A short trailer was just put online for Michiko To Hatchin–the story of Michiko; a free-willed “sexy diva” who destroys a supposedly inescapable prison fortress and Hatchin; a girl fleeing her strict foster parents. The two join forces on an improbable escape to freedom. The trailer itself doesn’t seem to show any of the actual scenes from the show, probably an OP clip, but the music and animation were both excellent.

With the production staff Michiko To Hatchin has got, I’m really excited to check this show out. Shinichiro Watanabe, the brains behind Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo will be involved, but not as a lead director this time; he will be involved in music direction. While Hiroshi Shimizu, who has worked in animation for FLCL, Fullmetal Alchemist, Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, will be contributing as a character designer this time around. Also Sayo Yamamoto, an experienced storyboard writer from Death Note, Ergo Proxy, Eureka Seven, Rozen Maiden: Traumend, Samurai Champloo and Texhnolyze will be directing the show.

As you can see, the crew has some big names under their belt, but they are all trying new areas they haven’t done much in, so it should be interesting to see how well they do at it.

Here’s the trailer;

Yeah, I turned it off. It wasn’t exactly all that active (see: no posts at all), so I decided to disable it for now. On the bright side; I finally finished Mass Effect and it was awesome. I might write a post about it soon when I can find the time.

I was hanging out with a friend of mine and he showed me a new card game he got recently called Zombie Fluxx. I had quite a bit of fun playing it and it’s a very cool idea for a card game. Most card games have some set goals and rules that you follow, leaving you shaking in your boots when you look at your cards and see you have nothing of any use. Not Zombie Fluxx–in this game the goals and rules can be completely turned around in a single round, but don’t let yourself think that makes it confusing. It certainly makes you think a bit, but it’s a very ingenious way of doing things.

There is just a single deck of cards that everything is mixed into, at the start of the game each player draws three cards–if any of them are zombies you lay them infront of you and keep drawing until you have 3 cards in your hand. From the start of the game there is actually no condition upon which a player can win, the players actually have to introduce a goal themselves by using a Goal card which can be drawn from the deck, just like anything else. On your first turn you draw one card from the deck and then you can play one card from your hand if you want. The turn doesn’t necessarily end there though. Say, for example, you use a Play 5 Rule card; you can now play more 4 more cards. If you are lucky you might now be able to play a Draw 5 card or something of the like, allowing you to draw a few more cards than what you already drew at the beginning of the turn. There is also event cards that allow you to do nasty things like taking another turn or sending your zombies to another player. As you can probably guess; it’s bad to have lots of Zombies…mostly. There is a few Goal cards you can play that can completely turn the game around for the seemingly hopeless; some goal cards require you to have many zombies, like Zombie baseball…some even require that you have ALL the zombies in play! There is also mean things you can do, like play a Goal card that requires you to have Zombies to win when another player has the Zombie Repellent card.

It’s very enjoyable because there is literally no way to know when another player is about to win the game. If you like Zombies and you don’t hate fun I highly recommend you give this game a try! It’s only about $10 on ebay, how could you go wrong?

I’ve always been an avid supporter of web standards, so I was glad to here that Gecko 1.9, the layout engine used in the Firefox 3 beta, passes the Acid2 test, but I found the future version of Firefox is still lacking one single thing that I feel holds it back rather significantly from being what it could be. That features is the RSS Updates counter that Safari has had for pretty much ever. How long will it take before Mozilla catches on that Firefox’s lack of this simple feature is a deal-breaker for many people? I guess I’ll have to continue using two browsers until Mozilla catches up.

This is a somewhat pointless post, but I thought it was pretty funny when Google gave me this result on a search I made a few minutes ago. Anyone else have any amusing stories of the occasionally quirky behavior of Google’s search system?

For the longest time my MP3 Player was an iPod which, in all appreciation for how it changed the portable media market, is vastly inferior to some of the lesser known Portable Media Players to come out in recent years. The most significant, in my opinion, being the Cowon A3–the perfect portable media player for an anime lover such as myself. Why you ask? Format support–this thing can play just about -anything-. It can play H264 (unforunately it doesn’t yet support Main Profile) and XviD and most importantly; supports all sorts of container formats like OGM and MKV (Matroska Video). What does that all mean? Well, I’ll let you put two and two together; more than half of fansubbed anime is released in H264 format in an MKV container. Until now those have been unplayable on any form of portable media! That’s just the beginning of the A3’s awesomeness!

What makes this thing so great for an anime fan such as myself is that it has subtitle support! For now it’s not quite as comprehensive as I’d like, but Cowon appears to be working hard to make support better. As of now it doesn’t support internal subs, so they have to be extracted from MKVs with MKVExtract and it doesn’t support SubStation Alpha subtitles yet. Sadly SSA subs are the most popular among fansubbers, but fortunately many fansubbers are nice enough embed srt subs as well and for the ones that don’t there is always VobSub’s SubResync.

The A3 was designed to be an all-in-one multimedia device so it can do anything–even things you thought you’d never need. Audio and Video Recording for example; you can record lossless quality audio with the FLAC audio codec and record DVD resolution video up to 3Mbps! Expect to see lots of video captures of video games and such from this thing in the future. The recording system is quite good too; you can record audio and video from the line in, but you can also record it from the FM radio, the built-in microphone or even Wireless Television via DMB, 1SEG or DVB if you get a MobileTV tuner! It supports recurring schedules, so you can record daily or every weekday, or you could just schedule so specific date and time for a single recording.

It’s great to be able to just copy any media file over and not have to worry about converting it to something else first. The Cowon A3 doesn’t use any proprietary and confusing sorting system like most media players do; you can just copy any kind of media file anywhere on the hard drive by simply dragging and dropping files to a window on your computer. There is several default folders to sort things in, but it doesn’t actually restrict you to use of these folders. A good example of why this is good is music videos. Do you place them in the Movie folder or the Music folder? If you place them in the Music folder they will show up in the directory listing for the Movie Player, so you can place anything anywhere! What’s even greater is that it keeps track of what types of files are in each folder; if you go into the Music folder when browsing in the Movie Player you will only see folders listed that contain video files in them. It makes browsing for music videos much faster if you have a handful of music videos but have thousands of different albums from all sorts of different artists.

You’ll probably also love the Recent Files system it uses. The A3 keeps a list of the last 50 files you played without finishing them. Imagine you are on a trip somewhere and you decide to watch a movie; what if the movie is longer than the ride? You want to see how it ended don’t you? Well then, when you find the time to watch the rest, just turn on the A3 and go to Recent Files then select whatever it was you were watching and it will start back up right where you stopped it!

For audio there is full 10-band Equalization, BBE, Mach3Bass, MP Enhance and 3D Surround. As you might assume; you can get some rather fantastic audio quality out of this thing–that’s what Cowon is known for; audiophile-pleasing quality.

I also really like the Boundary setting for playback; you can set playback to restrict to all files, one folder in from Music, two folders in from Music or Playlist. If you organize your music by Album folders in Artist folders it makes this system work great; you can listen to a specific album, everything from a certain artist or everything. My only complaint is the playlist support; it uses some built-in playlist that you only have one of and it doesn’t allow saving or loading of common playlist formats used on the PC such as M3U Playlists.

The greatest thing about this device though? The screen. It sports a very high resolution 800×480 resolution in the same size as a PSP screen–that’s almost twice the resolution of the PSP’s screen! You know what else it has twice the PSP in? Brightness. The screen on this thing can be turned up so bright you can see the vibrant colors perfectly even in direct sunlight! *_*

The Cowon A3 also has a line-out for viewing on a bigger screen–and component, s-video and composite even! You can watch gorgeous 720p High Definition video on your big LCD TV from such a tiny portable unit!

Overall this is a truly amazing device that’s a simple firmware update away from being perfect. If you like having some sort of portable entertainment then go buy this device RIGHT NOW. No seriously, do it; you won’t regret it.

For awhile I’ve been using a video service called Stage6 which was similar to YouTube except they offered High Definition video uploading…it wasn’t very ideal though as it needed a proprietary DivX Player to play the videos. Not long ago they closed up shop, so I decided to look around and see if I could find a better video service than YouTube. Well, in my travels I discovered this wonderous creation known as Vimeo! You can upload HD videos up to 720p and they are way, way faster than YouTube! Check the shiny HD video above to see just how awesome Vimeo is.

Normally my tastes are more manly than chick flicks, like playing football and showering naked together with other men in the locker rooms…okay, maybe that was a bit of a lie, but I feel it needs to be emphasized that you don’t have to be some scrawny, girly wuss to enjoy the NANA movies. If you like JRock or most any kind of modern japanese pop culture medias you will likely enjoy these movies just as much as I did. The music is really great, the characters and their interactions are very believable and the writing is quite interesting. Basically NANA is a chronicle of the struggles a small rock band endures after being torn apart by the seperation of their bassist and their adventures as they attempt to rise up again and take the music scene by storm.

NANA

The movie begins following Nana, the singer of a rock band called Blast that faded away when Ren, their former bassist and Nana’s love interest, left to join a major band called Trapnest. While riding on a train to Tokyo she coincidentally encounters another girl who is also named Nana, is the same age as her and is going to the same place at the same time. They sit next to each other for the ride and talk a bit, but aside from the various coincidental similarities, the two couldn’t be more different. This Nana is well brought-up and polite while the other is somewhat more rebellious and, at times, insecure. After the train arrives at it’s destination the two part ways and the new Nana goes to live with her boyfriend–or so she thinks. The guy she moves in with doesn’t really seem to be as interested in her as she is in him and he asks her to move out and find her own place somewhere. While on her hunt for accommodations she finds a nicely priced place at only 70,000 yen, the Japanese word for 7 being nana, not so coincidentally. She immediately decides to preview the place and when she arrives there coincidentally runs into the other Nana once again. Despite being polar opposites of personality they decide to rent the apartment together because it would be much cheaper that way. They quickly become good friends and the proper Nana helps punk Nana to regain her confidence reform Blast and reclaim her glory as a Rock singer. In between all this, good Nana is being cheated on by the guy she still thinks is her boyfriend and punk Nana helps to comfort her and push her to keep going. Good Nana wins some free, front row tickets to a Trapnest concert and, not knowing punk Nana’s prior involvement with Ren, invites her to come along. She however declines without really supplying much reason aside from being ‘busy’. She later discovers Nana and Ren used to be close and that she probably still has feeling for him and despite this, or possibly even because of this, she decides to try asking her again. This time she’s a little less resistant and decides to tag along. After the show, punk Nana happens to meets up with Ren and have an emotional moment, albeit a bittersweet one because they know that even though they want to be together they want even more to play their music and that will keep them apart from each other.

NANA2