Patlabor: The Movie is pretty good but (IMO) nothing special. The OVAs/TV shows are very slice-of-life and have a much slower tempo than the movie. (From the article: "One memorable episode of the TV series was about the tribulations involved in getting a Chinese restaurant to deliver to the base.") The second movie is much darker and more cerebral, a la Ghost in the Shell (same director), and was previously discussed on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37916306. Overall though the whole franchise is very enjoyable
> The second movie is much darker and more cerebral
It's one of the most underrated animated movies there is I think. There's a limited edition I was lucky to grab in a pretty random store in Tokyo years ago that comes with two books, one has a lot of the storyboards and the other contains interviews with Oshii and he considered it the most important movie he made for its exploration of post WW 2 Japan. And although GitS is great I think it's a bit of a shame that it overshadows Patlabor so much, in particular internationally.
> decidedly quotidian view
That makes me think of Planetes, which follows a space-junk cleanup crew.
Being "hard" sci-fi, it too might end up being prescient.
I loved Planetes, but it's unfortunately unique, as there's not a lot of other hard scifi out there, and even less animation
On top of my head I remember Uchuu Kyoudai and Rocket Girls for space exploration anime using even theoretically shorter term technology than Planetes. Futatsu no Spica is similar to Uchuu Kyoudai, but is not really scifi as it's 99.9% drama on earth, so it doesn't really count. The anime also stops at a weird place,
In special, I was reminded of Rocket Girls by the Polaris Dawn mission recently. EVA from a capsule, highly eliptical earth orbit, all private mission, etc.
Anyone know a place it can be watched? Just checked all my subscriptions and came up dry :/
> the Ukrainian military’s reliance on Starlink, a satellite-based internet provider run by Elon Musk, whose stance on the war is at least Putin-curious.
Ha, "Putin-curious" is an amazing phrase.