As you may have noticed, I’ve been on a bit of a blogging break of late, slowing the routine down to a weekly ritual chock-ful of filler. If I were more pessimistic I would chalk this up to burnout (or to Burnout, which is a fantastic visceral thrill), but really, the fact of the matter is that for once I don’t have much to talk about. This is especially so in the middle of summer, where I spend a lot of my time hanging out with friends and getting whored out for eight dollars an hour.

Really, it’s not such a bad thing, personally, for me to be going quiet. Sure, having not much to say means that no anime has really struck me in an incredible way (or at least enough to make it out of my MAL mini-blog), but on the flip side I haven’t watched anything really bad of late either. It’s all rather ordinary and that’s welcome, kind of like how cars don’t routinely explode on my way to work or how my computer turns on every day without myself having to sacrifice a few virgins.

As such it’s kind of ironic that the thing that gets me back into the talking groove again is not something I’ve watched, but something I haven’t.

Where we last left off in regards to myself and Itazura na Kiss, I was standing on my chair screaming “F*** YES KOTOKO, YOU GO GIRL” in response to the 14th episode, much like another three-capital-letter blogger (OGT) whom I read frequently.

If you want to make your own imaginary graph and extrapolate how awesome I think ItaKiss is from my enjoyment of the first 14 episodes (and that is a lot of awesomeness), you would imagine it would be up there with the Tier 1 shows (KimiKiss, Kaiji, ef, etc) by now.

Instead, a rather peculiar thing happened, as you may have inferred, in that instead of being on a golden pedestal somewhere ItaKiss has found itself on the side of a milk carton with the caption “Have you seen my awesome?”

And while ItaKiss may be the blond-haired poster child for abandoned shoujo anime, Amber Alerts have been placed out for its brethren as well, those being Special A and Toshokan Sensou (Library War).

These are three anime I haven’t really been arsed to watch in the last two weeks, despite the fact that I’ve waxed at least moderate amounts of love for each of them on this blog before. The question is:

Why?

(Oh yes, and I do spoil ItaKiss and Special A through about episode 14 or 15, so play it safe as applicable.)
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If perhaps you’ve been within a few miles of the otakusphere in the last few days, you will have noticed that something quite interesting has come out of its innermost workings in the form of a doujin-esque visual novel from Hinano, named RenAi Blogger.

Now of course, like most things I write, I’m too lazy to fill you in on the details especially given that many other bloggers have helpfully done it for me - suckers - so I will skip to the meat of this review and that is tearing this effort a new one.

To do this today I decided to disseminate RenAi Blogger in a completely novel and unique format that no other idiotic dinosaur could copy and that is in an exhausting multi-round fight contrasting and comparing it to some other popular visual novels in the industry in a half-humorous, half-serious manner.

Of course, RenAi Blogger is only a four-month, one-person effort and so it would be cruel to line it up against visual novels that took dozens of people years to complete … so I decided to set the bar a bit lower. I figured another doujin effort would be fine - but I only had one of those that I actually played, so I settled for picking up another first visual novel, one that was the beginning in a long pedigree of games.

And so there the three competitors sat…at least virtually, on my hard drive.

One doujin visual novel, and one first-in-a-series visual novel. Can Hinano’s top either? (more…)

Hey, anyone else remember that one show from last summer, Code-E? Remember how good of a warm, slice-of-life show it was with a dash of romance on the side? How you cried for more after that ending that was just asking for continuation?

Well, no you didn’t, because nobody watched it. But it doesn’t matter because apparently people in Japan are awesome and actually did enjoy Code-E - or maybe some higher-up is flexing his muscle right now to get a sequel to a show two people in the world enjoy - because Code-E has a sequel.

It’s called Mission-E, and if you’re particularly adept right now in either detecting either sarcasm or reading the summer previews from a few weeks ago, you’ll notice that it’s been running for about a month now. And as you may glean from the title and the tone of this message, there’s been a distinct lack of, well, presence for Mission-E.

It was the same for Code-E, which was under-the-radar fun, but at least that show was completed by Subbers Anonymous, a group which has apparently dissolved before it could take on Mission-E.

And unfortunately for us that leaves us with one group on the roster to sub Mission-E, Hoshi no Yume, and while I won’t attack them for being a group I’ve never heard of before, I must admit to being annoyed at how they’ve been swept away by the sands of the internet. As in, uh, they haven’t done anything so far. Not cool.

So, like most disgruntled, desperate people, I came up with a plan straight from a sitcom or B-grade movie: if no one else wants to do it, take matters into your own hands.
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Ja**n M**o who now?

About time I lived up to my name here at Mega Megane Moe (lit. I like glasses a damn lot) by providing an easy-to-use compendium slash ranking of all the people with glasses that I know from modern anime. Ever wanted to watch an anime just for the cute characters with glasses, while ignoring plot, character development, or anything else useful? Now you can!

But seriously, it is a little weak point of mine, so I don’t mind doing something silly and filler-ish like this. And, to one up any other people who might also do equivalent rankings on a not-at-all consistent basis, I’ve even included a little picture of each character for reference

And that’s not all! I don’t just cover the grace of anime fanboys ever, the holy meganekko (glasses girl), but also the glasses guys for the fangirls. Or for the guys who want a self-insertion fantasy. Or, for people who just like glasses, damnit.

Note that the qualifications for these rankings are simple: one, I’ve watched the show they’re from, and two, I remember their name. This means such characters as That One Classmate From Tokimeki Memorial With The Glasses That I Think Was Cute aren’t eligible. Additionally, they have to actually wear the glasses for a reasonable span of time, or, barring that, at least indicate that they should wear glasses. Thus, I can’t slot in Mai Kawasumi, who slapped on some specs for about 5 seconds in Kanon, into these rankings.

Finally, note that these rankings reflect somewhat on my enjoyment of the character but also on their glasses-worthiness as well. That is, even if a character is ranked relatively low, that’s not to say I don’t like them; sometimes that just means that I don’t think that the glasses are important to their character. Those who embody the spirit of meganekko will gain bonus points, similarly.

That said, 7 guys, 16 girls: let’s go.
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There’s one of my groundbreaking review ideas out of the bag. Well, not groundbreaking since it’s a rip-off of one of the larger video-game-culture phenomenons of late of Zero Punctuation, everyone’s favorite fast-talking fast-insulting Australian guy who rambles on about video games while ironic images appear in the background.

I figured I’d do my best to bring such a wonderful thing to the otakusphere by banging out my own ripoff parody homage to this style of reviewing, and my first topic would be Kure-nai, simply because if I did something silly like this no one would notice that everyone beat me to discussing this show, even Baka-Raptor and otousan and apparently another one by Karura showed up on the aggregator today.

(Yeah, I’m half-linkwhoring, half apologizing for not commenting on the other reviews because I was expecting to talk about it in mine. Additionally, becuase I was listening at the ABC channel last night about how there’s not enough interblog chatter. Thus, link-whoring.)

Of course somewhere between here and there the motivation ran out and the review admittedly ran horribly, horribly long and so I decided to scrap this script as a Zero-Punc script and just post it up as an actual review.

This is mainly because, aside from the fact it took me 7 minutes to read, I didn’t believe that it really captured the feel of Zero Punctuation. I managed to write a bit snappier and cracked a few more jokes than usual but it wasn’t laden with hilariously graphic metaphors and, as usual from me, was a bit too serious.

So you can judge for yourself whether it would have worked or not; although it might be a bit tricky because there’s no ironic stick-figure images that contrast the text to make the writing a bit more amusing.

Oh, and don’t forget, there is a review of Kure-nai in there somewhere too.
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