Reviews and previews
So it’s been about a week since I launched Anime Nano, and I figured I’d give an update on the status of Anime Nano, including stats and other useful information.
User feedback has been very important to me, as many bugs were found by unsuspecting members. I won’t go through agonizing detail, but let’s just say there were quite a few bugs. Feedback has not only been helpful in assisting me find errors, but in figuring out how to improve Anime Nano as well.
Okay, so maybe it would be best to wait until the season is actually over to announce the best anime of Spring 2006, but I wanna know now! We’re more than halfway through this anime season (for the 12 episode shows, at least), so I think that by now the anime will have shown their true colors.
It’ll be especially interesting to see what impact The Crash of Suzumiya Haruhi will have on the poll results…
Hare Hare Yukai wins the poll for best anime ED of Spring 2006. I wasn’t really sure how it would compete against the other EDs, but I guess the strength of haruhism is too strong. Actually, Shissou was right up there with Hare Hare Yukai for a while.
In the end, Shissou still got second place, and Utawarerumono + Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni tied for third place. The rest of the votes were pretty evenly divided among the other anime EDs.
I’m not too sure if people are voting for their favorite anime EDs or actually voting for their favorite anime. Or maybe since it’s their favorite anime, it also influences their liking of the ED? Or vice versa? Oh well, I’ll put that to rest with my next poll. Stay tuned for that.
So WordPress has this funny dashboard feature that shows blog-related news and tools when you sign in. Sometimes these are really cool (templates!) and sometimes they’re kinda spammy. I saw one a while back that sparked my interest: Submit your blog to 9rules.
So I’ve been keeping myself pretty busy this Summer. ‘Doing what?,’ you ask? Rolling my own blog feed aggregator and forums, that’s what! Yep, Anime Nano is yet another blog feed aggregator for, you guessed it, anime.
Now, I have nothing against either Animeblogger.net antenna or Blogsuki. To me, they’re on two weird polar extremes. Animeblogger.net Antenna has a lot of blogs. Like, 100! There’s a lot of good blogs on there, but not all of them interest me. On the other hand, Blogsuki has less blogs, and a lot of good ones were kicked off. I really like Blogsuki, but I think I should be able to choose which blogs I want to read. That’s where Anime Nano comes in.
While watching Kashimashi, I noticed that the ED song kept changing. At the time, I thought “wow, this song is really good, plus they have a billion versions of it!” It turns out that episodes 8-11 of the anime all have different seiyuu singing it! The different characters all have unique lyrics so the song fits their character too. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yep, it’s time for a Seiyuu Showdown: Karaoke Battle!
I find it kinda funny that a couple of days after Jason writes a post on DRM and payed anime downloads, ADV announces that they’ll be offering anime available to download on zvue.com. From the press release:
“Anime has become big business, and it’s getting bigger every day,” said ADV Films co-founder and chief executive officer John Ledford. “The popularity of anime continues to grow in the U.S., and our alliance with HandHeld and its ZVUE.com download website means that more fans will have more access to the anime they love.”
Okay, so that sounds great! The companies are finally taking distribution online and offering anime downloads, right? I dunno…
The ZVUE is a handheld personal video player, so I assume the video quality for the downloads will be fairly low. Also, I’ve never heard of the ZVUE until today when I read the press release. Browsing their online store, it seems they sell a lot of puppet and genie videos (WTF!?). The content that’s on there now looks worse than most stuff on YouTube. I don’t think I need to remind you that YouTube is free…
I’ll have to commend ADV for trying something different, but haven’t they ever heard of iTunes music store? Google Video also offers payed content, too. I have a feeling that fans would totally be willing to buy anime on either service, and then buy them again when they hit DVD. Heck, I’d be happy with them offering a DRM-free PSP sized download directly from their site!
It seems to me that by going with this virtually unknown company, ADV is dooming themselves from the start. Is anyone going to buy a ZVUE player for $100 just so they can pay to watch anime on a really small screen? Hopefully they prove me wrong by selling a billion downloads of Azumanga, but right now, I have a bad feeling about this…
For every to there is a fro, and for every stop there is a go. Likewise, for every OP there is an ED (except for, y’know, weird anime that don’t have an ED), so here’s my picks for the top 5 anime EDs for Spring 2006:
Following the news of the Genshiken manga ending, it seems that the highly anticipated second season of the Genshiken anime is actually Kujibiki Unbalance.
While initial reports from Comiket were that there would be a second season of Genshiken, Moonphase now reports that the project is actually a new, independant Kujibiki Unbalance TV series and a serialised manga.
That’s too bad, because I was really looking forward to a second season of the Genshiken anime. I have a feeling fans would rather have Genshiken 2 then Kujian. While I thought the OVAs were kinda interesting in that anime within an anime sorta way, I dunno if it could stand on its own… I do remember it having a pretty catchy theme song, though.
I’m also not sure if this means there will definitely be no Genshiken 2, or if it’ll happen in the future…
Rakugo Tennyo Oyui actually came out in the Winter anime season, but LIME anime finally decided to sub it. I can’t honestly say that I was waiting to watch this one, but hey, it’s out, so check out my first impressions!