I am collecting the Blu-rays for the Studio Ghibli movies. I love the studio and most of their movies, so I have set out to collect all of their BluRays! I mentioned in a post before as to how I started my collection, and now when Porco Rosso arrived I can blog about how my collection has grown.
Kiki was given to my for my birthday in February by my good friends from the anime club and Porco Rosso I ordered myself, because it is my second favorite movie out of all the Ghiblies, so I had to have it! Lets see how long it will take for me to finish my collection.
Why have I not seen this movie up until now? Its a Quentin Tarantino movie, yet I have just watched it last week! Well, to be honest, I haven’t seen any of his other movies, but I have heard very good things about them and some people even say that he is a genius when it comes to film making. There is no reason why it took me so long to watch Kill Bill, but I am grateful to German for making me watch it (just like that: “we are watching this movie now, no buts!”). I will just give a brief overview of the show and wont get into much detail, so there will be no spoilers.
The story revolves around the main character ***** (played by Uma Thurman) who was supposed to be killed along her friends and fiancée during their ‘wedding’. She wakes up 4 years later after a coma and is seeking revenge. Then we slowly learn of her story, and also how and why this whole “incident” happened.
Why is this show so amazing? Of course the plot - it is easy to follow, and all makes sense in the end. Then the actors - wow, just wow, all the actors preformed magnificently, I think even some won an Oscar for their acting. And of course Tarantinos crazy story telling techniques and camera angles. Heck a good 15 minutes of the first Kill Bill was made as an anime and then another 20 or so minutes were in black and white. As most of his other movies this one had a lot of killing, blood and pure violence which is just so much fun to watch. Another aspect of these movies that I really loved was that when the action was happening in Japan, the actors who played the yakuza were actual japanese actors who I have seen in japan made yakuza movies and they were speaking proper japanese. Same goes for the old Chinese guy.
Overall it is a great movie, which I would recommend everyone to watch.
My holiday is over, its time to go back to Sydney, my current home, where my friends and loved ones are eagerly awaiting my return. It was fun, this month flew by very quickly. I got to see my parents and meet some of my high school friends as well as my best friend German (Herman - Гера). He left for Austria, I left for Australia.
This time I didn’t have any trouble checking in and I got my tickets to Sydney straight away. I managed to evade a overweight luggage fine, by 100g, my suitcase had 23.9kg in it, PERFECT!
Now I am sitting in Helsinki airport, waiting for my next flight to Singapore and the later of to Sydney.
The title reminded me of the opening song of the TV series Superjail! The series is seriously psychedelic, so I will not recommend any sane person to watch it. Anyway here is the song:
(DO NOT WATCH IF YOU CANT HANDLE GORE AND PEOPLE DYING)
See you guys in Sydney soon. Im arriving on Friday in the morning, but will most likely be dead, so I will see people either on the weekend, or once semester starts.
I was introduced to this game by my friend Patrick. I remember that day well, it was before one of our club karaoke sessions, Pat came over and said something along these lines: “Hey Vadim, I know you love juBeat, here is a game that will test your skills even more. Its called Super Hexagon.”
At the time I didn’t know what I had gotten myself into. This game is seriously addictive. Why? well because you want to beat it!
The mechanics are rather simple: turn the small triangle in the middle around the hexagon and try evading the incoming lines. There is always a gap which you can go through, the thing is… with each level, the speed of the lines coming towards you increases. To clear the level you need to survive for 60secons. Of course you can go over and prove that you are the very best, like no one ever was, cause you dont have to pass that test, that is not your real cause. There are 6 levels overall: hard, harder, hardest, hardester, hardestest, hardestestest. Each with its own color scheme and tricks. In the beginning you have 3 levels unlocked and then by clearing them you unlock the other 3.
You don’t think its hard? Well take a look at the trailer.
Finally after over 6 months of playing it, I finally managed to clear the hardestestest level and complete the game!
Thats it, its over, I’m done… or am I? This game doesn’t have a end, you can keep on going, keep on improving your score, keep on bragging to your friends at how awesome you are XD.
Is the game good? You bet it is. Could anyone play? If you know how to touch a screen or press a button then yes! Would I recommend it? To anyone and everyone now!
Genshiken Nidaime - The third season of an anime about otaku in a university anime club. Loved the first 2, loving the manga, definitely a must watch, cause the are referencing new anime and thats just so cool.
Gin no Saji - an anime about agriculture, somewhat like Moyashimon. Made by the same guy who made the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, so the artstyle looks very similar.
Danganronpa - Mystery anime with a survival game similar to Mirai Nikki, based of a game, should be good.
Kimi no iru Machi - The manga was good, had high hopes for the anime, not that great so far…
Shingeki no Kyojin - Best series of last season by far, and I would even say that its the best series this year, it has generated way to much hype. The series is very solid and has a good premise. If you dont trust me, here is a link to a first impression video by AnimeZone.
Wata Mote - amazing manga, amazing series. Unpopular girl trying to live a normal high school life and is failing, but in a cute way :)
So there you have it. Its a big list, so I have no idea how I am supposed to keep up to date with all of this, AND do well in my studies this semester… Буду стараться, чё!
I went to my good friend Clara’s blog and saw an article about Pixar. Well Pixar being my favorite western animation studio (Shaft, KyoAni, Ghibli are still my top3 in japan) I just had to read it. It is a interesting theory by this guy - Jon Negoroni but its so crazy that it might even be true! Hey they even mention time travel to fit in Monsters Inc and Brave.
As Clara put it, she was:
blindmown.
I concur! After reading this theory I have the sudden urge to to rewatch all the Pixar movies in the chronological order that he made as if they were connected.
Today I finally finished this great game. Wow, just wow. I really love puzzle games and I can say this is a very high quality puzzle game. It makes you think out of the box (or should I say cube XD). I am talking of course about Antichamber.
You start off in a dark room wondering what you need to do. Then the sign says jump, so you jump! And you fall. In this game you cant die, your character doesn’t have a health meter, you just walk around and solve these puzles and figure out where the hell do you have to go next. Seriously this game bends your mind. Say for example you have a choice go up or down, you go up and end up where you were then you naturally go down and end up in the same place again!
Don’t even try to understand the map, its impossible. Trying to figure out where to go next is hard, but a piece of advice: don’t go seriously out of your way to get somewhere. If its near impossible, but requires you to build a bridge of blocks and it takes you more than 5 minutes to do it, stop, that’s the wrong way. If I had to compare it to anything, I’d say its a lot like Portal, but you dont have distinct levels and there is no GLaDOS leading you to cake.
To sum up this game will make your brain hurt, it is just that good. So if you have a PC I strongly recommend you get Antichamber on Steam now!
Kaplan, A.M. & Haenlein, M 2010, ‘Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media’ Business Horizons, Vol. 53, Issue 1, pp. 59-68.
Kickstarter, kickstarter, kickstarter… This service is changing they way the world works - games, movies, tech and now even anime is using Kickstarter to gather funds for creating their projects. This time around we have Studio Trigger who brought us Inferno Cop and Little Witch Academia and coming out with Kill la Kill in Fall has decided to use kickstarter as a platform to aquire funds for creating a sequel to Little Witch Academia.
The original Little Witch Academia (LWA) was creating during the Young Animators Training Project 2013 where basically the japanese governments funds the creation of anime. This new studio has staff from the original Gainax who worked on Gurren Lagann and _Panty & Stocking* so naturally the whole western community is super hyped.
/a/
Their initial goal was to raise 150,000$ and they gave us 30 days to do this. Well in the first minutes of the kickstarter page going live a thread on both 4chans /a/ and reddits r/anime appeared with a discussion of this event. I backed this project when it had around 30,000$ already, so 1/5 of the way. At that time I already thought that this is going very fast, but what happened in the next 3 hours completely blew my mind. Not only did the project get funded in less than 5 hours after it was put up, but the thread on /a/ reached over 6k posts with the last 1k being something along these lines: ” today is the day /a/ saved anime”, “project funded, good job /a/nons”, etc. From the post you could see that some people backed from 50$ to the maximum 10,000$ (which is craaaaazy if you ask me, but I gave my 100 to support based Trigger). Of course the producers were not expecting the project to be funded in 5 hours and now they are thinking of stretch goals.
Later on there were even discussions on how Japanese otaku don’t like this system and don’t like how local studios are seeking help from gaijin (foreigners). Also as it seems they didn’t like the anime as much as the western audience did (which is strange as we love this show).
Oh you can also view the episode here on YouTube, but they said they will take it down at some point:
So what do I think about this?
There are 2 things that can come from this: they succeed and set an example for the industry or they succeed here but fail on everything else. What do I mean by that, well…
- They will succeed with this project no dobt, hell they are already sitting at 300,000$, which is double what they wanted.
- The anime industry in Japan might start to recognise westerners as a potential new audience for their works and they might even change the way they think before releasing a new anime, like actually considering us western otaku. If this happens, it will be a serious game changer, because all non japanese otaku combined I think have more people then just japanese otaku. And if all these people can legitemetely get their hands on the shows they love and if these shows are reasonably priced (in comparison to the countries economy) then the studios could make more money then if they concentrate on Japan alone. What else could happen is that the prices on anime could fall in Japan and increase overseas, potentialy leveling them equal.
- On the other hand though everything could go horibly wrong. What I mean is that japanese otaku tend to bycot shows or even studios if they cater for foreigners, especially koreans. There have been cases like this before. In this case even if LAW2 is a success because of kickstarter and crowdfunding, japanese otaku might just boycot Kill la Kill when it comes out thus making Trigger lose money and potentially disband. (it will be time for /a/ to save anime again).
But right now its just a guessing game as to what happenes next. Lest wait and see. This could eiher be the day/month when gaijins proved that they care about anime and that their voices and opinions should be heard, or the time when japanese otaku destroy a briliant studio because they are racist.
