Final Impressions / First Impressions / Gundam Unicorn / OVA/Movie

Gundam Unicorn – 07 (END)

「虹の彼方に」 (Niji no Kanata ni)
“Over the Rainbow”

It’s been quite a journey with Gundam Unicorn–a four year journey in fact–but the seven-part movie-like OVA series finally comes to a close. Was it worth the wait? The short answer is yes, especially for a longtime fan of the franchise like myself, whose perspective of the Universal Century timeline has been forever changed.

Miscellaneous / Random Musings

As You’ve Probably Noticed…

…the site’s been down for the past couple of days. I managed to put up a maintenance message for a good part of time, but for those who missed it, the server had a hardware issue that required some emergency maintenance. The short story is that the hard drive was failing. To make matters worse, the RAID-1 mirrored drive that’s supposed to have me covered in this situation actually failed back in July without my knowledge, which left the site running on a single faulty drive that needed to be backed up and swapped out immediately so that both drives could be replaced.

With the help of Mentar and his friend Fruit, I managed to get a full up-to-date backup of the site, so nothing was lost — not even a single comment — unlike the crash we had back in the day on Aniblogger. It took me longer than I would’ve liked to reconfigure the server with a new Debian (Squeeze) distro, but everything should be up and running now. I expect there to be some hiccups, so please let me know if you encounter any issues (performance or otherwise). Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Note: Expect a flurry of posts to be published, as the writers have been staying on top of things during the downtime.

Season Preview / Series Introduction

Summer 2012 Preview!

With the summer season just around the corner, I thought I’d poke my head in and give an overview of the 26 new shows lined up. At first glance, there are some noteworthy continuations such as Rinne no Lagrange Season 2 and Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon II, but a closer look reveals some gems such as Yuruyuri ♪♪ and Moyashimon Returns. In terms of all-new series, we have the highly anticipated Sword Art Online, an adaptation of Accel World creator Kawahara Reki’s other virtual reality fantasy novel — TARI TARI, another original slice-of-life series by P.A. Works — Natsuyuki Rendezvous, a romance/drama airing in the noitaminA time slot — plus a good selection of romantic comedies to round everything out. So without further ado, let’s have a look shall we?

Note: I don’t plan to write any more season previews while I’m on my indefinite hiatus. This was a special case since I was personally asked to write this season’s.
* This preview will be kept at the top for the next while, so be sure to scroll past it or check the Recent Entries on your right for new posts.

Miscellaneous / Random Musings

New Contributors On Their Way!

First off, I would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who took the time to apply and expressed their interest in helping keep Random Curiosity running like it’s always been. The outpouring of support has been great and I really wish I had the time to thank each and every one of you individually.

Given the number of promising candidates, I actually increased my initial plan of 3-4 new writers to seven and have already contacted them. If you weren’t contacted, please don’t feel slighted in any way. There were so many great people to choose from that I could’ve easily brought on 10-15 new writers. I guess that’s to be expected of the best readership that I’ve had the pleasure of writing for over the years, but I had to draw the line somewhere and not make this sudden influx of new writers too overwhelming for longtime readers.

You can probably expect introductory posts to trickle out over the course of the week, as well as first posts by at least a couple of the new writers who will be finishing coverage of some of my remaining shows. I hope you’ll extend a warm welcome to them like you did for me when I first came on board.