The Rainbow Gatekeeper

I've actually had Meiling for a few weeks now, but I haven't had the chance to really take her out of the box and have a good look at her until now. My room is cluttered enough that finding enough room to take out a figure and set it up properly is no small task. I don't have a proper display cabinet either so I can only have a few figures out at a time, the rest relegated to their boxes until I rotate through them.

Anyway.

As I'm sure you all know, Hong Meiling (紅美鈴 [that last kanji isn't showing up right for me, maybe it's the font], a.k.a. China) is the beautiful and reliable gatekeeper to the Scarlet Devil Mansion. In her present capacity, however, she's been demoted to guarding my desk against intruders.

I should have stayed in bed

<rant>
It's been one of those days. I decided I'd try and make it to class for once, so I woke up early, ran out the door and went straight to the bus stop a couple of minutes early. However, since my city's public transport doesn't consider time to be of particular importance, I soon figured out that the bus had come even earlier and that I would have to wait almost half an hour for the next one. Not much fun, but that's how it goes. I eventually get to class almost half an hour late to find that the lecturer hadn't even bothered to turn up yet. I waited another 20 minutes before he deigned to grace us with his presence and begin the lecture which should have started the better part of an hour ago.

Procrastination/General

First off, a request. If you buy figures from sites other than HLJ and get them shipped via EMS, could you give me an example or two of a figure, the store you got it from and the shipping cost? I'm working on a sort of data-based review of some of the biggest figure sites and I just need a few more numbers than I can get from my own records, considering I mostly use SAL.

So anyway, I'm falling further behind with my study despite it only being the fifth week or so of the uni year. Every semester I decide that this time I'll study regularly instead of leaving it to the study week before exams, but it's yet to happen. I was going to go over some lectures this arvo and maybe start on an assignment but seeing as it's bloody 35 degrees hot here and my fan's broken, fuck it, I'm going to blog about the anime I'm watching this season instead. A bit behind the times I know, but I've just caught up on my backlog (turns out I'm quite capable of procrastinating on watching anime too).

The littlest witch

I've always found SAL shipping very reliable: almost to a fault, packages will arrive exactly one single week after I've given up all hope of them ever reaching me. To its credit though, everything I've gotten shipped via SAL way has turned up eventually. This time it was Lucchini who spent the better part of two months in limbo, but she finally showed up today.

Soutaisei Riron

There's nothing better than waking up to a knock on the door and seeing the postman holding a package with moonrunes all over it. Today's delivery was three albums by Soutaisei Riron, a Japanese band I'm quite fond of. The first time I heard them I was some 12000m above ground level idly flicking through the various CDs on Qantas' in-flight entertainment system. I liked what I heard over the roar of the plane's engines, jotted down the name of the band, and promptly forgot about them. Some weeks later I was hooked on the Tatami Galaxy ED and, in between replaying it over and over, found out that the singer (Yakushimaru Etsuko) was also the lead singer of Soutaisei Riron, that band I faintly remembered from the flight. The rest is history.

If you're going to listen to any of their albums, make it this one.

The band itself has a fairly minimal sort of sound with the focus being on Yakushimaru's vocals, which are described on wikipedia as "moe", and are very flighty and acrobatic. If you've heard the Tatami Galaxy ED or the Arakawa OP then you've got a pretty good idea of her unique sound. If not, then I'd highly recommend you watch The Tatami Galaxy (seriously, it's a great anime) then get back to me.




Tracks to try:
Shinagawa Number - halfway through Hi-fi Anatomia, this track is my pick of the album - though not by much. Yakushimaru's vocal dexterity complements the fairly simple guitar riff perfectly, resulting in a great sounding track. But yeah, I really could have said the same about half the album.
LOVE Zukkyun - this track is from their first album and has much more of a lo-fi sound to it, with the guitar being noticeably more prominent than on the later albums. This doesn't stop it from being damn catchy. The video on the youtube link is either the actual PV or a weather report.
Peperoncini Candy  - This is from their latest album Synchroniciteen, and is extremely cute. I don't really think much more needs to be said here.

I wonder if I could safely assume anyone reading this is going to be able to read at least some Japanese? I'd feel more comfortable posting track names etc. in Japanese rather than having to hit up Wikipedia and other sites to find the standard translation. Anyway, sorry for starting this off on a decidedly non-anime-related note, but it was fresh on my mind.

Back to watching Nico Nico Live then.

Oh look it's a blog

Because there sure aren't enough of these on the internet already.

I'll be posting mostly about Japanese shit, such as current anime, Vocaloid, figurines, Touhou and so on. Maybe also some video game stuff, who knows. Thanks for reading this, and I hope you find my posts somewhat interesting or informative.