Author: Tom

I have been blogging about anime for more than a decade. My other interests include sports, legal affairs, and philosophy.
No comments

Megumi Momono, Movie Lover

  By ,


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.

No comments

Yuri Kuma Arashi At Its Halfway Point

  By


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

2 Comments

I Attended AOD 2015 on Saturday

  By

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

No comments

So I started a side blog this week

  By


On Sunday, I began writing on a side blog that will focus on sports fiction (anime, manga, films, comics, etc.) and I’ve made a couple news-related posts on it so far. My intention is to cover smaller items that I likely wouldn’t bother fleshing out on here as well as profiling various sports series and other media. I also created a preliminary page to keep track of sports-related panels that have been presented at fandom conventions over the years since there’s been a growth in those, paralleling the popularity of simulcasted sports anime.

I’m still early on in this project so feel free to make suggestions on possible improvements.

No comments

Three Books About Japanese Movie Posters

  By , , ,

At Anime Expo 2011, I bought a book called Anime Poster Art for a discounted price of $5 from Akadot/DMP’s dealers hall booth. I looked through it at the time, intending to write something about it, but I didn’t get around to doing so.

Four years later, I found that two similar poster-focused books from the same cocoro books imprint – Japanese Movie Posters and Silver Screen Samurai – had cheap listings on digital storefronts such as Amazon’s Kindle store. I decided to buy both to go along the physical copy of Anime Poster Art that I still own.

Continue reading

11 Comments

Before Twitter and Tumblr: Thinking about older anime blogs

  By

Seeing the above tweet by Spiritsnare last night sent me into a whirlwind of thinking about bygone and still surviving aniblogs that started in the previous decade (2000-2009). While memories were swirling around in my head, I realized that this May will be my ninth anniversary of blogging on a semi-regular basis – not as long as AWO has been podcasting (December 2005) but it feels like long in Internet time.

Continue reading