The law doesn’t touch this
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is set to pass new legislation restricting the sales of manga depicting certain sexual acts to minors under eighteen.
Contrary to what certain easily-excitable individuals may proclaim, this is not a ban and this is not the end of the anime. But it will certainly pose a huge problem to the industry.
(Sauce)
“I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes”
WikiLeaks may turn out to be the real-life Laughing Man. Whether as a hero or villain, it has already secured a spot in history with the release of US embassy cables.
The release of a quarter of a million confidential to secret diplomatic cables will be remembered as another milestone heralding the rise of non-state actors as a major influence on the development of the global order. But is it still too soon for the digital rebel to triumph over the physical establishment?
How the mighty has fallen. Once upon a time, Microsoft could sell garbage and people would still buy them because it was the only garbage in town. Now it’s desperately playing catch-up to iOS and Android with its late-to-the-game abysmally-named Windows Phone 7 operating system.
Naysayers are already predicting a Kin-like premature demise for WP7 and that may very well turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But for this ethereal moment, I am happy with my LG Optimus 7.
Recently, renowned sci-fi writer William Gibson of Neuromancer fame annoyed a bunch of Miku fanboys when he tweeted, “Hatsune Miku doesn’t really rock me. I want higher rez, less anime.” This was immediately parsed by some to mean that he hates all things anime and wishes horrible things to happen to otakukind and hilarity ensued.
Coincidentally, I have been spending some time thinking about the concept of virtual idols recently and just picked up a copy of Gibson’s Idoru novel that touches on this exact issue. Incidentally, it has a pseudo anime-style cover.
A very expensive piece of plastic
Or the one where I got to see SCANDAL perform live but showed up too late to get an autograph. Alternatively, it is also acceptable to refer to it as the one where I still had yet to buy an external flash for my camera and ended up taking shitty photos.
Oh wait, that applies to all of them. Bazinga. How about we just call it the one where it was AFA X and I went there.
An extremely short trailer for Makoto Shinkai’s latest project “Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo” has been released on the official site. The length and amount of plot details contained are about the same as the Byousoku 5cm trailer.
It looks like he is actually moving out of his comfort zone into more adventurous fantasy territory. There’s a really strong Ghibli vibe in this one, both in terms of design and setting, but since the character designer is still Takayo Nishimura as in 5cm, I suppose this is more of a deliberate homage and probably doesn’t actually have any Ghibli involvement.
日本鬼å (ri ben gui zi) is a common disparaging term in China for Japanese people, dating back to the Sino-Japanese War(s). After the recent Diaoyu/Senkaku geo-political drama, the term has seen a resurgence in popularity in China, where the anti-Japanese movement comes back in fashion every so often.
Some creative Japanese folks noticed that 日本鬼å can easily be parsed as a female Japanese name “Hinomoto Oniko” and the moé-fication project began.
A Japanese blog (that has since been made private) translated some responses obtained from Chinese netizens. Most of the reactions can be summarized as, “What is this I don’t even-” but one guy calmly said, “Please give her long straight black hair.”
We have won one or two Internets before in our lifetime and now we can finally claim our hitherto figurative prize.
The entire hosted content of the defunct Geocities free hosting service will be released as a 900-gigabyte torrent file by a group called Archive Team. I’m sure we all have fond childhood memories and traumas associated with the pop-ups-with-flashing-cursors monster that was Geocities. Here’s the chance to relive it.
I’ve long been a keen observer in the growing war of opinions over the future of intellectual property rights. Just a few days ago, ABC, NBC and CBS decided to block Google TV devices from streaming from their websites, joining Hulu in what appears to be a last-ditch effort in forcing Google to cough up concessions it really shouldn’t have to. This got me thinking, so I shall leave a few notes here for my future reference.
Two of the NDS’ top selling franchises decide to get into bed together. I suppose this makes one compelling reason to get an overpriced Nintendo 3DS.
