Mistakes of Youth: The Blog (Powered by EXCELLENCE!)

もっとSparking Now! 強くタフなハート
磨いたら世界は見違える
Sparking Now! 高くかざしたソウル
力の限り 目指せ1000%

When this single hit something like, what, almost two years ago? I was all over it. But, like most things on my huge anime playlist I forgot about it for newer tunes, and only rediscovered it recently because I have it set to play right after the Zettai Karen Children ending theme single. I’ve fallen in love all over again! This song is so fucking amazing in how it combines moe and hot-blooded passion all in one crazy amazing package. I mean, look at those lyrics! MOTTO SPARKING NOW! TSUYOKU TOUGH NA HEART!! Doesn’t it just make you wanna go outside and do something!? Seriously.

She asked for a kid’s meal… that’s so adorable.

Anime has always been cheap, and these days it’s super cheap. The big budgets of the bubble era are long gone, and while some studios see this as a drag, others see a challenge. People, at least people in the US, remember 80s era anime for its complex and intense design work, which often employed a lot more lines and shadows than we see today. These days designs are more economical with their lines, and shading is often less involved. Some see this as the anime industry cheaping out, but I see this as artists challenging themselves under harsh circumstances.

Designs probably didn’t get simpler just due to budget constraints, but I’d say such things played a big part in establishing the current anime aesthetic as we know it today. You’re always going to have lazy artists in any generation, but I think the good designers of today are more impressive than the ones of 25 years ago. It’s one thing to make a killer design with unlimited resources, but it’s another to make one with your resources limited. If you can make an expressive, attractive and unique design in keeping with the normal TV anime constraints of today, I think that’s pretty impressive.

It goes way beyond designs, though. Some low budget anime can be pretty impressive, too. I mean just look at Voices of a Distant Star with its budget of something like zero dollars. Or any Shaft/Shinbo work. Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is an absolute joy to look at, but the show has barely any animation at all!

Really, I don’t get it when older-school fans knock on the designs of today. Either they just can’t let go of their Western sensibility of ALL ART MUST BE SUPER REAL or they just don’t understand art at all. A lot of old Japanese art was minimalist anyway, so the fact that anime is heading in that direction isn’t really all that surprising.

In the midsts of my Shuffle! merch buying frenzy some months ago, I came across this “Clear Sheet Collection” over at CDJapan. I noticed that of the fifteen “clear sheets” available, two of them were rare images that I really wanted highres copies of (Kaede in naked apron and Kaede in maid outfit) and a quite a few others were images I liked but didn’t have highres versions of. Though, there was a catch: of the fifteen images available, the most you could get from each set was twelve, so you’d be missing out on three of the images no matter what. But despite that little hang up, I snatched this up without a thought and hoped for the best. After a few weeks, it finally arrived at my doorstep (gogo SAL shipping.)

Turns out my luck wasn’t totally horrible like it always is, and I at least got one of the two rare images I wanted. Alas, Kaede in a maid outfit seems forever out of reach, save for bad Yahoo auction pics. If anyone has that one, I’d love a scan of it. Anyways, on to the review…

This “Clear Sheet Collection” is really just a set of transparent pencil boards with various pieces of Really? Really! promotional art on them. Of the fifteen offered, only five of them are the same old recycled art you’ve seen everywhere, with the other ten being rarer images. So, no matter what kind of batch you get, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get some good stuff.

And what good stuff this is! Aoi Nishimata is in top form here with a bunch of cute Kaede renderings along some hot Primula, Mayumi and Sakura action for good measure. Hiro Suzuhira makes some brief appearances with a few Asa and Ama pics, but is mostly absent from this collection considering she apparently left Navel a while ago due to health issues. If I had to say anything negative about this set (aside from the fact that you miss three of the images >:((( ) is that the transparency thing seems pretty pointless. All it really does is make the art look faded, which isn’t a good thing. However, if you’re like me and tape up pencil boards, these look decent against a white surface. They’re also good to collect in an album of some sort!

I’d recommend these to any serious Shuffle! fan such as myself, but good luck finding them now. CDJapan is out, and I have no idea where else they’d sell these. Your best bet is Yahoo auctions, probably. In fact, I should go there right now and see if anyone is selling the Kaede maid “clear sheet”!

Bonus

As a distinguished member of the interwebs, I’ve decided to scan some of the rare images for my fellow otaku. I’ve uploaded all of these to danbooru (18+), but this blog post has a better scan of Naked Apron Kaede. Get ‘em while they’re hot!

Yay

Hay guys, I’m 20 years old today!

All I really want is

…and maybe some money to get the latest Megami, or a new bag.

Also, instead of happy birthday, let’s all sing OKKUSENMAN!

Here ya go

I’m also on mixi, if anyone cares…

Original Post

This comic is pretty horrible in every way, but at least I got to draw the gununu face! Aside from that though, the rest sucks. Especially that last panel. I actually had to edit that so it’d look less like ass, if you can imagine that. I do like how the background in that one turned out, though. Still messing around with a new template for the comic– I just switched comic construction to 300 dpi (I always do character art in 300 dpi, but constructing the comic was done in 72 dpi before now), so I figured I may as well change the layout a bit too. It’s a work in progress. This comic took ages for some reason. Maybe because it’s 7 panels. Next comic will be 2 panels because I’m lazy.

Answerman linked me for some reason, and it’s been brining in decent traffic. Not as good a StumbleUpon link, but decent. Not sure how I feel about ANN readers here, since I think I go against everything that site stands for, but so long as people stay I’m cool.

If you’ve been following the blog you would know that I just got my new computer (and no, it’s not the one pictured here. That’s the old one.) It’s great. Photoshop never slows down and I can watch highres subs! There are however bugs that need to be worked out. Two somewhat big ones, to be exact. One problem is that now I have trouble playing normal res videos in full screen! This trouble isn’t anything major, but it’s annoying. See, when I play any sort of normal res 16:9 video in full screen, I get little bits of noise– jumpy bits of horizontal white/black lines that flicker all over the screen randomly. It’s not totally distracting, but it happens often enough throughout playback that it’s annoying. I messed with a bunch of things starting with the video card drivers– when I uninstall the drivers, the videos play fine. Of course, I can’t leave my drivers uninstalled since that causes a bunch of other problems. Another thing I tried was changing screen resolution, and it seems that if I have the screen resolution set to anything under 1152×864, things work fine. But, I can’t do that since I like my resolution at 1280×1024. I’m sure there are other people out there with my same setup (that being, a computer with XP Pro and an ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO 128MB video card) and I’m wondering if they had this same issue and how they got around it. THE PROBLEM HAS BEEN FIXED. The other issue is with Firefox and my DanbooruUp extension not auto-completing tags. I have no idea how to fix that, though.

Anyway, I need to cut things short since I have a large backlog of anime to get through. Until next week…!

Image stolen from here. Please don’t kill me original artist.

Current
Chi’s Sweet Home: Cat.
Code Gayass R2: Even more over the top! And they said it couldn’t be done…
Golgo 13: Man this is some trashy stuff.
Kanokon: Man this is some trashy stuff. With heart shaped nipple covers.
Kurenai: IT’S GREEEAAAAT. The end of episode 9 was a bit wonky, but this one is still the best.
Kyouran Kazoku Nikki: Liking it less. The episodes seem kind of thrown together and the direction is poor. Maybe it’ll get better.
Macross F: Ranka is still cute. The CG is still good. Story is moving kind of slow, though.
To-LOVE-Ru: Wow, way behind on this one. Still, good harem fun that’s worth catching up on.
Toshokan Sensou: Getting a bit too serious. Still, it’s a Production IG show that’s actually good! They haven’t done that since IGPX (shutupitsagoodshow)
Zettai Karen Children: As good as Kurenai but for totally different reasons. So cute~. The story stuff is silly, but who cares.

Not so current
Nadesico: Kind of got stuck at episode 18. I’m enjoying it, and I can see why it’s an anime staple, but I’m not totally in love. It seems like its obsessed with fitting in AS MUCH INFORMATION AS POSSIBLE into 25 minutes sometimes. I don’t see the genius that dm sees in it yet.

Dropped
Allison and Whatever: Not like I don’t like it, just I noticed I was behind by 3 episodes and didn’t really feel like catching up.

The last episode of Miina is finally subbed. I dropped off at episode 8, so I’ll marathon the last 3 at some point.

Will finish Baccano after this post.

After Nadesico I may watch Planetes since I realized I own it all and haven’t finished it. Whoops.

Here’s how it happened: One of the pencil boards taped up on my wall fell down behind the shelf, and while I was moving the shelf away from the wall to get the thing, this ancient piece of paper from elementary school slipped out.

See, Pokemon was fucking hot like 10 years ago. So hot that my school (and probably many others) banned it since it was interfering with stuff. As such, they did this– the “Pokemon Festival” in which one could, as the sheet says “think, talk and breath Poke’mon.” Honestly, the experience must not have been terribly memorable, since I can only remember it now because of this little slice of the past that I happened to trip over. I was sure into those Pokemon back then, though. I still have my 5 billion cards stored away some place. I could probably sell them all for like 50 cents or something.