spiritsnare's snareblog

K-ON! is good. Queen’s Blade will never touch my machine ever again in animated form, but a couple of friends found scanlations of the source material, and so my laptop plays host to a handful of PDFs for their use whenever necessary.

And Sketchbook continues to be wonderful. I think I might be addicted, even. It’s so good.

So there’s this project I contibuted a bit to, an XNA Community Game by the name of BeatBlox. Basically, you make as huge a blob of like connecting panels as possible before bomb panels blow the whole thing up in time to music, and it’s pretty nifty.

This is my obligatory plug, because XNA releases need all the advertising they can get: buy the game. It’s only $2 and promises hours upon hours upon hours upon hours of fun!…well, not hours upon hours, but it aims to deliver you enjoyment!

Today, I found it relieving to know that someone else – namely, a scanlation group by the name of DRAT – also cares about Sora no Manimani.

Which is good, because otherwise, I might’ve broken down and torn apart my own hard copies to make ghetto Rikaichanned scanlations. I’m thinking of contributing to the hype, if only to see releases beyond chapter 2.

Today, I dug into Sketchbook ~full color’s~ for two episodes due to an acquaintance of mine proclaiming it better than Hidamari Sketch. I wonder why he made the comparison, because it feels as though I can’t really link the two, other than the fact that both of them deal with students with an interest in art and the fact that both of them have “sketch” in the name.

For the better part of episode one, I thought aboout how I could liken it more to ARIA…until they showed ARIA-shachou in the form of a bowling alley’s mascot. Looking up Sketchbook on the Anime News Network encyclopedia, much akin to the realization of my not-so-strong Yui Horie link, it makes a bit more sense: it’s animated by the same guys who worked on ARIA, it’s published in the same magazine as ARIA, and it has Makino Yui, who, likewise, is responsible for theme songs for both series (ARIA OP, Sketchbook ED).

Speaking of Toradora!, I should probably get around to watching the rest of it, now that it’s done. Seems like something I should perhaps watch. And, speaking of anime, I’m somewhat disappointed at the lack of a preview for a new Key series adaptation at the end of Clannad After Story. 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, after all.

Yumemi shall be second to Miichan this year, I suppose.

Because I can’t Matroska worth a damn:

Do yourself a favor and go to the Sora no Manimani website, or at least copy that link and paste it in your browser’s address bar. At the end, type in manimani_1000.mp4, and hit Enter to download nice, high-quality trailer goodness straight to your desktop.

If you have the Community Combined Codec Pack (or something that can view Advanced SubStation Alpha files, like DirectVobSub), you can download my lovingly handcrafted English subtitles for the trailer here (right click and save as). It’s best viewed with the Estrangelo Edessa and Qlassik Medium fonts – the former is usually installed by default in Windows XP and higher, and the latter can be found here.

And, lastly, a disclaimer: the translation isn’t the best. In fact, a good chunk of it is Rikaichanned, as usual! Also, feel free to distribute it, so long as you don’t edit it.

Addendum: I’ve got a preliminary MKV up for direct download here. Enjoy, and please comment if you find any problems/TL issues!

(Disclaimer: Sora no Manimani is (c) 2006-9 Mami Kashiwaraba/Kodansha – animation (c) 2009 Studio Comet/Marvelous Entertainment/Souei High School Astronomy Club. Fansub done without permission for fans by fans please don’t kill me Japan, uwa~)

The trailer for Sora no Manimani got posted. It is wonderful and promising and oh so hype. Well, at least for me – your mileage may, as always, vary.

It’s quite the coincidence to find Kanae Itou taking the helm of main heroine Mihoshi Akeno. Her voice sounded too familiar, like a certain Hinamori Amu. Well-played, Studio Comet!

I sat down to watch a few episodes of Shugo Chara! yesterday, reaching episode 13. Using that momentum, I took it a bit further, and got to episode 17. And I’m loving every bit of it.

I think I’m enjoying this show more and more as it progresses. Every time I worry that the formula might get stale, the show piles on something that spices it up and somehow manages to refresh the whole thing. It feels like they’re not in any hurry to drop the ball and then have Amu and the Guardians fight against One Huge Problem chunk by chunk, but slowly piles on the intrigue each time by gradually introducing things that stack upon one another to make that One Huge Problem, while not leaving them completely without a way to fight back.

I’ve come to really enjoy this kind of pacing. And if this keeps up, I might have to put it on my all-time favorites list for never letting me down, or at least after I get over the initial hype of watching it. That might be hard, though – Doki-, the second series, is currently airing…

I love you, Tomosuke. I love you so much.

I think, perhaps, that The Epic of Zektbach might be my all-time favorite Bemani album, maybe next to Milestone – the only thing that irks me about the album is Osamu Kubota’s voice in his rendition of Zeta – but even then, his voice does not render the track entirely unlistenable.

Also, I’m willing to bet that L’Erisia (Primary Logic) is going to become a pop’n boss song. There’s too much potential in there for a great chart across the board (cue 0:37, for instance) that I’d be surprised if it didn’t make it into a Bemani game in playable form.

If it makes it into IIDX, I wonder how the video will look like – especially after the oh-so-wonderfully produced Turii…

Seattle-based Sakura-Con staff sure are, uh, spirited when they do their promotion videos for the con.

Doing a search for GIRUGAMESH! and Sakura-Con on the AnimeBlogger Antenna returns no results ranting about their latest piece. I’m sorta disappointed.

I’m also rather surprised they turned this out after their previous year’s commercial, which is much, much better than this year’s ad, Girugamesh Guy notwithstanding.

While chatting with Rome yesterday, he mentioned something about our blogs having not updated in a while. Not much has been going on in my life, other than the usual tedium of waking up, going to school, and going home, and perhaps hanging out with friends (sometimes referred to by my friend Tsubasa as “sociable nothing”) on the weekend. There are a handful of things that I can think of – none of which I can expand quite nicely upon.

This will be a post not unlike that of the Raymond Mar bullet-point variety: a collection of small (yet somewhat notable) things in my recent life.

• At Sunnyvale Golfland, beatmaniaIIDX 16 EMPRESS and GuitarFreaks&DrumMania V5 Rock to Infinity have been fully unlocked. On the IIDX front, Himiko (injoke aside) is, uh, a 12 on Hyper. Yes, I know that the song’s rated 11, but that’s called Konami Lying To Us. Also, Rock to Infinity (the song) is giving me a run for my money on Basic (88). And while I’m playing copious amounts of both, my time with pop’n music has suffered.
• Speaking of pop’n music, pop’n music 17 THE MOVIE officially released on March 4 after a small delay. The staff mention that the number of unlockables is to make up for the number of songs that were cut. Can I finally say hello to Water Stand songs on AC? Please?
• I recently got into Puerto Rico. It’s a pretty fun game. In fact, I’m considering whether or not I like it more than Die Siedler von Catan*.
• I started actually searching for and browsing stuff on pixiv, which is sorta like the Japanese equivalent of deviantART – the difference being that since I enjoy music game fanart and character fandom (it’s half the charm of pop’n music!), I get a lot more out of pixiv than I do out of deviantART. As an aside, I enjoy having 40 pages (registration required) of smooooch・∀・ parodies to look at, and I don’t know what kind of person that makes me.
• I’m still waiting for the full US release of DJ Max Technika. This week’s unveiling of the update at the Amusement Showcase International exposition in Las Vegas both kills me (I want to plaaaaaay~) and gives me hope for a prompt release of both the game and its online features (the update is scheduled to hit East Coast arcade hotspot 8 on the Break shortly after the show). In the meantime, I’ve found out that I can’t play a DJ Max Portable game anymore without thinking of Technika and how much more fun it would be tapping a screen as opposed to, essentially, DualShocking beatmania.
• I’ve started two JRPGs: one because one of its sequels is the hot thing of the moment, and one because I’ve been hearing hype about it and I’ve been meaning to try it out. Both are pretty fun.
• I watched one episode of White Album, which was interesting. I then rewatched half of Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight! (I need to grab the other half from the aforementioned Tsubasa) and watched its OVA about three times. And, finally, an obligatory Clannad After Story update: I didn’t expect that, why’d they have to go there again?

* I like saying Die Siedler von Catan, as opposed to The Settlers of Catan…if only for my opinion that it sounds cooler.