More pictures to follow.

Nanaka Shirakawa teacup from COSPA!

I have a confession to make: I am a huge Nanaka fanboy. *gasp* I know, I know, it’s a shocking revelation. But it’s really a nice teacup… orz. I mean, come on, Nanaka in her hatsumode kimono and Chibi Nanaka on the reverse side, that’s a sure-fire recipe for fanboy overloading.

Thanks to Kieth Keith from KKnM for helping me secure it. I love that store. Everyone should buy from them. (Do I get discounts for this?)

If you don’t live in Singapore, you can always get Nanaka online from HLJ for ï¿¥800.

Moving on…

It’s Lacus Clyne! Lacus-sama! Lacus-sama! Lacus-sama!

Confession No.2: I am a huge Lacus fanboy. *more gasps* This 1/8 PVC figure from Megahouse’s RAH DX series returns Lacus to her somewhat lolilicious younger appearance from the original SEED.

As is mandated by Japanese industrial laws, she comes with removable skirts. Haruhi bless Japan.

Or you can leave only the top part of her skirt on to get a pseudo miniskirt. Mmmm… Human ingenuity reaches new heights.

One last look at her purplish-pink pantsu. Mmmmmm… And a pink Haro. Don’t forget the pink Haro.

You can get Lacus from HLJ for ï¿¥4,000.

Kasumi was an impulse buy. I don’t even like Dead Or Alive. This 1/6 figure of her from Max Factory originally came in blue, followed by white. Black is the top secret colour variation obtainable only by cool people like me. Yup.

Unfortunately, she’s probably sold out online, except maybe on some way overpriced websites. It’s quite an old release after all.

Just look at those nice-looking… strands of hair. Uh. Yeah. Those.

If you live in Singapore, you can get her from Urban Attic located on the 5th floor of Funan. Unlike tj han and tsubaki, you probably won’t get any discounts for mentioning my blog. :3

And of course, Mahoro. You can see the nice pictures here and buy her from HLJ for ï¿¥10,000.

Some pictures of the bike without Mahoro.

And on a final note: ALL YOUR FIGURES ARE BELONG TO CHINA!

Forget it. 400px wide content div it is. GAO!

I also tweaked the layout here and there and added a tagging system. Now all I need to do is to blog more often… :P

BTW the RSS feed from Danny is part of his “Featured Feeds” initiative.

Ok I’m lying. As if I would voluntarily go to the beach. It’s just an oversized sandpit and a shit load of salt water for Haruhi’s sake. I just fell victim to peer pressure. It was horrible. People were getting buried alive. I think a few drowned too. Just imagine the fishes picking away at their corpses as we speak. The beach is dangerous place.

Since I probably won’t be going to Sentosa for the next few years, I took the opportunity to bring Saber along for a holiday that she deserves. I mean, she’s called “Holiday ver.” for a reason.

See…

Saber likes lions.

The Merlion is half lion. (Or so the travel brochures claim)

Therefore, Saber likes Merlion.

GAO!!!

I’ll just go lie down and die now. I think I walked for 10 hours today.

I rock.

ZOMG YES LENS FLARE!

Look mum, no propulsion!

Ooo, look at the lame laser effect

How did Makoto Shinkai make Hoshi no Koe on his Power G4 Mac without going insane is beyond me. And yes, I do realize that the sun shouldn’t be visible in the last picture…

DarkMirage

and

Dark Mirage

Spot the difference.

You know who you are! And no, it’s not just one of you out there. :|

…You know, I get the feeling that people will start mistyping my nick on purpose now just because I don’t like it.

That’s how I look like IRL. No, really. Yeah, I was the guy walking around in the SOS-dan T-shirt.

Long story long:

I met up with tj han, tsubaki, bj0rn and zima (from SOS-dan @ rizon) at the event. We had a lunch break just after the individual round and stayed till the whole thing was over.

I was standing quite far from the stage and almost everything was taken with at least 2x zoom freehand. I fail at photography.

Generally speaking the costumes were on par with the recent Cosfest but unlike Cosfest there wasn’t any particular costume that I really liked.

The event is divided into individual and team rounds, with some performances in between, such as Mizuki performing “Endless Story” just like she did during Cosfest. You can see a bit of her Cosfest performance here.

The cosplay competition itself was pretty meh. The emcee wasn’t doing a good job. She couldn’t really engage the contestants and her attempts at humour made me cringe. At least the Cosfest guy sounded like he’s in the emcee business, sarcastic asshat as he may be.

The highlight of the show was probably when the guy cosplaying as Ichigo from Bleach took the mike, pointed at one of the judges with his sword and said, “If I don’t win, you’ll be the first.” (or something to that effect…) He ended up second. And there was also a guy who went up the stage and started singing the theme song from a last-century sentai show at the top of his voice. o_o

Apparently tj han was looking forward to meeting Lenneth, the Saya cosplayer from Cosfest, but he forgot to ask for her contact number and didn’t manage to bump into her. He claims that he’s fine, but we all know that he’s very disappointed. :( Well, I’m sort of disappointed too. :(

On another note, Haruhi didn’t take part in the competition and left the place quite early. Probably because there weren’t any aliens, time-travellers and ESPers around.

After the event, we went to Kinokuniya. It’s currently having a 20% discount for members. I picked up two volumes of Hayate no Gotoku and almost bought the latest issue of G’s Magazine. Then we headed down to Sunshine Plaza where I accidentally purchased the latest issue of Megami. We sat down on the comfortable couches in Kare Kano no Mise and wasted the rest of the time away talking about everything from figurines, seiyuu to tj han’s hidden lolicon tendencies…

P.S. I hadn’t bought an issue of Megami in a long time, but this issue is… special.

I still hate them folds though.

According to the blog サイコロキャラメルの謎, which belongs to the creator of this awesome custom resin figurine, Suzumiya-sama will be on sale during the next World Hobby Festival to be held in Kobe on July 30th (and not the more popular Wonder Festival Summer to be held next month in Tokyo). Details as follows:

• Price: 12,000 yen (~100 USD)
• Availability: 200 pieces
• Type: unpainted and unassembled resin kit
• Limited to one per person

Well, WHF is held in Kobe, just a bit away from Osaka. Alternatively, you can try Yahoo! Auctions Japan in a few days’ time and buy one for an insane amount of money.

Gah, if only it were Wonder Festival. At least I know some people who are in Tokyo and going to be there. But Kobe is just… =_=

There is currently no plans for PVC mass production.

I am not interested in the game and I speak Japanese fine, thus it does not matter to me whether or not NNL decides to release the patch. That said, I do feel strongly about this because it affects the community as a whole. Now, the IRC anime community is quite small and I’ve already annoyed quite a few people by ranting about this topic in the SOS-dan channel today. I hope, whoever you are, that you understand that I am not being personal about this. Even if you are related to NNL in anyway at all, please read on. This is what I have to say and I hope you will at least read it.

First of all, I know what everyone is going to tell me. I’ve been hearing it all day long. Yes, NNL did make the patch and they are free to do what they want with it, even if it means keeping it sealed away forever. (Although legally speaking the patch was done without the copyright holder’s permission and thus it still legally belongs to the game company.) I am not going to say that NNL must release the patch to the public, I’m just suggesting that they should. With that, I shall present my points.

I assume that NNL is doing this because the people who spent years translating this do not want to hurt the game company by encouraging piracy. I cannot deny that a person who downloads an illegal copy of a game he does not own is a pirate, that is a true and fair definition. However, is it such a bad thing to encourage more people to download the game (illegally as it may be) when those people would probably never ever touch the game without the translation? A person who does not speak Japanese is outside the targeted audience of the game. If he pirates the game, it does not hurt the company, it only helps to foster a new market. I know this sounds like a generic excuse, but I’ve felt its effects firsthand and I do believe in it.

If NNL gives the patch out without restrictions, a lot of people will download the game illegally, true. But that means that a lot of people who would otherwise never have touched the game will now give it a try, and some of thems will become fans of the series. I can say for certain that out of those people who become fans (because they are now able to understand the game), at least some of them will end up buying the game.

On the other hand, what happens if NNL gives the patch only to people who can prove that they own the DVD version of the game? Most people who own the game already played it. They probably speak Japanese. Those who haven’t bought it aren’t going to buy it just because there’s now an English translation for it (which they may or may not be able to obtain successfully even after they buy the game). The fact that the tests involved are largely arbitary and even a person with the game in his hand may possibly fail them only further aggravates the situation. And let us not forget those people with the CD version of the game…

That leaves us with some hardcore Wind fans who do not speak Japanese, have never played the game itself, but somehow have already purchased the correct version of the game. All three of them. I fail to see how this helps the game company.

Visual novels are at the same stage in North America as anime was 20 years ago. Few people know about them, few people watch/play them, few of them are available in English. Whatever one may think of the fansubbing community today, I think we can all agree that fansub in those days was the number one reason for foreign proliferation of anime. What NNL is doing is basically denying what fansubs have done for the community. We are pirates, I admit that. But speaking from personal experience, I would never have spent thousands of dollars on anime and related products if not for this form of piracy we call fansubbing. That’s right, fansubbing is piracy. Those video and audio files are copyrighted. Even the translation itself is illegal without the author’s permission. Fansubs are illegal. But I would like to think that those thousands of dollars I spent thanks to fansubs did do some good for the anime industry.

And I think those of you at NNL do agree with me. Afterall, you are a fansubbing group. You have fansubs containing copyrighted footages up for download in your BitTorrent section. Why do you not ask the people downloading those files to prove that they own the original R2 DVD? The answer is simple: you KNOW that they do not. And that is part of fansubbing. We are copyright infringers, but we have a greater goal, or at least we like to believe that we do. We hope that we are helping to make the series we love more popular. We hope that at least some of the people who didn’t know about the series will now end up becoming fans for life. We hope that at least some of those pay for the legitimate copy. We are helping to create markets where there were none.

So why should it be any different for visual novels? Why are you turning the whole system upside down just because we are now dealing with a game instead of a video? Anime has become quite popular in North America and I can see why there are people calling for fansubs to stop now that illegal fan translations are no longer so vital to the survival of the fandom. But visual novels are 20 years too early for that.

Once again, it’s NNL’s time and effort and it’s up to them to decide whether they want to release the patch or let it become a forgotten part of the history of fan translations. (We call it kuroi rekishi.)

But seriously, years of effort just for three or four people? It’s NNL’s decision, but I can’t help but feel that it’s a sad loss for the community. It could’ve been so much more.

Call me a busybody because I am one. *plays BGM*

P.S. You can read about the latest developements from VisualNews.