Hi all, sorry the site's been pretty inactive lately, we've all been busy with various IRL things. For the time being, I've disabled trackbacks. We were getting nothing but spam, and I just finished clearing about 20,000 of those. Until we can find a reliable spam filter for it, we're not going to be allowing any for the time being.

The reason for this decision is also partially influenced by this article, which was brought to my attention this morning by GarbledOne. It seems spammers are getting more and more creative in their methods, ruining it for everyone. I won't rant more than that--I'm sure you all have your fair share of spam to deal with.

Anyway, I have some new material to talk about, so expect to see posts from me this week.

As I promised in my previous post, I have started the first of what I hope to be many Compilation Projects. The theme of Compilation Project 1 is "Yuki Kajiura vocal mix." This covers any vocal track she has composed for (herself included): See-Saw (and Chiaki Ishikawa), FictionJunction, Chiba Saeko, etc.

Yuki Kajiura: Fiction
In order to make my information gathering and tracking a little easier, I have also installed and launched the official OtakuGen.com wiki. It can be accessed at wiki.otakugen.com. (More info about the wiki after the break.)

While surfing JPOPSUKI last night (I usually go there for the weekly ORICON compilations), I discovered an album labeled "lounge morning nanoni."

lounge morning nanoni: Mix Tape 12 (site link in the picture)
The album consisted of a nonstop mix of original version and remixed J-Pop, including anime themes. I downloaded the first 3 albums to give it a listen, and I was impressed. He claims he's an amateur, but that's no reason to avoid these mixes at all. I'm in the process of downloading the rest of his released albums now (13 total as of this post).

Interesting thing is, I was planning on doing something for my blog, along the same idea, but in more toward "compilation" type. (More after the break.)

On New Year's, GarbledOne and I went over to Little Tokyo in LA to check out the celebrations that were going on.

New Year's in Little Tokyo: A family pours water on the Buddha outside a temple.

Full story and more pictures after the break.

Keyboard Crasher: AKA Angry German Kid
Another subject that is very popular on Nico Nico Douga, the Japanese take on YouTube, is "Keyboard Crasher." He is known to English-speakers as "Angry German Kid." Here is the original (translated) video:

Note: This is acting. Go to the video page for all the details about him and this video.

This video got incredibly popular among the internet crowd, and like many foreign video clips (to both Japanese or Americans), they tried to pick out words in their own language, often ending in hilarious results. (Continued after the break.)

I noticed while poking around YouTube, there are some videos labeled "high quality", and the playback features sharp video that has not been eaten up by the YouTube uploader. Here's an example:

Furefurepponpon!, the ending theme to Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun

The video runs for 1:30, but note that the player shows over 9 minutes. There's a 6x discrepancy between the YouTube player and the actual video. Essentially this equates to 6x the quality of your average YouTube video.

Further explanation and tutorial links after the break. (EDIT: high quality MP3 uploading is also possible!)

I took a look at my account age when I logged in this morning and I noticed it's been a full year since the Drupal version of OtakuGen.com has been opened. Let's take a look back over the various forms the site went through:

Version 1, 2005 thru Nov. 2006
BoastMachine 3, a simple PHP and MySQL based blogging system. It was very simple, but didn't have much expandability without serious modification.

Verison 2, Nov. 2006 thru Oct. 2007
Drupal 4, using the WordPress-inspired Kubrick theme. More or less the basic installation, not much in the way of add-ons.

Version 3, Oct. 2007 thru Present
Drupal 5, using a modified theme based on Barlow. Drupal 5's module system is much more comprehensive, so I've installed several 3rd-party modules to make posting easier and allow us to focus on bringing you content.

We're always talking about what we can do to bring new content to and improve the site, especially about how to improve our podcasts. We're prepping to record our second episode (AKA ep01), and we'll post it up as soon as it's finished. I'm proud that we've been able to run the site for this long, and I promise that the best is yet to come!

Must resist urge to buy XBOX360 and Ace Combat 6 while broke...
Su-33 Flanker, Miki Edition: For only 400 MS points! ($5)
via Famitsu

Since I spent so much money putting this recording rig together, and since it's production-grade equipment, I figured I should use it for other stuff than just our semi-regular podcasts.

So I decided I should test it with none other than: the Nico Nico Medley.

This is no small undertaking, if you've ever heard it. It's a marathon of 20+ songs all done at denpa speeds (130+ bpm), over a span of nearly 11 minutes. I'm going to have to start by gathering up all the song titles, then lyrics, and possibly a translation into English. I haven't decided on the English part, but either way, I'm going to be doing at least 2 voice tracks as well, adding in background vocals and make an attempt at harmonies as well.

This is gonna take some practice, considering I'm not a fluent speaker and my accent is not so great either. I'll make a serious attempt at it nonetheless and post it here once it's all together. Wish me luck! (I promise it won't suck, at least.)

Tonight was anime gambling night, got an episode of Kaiji in and started up Akagi. No in-depth character reviews this time around, because there's not much to write about their personalities. Not that they're flat characters, just that the story is more focused on how they play the game and how their personalities fit into it, rather than their individual dramas and developments.

Kaiji
EP06: It continues to be like watching WSOP in slow motion - riveting, but you wonder at the end where all the time goes. Already 6 episodes into the same gambling situation and still not really an end in sight. I wonder if the whole series revolves around this single night...
Line of the episode: It'll be fatal if we don't tackle this with everything we have. - Kaiji

Akagi
EP01-03: Kinda like Hikaru no Go, but with mahjong and much, much darker. The way they approach the game is perfectly targeted at raising interest, and it's working. I'm interested in learning about mahjong now.
Line of the episode: Don't tell me it's over already. - Akagi to Ryuuzaki, the yakuza underboss