Posts Tagged “News”

According to a post made yesterday on TorrentFreak, anime fans who use BitTorrent sport the highest share [seed/leech] ratio (2.5) over other more popular categories like TV shows (1.87) and applications (1.53). However, anime only made up 5.4% of traffic whereas “TV shows” was the most popular category at just under half the total traffic, 49.68%. Also, something interesting to note is that only 10% of torrents offered are TV related; anime torrents make up 4.3% of all listings.

The stats given in the post were based on a sample of over 400,000 .torrent files from public BT sites. Supposedly these numbers will be reported monthly so it’ll be interesting to see how they change in the future. Personally, I’ve started to use IRC more than BitTorrent to get my fansubs especially if the series is more than a couple years old and there are only a couple seeders.

An post on Japan Probe mentions that the tax office of Oharu in Hokkaido has put up for sale rare figures owned by a toy retailer who didn’t pay his taxes. The unopened figures included characters from Sentimental Graffiti among other ’90s love simulation games. The department uses online auctions site like Yahoo! to sell other seized items like cars and paintings and back in February, over 100 bids were made for four figures with the highest bid at 7,250 yen. Another ten sets are currently being hocked and bids will be accepted until May 1. Don’t ask me where, though – if you’re interested, you should be motivated enough to search for them yourself. Let this be a warning to all you collectors out there, especially if you’re running a business.

Not quite at that stage yet…

Almost everyone in the fan community dislikes 4Kids Entertainment for how they have handled titles like One Piece and some of them wish they would go out of business. Well, the company reported on Friday a $2.3 million net loss for the quarter ending December 31, 2006 and a $1.0 million loss for the year ending 12/31/06 (net gain for 2005 was $5.1 million), but they still have over $18 million in cash and $111 million in total cash and investments so they’re not going out of business in the immediate future. However, there is room for concern as their net revenue as steadily decreased over the past two years from $99.1 million in 2004 to $71.8 million in 2006.

UPDATE (3/2/07 6:30PM PST): I posted some corrections regarding the streaming issue and gave some impressions after watching it.

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I was watching the Oscars last night and thought of the American Anime Awards that were awarded the night before on Saturday at New York Comic-Con. While I am glad that the presentation is more tasteful than other genre-based award shows like the Spike Video Game Awards, I have four suggestions on how to improve the AAA’s (the Anidubs?) for next year.

Suggestion 1: Limit the Eligibility Period
The seemingly only criteria for eligibility is that an anime or manga must be available in the US during the previous year (e.g. 2006). This means that an anime could be nominated in multiple years if it gets a thinpack release in a different calendar year than its debut on the US market. This multi-year nomination problem also affects manga because something like Fruits Basket (the winner for best manga) with more than 10 volumes will likely have its volumes released over a number of years. In an interview with ANN, Milton Griepp from ICv2 was asked about this. Below are both the question and Griepp’s response: Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE: image not from the upcoming game.

According to ANN, Ideafactory is making a Ouran Host Club romantic adventure game targeted at women for the PS2, due to come out in spring 2007 in Japan. I guess this isn’t exactly a case of life imitating art but more like games imitating anime and manga since Renge, the host club’s self-imposed manager, went to Japan because she was a fan of a relationship game (a parody of Tokimeki Memorial) featuring lookalikes of the host club’s members. I hope the characters have the same voices and I wonder if Haruhi would be available as a love interest…

[via kottke]
The Washington Post has an article about how the old method of making kimonos from scratch is dying in Japan, particularly in Kyoto’s Nishijin district. Many are being made in China and those kimonos are made in Japan are woven with cheaper imported silk rather than Kyoto silk.

Here is the main problem:

Fewer Japanese are marrying today than ever, and those who do largely shun traditional white wedding kimonos in favor of Western-style dresses. A declining birthrate, meanwhile, has meant fewer babies, which in turn has meant fewer sales of kimonos for children’s coming-of-age rites. Nationwide, kimono sales have more than halved in the past decade.

The reporter uses 102-year-old Yasujiro Yamaguchi, one of the last master weavers in Nishijin, as a narrative focal point through the article. He is one of only three left who can create a kimono from scratch, which means planning and weaving it with his own hands to “infuse the intended wearer’s personality”. All three are over 70 and none have any apprentices.

The kimono is one of the few things that I can think of as distinctly Japanese alongside Shintoism and samurai. If one looks at the kanji for the word (??), kimono literally means ’something worn’. It’s a symbol of traditional Japan and subtle beauty. I think this quote from Yamaguchi says it best:

“The kimono is not just about our country,” [Yamaguchi] added. “It is about the Japanese race — our daily rituals, our history, our religion, about who we are as a people. We have to do anything we can to protect the kimono, even if that means making them overseas.”

Right now, I am trying to create rough member card mockups for Anime Club as well as a tentative schedule for the remainder of the year. After the jump: two DVD collections get delayed, hack//ROOTS premiere details, and ADV incentivizes its digital distribution service.
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[via ANN]
Brian Ruh, the editor of Anime Research and author of “Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii”, is putting together a collection of essays tenatively called “Terminal Dogma: Essays on Neon Genesis Evangelion”. That’s a pretty good title right there but there’s another interesting thing about this project: Ruh is soliciting submissions from not only academics, but also anime fans who haven’t done graduate work and such. The article lists a list of fifteen likely topics to covered although there may be a couple more if there are some good essays from off the list. Read the rest of this entry »

For some reason, I’m still subscribed to ADV’s email newsletter. Most times I don’t bother to read it but yesterday, I found something interesting. This particular edition was promoting the company’s presence at Anime Weekend Atlanta, which apparently is taking place next weekend (Sept. 22-24). Near the bottom were dates of Anime Network premieres.

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Mark Beall over at Cinematical reports that producer Gerald R. Molen (Jurassic Park, Minority Report) recently got onto two major projects: one is a sports drama about baseball players in WWII and the other is Lupin the 3rd. The sports flick is scheduled to begin filming in Feburary while no date has been set for Lupin. This news made me think of previous and ongoing anime-to-live-action attempts. Read the rest of this entry »