Well... my internet has been retardedly slow yesterday... "Everything is alright on our end." my foot! Your customer service sucks! My next door neighbor and a friend who lived in another district also complained of the same thing. They should really start expanding their coverage of their service they offer cheaper promos for their ISP. Grr...Anyway, my one-day reprieve of anime allowed me to watch shows with a clearer head and no burnout. Either way, subs are coming in slow (except for the shows that I have no intention to pick up *storyofmylife*) so I resorted to downloading some raws too.Natsume Yuujinchou 01 ~The Cat and The Book of Friends~Natsume is a boy who moved to a town to live with some relatives (or is it friends?). He has always been a loner because of his ability to see spirits since he was a child. His parents died when he was young and he has been jumping from relative to relative. When he moved to the a town, spirits have been actively pursuing him, asking him to return something. He stumbled upon a temple and accidentally released a sealed cat spirit, which followed him home. Anyway, he learns that his grandmother Reiko was a lot like him – able to see spirits and a loner. She defeated a lot of spirits when she was younger and asked them to write their names in a book and they would become her servants. And now, he aims to return the names of the individual spirits that his grandmother took.I remember reading off Memento that Natsume’s seiyuu is the one that also did Takemoto from Honey and Clover and the cat is voiced by the guy who did Miyagi from Junjou Romantica (I loved him in Junjou). But my problem with series with these kinds of themes is that although I get really interested in them in the beginning, I tend to lose interest in them after six or so episodes (i.e. Wagaya no Oinari-Sama). I’m wondering how this is going to play out since it’s only supposed to be only 13 episodes and I don't really want to watch Natsume just meeting, defeating and returning the name to some random spirit at each episode. This will be placed in the “Maybe” pile – will watch two more episodes.Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na koto –Natsu no Sora–Yay! I’m picking this show up. And it has nothing to do with Maeno Tomoaki (since his character Gouta had very little screentime)!!! o^^o So happy that I am still at that road where my interest in an anime has nothing to do with a seiyuu… probably. With the lack of anything else to watch, I picked up the way of the second episode and realized my boredom with the first episode had something to do with the countryside scenery (which always bores the hell out of the city girl like me) and the long gaps in between dialogue. And when Sora finally gets around Tokyo, the pace picked up, they talk more (even if it’s just Sora talking to herself), the Celtic BGMs last longer and for some reason has turned interesting to me. I can’t wait for the subs!My watchlist is now up a whopping two shows, this and Hidamari Sketch X365 – Chocolate Underground does not count since they’re only 3-5 minutes at a time. I will stop calling this by the Japanese title since I just copy-paste it everytime because the effort to memorize is too great and calling it Mahou Tsukai blahblahblah is still too long. And anyway, everyone else knows it as Someday’s Dreamer already ^^Koihime Musou 01 *Needs more MANS*The only non-ugly, non-just-standing-in-the-background man character... and he's dead. >.<Nothing but glorified fanservice in pretty animation. Fail humor. Every character is female. The men are either ugly or uglier. Umm... no.Koko wa Greenwood 01I fell in love with this anime OVA series when I watched this it last month and couldn’t believe that they had a j-drama for this! Well, I never heard of any group subbing this (still crossing my fingers that there is >.<) so I picked up the raw. The first episode was kinda loyal to the first episode of the OVA so won’t put in a summary anymore with a little modification. But when I checked out DramaWiki, the cast does not include anyone playing Nagisa or Miya (that sucks!) and I didn’t read the manga (usagijen beat me to them from the Manga Kissa sale) so I’m not sure where they’re planning to go with this. Drat! I like the Miya episodes. Most of the actors are relative newcomers with little dramas to their credit. Maybe it’s because I love Mitsuru so much in the anime, but I didn’t like the guy playing him – reminds me of a psycho.My main struggle with this show would be the fact that no sub group is going to be picking this up – please let me know if there is. This is the only j-drama I’m picking up this season and I really wanna watch it with more understanding than my broken Japanese can handle.Takane’s BicycleThis is not really a series, but a one-episode thing. I picked it up because this won the 2007 Animax Pan-Asia Awards. To those not living in Asia, this was an Asia-Pacific-wide story-/manga-/script-writing contest sponsored by Animax where the winning entry will have his/her entry animated by A-1 Pictures into a 30-minute short. Surprise, surprise, someone from Japan won -_-''' There is another entry that won a special recognition award and will be animated too (LaMB), but that won’t come out til next year I think. Anyway, I was curious what it takes to win this.This is what won!?!?! I don’t get it. Tanukis come to town. Takane got knocked off bike by tanuki. Little sister is afraid of the temple because she was freaked by the place when she was a child and the dog ran off there when she was walking it. Takane goes to temple to get dog. Little sister gets eaten by kitsune and runs off. Takane chases after him in the bike. Tanukis show up and bowed down at him and enchanted his bike so he can follow the kitsune and save little sister. He and little sister float in the sky and little sister apologizes. Seriously, I don’t get it. Maybe it’s based on Japanese local folklore type thing. But I just thought that since it's a Pan-Asia competition, they could have at least picked up a winner where the story would be something everyone in Pan-Asia can appreciate. Anyway, this actually makes me not look forward to LaMB now - even if it's bound to have some Filipino elements to it..
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