Animeparty in London - The Aftermath

After weeks of planning and living towards it, the meet finally happened. Sunagan and I went on the plane and made the trip to London. It was a first for both of us, never having visited the country before (Sunagan visited the UK before, but never been to England). In short, it was something we were really looking forward to, not just for meeting up with the A-Pers and ISSUPians, but also to visit the metropolis.

Manga Recommendations: Metro Survive, Uzumaki and Solanin

Image by Nobicco

Besides watching anime, manga also has a large place in my heart. Although I’ve read not nearly as much as I’ve watched, the count is steadily increasing. Among these titles, there are three that I wanted to give special attention to in this post, titles that meant something special for me, or stood out in one way or another.

Animeparty in London

Hi there everybody! As the event itself will be coming up fairly soon, I thought I might as well make a post about it. So, here it is ^_^. Although the initiative for the party came from a few enthusiastic ISSUP members on the forum of Anime Planet (ISSUP is the International Society for the Study of Ummm… Pervertedness), the only real requirement for attending the party is being an anime fan who’s able to make it to London during the weekend of 22-23-24 october :-D.

Guest Post: Pokopori - If my life was an anime

Today's post will be the beginning of a new feature in the PAAS-blog, namely incidental guest posts. Guest posts are for everyone who's good at writing but just doesn't have the time to update a blog every week. If Omurqi and I think your piece is good enough for our blog, we'll definately contact you ;-)!

So, I guess I'll introduce our first guest-writer for PAAS: Pokopori (an enthusiastic Anime Planet-user). (if you want to read her profile, click http://www.anime-planet.com/users/pokopori). Pokopori is an anime addict who loves epic series (Code Geass, Hajime no Ippo, Rurouni Kenshin) and yaoi (gorgeous, droollicious bishies). As you can understand judging by our partially similar loves, Pokopori and I are good pals on AP. I regularly read her blogs and I was particularly impressed by the following one:

The good, the average and the atrocious, August 2010

So, when the month of september is almost coming to an end, let me present to you the first post of the month, the all-known good-average-and-atrocious ^_^. A lot of things and activities happened in august. I’ve been on musical summer camps for about 2 weeks, Omurqi and I got together for an afternoon of jamming (when we recorded our Eden of the East and Lain covers :-P) and we had a 2-days anime marathon at his house. We watched Cowboy Bebop, Cowboy Bebop the Movie, Akira, Natsume Yuujinchou and Honey and Clover in this marathon. In short, it was a great month :-P. My watching average in august was 5.6, pretty good considering I was gone for 2 weeks to a place without internet xD. Now, without boring you any further I’ll move on to my watching activities:

Halfway Through - Impressions of the Anime of Summer 2010

Weeks have passed since the beginning of the Summer 2010 anime season, and both Sunagan and I have been watching a lot of the currently airing shows (well, to be fair, Sunagan has. I've just been slacking and only been faithfully following a select few). As promised, here are our impressions of the seasonal shows so far.

Fanmade Covers: Serial Experiments Lain and Eden of the East

So, this one day Omurqi and I decided to make some music together since we like singing and since we're only living 2 hours apart (it's only 40 minutes by car, but sadly neither of us has that kind of luxory... we most definitely are poor students...). We sang some crazy songs like the Azumanga OP, some were too difficult for the moment (like Spice and Wolf) and others we'll probably do when we both get the lyrics down properly ('Again' from Yui (fullmetal alchemist brotherhood OP) and the ending theme from Working!!). Aside from all of our failed attempts at making somewhat decent sounding music, we also practiced and recorded 2 songs that came out well in the end. We're both just amateurs so don't go into this expecting something professional, but I still think we did a nice job ;-). We hope you'll enjoy our fanmade covers!

Serial Experiments Lain:



Eden of the East:



And by the way, our 'first impressions post on summer 2010' wil be posted soon by Omurqi, so that you'll have something to look forward to ^_^. Lol.
That's all folks ;-)!

How Katanagatari’s 7th episode managed to piss me off

Katanagatari, that show with that unusual style of animation, the show that releases one episode a month. It’s a show with unique characters and conversations and even more extraordinary morals. I’ve come to love it unconditionally during the past six months for its distinctiveness in these features.

Then why, why does it feel like episode 7 slowly starts ruining everything?

The good, the average and the atrocious, July 2010

Back from France with a tanned skin and otherwise drained from nearly all my will to live, I’d like to present you with pride the meager harvest of this month. Fasten your seatbelts, for the ride will be short and intense due to the complete lack of internet during my stay in that incredible country with those atrocious toilets. Oh, and they still haven’t learned how to speak English decently, by the way T_T. I can speak French alright, but if the ticket machine in the Louvre just refuses to spit out my ticket for more than 30 minutes and they even have to fetch the manager to fix it, it sure would have been handy if they’d have just a basic vocabulary of the most widely used language in the world. 100 words or something would have been an excellent start. *Sigh*. Let’s just keep on dreaming.


Moving on to my watching activities, apart from finishing all airing series of spring 2010 it wasn’t all that much really. My daily average boils down to no more than 4.4 eps. I’ll be gone for 2 weeks in august as well, so I seriously doubt the possibility of an improvement in this statistic next month. Anyway, let’s start my watching log.

Spring 2010 - Final Thoughts

Better late than never, here are Sunagan and mine opinions about the anime we've watched last season. Some good, others average and a few atrocious, spring 2010 ended up being a mixing bowl in terms of quality (or enjoyment, as I hate to label things as fundamentally good or bad). So without further ado, the shows:

Manga Review: Hitsuji no Uta

After watching the anime OVA of Lament of the Lamb a good while ago, I looked a little into it and quickly found out it was actually an adaption of the manga. Since I loved the 1h45 show for its dark, gritty and gloomy way of storytelling, the manga was quickly marked as Want to Read. However, due to all sorts of things, I kept putting it off until now. How I regret not reading this sooner…

The good, the average and the atrocious, June 2010

Wow. June passed by in a flash. I spent large amounts of my time at home either working on my super annoying paper (which I finally finished and got a passing grade for after repeated sessions of feedback, hallelujah) or watching anime. On the average, I watched 8.8 anime episodes a day, went out a lot with friends, in short, it was like a pleasant prelude to the freedom of summer holidays. As for my actual watching activities, I saw some terrible series that make you question the whole medium and a few shows that instantly hooked me – the kind of show that reminds you of the reason why anime is, in fact, awesome ^_^.

Letter to Death the Kid (Soul Eater)

The following is a letter adressed to Death the Kid from Soul Eater. It will feature some small comedic spoilers, so decide for yourself if you’ll read this or not if you haven’t seen Soul Eater yet ;-). Enjoy!

Mirai Nikki PV released

As some of you might already know, Mirai Nikki (Future Diary) is getting an anime adaption later this year, based on the manga by ESUNO Sakae. Seeing the first PV came out the other day, I wanted to share it with you all. As for now, the air date stands on the 9th of September.

Summer 2010 Preview

With the summer around the corner, what better way to spend your sunny days than by following a bunch of freshly airing shows? Only one day before the first show starts airing, Sunagan and I take a look at what will be coming at us for the next months.

The good, the average and the atrocious, May 2010

My watching activity this month started out on a great note. My parents and pesky brother had vanished into the cold and rainy forests and fields of Holland to go camping and I wasn’t sorry at all that I couldn’t go with them (no vacation at university). So, they were gone (sadly I still live at home, but then again, I rather watch anime than work for living expenses :-P. Guess I’m pretty lazy), and I attempted to break my record of the amount of watched episodes a day. I succeeded – I broke my previous 38 episodes record and achieved watching 50 episodes in one day. I watched from 9.00 am to 5.30 am. It felt crazy, but also really good, just to have done this once :D.

True Opinions Don’t Exist… Well Neither Do False Ones!

‘There is no truth. There is only perception.’ This statement has come to be one of my pet peeves these days. Upon completing my first (and now second) year of university, I started to get a firm hold of the idea that ‘truth’ is not always ‘out there’, but that instead it usually is more of a fleeting concept. Even in science man admits: there is no secret door we can open to discover the real truth, instead we try to uncover it bit by bit – with people who are, inherently, biased, with statistical methods we devised ourselves, and limited by our human imagination. In science, we don’t talk about true theories. We talk about theories that seem to approach the truth, when they are supported by sufficient empirical evidence. And even then, we can’t be sure. The truth of today may be the thrash of tomorrow, and what seemed impossible yesterday is what we call reality now.

That’s right. Truth is a fleeting concept. Especially in the world of entertainment, where it’s not a matter of life and death if there exist millions of opinions around one ‘truth’, if you will. Music wouldn’t be as enjoyable without the freedom for a personal interpretation. Neither would books, movies or… yeah you guessed it, anime.

VN Review: True Remembrance

Many people, up until a year ago myself included, skip over the medium of Visual Novels because of the general image people have of it: H-Games, eroge or porn with text. This is a real shame, since there are tons of great Visual Novels out there where smut takes the backseat and story prevails (kinda like how not all anime focus on sexualisation like hentai does).  Now not to give off an entirely subjective look into VNs, it is indeed true that many works, even those with the most grandiose storyline, have a few H-scenes squeezed in. Sex sells after all, and in a somewhat niche business like this, every penny counts. In my yet-short venture through different kinds of VNs, I stumbled upon True Remembrance, a non-H story that instantly caught my eye.

And with a loud *bang*

Well hello there readers. Before placing my first content post here, I thought I’d start out with a little introduction, so here we go. I’m Omurqi, co-creator of the PAAS-blog. Sunagan and I decided that I’d make posts here every once in a while whenever Sunagan is unable to do so that week; university life can be cruel at times. 

Letter to Simon (Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann)

Warning: the following is a letter addressed to Simon from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann from the fictional perspective of Yoko (my own opinion is moderately incorporated :-P). It’s written based on the whole series (27 episodes) and will contain major spoilers. Do not read it if you haven’t seen this series. In case you have seen it, enjoy ;-)!

The Privilege of being a Survival Anime: Jyu Oh Sei, GANTZ and Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

There must be as many kinds of anime in this world as one can count stars in the sky; mindfuck, idiotic fluff, allegorical stories, adventure and action, anime with societal themes, psychological, martial arts, anime exploiting mature sexual themes or anime that keeps getting stuck at middle-school level. There is anime that presents itself as a fable, stories which are an intellectual challenge even to the smartest of the fanbase, and there’s also anime that isn’t intending to be smart or amazingly well constructed, solely focusing on the level of entertainment. There’s also anime that mercilessly makes you laugh hysterically without being able to stop. Stomach ache sucks, but I still love you Ouran xD!

In principle, there’s a lot of interesting things to say about almost all genres, but today I really feel like highlighting one in particular. I’d like to point out the survival anime, as it holds a curious place among other genres. It’s substantially different from the others in a few remarkable ways.

The good, the average and the atrocious, april 2010

So here it is, the long awaited monthly Watching Log! ‘Cause ‘watching log’ would be an excruciatingly boring title, I’ve decided to dub it ‘the good, the average and the atrocious’ just for the sake of originality :-P!

Embarrassing!

Situation 1: When I’m talking about the swimming pool episode, every anime fan will probably know what I’m talking about – yeah, fanservice. What could possibly be more fun than an episode full of skinny animegirls with various breast sizes (fitting every possible taste guys could have) and Body Mass Indices far under the critical value of 17 splattering around in the pool?

The Fundamental Hentai Problem for Female Audiences

I'm perverted. I'm not in any way going to deny this; as a young, healthy woman, why should I? Pureness and innocence are a fairytale in our age group. Sex is natural, sex is fun. Watching sex is, to certain extends, fun too.

The Great Shounen-3

As a passionate shounen fan with a love for epic stories, sarcastic humor, monstrous fights and loveable protagonists, I really adore the great shounen-3. They are long, mainstream series, loathed by almost every self-respecting site reviewer, but I personally happen to love them.

P.A.A.S - the birth of a blog

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing (Socrates)
There is no truth, there is only perception (G. Flaubert)
There is no spoon (The Matrix)
The world is not beautiful, therefore it is (Kino no Tabi)
I don't think it would be bad to live in the darkness remembering the light (Mushishi)