One of the girls working in the office with me happens to be an artist as well as a keen fan of anime (which is a great combination in my book), and happily agreed to create/design a character to represent Animated Meanderings as a mascot.

So, after a few weeks of waiting (she wasn’t in a rush, and since she was doing it in her own personal time I wasn’t going to rush her), we’ve finally got our character.

And here she is: Read the rest of this entry »

The term, harem, tends to crop up a lot when various anime series are discussed. Now, in the unlikely event that this is your first foray into anime, and visions of Arabic princes with forty-odd wives fill your head, I need to explain one or two things. Well, maybe one.

The word harem (like many other words) was simply adapted to describe situations in anime where the main character is male, and the majority of the remaining protagonists are female, are various ages within one or two years of the main character, and they all have various levels of feelings towards the main character. These feelings tend to vary in type and intensity.

Surrounded by beautiful girls - what more could a guy want? (Shuffle! and Seto no Hanayome)

Read the rest of this entry »

I saw this coming in as a search to Animated Meanderings, and I decided that I’d take a look around and see what info I could dig up about it. Earlier this year, I did a post about the Vocaloid concert held in Tokyo on the 9th of March – and thanks to Vocaloidism, I have learned that Sega have announced a release of the concert.

The concert will be available in 3 formats – BlueRay Disc, DVD and CD – and the release is scheduled for the 1st of September this year. This is great, since it is just the week before my birthday (*hint hint*). Here’s the eye-candy Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve got to hand it to the Japanese. Nothing seems to be beyond these guys.

There’s a whole history behind this, which I intend to cover at a later date. But basically -  we had a bunch of virtual characters stage a live concert. Using the voice/music synthesis software, Vocaloid, to sing their songs, the 4 Vocaloid characters appeared live, on stage, in front of a crowd of about 2,500 adoring fans on the 9th of March, 2010. The concert was intended – if I understand correctly – as a thank you to the Vocaloid community; hence the date on which it happened (3/9 can be pronounced as sankyuu in Japanese – which is similar in pronunciation to “thank you”)

Read the rest of this entry »

And we’re back …

For those of you following the blog, you’ll have noticed that we had a bit of a problem over the course of the past few weeks. I’m not sure exactly what to tell you guys, but the short explanation would be that one of my plug-ins decided to become corrupt while I was performing and upgrade.

The rest of it is pretty much history – it caused something along the lines of an infinite loop, which gave my hosting server some hassles, as I suppose it would in most cases. I’m not going to go into all the technical details – but the offending plug-in has been removed, so everything should be back to normal, barring one or two missing pieces, which shouldn’t affect any visitors – it was part of the back-end admin.

If you are wondering what I was keeping myself busy with in the time that I couldn’t create posts – I was happily plugging away in Photoshop – my large collection of manga has been giving me plenty of material to work with for fanart, and in response to some of the comments I’ve been receiving from friends I’ve created a Deviant Art account to brag with. If you would like to visit – head off to my Deviant space. I’m not doing it full time or anything, but I should have new things up every few weeks or so.

In addition, I’ve purchased a new domain – which will also go by the name Stellar Illusions. I’m a bit ambivalent about what I intend to do with it right now, although I’m considering – once I have my first AMV completed – using it as the name of my AMV and art production studio. And of course, building up a group of fellow AMV creators working as members of Stellar Illusions – maybe some day being up there with Random Destination Studios and Premonition Studios. Something to dream about anyways. Anybody interested in joining up?

I don’t intend hosting AMV’s on it just yet – that will cost more than I can shoulder right away – but once again, its something to aim for. AMV’s will be played via YouTube for the most part, with download links to animemusicvideos.org. But that’s still far in the future … in the meantime the domain will remain parked – so don’t hop over there just yet :)

For now, I have a few posts waiting in the wings, ready to be posted – so look forward to those. I’ll have some more news for you later :)

Greetings everyone!! I would like to take this oppurtunity to wish all my readers a Happy Valentine’s Day, regardless of whether you celebrate the occasion or not. I’m sure there are plenty of singles out there, so you’re not alone. Problem is, I’m sure a lot of guys are going to wimp out (girls too), and simply say Happy Valentine’s Day in their Facebook status. That’s a fail people!!!.

Here’s what you do. Whether you are romantically inclined towards them or not, pick a couple of your favourite members of the opposite sex, give them a call and wish them Happy Valentine’s. Or even just send a text message. They’ll appreciate it … I can almost guarantee it. It’s not that difficult. Now, did you do it? Do you feel better? Awesome!! Are you a little embarrassed? Don’t worry, you’ll get over it.

Of course, in Japan, Valentine’s Day also gets celebrated, although things are done a little bit differently over there. 14 February is the day that girls give chocolates to the guys in their lives – and no, the guys don’t do anything, not in February anyways. It’s considered good manners to reciprocate on the 14th of March, on a day called White Day in Japan.

Chocolates don’t always go to the love of your life, however. Apparently, it is quite common for the guys to receive chocolate in the form of a friendship gift as well, as the girl wishes to indicate her affection and appreciation for the lad’s friendship. It’s pretty nice, I think. Miko made a very nice post on Chikyu Biyori about Valentine’s Day – I’m hoping she’ll be following up in March with a post on White Day. We’ll have to wait and see.

Of course, even in Japan, there are going to be guys who don’t get anything on the day. Well … the ever inventive Japanese have even come up with a solution to that one – not one I would take, but let’s see if it works for the – the lonely hearts can purchase themselves a box of Moe Chocolates – complete with a cute little message so they can pretend to have gotten it from some cute girl (source: Alafista.com).

Not that I’m sure you’d want to whip the box out in front of your mates – it would be a bit of a dead giveaway *lol* Might be better just to swallow the pride and say you didn’t get anything. In any case, this little gem retails for about ¥500 yen (about $5.40), and its only available in Japan – sorry guys :D

Anyways, from me here at Animated Meanderings, I wish you all a lovely day, and I hope you get at least one call. Happy Valentine’s Day!!

I’m sorry to have to inform you all that the forums have been taken down – probably permanently, or at the very least indefinitely. My reasoning is relatively simple – so I’ll explain it quickly.

The last time the forums went down (and here is where it gets a little technical) – I was informed that my domain’s application spool had been corrupted. Or something to that effect. The problem was that atttempts to fix it ended up knocking over the blog as well – the end result being the loss of a little more than a week’s worth of work, on both the blog and the forum.

Rather than risk the same outcome, as the forum installation had proved to be inherently unstable – I’ve decided to remove the forum entirely, until such time as I can get around to installing a more stable forum, or find a hosting server which is less prone to having nervous breakdowns.

So to those of you who participated in the forum’s brief run, I would like to say thank you very much. The blog, however, will still be going strong – so keep your eyes here – I’ll have my next review up in the next two days.

Well, 2008 is finally over and 2009 has rolled around – so from us here – Akemashite omedetou. The blog is now also a little more than a year old (a year and a month to be exact) – and I’ve been fiddling around with a lot of things over the course of the past year – so anyone who has been paying attention would have noticed a lot of little changes taking place from time to time.

That being said, I have some loyal readers, and the blog has managed to get a little bit of attention – something I’m relatively happy about. Of course, posting has been a little bit inconsistent, but that is just one of the things I’m intending to pay some attention to over the course of this year.

I have a lot of unrealised plans and wishes for the site as a whole – and 2009 is going to be the year where I’d like to make as many of them as possible come true. For this, of course, I’m going to be relying on a lot of other people – KittiWithKatana and Xxxtrilic are already helping out with posts and reviews, and I’ll be asking Okashii and TiTus to help out with the design and graphics for the main site, since the main site has turned out to be a fairly massive project which I won’t really be able to tackle by myself.

The forums also seem to be quite stable at the moment – they are a little slow to load, for which I apologise – but for which I must also blame the current telecommunications setup in SA – they were designed with broadband in mind. Hopefully, with June seeing the landing of the new fibre-optic cable – things like speed and bandwidth allocations will start looking a little better – we can only hope.

So, from me and all the other staffers here at Quantumworx, best wishes for 2009, wish us luck for this year, and hang around as we set out to make something special of the site.

Yoroshiku!!

I’m pleased to announce another little addition to Animated Meanderings. In my random running around the web, I’ve come across two personal blogs, both written by two Japanese citizens and both shedding some light on happenings and everyday things in Japan that I thought some of you might find interesting.

The first blog is Chikyu Biyori, written by Miko – in which she details a lot of the daily things that she goes through with her family. The tone of the blog is really light-hearted, and it makes for a fun read. Although she only updates once every couple of days, you have to admire the effort that goes into this, since she posts in four different languages – Japanese, Chinese, French and English.

What makes especially the English portion interesting is the fact that Miko adds in little Japanese phrases and translations into the text – all coloured, which makes them easy to find; and, since they’re all in context (within the English), a little easier to understand.

The second blog is called A little something, and is written by Kousuke. Kousuke started the blog as part of an attempt to improve on his English, and updates on a nearly daily basis with anything he comes across that he thinks his readers may find interesting. Similarly to Chikyu Biyori, the tone is also quite light-hearted.

Kousuke also, at the same time, provides links out to other websites (Wikipedia mostly) that explains some of the things he refers to in his posts.

I’ll be adding links to the two blogs in my sidebar menu, so be sure to pop in and have a read from time to time, I’m sure they’ll both appreciate it, and I’m also sure that it will help you understand the Japanese lifestyle and culture a little bit better as well – after all, isn’t that why we are all here?

I’ve recently gathered up enough courage (and time) to go about installing forums on the site – the Quantumworx Anime and Manga Forums. As a new project, they happened to be a little bit of pride and joy – unfortunately, a few days later – my hosting server decided to throw a fit, dropping both the blog and the forum into the internet void.

Two days down the line, things are back up and running – my datacenter used a backup to restore things – the bad news is that the backup was a week out of date, which means the forum, and all the work I put into it, had disappeared.

The forum is currently offline, while I attempt to sift through my memories to recreate all the categories and subforums – this is likely to take a day or two. The theming and editing is likely to use up a couple of hours by itself *cries* Obviously, the restoration has also knocked the blog back a couple of days – no posts were lost, but a couple of modifications have made their way into the mists – and I’ll be spending some time getting the house back in order again.

I guess this will teach me to do everything by myself – so I’ll be on the hunt for some helpers – luckily, I already have KittiWithKatana and xxxtrillic helping with posting on the blog. All three of us have posts in the making, so things will be getting a little more active again.

In any case, I’d love it if my regular readers could swing by the forums and sign up and help me build a little community based around a shared passion. Since it’s still in it’s early stages, there’s still a lot more to come – keep checking back … the forums should be back up and running by tomorrow (Friday 12 December).