It’s time for another post. Apparently these “updates” are weekly now…I didn’t intend for it to be this way, but I’m just too lazy or too busy with other things to post until a week of not posting goes by and I start feeling guilty about leaving my blog.

So, what’s new this week? Basically, now I’m an anime freak. I finished watching Full Metal Alchemist along with the Full Metal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shambala movie. Both the TV series and the movie were extremely good. So I figured I should get my hands on some more anime and I ended up Googling “top 10 anime” and came up with this list. Then I looked up all of those in the Wikipedia and decided which ones I would try to get my hands on. So far I’ve been able to get Rurouni Kenshin OVA, FLCL, Haibane Renmei, and Serial Experiments: Lain. And I’m still trying to get Last Exile. Those were the only ones that really caught my attention. I’m also trying to get the Grave of the Fireflies movie, although that’s not on the list.

So far I have only watched Rurouni Kenshin OVA and one episode of FLCL. A word of advice for those of you looking for “Rurouni Kenshin OVA“. There appears to be a lot of Rurouni Kenshin stuff, but you’re only looking for the first of the OVAs, that’s the one that’s REALLY good. Your looking for: “るろうに剣心―明治剣客浪漫譚―追憶編” or Rurouni Kenshin – Meiji Kenkaku Romantan – Tsuioku Hen, or Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuioku Hen, or Samurai X: Reminiscence, or Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal or any variation of those names. They’re all the same thing! However, anything else that says either “Samurai X” or “Rurouni Kenshin” or “るろうに剣心” is not what you are looking for. There’s a TV series, a movie, and another OVA. Chronologically the first OVA comes first, then the TV series and finally the second OVA. I’m not sure where the movie fits; as far as I can tell it goes somewhere inside the first OVA. From what I’ve read the TV series is not too bad, but the style is very different from the first OVA and it’s less serious and more like a romantic comedy. The fans seem to hate the second OVA because it does not follow the manga. And the movie…well, I haven’t read anything about it.

But let’s go back to the first OVA. It’s very good. The animation is simply amazing. In some of the scenes the animation is mixed with live footage and it looks beautiful. For example, at the beginning of the third episode there are some great scenes where the water was taken from live footage but the rocks inside it where re-drawn to fit the style of the animation. But it’s not just about the animation; the characters, the story, the score, are all great too. After watching it, you’ll understand why so many people praise it. Do yourself a favor and just watch it.

As for FLCL, although I’ve only watched the first episode, I can tell that it is one of those things that even though you don’t fully understand it, you know it’s good. It’s actually the first anime that I had to watch dubbed. I tried watching the subtitled version first but there was too much going on and I couldn’t keep track of what was happening and read all of the subtitles in time. I know that the translation for the subtitled version is a lot better than the translation for the dubbed version, but I really had no choice.

Other than watching anime, I’ve been editing the video of my sister’s wedding, and hopefully I’ll be done this week. Once I’m done I’ll go back to trying to post some more stuff to my website. In other news, Google finally added my site to their index! Hopefully that’ll get someone to come here.