2chan.us

It seems strange that no one has mentioned this recently, so my apologies if this had been known for years on end:

Wani Magazine has a little bit of info up on their c75 page about what appears to be the successor to ROBOT, their full-color genre-defying anthology full of a lot of my favorite artists. The book’s name is GELATIN, and it is promises us “leading-edge all-original bishoujo comics”. Release date is 2/4, 192 pages (160 color, 32 b+w), B5 size and 1500y.

That alone isn’t enough to get me so excited that I’ll make a blog post about it, though. What does excite me is that Wani managed to bring us another ridiculous lineup of creative and talented illustrators, including some familiar faces from ROBOT. The current lineup:

Naruko Hanaharu
SABE
toi8
Maeshima Shigeki
Ayakura Juu
John Hathway
huke (ps if you haven’t seen the new pv he did check it out)
mota
KEI
Suzumi Atsushi
Houden Eizou
Moriyama Daisuke (can’t find a hp, sorry)
Gorakuin Sakurako (Sekirei manga-ka)
Takamichi (wwwwwww)
Bosshi (aka askray)
miggy

in short, 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.”

first and foremost, hats off to the anime team for the spoo reference.

Second, weblab.ota has a great flowchart describing what in the world is going on with this whole mess, if you can manage to read the Japanese. I’d love to read it for you, but I have a 10 page paper due in 48 hours.

Finally, the current rumor circulating around the internet around Takenashi’s health is that she fell down a bunch of stairs due to anemia, if this mystery barebones blog site by some light novelist who may or may not be referencing Takenashi when she talks about “U-nyan” is correct. Kind of a stretch, I guess?

I am thankful to the gods of curry for bringing a second Go Go Curry location to Akiba, far more conveniently located to all the action. Maybe now I can actually manage to sit down next to a friend when I go there for lunch?!

Trawling around the net, catching up on rss feeds and adding new ones now that I’m actually getting settled in. Some very mildly interesting things that have likely been posted elsewhere:

Lupin: Cagliostro, Secret of Mamo, TV Season 1+2 coming to Blu-ray
5040 per movie, that’s like half the price of what Bandai Visual wants for Honneamise!

Tokyo International Film Festival has a ridiculous anime lineup, why am I stuck in Kyoto
animecs TIFF is doing a Tezuka restrospective and has some bad-ass premieres of “Japanimations” and ungggg

notables:
10/18: Marine Express (lol) (digital betacam), Hell’s Angels (premiere, hdcam-sr), Both Rintaro’s Phoenix and Ichikawa’s Phoenix (35mm), Summer Days With Coo (35mm)
10/19: Both Unico movies (hdcam), Shoji Kawamori feature “The Universe of Kawamori Shoji” (!!!)

maybe I’ll just take a week off of school and go to M3 and then go to TIFF!

“Relese” details on the new Ali Project single/op for Kurogane no Linebarrel
Atonal warbling, no one cares, etc

Drunk Germans covering Ghibli film songs: the album
Featuring probably the best cover of this song that will ever be recorded

I’d spend more of this entry talking about the newly-available doujins by Yoshitoshi ABe now on the iTunes store for the low price of $5 or something, but that’s been around forever, and I have a feeling that anyone who bothers to read this would also have the time to read ANN and their article on this so I’ll just say that you should really go ahead and buy it if you’ve already gone and dropped hundreds on Apple hardware. The translation isn’t really top-notch but that’s the price you pay for getting the doujin 90% cheaper than second-hand price, I guess.

The second piece of news seems a little more fresh: After opening up my goodies acquired from today’s trip to Akiba, I was unexpectedly greeted by a full English translation of the manga portion of Strike Witches: The Witch of Africa/Witch in Africa (Japanese article here). If you’re too lazy to click those links, this has some fairly big names working on it, like the Godfather of Mechamusume himself, Shimada Humikane, Takeshi Nogami, and apparent military nut Suzuki Takaaki, and it’s all translated by Dan Kanemitsu, a REAL TRANSLATOR! Unfortunately, some lines are botched in a way that make me think that a Japanese guy went back over the thing and threw some crap in there (“Gentlemen! What are doing?!”), but it’s still worth the 1200 yen, and Toranoana still seemed to have big stacks of em’ if you want to pay up (which you should do if you love girls with no pants!!)

This is a worthless post I stole from a bunch of other people. Sorry!

• ADV Films is in financial trouble! I bet you didn’t know that. I actually like them, even though their magazine was boring and all of their DVDs are encoded horribly at random. Hopefully they can stay away from actual Japanese businessmen in the future, since apparently they don’t know how to sell anything.
• Of course, some companies nobody likes; GONZO’s holding company is in a stock death spiral and will probably be delisted.
• You can watch Yu-gi-oh Abridged with Japanese subtitles on Nicovideo. I was going to do a panel about Nico at Otakon, and this would be great for it, but their panels department has been messed up since last year and rejected it. Guess I’d better prereg…

A 25-year-old yakuza named Tomohiro Kato completely ruined everyone’s day just now, driving into a crowd in Akihabara and then stabbing 15 people, with 5 of them in cardiac arrest. The pointless TV media attention has just been dying down, but now I guess it’ll be back for a while, and even worse. Patrick thinks it’s going to mess up everything, but hopefully it’s going to reflect badly on the Yakuza and not on the Tsukihime remake!?

alex: I’m going to be hearing about this for fucking weeks
alex: holy shit it was right out side the fucking sofmap

Live report from a maid and japanese akibablog