Guess the first thing to notice is the site has a new layout and the forum returned to one of the previous look. They’re finished except for a few minor tweaks in Internet Explorer.
There’s a new Strawberry Marshmallow mood set, default Air Gear avatar, a thanks system, personal links and panel when logged in, a new help page, better quality Youtube embedding in posts, an Anime Gerad MySpace was added, and the user blogs have been removed.
It’s nothing too new that the big global chain Borders isn’t doing well. The company lost several million dollars this year from what they normally earn and it can be seen when entering a store. Music and other non-book merchandise has been doing more harm than good. The greeting person they have by the door now is pretty annoying, too. Shelves are getting bare, there’s longer lines, and stores I visited don’t carry any manga from Yen Press (minus the magazine Yen+). It would be a tragedy if such large stores went under. Having such stores around makes getting into manga much easier and Borders does tend to carry more mature series then others (either certain types of romance or graphic action).
It’s been weeks since volume four of Moon Boy was released. No way to get it for myself unless bought online.
Don’t hit the play button if you don’t want to see a kid and his first friend and pet. Having color and some actual animation helps put it ahead of other videos.
This fan made CO2 gun actually shoots and looks like one of the guns found in the Gungrave anime and games. It can hurt you and that’s likely why it’s not for sale. It would have been perfect if there was a similar case and a silver version of the gun to make the pair.
There’s one odd thing about Gungrave: There’s not much of tie between the fandom of the anime and the video games. The anime was more realistic and included romance while the games from Sega were mindless but very styled. Gungrave the anime wasn’t bad, but it has two sides to it. From the start it’s about the friendships and the mafia, but later changes focus on Grave and his powers. Worth watching for drama or playing to shoot everything up in the games…just depends on your interest.
Wikipedia is a wonderful site for information despite the spoilers. It’s best used when you’re writing when you don’t wish to spend time creating a summary or telling some of the readers something they already know. It’s not so helpful when used to explain for you everything you wanted to say. Wikipedia isn’t perfect and nobody is saying that Wiki sites shouldn’t be used or linked to. Many anime and manga pages contain episode summaries on the main page or carelessly drop spoilers. Perhaps it’s the Wiki user’s fault or maybe that’s how the largest encyclopedia site wishes to be, but it’s something to think about before linking, though.
One other issue is giving credit to Wikipedia for information when there’s sources you can link to instead provided by the site itself. It would surely help other sites get some nice attention, too.
I have had series like Bokurano almost ruined, but it does make up for it with the epic CLAMP versus Clamp debate when users were deciding if the mangaka group should be all caps. At the moment it is Clamp. Maybe let CLAMP decide?
Origin ~Spirits of the Past~ is the licensed English name of what was called Gin-iro no kami no Agito. This isn’t so much of a “hey look at this” anime, but “hey it’s been many months and I’m still thinking about it” anime. Origin is one of those Gonzo movies that came out a couple years go when the company stated how they wanted to change their image: A family company that could make movies for everyone and compete with the big corporations like Disney.
To sum up the movie, you have humans on a nature ruling Earth with cities in ruin below ground. Plant beings rule and humans are restricted in certain areas such as places with waters. Nature decides how much water the people get. Nature and humans are suppose to coexist, but with swift destruction of most of the human population and technology, that’s not the case anymore. One day a young boy named Agito finds a machine with people inside. One person appears to still be alive and out comes the girl. This pretty much angers and strikes fear into forest above. This girl (of course named Toola) has something that can allow her to unleash something that can return the balance. The people who live with the forest aren’t the only people, as nearby there is a massive structure in a desert that provides water using technology and machines to keep the forest at bay. As a whole that was their only intention.
If you plan on watching this anime you may want to skip this part for spoiler reasons, but if you’re okay with that then this is what made Origin ~Spirits of the Past~ special. It hit me and my progressive views in ways that disturbed me. Humans are no longer able to develop? The sky is no longer a limit because it makes the world unbalanced. Media and all the comforts that make everyday life as we know it are no more. The goal of the anime is to show that you can’t live without balance and that life should be respected, even if not human.
Years ago scientists wanted a way to make a balance on their own, so they made an experiment on the moon that was suppose to make plant life smarter and better able to compete. Sadly one of the scientists on his own thought that the project would go faster if the plant life was even stronger. This lead to massive dragon like plants shooting across to earth destroying cities and laying ground to the new world. This man is the same who also awoke in a similar machine like Toola, but instead sided with the desert people and (mis)lead them to help him destroy the forest. This all is bothering in more ways than one. The human made machine meant to destroy forests had let’s change our mind and live with the forest feature. That feature was used and the forest showed that people are apart of nature and that nature creates people. That is nice, but that puts humans back to the basics and no way of return. If humans were ruining the environment, why not allow them to develop technology to explore the universe and why must so many people die for balance? After many months after watching this movie, it bothers me that all of our progress became the past and the people who were alive hundreds of years ago moved on.
If you seen Origin ~Spirits of the Past~, you may also like Green Legend Ran. They both have a similar aspects where Earth’s landscape is changed, water is controled, and a young boy who ventures out to save a girl.
