All in all, I’d say their reference of this particular meme was highly appropriate considering the scene directly preceding it. It’s really too bad there weren’t two other people in the scene to complete it (though I guess no one else in the series would be quite as excited).
There’s absolutely no mistaking the reference. Both Araragi and Suruga are in the exact same poses as the nearest two dudes and their expressions are nearly identical as well — just Suruga’s eyebrows seem to make her a bit more “Holy shit!” than “Hell yeah!”
[View the rest of this entry...]
Well, I kid, but by now I’m sure you’ve all heard the breaking news: DISNEY BUYS MARVEL, and I’ve always wanted to use the “[Noun]? In my [Other Noun]?” format. :P
There are only a few naysayers, and most either confused or cautiously speculative, but I honestly don’t think many things on the fandom end will be affected; there will just be more money in different people’s pockets. What’s really going to change with this acquisition? Disney is notorious for aggressive merchandising and pushing their licensed characters, but will a flood of new action figures and new Marvel-themed rides at Disneyland really affect Marvel’s artistic integrity or quality of work? As long as Disney keeps its hand out of what the folks at Marvel actually do, then I don’t see a problem. People were upset when Disney bought out Pixar too, but Pixar has, for the most part, retained its autonomy and continues to produce outstanding films. So why shouldn’t I expect Marvel to continue making comics like it always has?
[View the rest of this entry...]
Wow. This is a topic I’ve intended to write about for a while, but I never imagined that it might cause such rampant drama across the community. Of course it had to start while I was out of town. I’ve only skimmed through a majority of the posts made thus far about fanart and artist attribution, but the number of comments and trackbacks to WAH’s original post, as well as his two follow-up posts lead me to think that just about every possible opinion has already been shared. For the most part, I agree with WAH, and I’m glad to see that a lot of people seem receptive to the idea of attribution. Still, there might be a few other things that are worth bringing up.
Art by Kiriska; I drew this. Yeah, yeah, yeah~.
I don’t really use fanart here. Almost everything I use is official art and the occasional screenshot, and hell, most of my earliest posts had no images at all. Official art and screenshots, regardless of artist, generally belong to the series’ company, which is easy to look up, so I don’t particularly feel the need for accreditation there. The fact that official art is usually purposed for mass distribution is also a good argument. Fanart, on the other hand, is always tricky business, even outside of the aniblogosphere (or perhaps, especially outside of the aniblogosphere?). Legality aside, it’s a question of common courtesy and manners. Regardless of your thoughts concerning your own work, be it your own fanart, writing, quotes, coding, or whatever, there’s no point in pushing your ideologies onto others. Just because you don’t care about being credited for your creations doesn’t mean other people can’t be touchy about their stuff. It’s their right to be touchy if they want to be.
[View the rest of this entry...]
As is my routine now, I reread Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night in preparation for the movie, which debuted at midnight, but which I’ll not be seeing until this weekend. It was either my third or fourth time reading it. I know I reread it two summers ago just before the final book’s release, but I can’t remember if I’d reread it another time between that and when the book itself released (HBP is the sixth book). I think Half-Blood Prince is probably my least favorite of the series. I’ve always felt that my opinion of Harry Potter started to sour a little after the fourth book, after which I felt that J.K. Rowling lost a lot of focus and inserted many unnecessary and pointlessly distracting things when she should have been focusing on more pressing matters – so I guess the sixth book would be an accumulation of those disappointments. I don’t think my impressions changed much during subsequent rereading(s) of HBP.
So I guess I’m kind of surprised that this time, I think I liked it much, much better.
(This post contains no spoilers for any Harry Potter book or movie.)
[View the rest of this entry...]
Here it is, my review of Eureka seveN, which is a wonderfully obnoxious 2,000 words. (The MAL mirror is here.) The short version is that I didn’t like the series very much though it did have a lot of technical merits. As usual, the review is spoiler-free, but today, there shall be additional, spoilerific rambling in the rest of this entry, followed by some kind of epic fanboy/fanrage showdown in the comments because ghostlightning thinks there’s love to remember in Eureka seveN. How about that!
[View the rest of this entry...]
I was out most of today, but when I came back, I had a slew of Anime Expo-related tweets waiting for me. Some of the most interesting ones were centered around the OEL manga panel, which apparently offered some very harsh/blunt words on both the business side of things and the artist side of things.
[View the rest of this entry...]
I was really hoping that this would be some kind of joke, but it apparently isn’t.
There’s already been a live action adaptation of Death Note. Two of them, in fact, since the story isn’t easily told in one. I might be in the few as far as thinking that they were both fantastic movies and worked wonderfully as adaptations (I swear I’ll get around to reviewing them both), but the fact remains that it’s already been done, not to mention that L spinoff movie, which I’ve yet to see. All three of those movies have been licensed and released Stateside, so why do we need Hollywood to make another one?
Of course, Hollywood re-making Japanese (and other Asian) films is nothing new, and there are many instances where those re-makes are wildly popular and subsequently profitable. The Ring comes to mind, but I’ve seen neither that nor Ringu, from which it was based. Even so, there’s at least one adaptation that I found to be successful (The Departed, based on a Hong Kong film). But Death Note is not a J-horror and Death Note is not an action drama. And from what I can understand, Warner Brothers will not be basing their movie off of the existing movies, so Death Note isn’t even a movie.
Death Note is a superntural, psychological, suspense thriller manga, and I have little faith that a Hollywood adaptation will 1) make any money, 2) treat the source material right, 3) be a decent movie on any kind of level. Well, at least it isn’t Fox, right?
[View the rest of this entry...]
Apparently, FUNimation announced at Sakura-Con that they’ll begin streaming some of their videos on ANN. Earlier this month, they added a bunch of stuff to Veoh. There was also the recent announcement that they’d be adding a bunch of old TOEI properties to the their own video site and that they’d be adding a bunch of shows from their rival, Viz, to their broadcasting station. And of course, they already have a YouTube channel and Hulu channel with a ton of stuff on both. Oh, and their Playstation Store is now up too, the latest of their various Download-to-Own platforms (the others being their own site, Xbox Live, iTunes, and Amazon Unbox). I might have missed some. Is it just me or is this a bit much?
On one hand, I’m always happy to see FUNimation take the initive and find new ways to get their products to their fans and their customers. On the other hand, it’s starting to feel kind of disorganized. Many of the titles are available across most of the streaming sources — YouTube, Hulu, FUNimation Video, and now ANN — but there still seem to be a number of series that are only available in one place or another; I think the FUNi video site has the most titles, which makes sense, but then I kind of wonder why they bother with everything else? Most video sites are pretty much the same to me; Hulu might have the best quality of the aforementioned, but I find myself using the FUNi site more than anything else because I perceive it to be more beneficial to them.
[View the rest of this entry...]
Finally saw the first episode of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood tonight. As I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t that eager to see it, but then my RSS feeds started getting cluttered with other bloggers posting about it and I spent the week feeling a little impatient. It’s always annoying having to avoid reading things ’cause you’re not up-to-date, but I guess that’s something I’ll just have to deal with since I’m going to be adamant about supporting FUNimation’s stream on this one. I’m actually pretty disappointed that so many people seem to have downloaded fansubs anyway since I think a vast majority of anibloggers reside in countries that are getting a simulcast in one form or another. (Sorry, Europe!)
That said, I was surprised to find that I had ton of issues getting the video to work right for the stream. I’d previously seen all of Ouran Host Club and some of Mushishi on FUNi’s video site and never had any issues, so I’m not sure what was up — the video wouldn’t load at all in Firefox, so after several attempts, I took it into Chrome. There, it loaded… but very slowly. Like, absurdly slowly. It kept stopping to buffer, so I decided to just let it sit to load the whole thing before playing. It took like two hours to load the whole episode. Unbelievable. I’m sure there was a lot more traffic on the site than usual today, but still… I sure hope it isn’t like this every week. :|
The video quality was great once it did load though. The subtitling is consistent with the other subs FUNi offers, and that’s pretty damn good, I’d say. I would have liked to see a translation to the opening and ending themes, but that’s not a huge deal. It did bug me a little that they used “sneaked” instead of “snuck” twice in the episode; even though the former is actually more correct than the latter, “snuck” has become so much more common these days. Oh, well. All words are created equal, but some are more equal than others!
Anyway, on to the actual content of the episode…
[View the rest of this entry...]
Okay. You know, now I’m just kind of confused.
We had our first look at the art of the DOGS OAV back in December. It was questionable, particularly for Badou and Haine’s designs, but I decided to be optimistic. This optimism seemed to have paid off, as the short trailer that surfaced last month looked brilliant. There actually aren’t many shots of Haine in the trailer, but Badou, at least, looked terrific. (Camoflague print is still missing from jacket, but I’ll live.)
Now, some character sketches seem to have surfaced, and it looks like we took three steps forward just to take ten steps back?
[View the rest of this entry...]