And so we bid an imminent fond farewell to Anime Blog Toshokan and welcome Jason’s creation of its new and improved successor, blog好ã (blogsuki), now with its own domain, wider column width, search function and categories.
I trace my first use of an anime blog aggregators to the Elsewhere box in King Matthew of the Kingdom of Kawaii’s sidebar. It was a convenient way to see the latest posts without having to check out each site individually and it also generated a huge amount of hits for my own blog. :) However it was limited to displaying 11 or so posts at a time and I didn’t discern any archive or search function for it.
Then there was Anime Bloggers: A Daily Anime Review Site which was manually updated. Its listing of anime blog posts operated roughly 2005-07-22 to 2005-08-17 which was unsurprising due to the proliferation of anime blogs making manually updating an ever more tedious and time consuming task in seeking out posts and updating the main site in contrast to the RSS feed aggregator used in Matthew’s Elsewhere box.
On 2005-10-22, Jason Miao of Anime on My Mind announced the setting up of Anime Blog Toshokan, an anime blog RSS aggregator to give a wider picture of what’s happening in the anime blogging community as well as provide a better resource for English anime blog readers. About a week later Matthew launched a similar resource - the AnimeBlogger.net Antenna (I always think of the hair antennae of anime girls like Lunamaria when I see that). I thought this was an excellent thing and see both RSS aggregators as complementary rather than in competition with each other. There’s an element of backup redundancy as well as slightly different populations of anime blog feeding into the two. A great way to quickly discover new posts, new anime blogs and the lastest anime news and goodies. In all, greatly valued resources for my anime habit.
blogå¥½ã… just more to love.
And we loves it!
Bought Azumanga Daioh DVD Vol.1-6 over Christmas and first week of the new year from Forbidden Planet London and Amazon.co.uk. Absolutely lovely series though some of my friends whom I lent my non-DVD copy to commented that there were too many Japanese puns in the series for their liking (presaged by the untranslatable title) or that “nothing happens!” Bah, philistines! :P And due to Erica’s reviews at Okazu, I got the complete set of GONZO’s Bakuretsu Tenshi manga via the Yuricon shop’s convenient links to Amazon.co.jp. Shipping cost was more than the manga themselves though. T_T Continue reading ‘January Loot’
Looks very promising. Especially liked the scenes with Alucard changing his gun’s magazine. May be shaping up to be a huge improvement over GONZO’s previous version - while I’m more forgiving of how GONZO "innovated" on the story (the manga’s plot didn’t really come together until Vol.7 for me), the TV series was not appealing to mine eye at all. Dark, much too dark, probably didn’t help that I saw on it on the crappy ODEX VCD version.
Seras Victoria is rendered the most differently. I found her hair and face a bit too pointy but I think I’ll get used to it. I also liked her SD mode which is really faithful to the manga (as well as the screenie of her above which is my favourite scene of her in the manga, art-wise). She’s my favourite character of the series - ample bosom aside, she plays the rookie role to Alucard’s God-mode and the most interesting part of the story for me is Seras coming to terms with her vampirism. Really looking forward the OVA’s release on 2006-02-10. See Kurogane for his 135 screencaps.
Saber and Lancer fight but the latter leaves after the former discovers his real identity. Rin adorably pouts and whines about the unfairness of Shirou getting Saber instead of her. Ooh Rin, you do want Saber so badly, duntcha? Rin gets Kotomine to inform Shirou about the rules of the War of the Holy Grail and we have the clichéd ‘Hero Determines He’ll Fight’ Resolution. Fortunately creepy little Ilya and Berserker, whom I hope will help matchmake Rin with Saber, show up at the end of the episode.
Bit of a slow episode. While buildup and laying out groundrules is important for plot development, I hope we’re not going to get more episode where half of it is spent just talking a lot. Come on, this is based on a fighting game after all. Continue reading ‘Fate/Stay Night 3′
Arika is rescued by Sergey - with some help from the Juliet Gang. Sergey does not kiss Arika despite his orders from Nagi to seduce the real queen of Windbloom (at this point, Sergey assumes it’s the one with the Blue Sky Sapphire pendant) and instead antagonizes her by ridiculing the Have Your Dream and Love Plan and blaming Rena for the deaths of the King and Queen. Sure it’s a welcome relief that they don’t kiss but it seems that Sergey didn’t kiss her to protect her and then is out of sorts on his office couch later. *ominous thunder* Miiya is expelled but does not implicate Tomoe who is certain that Shizuru pays attention to Arika only because of the Blue Sky Sapphire. Arika and Mashiro get their mojo back - the former resolving to become a Meister Otome as quickly as possible while the latter accepts Arika’s suggestion to become a queen who makes her people happy. Continue reading ‘Mai Otome 15′