Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

As for announcements, I hope to add a few things in the next couple of weeks. I have plenty of article ideas along with some end of fall 2007 series reviews. If I have one new year’s resolution for this site, I really want to add more content quicker.

To all who follow this site, thank you for consistently visiting this site. I really hope to make this site larger and better. It is for the readers of anime blogs that us writers keep ourselves motivated. Thanks.

Have a great holiday whatever it may be…

Quick Thought: DVD upcoversion making anime look better?

So two days ago, I received my new Panasonic DMREZ27K DVD recorder. I originally intended for it to be my gift to my family. (Actually Panasonic DIRECT just stamped the UPS label on the factory box and sent it as is. It also got to my house before I got home.) Now that everyone at home knows, I decided to set it up with the current home entertainment system. I got it set up, but I didn’t have enough time to test the record functions. I was able to run a few anime DVDs to test the play functions quickly and I thought “ooo… perdy…”.

2007 Year in Review – Top 5 Anime News Stories

This is the first post in (hopefully) a set of posts about this past year in the world of anime. I plan to do at least another post on my personal favorite anime from 2007. So for now enjoy this first post on the major news stories of 2007.

So thinking back at the 2007 anime news stories, I wanted to pick out news stories from both Japan and North America that had an affect on anime in the States. I tried to list these more as major news themes than individual stories. So here are the top five anime stories of 2007 that I came up with:

5. Government Involvement in Anime

Both the Japanese and American governments have done things that may affect anime in the future. The American government has increasingly focused their attention to the regulation of child pornography which may lead to possible increased censorship of anime. On the Japanese side, the Japanese government has been particularly active with anime this year. The government is open to actively promoting anime as a cultural export which has also seen some criticism in a major American publication. Yet promotion also comes with some policy as the government looks to possible censorship because of poll and asks the American government to stop the distribution of illegal animation online. Along with this, the Japanese government also is looking into realizing “Gundam”.

Seriously Japan. You know that if you don’t get there first, the North American Colonial Army of Britannia (*cough*United States*cough*) will flatten Tokyo with their Knightmare (*cough*George Bush Class*cough*) frames.

Reflections on NYAniFest 2007

Otaku and the City, what’s the worst that can happen?

So the New York Anime Festival was last weekend. After a little fighting with bro-ham, I “won” the right to provide the review of the show for you folks out in the blogosphere. After some thought, however, I decided I had not been to festival enough (We only went on Saturday), to give an honest review of the proceedings. So this will more likely take the form of “things that struck me as interesting” post. Here we go:

1. The Industry “Force” is strong in this one. The NYAniFest brought nearly all of the major players in the Anime and Manga industry into the Jacob-Javits center. From ADV to MediaBlasters, and from Del-Rey to Tokyopop, it seems the industry couldn’t give up the chance to advertise themselves in the city that never sleeps.

Seriously? Looks like Bandai is planning to milk this kitty dry, or until they get the rights to the second season. Looking forward to Code Geass and Lucky Star though.

2007 Anime Conventions & My Ever-increasing Pile of Debt

…is exactly how I felt when I looked at my credit card bill this morning…

After attending Unicorn Table in concert at the New York Anime Festival, I have finally completed my list of conventions I was willing to attend this year. I already mentioned before that at the end of this past weekend, I would’ve attended five conventions. Here were the conventions I attended:

• AnimeNEXT 2007 July 6th – 8th (Attended July 7th), Secaucus, NJ
• Zenkaikon 2007, October 13th, King of Prussia, PA
• Shikkaricon 2007, October 27th, Newtown, PA
• TandokuCon 2007, November 9th – 11th (Attended November 10th), Philadelphia, PA
• New York Anime Festival 2007, December 7th – 9th (Attended December 8th), New York, NY

This year was actually the first year I started going to conventions. I wasn’t able to go attend cons previous years as I was particularly stingy with my money (as a broke college student). Now that I have graduated and became a working member of society (woot), I can actually pay to go to cons and buy a reasonably good amount of dealers room stuff. Here are some of my thoughts about the cons I went to: