Shop Report and Record of Lodoss War review

Okay. So I don't have the new Harry Potter book. Period. In fact, I'm so negligent about fandom, I even forgot about when it was supposed to be released. Anyway, judging from the laws of supply and demand, my local bookstore ordered way too many, so I'll still have time to get my hands on one.

Yesterday, we might as well have not opened the shop at all, since we got only $15 in sales. For the whole day, only around 5 people wandered in. The parking lot was bare! The combination of a grand opening of the renovated Murrieta Old Town with a street fair and the HBP release meant that no one at all was at the mall.

On the anime front, I managed to rent the whole series of Record of Lodoss War. It's like watching a D&D session; every single standard cliche of the genre was present and accounted for. Which is nice, in its own way, because this particular anime is the definitive RPG anime. There are some inconsistencies that bugged me, like how Deedlit (Who comes up with fanstasy names?) the elf was all over Parn because he was about to use his sword on a tree to practice, and then later, completely ignores Wood the thief when he stabs a tree with his dagger in frustration. There are some fashion gripes I have, but that's not something other people should worry about. Like how Deedlit's armor is just... stupid looking. She was wearing standard elf clothing; green tunic with leggings and boots. And also for no purpose I can think of, honking big shoulder paldrons. It effectively added around two feet of width to her shoulders. What the heck? She's shown bouncing (or teleporting, the animation wasn't that good when it comes to action sequences) from branch to branch in the forests and I keep on wondering why she didn't get stuck. Or maybe, because she didn't have huge anime boobs, the animators just had to make her top heavy in other ways. Anyway, the music was suitably dramatic and orchestral, the plot moves at a reasonable pace, and the characters weren't annoying except for the way some of them were dressed (and that's not their fault).