It's been a year, and it's time to hold another one of these:

Crunchyroll had released their press release on the event, but the Cherry Blossoms Falling site has their own press release on the event, which I'll copy here:

ANIME FANS WORLDWIDE TO CELEBRATE GLOBAL SHINKAI DAY 2010

Fans of the Japanese anime creator Makoto Shinkai are gathering worldwide in cyberspace March 5th-7th for the Second Annual Global Shinkai Day 2010. The Makoto Shinkai fan site Cherry Blossoms Falling, is celebrating the event with contests, forum discussions and a live Shoutcast. Cherry Blossoms Falling is calling upon fans from every part of the globe to show their appreciation and support for the works of this highly acclaimed director. Contests will be held for inspired fan-made works in art, AMV, film and essay. This year’s prizes are Makoto Shinkai autographed movie posters from his most recent film, 5 Centimeters Per Second. Crunchyroll.com will be hosting the films for free, for a 48-hour period beginning on March 5th at 5pm PST.

For further information and a schedule of events please check out Cherry Blossoms Falling or contact laz_long87 [at] yahoo [dot] com for more information.

There is a planned schedule of events and several contests with some nice prizes running, and I'll be hosting a teamspeak server for people to join in a talk and a shoutcast feed for those who want to just listen in. My impromtu commentary was apparently a hit last year, so I'll be doing my best to host and inform people again this year on Shinkai's work. Maybe I'll get drunk and start playing guitar this year too...

Basically, come on by, relax, and enjoy yourself. We should have better instructions to connecting to the voice chat online when it gets closer to Global Shinkai Day 2010.

...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.

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

UPDATE 2-25-2009: Crunchyroll hosting Shinkai's movies for Global Shinkai Day

I haven't posted anything on here for a while, but there's news of an event hosted by Cherry Blossoms Falling:

ANIME FANS WORLDWIDE TO CELEBRATE GLOBAL SHINKAI DAY 2009

Fans of Japanese anime creator Makoto Shinkai are gathering worldwide in cyberspace February 27-28 for Global Shinkai Day 2009. The unofficial English-language fansite Cherry Blossoms Falling (http://cherryblossomsfalling.myfastforum.org) is hosting the event with discussion and contests, calling upon fans from every part of the globe to show their appreciation and support for the works of this highly-acclaimed director. A chat widget will be available on the main page for fan discussions. Contests will held for inspired fan-made works in art, film and essay. No subscription is necessary to participate. Participants who own copies of the four anime by Mr. Shinkai (She and Her Cat, Voices of a Distant Star, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, and 5 Centimeters Per Second) are encouraged to watch these in chronological order during some portion of the 24-hour period beginning at 8 pm EST. A proposed schedule is posted on the site.

The unofficial Chinese-language fansite (http://www.shinkai.cn) will also be participating, showcasing fan-made short films inspired by Mr. Shinkai's works. The unofficial Japanese-language fansite Makoto Shinkai Fan Web (http://daike.hp.infoseek.co.jp) is also lending its support through news and information.

Please contact laz_long87 [at] yahoo [dot] com for more information.

One thing that has struck me about Makoto Shinkai is how his style had evolved over the years, and watching through all of his short films emphasized that point. He

Well, according to the Makoto Shinkai Fan Web (Who performs the wonderful service of translating tidbits from the official Byousoku 5 Centimeter site for us English-speaking Shinkai fans), the final edit of Shinkai's upcoming film had been completed sometime before this previous Tuesday (Jan. 23, 2007) and that it will premiere at the Cinema Rise theater in Tokyo in March 2007! Heck yeah I'm excited!

Check out the screenshots that I've captured from the high-definition preview trailer! You can also download the trailers themselves from the official site, and you can also find subtitled version if you look around (I.E., search on YouTube . I would do it for you, but YouTube was down for maintenance when I was writing this entry...).