I didn’t go back and hunt down Full Metal Panic, though.

Haruhi was one of those perfect storm sort of shows, playing with anime stereotypes in a way that came close to breaking the fourth wall, but never quite crossing the line into being an outright parody of itself, with really good music and a heck of  a lot of fanservice for us boy type people.

Anyway, after about three years of endless rumor speculation and rumors, KyoAni actually made new episodes, slipping them – all stealthy-like – into the middle of a re-run of the entire series.

And I watched the first episode, and It Was Good, and then I kind of forgot to go looking for more episodes for a while, long enough for the entire new series to be broadcast, translated, and surreptitiously distributed to legions of slavering Haruhi fans.

So anyway, I got myself a full set of episodes and settled in to watch them.

The second episode was a little plotless, but fun enough.  It was a lot like the baseball episode from the first series; Haruhi makes up her mind to do some sort of random activities and forces the entire group into participating, hilarity ensues, blah blah blah, end credits.

The third episode was the same as the second episode, except that the characters realized halfway through that they were in a time loop, but have no idea how to break it by the end of the episode.

The fourth through eighth episodes of the series were the same as the third episode.  They were animated differently, but the characters were doing the same things, in the same order, realizing halfway through that they were in a time loop, and unable to break out of it.

The ninth episode repeated the same sequence of events, but at the very last minute Kyon figures out how to break the loop.

That’s 8 episodes – three-and-a-half-hours of anime – that were basically the same episode over and over again.  After the fourth one, I actually went to wikipedia to make sure that there really WAS an ending.

I’ve seen things described, in the past, as being “love letters to the fans”

This would be more along the line of “hate mail for the fans”; the only enjoyable part of the whole thing was, after I’d finished watching the series, going online and reading the rants of everyone who’d watched it week-by-week.

After these 8 episodes – appropriately all titled “Endless Eight” – finished, the remaining new episodes were actually pretty decent, so it has that going for it.  I just can’t fathom the thought process behind making two month’s worth of episodes all the same; it’s a low point that makes the infamous “island arc” from Nadia look like a triumph of storytelling.

Anyway, it’s over now, and I kind of feel like I accomplished something by making it through.  I usually feel very detached from other fans, but reading the rants from around the web makes me feel a brutal sort of camaraderie; we’ve shared a certain pain and we’ve all made it through.

But I wouldn’t recommend experiencing it yourself.

When you leave Akihabara Station, you have to pass through the Maid Gauntlet. This is where girls in maid outfits try to hand you fliers and pretend they’re not thoroughly creeped out by their prospective customers. I guess the girls on flier duty have it easier, really, they’re not the ones who are giving out the massages and reflexology “treatments” and eye exams and guide services and so on. I turned around after I passed the last one and took this shot, facing back down the gauntlet. Unfortunately, apart from the one in foreground, you really don’t get the effect – maybe you can see a frilly headband here and there, but the mass of people kind of obscures the whole thing.

Those guide services I mentioned, that’s taken directly from a flier that got handed me. For Y2000 every 30 minutes, you can have your own personal maid to go on a “date” with you – she’ll go shopping with you, do karaoke, have dinner with you “and so forth”.

I’m guessing that the “and so forth” stops well within the realm of the tame, at least, for those prices. I saw a couple of guys who obviously considered it a reasonable fee to have a girl in a maid outfit hanging off their arm, and they looked happy enough; who am I to criticize?

I wound up in an arcade because I wanted to find an Otomedius machine. This is a shooter that’s gotten plenty of coverage on western game sites, because it combines Gradius gameplay with Yoshizaki Mine character designs.

Two minute’s googling would turn you up plenty of examples, but I went to the trouble of ignoring a clearly posted – in clear, correct English, even – NO PHOTOGRAPHS sign to give you this picture of an advertising standee:

I played through the first three stages before getting a game over sort of screen – I suspect it’s because I had to use a continue to get through the third stage and that if I’d managed it without continues I would have gotten more stages, or something.

Ignoring the cute girl factor for the moment, it’s a lot of fun, a 2.5D sort of horizontal shooter affair with lots of 3D characters that move between the backgrounds and the foreground play. The enemies trend towards the weird – lots of penguins, for some reason – and the bosses are appropriately massive screen-filling affairs with glowing weak points that shout “shoot here!”

It’s coming out for the Xbox 360, at least in Japan. It had better see a US release, damnit.

I had a guy hanging over my shoulder waiting for a go at the machine, so i bid it a sad farewell and went off in search of small things that I could stuff into niches in my suitcase and use up my small change on.

I happened across a bank of capsule toy vending machines; these are evil soul-sucking devices that take your yen and give you pretty much exactly every possible toy except the one you want. The first time I was in Japan, I sunk probably twenty bucks into one that had Gainax characters in it, trying for a Noriko from Gunbuster with no luck. After I gave up, my wife – who had no vested interest in ANY of the characters, an important point – put money into the same machine and a Noriko popped out, first try.

I digress. The particular capsule toy vending machine that caught my eye was a Haruhi-characters-in-nekomimi capsule toy vending machine.

I have some simple rules about nekomimi: They’re a simple way to add moe factor to an anime or game character, and it’s generally successful. When a real, live human tries to pull off the look, though, it has something of the effect that a bright red patch has on a frog: It says, “Poison here. Avoid.”

This doesn’t apply to the hard-working staff at Cafe With Cat, however.

But there I go digressing again. Anyway, I saw this machine, and it offered up the option of Haruhi, Nagato, Mikuru, or Tsuraya-san figures in nekomimi.

Assuming I’d get a Tsuruya-san, I put in my Y300.

Out popped a Haruhi. Not bad, I thought to myself, and here I have Y900 left in Y100 coins, let’s see what else comes out.

The second and third were also Haruhis.

While I guess that’s better than three Tsuruya-sans, a man only needs one of these. Arguably he does not even need one, but that goes down that whole road that leads to admitting that I don’t NEED ninety percent of the stuff I own:

Anyway, I had Y300 left and was thinking very unkind thoughts towards the evil machine by this point. Fortunately the fourth round popped out a different character; a Nagato this time, and I beat a hasty retreat.

On the way back to the hotel, there was a nice fog effect around Tokyo Tower, so here’s a shot of that. They’ll be turning off the lights on Tokyo Tower and several other big tourist attractions from tomorrow through the 7th of July, so tonight was the last night that it’ll be lit up for a while.

Thus endeth my final night in Tokyo.

From the searches that bring people to this site – I’m not alone here.  People come here looking for anime girls with cat ears, or ninjas, or ninja girls, or anime ninja girls with cat ears.  If you’ve been brought here by a similar search, well, you are in good company.

Oddly enough, though, after you filter through the list of moe traits, the next most popular thing that brings people here is “Shadow of the Colossus”.  All I can say to that is that people have excellent taste in games.

In the spirit of pandering, I wanted to show off a character good that I bought at Nakano Broadway back in August, and then we can count all the groups it panders to together.

So, let’s see:

You’ve got your Haruhi fans.  And WE ARE LEGION.  This caters to us pretty well.  It’s got Haruhi, Mikuru, Yuki, AND Tsuruya-san, so it’s not like anyone’s favorite character is being left out… Well, unless your favorite character isn’t one of those four.  Hmm.  It’s got a good chance of not leaving anyone’s favorite character out, anyway.

You’ve got your nekomimi fans covered here, too, and your cosplay fans.

Unfortunately, it’s the post-glasses Nagato Yuki, so no pandering to us meganeko-lovers.  They missed a chance there.

And I suppose it also caters to anyone who just likes putting together jigsaw puzzles.  Who doesn’t like to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon putting together a jigsaw puzzle?   This doesn’t even look like a terribly difficult one. The orange background might be a little dicey, I guess.

So this gets a solid B+ on the pandering scale and still manages to stay on the good side of decency.  You could have this half-completed on a card table and have people over without fear of more than a raised eyebrow.

All that, and it was marked down to 800 Yen.

First you buy the DVD with the box as soon as it comes out – so you don’t miss out and NOT GET A BOX. Because that would be a travesty, see.

Then, you buy the DVDs as they come out to FILL the box, and in the end you have a nice box full of DVDs that is in so many ways more satisfying than a bunch of DVDs that don’t have a box.

Or – forgive the run-on sentence coming up here – maybe you have the box, but then you neglect to buy the DVDs as they come out and then you wind up down a few volumes and all of a sudden it’s going to cost like $120 to fill up the box and that just seems like a lot of money, so you put it off… and then the $35 thinpak edition comes out and you buy that… and then you have a single DVD sitting in a mockingly-empty box and a thinpak next to it that you’ll actually watch.

I am rather ashamed to admit that I have done that a couple of times.

Eventually I realized that it might be better if I limited my box purchases and mostly waited for thinpaks.

I was even going to do this for Haruhi, but they put out such a shiny keen box, with little magnetic doors and a slide out drawer and…

…well, I got sucked in.

But, today I bought volume 4, and so the box is completely full. I have my four DVD cases with a total of, I think, 7 DVDs. I have my mini pencilboards, my iron-ons, my “dancho” armband and Haruhiesque headband. I have the four CDs.  Granted, I’ve had all of them for months, but these ones have, uh, translated liner notes and lyrics.

I even have a couple of pillowcases.

Now, if I only had a spare day to sit down and indulge myself in a start-to-finish rewatching of the series.

OK, to give her credit, she did watch the first three episodes with me.  She made a good-faith effort, but her tastes lean more towards Wolf’s Rain, Pretear, Inuyasha, Gundam Wing, that sort of thing.  Shows with some angst… drama… pretty boys… you know, girly stuff.  We find common ground on Card Captor Sakura.  Who doesn’t love Card Captor Sakura?

Anyway, tonight she was looking at one of the shelves o’ toys  and said something unexpected.  Usually it’s more of an “oh, please” reaction, and I will admit that there are some figures that I buy solely to get the “oh, please” reaction.

Tonight it was “that’s cute.”

I looked where she was pointing.

I moved the super-deformed Gamera to the left.  I moved the small, purple Pokemon whose name I do not know to the right.

I said, “Point again.”

She pointed, quite clearly, to the Mikuru.

She’s starting to crack.  Soon I’ll have her doing the Hare Hare Yukai dance.

…on other topics…

I have been enjoying the second season of Genshiken and eagerly awaiting both volume 9 of the manga and a licensed version of the OVAs and the second TV series.

I bought volume 9 of the manga from Kinokuniya books some months ago, but of course it’s untranslated and my Japanese skills… not up to it.  I should try again now that I’ve got another 150 or so kanji more-or-less memorized.  The domestic version comes out the 27th of this month.

Anyway, it occurred to me that an awful lot of folks probably know and like Genshiken, or Comic Party, but may not have ever experienced Otaku no Video, so I thought I would plug that a bit.  Mind you, I’m not getting any kickback on this.

Otaku no Video tells the heartwarming story of a young lad about to go down the dreary path of Normal Japanese Life.  He’s in college, he has a girlfriend… He plays Tennis, for fun, and hangs out in bars with his car-obsessed buddies.  He’s a couple of years of school away from marrying the girl, having a couple of kids, and reporting to an office job for the next 40 years until retirement, punctuated only by the obligatory August-and-New-Years Vacations.

Then he meets a guy from High School who he hasn’t thought about in years… and Things Change.  It’s an epic story of shattered dreams, lost loves, climbs to success, betrayals, cosplay and extremely bouncy bunny girls.

The references are probably a bit dated for modern fans, but I strongly recommend it, especially if you are a Gainax or Kenichi Sonoda fan.

Here is a link to AnimEigo’s site which has a trailer for you to watch.  Of course, because AnimEigo has absolutely no marketing acuity, it’s a trailer for the second of the two OAVs on the disc and makes no sense at all.  I know they had a better trailer… you know, one that was funny and gave you some sense of the beginning of the story… back in the VHS/LD days, but that trailer does not appear here.

Otaku no Video (AnimEigo.com)

That “anywhere in the known world” excludes Japan and South Korea.  I’m not real likely to go back to Seoul any time soon (Although I did enjoy my trip there in 1994), but I rather like visiting Japan, so it rather irked me that I’d fallen for the salesguy hype without doing adequate research first.   It still looked really neat, so it had that going for it.

The Nokia, well, it doesn’t have the instant recognition factor of the RAZR or a Blackberry – it’s not going to turn any heads.  On the other hand, the keyboard makes text entry easy, it has a pretty nice web browser – so I can actually check traffic reports and look stuff up on Amazon – and it has an email client build in so I can check gmail from wherever I happen to be at the time.  In short, I feel DISTURBINGLY connected, and I haven’t even started loading it up with applications.  I am, however, sending enough text messages that I might want to drop the extra 5 bucks a month on the cheapest texting plan T-mobile offers.

I got my 1GB MMC card from Newegg today, which went right in and formatted nicely and in general was as invisible as you want a hunk of flash memory to be, and I got a Jabra BT350 headset that was DOA.  Thing won’t even charge.  It was just cheap enough that I don’t know if I want to bother trying to get a replacement, but just expensive enough that I’m rather vexed with myself for being willing to write it off.

With the MMC card, the not-bad-for-a-cellphone camera becomes a viable option.  It takes 1280×960 pictures, nothing in comparison to the Sony DSC-W55 but four times better than the RAZR’s camera.  I can even apparently record up to an hour of postage-stamp-size video should I go that route.

When I first started trying to get pictures off the phone, I was rather annoyed because I couldn’t browse the phone FROM the Mac mini.  That’s what I did with the RAZR, after all.  I didn’t realize that I could tell the phone to send them TO the mini over bluetooth.  It was quite a surprise when I tried it and the mini popped up a dialog telling me that it was receiving a file, and did I want to allow the transfer?

The advantages of being a diehard pessimist is that when things actually work in a reasonable manner it’s a really nice surprise.
My sole justification for ending this with yet another picture of the phone is this: I found a cool wallpaper for it.  Nobody I work with and nobody I’m likely to be around will ever “get” this wallpaper.  By putting it up here I assume that someone out there will see it and say, “Hey, cool Haruhi wallpaper!” and I will have found the self validation I so desperately crave.

To make my point quickly and move on: There’s rather a lot of guilt that happens when you spend a half hour utterly ravaging some poor Joe’s paper and pointing out all the places they didn’t follow the assignment and in general have no business being allowed near a keyboard…

…And you get your OWN paper back from that same Joe and it’s filled with comments like “I really like what you did here” and “good images” and “this is great” and basically non-stop positive happy vibes…

I’m just saying, I’m glad I don’t have to actually face these people on a daily basis.

Other stuff:

The last Moon Phase / tsukiyomi DVD came out! Time to sit down and get my nekomimi on. Boy, that’s a weird phrase. Try : “Time to sit down and watch the rest of the series since I only watched the first 2 DVDs and now I finally have it all”.

The first Haruhi DVD came out! I intended to be strong and not buy the collector’s edition and maybe even hold out for the complete series box, but my wife wouldn’t let me – she took the box off the shelf and made me buy it. Probably just so she doesn’t have to hear me whining about missing out on it later.

I will present Greg Dean’s take on what it’s like to be lucky enough to be married to a woman who understands fanboys … This is really quite close to a normal scene for us.

On the subject of fanboys, one advantage of my new job is that if I walk home, immediately put a DVD in, eat, and walk back, I can get an episode of something in and make it back to work in less than an hour. So I’ve been re-watching Genshiken, a great series and probably this generation’s best answer to Otaku no Video. Otaku no Video represents a completely different age, of course, one in which being otaku was so unusual that if you were one you tended to turn into a bit of an evangelist… trying to convert people to the otaku way. These days, with the different attitudes and the sheer ease of access, converts find their own otaku way on their own, and seek out others of their kind. It’s hard to put in to words how things have changed… but I think if you were around then and you’re still around you understand.

To get off the maudlin sentimental bit, Deux Ex continues to be an excellent and engrossing game. I’m just past the bit where you meet your brother at the 747, I think that’s a good way to describe my progress without spoiling it for anyone. I think I have an awful lot of “game” left to see, there are so many plot threads open at this point that there’s no way they can resolve quickly. I’m kind of wishing I’d downgraded pistol at the start and dumped every point I could into low-tech weaponry, I find that 90% of the time I’m using either the baton or the prod.

Other stuff… I downloaded Stepmania recently and need to see if my PS2-to-USB converter works with my PS2 dance mat. I’d been curious about it for a while and not really sure where to get started, but j1m0ne posted an excellent writeup that got me going in the right direction. I’ve played around a bit with it on keyboard, but it will be much more enjoyable once it’s actually making me sweat. It’s like DDR… but with songs I actually know!

Also in Eternally Behind the Times… I can’t use my DS Lite’s Wi-fi connectivity at home because it only supports WEP and my wireless network is running WPA with as much security turned on as I can manage, but I did take it to a McDonald’s yesterday so I could try out the online mode of Bomberman Land Touch for the first time. First time I’ve had McDonald’s food in a year and a half, too, apart from a couple of McBiscuits – very weird considering I used to have McDonald’s probably 5-10 times every week.

But that aside aside, Bomberman Land Touch online. Setup was easy, very few people out there to play with though and once I got into a match I died quite quickly. Still an enjoyable experiment. I’ll have to look into what other DS games offer online connectivity.

Seven Haruhi character singles.  I happen to know there are people with much worse obsessions.

I’m not. I don’t have a problem. I can give it up any time I like.

…

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LACM-4270 Animation / Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu Character song Vol.2 Yuki Nagato
CDA 1143yen * 1 Released:2006/07/05

LACM-4323 Tsuruya san (CV: Yuki Matsuoka) / Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu Character song Vol.4 Tsuruya san
CDA 1143yen * 1 Released:2006/12/06

LACM-4324 Ryoko Asakura (CV: Natsuko Kuwatani) / Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu Character song Vol.5 Ryoko Asakura
CDA 1143yen * 1 Released:2006/12/06

LACM-4341 Sayaka Aoki / Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu Character Song Vol.6 kyon’s sister
CDA 952yen * 1 Released:2007/01/24

LACM-4342 Yuri Shiratori / Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu Character Song Vol.7 Emiri Kimidori
CDA 952yen * 1 Released:2007/01/24

LACM-4355 Istuki Koizumi(C.V.Daisuke Ono) / Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu Character song Vol.8 Itsuki Koizumi
CDA 952yen * 1 Released:2007/02/21

LACM-4356 Kyon(C.V.Tomokazu Sugita) / Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu Character song Vol.9 Kyon
CDA 952yen * 1 Released:2007/02/21

MECR-1031 THE BLUE HEARTS / Linda Linda / Boku wa koko ni tatte iruyo
CDA 952yen * 1 Released:2002/02/06

ESCL-2917 Animation / Honey and Clover Complete Best[w/ DVD, Limited Pressing]
CDA 3200yen * 1 Released:2007/01/17