So remember that list of unsourced rumors i posted about earlier from 2ch that just happens to be incredibly accurate? Welp, guess what showed up on the 2ch thread that everyone gets their news from?
I mean there is definitely a good chance that 10,000 hours, pixels, etc, but honestly, even if this is fabricated, Railgun anime almost seems like a given at this point, no?
Yunakiti reports on the 2ch thread where otaku realize that Geisai 12 took place right next to Reitaisai, in East hall 1. Guests there included Yamakan, Ozoku band (Tissue Princess and other Nico Allstars), and Zombies, the ultimate anison dance group.
I kind of feel bad about not knowing about this, but on the other hand it looks like if I went I’d be giving money to Takashi Murakami, and he doesn’t really need any more money than he already has. Not to mention that I honestly believe that Reitaisai is a more significant event of the two in basically every way! Well, except for no yamakan.
As many of you may know, Reitaisai moved from the West-4 hall at Tokyo Big Sight last year, where from all reports the event was crowded and ridiculous and chaotic beyond anyone’s imagination, to the larger East 4/5/6 halls this year.
What was not announced was that the Reitaisai organizers also rented the East 3 hall, for the purpose of line control. Yes, they rented a 3.5 million yen/day hall for the purpose of making the event less of a living hell by lining up the first x thousand people to show up inside the event hall. Upon discovering this hall, I felt a little less bad about having to spend $19 on an only-event catalog. I took it somewhat easy, getting up at around 6 and arriving at the hall at a little past 7, and just barely made it in the nice climate controlled room where many thousands of other Touhou fans were, many of whom probably were hanging around the Big Sight all night.
As at all doujin events, there is a page in the Reitaisai catalog and all related materials that states that you SHOULD NOT line up overnight, or even get there really early in the morning, suggesting that you instead arrive at an hour when normal people will be awake, in other words, when you won’t bother them. Of course, a lot of people don’t actually follow this rule, creating tensions between the rule-breaking overnighters (徹夜組), the on-the-fence first trainers (始発組), and the rest of us plebes who more or less follow the rules and wish grave harm upon the first group and mild harm to the second.
Most conventions state that there will be some sort of vague penalties for showing up early. I’m fairly sure Comiket isn’t actually able to follow through with this threat, and they’re already pretty well equipped to deal with the crowd. Reitaisai last year, on the other hand, didn’t hand out any penalties, and the event was pretty chaotic. Sunshine Creation was fairly well known for actually dealing these out, moving some people to the back of the line, or I believe in one case making the overnight folks shovel snow if they wanted to keep their place in line. Of course, this can always backfire, as apparently at last Comic1, the 100 or so nerds who were cordoned off as a penalty by 5 staff members decided that their collective inertia could not be stopped by these 5 staff members if they all moved together, and basically just plowed into the event hall. tsk tsk.
Back to Retaisai, though. Like I said, I just barely made it in east-3, and I could hear people around me mumuring about penalties and whatnot, some calling the building we were in a ペナルティã»ã„ã»ã„, “Penalty Hoihoi”, a play on the Japanese for “roach motel”, “Gokiburi hoihoi.”
Well, it turns out they were right! At 9:45, 15 minutes before the event started, the periodic announcement by the cheerful female announcer reminding us to please buy a catalog if we hadn’t yet was replaced by another announcer, this one male, and much less cheerful. He informed us folks in the hall that we all probably knew that lining up early was expressly forbidden. In classic Japanese chewing-out style, he let us know how much of an annoyance we must have been, partying outside all night when there’s a hospital with a giant cancer ward just next door, and that we should probably feel bad about ourselves. Oh, and there would be some changes made to the line.
Without even a “have a nice day”, the PA clicked, and everyone went from being dead silent to excitedly talking to their friends. The guys around me seemed half-scared but half-thrilled, because we sort of followed the rules by showing up after the first train, and even if we did get hit by a penalty, we had already showed up late enough that it wouldn’t reaaally make much of a difference.
At 9:55, our line, 6 wide and 90 deep, and only our line, started to move. We all started freaking out, wondering if we actually were going to be the first regular attendees in. They lined us up right in front of the entryway to the event, and held us there for a little bit, telling us that we shouldn’t run under any circumstances, that we should have our catalogs out, and that we should have our shoelaces tied. When 10 came around, everyone started clapping, as you normally do at these events.
Oh, except for the people who had stayed overnight at the Big Sight. Apparently they weren’t too thrilled about the entry order to the event of East 3 being completely reversed.
as they say on 2ch, 徹夜ã–ã¾ã‚ wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
Anyway, I ought to go now. Need to install my Seirensen demo!
I wasn’t going to post this originally since it seemed too out there, but now that Hagaren’s cast has changed I feel marginally more comfortable posting these completely unsourced rumors from a random 2ch post, many of which have already, by pure chance, come true! via yunakiti since I am a busy adult with no time to actually read 2ch
Munto will be 9 episodes long â—‹
Basquash getting aired on 10 channels across Japan, is 2 seasons long â—‹
Strike Witches S2 in 2010, based on the light novel â—‹
April Haruhi airing will be a mix of season 1 and season 2, aired in chronological order
Shangri-La will be 2 seasons long
Asura Cryin’ will be 2 seasons, one in Spring, one in Fall
Seitokai no Ichizon airing in July â—‹
Omamori Himari getting an anime adaptation ○　(this, Seitokai, and SW s2 were posted in late January)
Railgun getting an anime in 2010
The Final Negima OAD won’t be produced by SHAFT (? i might be reading this wrong)
Mangrove doing Seiken no Katanakaji
Many changed voice actors for the new season of Hagaren â—‹
Wolf and Spice s2 in July, 12 eps in all â—‹
I guess we have to sit back and see how this pans out! Maybe it’s all part of Kadokawa’s master plan. even this very blog post.
I’m really tired so this is going to be really short:
Zun showed up at the very end of FN2009, and the MC asked him if he could give any information about Touhou Seirensen: Undefined Fantastic Object. After dodging the question for a few seconds with “get the demo on Sunday, you can find out then,” he let slip that
“It’ll be better than Chireiden”.
Thanks, 神主. Of course, this was a few hours after an audience poll of “what’s your favorite Touhou game” where about the same number of people raised their hands for Chireiden as they did for Bunkachou (StB), which is to say very few. Other interesting facts learned from the audience surveys: the vast majority of people play on gamepads, and maybe 30-40% of the crowd was in their teens. damn kids in my fandoms.
He also mentioned that the game will be very “pop”, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the demo to find out exactly what that means.
All the bands were great, but some were more great than others. Also, the Makuhari Messe apparently uses a Bosendorfer as their in-house piano?? wtf
The Gallery of Fantastic Art is one of those places in Tokyo that I keep meaning to go by that I never actually bother taking the train to. Either they’ve been in between exhibits or I just plain forget about the place, which is really sad considering that I’ve been checking their website on and off ever since I started being interested in Range Murata.
As the name would suggest, GoFA is a small gallery that displays, well, fantastic art. If you go to AX, you may be familiar with them, because it seems like they run a gallery there every year. Anyway, “fantastic” basically means anime/manga illustrators, mostly from artists who you’re likely to see in Wanimagazine pubs (ROBOT, Gelatin) like Murata, Yoshitoshi ABe, Miggy, Okama, and Kei Toume, but also some older artists such as Go Nagai, Mizuki Shigeru, and, as you probably have guessed by now, Tetsuo Hara. More on that in a second.
The gallery is a bit tucked away, but still incredibly easy to get to. All you have to do is take the subway to Omotesando station and walk straight out the B2 exit until you hit the Aoyama Oval Building, which is a big oval-shaped building (surprise!) with a Citroen showroom on the first floor. Take the door on the left of the elevators and the door after that to get to the stairs, walk up one floor, and you’re there. Entry is only 500y, and the ticket is usable for a free coffee or tea at the cafe downstairs. (A 300 yen value!)
So yeah, Fist of the North Star art exhibit. It was basically everything I could have hoped for, though it’s a fairly small space. There’s a modest merchandising table at the entrance with a few dvds, magazines, and other goods for sale (I bought this), as well as some anime cels and some larger framed works for sale, including prints from the crazy “7 Artist Ten” (展) project. There’s also life-sized Ken and Yuria figures staring you down as you come in. Some pictures can be found here.
As far as the Tetsuo Hara part of the Tetsuo Hara exhibit, they have prints of the original manuscripts for the entire first chapter of the Fist of the North Star manga, as well as some manuscripts of later famous scenes. Some full color prints by Hara are also on display. All of it looks great, although staring at the famous spread of Raoh raising his fist to the sky made me realize that the proportions or maybe the perspective of the scene seems a little off. Oh well.
If you can make it this Sunday, they’re going to be giving away 3 A1-sized promo posters of the event, since it’s the last day of the exhibit. I’d totally show up, but Reitaisai. Future shows include Kei Toume from 3/20-4/5, Takada Akemi (char designer for KOR, UY ovas) from 4/29-5/10, Abyukyo from 5/16-5/24, and Range Murata from 5/29-6/14. It’s a really nice place to spend an hour or so, and the free drink is a great added bonus. I’d consider taking someone there if I had friends. Not to mention, it’s in the Shibuya area, so you can get some shopping done afterwards, at Mandarake of course. Maybe writing this post will remind me to actually go back next time they have an exhibit on and I’m in Tokyo!
The Natsu Style reports that Miku super-cd supercell has charted at #2 on the Oricon album daily charts, with over 20,000 copies sold on day 1. Kalafina’s Seventh Heaven made #8. Got my copy, how about you guys??
via katoyuu
Yunakiti reports the 2ch thread reporting on the VIP thread about finding these two pages detailing release info on the Haruhi-chan and Churuya-san dvds. The first page notes that the DVD will be 40 minutes long and has the release date down as 4/24, while the second link says that there will be 3 dvds in all. Do be warned that both sources are from DVD rental sites, which could mean that the information isn’t totally accurate. Or maybe just made up, who knows. (comedy kadokawa trolling option.) Anyway what do you guys think a fair over/under on the price/dvd would be, 5000y?
In other news, Supercell is officially released today, though it was readily found in otaku B+Ms around the country yesterday. This is what I get for not going outside yesterday! Also, preorders for the Goodsmile Black Rock Shooter figure have opened, at the low price of 9800y, release in August. Interview with huke can be found here, and a new commercial/PV for it by huke can be found here. “Brack Rock Shooter” indeed.
edit an hour later: two other interesting links I came across that don’t quite deserve yet another news post on the same day:
new IOSYS / Tetla Pot PV for another track (The Ultimate Yakiniku Restaurant! Orin’s Store of Hell!) off of Touhou Chotto Matten. First was this pv. Unfortunately, I don’t see either of these becoming memes.
Also, the To LOVEru*LOVE blog points out some amusing facts about the new Bakuman cover.
The Hiroshima Financial Times reports the opening of a brand new branch of Hiroshima’s Maypretty maid cafe, this one for “novice otaku” (オタクåˆå¿ƒè€…). Located near Hiroshima station, they claim to have toned down the overall otaku-ness of the place, opting for calm, white walls and regular music and soundtracks as opposed to the main Ootemachi branch’s pink palette and anime songs. The menu features maid cafe staples such as omelettes with ketchup drawings on them and oversized cokes. Their blog can be found here.
I guess trying to attract new blood is good and all, considering the recent maid cafe mass extinctions, but I’ll stick to Schatzkiste. Oh wait, they close in 10 days ;__; On the other hand, I’m going to Hiroshima on a school trip in a few weeks, this might call for some maidbloggin’!