On our second-to-last day in Tokyo, everyone was instructed to show off all the crazy stuff they’ve purchased during the course of the trip. And if ever I needed confirmation that I was surrounded by a bunch of weeaboo, that was it. It was like a mini-dealer’s room. I was going to save these photos for the end of my eventual series of posts about Tokyo, but I figure, hey, it’s Christmas Eve. Let’s look at all the cool stuff people got in Japan. For all the money that we spent there, we probably aren’t getting any real Christmas presents anyway…

Exhibit A is a table full of stuff purchased by two Gundam fujoshi. What do we have here? A 00 poster, some figs, a stack of 00 doujin behind that and a stack of other doujin under that DeathScythe cell. I kind of wish I knew where she’d gotten that Haro coin purse though… I think I would have bought one too if I had seen it. I do have that Jolteon plush, but my Pokemon haul can be another post entirely.

Apparently the fourth floor of Nakano Broadway has an asston of cel stores. I wish I had taken pictures of the MOB of students that went insane in those little stores, rummaging through boxes and pulling out cheap, cheap cels for¥200- ¥600. Predictably, the animation kids in particular were going nuts. Of course, most of the cels from more well-known and popular series were in the range of ¥2,600-¥350,000, but there were still many good finds. Personally, I didn’t look that long or hard because I just wasn’t expecting to find anything I wanted for a price I was willing to pay. Even this particular cel — if I had found it first, would I have gotten it? It’s a gorgeous cel and I’m still rather fond of the DeathScythe, but I don’t know.

This is the other half of the same table: another huge stack of Gundam 00 doujin, some random things in boxes, piggies from out of UFO catchers, Miku figure, things from the Ghibli Museum, random gashapon…

Next table! A giant book about the Ghibli Museum from the Ghibli Museum, random figs, Yu Yu Hakusho cel of Koenma — not sure how much this one was, Vaporeon plush…

This was my roommate’s table. I THINK I SEE AN EVA FAN, YES? Pah!

And a One Piece fan… I was tempted to get some One Piece socks for my brother, but I doubt they would have fit him. Glad I didn’t anyway though because I ended up getting the bastard way more Touhou crap than he deserves. ;\

Next table! Oh, snap, is that a Spike cel? Sorry for the glare. I think that thing was upwards of ¥15,500, but I don’t remember. I’m surprised it was for sale though since a lot of the cels from popular series were for auction only, including some Ghibli and Disney cels.

Art kids like artbooks.

A whole stack of artbooks and some Gundams.

I wasn’t kidding when I said these guys literally mobbed those poor cel stores. The employees seemed so utterly befuddled at this massive horde of gaijin spazzing out in their store. A lot of them just sat down on the floor and camped out in front of boxes as they sifted through every single cel, looking for hidden gems. So here is a Card Captor Sakura cel, a pretty awesome G Gundam cel, some Bleach production sheets, a Di Gi Charat cel, and some random white-haired badass because the person who bought these apparently has a thing for white-haired badasses (just like the rest of Japan, amirite?).

More art books, some PokeCenter swag, and that Rajah plush is from DisneySea though in Japan his name was something else — Chandu, I think?

Someone isn’t embarrassed of their giant Queen’s Blade fig box, lmao. Too bad I totally don’t remember who this was since I was just running around taking pictures and not paying attention to the stuff’s owners.

Even more cels! Slayers! Tenchi! Actually, I think someone dug out a fairly nice Ryoko cel and showed it to me, but it was ~¥6,500 or so, and I didn’t want to pay that much… wish I’d remembered to get a picture though. Annoying thing about having a fancy DSLR is that it’s a pain to bring it back out once you’ve stuffed it back in its bag.

So apparently in Akihabara and Nakano Broadway, there are about a billion little stores celling old gashapon figures of all sorts, often at really nice prices. Thus, it’s easy to quickly accumulate waaaaay too many of the little things. Thankfully, I had more self-control than this compatriot of mine… though I admit I dug through quite a few ¥50-¥100 discount bins…

Halfway through our marveling of each other’s crap, one of our professors announced that one guy probably had us beat as far as ridiculous expenditures went… apparently, he dropped $1,000 USD on Macross figs and had to get two other people to help him carry the boxes back to his hotel room. He obviously did not bring all of his loot to the party, so I don’t really know what $1,000 worth of Macross insanity looks like. Then again, I’m sure a good chunk of folks regularly spend thousands of dollars importing nonsense from Japan, so this was really only LOLWUT because he apparently dropped the change all at once.

A bunch of figs. Most of these were probably gashapon at some point. I know that the Lupin III stuff on the corner was all from a set of gashapon anyway.

And this… this is apparently a Pikachu condom. Apparently.

Artbooks and doujin and the most adorable Gurren Lagann figs ever. (There was a Viral and a Nia in the set as well.)

More artbooks, Gundam, figs, and a full set of Dragonbouncyballs. This particular person hid the seven Dragonballs in random places in her room and left when the cleaning ladies were coming. When she returned, the cleaning ladies had gathered the seven and put them on the center of her bed. Oh, Japan, we love you!

Gundam!

Zaku cel! …I think I might have bought this if I had seen it first. :( It would have been amazing if there had been a Gouf cel as well…

I WISH I HAD THAT CHARMANDER. FFFFF. IT IS SO CUTE. AHHH. Why didn’t I find it too???

And that’s everything! Well, everything that people brought in to show. I’m sure there were pleeeeeenty~ more that people left up in their rooms, like me. I didn’t bring any of my stuff down, partially because it was a lot of stuff and partially because I didn’t want people getting their dirty mitts all over my merch… <_<

But what do you think? Good haul? What would you be looking for/hoping to find in Glorious Nippon? (Or under your Christmas tree?)

But oh, hey, I’m on WordPress now! And at the very least, I guess this move from Blogger to WordPress is significant enough to mention. (Update your RSS feeds, guys! Unless you were on my Feedburner feed, in which case, I’ve already updated it for you!)

One Year Anniversary for Opinion Prone! (Artist unknown.)

It was a pain in the ass importing and retagging and categorizing everything, but I think it’ll be worth it. It’s also kind of sad that all comments have lost their identities beyond a plaintext name, but it’s better than nothing. I spent a couple of hours yesterday going through all my old posts and trying to fix metalinks so they link back to this new domain rather than the old Blogger one, but I’m sure I missed a bunch… can’t decide how obsessive I want to be about that. (If you spot any, though, please let me know?) A lot of the older posts also hotlink pictures from all over the place (my bad), so there are probably some broken images I should fix too…

I’m also going to be mirroring all my reviews from MAL on this site because I’m still annoyed about the lack of BBCode and want my italics back, dammit. For some reason, I’ve decided not to port over all my numerical ratings for reviews though? I never used numbers in my blog-only reviews, such as those for live action movies and music, so I guess it’s to keep some sort of consistency… then again, since my MAL reviews were off-site, I think I’m going to keep my reviews for anime and manga as pages rather than posts. I’ll still make a post about it every time I finish one, but the text of the review will be on a separate page. Unlike my reviews for everything else, which is usually in the body of the post. …My OCD makes no sense. :( But yeah, in the process of mirroring the MAL reviews — pardon my dust in the meantime.

I guess that’s really all there is to mention. I still have a ton of reviews backlogged, but I have something more special to post this week, so look for that first!

PS — Happy Father’s Day.

It’s probably because I watched more anime in December than I ever have in a month. I had the entire month off from school, was stupid and didn’t get a job in that time, and wasn’t particularly motivated to do anything even vaguely relevant to my career. So I watched cartoons. Lots and lots of cartoons. Specifically, I ended up starting and finishing six whole series (Mushishi, Nodame Cantabile, Nodame Cantabile Paris-hen, Gundam 00 S1, Planetes, Ouran High School Host Club) and three movies/OAVs (Ghost in the Shell, 5 Centimeters per Second, GSD C.E. 73: Stargazer), all of which I’ve already reviewed except Host Club. I also started a half dozen other series that I’ve either put on hold or dropped: Ghost Hound (hold@1), Toshokan Sensou (drop@2), Seto no Hanayome (drop@3), Higurashi no Naka Koro ni (hold@7), Infinite Ryvius (hold@4), and Darker than BLACK (hold@5). I reread all of my Gundam Wing manga before I sold it, and I reread all of DOGS and Bullets and Carnage, not to mention keeping up with current episodes/chapters of Soul Eater, Gundam 00 S2, and Bakuman.

It’s probably not impressive as some people’s monthly consumption, but it’s a lot for me, especially compared to the amount I watch when classes are in session or when I’m working in the summers (it took me a month to finish Spice and Wolf, a thirteen episode series, during school; it took me three days to catch up with thirty-five episodes of Gundam 00 during break). I’ve had too much anime on my brain, and that dream probably isn’t the worst of it.

Is it bad that a lot of simple responses to every day situations come to me in Japanese first and I then have to translate it back into English before I respond? Is it bad that sometimes when I’m staring out the window and pondering random things, there seems to be a wave of Japanese gibberish chattering in the back of my head? It’s not even just the Japanese thing. Usually, I feel pretty secure in my blatant otakuism and weeabooism. I don’t really care what people think about my hobbies and don’t mind bringing it up in conversations with friends as most of them are also fans of one degree or another. But sometimes it’s hard not to wonder if you’re becoming that kind of fan. Even the most confident of losers don’t really want to be that guy, y’know?

I flew to New Orleans on Friday and was spending the night at my roommate’s (parent’s) place before we drove back to Savannah on Saturday. Every turn of the conversation seemed like the prime opportunity to talk about some anime I’d seen over break. It was ridiculous. There was some on and off storming when we were heading out to dinner. We saw a rainbow, and I wanted to mention that one episode of Mushishi (ep. 7). Later on, we were talking about classical music or something, and I wanted to recommend Nodame Cantabile. At the mention of dreams becoming reality, I wanted to relay that other episode of Mushishi (ep. 4). Sure, roomie’s a fan too, but she has a dial-up connection at home and thus can’t watch nearly as much as me (of course, I offered to transfer a few series to her before break, but it never happened :|), and even I would get annoyed after a while if someone talked continuously about anime to me. It always did bug me when some people related everything to anime (especially when it wasn’t really related).

Maybe I get paranoid sometimes. I can’t seem to find too many fans like myself in real life. People around me are either very casual fans or very annoying fantards. Where’s the happy middle? I’d like to think that I’m a happy middle excepting those occasional ventures into fantard land, and it’s in those moments that I get self-conscious and feel like a hypocrite. It’s probably reasonable to allow for those occasional fantard moments, but it’s a fuzzy line to draw. How much fantarding is too much fantarding? When you start dreaming in a language you only understand a few phrases in? When your every reaction to everyday conversation is in relation to some series you saw recently? When the itch to write fanfiction hits again?

It probably doesn’t matter. Classes start tomorrow, and there shall be no more series binging for a while probably. Ports are blocked here, so there’ll be no torrenting either until we get around to getting a router hooked up. Until then, I’ll keep up with my weekly series by having my brother send them to me over AIM or making due with YouTube/Veoh. The only new series I’m picking up for this season is Kurokami, which, as I expected, never got news of an official stream. I wonder if anyone’s actually lucky enough to catch it on TV? Going back to this reduced consumption will likely take a lot of the Japanese out of my head, but it might take a bit longer for the impulse to share other series I’ve seen recently to go away. Sharing is caring, and I care too damn much about these things.

I’m not particularly worried about this blog though. I’ll still be keeping up with news and the aniblogosphere and such. I still have that review for Host Club to finish up and random other editorial-type topics in my head. I’ll probably do some photoshoots of miscellaneous figures I have too, now that I’m reunited with my collection. I haven’t really gotten around to taking many pictures with my shiny Canon Rebel after all. Feraligatr and the Zaku want more action! v_vV

And now it’s time for my rant about Comcast even though I’m sure that there isn’t a single person that would sing praises for them!

My family swapped from Time Warner to Comcast for phone and Internet services since, apparently, Time Warner stopped service in the area. Why? I dunno. To give Comcast a total monopoly!? This seems to be the case! Comcast is notorious for its shitty customer service, and this is compounded by their shitty service in general! For the last week, our Internet has been up and down and down again. It was mostly just an annoyance at first because it would glitch off for a minute at a time every half hour or so. Then it turned into five minutes. Then I noticed that certain sites I’d try to visit would be arbitrarily blocked. A lot of blogs. Things on my blogroll would be blocked mysteriously with a “401 site blocked by administrator” notice. A Google search for “proxy” wouldn’t loud. Then the blocked sites would reappear. It was very puzzling.

Saturday night, the Internet was down for at least eight hours. Sunday evening and into this afternoon, the Internet was down for twenty. I couldn’t even leech off the neighbor’s wifi because everyone else is on Comcast too (well, that and more and more people seem to have gotten the grasp of security-enabled networks)! It’s utterly ridiculous. Oh, the phones were down too, but I don’t use the landlines, so that didn’t bother me. Calls to Comcast directed us to crappy customer service agents reading off manuals that didn’t have any better advice than “reboot your machine.” When pressured for better measures, their responses were “we can’t help you if you don’t follow our instructions.” Excellent.

In the last day, I’ve played 38 games of Freecell and won 23 of them (60% yay!). I’m not even going to tell you how many games of Solitare I played (and lost). It’s funny how the Internet is often considered a distraction, but I honestly can’t get any work done unless it’s there. My routine is to work for a few and surf for a few. Ten minutes of work for five minutes of surfing. Sure, sometimes I get into something and end up online longer than intended, but unless it falls into repetitive checking of email, I don’t really consider my online activities to be completely useless. I’m sure it wasn’t always like this, but I’m too ADD now to concentrate on anything for prolonged periods of time without Internet breaks. Dependency? I guess, but it usually isn’t bad. I get stuff done. Honest.

It’s just those days when the Internet isn’t there. Curse you, Comcast. Curse you and your monopolizing ways.

This picture has no relevance whatsoever to this post. But I want one! D:

• What anime are you watching now?

This is a silly question when these tools are available, but I’ve just started Nodame Cantabile Paris Chapter, and will probably be taking it two episodes a night until I’m caught up. My brother has gotten me to start Seto no Hanayome, and I’ve thus far seen two episodes, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue. Doesn’t really seem like my kind of thing. Last night, we also started Library War and spend the entire first episode making fun of it. I’ll probably check the second episode out, but it doesn’t look like a good verdict. I saw the first episode of Ghost Hound a few days ago; the brother didn’t like it though, so I might finish checking it out on my own later. I’m still undecided on how good it’ll be. Soul Eater I’m following as it airs, and Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is enhancing my ADD, so I’m watching an episode every week or so?

• What is your favourite time to watch?

Evenings, anytime between 10pm and I dunno, 5am is usually when I try to go to sleep nowadays.

• And your favourite place?

A chair in front of my laptop.

• Who is your favourite auteur?

This is hard mostly because few people have done multiple series I really enjoy. Let’s say Satoshi Kon though.

• Your favourite OST?

Aw, man. Can it be a three-way tie between Cowboy Bebop, Gundam SEED, and Gurren Lagann? But… I also really like Ghost in the Shell, X, and Fullmetal Alchemist‘s soundtracks too… :(

• What is the most difficult anime you’ve ever watched?

I’m not really sure what “difficult” means. Among the most frustrating were Neon Genesis Evangelion, Romeo x Juliet, and Loveless though. It surprises me that I managed to finish any of them.

• What was the first anime you remember watching?

My Neighbor Totoro as a Chinese dub, followed by little-known Zettai Muteki Raijin-Oh as a Chinese dub (it took me years to track down the title of this). After that it was DiC’s Sailor Moon dub on Toonami.

• Do you have a comfort show that you re-watch?

Random episodes of Gundam SEED. I used to rewatch Gravitation a lot, but I’ve outgrown it, I think.

• What is the most erotic anime you’ve watched?

Uh, uh. Code Gayass? :<

• Which classic should you have watched?

Serial Experiments Lain — I have a poster and have never seen it. Also, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and I’ve been meaning to finish the original Mobile Suit Gundam. I’m a shitty Gundam fan!

• Which series did you never want to end?

Not to copy the dude who filled this survey out before me, but it’s true that all the best series are those with good endings. I mentioned in my review for it that Mushishi deserves a second season, but now that I think about, it’s probably good that it doesn’t if they’ve run out of ideas for it.

• What is your most overrated anime?

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I wanted to stop watching it at episode one, but forced myself through another five because I thought that there had to be something there to make everyone go crazy over it. No. There wasn’t. The only thing neat about Haruhi is its dance, which I admittedly know.

• Which character could you have an affair with?

If I were in a relationship in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have an affair with a fictional character. ;3

• Who is your favourite character?

Currently, Lelouch vi Britannia of Code Geass.

• Which character do you most dislike?

Light Yagami of Death Note, though that’s because he was such a well-written asshole.

• Which character do you identify with most?

…Moritaka Mashiro in the opening two dozen or so pages of Bakuman. Not so much after he gets a fire lit under his ass though. :(

• Which anime changed your life?

It’s over-said… but Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z. Both helped to really get me into anime in general. Both got me to start drawing human figures more seriously where before I had concentrated almost exclusively on animals. The latter also catapulted me into online communities and was a huge part of my social life from 2000 to 2003. One of my best friends and roommates at the moment I met then… online on a DBZ forum. ;3 (Oh, god, we’re such losers. Holy crap.)

Since classes have started, I’ll continue to be on a slower posting schedule, though my hope is that I’ll be able to post at least once a week, if not twice. My RSS feed has exploded in the last few days while I was busy with con preparations and school, and I now have over 300 unread items… It’s hard to keep up, definitely, but I’ll try. I’ll also hopefully have a review for the Gurren Lagann Parallel Works done soon. And going to a con will always bring things to talk about, yeah?

Anyway, I promise this will be the last of the self-promotion for a while, but here are some of the things I’ll be selling at AWA this weekend:

More over here.

Anyway, to make myself feel slightly better, I was looking for Gundam Wing episodes to rewatch for the lulz. Veoh seems to be complete fail and YouTube’s not much better, but I did manage to find most of the first two episodes. It occurred to me that I haven’t seen very much of the series subbed, but oh man. First of all, Wing’s age is really starting to show. The animation for the most part really isn’t so bad, but the people are hilarious. I sure as hell didn’t notice this ten years ago, but the G-boys’ proportions are… accurate. They’re fifteen year old kids! It’s awesome! The voices in Japanese are ridiculous different; in Heero’s case, it’s disturbingly… spunkier? Is that the right word? It’s kind of odd when it’s his wannabe badass English voice you remember the best.

Duo is awesome Japanese or English. And the Deathscythe such a badass. Come on! Wing falls into the ocean five minutes into its debut and idiot Heero is going to blow the damn thing up. Wow, what a way to destroy the series’ namesake?? Meanwhile, Deathscythe is kicking ass and taking names, and then he goes and kills all the dudes trying to salvage the Wing. And Duo tries to be a good guy. D’aw. No wonder this guy has like ten times the fangirls as Heero. And sure, we get a few shots of the rest of the dudes. Trowa is playing with lions, and Quatre is bringing his crazy house of servants everywhere. And Wufei is buying a truck full of explosives. 8D

The pacing in this series makes no sense either. It’s great. And characters (or maybe just Heero and Relena) just seem to zone out all the time for no reason. “Heero! What are you doing? Blah blah blah! I’m going to talk for a minute!” “…Huh? Relena?” But Heero’s not half as bad as Relena. Really, what the hell? The whole school worships her and she’s busy thinking about the random terrorist kid that 1) beat up all the ambulence dudes that went to save him, 2) embarassed her and threatened to kill her, and 3) is probably opposing her father! “Relena! Blow out your candles!” “…What? Oh, that’s right. Candles. You blow them.” God. Even in Japanese all of her dialogue is horrible. “Oh! Heero! You’re about to send those torpedoes off? GASP! I AM SO SURPRISED THAT YOU ARE POINTING A GUN AT ME! D8″ Ten years later, I still want to beat her face in. Oh, Duo, why’d you have to go and save her? She doesn’t like you anyway. :( I miss this show, as weird as it to watch it now. The opening theme is kind of strange feeling because they never aired it on Toonami, and has cuts of sound effects in it. The animation in the opening is pretty much like every other Gundam ever, lol. TWO-MIX also has an older feeling style of music, I guess. Techno oddities. The show itself seems to have a really prominent soundtrack, though that might be because I recognize it really easily because I love it~. Maybe one of these days, I’ll get off my ass and go buy the boxset or something, but I really wish they’d stream these somewhere or something. Oh, ANN would like you to know that TOEI has Digimon Adventures 02 available for purchaseable download though. That’s another series I need to rewatch sometime because I’m sure I missed tons the first time around.

Man, I’ll rewatch almost anything for nostalgia’s sake… I’m not old enough to be reminiscing about the good old days, am I? But I do miss me my oldschool Toonami. Remember when Moltar hosted? TOM? Rising Sun? Midnight Run? The plots we had on the Absolution? So awesome. What do kids these days get? Miguzi? Do they still have that piece of crap? Bah! I’m going to go watch all these awesome old Toonami commercials now, and then maybe watch some of my Batman: TAS before going to sleep crying about how I have to wait like TWELVE MORE HOURS before I can finally see Heath Ledger live it up as the Joker.

OH, WOE.

Edit - Aw, man. I MISS REBOOT!

Unfinished blog topics thus far: writing fanfiction, why some couples are better than others, more on TOKYOPOP and the OEL market, Kodansha’s overseas publishing, why CG R2 is full of crack…

Oh, woe. I also have a review of the disappointing Death Note anime to write. Man, and I wanted to update this thing at least four times a week too. Woeeeee.

The problem with a lot of subjects is that they only strike my interest once in a while, and once in a while isn’t good enough for maintaining a proper blog. Of all the subcultures I maintain membership in, the anime and manga one is probably the one I’ve been involved with the longest. From a quasi-professional standpoint, those topics aren’t really that valuable for discussion — for the most part, there isn’t really anything deep or profound or life-changing here. It’s a fandom, after all. Still, as an I-really-have-no-idea-what-I’m-doing-when-I-graduate art student whose style is deeply entrenched in this fandom, maybe garnering an audience of one sort or another within it isn’t such a bad idea, even if writing isn’t the primary medium I plan to make a living in.

Ulterior motives aside, I do actually enjoy writing about anime and such quite a bit. Anyone who knows me personally would know that I can be pretty annoying sometimes pushing my opinions and recommendations on people. What can I say — in the end, I’m just a fan, and I get riled and worked up over these silly Japanese cartoons and comics. I love sharing and there’s no greater joy than getting someone else to fall in love with something I’m crazy about, y’know? I wonder if well-articulated rhetoric is enough to give my opinions “credibility” though. Is that enough to make my opinions worth reading? I tend to be a bit too wordy sometimes too, in case you haven’t noticed already.

Oh well. Here’s the beginning of yet another blogging venture. This will be my new venue for fandom-related opinions over a variety of topics, most likely. Recommendations and discussions and controversies and maybe even some state-of-the-industry madness if I am so inclined. To begin with, I have a few things already planned, and I know I’ll have time to write them when I’m sitting around the office this summer. So with any luck, there will be at least two and a half months of content here before I’m inevitably distracted by the likes of school.

Look for a first installment on Monday, guys. Cheers.