Remember John Ledford’s mention of “B” titles a month ago? I had kind of forgotten about it until I came upon two things recently that mentioned it. This week’s edition of the AnimeNation News Podcast released on Thursday covered the topic and an ICv2 interview with Mike Balliff, ADV Senior VP of Sales, mentioned the phrase in a question about whether popularity in Japan is a good indicator of success in America.
Every week on the AnimeNation News Podcast, the hosts cover the news of the past week as well as two or three Ask John questions. The question from June 22nd, “Why Don’t ‘B’ Titles Sell in America Anymore?”, was the first of two to be discussed and below is the audio from the June 28th episode:
With the industry panels beginning tomorrow at Anime Expo and Otakon taking place in just three weeks, many big-name licenses are sure to be announced by the major US distributors. There will be confirmations of previously discovered domain names, logical steps and sequels based on previous licenses, and a few out of the left left field” announcements. The slam dunks and the relative unknowns share the stage of their respective industry panels. It’s the perfect time for fans to play prognosticator and predict how the chips will fall regarding the R1 fates of their favorite titles. [AOD has a topic on this for their AX forum.] Below the jump are those that will probably be locks along with many other less substantiated possibilities. Read the rest of this entry »
I decided to do a summer anime preview even though I probably won’t be able to watch much in August and, for some reason, I haven’t gotten more than 3 episodes into most of my five picks for spring. Nevertheless, I feel I have to let you know what I am looking forward to watching and recap how my spring picks are progressing. If you want to hear me go through the list of summer anime premieres, download the 40-minute long second episode of Amateur Otaku Radio. Anyway, below are five summer anime that look good on paper to me right now (in order of premiere):
If you’ve visited this blog the past day or so and clicked on most images, you likely have noticed that a “lightboxed” version of the full resolution lays over the page and fades out the actual page. I ended up installing the Lightbox 2.0 plugin earlier this week and have been quickly appending as many previous entries as I could with the extra image code. The main reason I did this was so I could post thumbnails of screenshots and let readers see the fullsize images without having them open new windows or tabs.
I made a decision to not add the functionality onto images larger than 1024×768 because I don’t want someone’s screen to be overwhelmed. So far, I have adjusted entries as far back as October and plan to be done by Monday. I hope this addition enhances the experience and doesn’t slow things down too much. (Posts that were written in the PTO days either have their images still on WP.com or Photobucket so they may load a little slower than those from January 2007 and after.)
A more cosmetic update is rotating banners, something I have wanted to do for a while now. (I actually got it to work with the Dark Ritual theme when I was still figuring out the initial look for the domain move back in December but the categories weren’t the way I wanted so I chose what I’ve got now.) The plugin I am using is called Header Image Rotator, created by Matthew Hough, and I have set it to change switch out headers every minute.
Currently I have four banners uploaded including the one with Edward that has graced the top of the blog for the past six months and I’m trying to make that total reach about twenty in the next couple weeks. More variety is better! One gripe I have with the settings is that the interval choices are Minute, Half-Hour, Hourly, Daily, and Weekly. I would rather have 15 minutes as an option because that’s not as often as every minute but shorter than a half-hour. Other than that, it was relatively easy to set up with a couple of CSS edits so my next task is to make more banner images!
I admit I’m a little late reporting about my experience watching Sci-Fi Channel’s Ani-Mondayblock this past Monday but I took cameraphone pictures so that makes up for the tardiness, right? Anyway, I tuned in around 11:40pm so I missed Noein and the first half of Tokko, which is fine as I’ve already seen the first episode of Noein. Tokko was interesting to watch with chest faces making people into zombies and I want to know the background so I will keep watching that.
Last week, I foolishly bought 25 Geneon DVDs for $100 from RightStuf and they arrived at my regular home Wednesday, waiting for me until I came home from Davis on Friday. The problem is that I had to pack three small boxes to take home the discs that I had in my apartment. While I was carrying them to the car, I came to the realization that I have too many DVDs (anime and domestic films). Read the rest of this entry »
Now that I am finished with finals, I have no excuse to not trudge through my backlog of unwatched and unread anime and manga. The first of these is Moeyo Ken OVA, released in January 2005 by ADV Films. I bought this DVD in Japantown during the Cherry Blossom Festival in April for 5 bucks from a video store that was selling off previously rented anime. I bought it and figured I would give it a shot. I finally got around to watching it this past week.
Back in March, I wrote about Anime on Demand, a program built on the .NET framework that allowed you to watch streaming fansubs outside a browser. I didn’t particularly use it much after writing that post except for saving my ass once during an anime club showing. (Never screw up Ouran when there are fangirls. Ever.)
Anyway, lunarising89 left a comment yesterday saying that none of the streams worked anymore and I checked myself to find that to be pretty much true save for a handful of titles like Battle Programmer Shirase. For most, a drawing of a ball-and-chain prisoner with a message of removal appeared for about 10 seconds. So I e-mailed the developer and webmaster Rathlar this afternoon to find out what was going on. His reply is after the jump.
Light Yagami is one of the more popular male characters in the anime/manga world right now (especially when paired with L in some yaoi doujin) but I wonder people should be rooting for an anti-hero that quite frankly acts like a bastard. I think that anyone who is familiar with Death Note is well aware about Light’s arrogance so I would like to write a little bit about his actions in relation to ethical theory.
I’ll start by highlighting an important part of Death Note’s premise in that there is a combination of objectivity and subjectivity. The notebook itself follows strict rules in carrying out deaths such as the person needing to be visualized by the Note user for the death to occur and the option of specifying the cause of death and details relating to it. It doesn’t care who is being targeted because it views each person as equal to the next one - a person is a person is a person. The person who writes the names and details into the notebook, however, will always be influenced in some way by their feelings, whether they be anger, fear, frustration, or greed. (Shinigami are assumed to impartial mainly because they don’t particularly care about human affairs and simply use the Death Notes for entertainment.)
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