Oh man I’m a lazy bastard…I have not updated in 7 months. The chances are, that Comiket report will probably never happen (see couple posts below).

I begin to realize that laziness sets in when I have to write large amounts of text then layout pictures.

So from now on I will only do one, not both.

With that said, let’s see what happened at Otakon.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I will just post picture highlights…

1) The man, the legend, the director god himself, YAMAKAN / Yamamoto Yutaka / ヤマカン

(He blinked, Orz. He was extremely impressed about my AX 2007 Haruhi poster which I fought an arm and leg for.)

Yamakan in numbers: 3 panels attended, 4 autographs received, 4 pictures taken with him.

In total, I asked four “juicy questions” – that’s right, none of those “What is your biggest influence” “Which one is your favorite work” stuff. Juicy insider stuff only. (W = Me. Y = Yamakan)

Friday panel

• W: I read some interviews in which you stated that you dislike director Shinbo Akiyuki or his work. Can you please tell us what is it that you don’t like about his work?

• Y: First of all, I’d like to say that I do not necessarily “dislike” Shinbo. There was once in the past in which I made some criticisms about him, but I have nothing against the man personally. There was once when Zetsubou Sensei was named as one of the top 5 anime of 2007 and I was somewhat jealous. There are some things that Shinbo does with his work and sometimes the way he does things – that I do not agree with, but this is all nothing personal.  We mutually respect each other, we have worked with the same people on different works, and we have met once and we got along fairly well. So

• W: So, last year there was this entire shitstorm about Nagi-sama being second hand…I’d like to hear your opinions on that.

• Y: Hahaha….well….you see…whether Nagi-sama is used goods or not, it was not even explicitly stated in the original work by Takenashi-sensei, so I don’t see how we can go about speculating whether she’s used or not. I think we should wait for an official explanation.

Saturday panel

• W: I read your blog. So a while ago the director for Basquash! got fired from his position after a few episodes in order to “spice things up a bit.” What is your opinions on that?

• Y: Well, I can tell you this much as someone who personally went through this himself. Let me first say that I do not know the circumstances in that company, or what happened within Satellite internally. However, for fans who actually enjoyed the first nine episodes directed by the original director, the way they announced this change of director was an extremely terrible and rude thing to do.

• W: You are someone who is known to put a lot of effort on details in so-called “live concert” scenes like Haruhi episode 12 Live Alive. I was wondering if you have seen K-On!
  

• Y: Man, I knew this question is going to come on. Let me ask you this, what do you think of the concert scenes in K-On?

• W: They are not as good as Live Alive. (ライブアライブの域に達していません。）

• Y: OK. I have not seen K-On. But the people who work on K-On, many of them are the same people who worked with me on Live Alive, so I am sure that they too put their maximum effort into the concert scenes just like when they did with Live Alive.

There are a lot more questions but I do not remember off the top of my head (actually I remember a couple more) – there was a particularly juicy bit about Endless Eight which he asked us explicitly to “Not upload onto the Internet” so I am not going to do that. The people who did upload it and spread it on the Internet – SHAME ON YOU.

When I find a good report on either or both panels with a more complete transcript, I’ll link them.
There are a couple live feeds from panel 1 and panel 2

Oh ya, me Wotagei‘ing during the Kannagi panel when they played the OP during the Yamakan panel.

Courtesy of Scott from Anime Almanac. Explanation – I love Kannagi, but I love a good Wotagei even more.

2) Aniplex Kannagi panel

So, at the end of the Aniplex TBA (= Kannagi) panel, they said “Hey, we are going to have an audience interactive event now.”

So they brought the Kannagi cosplay girls to do the dance. I already whipped out my LED glowsticks (see video above) to do some good Wotagei to it. Then the Bandai dude said “Who of you know the dance?”

I instinctively raised my hand.

“OK, come on up to the stage and do the dance.”

What?!? Orz…so I was semi-forced to do the dance, which turned out fairly well… Apparently Yamakan was doing the dance behind me as well, amusingly.

I am the Aniplex Idol = =

As a reward for my shamelessness, I was given the poster as in the picture above. It has since then been signed by Yamakan after a few of us hounded him after the panel as he was heading off to the opening ceremony.

3) Inoue Kikuko

First of all, she is a super sweet and lovely lady. She can be 60 for all I care, but she will still be the eternal 17-year old. This is fromthe first autograph session on Friday…when they were not so pressed for time (apparently she was only here for one day…wow).

I got my Clannad After phone card signed (featuring Nagsa + Sanae cosplaying as a school girl). When it was my turn to get my autograph, I asked her to do the 17-year old tsukkomi with me…

Her: Hai, deha, ikimasu. Inoue Kikuko, 17-sai desu.
Me: Oi oi~

Then I got my autograph and this picture taken. Apparently the second session was not so successful – a lot more people were in line, and she wasn’t feeling well so they cut the line off early and a lot of dedicated fans got shafted (me included). At least I got what I wanted (in picture above of course).

4) Mell concert

Not much to say here, except I had a hell of a time. She has great stage presence and the live band is a huge plus. I am sure I did not have as much energy or sweat as much as Jam Project last year, but I still had a great time – especially doing Wotagei (Romance, OAD, PPPH, Mawari anyone?). My calves hurt like hell even until right now. As do the rest of my body. No signed CD album though, unfortunately, those sold out very quickly, but I did get an I’ve bag signed.

5) The gameshow was a success once again

As with the past couple of years, I was involved in Otakon Gameshow because the it is entirely run by CJAS alumni. Not much to say about this either. I hear people thought the questions were too easy – I think we need to spice things up next year.

6) Meeting lots of people – generally not people I knew myself, but more like people I know through friends (particularly through TheBigN). Well met, Omo, Miz, Moyism, Link, and others…remind me if I forgot Orz! Got to do some minimal karaoke with Omo and BigN – the line was extremely long…but I did manage to squeeze in one Diamond Crevasse.

Helped Hendane! with running their booth in the dealer’s room for a couple hours and also for cleanup. Was nice to get a dealer’s badge…can skip dealer line. Greetings to fellow Nekonyan cohorts Shinikenshi, Doc Kyosuke, k.misuzu, and Kaori.

Also met up with fellow CJAS people…BigN, James, Nathan, John, etc etc. Co-conspirators in gameshow.

Once again, this proves my theory correct – Conventions are like a sinusoidal function – on-year / success-year followed by a fail-year / off-year in terms of my primary objective: get autograph and picture taken with guests. This year was a great success after I failed to get a picture last year with Jam Project. This has been an extremely enjoyable experience.

Other miscellaneous:

As usual, there are way too many Mio and not enough Ritsu or Mugi.

On flight from BWI to DTW

If I have anything I want to add, I’ll probably add make a new post. If not, then that is all I have to say about Otakon.

Until we meet again, friends…

12/28/2008. Day 1 of Winter Comiket 75

Today’s itinery:
1) Go to Comiket!
2) Line up for INDUSTRY HALL (West)
3) Scour for expensive goods
4) Drop off stuff @ Hotel
5) ???
6) PROFIT!

In progress…

12/27/2008, I leave from Taipei International Airport, Taiwan, for Japan. My flight was around just after mid-day, and we arrive in Narita a little before 5PM.

Today’s itinery:
1) Meet up with Shinikenshi and Ayu from #nekonyan at the airport. They are folks whom I know through Zalas of Encubed (Shinikenshi is also the eroge peddler many of you know from Hendane! at major North American cons)
2) Get to my hotel in Roppongi, drop off, ready for the big battle ahead

Apparently their flight were slightly delayed so I ended up landing before they did. I headed over to the Softbank booth in a couple floors down and got myself a Japanese phone until they arrived. We split up from there – me and my sister (who was going to Comiket with another friend who’s already in Japan) wanted to drop our stuff off first at the hotel in Roppongi – where I will be staying for the next 4 nights.

From research, I found that there’s this awesome cheap plan for gaijin to get both Suica (the subway card) and Narita Express ticket for 3000 yen, so we did just that. The trip was very smooth, and took less than than an hour. After some hauling luggage around Tokyo, we eventually arrived, my sister met up with her friend, and I dropped my stuff off. Dinner was at the delicious Tenka Ippin ramen restaurant, Roppongi store, which is pictured below. I also snapped some pictures around Roppongi. As many have described, Roppongi is full of foreigners: because it was Saturday night, there were extra many gaijin club bouncers loitering around the entrance to the hundreds of clubs with English signs. Yup, it’s almost like back in Collegetown…almost.

Shinikenshi and Ayu are staying with other #nekonyan cohorts all the way down in Shinkiba, nice and close to Comiket. I wanted to head over and meet up with them but decided the night was late, I’d be better off meeting up with them in the morning. Reducing the weight of my backpack took extra time, so I didn’t sleep until 2:30am.

Total amount of sleep accumulated for the night: 2 hours.

(Pictures to be added until all write-up is done)

I will be going to Japan tomorrow. Less than 12 hours in fact. This will be 5 years since I last been to Tokyo, or Honshuu for the matter…

More to come…

Courtesy of the official May’n mailing list, you can now listen and preview May’n new mini-album on the Internet:

Just follow this link and click on the songs…(Windows Media streaming format)
http://www.jvcmusic.co.jp/-/Discography/A021682/VTCL-60090.html

May’n Street will be released 1/21

The first track, May’n Space, sounds a little more poppy than I expected. It’s Yoko Kanno song of this album.

My impression is that they all sound great – of course they’re just like 10 second previews so it’s kinda hard to tell for now. Except that I thought Lion sounds the same as before XD

This set of picture amused me:

It’s Mizuki Nana and Hirano Aya posing for pictures together (left from Nana’s blog, right from Aya’s blog). I can just feel the horde of Nana fanboys around the world collectively pop their veins when they see this picture while cursing profanities (“Get away from our goddess, you filthy woman!” etc.) Is there anyone out there who is a die-hard Nana fan and doesn’t hate/laugh at Aya, or is a die-hard fan of both? If you are, please disprove me and leave a comment – I wish I am proven wrong.

I admit (which is no secret by now) that I am a huge huge huge Hirano Aya fanboy/worshipper/follower, but I have never been one to laugh at / speak bad of other seiyuu and singers. But from my experience in the seiyuu otaku world, the ones who badmouth Hirano generally fall into the following categories:

1) Mizuki Nana fanboys
2) Horie Yui fanboys
3) Tamura Yukari fanboys
4) Fanboys of other seiyuu

Seriously, are fanclubs and fanboys so insecure that they feel the need to ridicule other popular seiyuu icons in order to make themselves feel better and superior? I for one have never felt the need talk down fans of other seiyuu in order to show my support for Aya. I admit that she’s not perfect – she still needs to work on her singing during live performances (she’s already much better from what I see in Animelo 08), she needs to fire her make-up artist, and I did laugh a little @ Aya Style bikini. But there are many things which she excels and cannot be replaced by others – voice acting (I dare anyone to say with a straight face that strictly in terms of voice acting, Nana is better than Aya), her energy, stage presence, etc.

As for those rumors / slander about Aya originating from 2ch (e.g. “she’s using seiyuu as a jumpboard into the mainstream entertainment!” or “according to animation staff, in reality, she’s a stuck up snob!” or “She’s getting so much coverage because her dad’s a powerful dentsu executive!”, etc.) Well guess what, I really don’t give a rat’s ass about them. Neither should you. Since when can the crap coming out of 2ch ever be taken seriously? INTERNET, SERIOUS BUSINESS!!!!!11111I like VIP and 2ch culture and I find it extremely funny, but anything coming from 2ch should always be taken with a grain of salt because there’s so much trolling.

Just some random seiyuu ota ranting from me…

It is finally here. I have ordered my copy, have you?

全力で買え！！！！ BUY WITH ALL YOUR FORCE!

We must work together and push this CD to #1 again!

Order from HMV….
http://www.hmv.co.jp/product/detail/2807646

Me? I have been busy. I expect activity to start up again sometime during winter break, or perhaps during exam study break.

Oh,  I will be attending Comiket 75 this winter!
12/27 – 1/3 in Japan.

Keep watching this space for May’n 19th birthday celebration (Oct 21)

You may send her your birthday greetings here:

http://mayn.horipro.jp/mail/

or leave a comment in her latest blog post.

Even if you can’t speak Japanese, “Happy birthday” should be sufficient.

http://www.oricon.co.jp/rank/ja/d/

I am at school right now so I can’t post a lot, but CONGRATULATIONS TO THE ENTIRE MACROSS STAFF!

Macross Frontier OST2 ranked #1 on Daily Oricon rankings for Oct 8. Of course I helped too…because already pre-ordered a copy.

INCREDIBLE! AMAZING!

Haha my copy of Nyan Tora came today in the mail courtesy of HMV + EMS. So fast. This is literally same-day international service XD. Pics later.

Also our goddess Hirano Aya’s new single Namida^3 (too lazy to type all 3 out) got #10 on Daily Oricon Singles Rankings. Job well done.

Happy 21st birthday. If she comes to America she can drink alcohol XD

２１歳のお誕生日、おめでとうございます。アメリカでお酒が飲める年齢ですｗｗｗｗｗｗ

I will continue to support you!
これからもずっと応援します。がんばってください！

Hirano Aya’s works in the fall season:
Nonomura Ayumi, Hyakko
Miu Kujo, Linebarrels of Steel
Nagase Minato, Akaneiro ni somaru saka