Caddyfile from Lemmy-Easy-Deploy?
- Comment on Anime wisdom 5 days ago:
I’m not sure about the others, but the last guy (from Oregairu iirc) was definitely pretentious. Like being vague about his ideas just to appear smart and productive. The hand gestures was the best part.
- Comment on Winter Anime Season Wrap-Up Discussion [2025, Week 14] 1 week ago:
Though they couldn’t even manage to do that without sticking the bitch in the scene
I read the Scum’s Wish manga. If I recall correctly, there’s an extra chapter of her some time after the events. I think that was the very last chapter too. Now that you point it out, it does kind of seem like the story centered around her a lot.
For some reason though, I actually enjoyed this manga lol
- Comment on Phantom Rides: Trains in the work of Hideaki Anno by River Seager 1 week ago:
I found this video essay interesting. The style is a bit different where narration is text on screen but I found it enjoyable without an audible narrator.
I never really thought about the trains in Hideaki Anno’s works but now I’m a lot more conscious about it.
- Submitted 1 week ago to anime@ani.social | 1 comment
- Comment on Director of Japan's First AI Anime Defends New Spring 2025 Work: 'It Will Give More Opportunities to Animators' 1 week ago:
In my opinion, the cause of “the burden of animation” is being underpaid and overworked. If there were better laws that can address these issues, we wouldn’t need to resort to AI.
But for in-betweening, I assume you’re referring to something like CACANI but that’s a bit different from generative AI I think. It behaves more like 3DCG because the lines are vectors.
- Comment on 'An Insult To Life Itself': Hayao Miyazaki’s AI Criticism Resurfaces As OpenAI’s Ghibli-Style Image Trend Takes Over Social Media 1 week ago:
The clip is from a documentary where Miyazaki works on a 3DCG short film (something completely unheard of). You can watch the documentary here. I do like the point he makes:
(Suzuki) “So, what’s your goal?”
(Guy) “Well, we would like to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do.”
(Miyazaki) “We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”
- Comment on Lucky Star Dance Lyrics in English (fan dubbed)- peertube no ads 1 week ago:
Could you send an email to help@ani.social so I can take a look? Thanks!
- Comment on Why is Lemmy only popular in the western World? 1 week ago:
I should clarify that NLnet is probably not a commercial company like Skeb is. I know translation exists but all the Lemmy support chatrooms are in English.
- Comment on Why is Lemmy only popular in the western World? 1 week ago:
Reddit was (and still is) seen as foreign/overseas social media. Other social media platforms are much more diverse than Reddit. Twitter, TikTok, and Insta for example. YouTube and Facebook too.
Most people here in Lemmy come from Reddit. Reddit is very popular in the Western world. It’s not popular outside of it.
In the context of the larger Fediverse, I think Misskey is an interesting case study. It’s created and designed by Japanese people. The docs are in Japanese. It’s sponsored by a Japanese company. Resources and support are also in Japanese. Therefore it has a strong Japanese userbase.
On the other hand, Lemmy is created and designed by Western people. The docs are in English. It’s sponsored by a Western company. Resources and support are in English. Therefore it has a strong Western userbase.
Also I should point out that other than Twitter, Instagram, etc. there are some platforms operated by non-Western companies. China has a lot of those like Bilibili, Weibo, Baidu, etc. Korea has Katalk and Line, etc etc. They aren’t popular outside of the region.
- Comment on What is your best supernatural anime? 1 week ago:
Monogatari Series
- Comment on Discord going public. Plz help a future refugee. 3 weeks ago:
It was 8mb then 25mb then 10mb now.
- Comment on anime that are built diffrent 5 weeks ago:
Some that haven’t been mentioned yet (I think):
-
Kuuchuu Buranko: This one uses rotoscope animation. It’s a “trippy” anime that deals with various mental health problems (mostly OCD). I think this is one of those anime that almost nobody really knows about. It’s very obscure.
-
Aku no Hana: This also uses rotoscope animation. I actually never watched the anime and only read the manga. It’s one of those psychological types but it’s well-grounded in reality. The animation itself is weird however. Probably because rotoscoping at this level is uncommon in anime.
-
Monogatari Series: The notoriously “immoral” anime series (and one of my all-time favorites). Generally speaking, anything by SHAFT have really unique visual storytelling which includes Madoka Magica and Sangatsu no Lion.
-
- Comment on Anime song stations? 5 weeks ago:
Not quite the same thing but I remember someone linking animethemes.moe in this comm. It’s just a huge collection of anime OP/ED themes with a music player. Not really like a radio station.
- Comment on Manga Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 09] 1 month ago:
Well that’s another similarity, at least based on what other people have said so about it lol
- Comment on Manga Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 09] 1 month ago:
I spent an entire morning a few days ago reading Prison School. I don’t know why I had a sudden urge to read it. I finished up to Chapter ~90 at which point most people say it goes down hill.
It’s a fun read so far though. Not a life-changing experience obviously but it’s ridiculously entertaining. I probably looked stupid giggling under my sheets that day. Also, the art style is incredible. For some reason, this inspired me to study drawing poses again. Too bad it’s not something I can read while out in public.
I’d categorize this one with Domestic Girlfriend as “Stupid But Very Entertaining Manga With Great Art”.
- Comment on Evidence For A Persona 4 Remake Is Mounting Up Thanks To Singer Shihoko Hirata 1 month ago:
Yeah I actually really like P4G even if it looks “outdated”. I played P3R as my introduction to the Persona series but I thought P4G had a lot of charm in its style.
I’d be interested in a remake of P1 and P2 though.
- Comment on Server Maintenance - Feb 14 at 22:00 UTC 1 month ago:
That’s actually really cool. Maybe I should put something up like this too. I’ve been curious about our stats lately
- Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 08] 1 month ago:
I mean, that’s a choice if you want to hate life for a while.
Now I’m really curious. I’m going in completely blind then. I think I’ll start the first episode tomorrow morning.
- Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 08] 1 month ago:
Stay safe!
- Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 08] 1 month ago:
I didn’t really get to watch anything last week as I’ve been studying for exams. I’m thinking of watching Angel Beats for this week though because my friend said it was the only anime that made him cry.
- Submitted 1 month ago to anime@ani.social | 21 comments
- Comment on Server Maintenance - Feb 14 at 22:00 UTC 1 month ago:
Thanks! I’ve used this before but decided not to set it up for this server because of Fediverse things. I’m afraid I might break federation with it. But I’ll see if I can work around that.
- Comment on Federation using lemmy-federate 1 month ago:
Done! I did not know this existed. Thanks for the suggestion!
- Comment on Server Maintenance - Feb 14 at 22:00 UTC 1 month ago:
Nothing else went down. After blocking the ASN, I found out that they’ve been scraping the site from Hong Kong too but not as aggressively with Singapore. Or rather, the Hong Kong servers are more consistent but not as frequent (I don’t know how best to describe it lol). The only info I have is the ASN which points to the Alibaba Group. It also doesn’t disclose what it is other than “Microsoft Edge Windows” which is not very nice in my opinion.
Cloudflare only gives me logs for the past 24 hours but most of ani.social’s traffic comes from other instances federating in (unsurprisingly, Lemmy.World is #1).
Some graphs if you're interested:
Image The green line is Singapore. This happened a few hours after the crash the other night. Image This is a closer look of the spike. The lines are 5 of their IP addresses. You can see that they’re dormant then suddenly they start hammering the instance with requests. Image These are the top countries for the past 6 hours that use GET after filtering out Alibaba. United States is high because they have a lot of web crawlers/scrapers like Open AI (at least they’re honest) but I might block the AI ones too.
- Comment on Server Maintenance - Feb 14 at 22:00 UTC 1 month ago:
They only seem to be scraping the lemmy-ui frontend and not the others. I’m actually not 100% sure if it’s scraping but this is what it looks like:
All from the same IP range in Singapore. A huge spike in requests matches the time when Lemmy-UI crashed last night.
I captcha’d the ASN (it’s Alibaba btw) for now (I don’t know if that’s okay to do, hopefully I’m not blocking real people) but perhaps there are better solutions like ratelimiting.
Anyway, let me know if you’re still having trouble accessing the site. The filter should only cover that particular ASN for now.
- Comment on Server Maintenance - Feb 14 at 22:00 UTC 1 month ago:
My bad. I think I messed up somewhere but I’ll turn off the filter I made in the meantime. I’ll figure it out again when I get home from class.
- Comment on Server Maintenance - Feb 14 at 22:00 UTC 1 month ago:
Update: I’ll postpone this for a week as it seems like the issue comes from a Chinese datacenter in Singapore that’s scraping the site very aggressively.
I’ll block the IP range and see if that solves the problem.
- Comment on Server Maintenance - Feb 14 at 22:00 UTC 1 month ago:
Thank you for being a good member of the Fediverse! o7
