(source: culturejapan.jp)

It may come as no surprise to a lot of you – but Japan is struggling a bit at the moment. After the twin disaster of the Tohou quake and the near meltdown of the Fukushima Nuclear plant, Japan has lost a lot of the revenue it gains from it’s tourism industry – rather understandably, a lot of foreigners are a little shaky about visiting what may now be regarded as a pretty dangerous part of the world.

A little unfairly in my book.

Of course, I doubt these are the only reasons; one has to keep in mind that the world economy is a little shaky at the moment, and folks aren’t quite as keen to spend their hard-earned cash. The Japanese government though, has come up with a scheme they hope will turn things around a bit. Read the rest of this entry »

… although, while I would like to call it a preview – it’s turning into more of a review thing, since I’m running a little late as per usual. But time caught up with me, unfortunately.

So, incomplete as it is, the list of anime releases for the Autumn/Fall release cycle – with my thoughts attached, are available here – I’ll be updating with relevant information as we progress.

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Today, 31 August, marks the 4th anniversary of Miku’s release into the world, and for four years she’s been keeping budding video and music creators busy, and entertaining thousands, if not tens of thousands, of fans around the world. Or maybe I should be saying hundreds of thousands … at the time of writing this, the fan-count on the Hatsune Miku Facebook page is well over 250,000.

Miku's 4th Anniversary (credit: KarenT.jp)

It seems that 5pb aren’t a company that doesn’t listen – some of you will probably remember the rather disastrous Mikupa concert that took place on the 9th of March earlier this year. The backlash was so bad, in fact, that the CEO of 5pb issued a public apology. But they learned from their mistakes, and yesterday held another Mikupa concert in Sapporo, and based on some of the reports I came across, it was many levels better. They even had the clear screen back.

There was still some griping about the tickets though – which set concert-goers back something to the tune of ¥5,390 (about $60). That must have stung a bit in what is widely considered to be Miku’s hometown (Crypton Future Media, Miku’s creators, are based there).

I’m not going to go into any detail about the concert itself, since there was no streaming (apparently piracy was a worry), so it may or may not have followed the same playlist as the original concert. There’s a very short report regarding the concert over on Sankaku Complex (warning: NSFW), and I believe the posted pics will speak for themselves.

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Mitsuki - now a year old

Anyone remember her? The cute thing in the picture?

Probably not, right?

Last year, 10 August, was the day I revealed, for the first time, the mascot character for Animated Meanderings, although she was unnamed at that point. If you need to refresh your memories, head on over to this post. :)

With a little bit of input, mostly on the Facebook page, I decided after a few days to give her the name Mitsuki – but developments have pretty much frozen at that point. Which is why I decided to give Mitsuki, as her first ever birthday present, a slightly more complete profile.

That being said, it’s not 100% complete yet, but I have no intention of leaving things completely static from this point forward; I’ll continue working on the character as time goes by, rounding out her personality and, who knows, creating some additional characters to keep her company.

Here is the link to Mitsuki’s full character profile – which has all the juicy details – but I’m going to give a brief summary here:

Mitsuki, as the picture suggests, is not completely human – her father was human but her mother is a Kitsune. Due to her father passing away shortly after her birth and her mother being forced to depart the human realm, Mitsuki has ended up in the care of an elderly monk at a local shrine – who, despite his complete lack of experience with children of any sort tried his best to raise Mitsuki well (apparently he owed Mitsuki’s mother a favour or two). Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who tried visiting the site over the past two days may have noticed a general failure to appear. While I was momentarily convinced that there was a giant conspiracy behind and/or the server hated me, after a great deal of back and forth between myself and my hosting provider we discovered that one of the databases had decided to play nasty.

I have no idea what the root cause was, but happily everything seems to be running as it’s meant to.

Other than that, the domain will be migrated to a new server in the near future – for reasons of storage and bandwidth usage; it will also enable me, hopefully, to host my own AMVs on the site (when I get around to making them one day). The shift should be more or less seamless, so the majority of you won’t notice anything, but just in case there are some glitches that will be the likely reason.

I’ve been quiet recently, for the simple reason that I’m currently working on Mitsuki’s (my mascot character) character profile, which I’ll be making live soon on what will be her first birthday. Any input, of course, will be welcome :)

See you all then.

As many of you probably know by now, Vocaloid3 will be released later this year. As far as I know most of our favourite Vocaloids will have their voicebanks adapted to the new version, so we won’t be losing Miku, Luka, Gumi and any of the other old favourites.

Of course, with the new package being released, it also presents an oppurtunity for a new Vocaloid to join the ranks – the new character was designed by well-known eroge artist CARNELIAN – and you can see the pictures of her below.

The newest (currently nameless) Vocaloid © Studio DEEN & surfersparadise

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SEGA uploaded a video of the Mikunopolis concert on Youtube yesterday – it’s an 8-minute (give or take a few seconds) video summary, if you will, of the concert – and it’s also available in HD if you feel like watching it full-screen.

I still don’t know if a DVD/BD of the concert is going to be released – but this particular video gives me some hope. In time for Christmas would be good :3

Here’s the video – enjoy:

There are very few things that will drag me out of bed at the crack of dawn. Work being one of them, sadly, but then again you never really have a choice there. As for the others – almost nothing, except that this weekend, at about 4AM on Sunday morning, I yanked myself out of bed, and with great anticipation parked off in front of the PC to catch Miku and the other Vocaloids live in concert at the 2011 Anime Expo in Los Angeles.

As much as I would like to regale you with the various horrors of getting up at that time of the morning, instead of the usual … say … 12 in the afternoon, I’m kinda guessing that’s not why you’re here – so we’ll get on with talking about the actual concert.

Two things before I move on. First – there’s a lot of images after the jump. And second – while I would love to post videos of the actual concert – SEGA has been actively hunting down videos on Youtube – for reasons I’ll make apparent later in this post – and there is no guarantee that what I post now will still be available later.
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According to Moetron, one of my wishes for 2011 has come true after all – due to my inability to instantly jet across to the US (along with thousands of other people, I guess), I was getting depressed about the fact that I was going to be missing yet another Miku concert.

Happily though, NicoNicoDouga once again steps in, and it was announced recently that the concert would be streamed live via the Japanese video-sharing service. Tickets to the actual live show has long since been sold out, so I’m willing to bet that this will be a happy bit of news for the several people who weren’t able to get their grubby paws on a ticket.

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