We has a problem

Starting tomorrow, I will be off to taste the wonderful working life. I have no idea if I’ll ever survive 4 months of rabid scrutiny, dastardly office politics, wrangling obsolete software and hardware, and hunting down places to eat.

On the plus side I do get to wear a shirt and tie :3

Until I wrangle a way to write undetected from my boss (or do some mad scheduling), I’ll be writing with a lot less frequency that ‘d hope I’ll be doing. And if I do maintain a breakneck pace, I’ll most probably be not sleeping or have finally mastered time management.

Until then, enjoy the shiny new banner, and the ones that didn’t make it. (Not safe for mind)

CLANNAD: 4 DAYS

CLANNAD airs in 4 days.

Freakin’ awesome.

We has eufonious (OP)

It is delicious dango you must watch it’s life cycle (ED)

Nid moar Sunohara.

The natural cycle of life triumphs

Consolation: Yuka vs Keine

Yuka Kazami vs Keine Kamishirasawa

236 – 406

The cow ated the flower T_T

One of these days, I’ll find a cash cow, and I’ll kill it for meat.

People say animé is dying, if the recent Geneon going ‘bust’ is to be an indicator of things to come. Or maybe it’s because of Japan having a bad time this year when it comes to Japanese animation. Or maybe a bunch of school kids have either murdered or almost murdered their peers/parents and that caused a bunch of shows to be pulled off the air for a bit.

I have only this to say: O RLY?

Let’s take Geneon going ‘bust’ as an example. Just because a company is scaling back it’s operations doesn’t mean they are dying, it means they are doing their best to prevent more losses. Geneon, I think, is a victim of a string of bad business decisions, ending with the failed merger with ADV. And from Answerman, I think they are really up to their necks in debt.

Sometimes when one makes a bad decision, he has to pay for it for the rest of his life. The same goes for companies, only this time with higher stakes. A good example of a Bad Business Decision would be Nintendo stubbornly sticking to the cartridge format for the N64. Compared with CDs and DVDs, carts were bulky, expensive to develop for, and thus, unprofitable. This caused Nintendo to lag behind in the console race, something which they paid for with decreased sales and lack of third-party support for the Gamecube, even though the Gamecube did rake in a tidy sum for Nintendo. Thank goodness they wised up and made all the right decisions for the Wii, though time will tell if they had made the right choice. (But right now, it seems like they did make the right choice, eschewing the hardcore for the casual and non-gamers.)

Another Bad Business Decision is ADV throwing money around to get licenses. Well, when you become greedy and grab every license you can get your hands on, you will have mediocre and crap title, along with the good and very good titles. That’s good money wasted for things you can do with the wasted money, like retraining the workers or hiring better voice actors/actresses. I’m not saying ADV products are bad, but let’s just say from what I’ve read, it could be a lot better. And if you don’t improve your products, you will eventually lose out. Thankfully, ADV have learnt the error of their ways, and are reorganizing their business to meet the needs of their customers (I hope).

But back to the point: Is animé really dying? To answer that, we can’t look at the American market. The American market as far as I know is a distribution market, not a creation-type market. We have to look at the Japanese market, where animé and the like come from.

On the surface all seems well. Finances are constantly in the black, there’s marketability in Akihabara, people are at least curious about the place. Unfortunately, all is not well in Akiba.

Otaku are slowly being driven out of Akihabara. If Patrick Macias is to be believed, animé as a whole is slowly dying. It’s not even a natural death, where people lose interest and move on. It’s the kind of death only the likes of Singapore can inflict on a community: a slow cancerous death, where all that is good is slowly being replaced with all that is not good. Think of it as cultural chemotherapy for a cancer that the Japanese culture has never faced before. It’s not a pretty sight.

Havens for otaku are being replaced by shiny new things. Corporations slowly grabbing whatever reason to expand into what people call ‘otaku paradise’. Laws are being enacted to prevent otaku from doing certain things. Heck, they’re slowly trying to wipe out all the porn in Akihabara. This resulted in the ill-intentioned “Akihabara Liberation Front” and the sad day they tried to kill some people in Comiket.

Again, I say this is more of a cultural problem, stemming from the problems of Shinto. But that’s for another article.

Indeed, the subculture we have come to know, love and hate is slowly being wiped out. I quote Patrick Macias (from his article, “Akihabara’s Awful Truths”):

But what you can’t find is what it was that made Akihabara buzz in the first place. It wasn’t just anime, manga, and video games that built it, or continue to sustain it even today. Instead, Akihabara was the side effect of collective fantasy and private desire desperate to find expression through technology, through commerce, molded plastic, pixel, and drawing paper. Now, those dreams are threatened by a dull and dreary reality.

That paragraph summarizes what is wrong with animé today. It’s not about the bloody fansubs or about P2P (I’ve had enough about all that cowcrap, you want to end this, destroy the Earth. I dare ya, corporations of the world. Blow up this Earth. It’s the only way to preserve your bloody profits.). If Akihabara falls, so does animé, and the entire subculture.

Funimation and VIZ may be in the green, and ADV is slowly looking to the future, but what good is the future if we can’t protect the present? Without Akihabara, animé may just as well be cartoons from Japan. Which is, in reality, true. And we all know what cartoons are in America and beyond.

I ask the good people who watch this form of entertainment, legally or otherwise: Would you watch cartoons from Japan if Akihabara never existed?

Reading fun:

Patrick Macias
That article
Answerman’s take on the whole Geneon thing
lol Shingo

I guess everyone loves asthmatic bookworms instead of lazy busty, erm, shinigami?

Consolation: Patchouli vs Komachi

Patchouli Knowledge vs Komachi Onozuka

471 – 203

I guess if you rain books and the occasional Royal Flare (not to mention some futa loev), you can beat seemingly immortal lazy things. Or something.

Speaker for the Dead

Well, call me out for being an idiot or something, I don’t care. I’m doing the right thing even if it is extremely messed up.

I can’t really say that this is an eulogy for Itou Makoto. To be honest, I can’t really say anything good, and whatever good I could say would most probably something mildly disparaging and insensitive to the dead. The words below are most probably the best I can say without offending everyone too much. Again, quoting Scripture isn’t my style, but unfortunately it’s also the most appropriate thing to say.

For all this I considered in my heart even to declare all this, that the righteous, and the wise, and their works, are in the hand of God: no man knoweth either love or hatred by all that is before them. All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath. This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead. For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun. Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

-Ecclesiastes 9 : 1-10

Do I hate the deceased? Maybe just a little bit. Even considering all the cultural factors that led to such a tumultuous chain of events, personally, I feel that he should never have strayed. I suppose it’s a matter of perspective and personal values, but at the end of the day, after examining my own feelings, I can only say this: only his actions were detestable, and he has been fairly punished for it, even if he was of immoral character. Let that memory lighten grief.

As for Sekai, I’ll most probably have to do one in the same vein (hopefully with less Scripture-quoting). But give me some time to mourn and grieve.

Onoz not the doll T_T

Shanghai vs Eirin Yagokoro

371 – 399

Shanghai lost T_T

*has nothing to say

School Days, Dio Brando, and something about Tsukihime

So I gather everyone has head the news. Enough chatter about the adulterous prick getting his just desserts. I’ll just write my own ending because I feel like it.

Kotonoha, for some reason, calls Sekai, informing her of this quaint little abortion clinic just outside of town. Or something. Sekai, uh, I suppose refuses it for reasons unknown, so Kotonoha flips.

Kotonoha confronts Makoto, unsheathing her family’s katana (still razor sharp, even after all these years!), and promptly cuts the faggot into ribbons. And beheads him. Yeah, now you know how the samurai died with honor. By asking someone to cut their head off with their katana.

Actually, I was lying about the last bit. What actually happens is DIO BRANDO (Jojo’s Bizzare Adventure WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRY, 4chan) appears out of nowhere, mistakes Makoto for Joesph Joestar and performs THE WORLD on Makoto. except Dio isn’t throwing knifes at him or dropping a steamroller on him, but instead throws SUPERTANKERS at the boy and drops a NICE BOAT at the end of it all. Of course Kotonoha smote the head off him after Dio was done with his stuff.

Mail, rooftop, etc. Kotonoha shows Sekai the last thing she’ll ever see of Makoto. I’m so tempted to say Richard (of Looking for Group Fame, singing Destroy the World, of course) suddenly came in and flash froze the two girls, but that isn’t the case here. Kotonoha kills Sekai. (OH MAI GAA NUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU)

And.

Does.

Something.

Unspeakably.

Horrible.

To.

Her.

Body. (By this time you know where my fan loyalties lie.)

Possessed by some unspeakable WW2 Japanese soldier spirit she does something akin to what the Japanese did to pregnant women: slice open the poor girl’s bellly and rip out the baby. Of course Kotonoha doesn’t know that babies are zygotes at this stage of pregnancy, and mutters something to the extent of “no baby” and “you bleed red blood”.

And then she sails away with Makoto’s head in her arms. Oh, I suppose she squicks the head of the formerly insensitive, philandering clod but those are technical details.

OK, alternate ending:

Shiki, chasing Van Fem, wanders into the world of School Days. He meets up with Richard (the undead warlock from LFG, duh), Nanaya mode activates and the both of them Destroy that World. Van Fem drops a NICE BOAT on Makoto. Actually it was closer to a supertanker in mass, but eh, boat sounds funnier.

Kotonoha marries Sekai in what seems to be a bizarre lesbian ritual. The child that was born to the two eventually start the Nanaya clan. By the time Shiki is born, there are no traces of Makoto’s DNA present.

I’m horribly evil, so sue me.

This post is dedicated to wildarmsheero

And why not? He ruddy asked for this post by complaining about anime bloggers (and hmself) being unable to write effectively

OMG WILDARMSHEERO IS SO SUGOI KAWAII!!!!!!!! ^_^

Okay, I really got nothing.

Break out the Kool-Aid Man!

OHHHHHHHHHHHHH YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

*breaks through Overflow’s BRICK WALL.

Still doesn’t change the fact that Itou faggot has to uh I dunno, can’t use the word die here… … …

How about being tortured by music? Listening to Britney Spears, Christina Uglylera, and the likes of them should either drive him mad, turn his brains to mush, or get sued by the RIAA Unless he’s already listening to them. Then we switch over to conventional torture.