As many of you are by now aware, a pseudo-sequel to one of my all time favorite Slice-of-Life anime has been announced. The show will be a side-story – dealing with the characters from the Miyakawa family, based on the spin-off manga of the same name.
For the uninitiated, aside from their own manga, the Miyakawa sisters made several appearances in in the main series and feature prominently in the Moe Drill game. For me, as long as it has the same charm, wit and humor as the main series, I’ll bite! Not to mention, I am looking forward to the inevitable cameos!
With my interest piqued, I checked out the manga. As I couldn’t find a translation of the Miyakawa manga available anywhere, I took the liberty of translating and typsetting the 4-koma short that was on the back of the first volume to give fans a taste of what this series has to offer. Hope you guys like it. I’m pretty happy as to how it turned out, if I do say so myself. (^.^;) I would be grateful for your feedback.
(More updates very soon!)
Screencaps of cameos of the Miyakawa sisters in the original LS anime after the jump!
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. (^.^)
Something that I rarely do is buy Manga. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not because I pirate Manga, which I don’t, it’s just that I am not really a Manga reading person. If you ask me, given the choice between Anime and Manga, I’d choose Anime. Why? Because it’s a more immersive and engaging experience. You have movement, voice, audio, color, the works. However, I do understand that usually, due to budget and run-time issues, the Anime version ends up being a less-than-faithful adaptation of the much-better original Manga. Yet, knowing this, another reason I avoid reading Manga is because I fear that I would spoil myself if they were to ever make an Anime adaptation of it.
Yet, sometimes, I do buy the Manga to give it a read after I’ve finished, and loved, the Anime series.
Here’s the thing. Having not bought any US Official English Translated Manga before, I was extremely hesitant to. I have seen my fair share of liberal official US Anime subtitles and being a staunch supporter of literal-translations, I could not fathom the horrors that awaited me. But, I went ahead and bought three different volumes of Manga, Railgun, Cardcaptor Sakura and Lucky Star.
If you are an Otaku, other than Akihabara, chances are you’ve probably heard of Nakano Broadway, home of Mandarake. For those of you who don’t know, Mandarake has a whole series of shops with each one dealing with a different type of good. These shops have a ton of second hand stuff that one can usually find terrific treasures at amazing prices. Usually, the ‘opened/used before’ item will yield a lower price. Of course, there were other dealers there selling their wares.
The Singapore equivalent of Nakano Broadway would be China Square Central, just about 7459235326 times more awesome. Or was it 7459235327 times?
As I have mentioned numerous times in previous posts, on my channel and on various online forums, this loot was going to be a whopper. Yes, I did actually purchase everything you see in the picture above last month, but everything only arrived a few days ago. Now that everything’s been sorted out, let’s see how this loot can blow your mind, shall we? (^o^)
If you don’t know what has been going on, Funimation licensed ‘Dance in the Vampire Bund’, a pretty good Action/Supernatural series, that features nude scenes of a Vampire, Mina Tepes (title pic), that appears to be a young girl, however, she only appears physically young and is in fact very old. After all, Vampires age very slowly.
They have stated that in their streaming releases of the show and DVD releases, these scenes will be edited.
The first of possibly a number of videos, chronicling my experince in the land of Anime to Figures and beyond. (^.^)
What better way to start than to show you guys a snippet of my time in Akihabara – The fabled land of Otaku… (Day 1 and 2 of my trip)
This video focuses more on the stores of Akihabara and proves that Akihabara really is, Otaku heaven. I mean… WOAH. And that was just one store.
While the video only shows the inside of Radio Kaikan, more details of the places and the various stores I visited, like Gamers, Toranoana, Animate and more, along with accompanying pictures, can be seen by clicking the ‘Actar in Japan’ tab. (^.^)
I fight a fierce and furious battle with the sleep monsters as I pen my experiences down in my humble little blog. Thus, since I seem to be losing this battle quickly, I’ll cut down my exposition and let my pictures do most of the talking. Hm…
After years and years of waiting, fans of the Full Metal Panic! series have finally been blessed with a figure of the main Arm Slave piloted by protagonist Sagara Souske, the ARX7 Arbalest.
Posted by Actar 
Actar's Otaku Life 