Here’s my (probably quite brief and random) report on Tokonatsu Kraken-con Spike-con!

First of all, Tokonatsu is a little different to your average anime con, it’s in a field… with tents. And second, for an anime con, there’s actually very little anime related things there, but to be honest, that made it more fun!! ^_^

Day 1:
Train journey from where i live, across London (during rush hour), up to Milton Keynes went fairly smoothly. Arrived at station, waited for people, got in taxi to take us to the field.

We were greeted at the camp site by the gophers where we were promptly registered, told our houses, and shown to our tents. Unpacking began, namebadge was put on, and conbook was packed into bag to be read on the journey home (as usual).

After that it was pretty much fun fun all the way, the beer came out, there were pleanty of water fights (dubbed “Otaku Royale”), and anime pictionary games (all the games scored points for your house).

Drinking carried on well into the night, umm… there was a campfire… umm… it was dark… umm… yeah… as you can tell… anything after the afternoon became hard to remember.

Day 2:
The less said about the morning the better. Most of us were feeling the effects of the night before. And the cornflakes felt more like glass down the throat due to the lack of saliva.

More games, more fun, no daytime beer this time. I for one actually enjoyed Fail the Flag, dispite not having a weapon.

The cosplay masquerade happened after lunch, it started slightly late so we were treated to the story of Harry the cornflake, as told by Spike. But then the masquerade began before we could hear the end of the story. Some rather good skits… particular highlights were Team Rocket and Gaara Gayra.

After a while the anime disco began (and the Kraken was discovered in the lake). The anime disco actually started out with Japanese stuff, but by request somehow ended up with Spike DJ’ing, and telling the story of Harry the cornflake again, and pleanty of 80′s cheese music. Hearing Queen in Japanese was rather entertaining, as was seeing a marquee of 50 people all doing the Yatta dance.

Once again we were horribly interrupted by rain and the disco had to be shut down (at about 2am i think), so we didn’t hear the end of Harry the cornflake.

Day 3:
More CTF games, more pictionary, anime quiz. Then we packed up and begun to leave.

We did try to get Spike to finish the story, but were informed that it’s not possible without an audience. We all eagerly await the exciting conclusion next year.

Oh, and my house… after winning throughout the whole weekend, we ended up coming last. Mostly because we donated a member to another team during the quiz… the team we donated a member to ended up winning overall.

I believe this image sums the con up well:

(Click for full size)

Surely i can’t be the only one that’s getting *really* pissed off with .hack//roots? It’s just so bloody lame, .hack//roots is a meer shadow of the .hack we used to know. I really don’t like the way they’re treating this series…

A) The characters/designs are so goddamn unlikeable and miserable (with the exception of Tabby). Heck, even the bloody scenery is miserable and unlikeable. And what happened to the other towns, were they too lazy to draw up backgrounds for them? Or is there a reason behind that?

B) They’re treating The World as if it was real life… oh yeah, sure they slip in the occasional “oh btw she also happens to be in a coma irl”. But what happened to the real world tie-ins?? We don’t know anything about these players in the real world. That’s one thing i really liked about the original .hack, the games, and the novels, the fact that we learn about what these players are like in the real world too, and the fact that the game is having an effect on the real world. But with .hack//roots it seems they’ve given up on that. They’re treating the game as if it were real life, some of the character reactions to things that are happening in .hack//roots just wouldn’t happen to anyone playing a game irl. >_>

C) They’re just re-using the same storyline *again*. “Oh noes… people are falling into coma’s we gotta save them!!!!!111″

So, as you can tell i’m not happy at all with .hack//roots, it just pisses me off watching it. They have dragged the .hack name into the gutter.

Please… no more… please make it stop. With every new episode that airs i can feel the originality of the once great .hack draining from existance.

This is quite possibly my most random post yet, but please bear with me, there will be anime stuff, and habanero pics at the end. ^_^

Ok, so i was walking home from work today, and there was a group of rather confused looking American tourists waiting to cross the road. I walked past one and heard them saying “this must be one of those funky traffic circles”. I couldn’t help but laugh, sorry.

Is this what English roundabouts are known as in America… “traffic circles”? Seeing as many people from other countries may not know about roundabouts, i prepared a little guide (i have no idea if the arrows are on the correct side of the road)…

Above we have a typical roundabout, cars go in, they go around, they exit where they need to. The green arrow in the middle is the inside lane where you would go if your exit was all the way around the roundabout. When you are nearing your exit, you would move to the outside lane. Very efficient i must say.

And above here is what i believe the American road system uses (Do Americans call them crossroads, or intersections or something? I can imagine some American thinking to himself “haha lol, the funny Englishman called it a “crossroads”.”, so i hope that’s the right word! ). As you can see, it clearly doesn’t work. Apart from the obvious explosion, what happens when you want to add more than 4 roads? You can’t have like 8 of them going into the same square, it just wouldn’t work. You need to focus on scalability. Our roundabouts are very scaleable… need more roads into it… just make it bigger and add the road in!

And that conclueds the traffic lesson. And you know what… after drawing that, i can see how a roundabout would be considered rather confusing, and i think i’m beginning to like the whole “traffic circle” name, i may just start using it.

Ok, onto some anime…

The first series of Gyagu Manga Biyori has been fully subbed now, i must say that even with the whole “WTF??” nature of it, i liked it a lot. I’ll be looking forward to season 2.

High School Girls also finished… i shall be sad to see it go. I’ll miss the funny parody openings they done for each episode. Here’s hoping for a season 2.

Also, i have to say, Doremi really deserve a lot of credit for their work on Keroro Gunsou, they just keep releasing more and more episodes, do they have an army of translators locked up in a basement or something? …well however they’re doing it, keep up the good work, we love it!

As for stuff of the summer season, i guess i’ll make it brief (please note, unless otherwise specified i have no experience with whatever any of these shows are based on i.e. their manga/novel counterparts)…

I watched one episode of these before giving up:

- Muteki Kanban Musume

- Akazukin

This is what i shall be continuing with:

- Tsuyokiss… Characters are quite entertaining, which is always a plus.

- NHK ni Youkoso!… Intriguing… must watch more. Not too keen on the OP/ED though.

- Zero no Tsukaima… best of the season so far imo, funny, cute, not too childish, maybe the story is a little predictable though, we’ll see. It’s just like a comedy version of Shana.

- Chokotto Sister… that ED theme… that wonderful, wonderful ED theme. That alone makes the show worth watching. I can’t wait for the full version of that to come out. Easily best song of the season.

If i haven’t mentioned certain shows above it either means i haven’t watched it yet, or don’t plan on watching it at all (more than likely the latter).

Ok (wow…feels like i’ve been typing for ages), now Habanero-tan… only 9 days on from the previous photo and it’s turning into day of the triffids. >_<

Poor little Habanero-tan… lost in the jungle. And what’s this, is that some buds i see…

It’s only a matter of time before we get some flowers and peppers! And you know what i’ve realised… i’m not too keen on super spicy food, lol. Ahh well… i’ll find a use for them.

And finally (yes finally… my fingers hurt), i must apologise for posting this. I am sorry, i truly am, but it has to be done:

Italy won the World Cup on penalties. I think they thoroughly deserved to win, especially after all the crap going on with their home league. And as for Zidane, well… what a prat, i think it’s a good job that was your last game:

Not much else to post right now, i guess my first impressions of the new anime season will come later, but at the moment Zero no Tsukaima is looking the most interesting out of what i’ve seen so far (not seen NHK yet).

And Habanero-tan… you’ll notice i moved it inside again… apparantly the sunshine in England was too much for it, lol. The leaves kinda got burnt after 1 day, but it seems to have recovered now:

First of all… the less said about England the better, but here goes anyway…

It’s a shame we went out, and perhaps we didn’t deserve to lose on penalties after the game we played, but to quote an earlier post “this is not the way a World Cup winning team should play”. Quite frankly, we’ve been playing poorly the whole World Cup, we definitly didn’t deserve to get to the final with the way we’ve been playing. Lets hope our next manager is a bit more outspoken… instead of sitting down and quietly watching the game. >_>

Right, now that’s over, i’d like to direct everyone’s attention to the links section of my site, for the past couple of weeks i’ve been manually adding and tagging all my bookmarks in del.icio.us. It seems to be a fairly useful way to organize bookmarks and stuff (so long as everything is tagged properly). For example with the current hierarchical bookmark system where everything is in it’s own folder, you have to know the exact folder a bookmark you want is located in. And if you happen to have a few hundred bookmarks you will know that some of them could potentially be located in a couple of different folders (unless you’re really really organized). This is where del.icio.us comes in… because all bookmarks are tagged with keywords it makes it easier to find certain things. For example if i wanted to find all my anime related blogs i could click the anime category, which would list everything tagged with anime, then i would click the blog category, which would list everything tagged with anime and blog. Makes it much easier to find certain things if you can’t be bothered to organize your bookmarks into neat folders.

Therefore… i’ve replaced my links section with my del.icio.us tag cloud, i think that’s much tidyier than a long list of bookmarks (and it means i can share *all* of my bookmarks instead of a selection of my favourites). ^_^

In Habanero related news, it seems someone else had the same idea as me: http://www.foxcomic.com/play/habanero/0606.html

Mine isn’t quite that big, but i blame the transport time it took to get from Japan to me (and possibly the English weather).

In an effort to speed up growth time i have now moved my plant from the windowsill to the garden (since England seems to be having some pretty stable sunshine now), seeing as these plants grow in Mexico, i guess they’d prefer the outdoor sunshine to the windowsill. ^_^