Miscellaneous

Server Maintenance Complete

Sorry the server maintenance took longer than expected, it took longer than we expected for the hosting company to actually get the replacement server in place, then about 12 hours to reconfigure it. The site (and server) should be more stable now that we have the bad hardware replaced. 🙂

Comments have been reopened on all posts, be sure to let us know if you encounter any problems!

Miscellaneous

Server Maintenance Tonight

We will be taking down the server to do some maintenance late tonight starting at approximately 3AM Eastern Standard Time. All comments will be disabled around 9PM so that we can back up the databases before the maintenance. If everything goes well, the server should be back up and running normally sometime tomorrow (Thursday), though I’m not sure exactly when.
Comments have now been disabled.

Miscellaneous

Random Curiosity Power Rankings – June 2007

In Random Curiosity’s endless pursuit to distract you from real-world productivity, we’ve devised another way to hopefully make your summer days a little less boring. Introducing…monthly power rankings! Pachi pachi pachi.

Those who follow sports will be familiar with these – sites like ESPN typically have weekly power rankings to track teams’ progress throughout the season. If anything, it’s just fun to compare things. The difference with the anime rankings and those in sports is that we’re trying to compare things that pretty much fall in completely different genres, and don’t even go head-to-head against each other any sort of way outside of TV ratings, which we don’t have access to nor really want to bother with, since Japanese people have strange tastes anyways (who the hell watches crayon shin-chan).

June 2007 Rank (LW) Title Comment
1 (1)
 Gurren Lagann Even (especially) with the unheralded loss of Kamina, GL grabs the top spot with its ability to maintain its distinct wackiness, feverish action, and likeable characters. The addition of flowery Nia to brighten up the gloom was a brilliant move – which begs the question, Yoko or Nia? Big guns are hot, but so are flower petal pupils.
2 (2)
 Denno Coil DC is a lovable series because it dares to dream, and yet doesn’t get greedy. A great premise coupled with solid animation and upbeat action, together with an uncertain yet anticipated ending – all the makings of a great show. After a strong showing in episodes 1-3, an epic episode 4 bumps it to the second spot. Who would’ve thought, such a special show came so late in the season.
3 (3)
 Seto no Hanayome I was a little surprised that the whole show moved to a generic school setting, but my doubts were cast aside as SetoHana keeps hitting us hard with uproarious humor and falling sakura petals, at the same time introducing several more interesting characters. Weird thing is, one of them is a Haruhi clone, the other an Akira-sama clone. Points for having the most unique beta-male character in recent memory.

More after the jump….

CODE GEASS / Random Musings / Tsubasa Chronicle

Random Musings – GEASS Updates and Tsubasa OVA Edition

  • There will be a new theme song for episodes 24 and 25 of CODE GEASS called Hitomi no Tsubasa by access. The song is already being played on the airwaves in Japan, so copies of the full version are floating around the Internet. If you have a Nico Nico account, you can listen to it here, and someone has also put a fan-made opening sequence with that song onto Youtube. I’ve listened to the song several dozen times now and although it started off sounding like an average T.M.Revolution song, I really like it now. The song goes on sale July 4th as part of access’ binary engine album.
  • Despite the special premieres announcement from last month, there is still no official television air-date for episodes 24 and 25. I believe speculation and sources place the time in early August, but again, no official word. There have been, however, quite a lot of spoilers, much of the former courtesy of anime magazines. According to Celiss Galvea, the confirmed spoilers are:
    Show Spoiler ▼

  • Speaking of which, the latest batch of magazines – Newtype, Hobby Japan, Animedia – have some very nice covers. The one pictured above is the spread from July’s edition of Newtype, and you can find scans of the others here. I especially liked the CLAMP-drawn cover of Newtype and the one of C.C. from the July edition of Hobby Japan.
  • And finally, some other CLAMP related news. A lot of people have been asking me about what happened to the next season of Tsubasa Chronicle since this spring season passed us by without the third series. There’s been a lot of speculation about whether it was because the next part of the story was too violent or because CLAMP was unhappy with the production or whatnot. In any case, it was announced today (sort of) that Tsubasa will be getting a special OVA called Tsubasa TOKYO REVELATIONS. I say “sort of” because publisher Kodansha originally posted the image of the manga’s volume 19 cover on their website with the announcement attached, but they have since taken that image down. Based on what was seen before the image was removed, the OVA will supposedly be available through purchasing volumes 21 to 23 of the manga, but details are still sketchy and will probably become clearer once there is an official announcement.