mokudekiru

After a tiring week of midterms… I am glad to say I am done with the first round. To reward myself, I came home from the CS midterm last night and finally watched the epic conclusion to 花ざかりの君たちへ, which was a double episode finale.

This show was really great. You have to love a show subtitled “prettyboy paradise”, with a title screen like: (quiz: find the girl)

The finale was a little more conclusive and a little happier than your typical drama ending — Mizuki, the main character, is caught (people finally figure out that she’s a girl) so, having accomplished what she set out to do (get Oguri Shun to high jump again), can go back to America, no regrets. There was a long, drawn out, ceremonial goodbye scene before she left, one final moment with Oguri in the airport, when he finally lets on that he likes her — says basically “I’ll come visit sometime,” kisses her, and she goes on her way.
The final scene takes place when she is back in California, which apparently looks like this:

And now that she’s not going to a boys school anymore, she can finally start “dressing like a girl” again… you find me one girl in California that dresses like this, please:

So the last scene she finds out that the school trip for the boys’ school in Japan she was attending is going to have a school trip to… California! So she and Oguri and co. will be reunited in the future.

The surprising thing about this show was that I *wasn’t* rooting for Oguri Shun — I was rooting for the other guy, Nakatsu. Simply because he still liked Mizuki, even when he thought she was a guy. Oguri Shun was a little too strong and silent.

I’m not sure what the overall best moment of the show was, but the point in episode 11 when all the guys did a cheerleading routine at the sports festival to Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” is really hard to match. Look it up on youtube and be amazed.

Again, feel free to play spot-the-girl:

Now that it’s over, I’m going to have to start researching fall dramas, which should start up in a couple of weeks.

BUT! I have more to say. Watching Hanazakari was amazing of course, but what may be equally amazing is the new program I have downloaded in order to watch it. It’s called Miro, and it’s a video player that visually borrows heavily from iTunes, and is a really nice way to organize and play your movies. It also allows you to search and download youtube, google, dailymotion, and other videos from the web. You can also create folders on your computer and tell Miro to treat them as a feed, updating as you add new movies to that folder. Of course, you can also subscribe to real video podcasts or any video feed on the internet.

Plus, it’s open source.

Here’s a screenshot:

Mostly I’ve been using it to organize and view jdramas, but since I can download youtube videos, I’ve downloaded the past few Ainori episodes and watched those — not important enough for me to find a high quality version of, but it’s sometimes nice to just leave it playing in the background while I do something else — it brings back that atmosphere of Japan where there is always some announcer explaining something really ridiculous in highly formal Japanese.

It’s not perfect–it can’t play quite any file format, and there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to mark videos as viewed without actually viewing them inside Miro. But overall this is a very nice program.

TV really needs to just be on the internet anyway — Miro is helping make that happen. Go check it out: