Nigorimasen! Blog

Later this morning, I’ll be heading to the airport to embark on a 26-hour journey to Düsseldorf, Germany, with layovers in Minneapolis and Detroit. Probably going to see a lot of interesting things during my month’s stay in Deutschland and take many pictures of architecture and scenery. This might also be the self-realization journey (like Takemoto’s bicycle trip except less physically demanding) I didn’t ask for as I travel outside the United States for the first time ever. Yep, haven’t even been to Canada yet.

I’m not going to be packing my laptop so I’ll have to use the computer labs at the university (free) or an Internet cafe (not free but gonna try it once!) to check my e-mail, upload pictures, and submit an occasional post. I still have to read a good amount of class material which I could probably make a dent in while I’m flying thousands of miles in the air.

I’m going to try to post at least once a day (except for the last week when I’ll be on a bus) to a specially dedicated blog I set up for this trip. The address is studyabroad.crumplednapkin.net (link is also in the sidebar under “My Other Sites”) and I hope I don’t forget to do it after the first couple days. I have to keep a hard-copy research journal that I have to turn in near the end so the entries I write in that notebook may overlap with what I write online and keep me on a schedule of sorts.

This month, I lived up to a “promise” I made back in August 2006 that I would buy Solid State Society when it came out. I managed to get the limited edition for $16 from Best Buy three weeks ago and decided to review all three parts of the package: the feature itself, the extras disc, and the soundtrack CD. I wrote the feature part right after I watched it (and revised it slightly recently) but I somehow managed to misplace the extras disc until a few days ago so this entire thing was delayed until now.
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One of the rules in baseball that may not be obvious to casual baseball fans is that a batter can run to first if the catcher drops the third strike (i.e. the ball is not “legally caught”) and fails to tag him out when first base is open or when there are two outs. It still counts as a strikeout for the pitcher and the runner gets to stays on base if he reaches. (This has sometimes led to MLB pitchers getting four strikeouts in an inning.)

Well, during a tournament game between teams from Yokohama and Tokai, the Yokohama catcher dropped what would have been the third strike to close out the inning and the entire defense walked off the field toward the dugout. As the Tokai batter was walking back to the dugout, someone told him to run to first. He did and then went to second, then to third before scoring all the way home. The two other runners on base also scored, making it a three-run strikeout and expanding Tokai’s lead to 6-0.

At least the umpire was nice enough to explain the situation and outcome to the crowd.

I just finished watching “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” (Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo), a movie I had been wanting to see but hadn’t gotten around it until tonight because a friend bringing it up a couple days ago reminded me about it. TokiKake was a very touching film - made me cry a couple times. My brain is still trying to think about deeper meanings while my hands are typing this so I’m not going to attempt a detailed analysis. (Besides, that would spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, right?)
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(Photo courtesy of Revons under Creative Commons license)

I did not attend Otakon 2007 because I don’t have the money to fly over to Baltimore, get a hotel room and then likely purchase stuff at the convention itself. I think of Otakon akin to Anime Expo as each being the big summer convention for their respective coastlines. I WOULD like to attend it one of these years to get a feel for how differently it is run from Fanime and AX and the general atmosphere. Thanks to the Internet, I can at least get panel reports from ANN and extract interesting things from them.

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In the first part of a ICv2 interview that was posted today, Bandai Visual USA president Tatsunori Konno said that there are not “more than 200,000 core fans” and estimated its size in dollars to be $350 million. Konno also clarified the difference between Bandai Visual and Bandai Entertainment and the company’s relationship with Sunrise. There was mention of the Wings of Honneamise being released in DVD/Blu-ray and DVD/HD-DVD packs at an MSRP of $79.99, which is double Freedom’s $39.99 MSRP. That is likely because Honneamise has a “quite long” running time (120 minutes vs. Freedom’s 25 minutes) and thus requires two separate discs (1 regular DVD & 1 hi-def DVD) instead of a single twin-format disc with HD and standard-def on the same side.

Konno said in part two that the company wants to let fans to know they are producing high quality products and that if people notice and buy it, prices could reduce gradually. Even with that justification, RightStuf, AnimeNation, RACS, and Amazon each have their pre-order prices at or below $59.99. Wings of Honneamise comes out in high-definition for both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray on September 11th, a little something nice to distract us Americans from the “anniversary” coverage the news media is bound to do on that particular Tuesday.

ADV released some new trailers this week for 5 Centimeters per Second (December), Pumpkin Scissors (Oct. 23 - tentative), Red Garden (Sept. 18), Welcome to the NHK (Oct. 2 - tentative), and Xenosaga (Sept. 11). They are the usual no-dialogue teasers with either the opening and ending song as music and narrative trailers with some footage that overlapped with the teasers. If I had only seen the trailers and not any episodes, I would be interested in watching Red Garden (zombie hit by a truck!), kind of like to see Pumpkin Scissors (”In a country ravaged by war…”), and not care for Welcome to the NHK (”porn” is said three times…) and Xenosaga (never played the games). I don’t believe that Red Garden is the “most anticipated horror thriller of the year”, though. Videos after the jump.
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The back-and-forth between Hidoshi of That’s Not Kanon and the anonymous author of Ani-Nouto about classic anime made me think about not exactly what should be consider a classic, but rather how old must be something be before becoming a candidate in the first place. The argument over what is and is not a classic is a subjective one while devising a method for making something a candidate for classification is a step toward objectivity. So the following is my suggested method of qualifying anime for consideration of classifying them as classics.
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I got a Zune earlier this week through a Microsoft promotion so I’ve been messing around with it and decided to see how anime would look on it. I chose to use one fullscreen show (Manabi Straight) and a widescreen show (Victorian Romance Emma) as my test material. Because the sync software for the device only accepts .wmv, .mp4, and .mov file formats, I chose to use a program called Windows Media Encoder (a free download from Microsoft) to convert the AVI’s into something more useful. Being able to read the subtitles was my main concern but I was also looked at how the whole thing looked. More pictures after the jump.

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[from Japan Probe]

To promote the upcoming release of the first Rebuild of Evangelion movie on September 1st, Frito-Lay of Japan started selling (on July 9th) bags of Doritos with a few different Eva designs featuring Rei and Shinji. The two single character designs can be found on both 50g and 90g bag sizes but only the Puchi Eva designs from the figurine series are on 50g size bags. The chibi characters get the smaller bag! This promotion isn’t that different from the cross-promotion branding that occurs when blockbuster films launch in America - examples from this year are Shrek 3 and Spider-Man 3.