Canned Dogs

Negima author Akamatsu wrote on his blog a few days ago that the Negima TV drama, Mahou Sensei Negima! Parallel, will run for 2 seasons (24~26 episodes). I don’t know if the world is ready for half a year of awesome Negima TV drama!

He also mentions in the same post that Negima will be appearing in a variety of media at the same time next year, which led to a lot of speculation from fans that he is hinting that a movie is being made. And in his newest entry, he says that they’ll consider a 3rd anime series if there is enough demand from the fans.

I follow the negima comic and all, but I still don’t understand how it manages to be as popular as it is.

Yume Nikki is a freeware game by Kikiyama where the main purpose in the game is to… walk through different dreams. You can find creatures in each dream and learn some new effects from them like getting a new hairstyle or riding a bicycle and stuff. The game doesn’t really have a purpose, but it’s great!

The game can be downloaded here. You also need to get the RPGmaker 2003 RTP to run it. This game was last updated 2005 December but I’m digging it up for lack of news!

The girl has a playable famicom too, good stuff.

Succubus Quest is a pretty good RPG for the PC where you have sex battles in order to defeat monsters. They’ve recently released a new version of the game at Comic Market 72 and have now actually released it free for download from their website. You’ll also need the RPGmakerXP RTP files to run the game.

I was actually surprised by the quality of this game, I was expecting it to be… less professional. There’s an update to v0.05 on the download page too, it fixes quite a bit of bugs so it’s best to get it.

Back in July when the stricter adult doujinshi guidelines were announced, there were posts on 2ch saying that the guidelines were announced because somebody was arrested and his doujinshi didn’t have the adults-only label on his book.

It does completely coincide with Shiyami’s doujinshi which was released in July and he didn’t have the label. I guess they were waiting till after Comic Market to announce the case to the public.

Right now I can think of a number of artists that need to brush up on their censorship skills… I hope no one else gets involved in this.

NHK news reports that 39 year old doujin author Miyashita Masaya has been arrested by the police in Matsuyama City for distribution of indecent pictures. The reason given by the police for the arrest appears to be that the censorship was not sufficient.

Police suspect that the author has printed a total of 17,000 books between April 2005 and October 2006 and have confiscated 7 titles totalling 6,600 books.

The author is apparently Yasamata Shiyami, a semi-well known artist that worked on a number of games(including EVE) under C’s ware.

Edit: Doujindou has pictures of the covers of Shiyami’s latest doujinshi that was sold in stores in July this year. We can clearly see that there is no “adults only” mark on the cover, which probably contributed to the reason for the arrest.

The 6.30 Akihabara Liberation Demo that was held on the 30th of June had a attracted a lot of criticism both good and bad. In particular, people were bringing up points on how the demonstration apparently had links to a particular radical left wing group.

The organizers then started discussing within their private mixi community on plans to attack and threaten some of the bloggers that have been criticizing the demonstration, even to the point where one of them suggests to strangle one of the bloggers who was a comiket staff member.

This information had leaked out prior to Comic Market 72 and the staff alerted the police and stepped up security in the premises. On Comiket Day 1, they caught somebody trying to take photos of the space for Shinsei Multi Oukoku, who was one of their targets.

The person taking the photos did not know anything about the plans, but he had revealed that he was asked by two of the 6.30 demonstration organizers to take the photographs. However, they did not bring charges on them, as the person taking the actual photos was underaged and was an unknowing accomplice, and ended it by banning one of the two masterminds from having a circle at Comiket in the future.

Source:
6.30 Akihabara liberation demo organizers’ terrorist act at Comiket

Japanese blog Dekadenbiyori has written a review of the English translated version of the Shakugan no Shana novel and comments that the standard of English used in the book was very poor and that the book does not convey the qualities of the story nor does it make use of the qualities of the English language.

The blog goes on to quote Yuji Sakai from the start of the novel, showing how Yuji Sakai is only able to say “Ugh” or “What?!” or some other form of exclamation, and concludes that he will not be touching the 2nd volume of the novel.

I thought it was funny to have such bad writing in an English publication that it is getting bashed by a Japanese site. I wonder how the novel was accepted in English communities…

After the Higurashi live action movie was announced a week ago, fans of the original have gathered together in an online protest to stop the movie from being made. Currently they are encouraging fans to sign a petition or email their concerns to Ryuukishi07, the creator of Higurashi.

The petition they’re using is “letter to the chairman”. The site owner will take action depending on the amount of support for each petition and send their concerns to the chairman of the organization that they’re petitioning against.

If 20 people support the notion, a letter is sent to the organization. If 50 people support it, a phone call is made. And if more than 100 people support it, they will arrange for an interview with the chairman. Currently support for the petition against the higurashi movie stands at over 350 people.

Though, Ryuukishi07 had written in his diary that the movie is already being made, so they have changed their notion to let the makers know how the fans feel instead, so they can try to make a successful movie production.

(Not related, but Letter to the chairman was also being used to petition for Hunter x Hunter to start again with over 800 supporters, the site owner is still making preparations for the interview)

A small collection of links to sites that have photos of itasha and cosplay at Comic Market 72. For those who don’t know, itasha means “painful car” and it’s used to refer to cars that are decorated with anime or game pictures. It’s “painful” because it’s embarassing.

Itasha:
Otaroad Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
Otasuke

Cosplay:
Ascii.jp
Hobby Channel 1, 2, 3

Man itasha really increased in numbers in recent years… The term itasha(痛車) is also a word play on イタ車(itasha), which was a term used to refer to Italian cars. But that’s a little bit of info that is completely irrelevant to this post.

According to Mantan web, Comic Market 72 recorded 180,000 attendees on day 2 and 200,000 attendees on day 3, bringing the total to 550,000 attendees over 3 days. This makes it the Comic Market that has the highest number of attendees in history.

Otaroad Blog was reporting that people in the industry area had commented that they observed a big drop in people on day 2 though. I guess they were all concentrated at the doujin area.