Due to a "technical difficulty" at Amazon.co.jp, I got this almost a month after release. And it's got that episode I've been wanting to watch for a long time, too.
First, we have a bunkasai happenings episode. Do you anime watchers ever think about the fact that "happenings" is never used the way I just used it, in native English? I find myself using it the Japanese way without even thinking about it. Scary....
Animation for the live is incredible. There's also a bunch of neat things you can discover if you look at out-of-focus areas during the episode. I have an example in the screencaps, but there are more, so go watch it again and try to find them.
And finally, the episode I've been wanting to see! It's the space battle (game) episode. Since it's an anime, we move in and out of fake real world and fake fake world. Animation quality is great as ever, but the path they took to describe what Yuki did with the software didn't quite meet my expectations. It looks like Yuki is working on multiple source files at the same time by switching among terminals while the game program is still running in graphical mode on one corner. But then, the windows don't ever come back, so that must mean she's not really working on multiple files at the same time, but rather finishing up with each file really fast and moving on to another. But if that's so, there's no reason to open new terminals.
What I imagined while reading the novel is more realistic. I thought she figured out the communication protocol between the game client and the server, and wrote her own text-mode client. If written right, it would be much easier to manipulate all those little split fleets directly without needing to depend on an inefficient GUI. Both the novel and the anime mentions that she rewrote part of the program while it was running. That seems unnecessary for what she needed for the anime. She merely needed to change some configuration variables. Since I doubt the client-server protocol was very secure, it would've been relatively easy for her to do that. In the novel, though, she did mess around with the warp mechanisms of the enemy ships, so I guess a little bit of rewrite is necessary. It wouldn't have needed that much, though. I think I'm being too serious about this little comedic chapter. Still, I expected her to have loaded a *nix variant on that Espon (sic) notebook, preferably *BSD.
Note that CD (KABA-1507-CD) is listed separately.
I got sticker set #27 with this one.
Hey, that's the same background, just with different colors and character drawings.
You can almost make out extern C statement in there. Mmm, C++, my favorite programming language. No, I'm not being sarcastic.
