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.

Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t believe that it took reading about Bandai Visual’s rather high pricing of the Gunbuster and fans’ reaction to it at SakuraCon last weekend to get me to write a post after a ten-day absence. My explanation is that I was distracted by a bunch of things including classes, chores, laundry, compiling my radio playlist, spending Easter day with my family, anime club, and watching the first season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on DVD. In that span of time, I start writing a couple of entries but I wasn’t able to finish them to my liking so I just moved on. In case you want to know, the first one would have been posted on Easter about religion in anime and would have focused on Scrapped Princess, FMA, and Chrono Crusade while the second was an informational post about MyAnimeList. Anyway, I apologize in advance if this is a relatively long post but I have a lot of stuff I want to discuss.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I received a package containing a DVD I’m set to screen for the next five Wednesdays from Operation Anime, Funimation’s anime club program. I had to bike to the former club president’s apartment to pick it up because there was some error after I changed the shipping address to mine and it apparently didn’t take. (That issue has been sorted out, though, and future stuff should be sent to me.) Minor problems aside, this post is meant to show what kind of stuff you get in a typical shipment. Pictures after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

How not to show off an elfgirl poster

I ordered the Genshiken box set in late December as part of RightStuf’s Christmas sale, got it about a month ago, and finished watching it over the weekend. Before I got the anime in the mail, I had already started reading the manga and recently finished volume 2, the plot points of which are covered in episodes 2-7. It was very entertaining for me to watch as I was familiar with the various subcultures of fandom, like cosplaying and figure building, as well as the societal stigmas that such practioners may encounter in public situations.

Read the rest of this entry »

There was also a head-on camera angle.

Okay, first off: I have two corrections to make to Monday’s AAA post. #1 is that the individual awards are also called Mechas. I could have sworn I had read about that name a couple months ago and just plain forgot until I looked at some of the stories published after the ceremony. #2 is that you CAN stream the ceremony online, according to ANN. (Windows Media Player handled it well for me.) After the jump: my experience watching the awards, comments on the Haruhi R1 dual-ordering, and a call for suggestions of anime to show during empty spots in club. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week was full of appetizing announcements regarding licenses and release dates but now that I think about it, I realize I’ve written some interesting posts about some of the anime involved in those press releases and that I have certain obligations to buy each of them (Tsubasa, Haruhi, Solid State Society) — or at least the first volumes of ‘em. Come along with me and look back at what I now slightly regret writing.
Read the rest of this entry »

This week I received three different packages from three different places that I had been expecting for a while. I’ll try to write stuff up about each of these soon but, like the Sac-Anime audio I promised to post, I’m not promising anything. (About the interviews, I might just eschew transcripts and put them all in a single post.) But back to the topic at hand…

First: the Excel Saga Imperfect Collection from Best Buy. While I was home during winter break, I ordered this from an in-store kiosk for $18 (thanks to the CAG forums) because 1) it wasn’t being stocked anywhere anymore ever since the Thinpak Collection was released and 2) the kiosk prices can be much lower than what’s online. Now I have two copies of Volume 1 which isn’t a problem but still a little annoying.
Read the rest of this entry »

Almost five months ago, I picked up the first four volumes of Kaze no Yojimbo for cheap at Big Lots and now I’m slowly making my way through them. The series is based on the 1961 Akira Kurosawa film “Yojimbo” and I might have to see that some time because I’m digging what I’ve seen so far on this first disc. The setup of the anime is as follows: a man named George Kodama enters the small mining town of Kimujuku looking for a man’s house and, in doing so, stokes the fires of a conflict between the town’s two power brokers and their factions. He works as a “bodyguard” to put food in his stomach as he digs into the dark history of what happened fifteen years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, I finally got the limited edition version of the Fullmetal Alchemist movie (as well as Love Roma Volume 4)! I would have made this post yesterday except my shipment from Amazon wasn’t delivered because my apartment’s mailbox is too small. Damn skinny malibox! So it was held at the city’s main post office and I picked up after school this afternoon. Anyway, below are some pictures from the unboxing. Sorry in advance for the crappy quality — I had to use my cameraphone because my digital camera’s batteries are recharging.

Read the rest of this entry »