Based on Clementine theme by Headsetoptions
© 2006 Otaku Times
As a followup to our recent reporting of HongFire Anime Network being stripped of its vB Forum License by PiracyReports due to its containing “Loli”. Jelsoft, the company responsible for the vBulletin software, decided to personally re-instate HongFire’s license and it is back online.
Good news for all PSP owners: you can now play any PS1 game using your PSP!
After the release of the official PSP 3.00 firmware it was made possible for PSP owners who also had a PS3 to download a small selection of PS1 games (at a cost of $5.99 each) using their PS3, which could then be transfered to and played on their PSP using the new Playstation Network feature.
What has now been discovered, and exploited by hackers, is that each of the PS1 games had a fully function PS1 emulator bundled with it; now that the emulator has been extracted into a standalone piece of software it is possible to play any PS1 game ISO flawlessly (although problems have been reported with PAL titles).
PSPHacks has more details on how you can update your PSP and convert your old PSX titles to play on it - note: no PS3 required.
Ramblings of a DarkMirage has some more images of the emulator in action and has also put up a YouTube video.
With snowboarding and Christmas I have apparently fallen way behind the times.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has now been licensed in North America by Kadokawa Pictures USA, with distribution being handled by Bandai Entertainment (note: earlier reports of Bandai holding the actual license were incorrect).
All these details were revealed on the new site http://asosbrigade.com/. As well as the news there is also an excellent live-action fan-styled video staring Patricia Ja Lee (of Power Rangers fame) as Haruhi and Haruka Inoue as Mikura (drool).
Yesterday the ability to vote for your favourite Mikura dub was also added at http://asosbrigade.com/auditions/a.php, the content of the audio goes something like this:
“huh, yes.. o um er.. how in the world do I.. uhh ah.. I don’t want to.. hewa ewa gah ahh noo.. don’t look.. ahh ew nooo ahhh”
The popular anime image posting/discussion website HongFire.com has just had its vBulletin forum software license revoked by a site called PiracyReports (outsourced by Jelsoft - owners of vBulletin) because of the Loli images posted in HongFire’s image gallery.
Loli, for those who don’t know, is a term which is short for “Lolita Complex” and describes a form of artwork (anime/manga styled) in which underage (well not really, since they are only drawn) girls appear nude, or appear performing sexual acts.
Legality: In 2003 President Bush signed a bill, the “PROTECT Act of 2003“, which made loli illegal, this portion of the bill however appears to have been overturned by the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as it was deemed unconstitutional. To date, only one person, Dwight Whorley, has been convicted for possessing loli, and this was after he had already been to prison for possessing actual child pornography.
The Otaku Times has been a little dead lately; the reasons for this are that I was on a one week snowboarding trip (which was excellent btw) and that the day before I left the server suffered a hard drive failure!%&*^:@!
Unfortunately I did not have a full backup of the site on my local machine, as I had been using tools such as pico to do remote editing, because of this things took a little longer to restore.
The biggest problem I had was restoring the css style sheet (the bit of the site which took the most work). Since Google does not cache style sheets, I had a lot of fun looking through Firefox’s browser cache using about:cache (type this in the address bar) and some other handy tools. After a while all hope seemed lost -the caches were either full of other pages, or full of 404 pages; I then remembered that just before the hard drive failure one of my Firefox profiles at university had died (giving the error “you already have Firefox running” whenever I tried to open it), I then proceeded to download these cache files remotely with WinSCP, and contained was a copy of the long sort after style sheet!!
The latest earning figures for Desu nôto 2, which has just finished its fourth straight week at #1, have now been published:
Source: Box Office Mojo
The Japanese clearly can’t get enough of the megalomanic teenage killer Yagami Raito - just like the rest of us really. If you have yet to acquaint yourself with Death Note, but would like to, here are some links which might be useful:
Death Note Anime Torrents (AnimeSuki):
- Animated version of Death Note. This has only recently started and so is still quite near to the start of the story arc.
Death Note Manga Direct Downloads (StopTazmo):
- The original medium for the Death Note series. In June of this year the manga finally finished, spanning 108 chapters in total.
Since its release, there have been an abundance of fan videos relating to the series ‘The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya’. In this article I am going to post about some of my favourites.
1) Murder Mystery Computer Game
The creator of this video has done a fantastic job at re-creating the feel of a visual novel style video game using bits of video from the ‘Remote Island Syndrome’ episodes. Throughout the video there are a series of text/selection dialog boxes and some very fitting music.
Whoever created this video either had way too much free time or simply used a plug-in to their favourite video editor.. either way, it is still pretty cool. The content of this video is the entire ending video of the series with each frame converted to ASCII.
3) Suzumiya Haruhi - God knows
Not so much a fan video, rather a clip of one of the best bits of the series. In this video you can watch Haruhi and Yuki playing Hirano Aya’s song ‘God Knows’.
Which are your favourite videos?
In this article and subsequent “Otakudom” articles I will attempt to explore features of Japanese society which are of interest to those who wish to become an Otaking (2). The experienced reader will often be better versed in these subjects than I, so please feel free to comment and share your knowledge on issues covered.
Cosplay (or Kosupure in Japanese) is derived from the words “Costume” and “Play”, originally being coined by one Nov Takahashi (allegedly). As the name suggests cosplay involves putting on a costume; the aim of doing so being to model the appearance of your favourite anime, manga, movie, or game charater.
The Harajuku fashion-district in Tokyo is widely regarded as the birthplace of the Japanese cosplay movement, and indeed it is still a popular place for cosplayers to mass. Although occasionally seen in public, the main congregation points for cosplayers are large anime, manga, and game conventions such as the Tokyo International Anime Fair. Cosplay is also gaining momentum outside of its native Japan; the huge numbers of cosplayers at American anime convetions such as Anime Expo are a testament to this.
In-line with the appearance of the character the cosplayer is attempting to imitate it is not unusual to see eccentric hairstyles (big blue spikes for example) and costumes which have had tens (hundreds?) of hours of work going into them. More extreme variants of the ideas behind cosplay also exist, for example a small niche of the cosplay community known as “dollers” wear full body suits and masks to attempt to closer replicate the appearance of their chosen character.
As is possible with anything, cosplay can either go extremely well (see top image), or disastrously wrong (see image below). From the abundance of cosplay images available on the net it is certainly fair to say that on average the Japanese are much better than their non-Japanese counterparts.
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If you would like to see more examples of cosplayers in action, check out some of the sites linked below:
http://www.hongfire.com
http://orz.4chan.org/cgl/
Just under a week ago Microsoft released their new Zune portable meda player. Now that people have had a chance to have a play, let us have a look at what was done right, and what was done wrong.
The first thing that strikes you when you look at the Zune is the huge screen, this allows for easy navigation and has obvious benefits if one wishes to watch videos on the player. Although it may appear so, the central wheel is in fact a four way controller, this however isn’t a real hindrance. The other two buttons on the interface are a back button and a play/pause button.
That’s all well and good you say, but what extra features does the Zune have over the iPod? The main feature which differentiates the Zune from its competition is the integrated wireless connectivity; with this it is possible to transfer songs directly between Zunes, reports suggest this can be carried out from as far away as 50 ft -very impressive. At the outset this appears to be an extremely handy feature, it is however riddled with problems, including:
Something which is rather useful that the Zune offers is a built in FM radio ($50 or so as an add-on to an IPod). Personally I would rather listen to a few carefully selected Podcasts than seeing if there is anything worth listening to on the radio, but I guess this is a matter of choice.
Now we move into the darker side of the Zune. Microsoft are big advocates of DRM and they didn’t hold back with their new media player. If you were thinking you could transfer songs purchased from online stores currently using Microsoft audio formats, such as the MSN music store, forget it; all songs that go onto the Zune must be either “unprotected” (not packed with DRM crap) or be tracks purchased from Microsoft’s new Zune Marker Place online music store. The Zune Market Place itself offers a meagre two million songs, and before songs may be purchased you must buy “Microsoft points” which can be spent on the songs.
All-in-all the Zune is a fairly nice piece of kit, however unless Microsoft change their stance of restricting what their customers can do with their own hardware/software, I certainly won’t be buying a Zune -poor initial sales would suggest I am not the only one.
Welcome, Welcome. If you are wondering what this site is all about, fear not, I shall reveal.
The Otaku Times is a new blog which aims to render for you the finest that geek culture has to offer. The word ‘Otaku’ is Japanese slang (Why Japanese slang? Because Japan pwnz0rz of course) which is used to refer to geeks, usually of the variety obsessed with Anime and/or Computers, our niches. ‘Times’ is used to demonstrate the fact that the site will be generating news related to important world issues (haha), as seen in for example ‘The New York Times’, ‘The Sunday Times‘, etc.
What you can expect to see:
Anime/Manga:
Everyone loves space bounty hunters, high school girls who are actually aliens, and big mechas (if you don’t you should be ashamed of yourself). Here at The Otaku Times we will do our utmost to bring you up-to-date news regarding the latest goings-on in the anime/manga world, and from time-to-time we will post reviews of series we have recently finished watching.
Computers/Tech:
Computers and technology are becoming a greater part of our lives at a rapid rate, with this growth there are naturally lots of new and exciting developments going on all the time. The Otaku Times will attempt to chronicle the developments which we believe are particularly interesting, there should also appear at some point a number of tutorials related to programming in languages such as ‘Ruby’, ‘PHP’, ‘Java’, etc.
Misc Fun:
As mentioned previously, here at The Otaku Times we love everything Japanese (well, pretty much) so expect to see some of the following:
Battle Angels (Japanese Idol battles) - ‘Who is hotter, Mihiro, or Miyabi?’
JRock/JPop related postings
Japanese Lessons
Blog posts will also often include links to external media files, these might be accessible via a .torrent file or as direct downloads on sites such as RapidShare or MegaUpload.
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If you have any interesting ideas regarding the content/direction of the site please feel free to post a comment. Also, if you share our interests, have an excellent mastery of the English (Japanese?) language (with some examples at hand), and would like to help out with posts, then please email us at applications [at] otakutimes.com .
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