Sora no Kikou ~The sky of the longing for memories~

Early this autumn, my friend from Japan brought me back several items, the one presented in this entry is Sora no Kikou ~The sky of the longing for memories~, featuring digital backgrounds by the studio CoMix Wave. The book is a 175 page softcover, the majority of which are images, which I find uncommon for most fanbooks. The pages are smaller than your standard letter/A4 meaning the images are a small, and knowing the level of detail in Makoto Shinkai’s work I think these images could be spectacularly crisp even if enlarged 4× the size. Inside you will find hundreds of backgrounds from Byousoku 5 Centimeter (5 Centimetres per Second), Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho (The Place Promised in Our Early Days), Hoshi no Koe (Voices of a Distant Star), and a TV advertisement for the newspaper “Shinano Mainichi Shumbun”.

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I finally received my custom Nokia Suprnova 7310 about a month ago, but I only recently found the time to take some photos and write an entry about it. I’ve been extremely busy with school, and aside from a few of the Haruhi-chan mini-episodes, I haven’t watched any anime since returning from China in April…

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Today is TsundereStorm’s seven-month anniversary, and to celebrate, layout version 1.0 is released. Kagami’s autumn attire will be archived until next autumn, and during the spring and summer months we will feature Kannagi in a breezy blossoming park. A few changes still need to be made, but If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or find any problems with the new layout, please leave me a message. Some browsershots.org images show the wrong fonts, this main fonts used by this site are Lucida Sans, Georgia and Verdana, as shown in this screenshot. And just like the previous layout, 1.0 is IE 4/5/6 incompatible. More details, including the design development of this layout, can be found on the corresponding about page.

There probably won’t be many updates for the next two weeks, but once I’m back home things should start to pick up again. I’ll be doing some periodicals on K-ON! and am considering following Saki, since I am a mahjong player myself), and I’m looking for somewhere to buy more Ghibli artbooks.

We seem to have some character design recycling going on here in K-ON!. Strangely, it doesn’t bother me as much as I think it should, probably because their personalities are likeable and not identical copies of other characters, and the episode is presented well. Is anyone else in love with the ending theme? It’s been stuck in my head since I heard the first 5 seconds. The only thing that worries me is the guitarist in the ending theme – I hear chord changes, but I don’t see hands moving… Hopefully it’s not like this in the episode body, especially concert scenes. With the mention of NEETs, it’s probably directed toward the otaku crowd, but if you like bands and light comedic drama then this might be a show for you. I’m definitely going to be picking this series up; I probably won’t be blogging about every episode though.

You have most likely heard of the popular Korean MMORPG Ragnarok Online, and many of you have probably played it at some point or another. I would like to bring attention to the sequel of that game, Ragnarok Online 2. Also produced by Gravity, Ragnarok Online 2 was to be another of their flagship games. It features the world of Ragnarok in full 3d, with new monsters, multiple playable races, but most importantly for this review, an OST composed by Yoko Kanno. She composed about 90 tracks for this game, which was first released to the public in 2006 in the Korean closed beta.

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