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Mizuki Nana – Shin Ai PV (WHITE ALBUM OP)

 

First off, Happy Belated Birthday Nana-chan! Despite being fairly knowledgeable about seiyuus and their past roles, I’m not quite obsessive enough to bother remembering their birthdays. Incidentally, I stumbled upon the fact that Nana’s birthday is on January 21st and she just turned 29. Her age makes me wonder if she’s going to tie the knot with anyone soon or if she even has anyone in mind, since she’s nearing the big three O soon. Takahiro Sakurai (Suzaku in CODE GEASS) perhaps? Unlike their North American counterparts though, most Japanese people seem to be so career-oriented that being single at 30 years old doesn’t automatically trigger some sort of mid-life crisis. Interestingly enough, it was Inoue Marina‘s birthday the day before (January 20th, turned 24), Makino Yui‘s the day before that (January 19th, turned 23), and Paku Romi‘s birthday today (January 22, turned 37). I’m not sure what’s up with all the January birthdays, but since they’re all noteworthy seiyuus in my book, best wishes to all of them.

More after the jump…

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Stereopony – Namida no Mukou PV (Gundam 00 S2 OP2)

 

Admittedly, I’ve always preferred female vocals over male ones, but it’s even better when it comes from an all-female rock band. Unconsciously, I tend to associate the ability to play an instrument with musical talent. Anyway, all-female rock bands aren’t something I recall seeing a lot of, with ZONE being one of the more popular ones off the top of my head. I don’t tend to follow “mainstream” Japanese music much nowadays with the constant influx of music from anime OP/ED singles though (some of which may be mainstream), so I’m far from being the most knowledgeable person in this area.

In any case, I’m really starting to like Stereopony‘s music, which has already been featured in Bleach as the 17th ending theme prior to Gundam 00. For those following Bleach, “Hitohira no Hanabira” 「ヒトヒラのハナビラ」 was their first single and did fairly well on the Oricon Weekly Charts, peaking at 25th.

More after the jump…

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Random Musings – The State of the Blog

On this day of Barack Obama’s inauguration (I had to stop myself from titling this post “State of the Union”), here are some notes on myself and the series I’m blogging:

  • I said last month that things should be better for me schedule-wise in this new year, but it hasn’t quite turned out that way. As some of you may know, I’m a grad student right now, and a big project recently came up for review, so I’ve been scrambling for that. That’s the reason Rideback and Soul Eater haven’t been blogged yet, though I did get some time to watch them. I’m probably going to try to continue on normally with writing up Bleach today and Toradora tomorrow and catch up on blogging those two series when I get a chance later this week.
  • Speaking of which, I’ve created a Winter 2009 Schedule page listing all the series I and Trillian will be blogging. You might notice that Tales of the Abyss, Kuroshitsuji, and Michiko to Hachin are not on the list – these series have been dropped. The latter two because Trillian is in the middle of job hunting and doesn’t have the time to cover four series, and Abyss because I had to let go of the show that I was least interested in if I wanted to pick up three new Winter 2009 shows and not kill myself.
  • Concerning Daily Doses, I do hope to restart them at some point and have been contacted by some prospective writers.
  • On a more positive note, I’ve been trying out Twitter as part of a social networking research class I’m taking, and I was surprised at how quickly I was able to create a list of friends just by importing my Gmail contacts. I also found some people I haven’t talked to or seen in a while who are apparently quite active on Twitter. Now I don’t know how much I’ll end up using this or if I’ll integrate it with the blog, but it’s been interesting to play with.
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    Zoku Natsume Yuujin-Chou – 02

    Summary

    While napping in class, Natsume recalls a nightmare about his young classmates calling him a liar and bullying him because they couldn’t see the frightening youkai Natsume could see. After waking, he returns to a world of pleasant school friends and family who don’t know a thing about the fact that he can see youkai, and he’s grateful for it. When his two friends ask him if he’s alright or if he’s not sleeping well, Natsume just tells them everything’s fine and he’s living everyday in happiness… and ironically they joke that his answer reeks of a lie.