Josh’s Anime Blog Podcast Episode #21 is now online! In this podcast, I re-review the anime series World of Narue.
You can now listen to my podcasts directly from this blog via this flash player:
Or you can still download it from here or from iTunes. (15.3 MB)
You can also download or add my podcast-only RSS feed to your favorite reader:
http://www.joshsanimeblog.com/podcast/podcast.rss
Enjoy!
This week I haven’t had much of a chance to touch my anime blog (I work at Virginia Tech). The posts for Monday through Wednesday I had already pre-posted due to a planned trip out of town. I’ll try to get my write-up for Nagasarete Airantou episode 2 up by Sunday.
I still plan on having a podcast this weekend, but I can’t guarantee it. Hopefully next week I’ll get back into my usual routine.
The “What I want to see” anime for this week is Kurau: Phantom Memory. This is a series I had been aware of for a little while, largely thanks to their ad on Anime News Network, but I hadn’t really made it a priority to watch it or anything.
Then one evening when I was bored I was looking through the (increasingly sparse) selection in my Anime Network Video on Demand section and I see the Kurau Episode 1 there. I think “what the heck” and decide to play it. The first episode definitely sparked my interest in seeing more of the series.
I’ll be interested to see how (or whether) they stretch the story for an entire series without turning it into a “mission of the week” type series but the premise seems to be interesting. This one is going on my Netflix queue to watch relatively soon.
April 17, 2007
Ai Yori Aoshi: Enishi - Brick Set
Elemental Gelade - Volume 6
Gate Keepers - Brick Set
.hack//Roots - Volume 1
Le Chevalier D’Eon - Volume 2
Noein - Volume 3
Pani Poni Dash! - Volume 3
Paradise Kiss - Volume 3
Peach Girl - Volume 1
Solty Rei - Volume 3
April 17, 2007
Drifting Classroom - Volume 5
Golgo 13 - Volume 8
Hana-Kimi - Volume 17
Inubaka - Volume 2
Monster - Volume 8
Shakugan no Shana (light novel) - Volume 1
Shakugan no Shana (manga) - Volume 1
Name: Love Hina
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Episodes: 25, plus two specials (Christmas and Spring)
Released: April 19, 2000 - September 27, 2000 (TV), December 25, 2000 (Christmas Special), April 1, 2001 (Spring Special)
Based On: Love Hina manga by Ken Akamatsu
Director: Yoshiaki Iwasaki
Produced By: XEBEC, Production I.G
US Distribution By: Bandai Entertainment
Naru Narusegawa: Yui Horie
Keitarou Urashima: Yuji Ueda
Mitsune Konno: Junko Noda
Shinobu Maehara: Masayo Kurata
Kaolla Su: Reiko Takagi
Motoko Aoyama: Yuu Asakawa
Haruka Urashima: Megumi Hayashibara
Mutsumi Otohime: Satsuki Yukino
Noriyasu Seta: Yasunori Matsumoto
Sarah McDougal: Yumiko Kobayashi
Naru Narusegawa: Dorothy Melendrez
Keitarou Urashima: David Umansky
Mitsune Konno: Barbara Goodson
Shinobu Maehara: Ellen Arden
Kaolla Su: Wendee Lee
Motoko Aoyama: Mona Marshall
Haruka Urashima: Jane Alan
Mutsumi Otohime: Jean Howard
Noriyasu Seta: Ron Allen
Sarah McDougal: Julie Maddalena
Animation: 7/10 (x 4 = 28 pts)
Story: 6/10 (x 4 = 24 pts)
Music: 7/10 (x 4 = 28 pts)
Coherence/Story Arc: 5/10 (x 2 = 10 pts)
English Dubs: 4/10 (x 1 = 4 pts)
Gut Score: 6/10 (x 5 = 30 pts)
Total: 124/200 (62%)
Love Hina is about a boy, Keitarou, who is studying to take the entrance exams for Tokyo University for the 3rd time. He’s trying to get into Tokyo U. because of a promise he made to a girl when he was little. The only problem is that he can’t remember who the girl is. Suddenly, his grandmother decides to travel around the world and taps Keitarou to run her Hinata Inn. However, the Hinata Inn is now an all-girls dorm and now Keitarou must deal with the harassment of the dorm’s female’s residents as they have to do with having a male manager and the fact that they’ll have to move out if Keitarou doesn’t become the new manager. However, Keitarou starts to wonder if one of the girl residents of the dorm is the girl he made the promise to when he was young.
For me, Love Hina can best be described as one of the biggest piles of wasted film, time, money, DVDs, and DVD boxes that has ever come out of the medium of anime. It is a series that impresses on virtually no level, and disappoints on many.
For example, the story line of who the girl that Keitarou made the promise to is brought up several times during the series, but it is often more of a side-story than front-and-center. Most of the story revolves around the dysfunctional relationship between Keitarou and one of the tenants, Naru, and how many times Keitarou can stupidly walk into the female’s bath or some other compromising situation which ultimately results in him being punched 2 miles away by Naru or being attacked by Motoko with a sword, and/or various other assaults.
While some of the episodes, especially episodes 21-24, actually have some coherence to them, the episodes are largely independent of each other. While the two specials kind of wrapped things up, they seemed to be basically be the same story from the series just slapped into a new situation. The animation could have been better considering that this series was the first done entirely digitally. The music largely sounds like cheap keyboard music (and this is 2000!) and the English dubs are barely tolerable - maybe, with a few characters with decent dub voices, but most with bad to terrible dubs.
Love Hina may be popular in some circles for the very reason that it’s a zany, random love comedy, but I didn’t find the humor all that funny, and it seemed so random and over-the-top that I found it more on the stupid side rather than humorous. If one is into truly random harem romance comedies, you may be into Love Hina. However, this is a series that can easily and safely be passed on by most anime fans.
First Watched: November 2005 - December 2005
Do I Own: No
Do I Recommend: No
I know this isn’t something that is anime related, but it is a website update, of sorts. Something that I’ve been thinking about once again is moving the hosting for my anime blog to a new server. There are several reasons for this:
1) I don’t like it being a subdomain of another website. Yes, the main domain is still mine, but now that this site is, for all intents and purposes including the podcast, pulling in around or over 2 GB of bandwidth a month, it may be to the size that it should be moved to it’s own domain name.
2) I had sort of thought of doing that before when setting up with Go Daddy’s podcast service. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize I couldn’t create my own webpage on there, just a little webpage based on pre-supplied templates. That did solve the problem of my podcasts being stored in sever space that I was actually paying for (and not archive.org) but it’s still not in the same area as the blog itself.
There are a few issues with moving, however, as well:
1) Having to set up another redirect for my RSS feed. Even though I’ll probably use the same domain name I currently use for my godaddy podcasting website, they do their RSS feeds kind of weird, so I’d probably change it’s URL. Of course, this means having to set up a redirect for the RSS feed.
2) Changing the actual location of my podcasts. How the GoDaddy service goes, my podcasts aren’t actually saved at www.mydomain.com/podcasts or something, it’s saved on some generic domain. That means I’ll have to go and fix those addresses wherever I have them, and it will probably result in people getting told that all of my past podcasts are “new” when their itunes reads the new feed.
3) I’ll have to redirect everyone from my current website to my new one. That shouldn’t be too much of a bother, though.
There are really three primary issues that I’m facing when selecting a new place to put the website:
1) enough space at a reasonable price. I’m looking for at least 5GB of space for the time being. That will give me enough space that I won’t need to even worry about taking up the space for a few years. By my calcualtions, at how big my podcast files are right now, It’d take something like 60 or 65 podcasts to fill up a gig. My current GoDaddy podcast storage is 1GB large which means that once I get through a year of podcasting, the space will be getting tight, and given that I’ve now already gone past 20 weeks, that thought is creeping up more and more. Also, I don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for service.
2) Enough bandwidth. As I said before, right now the total bandwidth I’m using is about 2GB. The more podcasts I put up and the more popular the blog becomes, the more that is going to increase. To give me enough space, I’m thinking around 100GB of bandwidth. I like having enough bandwidth to allow for, if I use up every byte of space on my hosting, it can be completely downloaded 20 times a month. From the looks of it I may need to pay for more space to get the bandwidth though.
3) Reputable. One of the issues I found when searching for hosts last time was that there is a serious problem in the webhosting community of people offering tons of space and bandwidth to people, but then clamping down on their accounts when they actually dare to use it. If they say that I get 5GB of space with 20GB of bandwidth a month, I want that to be guaranteed, and while I want it relatively inexpensive, I don’t want it packed on a server with so many other sites that it’s down half the time.
Meeting all of these requirements is one reason I’m with my host I am now. However, now that I have a podcast, they just don’t have a plan that gives me enough space for the price I’m looking for (they meet uptime, quality, and bandwidth needs nicely, but to get the actual disk space I’d need, it’d be well over $10 a month - I’d like to keep it under $100 for a year, that’s around $8 a month, if I can).
I have my eye on a couple of hosting services that I’m looking into to see if they are really as good as they sound. Also, even though no one normally comments on this blog (why? doesn’t anyone love me?), if anyone else has suggestions of webhosts that meet my needs, let me know and I’ll be happy to look into them.
Josh’s Anime Blog Podcast Episode #20 is now online! In this podcast, I re-review the Chobits manga series..
You can now listen to my podcasts directly from this blog via this flash player:
Or you can still download it from here or from iTunes. (13.2 MB)
You can also download or add my podcast-only RSS feed to your favorite reader:
http://www.joshsanimeblog.com/podcast/podcast.rss
Enjoy!
Nagasarete Airantou is an anime series about a boy called Ikuto Touhouin who, after running away from home, goes on a ship, only to be thrown overboard. He finds himself on an island, but not just any island. It’s an island populated entirely by females…
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| Must swim back to the ship… | |
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| Suzu | That ain’t a fish, Suzu |
Here a a graph of my blog traffic since my anime blog began (minus the one day in February 2006 that it existed and minus the current month):
You’ll notice a rather steady increase of traffic - which is good. The large jump in January 2007 is rather a mystery. I had a significantly large jump in traffic on the 14th and 15th of the month, were those two days made up around a third of the total visits for the month. Without those two days, January would fit in pretty nicely with the steady increase in traffic.
I’m not sure what caused this. This is well after the announcement of Haruhi being licensed in December (my post on the counter glitch, revealing the licensor did get linked by some people) and was before I found out my comments were broken on the old blogging software I was using then (so it wasn’t caused my my host and I repeatedly hitting the website trying to get it to work). Podcast Episode 7 was posted on the 13th, but I don’t see why a single podcast would make the visits jump that much.
In any case, taking into consideration this strangeness, and the fact that February was a short month, I’ve made steady progress, except for taking a big dip from May to June (possibly for not posting all that much during that period). After the June dip, I hit 500 “unique” visitors again in November, hit 1000 in January, and last month saw the most yet at over 1200. I’m on pace so far in April to beat March out for the most unique visitors.
For comparison, I’ve gotten about as much traffic 11 days into April as I did the entire month of October (I have more unique visitors but fewer visits). I already have more total visits this year as I did in all of 2006. (I also have more unique visitors, but since those are bounded by month, an annual count of unique visitors isn’t fully accurate).
