I visited AnimeBlues.com to check out some downloads today and saw a downtime notice. Specifically, I saw:
animeblues.com r brOked
Found a bug that we need to fix before service can resume. visit the forums to keep posted
Viz Media recently announced that Naoki Urasawa’s psychological thriller manga - Monster - will debut in the United States on February 21, 2006. The retail price is said to be US$9.99. Read more about the release at Viz Media.
And if you do not know anything about Monster, I might just be able to tempt you to read my review of the anime version of Monster, though unlikely as that may seem.
Okay, I have to admit that I’ve never read the manga version of Monster since I can’t find any English-subbed version online. But the anime is a breath of fresh air and I reckon the manga should be pretty good as well. Given that the US will see their copies of Monster soon, I suppose I could expect some to filter all the way to my tiny country soon enough.
With the recent downtime experienced by anime.c.la, I’m sure many didn’t expect it to come back up. After all, it must have been chugging some huge amounts of bandwidth - with no sustainable and reliable revenue source funding it.
But, plug in anime.c.la into your browser and you will find a working page with a French notice, but anime downloads are still not up. If you’re interested in the notice, read below for a Babelfish-translated version:
Animate-Network is back! Ca says anything to you?! The largest site of download of animated at the time! The site with due closing because of lacks of uploadeur.. But this problem will not reproduce any more because we henceforth will use Club-footed 100mbps for uploader and will make the distro episodes
What does “Club-footed 100mbps” mean?
Edit: Christopher provides a much better translation in the comments below.
Some bad news for avid direct downloaders that frequent Nekodownloads.com and Anime.c.la. Nekodownloads.com is down at the moment due to hard drive failure and will be restored as soon as this is fixed (as reported by an admin in Anime-Yume’s forum). Anime.c.la’s problems, on the other hand, are unknown to me. It has been suffering from rather frequent outages in recent days, most probably due to heavy traffic / bandwidth use, but this outage has been one of the longest yet.
In fact, mezura.computed.net - another popular anime direct download site for the most recent fansubs - has also been suffering from sporadic FTP outages. Lucky for us, the outages tend to be temporary (less than 1 day).
Today, AnimeNation’s Ask John column answers an oft-asked question: How many Americans prefer dubbed anime? John answers that “…based on my observations as an employee of an anime specialty retailer and as a habitual industry observer, I have no doubts whatsoever that the American anime watching population predominantly prefers anime dubbed into English…”
Truthfully, from my experience in anime forums, I thought most would prefer subbed anime. Dubs, in my honest opinion, are generally extremely bad - devoid of the original emotion put in by the Japanese voice actors.
What do you guys think?
Hmm, always knew that Slam Dunk was too realistic to be true. Just joking. But nevertheless, according to Anime News Network, it appears that Slam Dunk creator Takehiko Inoue plagiarised NBA photographs (and not just one or two either). To see the comparisons between the manga art and actual NBA photographs straight away, you can go here.
The similarities are definitely too close for the allegations of plagiarism to be false. Too bad I don’t understand Japanese because the text in the site that displays the comparison is in Japanese. But the similarities in the pictures are self-evident. See it yourself.
Howl Wins New York Film Critics Award
Nikkan Sports reports the New York Film Critics Circle has awarded Howl’s Moving Castle with a Best Animated Film award on the 12th. The prize of this society is known foretell future Academy Award winners. Spirited Away took this same prize in 2002…
Not particularly new or exciting news, but since I enjoyed Howl’s Moving Castle, this particular bit of news became rather interesting.
In any case, whether or not it manages to win the Academy Award, I’d say it would stand a better chance compared to Chicken Little…
Japanese media site Biglobe and Bandai Channel are now offering free streaming first episodes of a variety of anime series including Petopeto-san, Noein, Gunparade Orchestra, Witch Hunter Robin, RahXephon, Amaenaideyo, Gakuen Senki Muryou, Akane Maniax, Kimi ga Nozomu Eien, Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo, Sousei no Aquarion, My Hime, and the live action sci-fi/action series Shibuya 15.
AnimeNation News
This is definitely an excellent way to sample anime. Pity there is no subtitles though. Anyway here’s the link to the streams:
http://broadband.biglobe.ne.jp/sitemap/sitemap_bch.html
Now, I really don’t think most people who come to this blog can read Japanese, so Babelfish it. For those who do not know what Babelfish is, go here: http://babelfish.altavista.com and translate that page!