The summer season has started with quite a few interesting shows, looks pretty good compared to last season’s disaster with Queen’s Blade and the like. I’ll give you a short overview of what I’m looking forward to and what I’m going to be working on with the fansubbing groups I’m a member of. The shows I’m definitely going to watch are Aoi Hana, Bakemonogatari, Taishou Yakyuu Musume, Princess Lover!, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 and Spice and Wolf 2. I might be watching Umineko no Naku Koro ni, Geijutsuka Art Design Class and CANAAN – not particularly sure about those. I’m really looking forward to work with Nire on Spice and Wolf 2, a show which has a lot of potential, and Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 with Ainex, a group I’ve just recently joined. As usually I’m also going to work on a few projects with Chihiro, as it seems I’m going to take over the encoding of the second season of Hayate no Gotoku, a show I have very mixed feelings about. That’s pretty much it, I might as well mention that I’ve found a part-time job at our local cinema and am saving some money for Hatsukoi Limited BDs and my trip to England, departing July 26th staying there for three weeks. That’s it for today folks, not sure if I’m going to add any more posts before I’m leaving for England but I’ll make sure to post something while I’m staying there. As usually, thanks for flying with us – have a nice day.

I’ve just watched this 35mm film by Philip Bloom and it seemed like those 6 minutes were the longest 6 minutes in my life, it felt just as if time stood still. It was really fascinating to see how Philip managed to highlight the restlessness of the city but, at the same time, include those special and unique moments, in which time seems to pass a lot slower. The feeling of complete loneliness was very strong and the shots of homeless people, who are largely ignored, only intensify this feeling. This piece of work is just magnificent and it has really touched me, it definitely has left a certain melancholic aftertaste.

http://philipbloom.co.uk/films/35mm-films/alone-in-tokio/

けいおん！OPをFC風に再現
【けいおん!】 ﾄﾞｯﾄ絵でEDっぽくしてみた – の音をﾌｧﾐｺﾝ化ｗ

At home. I just returned from my 1 week school-trip to Charlton and it was quite some journey. I had lots of fun, bought tons of stuff, mostly manga and Japanese sweets, and took quite a lot of photos. I’ve been to London before but this time was even better, I stumbled upon TokyoToys, a nice little shop with lots of mangas and various other otaku stuff. Sadly enough Ryanair has this stupid 15kg limit on baggage otherwise I would’ve bought even more. We did a lot of sightseeing and went to a lot of museums, luckily enough they gave us a lot of free time too. Overall the trip was really awesome and I wish we would’ve stayed longer but at the same time I’m glad that I’m back home. Now I have to catch up with my anime shows.

I’m going to take a closer look at two new shows I’ve recently started watching. The first show is K-On, it delves into the high-school life of four girls who saved their school’s light music club from being abolished. The protagonist and also a member of the club is Hirasawa Yui – a cute, good-for-nothing girl with no musical knowledge. They try to teach her playing the guitar and make her participate in their “band”.

Tainaka Ritsu, the drummer, always wanted to form a band and pretty much coaxed the three other girls into joining the light music club with her. Akiyama Mio (bass guitar) originally wanted to join the Literature club and Kotobuki Tsugumi, playing the keyboard, originally wanted to join the school’s choir. Eventually they all joined and we can expect them to have lots of trouble teaching clumsy Yui-chan playing an instrument.

I definitely enjoyed watching the first episode of this show and instantly pre-ordered the blurays. I really love the way they drew the characters and my doubts about the voice acting, caused by the lousy preview, vanished. Definitely recommended!

I’ve recently started watching Spice and Wolf since I’ve heard a lot of good comments and remarks about the show, surprisingly enough it instantly made it into my favourites. I’ve read quite a few reviews and there seem to be two groups, those who think it really sucks and those who think it’s one of the best shows ever. I definitely count myself as part of the latter, I really enjoyed this show due to it’s intelligent dialogues. It’s a show where you have to pay attention to what is said all the time, otherwise you won’t understand it and get bored pretty soon. The lack of action is compensated by the enormous amount of story and dialogue. The show itself is set in a medieval age somewhere in Europe, one letter the protagonist was holding read a German title. The story goes in-depth on trading, bargaining and peddling and you’ll learn a lot about the medieval age, of course the amount of historical facts is questionable but one should not forget that this is fiction after all.

The character design is really magnificent and I’ll never grow tired of Horo’s smart comments, she is wise indeed. Horo, the wolf deity with a human body, is one of the most cheerful and heart-warming characters I’ve come across so far and I’m definitely a big fan of hers. Lawrence, the male protagonist, is a really clever person and a good trader, some might say he sometimes lacks a bit of experience – of course he’s not the type of person who’d admit that, he’s the experienced trader after all.

Another thing I really like about the Anime is the ending (ED), it’s really funny and especially the chibi drawings are cute. I really love the way it’s sung, it sounds slightly Engrish but it’s just perfect in a way. The song instantly got stuck in my head and probably won’t leave it for quite a while. To sum up Spice and Wolf is one of the best shows I’ve watched so far and is really high ranked on my list of favourites, I recommend it to those of you who are not afraid of a show with lots of intelligent dialogue and considerably few action scenes. If you’re looking for a second Ikkitousen this definitely isn’t your type of Anime.

So I was recently installing Perfect Dark on my server running Ubuntu and thought I’d just start it with Wine to let it download the 2GB unity and have a leechfest, seems like that didn’t work out as planned. Not only that Perfect Dark took ages to download the unity whereas I’m on a 100Mbit connection, it also just wouldn’t save my files to the harddrive and always throw a cryptic error saying “download error – code 2″.

Apparently nobody bothered to write a table explaining those codes so I was pretty much sitting around trying to decrypt that strange message. After some research I found out that it’s an error which occurs while PD tries to write on the disk, of course I immediately thought about all the horrible things that could be wrong, such as a corrupt harddrive. After performing some checks I was pretty sure it’s not the disk, though the error didn’t disappear. I spent some more hours researching the cryptic message and stumbled upon a post on AnimeSuki, apparently Emess had the same problem and managed to, at least partially, fix the problem.

So I thought I’d hop in #darkhold and ask him about it, luckily enough he managed to provide me with a proper solution to the problem – thanks a lot Emess. For those of you who are also trying to run PD on Linux and are experiencing the same problem, here’s the solution. The problem itself is that PD seems to mess up when using an English locale and won’t write your downloaded files to the disk at all. The solution to the problem is using the Japanese locale and setting PD itself to English, this also results in the proper display of Japanese characters. That means you’ll pretty much solve two problems at the same time, the diskwrite problem and PD not showing Japanese characters. Setting the locale to ja_JP.UTF-8 solved the problem for me and hopefully also for you.

Just open a shell and type in “locale -a” to see if you have the Japanese locale, if not you’ll have to install Japanese language support via the language settings interface of your distribution. To temporarily change the locale to Japanese just type in “LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8″ and run PD as usual. You might have to set PD to English via the settings menu, in case you didn’t already do that. Some buttons will still be Japanese, for instance the confirm buttons on question dialogues, but you should be able to cope with that.

I’ve just finished watching the final episode of Ikkitousen’s Great Guardians OVA and unless there’ll be a fourth season I’ve completed this show. I’m slightly impressed by the sheer amount of fanservice and nudity they managed to put in those 2 minutes of OVA. As some of you might know I’m quite the person to watch shows mostly consisting of fanservice and hence Ikkitousen was really satisfying for me.

I really enjoyed the story, as well as the rest, which hardly consisted of anything but fanservice. As expected I fell in love with all female characters, though my absolute favourites still are Ryofu Housen, Kan-u Unchou and the lovely Chouun Shiryuu – seen in a maid outfit in OVA Episode 6. Overall, completely satisfied with the show and really appreciated the extras. The ending was great, though it left me waiting for a season four announcement. Also really enjoyed the openings and endings, they had awesome songs – especially the Dragon Destiny opening, instantly fell in love with it.

One last thing I’d like to add is that the way the service was presented is just awesome, I’ve recently watched this wannabe fanservice show Zettai Shougeki and it was merely annoying, the character design was really bad and the girls’ bodies were just not ecchi material – overall the way they presented the nudity and service was just ridiculous.