Actually it is not my panel, but I will be helping out my buddies on Sunday night for their Japanese Figures and Collecting panel. The panel is schedule on Sunday night at 8pm (that's July 3rd), right when the masquerade starts, at LACC 515A or Live Programming 3. We're going to truck out a few figures for your viewing pleasure, do some cool slide shows, and talk about the human side of the equation.



I think we're going to try to keep this chummy and straightforward, and share from our own experiences what it is about these plastic toys that kept us spending hundreds of dollars on a regular basis. And maybe I'll try to embarrass myself in public again! Who knows what will happen?

But do please drop by the panel. If you are new or just getting into collecting figures, this is the panel for you because we'll talk about all the practical things you might not know about collecting, buying, and displaying them. And lots more. I mean, presumably you guys know this site that we're affiliated with; this panel may help you understand what they talk about over there.

On a related note, I will be flying in for Anime Expo again and hopefully write something while I'm in LA. If you guys have any tips or cool stuff happening at the con that you want me to check out, drop a comment and maybe I'll do just that!

I was talking to a friend about Mushishi, the watercolor-y, supernatural series about a wandering miracle maker/old-school medicine man. I presume you know how awesome this series is, or simply what it is about.

The thought struck me--while I own all of that mushy goodness on DVD, it never occurred to me to buy the manga as well, simply because I didn't think I would enjoy the manga any more than I would enjoy rewatching the show on DVD. Sure, they're not really the same medium, but I don't foresee myself going out of my way to read the manga regardless, even if liking the anime makes that possibility more likely to happen.

(The live action doohickey is something else though.)

If you didn't know (as I didn't), my friend said that Del Rey is going to consolidate the last 3 volumes of Mushishi into an omnibus, like every other manga nowadays. Then it hits me: was there any instance where I bought the manga or the anime and ditched the other, thinking it was enough? I know this was the case for some of my CLAMP favorites (Chobits and X being notoriously better in print in my opinion...), but being a fan of animation, I prefer that format over manga most of the time. It's only when I really like the "substance" of a series--characters, setting and the like--that I would get both the anime and the manga. In fact I think this is pretty rare for me normally, as I tend to not fawn over a show as much these days.

Is it just me? Or does anyone else do this? Yet just about every popular anime has a manga made before or after it, so some people must like/buy both. I know it works like marketing, but I'm not sure how that impacts the sales of manga overseas...

[Image from mya]

Today is the last day of Saimoe 2009. It's the finals, the last round.

The showdown between Taiga Aisaka of Toradora and Yui Hirasawa of (not P-Model) K-ON is, at a glance, just another day on the luls-filled BBS of 2ch. But what is interesting is that the Korean version of Saimoe, 2009 Best Moe, also had Taiga going all the way.

I run a tournament, somewhat annually, on the anime board of Megatokyo Forums. We call it the "Anime Character Grand Prix" (AGP). Our games are held usually during March, and this year Taiga also swept that. The turnout for our games this year is usually ~120-200 votes per match. In comparison, Saimoe, despite their super-weird-PITA voting method, draws upwards of 2000+. Just to get you an idea...

The International SaiMoe League (ISML) is still running. That thing is crazy. So don't talk to me about it :3 But I don't think ISML particularly predictive, even if it is probably the most prescriptive of all of these contests that I know of as far as who is moe.

But what is moe? Who knows? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?

Anyways, Taiga is going to make history if she wins Saimoe 2009, simply because KSaimoe and Saimoe have never produced the same winner. Coincidentally my little AGP never correlated with either of the other two contests, too. It might not be a big deal, but for people who follow all three scenes over the net--Japanese, Koreans, and the west--it's a notable curiosity. Saimoe always produces oddball winners, where as Korea tend to produce very "mainstream" winners, and the west is ...well.

Stick around and watch the making of moe history! Or not, if Yui has anything to say about it.

I'm rooting for Yui by the way. (And I would post a cute Yui ascii art whenever the lovely Modern Method webdev superheroes support unicode on the blogs~)