Yes, the lady who gave us Torii no Uta and Toki wo Kizamu Uta is getting married soon and has a baby along the way. She has had to cancel an upcoming concert because of this. She must be quite far along to require cancelation of an event. Either that or her record company and artiste management are being wary of that ‘attachment stigma’ (though this is a rather more extreme kind of attachment).

What it is, congratulations to her and her man. Best wishes to the both of them.

She does look a tad like Minorin.

First of all, there is an update to the plan to do lightstick calls for Minorin. To put it briefly, instead of each participant paying a fixed sum of 22 SGD for the lightsticks, there is now a fixed budget where the cost will be evenly divided among the people who joined the project. So the more people join, the less each person will pay. Original blog post here. 

Then there’s the additional attractions that were announced recently. Copypasta mode on!

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Sentinel011 from Bonkurasu, Bjorn and yours truly will be attending Daicon09. See you there, if you are heading over!

This is Julius Firefocht, signing off.

I’m so going to buy his toy.

Why indeed. We just watched this not long ago and honestly, I do not understand all the hate directed at the show. I believed Transformers 2 was the best movie I have watched in ages, and I am ready to stand by that statement. I do not even want to list out the reasons why I loved the show, suffice to say I believed I got my money’s worth and more, and I walked out of the movie theater satisfied and happy. The movie has done its job of entertaining while fulfilling the need for military toys and giant transforming robot action, and that is more than any Transformers fan can ask for.

At any rate, I definitely enjoyed this a lot more than Terminator Salvation.

If you have not watched it or are avoiding it due to the bad press the movie is getting, might I suggest that you put aside the negativity and so-called “reviews”, go ahead and give the movie a chance. You might not like it even after you have watched it, but at the very least your opinion is now formed by personal experience, and not by 3rd party reports. That has to be worth something, right? Or perhaps, who knows? You might be transformed into a fan too!

This is Julius Firefocht, signing off.

That’s right, a B2-sized poster of Nana-chan in cheerleading uniform. Yours for a thousand yen. I need to get at least one of this. Preferably two if possible. Because Nana in cheerleading uniform evokes a surge of unspeakable emotion from within me, some sort of primal instinct I thought long buried by the guise of civilisation… ok, I digress.

Take a look at the official webpage for Live Diamond merchandise and pick your poison. I have already chosen mine, with a double dose to boot.

This is Julius Firefocht, signing off.

Remember the Jewels Audition last time, here we are back again with the 3 seiyuus who are voted in.

I have not seen them in the aisp for quite some time and I managed to register 葉山いくみas my friend on aisp.

For some reason the 3 of them lined up behind the host.

Time for self introductions.

Its almost like the real thing with a real stage www.

Heres some close-up profile views.

Time for the live broadcast.

Chiyo-chan is cute >.<

As usual some after event activities… The birth of the 巫女三姉妹. 

It seems that come August 21st, a single featuring both Okui Masami and May’n will be released (potential Animelo song, perhaps?). Titled Miracle Upper WL (whatever that means), it’s supposed to be the theme song of some show called Ontama. The promo blurb describes this as the ‘combination of two voices from two different generations of artistes’ (liberally translation, sorry).

This should be an interesting song to hear and look out for, after the rumours that the two were supposed to duet Get Along (from Slayers) at Animelo last year.

More info here.

Friend of mine asked for some shouting space for his plan for Minorin’s concert coming up in less than three weeks.

Most of us I am sure are familiar with light stick calls, seen at anison concerts. If not, look up for mai moe moe waifu’s Eternal Blaze at Live Fighter Red Side on youtube. For Daicon, some guys are coming together to get lightsticks for the people in the AWSM section of the seating area. For those interested in chipping in for this plan, you can contact the chap at evenstar{underscore]280 [at}hotmail<dot>com. For those who really love her and want to show your support for her, please do contribute to this plan. Lightstick calls mean a lot to an artist.

Original blog post here.

Meer Hina is nice too.

Here it is. The moment I’ve patiently waited for, the single reason why I bothered with HnG S2 even though I’ve read the manga since some time back. May I present Hina’s performance of Cruel Angel’s Theses and damn, it was worth the 12 episodes it took to get here.

It’s funny, but I actually found myself more moved by JC Staff’s animation of this scene as compared to KyoAni’s handling of K-On’s last episode. Perhaps it had something to do with the song itself. Cruel Angel’s Theses still had the power to make me pump my fist in the air and sing along to it, even after all these years. Combine that with Hina herself and excellent animation, and the package is complete. Not that K-On episode 12 was bad in anyway… but Cruel Angel’s Theses is just too powerful a song and Hina too moe a character.

At this point, it would be disrespectful of me if I did not mention Itou Shizuka. She handled the song superbly, singing the song in her Hina voice while managing to make the entire scene sound like an actual live session rather than a prerecording. Impressed, I then listened to Hina’s character single which included a properly recorded version of Cruel Angel Theses. Suffice to say I preferred it to Takahashi Yoko’s 2009 rendition, though I am fully aware who the original singer was.

Overall, the transition from manga to anime was very well done for this important scene, and I have to take my hat off to JC Staff for actually making it happen. I thought it could not be done after reading that chapter in the manga, but it happened and it ended up better than the manga could ever be. Its just incredibly well done.

I am done raving about Hina, and yes, I realized I wrote an entire post for an anime sequence that lasted for no more than 1.5 minutes at the most. But hey, its the animation of a manga scene that I had looked forward to for a long time, so its worth it. I am not even sure if I will watch episode 13, but since I got this far I might as well finish it.

This is Julius Firefocht, signing off.

After six long, agonizing months, Top Gear returns to the telly today in the United Kingdom. That is all.

After taking pictures after pictures, I realised that it’s boring to take picture with people simply just smiling. And so at times I’ll encourage people to strike a pose along with it. Of course in Singapore, sometimes, when you try TOO hard, people tend to say stuff like why are you acting cute and such.

That aside, I feel that poses are important when taking a picture too, especially when you’re cosplaying. So let’s move on ahead! And so I came across this site and I got to admit, it has a very interesting content about Asian Poses.

This site is dedicated to documenting and collecting photos of the notorious but quirky and cute Asian poses. To help you recognize various poses, visual aids will be provided courtesy of popular Korean, Japanese, and Chinese models. Hopefully, this site can be of some help to some out you out there, especially photographers and models.