My Appearance on “Anime That Everyone Disagrees With You On” Podcast


I was recently a guest on the 2nd episode of Flawfinder’s fairly new “Anime That Everyone Disagrees With You On” podcast. My contributions were Voices of a Distant Star (my not-so-fond-of choice) and Madlax (my liked series that others dislike). It was a fun experience being on a podcast again and talking about differing viewpoints.

Yosuke Kuroda autograph on Madlax vol. 1

I mentioned briefly during my “liked” section of the episode that I’d like to rewatch Madlax to see if I enjoy it as much now as I did when I first watched it in college. I still have ADV’s DVD volumes in my collection so it wouldn’t be hard for me to do whenever I get around to the task. I remember many of the characters but not much of the later episodes’ plots.

Megumi Momono, Movie Lover


The day after watching this year’s Oscars ceremony, I was still thinking about the romanticism that was expressed for motion pictures during it, particularly the opening musical number involving host Neil Patrick Harris, Anna Kendrick and Jack Black.


My mind wandered to an anime character who loves watching movies, from a series I watched years ago – Megumi Momono from Mahoraba. Megumi has many DVDs in her room at Narutaki-sou. In episode 11 of the anime, she spends a day with main character Ryushi in a shopping district and they see a movie together, which reminds her of seeing films with her boyfriend. We find out that her boyfriend went overseas for cinema studies.


I have the first four volumes of the manga but I haven’t read much of it so I don’t know if Megumi and her boyfriend see each other again in person or what kind of send-off/wrap-up she has at the end of the manga.

I don’t consider myself a cinephile or a film expert but I do want to watch more movies and dive deeper into older ones to expand my visual culture literacy.

Yuri Kuma Arashi At Its Halfway Point


At the start of the winter 2015 anime season, I wasn’t looking forward to watching many new shows. I ended up trying out 9 first episodes and have 8 of those series currently marked as “watching”, despite being a few weeks behind on some of them. One I recently caught up on was Yuri Kuma Arashi, directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara with animation production by Silver Link.
Continue reading

I Attended AOD 2015 on Saturday

On Saturday, I went to Burlingame (near the San Francisco international airport) for AOD 2015. I had been to two previous AODs that were held in different San Francisco locations – this year’s event took place at the Hyatt Regency, same as in 2014. Registration was pretty seamless for me since I had pre-registered on the con’s website a few days before.
Continue reading