Just a brief post before I do a full write up, but the weekend was fun! Got An Nakahara’s autograph (she’s really nice), saw Morning Musume, where they remembered me from last year’s AX (sadly the “special guest” was not Koharu after all, but instead Nakazawa Yuko), and pleanty of other fun fun!

(click for fullsize)

So much other Kirarin Revolution stuff. The French clearly have taste, lol! Why can’t it have an official English release??? (though the “L” is somewhat irritating, lol)

I wish there were conventions like this in the UK, the London Expo gets enough visitors, why is it still so rubbish??

Oh, the rest of the photos are in the gallery too! (http://www.pori.co.uk/?p=2419)

…yeah, lack of posts for a while, but hey ho.

Regarding the Japan Expo in France, just to quote something I said in my original post on the matter back in may:

Oh and Morning Musume are going to be there too… but that’s less important… unless Koharu also turns up with the Kirarin Revolution relation and all. ^_^

Well it’s just been announced that there will be a special mystery ex-Morning Musume member guest also appearing at the Japan Expo. Speculation rife as to whether or not it is indeed Koharu, but it must be!

(News via: HelloBlog)

…and completely unrelated: WordPress 3.0 broke the lovely maths comment spam protection thing I had. No more excitingly complex and challenging sums for people to do.

Only just found out about this, but I must go!

http://www.japan-expo.com/en/actu/an-nakahara-kilaris-author-at-japan-expo_48.htm

This takes priority over AX (sorry Mano!!!). On the plus side it is significantly cheaper to get to! I must get autograph! And ask about exactly what creative control she had over the direction of STAGE3 of the tv series (I assume very little, but it’d still be quite interesting to know).

(Oh and Morning Musume are going to be there too… but that’s less important… unless Koharu also turns up with the Kirarin Revolution relation and all. ^_^)

I’ve been meaning to mention this game for a while (CDevil’s post on the subject finally made me get on with writing it).

Audiosurf (http://www.audio-surf.com), a PC music rhythm game. Imagine DDR without the need for all that sweat and legwork… or perhaps more appropriately Vib Ribbon for the modern age. Basically the game takes one of your songs and turns it into a track with blocks on it, you must dodge/collect these blocks as appropriate (depending on what mode you’re playing the game in). The layout/speed of the blocks will always be the same for each song (generally faster songs are more fun), and should in theory be the same for everyone else playing that song (in practice this is not strictly the case as even the slightest difference in the file could cause a few blocks to be in different places… but it’s largely the same). You get a score at the end, and each song has it’s own leaderboard… yes hundreds of thousands of leaderboards for all manner of songs. If you’re listening to something obscure then you’re likely to find yourself on your own on the leaderboard… but having said that there are many many players, so you might be surprised. Also, one amusing feature, when you’re top of a leaderboard for a song and someone beats your score (“dethrones” you), then you will get an email… amusing and annoying when you get an email saying you’ve been dethroned on a song you’ve held the title for for almost 2 years.

Anyway, my main point for posting this is that the JPop songs *need more players*!!! There is very healthy competition amongst anime songs, but seemingly fewer players on JPop songs. It’s all well and good getting into some friendly rivalry with someone on a specific song where you’re both up till 6am taking it in turns to beat each other (damn that Anataboshi). But it would be 100x more fun if there were more than 2 players playing that song!!! (well 2 players plus some miscellaneous player from Brazil that we keep dethroning, but that’s another story)

My proposal is that we get together enough people together that want to play JPop (or anime if you so wish) songs to form some sort of friendly competitive league where there’s a new challenge song each week. The only rules would be that everyone has to use a mono character (that’s the simplest one to use, and anyone who uses any other character cocks up the leaderboards… yes you kgado >_>).

Oh and one other feature it has, it can report the songs you play to your last.fm account (if you choose to), which explains the sections of time on my last.fm account where i’ve repeated the same song many many times.

What could possibly have arrived in this incredibly crumpled large box that I don’t ever remember ordering?

…and wait, what’s that, date of posting… December 2009???

………..wait a minute…..

…………….no………..surely not?

Indeed it is the calendars that were sent to me back in December, complete with “seasons greetings” from CDJapan, lol. Sadly (or maybe not so sadly) I now have two Shida Mirai 2010 calendars, lol.

Parcelforce in this country really do suck.