2chan.us

Very minor news since I have a bit of spare time: As of this Monday, doujin chain Melonbooks has changed from their old and busted paper + stamp point card to a much fancier solid plastic card with barcode. Instead of 500y/point, 20 points for 500y off, it’s 500y/25 points, 1000 points for 1000y off. If you can’t crunch those numbers in your head, that just means the numbers got bigger now that they don’t have to stamp each point manually. Honestly, I’m normally not much of a Melonbooks kind of guy, but it’s really the only choice for new doujin goods I have here in Kyoto. Also, this post would be totally non-notable, but I heard reports from one guy that they kind of sprung this on him, and that they didn’t transfer his old points to his new card, so if you’re going and you aren’t super proactive about getting Japanese store clerks to actually speak to you instead of mumbling under their breath because they don’t think you speak The Language, have your old point cards and some form of ID with your age on it ready. (apparently, the new cards are also used to check if you’re of age, not that they ever actually do that in Japan for anything. except for taspo :argh:) You also get 25 points if you register by 3/31, and you get 50 points whenever your birthday rolls around. You have until 1/31 of next year to transfer points at a store, and after that you have until 1/31 of 2011 to contact support and transfer points that way.

Minor other notes that will probably affect exactly no one reading this blog: if you have online points and want to get a point transfer certificate, you have until the end of the month to order them. Starting 4/1, you’ll be able to transfer online points to the new card system. Also, handing over your personal information is optional, but all they seem to jot down is your birthday for age checking+point bonus, it’s not like they’re making photocopies of your gaijin card or something.

More info for people who can make it to Akiba this week: Toranoana Honten is running a Fate/Zero Tribute Arts gallery exhibit until the 8th up on the event space floor (6f), and they’re even selling some event-limited swag there, like the limited edition Rough Material book that was only sold at C75 that I waited in line for two hours for. Assholes. The first round of illustrations is up until the third, then the second round up until the eighth. Wish I could make it :(

AkibaOS has pictures.

So apparently a few people on that 2ch site are kind of angry at doujin circle Hachimitsu Kuma-san over a recent job posting on the circle’s site as well as on their mixi.

In essence, they are looking for someone to do odd jobs for them, basically filling in whatever need they have at the moment. A few more details:
*Must live within an hour of Omiya city in Chiba prefecture.
*Must be able to be on call even after midnight on days off.
*Will work for free. (this part is only mentioned on the mixi posting.)

Sounds like a dream job, right?

Well, apparently those nay-sayers at 2ch don’t think so. What a bunch of negative nancies! They’ve even gone so far as to post a lot of copy/pastes making some pretty harsh allegations about Hachikuma-san’s business practices, but you can find those on your own, or I’m sure some other blogger will post them as The Absolute Truth, cause 2ch kopipe is never wrong. Anyway, any of you folks out there thinking of applying?!

(via katoyu–)

This is a bit old, but for any of you movie nerds out there living in Japan, Theatre Shinjuku is doing a bunch of anime film screenings from the 14th until the 27th. Of course, I go back to Tokyo on the 28th, but that’s school for ya. I have to admit, despite the name being pretty lame, these are some very cool animes that they have selected, like Akira, Roujin Z (with a director q+a session afterwards!), Blood the Last Vampire (ditto), Utena: Adolescence (interview here, too!), Tokikake, Jin-Roh, 5cm/sec, Haruwo, Paprika, Perfect Blue, Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer, Lupin: Secret of Mamo, and Hell’s Angels. Timetable can be found here, and general info about the event here.

via animeanime

This will hopefully be a shorter post than my day 1 report, since fewer interesting things happened. It was still kind of a trainwreck though.

I didn’t have very many clear goals for the day, since most of the Touhou stuff I like is either by guys that didn’t show up or the official games, and everything else is roughly a neat distraction. I did want to get the Maikaze set though, since their supply plans are still fairly unknown. I headed out to get on the first monorail from Toyosu, but wasn’t enough of an expert to know exactly which train car to be on, which meant that I got to the platform right as the first monorail filled up, which meant that I’d be delayed by about 10 minutes. (in other words, like 7500 people.)

The line was the same as always, I ate some convenience store bread while crouching in my 4 sqft of ground space from about 5 until we were herded into the event at around 10:15. Well, they tried to herd us into the event but the line to get down the escalators into west hall was already to the door by the time I got to the event entrance. Went straight to Maikaze to discover that they had been moved to a corner booth, with a very large line outside. Then I noticed that they had an even larger line a few meters away that fed into that line. I stood in this sub-line for about an hour, until they announced that they had sold out, and the line dispersed. I almost left at this point, since it was almost noon and basically anything that would be hard to find/expensive after the event sells out at noon, but decided to grab some stuff here and there before setting out. Here is what I managed:

most of the day 2 haul

notable purchases from here:

• Mesopota’s Touhou Roudoshou, a collaborative flash cd with dudes like Mi~ya working on the video with a bunch of big names doing music (IOSYS, COOL&CREATE, dBu, Silver Forest, etc)
• VISIONNERZ’s new book. Didn’t make it in line in time for the bag, though :(
• A couple of books by this guy who does really accurate Fist of the North Star parody doujin about rules to follow when shopping at comiket.

I also picked up something very terrifying on the advice of a friend:

WM's set

Circle-WM put out a very nice set of really terrifying things, most of which I believe involve either them naked or you dating wotaken. If you’re still confused, I suggest you watch this video to get a better idea.

I also picked up the Blasterhead vs Hardcore TANO*C vinyl, but I’d rather not post an image of it here.

I went back to Akiba to mess around with friends more, but didn’t go in any of the doujin stores since they were all ridiculously crowded. After getting home at around dusk, I checked Maikaze’s site on a whim, only to discover that they had distributed limited edition boxsets of their anime to various doujin stores, causing me to run back to Akiba and grab a copy. All that lining up for naught.

comiket :argh:

I’ll take pictures of my many-man-yen haul from c75 if I can figure out how to get pictures onto the computer I’m using while away from my normal laptop, but until then here are some neat things that I saw on one rss feed or another (actually, i think these were all from katoyuu):

According to the new Dengeki Daioh, Tanaka Romeo (Cross Channel, Yume Miru Kusuri, etc) is going to be writing a story for the extra booklet add-on for Toradora manga vol 2. Out on 1/27, mark your calendars!

Second, Mainichi reports that attendance for all 3 days of comiket hit 510,000 this year, up 10,000 from last winter. I blame Touhou. I saw the number 150,000 for day 1 attendance somewhere and this article says 190,000 for day 3, so I guess that means 170,000 for day 2, unless my math is really just that bad.

Finally, akibahobby has some promo pictures of the rest of the Touhou soft vinyl figure set from Toranoana up. They were showing these off at their industry booth and they look pretty sweet, I might have to break my promise once again to not buy figures that aren’t Yotsuba&!-related.

another news post, what next, episode blogging? anyway,

The official website for Flowering Night 2009 went up two days ago. If you’re not familiar with Flowering Night, it’s a big live show (real dudes playing real instruments dressed up in real skirts!!) of all Touhou arrangements. Tickets will be sold through Toranoana starting (and ending, :| )on 2/8, both through their website and in their brick and mortars, and tickets are 4000-6000jpy, depending on your spot. The event’s at the Makuhari Messe on 3/6. Bands currently listed as in attendance:

Kishida Kyoudan and the Meisei Rockets (if I go this is why)
CROW’SCLAW (also, this)
Sekkenya
SOS -Sound of Swing-
COOL&CREATE (beat mario, my hero)

its gonna be wild. GET HYPE.

I was going to make a blog post on ZUN’s latest blog entry about restrictions on doujin products and all, but thankfully Sankaku Complex did a slightly alarmist writeup of it zepy actually did a good writeup of it, saving me some work. In fact, I probably don’t need to make this post either, but I really want to procrastinate on this paper for as long as humanly possible.

Anyway, Maikaze now has a new URL, and you may notice that the website has so many disclaimers on it that I’m tempted to say that it’s a bit of a jab at ZUN. I mean, right under the TOUHOU DERIVATIVE DOUJIN ANIME there’s the big bubble that when you click on it says “THIS WORK IS A DERIVATIVE DOUJIN ANIMATION OF TEAM SHANGHAI ALICE’S TOUHOU PROJECT SERIES” and then a big UNOFFICIAL on the right side of the top banner. Well, I guess being thorough never killed anyone. There’s also a news post that stresses several more times that they are not official, just in case you didn’t get the point.

I’m not sure if this is related or not, but the signed copies of the script books that were originally going to be given out at C75 will also not be distributed out of “consideration of their situation at Comiket”, which I guess could mean “to keep people from getting trampled to death/hypothermia from camping out for a week in advance.”

Maybe I’m the last person to know this or something, but from the looks of it, Zun will not be showing up at C75. This means that all the other Touhou-related lines will be even longer. :ARGH:

Source: Comiket catalog, this dude who i found on google

With all the crazy news and c75 stuff and anime/manga announcements (Ore no Imouto ga Konnani Kawaii etc etc manga adaptation!) popping up today I keep thinking “man I should make a post” but then realize that I should spend more time studying for this test I’m taking tomorrow that I’m going to fail.

But then this showed up on my Katoyuu feed:

Idolm@ster, LIVE 4 U! ON PUBLIC TV!

THIS IS WHY I PAY YOU THE BIG BUCKS, NHK

update:

forget the jlpt, i’m laughing so hard i think i need to check myself into a hospital to make sure i didnt tear anything