Nick's Anime Weblog

There's been quite a few series recently that sported rather retro-looking character design styles, and Cashern Sins. And it should be no surprise, as it was originally created by Tatsuo Yoshida, the man behind series such as Gatchaman (A.K.A. Battle of the Planets or G-Force) and Speed Racer. And when I say retro-looking, I present the following as evidence:

The Hair! Oh my, such glorious hair!

So, I was going through my Linux RSS feeds when I stumble on this post of a translation of a "Ubuntu romantic school comedy"...

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe both. Printing it out now to read it...

Being inspired, I ended making a GDM login theme from a 1080p Blu-ray rip of Five Centimeters Per Second:

It is designed for my 1920x1200 resolution laptop running Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. Modified it off of this Serial Experiments Lain theme. Source GIMP XCF file is available inside the tar.gz if you want to modify it.

It's not the greatest, but it really didn't take much work. I added some sharpening and adjusted the colors and saturation from the source video screenshot, but that's about it.

I have to add another person to the coolest people in the world list1 list:

I have to thank Laz, owner of Cherry Blossoms Falling, for the following2:

Laz sent it to me for my work on the Ventrilo chat server I ran for Global Shinkai Day 2009. I still think it was too generous, but how could I refuse?

Thank you, Laz. I hope we can pull off a bigger GSD 2010 next yer.

This year has been a good one for receiving free stuff.

1. 1. Astro is on there for seeding my Blu-ray collection (which hasn't grown any, yet)
2. 2. Of course, frame not included with the gift. Went out and bought it for the poster. Now to figure out where to hang it...

...is coming to a close.

This had become a bigger event that I had even anticipated. I've been a member of the Cherry Blossoms Falling Makoto Shinkai fansite forums for the better part of a year now and I remember when Global Shinkai Day was just an idea put up to just get the forum members for a couple of fan sites together to simply watch Shinkai's movies together at the same time. I had the idea of setting up some kind of voice-chat collaboration so that we can talk and have conversations through the films, so I had setup a Ventrilo server1.

There weren't as many people with mics on as I wanted, but it seems that my ongoing commentary of the films (especially early on) became a bit of a hit anyways. I now have probably around 10 hours or more of audio to go through to pull out snippets of observations and information that we went through about the films. It would be pretty cool to put together commentary tracks for the films together. It would probably months of work to do, but I feel like I might be up to it. Still, much of it was me just blathering on about whatever came to mind at the time, even down to playing guitar at one point during the times between the films. Yes, you just might be able to hear me attempt to play "One More Time, One More Chance" on my Yamaha acoustic. If I dare. And the time I started imbibing myself on sake...

In any case, I really have to thank Laz from the Cherry Blossoms Falling forums for contacting the people at CoMix Wave and Crunchyroll to get all of this together. Here's a few statements from him to start and end the event that I recorded from the Ventrilo chat:

Introduction to Global Shinkai Day 2009 (MP3)

Closing Statements to Global Shinkai Day 2009 (MP3)

Again, a very big thank you Laz Long for getting this whole event rolling. Hopefully, we can make Global Shinkai Day 2010 an even bigger event.

1. 1. Settled on, really, as I was looking at options like Skype, Teamspeak, and Dimdim, but in the end, Ventrilo was just the best option overall. Though I'm going to have a good look at Teamspeak 3 in the future if it gets released soon.

I figured this was going to happen last week, but it was only a few days ago that crunchyroll announced that they were going to host Makoto Shinkai's three major works for streaming for free for the 24 hours that Global Shinkai Day will last (Friday (2/27) from 5 pm/PST to Saturday (2/28) 5 pm/PST). So I'm late that even Anime News Network had covered this yesterday, just been a very busy time between work, trying to prepare a few things for GSD, and other responsibilities.

There's a group made on crunchyroll for this event. Click here or on the banner below to go to it.

She is wishing you a happy Mardi Gras!

Since it's the day before Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, the custom down here in South Louisiana seems to be gorge yourself silly on food and alcohol before the 40 days of fasting and abstinence. Me, I just avoid stuffing and inebriating myself for Mardi Gras and eat normally afterwards. And there are the parades. Don't know if I'll go see the parades this year1, I'm not one for crowds and don't think that catching plastic trinkets is as good a time as it used to be2.

Still doesn't mean I can't wish everybody a happy Mardi Gras...

Mardi Gras Celebration drawing by Jeff Jue3.

1. 1. Haven't for a few years
2. 2. Never mind dealing with parking; many streets are closed and pedestrians (and often drunk pedestrians) are all over the place. And I don't dare go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras...
3. 3. He is my housemate. Managed to annoyencourage him to make this drawing, as there aren't many Mardi Gras-based anime drawings around.

When I started an account at Netflix so that my girlfriend and I could watch Heroes1 via streaming to our TV2, I figured I could use Netflix to also watch older anime series that I had passed over when they were available on fansubs. As such, this has been a pretty successful venture, as there were quite a few series that I could watch (Such as Girl's High3 or Gankutsuou4) legally without having to worry about purchasing the entire series or even leave my house. Even more, I didn't mind that most of the anime available on Netflix stream were only available with English dub, which meant that I could play stuff in the background without having to pay much attention to it if I wanted.

I figured I'd eventually find the occasional gem this way, and though I'm not sure I'd consider it a diamond in the rough, Kurau: Phantom Memory did manage to keep me hooked and had me caring for the main protagonists throughout the run of the series. I had never heard of this 20045 series before, and I wasn't expecting much from Kurau when I added it to my Netflix Instant queue, which Netflix estimated my rating for it to be 2.6 of 5 stars, while the general populace rated it an average of 3.9. Turns out that the general populace is more accurate than what Netflix thought it would be for me. My own impressions might have been exaggerated due to my lower initial expectations, but I ended up quite enjoying this BONES series.

1. 1. BTW, the first season was definitely the best. We lost interest in the series in the middle of the third
2. 2. At first, via the XBox 360 we were borrowing from a friend. Now we use the Samsung BD-P2550 Blu-ray player to stream Netflix to the TV.
3. 3. Dropped this series after the first episode
4. 4. Watched to the end, but I am unsure how I feel about it. I the series was good, but not good enough to buy
5. 5. A year that was rather good for anime

Alternate title: Astro is the Coolest Person in the World Right Now.

Had a surprise1 package featuring the two Blu-ray movies above. In fact, these are the first two Blu-ray movies that I own now. I got a Blu-ray player2 for Christmas from my Girlfriend, and I've only had one Blu-ray disk play through it: Appleseed: Ex Machina from Netflix.

1. 1. Ok, not entirely a surprise, as Astro had been hinting at it. I am surprised at what was in it...
2. 2. Specifically, the Samsung BD-P2550