iTunes is sometimes useful. Yeah, I know, I hear ya, it’s a piece of bloated thing of music management, but I quite enjoy the concept of cheap and instant gratification of legal music purchasing.

Like, say, downloading the Loosey Goosey single, a Halko Momoi song used for the opening to Yurumates (which was quite the fun watch), for just a buck.

Looking through their selection of anisongs, though (because Loosey Goosey itself is tagged with the genre “Anime”; I was curious), they have a number of artists that have things on the JP iTunes Music Store, but not on the American one. They pop up regardless.

The above picture is one instance of where Apple (or Lantis?) fails me. There are plenty of Hidamari– I mean, Sunshine Sketch fans here in the US…!

I didn’t realize, until a little while ago, that Hidamari Sketch x365‘s first OVA episode had been fansubbed, so I promptly obtained it, and it was quite the fun watch.

I actually quite like how, for special episodes like these, they try to cram most, if not all of the cast in; the karaoke box event was a pretty fun side dish of sorts that Shaft could’ve chosen not to animate. But they did, and it rocked.

Matsuki Miyu banzai!

Call me a month late to the party (apparently it released on January 21), but holy crap, I didn’t know Aoki Ume got her own character single.

I need to find myself a copy.

This post was originally an ode to Hidamari Sketch x365, having just finished it off two days after the guys at SpoonSubs released the last episode. Why is it so good? Why did the show never fail to envelop me in a blanket of warm slice-of-life goodness? Why are Hiro and Sae so damn lesbian and why do I find such a pairing so amusing?

But then I watched episode 9 of Clannad After Story and it flashed back to a handful of scenes in the original series that involved Nagisa Furukawa, and I wept.

There’s certainly enough space in my heart for both. I can’t say yet that a single Nagisa can stand in for my love of the wonderful Sunshine Apartments crew. There’s a good chance that she might, as I bear witness to After Story, and perhaps weep some more.

Oh, and I watched the first episode of Toradora!. It was okay.