Last night I watched the first five eps of "Endless Eight"--four because I wanted to, the fifth because, well, I wanted to.
The DVDs that I made of the Haruhi series work just fine, but there's an issue: they were made for and on a system I no longer have. On the blab slab in the family room, season 1 looks okay if I adjust the screen zoom, but on that same setting season 2 cuts off half the subtitles. To make things worse, if I can see the subtitles, the actual video frame is perhaps a quarter of the total screen area, but centered. This worked well on the 35" CRT; it does not work here.
So I thought, no problem, there's the streaming site and I can run them from that. Get everything set up and start it off and right away, I'm thinking, This does not look like the first ep of "Endless Eight", but one of the middle ones. It had been long enough since I saw it that I wasn't really sure until we got to the Obon festival sequence. In the first ep, Haruhi and the girls go buy yukatas--and they did not in this one.
Did some quick checking then and rapidly determined that--for reasons which completely mystify me--the streaming site has all the eps of S2 out of order. What they had listed as ep 2 was not ep 2; it was like ep 6 of the second season. S1 should be "Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody" but was in fact another "Endless Eight" episode.
Went to Floristica and checked the episode guides. I can't tell for certain but it looks as if season 2 was always played straight through, not in jumbled order like S1 was. So, I haven't the faintest idea WTF is going on here, but last night, at that point it was painfully obvious that this isn't going to work as well as I'd hoped, so I dug out a USB hard drive and copied S2 to Achernar in its entirety, and then was able to start up the episodes and play them in order.
As a bonus, the audio quality was better. Mrs. Fungus was trying to read in the living room and didn't want to hear the tikka tikka tikka tikka DESU! of Japanese, so I found a 1/8" phono jack extension cord and ran the sound through earbuds, which worked a hell of a lot better than I'd hoped it would.
And then I noticed something I'd never noticed before: the backup vocals on the OP theme.
I'm wondering, in fact, if this is a different translation, or what, because I don't remember seeing them before. Also, on "cicada catching" day, I can clearly and distinctly remember Kyon calling it "a ridiculously nice day" all eight times. Maybe I'm misremembering.
But! The backup vocals are all Engrish to one extent or another, but the one that got me was the last one:
HONKY TONKY HEAD
...no, I don't know what that means, nor do I really understand how it fits with the main lyrics. Oh, well.
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Anyway, yesterday was a full day. Mrs. Fungus and I went out for fajitas, then she powerwashed the driveway side of the house while I did some pruning. After that we relaxed in our gravity chairs on the back patio. She had me light a fire in the fire ring, and we toasted marshmallows and had s'mores; then it was game time and we did some WoW.
No complaints here. It was a ridiculously nice day yesterday, and also is today. Though that means it's too cool to swim, it also means I'm not paying through the nose to cool the house down. One of those plus/minus things.
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This headache's not getting any better. I'm going to lay down.