When is the next Soul Eater chapter coming out?
Shounen GanGan is released on the 12th of every month. Every now and then we'll get an early release on the 10th or the 11th, but in general the answer is almost always that it will be released on the 12th. If you want to double-check next month's release date, go here.

How do you get the latest Soul Eater chapter?
I buy GanGan magazine every month. It takes about two to three days to ship to my house from Japan. Which means that I can usually post a recap on the 15th or 16th every month.

Will you scan a raw of the latest Soul Eater chapter?
Yes, I do every month. The raws are posted in the same place every month.

Can I link to your recap posts?
Yes, but PLEASE link to the dreamwidth version!

( More behind the cut. )

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Whoopi Goldberg announced on The View today that JP is going to propose to Kyle in tomorrow's issue of Astonishing X-Men and that the two will be wed in June's issue.

So Marvel is going to have their first official on-panel gay marriage. :D

HEY MARVEL COMICS YOU KNOW WHAT? Since you're going all-out to ride this wave of gay marriage publicity and you've got this awesome Avengers fanbase just dying to throw money at you right now... You know what you should do?

You should make a Young Avengers cartoon. That's what you should do. And I know that I just said the same thing yesterday, but come on! Young Avengers features one of the best portrayals of gay teen relationship in either Marvel or DC canon. It would be an enormous and important step in the right direction if Wiccan and Hulkling could star in a mainstream cartoon series.

Having a gay marriage in the official Marvel comics canon is an awesome and amazing thing, no doubt about it. Here's hoping that someday (possibly soon?) Marvel is ready to take the next step and include a gay relationship in one of their cartoon shows.

No but seriously you guys Young Avengers is such perfect, perfect material for a cartoon adaptation. Absolutely perfect.

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I really wish that Marvel would take advantage of their Avengers-related momentum right now to produce a Young Avengers cartoon.

Think about it: It would be a perfect way to keep milking the franchise while everyone is waiting impatiently for the next film. The most successful superhero cartoon shows are almost always* the ones that focus on a team of teenagers, i.e. X-Men: Evolution, Teen Titans, and Young Justice, to name a few. And the Young Avengers comics have all of the elements that attract the devoted fanbases of those other teen superhero shows have, namely: Misunderstood/ostracized teenagers, lots of action, lots of angst, family drama, romantic drama, team bonding, team rivalries, unlikely friendships, the us-against-the-world-that-fears-and-hates-us formula that makes the X-Men perpetual favorites, and the young-upstarts-proving-themselves-to-older-mentors formula that fandom squees over in Young Justice.

To be fair, I've seen this idea bandied around before, and the most common response is usually along the lines of "but the Young Avengers characters have origins that are too convoluted and too deeply embedded in Marvel canon for a mainstream kids' show!" To which I can only say, really?! The Young Avengers characters have origins more convoluted than most of the cast of Young Justice?! Really?!

And also it's not like any of those convoluted origins can't be easily simplified or changed altogether for the sake of a TV adaptation, anyway. Come on people. IMHO, the only Young Avengers character whose backstory really shouldn't be messed with is Patriot, for what I hope are obvious reasons. I think that Patriot's origin story is incredibly powerful and incredibly important in the Marvel canon. But aside from Patriot, well, I wouldn't really weep if any of the other characters had changed or simplified backstories. Depending on how the origin stories are changed, some of them might even end up better off for it.

But anywhoo I just think it would be really cool if someday we got a Young Avengers cartoon. The characters are already popular with the comic-reading fandom, the recent success of Young Justice has shown that there's a huge fandom out there hungry for teen superhero shows, and with The Avengers kicking ass at the box office right now it just seems like perfect timing.


*Asterisk: The 90's-era Batman and X-Men cartoons are the biggest exceptions to this rule. But even in the case of the X-Men show I'd say it was still mostly about a group of angsty outcasts who certainly acted like teenagers a lot of the time, even if they were supposed to be older.

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Due to health problems and not being able to work earlier this month, I've been spending a lot of time catching up with old comics and trying out a few new ones. In particular I've been gorging myself on webcomics lately, and although I usually end up either underwhelmed by or outright disliking most of the webcomics that I try reading, there are a few that I fall head-over-heels in love with. So, here are some thoughts about some things that I'm reading right now, whether I've been reading them for years or have only recently discovered them, all of which I would recommend to the comic-inclined.

Namesake. Just starting reading this last week and have barely been able to put it down step away from the computer screen. A beautifully-drawn and fiercely feminist fantasy story about fulfilling roles in fairy tales and taking charge of your own destiny. And it does more to establish the heroine's complex and believable personality in the first six pages of Chapter 1 than most webcomics manage to do in an entire volume. I'm only pointing this out because that is definitely one of my number-one pet peeves in the entire "normal girl gets sucked into a strange world" genre of web comics: When the author doesn't establish anything about the heroine's personality before having her suddenly end up in the other world. Or even worse, when the author wastes time with page after page of scenes of the heroine doing "normal everyday stuff" in order to establish how normal she is but STILL forgets to let her show any hint of a personality trait. This comic is one of the worst offenders I've seen to date in that particular area. On the opposite end of the spectrum and as an example of Doing It Right, however, we have Namesake and also animeshen's delightful Wendy and Sully in Candlyland, which takes a succinct eight pages to give the reader a solid grasp on Wendy and Sully's personalities and how they interact with each other, and does so in a fun and interesting way.

Unsounded. This comic is about a young monkey-thief who can swashbuckle with her feet and who suffers from Black Star-like delusions of grandeur. If that isn't enough to of a selling point for you, there's also a mysterious and handsome zombie with a tragic past. And a magical mountain-shaped monster that befriends a blind boy and his assistance flame-monster. (Why have an assistance dog when you can have an assistance flame-monster?) Unsounded is immediately engrossing and tons of fun to read, even if it does suffer from some significant flaws - namely that the overcomplicated artwork can sometimes get visually confusing, and the story throws a lot of made-up terminology at the reader without really pausing for some more comprehensible world-building. But those are really my only complaints about this beautiful, beautiful comic.

Gunnerkrigg Court. I've been hearing nothing but good things about this comic since it began in 2005, but I never got around to actually starting to read it until earlier this year. I wish I hadn't waited so long. It is every bit as good as everybody says it is.

The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal. Young man calls off his arranged marriage, comes out to his family, gets disowned, gets drunk, and wakes up the next morning with a *~quirky and free-spirited~* hottie frying eggs and singing in his kitchen. Oh, and apparently the two of them made a pact last night to drive across the country together. In the hands of a lesser writer this could have been every terrible gay-romance-for-straight-ladies cliche rolled up into a "wacky roadtrip" narrative. But somehow E.K. Weaver manages to infuse the story with actually believable characters, believable dialogue, and plenty of humor and warmth. Highly recommended.

Patchwork and Lace. The new-ish fantasy comic by furikku (who is also the creator of Reliquary). A pair of lady monster-hunters, a fantasmagoric set-up, and an intriguing fantasy world. Need I say more.

Oglaf. You may have heard of this one as "that epic fantasy porn comic that's actually really, really funny." A rare example of comedy porn that actually succeeds at being whip-smart and hilarious, while embracing a freewheeling variety of straight, gay, lesbian, vanilla, and kinky characters.

The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. Superhero parody comics come and go, but this one remains one of my absolute favorites and definitely the funniest.

X-Men canon: Keeping up with Astonishing X-Men, Exiled, Generation Hope, New Mutants, Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, and Wolverine & the X-Men. I dropped X-Factor a while back after sticking with it for far too long. And I just can't get into X-Force no matter how much I love Laura. But with the notable exceptions of a) all of X-Factor, no seriously all of it and b) Forge's epic character derail in Astonishing, I have to say: I LOVE the current X-Men canon, in a way that I haven't really loved the X-books since the early 2000s. I love all of the New Mutants story lines. I love Hope and all of the 5th-generation X-Men. I love Logan's sixty-year character arc finally coming full circle. I love Scott and Emma. I love Rogue so goddamn much. I love Magneto's redemption arc. Everything about the X-Men universe is so much fun to read right now. I think that the overall tone of the X-books has finally settled on a comfortable level of danger/angst/darkness without descending too far into the boring-ass depths of grimdarkness, which is a MUCH needed improvement after the epicly stupid, epicly boring, and pointlessly grimdark mess that was Messiah Complex and all of its aftermath.

Buffy Season 9. Much, much, much better than Season 8 so far. Much better. (Although I will forever and always love the Faith/Giles story arc from the beginning of Season 8. Best and arguably the only solidly good part of that entire series, if you ask me.)

Homestuck. "There's not a lot of style to invisibility. Primarily because nobody gets to see how damn smooth you're being." Homestuck, for all of its overhype and its failures and its flaws, is still just a goddamn delight to read with every update.

And as for DC Comics, well... I am taking a break from DC Comics for a while. Might try to reconnect with the Batfamily sometime later, but I don't know. I loved everything that Grant Morrison built up with the "death" of Bruce Wayne and the birth of Batman Inc, and I'm still bitter about the New 52 just wiping all of those years of character development and storyline setup right out of the DC Universe.

Yup, that's how you know that I'm a mainstream comics fan: Still bitter about an storyline-breaking editorial mandate from over a year ago. Still bitter.

And as for what's upcoming that I'm the most looking forward to: It's the Adventure Time spin-off comic about Princess Bubblegum joining Marceline's band. Hell. Fucking. Yes.

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Today I worked with another student as a paraphraser. That means that if the student didn't understand a word in either a question or an answer choice, she could ask me to substitute another word into the sentence. But I wasn't allowed to give definitions or explanations: I could only give the student a single word that had the same or similar meaning to the word that they didn't understand.

So today we were doing the 7th grade science test.

TEST QUESTION: Which of the following types of cells has half the number of chromosomes compared to a normal cell? A. skin B. nerve C. sperm D. blood

I expected my student to ask me what a chromosome was. But instead she titled her head in confusion, stared at the question for a long moment, then finally turned to me and asked,

"What is sperm?"




Ladies and gentlemen, this is what you get when you waste millions of dollars funding "abstinence-only" sex education.

By the way, since I was only allowed to give the student one word to help her understand what "sperm" was, and since I figured that "ejaculation" wouldn't be very helpful to her, I threw my dignity to the wind and said "It's cum."

Her eyes lit up. "Oh, yeah!" Then she understood.

By the way, I was working with this student in the school library where a few other student/teacher pairs were working, and of course the whole room was deadly silent the moment that my student asked me "What is sperm?" I tried to keep my voice as low as possible when I told her "It's cum," but I knew that at least one other teacher heard what I said because she started laughing.

I think it's incredibly sad that most young girls recognize all sorts of slang terms for "sperm" but I bet that my student definitely isn't alone in not having heard (or having only rarely heard) the more neutral-slash-scientific term for it before.

But in the end, my student did end up picking C as the correct answer to the question. :)

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Today I was a reader/scribe for a 7th grader with disabilities taking his KPREP math exam.

This test, you guys. This test. At one point there was a series of three questions about a "box and whisker plot" that somehow was supposed to represent ERA for two different pitchers and--

Okay, hold the phone.

I was a straight-A math student in high school. I have a liberal arts BA but I still took advanced statistics and economics courses in college. I tutored ACT math and SAT math for the Princeton Review. I scored in the top five percentile when I took the math portion of GRE several years ago. I consider myself fairly math-savvy, okay? But I have never - EVER - not once in my life ever seen a "box and whisker plot" before.

And this thing was totally fucking incomprehensible. I don't even know how the hell it was supposed to work or how I could begin to fathom it. Maybe if I had stared at it for more than a few moments I probably could have figured it out, but since I was at the mercy of my student's pace and he knew better than to waste his time on a too-hard question, he just guessed and moved on before I could get a real good look at the damn thing. Here's what I saw, though: There were two boxes, with lines extending out of them, and a number line on the bottom, and nothing was labeled except for "Pitcher 1" and "Pitcher 2." I had no idea what the difference between the boxed part and the be-lined part of the graph was. There was also a line drawn through each box, though not quite in the center of either, and I think that was supposed to represent the median ERA of each pitcher? I'm only guessing that because the question mentioned "the median" of each pitcher's ERA, but if not for that clue in the question I would have no idea what that line not-quite-in-the-center of each box was supposed to be, because it's not like it was labeled or anything. Nah, that would make too much sense.

Also my student had no idea what ERA meant. I don't think the question bothered to define this as "earned run averages," either. Even if the question had defined ERA I still don't think that my student would have understood, because I get the sense that roughly about one quarter of the student body at my school actually understands and cares about baseball stats, and for the other 75% of the students baseball stats are pretty much gibberish. Now, technically anybody could have answered that question without knowing what "ERA" means - it's set up so that if you know how to read the graph, you can answer the question without even knowing that the graph is supposed to be measuring - but your average seventh grader isn't savvy enough to keep plowing through a wordy math problem after they hit the first term or concept that they have no idea what in the flaming hell is supposed to mean. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not too worried about the fact that they can't do that. Isn't the point of a word problem supposed to be breaking down mathematical concepts into real-world applications that students are familiar with? If at any point we find ourselves teaching students how to solve a math problem without understanding the concepts involved, then we are teaching them test-taking skills, not freakin' math skills. I would know, because that's EXACTLY what I taught students to do when I tutored for the Princeton Review. I taught them how to wrestle the correct answers out of advanced math problems without having to know or understand at least 50% of the actual math involved. I was teaching test-taking skills. And admittedly, teaching test-taking skills does have its place in the curriculum, since the sad and disgusting truth is that students need to know how to pass poorly-designed standardized tests in order to function in The Real World. But I would much rather that the math teachers at my school spend their time teaching, you know, actual math and how it applies to real life rather than teaching kids how to get answers on multiple choice tests without having to understand the actual question. Maybe if the tests weren't so poorly-designed, we wouldn't have to spend so much time teaching students how to answer poorly-designed questions standardized test questions. Maybe if we didn't over-test the students so much, we wouldn't have to spend so much time teaching students how to answer poorly-designed standardized test questions. Etc.

So tonight I Googled some and it turns out that a box and whisker plot actually is pretty useful for displaying data in quartiles, now that I actually understand how it works and what I'm actually looking at when I see one. But it's visually useless if you don't already know how it works; and the box and whisker plot question on the test that my student took today had exactly zip zero zilch in the way of explanation as to how the chart worked.

So the question presented a mostly-unlabeled chart with no explanation as to what the "box" and the "whiskers" on the chart were supposed to represent, constructed a word problem based on baseball statistics that the majority of my students would be totally unfamiliar with, and tried desperately to present a "real-world" problem in a bullshit artificial context that would never exist in the real world. (I'm pretty sure that in real life, when you want to compare one pitcher's median ERA to another pitcher's median ERA, you just google or otherwise look up "Pitcher #1 ERA median" and "Pitcher #2 ERA median" and see which one is bigger. You don't derive this information from a box and whisker chart that represents each pitcher's median ERA as an unlabeled line in the middle of a nearly totally-unlabeled chart.) Also I am not entirely sure how ERA can have a "median" in the first place because isn't a statistic derived from a pitcher's entire career to date? How can a statistic with the word "average" in the acronym HAVE a median?! I know that you can find a median of a group of numbers and you can find a mean of a group of numbers, but I'm not sure how you can find the median of a mean... But admittedly I know very little about baseball stats, so maybe somebody can explain this to me in the comments?

Anywhoo, way to fucking go, Pearson. You should be proud of yourselves for that question.

The ERA box and whisker plot: Brought to you by the same company that inflicted the "and then they ate the pinneaple" reading passage upon the New York state standardized reading test.

PEARSON: LOWERING THE BAR FOR HIGH-STAKES TESTING SINCE 1998.

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The F-Word is the best fucking food show ever. Period, end of story. And those of us over here in North America are finally getting the entire first season streaming on Hulu. I literally screamed a little bit when I saw it show up on my Hulu queue today. (And then immediately regretted screaming a little bit because OW HORRIBLE INJURY ARRRRGH.)

But seriously this is the best fucking food show in the world because it has EVERYTHING. ( Including: )

Anywhoo, this show is just so perfect in every way. Love it love it love it. It's a conscientious cooking show that addresses a lot of serious business issues, ranging from sexism in the culinary profession to how class privilege affects food access, while at the same time being full of fun and fabulous cooking segments, truly useful tips and techniques for home cooks, and Gordon Ramsay being Gordon Ramsay. It's the perfect cooking show. I can't wait to watch the rest of it as soon as it's available to me.

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No recap this month because a) I am dealing with a major medical emergency and b) this month's chapter was so painfully unfunny and boring that I can't. I just can't.

But a couple of things to get out of the way right now:

Like Soul, Clay is fully clothed in his weapon form. Dumb sexism at its finest.

I've got no problem with the shower scene because it was actually funny. As in, literally the only truly funny part of the entire chapter. Of course it's creepy that Ohkubo is digging around for excuses to draw 14-year-old girls naked, but as long as Ohkubo is going to keep coming up with excuses to draw 14-year-old girls naked he might as well give those scenes some entertainment value for the rest of us. Kid being Kid and then getting his comeuppance for being Kid was a beautiful moment.

There is no defending the full-page sequence of Kim pulling up her skirt and bouncing around in her panties, though. There's especially no defending the cameltoe that we got right in the middle of that page. It's creepy and disgusting, the same way that the shower fanservice is creepy and disgusting, but without the extra flavor of self-aware humor that makes the shower scene so much easier to swallow. Nope, this is just a fourteen-year-old shaking her ass at the reader because Ohkubo likes to draw fourteen-year-old ass. Nothing more and nothing less. And that's precisely what makes it so eyeroll-inducing.

And I've seen plenty of people attempting to defend the Pantydance Page already, including trotting out the usual bingo square arguments: It's Ohkubo, so this shouldn't be surprising! (I don't think anybody is surprised by this, but we also know that Ohkubo can do better so of course people are going to express disappointment every time that he pulls this crap.) But the manga has always had lots of panty shots! (No, it had a lot of panty shots in the beginning, which is one of the major reasons why a lot of people consider the early parts of the manga to be kind of terrible, and also one of the reasons why those of us who are fans of the manga keep finding ourselves in the position of having to tell new fans put off by the fanservice in the early chapters that "it gets better, no really!" Except for when it doesn't.) It could be worse, at least Ohkubo isn't Ritz Kobayashi! (How do I logic fallacy.) What do have against porn?! (Nothing. But Soul Eater isn't porn.)

And again, Soul Eater being what it is, I'm willing to forgive a lot of its fails with regards to fanservice of underage characters and/or sexism in the story as long as it, you know, provides enough of a measure of awesome in every chapter to balance out the inevitable bits of suck. This chapter didn't have any awesome, though. It just didn't. I'd say this is easily one of the worst chapters we've had since the end of the Salvage arc, and that's saying something. And no, it's not a terrible chapter because of the underage nudity or the underage cameltoe. It's a terrible chapter because it's boring and unfunny and my god even the artwork looks phoned in this month. It's pretty clear to me that this was supposed to be a comic-relief chapter, the same way that chapter 12 (once upon a time and many years ago) was a comic-relief chapter. It's just that this month's chapter failed miserably to deliver on the "comedy" part of "comic-relief" and was flavored with creepy sexualization of teenage girls throughout. Ugh on every level.

Well, here's hoping next month's chapter will be better.

ETA: Translations of new name reveals. Pretty much the only interesting new information in this chapter. Considering that over half of the chapter was spent in the Witch World, that's pretty pathetic.

ETA again: Translation of the Pantydance Page.

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My middle school students are working on a World Fair project to finish off the school year with. Today the students divided into teams, picked their countries to represent, and started researching basic information in the library.

Unfortunately, one of the students on Team Mongolia thought that it would be really funny to bullshit every answer on his research packet instead of, you know, actually doing research. I first caught him trying to write down that the capitol of Mongolia was "Mongolia City," next that their major export was "goat cheese," and then finally this happened:

ME: Okay, so who are three famous people from Mongolia?
HIM: Genghis Khan, Bono, and Chuck Norris.
ME: Bono is Irish.
HIM: Well, okay, I made that up. But Chuck Norris is actually Mongolian. It said so on the internet. I looked it up.
ME: Chuck Norris was born in Oklahoma.
HIM: But the internet said that he was from Mongolia! I swear I'm not making it up!
ME: After you've lied to me twice already I can't exactly trust your "I swear" today, [name redacted].
HIM: But I looked it up! Maybe there's another Chuck Norris who's from Mongolia and who's famous?
ME: Okay, so tell me. What is the Chuck Norris from Mongolia famous for?
HIM: (not even missing a beat) Selling cars.

Ladies and gentlemen, my seventh graders.

That's nothing, however, compared to what my eighth grade students pulled the next period.

So I caught a group of students passing around a lollipop and sharing licks of it. I promptly confiscated the lollipop and warned them that a) they were not to have food in the library and b) even if this were back in my own classroom where I do allow food, you are not allowed to lick each other's food, okay? I mean it's not like our school is currently in the middle of A PERTUSSIS OUTBREAK or anything. And even if it weren't, er, common sense?

So about ten minutes after I confiscated this group's first lollipop, they apparently unwrapped and started sharing another one. I didn't notice at first, however, because I was busy trying to explain to another group why Buddhism and Islam are not the same thing. In the middle of speaking, however, I was suddenly overpowered by one of my delightful coughing fits - because, you know, recovering from pertussis and all - so I turned my head away from the group and coughed for a few seconds. The kids weren't nearly as terrified by this as they had been the first time that I had done it that class period, but my coughs do sound kind of scary, I know they do, and the entire class got really quiet during those few seconds that I was coughing. (Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it that you never quiet down when I ask you to but when all of a sudden it's time to listen to your teacher involuntarily and uncontrollably horking globs of phlegm out of her lungs, hey, it's all ears on me!)

But anyway I guess my coughing fit sounded dire enough that one of the students asked, "Sensei, are you okay?"

"Don't worry, I'm fine."

"Oh." Then she held out her lollipop to me. "If it will make you feel better, would you like a lick of our lollipop?"

I just sort of stared at her dumbfounded for a few seconds, and because she apparently did not understand why this was a bad idea, she tried again: "Would you like a lick of our lollipop?"

Finally I found the voice to say, "I really do appreciate that, thank you, but I just got over being very sick, and do you understand why you shouldn't share food with a sick person?" Fortunately I stopped myself short of saying You want me to lick your lollipop after I just coughed up an entire mouthful of infected green mucus out of my lungs?! Do you KNOW what's just been in my mouth? Do you know what I just swallowed?! But I was tempted. Oh so very tempted.

So after a few more seconds of blank staring, a lightbulb suddenly seemed to go off in her head. "Oh. Yeah."

"Yeah. Now give me that lollipop." Not so that I could lick it. But so that I could throw it away.

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I know that I'm three weeks behind the times in finally knowing about this, but OH MY GOD: Hasbro actually ran a wedding notice in the New York Times to promote the My Little Pony season finale. Holy shit. That is fucking awesome. It's also awesome to see an Entertainment Weekly reporter write that "the hour-long [series finale] special is ambitious, absorbing, and thoroughly entertaining, even to those who stopped playing with My Little Ponies back in the mid-’80s. (Or, you know, never played with them at all.)" Quoted for GREAT TRUTH.

The subject of last month's Manga Moveable Feast was the Viz Signature line. I'd definitely recommend checking out some of those titles for anybody reading this interested in moving beyond your typical tweenybopper manga fare. (Not that I don't love and eat up typical tweenybopper manga fare with a spoon, but it's good to have some expanded horizons.) Or just scroll to the bottom of this post for a roundup of links to general overviews of the line and introductions to multiple titles and artists at once.

Meanwhile, in case you missed its extremely limited theatrical release outside of China earlier this year, Dante Lam's 逆戰 (a.k.a. The Viral Factor) is going to be released on Region 1 DVD next month. Not that this particularly matters when there's been a region-free official BluRay disc with multiple language tracks and subtitles available on the market for a while already now, but... At least a Region 1 DVD release means accessibility on Netflix and possibily iTunes, so hooray! (Seriously though, the advent of BluRay has so delightfully antiquated this entire concept of region-locked DVDs that a part of me even wonders why distribution companies even bother any more.) Oh, and David Brothers has an excellent review of the film here in which he nails what exactly it is about the movie that makes it so engrossingly watchable despite being objectively kind of terrible on a lot of levels.

Ryan Estrada teaches you how to read Korean writing in 15 minutes. I absolutely adore Hangul - it's one of the most beautiful and perfect writing systems in the world, ranking right up there with Devanagari and Arabic as one of the most ingenious and perfect writing systems ever developed IMHO - and this cute comic is a really great introduction to it. The comments on the post are worth reading, too.

Wooser's Hand-to-Mouth Life is the best thing on the internet. The best thing.

And, for people reading this who are interested in legal ways to access digital manga in Japanese! Kinokuniya has an app for that. ( Behind the cut: Nitty-gritty details re: how to download and use the app for readers outside of Japan. ) But, there's one more caveat: The selection in the app store is about three to four weeks behind the selection on the BookWebPlus mothership, which means that sometimes new books will be listed on BWP nearly a month before you can hope to buy them through the app. (This is the case for Soul Eater right now: the manga is available on the BWP website but not yet on the app.) However, there are a few exceptions: the newest volumes of Fairy Tail are listed on the app on the very same day that they're published in Japan (!!!!) and quite a few other popular manga titles are getting same-day app releases, too. In terms of selection of manga and light novels, I cannot stress enough how gloriously huge and diversified the app selection already is: Old stuff, new stuff, shounen, shoujo, josei, seinen, megapopular series, indie publishers, IT'S ALL HERE. In terms of digital offerings that I've been hoping and praying for Japanese publishers to SOMEDAY provide for us, this is it: It's finally happening. Kinokuniya, YOU ARE MAKING THIS HAPPEN and it is beautiful.

I still can't believe how far behind Japanese publishers are in terms of digital offerings when compared to North American manga publishers, but that is a rant for another day. Anyway, the Kinokuniya app is a HUGE step in the right direction here.

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The Anime/Manga/Manwha/Manhua Drabblefest is still going on! Come drabble with us!

The 2012 Not Prime Time Fic Festival is open for signups.

The Female Character Trope Fest is open for fills, too!

There is also a Transfic Mini Fest, a Podfic Meme, and a Reverse Remix Meme for all of your ficcing needs.

Filed under "Awesome Websites that Time Forgot": The Redwall Kitchen is still online. And there is a recipe for real honest-to-goodness homemade dandelion wine in there. Awesome.

Meanwhile, Atsushi Ohkubo.

Also, your Soul Eater Moment of Zen: Here is the entire Soul Eater cast made of pipe cleaners. Along with many other anime characters.

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( Fanart behind the cut. )

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Come drabble with us!

Man, it's been forever since I last wrote a drabble. I'd forgotten how hard it is to stick to that 100-word limit.

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My Little Pony and Wakfu have already done a lot to convince me that Flash animation can not only be, you know, actually good, but downright beautiful if done well. And then this freakin' episode came along and just blew all of my assumptions about the limitations of Flash animation right out of the goddamn water.

The animation! The luscious background art! The background ponies! The costumes! The character designs! The facial expressions! The cinematography in the musical numbers, the fight scenes, even the scene where Twilight is sitting at that cafe table and venting to all her friends!

Just freakin' everything about this episode was perfect. The new characters were great. Shining Armor was such an adorkable dudebro and Cadence was so courageous and awesome. The villains were straight-up nightmare fuel of the type that I haven't seen since some of the more phantasmagoric episodes of the original MLP series. And oh my god not just the epic songs but even the background music was fantastic. (asdfghjkl;asdfghjkl; that music that plays when Shining Armor and Cadence cast their spell!!!!) Everything was fantastic, right down to the sounds effects that the Changeling Queen's wings made when she flapped them and that her hooves made when she walked.

There's just so much amazing attention to detail paid to every single frame of animation in this episode, it blows me away. And the music was so good. I am so completely in love with the key changes in "This Day Aria" I could listen to it all day long. And the episode managed to balance its tone pretty evenly between the epic fantasy elements and the comedy elements. Which, to be honest, this new version of MLP always does consistently well - thank goodness it never makes the mistake that the original series did of taking itself too seriously, because then of course it would immediately become completely ridiculous - but I was especially happy that the big Twilight and Company vs. Changeling Swarm Kung-Fu Blowout turned badass funny very quickly. Because if it hadn't been hilarious it would have been hard to take any of it seriously at all, as paradoxical as that may seem.

HERE HAVE SOME SONGS BECAUSE THEY ARE AWESOME (ALSO SPOILERS but i kind of doubt that anybody reading this actually cares):



ETA: Rolling Stone covers My Little Pony music. I love how the reporter actually asks Daniel Ingram if he's using big words in the songs in order to pander to an older male demographic, and Ingram responds "No, I never forget about the original demographic of our show, which is six-year-old girls. Just because it's for kids... I don't think that influences me in terms of how sophisticated I want to make the music."

Oh Daniel Ingram I heart you so much for that response. So freakin' much. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love this show for never talking down to its audience, and I love the creators for refusing to buy into the idea that something for little girls can't be sophisticated and multilayered and intelligent, and I really wish that a certain segment of the Brony fandom would get on board with that idea and stop trying to claim that anything intelligent or complex about the show is automatically evidence of pandering to them because obviously big words and smart jokes are always intended for an adult male audience (*eyeroll*).

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I love style memes, but it's rare to find an artist that can actually do a spot-on mimicking of another artist's style. Oscar Vega, however, can.

So here, have some Homestuck characters:

Condesce à la Atsushi Nishigori

Aranea à la Rumminov

Nepeta à la Jamie Hewlett

Terezi à la Omocat

Dirk à la Pablo Picasso

Gamzee à la Dr. Seuss

Mindfang à la Adam Hughes

Snowman à la Frank Cho

Roxy and Jane à la Junko Mizuno

Feferi à la Audrey Kawasaki


...It's the Picasso imitation that really blows me away because it actually shows a basic understanding of how Picasso composed his portrait images. Rather than just, you know, throwing a bunch of shapes together and claiming "looks i did a picasso!"

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The opportunity to get yourself arrested and thrown in jail just to see if you can break out again, that is.

That's right. Free is back.

( And it is beautiful. )

Edited to add: Two things!

1. If you would like to link to this summary, I would appreciate it if you could link to the dreamwidth version, NOT the livejournal version! Thank you!

2. Also, shout-out to all the lazy scanslators reading this! Please don't be as lazy this month as you were last month, mmkay? (Explanation.)

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ME: Just don't do anything stupid with your fake sword.

STUDENT: Is there really anything non-stupid that you can do with a fake sword?

Touché.

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Just saw a Homestuck cosplayer at nat'l cherry blossom festival parade.

Holy shit. This is not an anime convention. So much secondhand embarrassment right now.

ETA: On the other hand, a guy riding a giant spider robot just walked right past me, so I probably shouldn't be surprised by anything at this point. (I am so not even kidding, this is A Thing That Actually Happened. The robot was sponsored by the USA Science and Engineering Festival.)

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Hiiro no Kakera is actually really, really enjoyable.

I'd even go so far as to call it, well, kind of good. It's definitely one of the best otome game adaptations I've seen in a long time. And as far as teen girl id-fulfillment fantasies go, it's leagues better than your standard Vampire Knight fare. The set-up is basically the same: Ordinary teen girl, magical powers, Great Destiny to Fulfill, harem of pretty boys fighting by her side.

But cliched thought the setup may be, it's still done damn well: Beautiful animation, fun characters, and an interesting enough story. Plus it has a really wonderful heroine at its center.

And oh my god this opening sequence is so damn beautiful:



So far the series seems to be following the Pretear formula pretty closely, but with the addition of a larger and more interesting group of villains, and minus the backdrop of conflicts within the heroine's family. Still to early to see if it's safe to call this a worthy successor to Pretear, but we'll see.

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