Wolf Hurricane Public Service Announcement:
Remember to properly stretch your wrist muscles before and after strenuous exercise.

So I decided to watch Training with Hinako on a casual suggestion from Meu and well, it’s… Interesting. Not really in a good or bad way. It’s simply 24 minutes of light ecchi with a cute, top heavy girl doing push ups, sit ups and squats with conveniently placed camera angles to keep your attention. I’m not exaggerating. All Hinako does is exercise for the entirety of the episode with the camera mostly focused on her areas of interest. The sessions are mixed up a bit with some lacy underwear and gym uniform repetitions, but it’s still mostly jiggling boobies and crotch shots. One of the squat sessions even consists of Hinako making questionable sounds in place of counting. So yeah… I’ll just go ahead and be frank with my impression.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like the title says, I had an impromptu disappearance from the blog for a week or so. I’m not quite sure what happened, but I think I was mistakenly kidnapped and wound up naked with 20,000 smelly NEETs. After a daring escape using Macgyver-like ingenuity with a paper clip, a roll of duct tape and a memo pad, I’ve returned from my unplanned absence…

What? You don’t believe my story? Well fine. I’ve been busy studying for my finals and have pretty much stayed away from the interweb and all its distractions which includes anime, blogging, looking at hentai, etc. I’ve briefly returned to do this little filler post explaining my absence that no one cared about or noticed.

Hm oh yes. I did stray from my studying regimen to buy The Orange Box on sale for $10 and play some Team Fortress 2. I’m not an FPS gamer by any means, but it was frentic and chaotic fun. There’s Portal and Half-Life 2 as well. I’m taking my time with Portal, and HL2 is pretty much a throw-in that won’t get much play time. I’m still a TF2 newbie but if anyone wants to play with me, I’m noirsword on Steam. Be sure to give me your name too so I can add you. This is also my AIM, so if you want to contact me that way to coordinate a match, feel free to do so.

PS: This pretty much translates to free kills while I learn the ropes.

Today, we’re throwing the spotlight on Alpha – a hardbound artbook featuring the work of ARIA manga author and illustrator Amano Kozue.

Read the rest of this entry »

Saki is not amused at the Johnny joke.

Eden of the East has been one of the more commonly talked about anime series of the spring season, with good cause. Having been an avid watcher of the first two episodes, here are some insights about this strange little concoction from Production I.G. (Spoilers follow)

Read the rest of this entry »

Yui shredding some wicked riffs on her equally wicked axe.

K-ON is simply said, moe crack. All the cool kids are doing it, it’s addicting, and it gives you a good high…

Read the rest of this entry »

Ladders, catapults, battering rams, siege towers? As demonstrated by Takeda Shingen, real men don’t need such trivial things to invade a castle. Just charge straight through the front gate and gallop up that wall, standing tall on your steed! 80 degree inclines and physics be damned!

Read the rest of this entry »

The internet is counterproductive for people like myself that are easily distracted by novelty and shiny things. Case in point, today’s original objective was to catch up on some shows, but I’ve spent the better part of an hour playing with Akinator, a little web applet that uses inductive reasoning magic to predict what person or character you’re thinking about. I’ve mostly been throwing all manner of anime and game characters from Kagami Hiiragi to Travis Touchdown at Akinator, and it’s been pretty dead on about 90% of the time. The database if fairly large, so see if you can outwit the Akinator with an obscure character if you have nothing better to do. I’ll probably continue to waste more time with this until the novelty wears off.

The grand finale of our spring impressions, because I don’t feel like covering anything else and have ran out of witty introductions. For this installment I feature impressions on the second season of Hayate no Gotoku, Natsu no Arashi and Pandora Hearts as well as a wrapup.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time to get naked and commence part 2 of WH’s spring impressions with a batch of action oriented shows. Huzzah! For this installment I cover first impressions on the Fullmetal Alchemist reboot, hotblooded Sengoku Basara, the less than subtle environmental Shangri-La, and visual novel-to-anime Tears to Tiara.

Read the rest of this entry »

This You Might Like It is a tale of two Scotts for me. You see, the man responsible for introducing me to Scott Pilgrim is Scott McCloud, perhaps the best known critical commentator on comics as an art form. McCloud’s best known for his series of books that approach comics from a scholarly yet accessible angle–Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. He also did a spectacular series called Zot! which I’m considering for a future YMLI. Anyway, McCloud was touring the states a few years ago to promote his latest work, and during his lecture he mentioned a number of comics he felt were noteworthy in helping to shape the comic medium. One that got the nod was Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim–which if you haven’t heard of yet you certainly will when the feature film comes out late this year or early next (Michael Cera from Arrested Development, Juno and Superbad plays the titular Scott Pilgrim). But why wait on a film adaptation when you could pick up a couple of paperbacks and discover for yourselves the exciting, bizarre action-romance-comedy, with a liberal splash of 1990s gaming nostalgia?

Is this awesome Y/N?

Read the rest of this entry »