2chan.us

nicovideo just wished me happy new year. happy new year to you too, nicovideo!

I’ll take pictures of my many-man-yen haul from c75 if I can figure out how to get pictures onto the computer I’m using while away from my normal laptop, but until then here are some neat things that I saw on one rss feed or another (actually, i think these were all from katoyuu):

According to the new Dengeki Daioh, Tanaka Romeo (Cross Channel, Yume Miru Kusuri, etc) is going to be writing a story for the extra booklet add-on for Toradora manga vol 2. Out on 1/27, mark your calendars!

Second, Mainichi reports that attendance for all 3 days of comiket hit 510,000 this year, up 10,000 from last winter. I blame Touhou. I saw the number 150,000 for day 1 attendance somewhere and this article says 190,000 for day 3, so I guess that means 170,000 for day 2, unless my math is really just that bad.

Finally, akibahobby has some promo pictures of the rest of the Touhou soft vinyl figure set from Toranoana up. They were showing these off at their industry booth and they look pretty sweet, I might have to break my promise once again to not buy figures that aren’t Yotsuba&!-related.

another news post, what next, episode blogging? anyway,

The official website for Flowering Night 2009 went up two days ago. If you’re not familiar with Flowering Night, it’s a big live show (real dudes playing real instruments dressed up in real skirts!!) of all Touhou arrangements. Tickets will be sold through Toranoana starting (and ending, :| )on 2/8, both through their website and in their brick and mortars, and tickets are 4000-6000jpy, depending on your spot. The event’s at the Makuhari Messe on 3/6. Bands currently listed as in attendance:

Kishida Kyoudan and the Meisei Rockets (if I go this is why)
CROW’SCLAW (also, this)
Sekkenya
SOS -Sound of Swing-
COOL&CREATE (beat mario, my hero)

its gonna be wild. GET HYPE.

Azure & Sands are putting out an unfortunately-named album of Touhou Christmas music at C75, a bargain at 100¥. You all make sure to get it so they can expand into other new kinds of doujin music (ska, sound horizon, j-rap, etc.)

I was going to do a longer c75 post, but I can’t remember what any of the circles are doing. Wi-Z and Project C.K. should be good, anyway.

I’m sure a lot of you out there on the information superhighway have been thinking, “boy, I’d love to get the supercell album but the used prices are just killer!!”, right? I mean, it’s not like any of you folks would think of downloading it… right?

Either way, you no longer have to worry about annoying doujin supply and demand dynamics, cause supercell’s getting his/(their) first album released by Sony! The deluxe package comes with a dvd, so you can have a real dvd pressing of the Black Rock Shooter PV! You nerds better have your wallets out on 3/4/2009!

A few movies for the uninitiated:
Black Rock Shooter
melt

According to this unsourced thread that I will still unconditionally believe, Tsukihime sold almost 20,000 copies for volume 1, then dropped to about 15,000 a disc. F/SN stayed pretty steady at around 25,000 a disc, and the KnK movies so far have been breaking 75,000 a piece total. This Aniplex press release says they’ve shipped out 400,000 discs for the first four movies, and that 183,000 tickets have been sold, grossing around 2 million yen. Not bad when you consider it’s only showing on what, 10 screens?

It seems strange that no one has mentioned this recently, so my apologies if this had been known for years on end:

Wani Magazine has a little bit of info up on their c75 page about what appears to be the successor to ROBOT, their full-color genre-defying anthology full of a lot of my favorite artists. The book’s name is GELATIN, and it is promises us “leading-edge all-original bishoujo comics”. Release date is 2/4, 192 pages (160 color, 32 b+w), B5 size and 1500y.

That alone isn’t enough to get me so excited that I’ll make a blog post about it, though. What does excite me is that Wani managed to bring us another ridiculous lineup of creative and talented illustrators, including some familiar faces from ROBOT. The current lineup:

Naruko Hanaharu
SABE
toi8
Maeshima Shigeki
Ayakura Juu
John Hathway
huke (ps if you haven’t seen the new pv he did check it out)
mota
KEI
Suzumi Atsushi
Houden Eizou
Moriyama Daisuke (can’t find a hp, sorry)
Gorakuin Sakurako (Sekirei manga-ka)
Takamichi (wwwwwww)
Bosshi (aka askray)
miggy

in short, GET HYPE

(This link is old, but it’s new to me!!)

Now, I know a lot of folks aren’t the biggest fans around of Seven Seas Entertainment, after all that KnJ unpleasantness and whatnot, but between trying to break into the US market with a whole bunch of light novels, trying to bring stuff done by Closet Child over here, and on top of that sending me a free copy of Shinigami no Ballad just so that it could be subjected to the verbal diarrhea better known as “me reviewing things”, they’ve got a place in my heart.

With that in mind, after reading this thread on their forums, I want to go to their offices and give them all (especially this Adam Arnold feller) a great big hug. Or maybe a big pat on the back or something, that seems less creepy but unfortunately more patronizing. I mean sure, 2channelers might burn multiple volumes of your manga, but any sort of entitlement complex that “nagi is a slut” betrays pales in comparison to the average American message board poster if this thread is any indication. After that thread I feel like I need to go spend all my holiday Amazon gift certs on light novels, yeesh.

I’m about to go to my last class for the next 3-4 weeks so I promise I’ll do reviews and other things that aren’t stupid nerd news some time soon, but until then:

Zepy had a good post about Comiket circles doing Touhou stuff over the years back in August, and the folks who made that have updated for this year: 1356 circles doing Touhou, up from 885. Good lord.

The other thing that came up last night that I was too busy watching Rosario + Vampire on tv to post about was that some folks on 2ch apparently got the new Mahou Shoujo Ai game a few days early (1, 2, 3), and well, if they’re telling the truth, the game didn’t really get a look-over before going gold, or something. As was pointed out to me by irc last night, this would normally not be a problem, since who the hell looks at anything but tentacles and the various parts that said tentacles interact with, but the problem is that in some scenes, the tentacles are missing. More than the tentacles, actually, it’s that some scenes are missing any art at all, and even the paper dolls might be missing in some scenes.

This is compounded by the fact that the game is a third of the size of the previous installments (500mb on a dvd?!) They’ve also caught some flack for apparently using CG from previous games on their website and on the game box as promo art for the new game. Of course, this could all be a very elaborate, awesome troll (one of “epic” proportions, as i hear the kids say these days), or maybe they got the Doom 3 devs to make this new installment, but otherwise… Matsuri da!!

I was going to make a blog post on ZUN’s latest blog entry about restrictions on doujin products and all, but thankfully Sankaku Complex did a slightly alarmist writeup of it zepy actually did a good writeup of it, saving me some work. In fact, I probably don’t need to make this post either, but I really want to procrastinate on this paper for as long as humanly possible.

Anyway, Maikaze now has a new URL, and you may notice that the website has so many disclaimers on it that I’m tempted to say that it’s a bit of a jab at ZUN. I mean, right under the TOUHOU DERIVATIVE DOUJIN ANIME there’s the big bubble that when you click on it says “THIS WORK IS A DERIVATIVE DOUJIN ANIMATION OF TEAM SHANGHAI ALICE’S TOUHOU PROJECT SERIES” and then a big UNOFFICIAL on the right side of the top banner. Well, I guess being thorough never killed anyone. There’s also a news post that stresses several more times that they are not official, just in case you didn’t get the point.

I’m not sure if this is related or not, but the signed copies of the script books that were originally going to be given out at C75 will also not be distributed out of “consideration of their situation at Comiket”, which I guess could mean “to keep people from getting trampled to death/hypothermia from camping out for a week in advance.”