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).

At the beginning of this year I made a post regarding Animax that ended up, I’ll admit, kicking up quite a bit of fuss – at the very least more than I was expecting. Several people, some of whom run blogs themselves, took the oppurtunity to express their general dissatisfaction with the service that Animax was providing to its subscribers.

Of course, it didn’t stop there, as some of the busier forums managed to get hold of the story and it ended up taking on a life of its own. I should mention that kicking up a fuss was never quite my intention, but now that’s all in the past.

So now, eight months down the line, I decided to take another look at Animax and see what had developed since that last post.

The following information reached me shortly after making the post: Animax SA was actually going through a trial period of 6 months which only allowed them to add two additional series to the channel every month, and they were very limited in what they could do with their programming.

So it appears that Animax has managed to get through their trial period, and they have since added a number of new programs to their line-up, including Neon Genesis Evangelion, Angelic Layer, Black Cat and Elfen Lied, to name but a few.

So has Animax managed to live up to its promise? The answer to that is: Well … no. Not quite.

You see, the problem lies in the fact that despite nearly running for a year, the programming on Animax remains almost exactly the same as it did 9 months ago (Animax started airing in November last year) – and to be dead honest, if I have to see one more repeat of Samurai 7, I’m probably going to be running around with a katana myself, slashing at random people.

The Animax SA site doesn’t do much to inspire confidence either – while the schedule on site does get updated, the remainder leaves a lot to be desired. The About Animax page, for examples, has since the launch featured nothing but what you can see in the screenshot below:

I’m not quite sure what the Fun tab is supposed to do, apart from annoy users bacause it actually does nothing at all. Furthermore, no other details, contact information or anything else is included on the site. If you compare the site to, for instance, the Animax Hong Kong site, you can see that it leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. In short, it just shows a general lack of commitment.

Based on this, we can see that Animax SA still has a very long way to go. It’s off to a decent start (several complaints notwithstanding), but I think the fans will be demanding more, and it’s up to them to deliver.

Heya all, how goes?

I was made an official new blogger by Fox recently, so… *bows to everyone* Yoroshiku~

Will hopefully upload my first post soon!

X-chan

I’ve been doing some work on the blog of late in an attempt to improve it overall, and with any luck some of the changes I’ve been making will help with that.

First off, my neverending battle with spam seems to be going my way – the new plug-in I installed seems to be blocking everything; I only hope it’s not blocking legitimate comments as well. To date, in the 2 weeks since I’ve installed it, it has managed to block just over 4,800 spam comments. 0.o Hectic!!

I’ve also upgraded my contact form – so if you have any suggestions, comments, complaints or anything else on your mind, feel free to head over to the contact form and let me know about it.

I’ve changed the navigation slightly as well – with the menu on the left now representing navigation for external sites and the main site itself, which will be updated as I (hopefully) start bringing it online. The navigation on the right is being reserved for the blog itself. External sites at this point consist of mainly shopping sites, but I might add more as it occurs to me.

The last change I made consists of the addition of my Resources page – this includes wallpapers, AMVs, general news and information – pretty much anything I can think of. Again, here suggestions will be much appreciated. I’m still batting the idea of adding download sites to the list – you’re welcome to make suggestions of sites like that – if I do decide to add them I’ll put them on there immediately.

Last but not least, I’ve been informed by at least one reader that my notification e-mails aren’t getting through – I don’t know if it’s an isolated problem with his e-mail alone or if it’s more widespread. Having run some tests it appears that the notifications are going out – but I’m going to need some feedback from you guys to be sure. If you are seeing this post for the first time, and you didn’t hear about it in a notification e-mail, please let me know so I can try and get the problem sorted.

That’s all for now … :) Ja ne!!

Yes, yes. I just did a very corny rip-off of a Star Wars title, but I needed to make a general announcement.

My blog isn’t huge, and gets a fairly low – if steady – number of visitors each day, which in a way was a blessing since this meant that the majority of spammers have overlooked it – thus far. However, spam-bots are a different story, and one of them has managed to stumble across the blog – which is the reason for this little announcement.

Spam is a pretty universal thing for any blog I think, and so far I have been fairly successful in avoiding it by having comments go into a moderation queue for approval before being posted (so that might explain why some of you readers don’t see your comments appear immediately – gomen). To date though, this has consisted of human spammers, which is a fairly low volume thing; spam-bots on the other hand are capable of doing hundreds of automated comments per day, and this is where my problem started.

I unfortunately don’t have the time to sort through the 300-plus spam comments that have been appearing in my queue lately (per day), so there is a fair chance that legit comments may have been deleted (the anti-spam plugins aren’t 100% accurate), so if you posted a comment and it never appeared – my apologies.

I’m investigating ways of getting around this, so bear with me for now, I should have it sorted by the end of this week … latest.

The battle continues …

[EDIT]

Okay – just an update. I’ve installed a plug-in which takes a fairly active approach to eliminating comment spam – and theoretically, it should only nail the bots; however, there is always a chance that it could take out a legit post … so for now it’s in a testing phase.

If anybody posts a comment and it does not appear within 24-hours (this is usually the longest I’ll ever take to moderate posted comments) please contact me using the contact form. Otherwise, happy commenting :)

Hey everybody.

First off, let me apologise for the extended hiatus in blog posts, due to constraints in time I haven’t been able to put together decent blogposts lately, and I prefer not to rush things too much, since every post requires at least a little bit of research.

That being said, I’m busy finishing off a couple of posts that should be up soon, and in addition I’ll be starting something else that has been floating around my head for a while. Every now and again I’ll be hunting down AMVs on Youtube and other video sharing sites and posting them on here for you to enjoy. While some of them may be older, it’s my hope that you may come across an anime or AMV that you haven’t seen yet.

Due to the limited amount of space in my hosting account, I can’t host them for download, but if possible I’ll include links that you can use to download them from – and, if I can track it down, any info on the creator of the AMV. Of course, Youtube being Youtube, there’s always a chance that the video will become unavailable at some point, in which case you can contact me here and let me know, and I’ll try and track it down again.

That’s it for now – stay in touch and I’ll have some new material up soon. :)

Well known manga-publisher Tokyopop announced this week that the company would be undergoing what it terms “progressive reorganization” – a move that will split the company into two groups: Tokyopop Inc, which will handle the company’s publishing activities, and Tokyopop Media LLC, which will be handling the group’s digital media.

The move also means a 39 position cut across the company, with editorial and design departments taking the brunt of the layoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

The year is practically flying by, and the arrival of May means that we’ve almost reached the halfway point for the year. It also means that the Otaku Mag crew will once again be coming down to Cape Town for what looks to become an annual feature, the Cape Town Otaku Road Trip. And of course, for us Capetonians, who exist in something of a desert where functions and events of the sort are concerned – it’s heaven-sent.

The first road trip back in 2007 was a first for all of us. There was a surprisingly big turn-out, with some of the fans braving some rather chilly weather and parking off in front of the door as early as 4:30am. Let it not be said that the Capeys aren’t passionate about their anime.

With the success of the initial roadtrip, we’re expecting a lot more from this year’s escapade; some of the staffmembers who didn’t make it last year will be joining us down here, we’re expecting some fan-art, cosplay, model-building workshops – not to mention a few other things – and of course, what would the roadtrip be without the required anime and AMV screenings :)

For those of you who don’t know about it yet … here are the details:

Venue: University of Cape Town (African Studies Building?)
Dates: 17-18 May 2008
Time: Doors open at 9:00am (I’ll be there earlier with Okashii – be sure to come greet the great Fox :P)

A list of the anime being screened (that has been confirmed so far):

Soul Eater
Code Geass R2
To Love-Ru
Vampire Knight
Druaga no To: the Aegis of Uruk
Kanokon
Kamen no Maid Guy
Spice and Wolf
Persona – Trinity Soul
Rosario to Vampire
Nabari no Ou
Zettai Karen Children
Wagaya no Oinari-sama
Kurenai
\Kyouran Kazoku Nikki
Himitsu – The Revelation
Crystal Blaze
Special A
Amatsuki
Macross Frontier
Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun
Shigofumi

There’s also going to be some gaming available – I’ll be dragging along my digital camera to cover the event as best I can, and I’ll see if I can arrange some video as well. Be sure to watch the blog for the report of the aftermath :)

See you there.