Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 2nd A’s Initial Impressions and Review (Updated)

Alrighty. I just had the honor of being one of the first in the world to watch the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 2nd A’s and here are my initial impressions on it.. I’m actually writing this in a Starbucks outlet just next to the movie theater and my thoughts are all over the place. So I apologize for the not-in-order point form writing in the ‘impressions’ part. (Yeah, it took awhile to get this on to the net… internet access here is not that readily available to a foreigner…)

As always, THERE ARE SPOILERS!　While the main plot remains practically the same, there were quite significant changes made to the events. So, if you don’t mind spoilers, do feel free to read on. (^.^)

Update 1: Proofread the post and updated some of the points.

Update 2: More fine-tuning, expanded and clarified some points, added a couple of design comparison pictures and everything is now in chronological order.

Actar in Japan… Part 2! – Day 1: Tired Touchdown

Yup, as of writing this, it’s 9:45pm and I have arrived in Japan. Well, more accurately, I arrived more than 12 hours ago. Gonna keep this post short and sweet because I’m dead tired.

Updates Since… The Last One.

Alright. It’s time to stop making excuses, blow the dust off this blog and get thing’s back up and running!

WARNING: This post has not gone through any editing or proofreading.

Japanese Popular Culture and Soft Power

Another semester, another academic paper on one of my all time favorite topics, Japanese popular culture. This time, it deals with the relationship between Japanese popular culture and Soft Power, the ability for one country to control another country’s wants and values through non-traditional means.

By now, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that my interest of Anime and Japanese popular culture extends beyond the boundaries of a mere hobby. Right now, it’s also a big, big part of my academic life. As the old adage goes: “Do what you love, love what you do, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life”.

Well, technically speaking, that’s complete bull because, believe me, writing this paper was not an easy task to accomplish. Hours of research, sleepless nights and sweat went into this paper and I’m ecstatic to say that all that effort was not in vain as I got quite a good grade for it.

As with all the other papers on my blog, the rest of this post will be sans pictures.

With that, I present to you the final draft of my work, untouched, for your reading pleasure. It can get rather technical at times, but I do hope you enjoy reading it. (^.^)