I’ve really, really been meaning to get back into the whole blogging thing (especially since I’m paying for this webspace here) since Spring ’11 is in full swing, and it’s shaping up to be a damn good season from the few eps I’ve caught here and there. Unfortunately my time for anime has been almost non-existent lately due to being swamped with stuff to do in the real world. It’s a sad world when Meultima, self professed gamer and all-around weirdo, is watching more anime than me. What a twist I say, good sir!

Anyway I’ve got a ton of stuff to talk about and dissect when I’ve got the time, hopefully before the end of May the way things are going for me… lolol and all that. A giant Madoka analysis should be the first order of business. After that I’ll discuss the Spring season in earnest when I eventually catch up on those. It would help if I wasn’t more than a month behind on all the current stuff, but slow and steady is the way to go rather than marathoning a bunch of stuff and getting burned out. After tackling those two topics it’s all up in the air. Here’s one final note before I leave.

／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼

“Just become a magical blogger!”

February 3rd marks the official beginning of the Year of the Bunny Girl Rabbit in the Chinese Lunar Calendar. We the staff (which is mostly just me actually) wish all the best to everyone out there. Don’t blow off your fingers with illegal firecrackers now, you hear? Now if you’ll excuse me, I must spend some time with the bunny girls for a bit…

Image by Kanna Asuke

Found on a FredMeyer book rack.

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Here’s something you might enjoy, I know I did.

On The Street | Animated

It’s a video from Bill Cunningham, fashion photographer for The New York Times. From what I gathered the man goes around Manhattan, taking pictures of well dressed people, and talks about style. Take a listen as he quite literally gushes over cosplay fashion. I thought it interesting to hear the style trend of cosplay as it would be seen through the NY fashion world.

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Drawing inspiration from some show about Umineko Wafers, co-author Meu suddenly turned violent, murdering me in bizarre fashion nearly two weeks ago, all the while mumbling something about a woman named “BEYATORICHE” over and over again. I was left in this unfortunate state until a kind White Mage recently happened upon my candy stuffed corpse and resurrected me with a Life 2 spell. The unfortunate side effect of being dead for so long is I’m more zombie than I used to be, but at least I’ve returned to the land of the living, even if I do have an insatiable hunger for the flesh of the living now. On the plus side I have candy stuffed inside me, so I’m like a frickin’ zombie pinata or something. Viva zombie pinata bitches!

You don’t believe my story? Fine. Let’s just say I was sick and have only recently started to feel better. It’s not as interesting, but I guess it’s more believable than dying and coming back as an anime blogger turned zombie pinata. So here I am, back again and very much out of the loop in regards to all things, because I haven’t been on the internet much if at all during that timespan. The state of affairs goes as such:

Anime Backlog – Fallen behind much more so than usual, so it’s time to binge again and slog through the shows recommended to me (currently Moyashimon with Baccano! next) in addition to what’s currently airing.

Twitter – Mostly dead. Good riddance too. Twitter is stupid so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Socializing – …Never did this to begin with. lolol.

Blogging – Wut? Oh right. “Blogging”. Got a couple posts that are waiting to be posted and stuff.

Killing Meu and Stuffing His Corpse with Taiyaki – Already done with extra Uuuuuuu~ for emphasis. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

Greetings again, everyone! After a lengthy summer driving around the United States in a truck, I’ve finally returned to the promised land of milk, honey and reliable internet access. I apologize for my absence but look forward to being able to resume, in a trice, my writing for Wolf Hurricane, particularly You Might Like It. But until then, I have a request for the good readers of this site.

If there’s anyone out there with experience in Nintendo DS Homebrew who’d be willing to give advice to a total noob on the subject, and perhaps do some troubleshooting down the road, shoot me an email at onepreacher@gmail.com. Any knowledge on the subject is more knowledge than I have–I just want to put Nethack on my DS, really!

And I brought cake!

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?

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I love American comics. When saying this, I always try to make it clear that this doesn’t mean Spider-Man and Batman. The long-running Marvel and DC superhero series all have their fine moments worth reading, of course (I highly recommend works such as Batman: Year One, Superman: Red Son and the Marvel 1602 miniseries). But their mythologies have never interested me much simply because there’s so much of it! I’m sure it’s not any hurdle to really throw myself in to the comics if I wanted to, but I love a good starting point; I like to read from the beginning to the end or the most recent volume, uninterrupted, without having to do more than pick up a trade paperback. Laziness? Absolutely. But there’s plenty of works for me to sink my teeth into so I feel no guilt over my sloth–I just finished Y: the Last Man, I’ve devoured most of Hellboy, and I plan to start on Image Comics’s Invincible at some point. Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to a comic that matches this profile to a tee–high quality, compact but masterfully crafted mythology, and a series run that’s notable, but not daunting. I speak, of course, of Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo. Quick and Dirty/why it’s not furry after the jump.

Usagi Yojimbo's author prides himself on historical accuracy. Except when awesome.

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Okay, so we established last week that I love platformers. It’s also a fact that I love Nethack, possibly the finest procedurally generated Roguelike dungeon crawler out there.  So when I learned through one of the BoingBoing.net of a game that was described as a combination of La-Mulana (which I wasn’t familiar with) and Nethack (which I was intimately familiar with), exactly half of my attention was earned. And when I downloaded Spelunky, and gave it a try, I immediately saw why this game was being called a contender for the best freeware title of the year…in January. The many reasons why (and a link to get it) after the jump.

This minigame sums up almost every deathtrap in Spelunky in one go.

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This week’s You Might Like It concerns the Japanese freeware adventure game Doukutsu Monogatari, known in the West as Cave Story. It’s excellent for a lot of reasons, but I’ll get to those in a minute. First I have to set the stage. I might as well get the Quick-and-Dirty out of the way before the break.

Well, this isn't the worst place I've woken up with a hangover...

The Quick and Dirty
- Cave Story info, walkthrough, and downloads for the game and translation patch at
http://www.miraigamer.net/cavestory/
- A platformer in the vein of Metroid or Castlevania
- Freeware, made single-handedly by one-man team Studio Pixel
- Other draws: emotive and adorable characters, original weapons and power-up system, holds its own against classics in the platformer genre. It’ll also be coming to the Wii via Wiiware in the future!

Now, I’m going to get a bit…scholarly.

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