Category: Special Articles

As you can see, the bandwidth for some of my images has run out. I’ve been using photobucket in order to display the pictures I need for each point, though the downside of this is the fact that it has a maximum amount of bandwidth it can use per month. As this month will end tomorrow, the problem isn’t that big, but it remains annoying. Thank goodness you can have more than one photobucket-account, which means that problems like this one won’t occur anymore. At least, let’s hope so. ^^;

I was fairly surprised when I ran into these ones while preparing for the July-Summary. Another surprising fact is that nobody seems to be talking about them. Well, time to change this, I just had to post it. Every single one of these OVA has a unique art style, and every one of them will probably have a very dark mood.

Maihime OVA

No, it’s not what you think. It’s not Mai HiME, it’s Maihime, or Dancer Girl. It’ll probably focus on the love of a dancer girl, judging by the art and the fact that AnimeNfo labeled it as a love-romance. Here you can see some teaser screenshots, and I have to say that I like them.

Neko Machi

There’s absolutely no information about this one, except for some japanese writing I don’t understand. Still, this looks to be one creepy OVA about cats. If you take a look at the teaser screenshots here you can also see that the art will be rather dark, strange, and probably unique. I like that. AnimeNfo labeled it as a fantasy-horror.

Zakuro Yashiki La Grenadiere

A french novelist called Balzac wrote the story for this one in the book “La Grenadiere”. It’s about a woman and a child who live in a small cottage in 19th century france. Supposedly, the woman was labeled as a mystery, as she didn’t get out of the house too often. AnimeNfo labeled this as a novel, which doesn’t really give much information about the genre, though I think it’ll be some dark slice-of-life story. Here are some teaser screenshots, and they look gorgeous.

Yo Shomei Bijutsukan LINE

This’ll be a rather unique anime. It’s about art. It’s art style is extremely simple, like an old picture-book. AnimeNfo didn’t assign any genres to it, though the teaser-screenshots, which can be found here give us more clues about the nature of this OVA. It’ll be simple, it’ll be art. Will it be good?

Gendai Kibunroku Kaii Monogatari

This’ll be a definate horror OVA. It consists of six parts.
1. At a dry river bed a refrigerator associated with a terrible anecdote, “Refrigerator.”
2.A one room western-style house, above a carved table an objects stands out like a sore thumb. It was an accidental discovery to a College of Arts student’s terror. “Daruma.”
3. On a long bridge while boys are traveling, they encounter a ghost personally, “Bridge of Evening.”
4.I n a free shopping market a sarcastic man is guided to the otherside, “U.S. Military Sale.”
5. The railway crossing; continual mortal accidents are a puzzle being persued, “Railroad Crossing.”
6. Summer vacation at a tranquil countryside, boys personally experiance a miraculous event, “I want a friend.”
These descriptions don’t really sound that scary, but who knows. Here are the teaser-screenshots, and I´m wondering how these descriptions and these screenshots are linked.

Fantascope Tylostoma

This is a strange one. We have this man, who appears every 700 years. Because of this, he’s able to see once flourishing villages decay into oblivion. Then he meets a woman, a prostitute, from this period, the passion begins. Most likely, this will be a love story. Though the most remarkable feature of this OVA is the art. Everything is in sketchbook-style. Here are some teaser screenshots.

Joseito

This anime will be making use of 3D-animation techniques, though not the standard way. Here are some teaser screenshots which show this. The show is going to be a school-life anime. Fairly unique among the other OVA’s listed here. It’s about a painter, painting a schoolgirl, and giving this schoolgirl her own story.

I kept telling myself not to get involved with this drama, though I have to say the following. As you all know, DrmsChr0 started a whole fad of bashing Jason. I have to admit, when I first read it, I felt very inclined to agree with him. But then I started to think. And I thought back about the post I made back in May, when I got kicked off blogsuki.

Basically (correct me if I’m wrong), all people are saying is that Jason sucks because his opinions are horrible, and he doesn’t contribute to the community. I have to admit, my opinion is the total opposite from his. He also isn’t involved in the Anime Nano-community, and doesn’t comment too often. Still, he runs his own forums, and I have had one comment on my blog made by him. Still, I certainly know more people are active when it comes to posting.

Does this make him suck? Of course not. People are forgetting one thing: it’s his site. He can do what he wants with it. The fact is, he isn’t looking for customers. He just wants to show his opinions. What does he get back? Opinions like “you suck”. Honestly, if you don’t want to read his articles, then why do you?

I see people noting that all of the anime bloggers out there are part of a community. Because they are, they have to comment a lot, and be active. This would indeed be true, if we were dealing with some forum. This is not the case, however. I can’t see why people who start a blog are automatically required to comment on other blogs and act like active parts of the community. That’s not the reason to start an anime blog, in my opinion. You should be able to choose this for yourself.

I finally managed to make my 300th post. Yay! Another milestone hit. On top of that, this blog is now exactly seven months old (I started it at november 22nd). I decided to use this as an opportunity to display some statistics.

– Over the past 221 days, I’ve made 300 posts, which equals to 1.36 posts a day.
– I’ve recieved a total of 244 comments. These are a total number of 160 if you don’t include the posts I made myself.
– Hopeless made a total number of 23 of the comments. Cos comes in second with 18, and Anga is third with 13 comments.
– The series with the highest number of posts dedicated to it is Jigoku Shoujo, with 24 of them. Bleach and The Law of Ueki come in to a close second with 23 of them, and Bleach will probably take the lead in a couple of weeks.
– The most posts on one day were made during my Christmas Update, on December 24th: a massive 12 of them.
– So far, I’ve reviewed 23 anime, and I gave each of them a rating. These anime averaged out at 80/100. (note, this doesn’t mean that 80/100 is the standard. The standard is 60/100, though I’m more inclined to finish 80/100 anime than I am with 60/100 anime)
– My longest post so far is my May Summary, which consists of a massive 4600 words. My longest post about a single episode belongs to Higurashi no Naku Koro ni – 08, with 2540 words.
– At the time of typing this, I’ve managed to gather 31095 visitors.
– The record of most pageviews in one day still remains at April 30th, when I was still on blogsuki and recieved 1554 of them. Ever since I was removed from blogsuki, this number has been halved, with a maximum of 609 pageviews at last sunday.
– The term most popular by the search engines was Saiunkoku Monogatari. Higurashi no Naku Koro ni comes in as a close second.
– So far, I’ve yet to discover any weird search strings. The funniest I could find is the following: “does bleach kill mosquitos”. I know, it’s out of context, but still.
– Best Series Ever: Mahou Shoujotai (couldn’t resist. I just had to mention Mahou Shoujotai in some way ^^;)

I was in a certain mood to check out as much trailers as possible. These are the results. I won’t be providing any links, if you want the trailer, then you can just use Google or YouTube. They were easy to find, so I don’t think that providing links is really nessecary.

Flag

I’m really getting exited about this series. The trailer only strengthened this. The character design will probably look very interesting, and the mecha-design and action scenes also looked very impressive. And that’s coming from a guy who isn’t too much into the mecha genre. The anime will indeed be action-packed. That’s certain. Though the thing to set this anime apart is the fact that the main characters have got nothing to do with these mechas. They’re just a bunch of photographers, set out to collect information. The music also sounded of very high quality.

Binbou Shimai Monogatari

I may be wrong, but I think the title means something along the lines of “Tales of a Poor Family”. It’ll be a slice of life-show. It doesn’t look too impressive, and it’ll probably revolve around the main characters, trying to make a living whilst living under poor circumstances. The trailer had some very cute moments, so I’ll at least check this one out, even though I dislike most of those slice of life-shows.

Demashitaa! Powerpuff Girls

I’m still wondering whether this anime will become a total succes, or a big failure. Still, the trailer gave a lot of hints. Apparently, the personalities of the girls will be changed. Blossom will be more of a fangirl and shopping-freak, instead of the bossy person focused on strategies in the cartoon. Bubbles will be miss-popular and have a very cool personality, instead of her crybaby version in the cartoon. Buttercup will be more ambitious, instead of her tough character from the cartoon. I have no idea about the professor, though he seems to have some kind of assistant. The major seems to have gotten some brains, and Mojo Jojo seems to be playing for villain. I’m hoping that we do get to see the gang-green-gang, though. Still, I’m a bit worried about the personalities of our three main characters, as they don’t seem interesting at all, and they remind me too much of certain american cartoons. The original series had some good points, but also some incredibly bad points. It’s up to the creators to remove these incredibly bad points.

Zero no Tsukaima

Alas, I was wrong. This won’t be the next Magikano. It’ll be worse. It’ll be the next Shakugan no Shana. I can’t believe that we have to witness such a horrible mess yet again. Not another Tsundere for this season! We’ve got enough of these already! The trailer just took away all of the enthusiasm I had for this Shana-clone. I can already see people going crazy about this. The katana probably gets turned into a magic wand and melon-pan gets turned into whatever favourite food of the main character. It’ll probably get its own SOS-fansite as well, including its own set of fan-made towels and t-shirts. I just know it! I’m so hoping for the side-characters to be able to save this anime.

Gedo Senki

This is the Ghibli-movie which is coming up in July. It’s promising to look awesome. I like the character designs, especially those of the main characters (which is a rare thing). A lot seems to be happening, and the graphics promise to look just amazing. It’ll probably take till january till it gets finally subbed (if it goes through the same process as Tsubasa and xxxHolic), though this is something to be watching out for.

Project Blue Earth SOS

After seeing the trailer, my anticipation for this anime has downed a bit. The art stopped looking amazing, it’s just above average. The two main characters are also exceptionally talented persons. At least, they behave like that. I hoped them to be just some ordinary high-school students who got involved against their will. Though I’m fearing more and more that they’ve got some elite goverment positions. In any case, aliens attack, and they’ve got flashy beams that destroy anything that hits them. Exiting. Not.

Coyote Ragtime Show

This was a trailer which made me extremely enthusiastic. The characters look amazing and unique, not to mention the music. It’s also got an interesting plot to back it up. This’ll definately be on my top list to watch.

Night Head Genesis

You know, this show might actually be interesting. At first, I wrote it down because of the horrible site, but the trailer showed some nice things. I especially like the look on each of the characters, and the girl on the moon also suggests at some mystery being thrown in. Who knows? The show might become very entertaining. In any case, if the creators make the little boy an important character, I’ll keep watching.

Le Chevalier d’Eon

The other good trailers really made me exited about the shows. That’s indeed what a good trailer’s supposed to do. This trailer, however, did not make me exited at all. That either means that it’s a bad trailer, or it’s a bad show. I’m hoping the former, as I like the setting. Still, the art didn’t look impressive at all, the animation was a bit buggy and none of the characters really grabbed me.

I suddenly realized something when I took another look at the front page. I haven’t changed the poll at all ever since the end of march. I guess I’m getting lazy. Ah well, now we at least know that Mushishi features awesome music.

Anyway, I decided to replace the poll with something that’ll actually be useful to the site: should I rate individual episodes or not? I’m seeing some sites who actually do this, and I often find myself looking for the rating they gave the episode. I’m wondering if more people experience this.

Okay, I sincerely apologize to anyone who came by here and tried to post a comment. It seems that everyone who made a comment on Star Crossed in the past is fine, but for some reason, people entirely new here are somehow blocked. This really explains why I didn’t get visits from any new commenters out there. Thanks A LOT to Ten for pointing this out. O_o

The story is like this: about a month ago, every anime blogger out there suffered from huge waves of comment spam (you know, the ones at which you got automatically generated comments who were praising your blog). Star Crossed was no other. And even though it managed to catch a lot of them, the spammers soon found a way to bypass the spam blocker: don’t include any links in the post, and keep your name cryptic. This way, tons of those little buggers came through, and I had to delete them manually (I swear, once this year is over and I have enough time for it, I’m going to move to something with Akismet). Of course, I became sick of this, so I started to search for a way for them to be automatically detected by the anti-spam-feature of blogsome. I messed with a couple of settings, and the spamming stopped. But now I see that I seemed to have turned off the entire traffic for newcomers, which SO was NOT supposed to happen.

I’m currently looking into some way to undo this. Let’s hope that the comment spammers won’t return after this. Agh, this is one of the reasons I dislike Blogsome. *kicks random item*

=Update=
Okay, I’ve managed to fix the problem. If you still have problems posting a comment, you can use the shoutbox on the right. With a bit of luck, I’ll be able to start moving around the end of june.

Okay, so suddenly, Jason removed Star Crossed from BlogSuki. Why? I have no idea. He gave two reasons in his little post, about the criteria of blogs to be removed. The first one is that you make make too many off-topic posts. Well I don’t recall having made absolutely any offtopic posts at all, or maybe my entry about my exams, back in december suffices, though I doubt Blogsuki ever existed at that time, so that can’t be it. The second reason he gave, was that you do not get enough readership.

So far, in the month May, Star Crossed gained an average of about 500 unique visists a day. This number has been rising ever since I set up this blog (November: 55 pageviews, December: 1233 pageviews, January: 1808, February: 2795, March: 6369, April: 13811, judge yourself). In my opinion, this is a pretty large number, though it makes me wonder what number will be good enough. In fact, I’m wondering what is even defined with enough readership. Let’s take a look at the stats for this month, shall we? What are the two pages with the most people viewing it? Higurashi no Naku Koro ni 04 and 05. Ironically, the anime with one of the most people blogging it is still way ahead of the anime I’m the only one blogging (say, Popolocrois). I just know, that if I started to blog Haruhi, Mai Otome, Fate/Stay Night and Magikano, that these would also have the same amount of readership. Does that mean that I have to start blogging just the popular shows now? Or did Jason mean something different by readership?

To be clear, this post is definately not intended to bash Jason in any possible way. After all, it’s his site, he can do what he want with it. I do admit that I’m not pleased with him kicking me just out like that, without any message whatsoever. Though I realize that it was me who sent him an e-mail in the first place, not the other way around, so I’m the one to blame in this part, it was my own responsibility. Anyway, this post is more meant as a bit of self-reflection. What am I doing wrong? (I’m obviously doing something wrong) And what can I do to improve it?

I believe that the biggest problem people have with this blog is the writing-style. Yes, I’m friggin’ Dutch. Of course my writing-style couldn’t par any of the native guys and girls out there. Just add this to the fact that I haven’t had any interest in writing until about a year ago, and you have an even more horrifying writing-style. I’ve aquired most of the writing experience I have right now in that year. One of the reasons I started this blog was also to learn more about writing, and it definately provided enough material for me to write about. I’m also finding that I’m not the best comment whore out there. And yes, indeed. I should be commenting other blogs a lot more often, though that’s just my nature. I’m horribly shy in real life. On the internet, this is significantly less, though I still find myself unable to write giant-length comments about just anything. I’m still amazed about how people like kawai are able to write such behemoths of comments, they must have some kinds of superpowers…

Then there’s the issue that passed about a week ago on Blogsuki. About the content of blogs, and how bloggers should not only post summaries, but also some in-depth articles. And indeed, all about I’ve ever done is make posts about individual episodes, write series reviews and posting previews of the upcoming seasons (heh, I’m probably the blogger who posts the earliest first impressions of all the other bloggers out there ^^;). I have some ideas about articles, though. For example a rant against people bashing RPG-based games, or a little opinion about the Naruto-fillers. (Note to self: write these articles once you have a lot of free time on your hands) I indeed hate it how lazy I am concerning these things. Another thing I’m lazy about is keeping up my blogroll. I’ve been wanting to update it for a long while now, as there are so many new interesting blogs which caught my eye.

When I look back to my earliest posts, I can see a lot of differences. At May 22nd, I’ll be celebrating the half-year aniversary of this blog, and since November, a lot has changed. First of all, my writing style was even more horrible than it is now. I think that that’s the worst thing about my posts back then. Another thing is that it really surprises me how short my posts were at that time. Most of them were as big as my individual quick first impressions right now. If you compare this with my recent posts that average about 500 words, alongside some entries which even manage to get as far as 1500, it really is interesting to notice. Though, I do have to say that I had something back when this blog was just fresh, and which I don’t have right now: my fanboyism. In the past, I used to get all giddly about some episodes, while currently, I’ve taken a way more objective look at things. Though, I’m not even good enough to say objective. I’m too happy with almost each episode I watch. Every episode is good in my standards, with only Bleach being a healthy change. I especially noted this when comparing my own entries of Ayakashi to Hopeless Sensei’s. I just had the same opinion I always have. And still, I seem to have lost my inner-fanboy. This makes me wonder whether I should pick up a show like Gintama… Anyway, I’ll try to find ways to counter this.

Another good aspect which I did have back in the old days, but don’t have right now is a simple one: Mahou Shoujotai. This is simply the best anime ever. No discussion possible. It was also one of my biggest sources of fanboyism, and one of the reasons I started up this blog in the first place. Now that I’ve finished it, I’ve ever since been searching for an anime which would be able to call Mahou Shoujotai its equal. I haven’t succeeded yet. I’ve seen a lot of amazing series, though, but they’re all just a bit below the awesomeness Mahou Shoujotai managed to create.

Though, when I look at my recieved comments, I indeed realize that this is one of the lesser sites out there. My maximum number of comments on one post remains six, while other people somehow manage to bring in fifteen comments for each one of their posts. Even if it was something as simple as a visit to the bathroom, they will be swarmed with at least ten comments, while I have to hope to get any comments at all. The comments I do get, however, are greatly inspiring. I especially love Hopeless Sensei, along with lolikitsune, Anga and Mina. I’m also incredibly glad with the people who keep pointing out mistakes I made in some of my posts, even though I don’t always show it. Believe me, I might be making the most mistakes of anyone in the blogging community.

The final flawed aspect of this blog that I can think of right now is the fact that I’m a post whore. At times, I really make four or five posts a day, because of the fact that I reserve one post per episode. When you have a day at which five episodes come in, the numbers pile up. I also keep thinking that I’m blogging way too many series at the moment. There are fourteen of them at the moment, which will soon be twelve when Noein and Jigoku Shoujo have their final episodes subbed. Then again, it will be thirteen again when Mushishi comes back into action, which could be any moment now. It’ll be most likely to come sooner than Noein and Jigoku Shoujo can finish, so I’ll eventually end up with fifteen blogged series at one moment. I might be experimenting with multi-episode posts in the future, though for organizational purposes, that would be horrible again. Still, I have been worse at times in the past. For the last couple of months, my maximum number of posts per day has been at april 1st and 2nd, after the combination of my exams and a sudden tidal-wave of new Jigoku-Shoujo and Utena-episodes coming in caused me to fall behind, and forcing me to catch up an incredible lot. Though, when you look at my christmas update, there appear to be even more posts made in one day (12, to be exact, in comparison to the 10 of april 1st).

Ah well, this event certainly won’t be keeping me away from blogging. It’s not like I needed Blogsuki anyway. Yeah, ok. It’s good and convienient for bringing in visitors, though I managed to survive for more than three months without it anyway. Also: if you’ve got a suggestion, or if you’ve got some critizism for this site, by all means, do not be afraid to post about it. I read all my comments. I’m an active member in a game-design community, so I KNOW that constructive critizism is extremely valuable. And for anyone actually bothering to get to this point of finishing the article: thanks for actually reading this little rant of mine. ^_^

Okay then, I finally managed to get everything over, although it didn’t come without sacrifices, as I lost every comment that has been made. Okay, there may have been only ten of them, but I do feel that I lost a small part of the sitewith this.

Anyway, The past week gave me a good chance to evaluate the pros and cons of Blogsome when compared to Blogspot.

Pros:
– So many possibilities to customize. You aren’t limited to html-only anymore.
– The template is much easier to edit, and it comes with some good documentation.
– Categories. <3
– Custom fields are also possible with Blogsome. I’ll probably use them to rate individual episodes and anime, because then I’ll be able to sort anime and episodes by their ratings. I know something like that’s possible, but I’m still working on it, though.
– The possibility for custom pages. I have no idea what to use it for, but it’ll surely come in handy someday.
– A decent in-site Search Function.
– A Calendar, the most popular posts and links to posts I made a month ago. Always useful.
– Creating a blogroll made easier. No longer do I have to edit the template in order to add a new link.
– Better statistics. Okay, it may not seem useful, but who knows.

Cons:
– Uploading Images will be a hell.
– Blogsome’s pretty difficult to understand.
– The Wysiwyg-editor needs a lot of improvement. For some reason, it doesn’t really give me the freedom in posting, furthermore, it creates nasty extra space for new paragraphs. Something I’d like to do myself. Thank god there’s a way to turn this off.
– I have to be careful with using smilies from now on. This is because in the template, I defined each image to have a small border (as you can see when looking at some random screenshots). This looks great with screenshots. But for some reason, the all of the smilies also got a border. The result is this: 🙁
– Transferring posts was horrible, as I had to do it completely manually. That wasn’t really fun.
– Although the categories are great. You have to have a default category.

Yay! Over the past three months, I managed to make a massive one hundred posts in this blog. *does a happy dance*

Anyway, this seemed a good moment to announce that I’ll be moving from blogspot to wordpress (or at least, a variation of wordpress). I should have it done round march 1st. Most likely sooner, but it takes a while to fully set up everything. Plus, converting the entries I already made doesn’t go automatically. ^^;;;