Wow, time really got away from me there. I was eating my MacNooglers, and one moldy fry, and BAM! 3 o'clock. I hope that moldy fry doesn't make me sick later. It seriously tasted like some sort of fungus. I might have cancer now, too. It was from McDonald's so you never know. Anyway, let's move on to things and other things, the first of which will likely be the Weekend Rollup.
Anime/Manga/Games
Anime News Network, the bunch of flaming assholes, has put up some lip service blog piece of shit (Yay! Now they can be just like IGN!). Apparently, ANN staff and industry people will post worthless, self-aggrandizing tripe about things they think are interesting. Oh, and ANN, thanks for pitting your two-bit phpBB blogs into your already shitcan latout. It's SUPER easy to read. Why don't you hire a designer to come in and fix that shit up for you? I'll do it for $100/hr. That's my going rate. And if you people keep making those fucking Hyde puns, I swear to god, I am going to send someone over there.
The Bleach Movie has a site now, and a title! It's called Bleach: Memories of Nobody. Just to recap, it comes out in December.
Media Factory is doing the just announced Happiness! TV series(WOO! Eroge!). The show will be airing on UHF TV (no, not the one with Weird Al. That movie rocked, though.)
Hobby Stock updated the Orchid Seed 1/7 scale Carmen 99 from Gun x Sword. They are still taking pre-orders, but she will most likely be out later this week, so you should hurry. A scant 13,965 yen. I'd say it's a high price, but it's CARMEN PEOPLE. Or Karmen, or Karumen, if you like.
That's all I have time for right now, but it ought to be enough. Anyway, I started a new site. It's NSFW, but yeah… it's called Onii-chan no Ecchi. Thanks to the animenano channel for the naming and purposing help. Please check it out. Haha. Also, someone link me to some Summer season anime rundowns, I need to decide what I will be watching.
The official Kujibiki Unbalance site has been updated to reflect the character information and all that jazz for the new series. More importantly than that, however, is that they've put up a minute and forty-seven second trailer for the show. The trailer is a streaming .WMV format, and played pretty choppy on my system, so for that reason, I will be uploading it to YouTube. The trailer itself is pretty boring, and looks like that are still chasing that Negima dream, but oh well. We'll probably all watch it anyway.
The YouTube video will show up after the jump. Tell me you love me. And if you saw it here and embed the player elsewhere, I'd dig a link back. Not required though. Weekend Rollup coming after this… and lunch.
Just announced today… or maybe yesterday, from Aizu Project, was a nice looking 1/6 scale PVC of Midou Chihiro from Pia Carrot e Youkoso G.O.! I've seen a few Aizu Project figures before, and they tend to be of a good quality, but god damn if their pictures of their products don't suck. I decided to hit their official site for some better pictures, and got excited when I saw a front AND back shot on the page, but they are both about 20 pixels wide. That's depressing. What's even more depressing is the price changes that seem to be going on here. Their official site lists it at 9,450 yen, the advert picture that's posted after the jump says 15,800 yen, and HobbyStock is pushing it at 16,590 yen. I will assume the latter is after tax, but what the hell happened to the price from Aizu's site to their ad paper?! What the hell man?! Oh well. 15,800 isn't unreasonable for a nekomimi meido in her full 1/6 scale glory. I'd buy it.
All three pictures after the jump, though two of them are a farce. I will catch up on figures tomorrow, I promise. I just have some work to catch up on because of being sick the past two days. YAY!
As you know, Yamato has a US distribution group and they've just sent out a press release this morning announcing some of their figures for later this year. Of course they are mostly crap, and represent about 1/100,000th of the actual market, but that is what we get openly in America. We get crap. It's nice of them to try though. Anyway, they announced the release of crappy trading figures from Ultimate Muscle, Ping Pong Club, and Excel Saga. Please look for them on your local Borders bookstore shelves. They'll be near the manga section, covered in dust, and completely untouched for months. But that's fine. Like I said, it's nice of them to try.
Full press release after the jump. Watch out for hipster PR talk.
The Tsuyokiss official website has been updated to include what I am guessing is a 15 second WMV downloadable and a quicktime streamable trailer. I say I am guessing because Japan is hammering the server so bad that even the images are dead. I will link you guys to it, and keep you updated. And if I can get a copy of it, I will host it here for download. Here's the link to the original .wmv. It's down right now, but I'm sure they will get it back up sometime soon. And here is the "Specials" page there you can click to pop up the streaming version.
The University of California's Irvine sector (I don't think it's a whole school unto itself, maybe it's just because they are talking about the extension program. Whatever.) is set to offer a class in the study of Anime and Manga. The class, which will be entitled "Manga and Anime Explosion: What, Why, How, and Wow!," is supposed to explore the history of the art forms and help explain this and that about them, blah blah blah. I could do a long spiel, but rather than advertise for this course, I'd rather question its intentions. Firstly, if they mean to say that manga and anime have become some exploding cultural phenomenon in America, I'd like to take a second to point out the hundreds, if not thousands, of anime that are either not licensed in this country, or are licensed but fail horribly due to apathy, disinterest, and a rather small fan base. I am sick of hearing about how anime is exploding in this country, when some of the most major anime sites still have a readership that barely comes to one-third of what sites like GameSpot pull. Yes, there has been a large push into the mainstream in Japan, but that isn't really culturally relevant for a screenwriter to be doing a course on in the Film Studies department at UC Irvine. Oh, and if you don't believe me, just look at a list of recently released fansub episodes and tell me how many of those are licensed. The numbers are pretty small.
P.S. I am feeling better, so I will do figure stuff tomorrow. And go back to work. YAY!
If you attend Nanyang Technical University in Singapore, and you're in the animation department, you might want to run for the hills. The university has partnered with AIC to develop animation for the Japanese market. Also, according to the article I linked, anime is only used to tell stories about sci-fi and fantasy things. Nice work, guys. Apparently, this is the first time the two countries have worked together in the animation industry, and the dean of the School of Computing Engineering is saying that it could cut per-episode costs and production times by up to 40%. Watch out, South Korea. You could be in trouble. Of course, I get a shit ton more hits from Singapore than I ever have from Korea. YAY SINGAPORE!
I swear Project Blue Chikyuu SOS sounds familiar, but my brain refuses to remember why. Maybe I announced their site opening. Ah well! There is a flash based trailer online for the first episode in this six part OVA. The trailer mostly just talks about the people who worked on it, and how awesome the special high quality super animation is and that it comes in HD and 5.1 surround sound. I wasn't too impressed with it, but then those sorts of shows never really grab my attention anyway. The first episode is set to broadcast on AT-X on July 2nd and the DVD will hit stores on August 25th for the low, low price of 6,090 yen or 7,140 yen with a special… airplane… I think.
Well, I guess it is inevitable that everyone is going to have to wade through a ton of moe crap just to get to the stuff they like these days. And to help that marketing sinkhole continue in a downward direction, Ikaros Shobo has put out a new magazine by the name of MC(star)Axis. The magazine is a bishoujo moe magazine, by their naming not mine, and the first issue's cover goes ahead and proves that no one knows what they are talking about by featuring a character that looks closer to tsundere, or femdom even, than she does to moe. She's too sassy and half-naked. But hey, whatever gets your dick up, I guess. Be sure not to buy any copies, as it will only encourage them. But then, they might have some nice centerfolds, so maybe just pick up one copy.
Since I am combining things here, I wanted to link to Shingo's bit about the whole maid cafe thing, as he does a good job of capturing my sentiments. As always, thanks for your well-spoken sentiments on the subject, as it saves everyone else a ton of time in writing out what they think. Now we can all just link to you.
