Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Comic Review: Hana Doki Kira

I waffled over reviewing this anthology or not since I don't want to be excessively mean-spirited to a fan project and I know that it's highly unlikely that the creators of these stories will see this review and then keep it in mind the next time they plan something (like you would for a critique). And yet, this was a project I had high hopes for and this book really just didn't pan out for me and I would like to articulate precisely why this was since I do think these are correctable mistakes and not all of them are the fault of the artists.


Hana Doki Kira


Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Anime Review: Terror in Resonance

Sorry for the delay here, I seem to write two kinds of reviews: quick ones where I can get one done in half an hour and then monstrous ones that take two hours to do a rough draft and usually I need to sleep on it to edit, guess which one this ended up being? So with that, no introduction this time around and let's just get down to Watanabe's latest series that's not Space Dandy, streaming on Funimations's website and hulu.



Terror in Resonance (Zankyou no Terror)



Friday, October 24, 2014

Book Reivew: Ironskin

I've been a reader of the tor.com blog for many years now and I really like a lot of the books that Tor Publishing puts out, it's a consistently good mix of fantasy and sci-fi, so I read a lot of the excerpts and summaries of new books and I also have fairly good luck with winning their ARC contests. I was hooked when I read the excerpt for a book coming out this fall, Silverblind, it's another fantasy story about a young woman naturalist similar to A Natural History of Dragons (which, if I remember correctly, was also a Tor book), and eagerly entered their contest to win an ARC. I did, opened up my package as soon as I got it, and then did a little bit of swearing when the back of the book mentioned it was the third in a series and I had completely missed that on the website. But thankfully my library had, well, this book and hopefully I'll be able to find the next one soon enough, I need to have a word with my other system, maybe my plan of actually reviewing a 2014 book in 2014 won't be in vain after all!


Ironskin by Tina Connolly


Thursday, October 23, 2014

Movie Review: Belle

Sorry about the delay here, between getting everything watched and written up for the Fall Anime Round-UP earlier in the week and the fact that I'm visiting home this week I completely ran out of time to sit down and watch a full movie until it was too late (next week's looks like it will be late as well probably). And I certainly didn't fall behind because I wasn't interested in this movie, I first heard about the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle a year or two ago, I think it was when the movie was announced and the actress playing Belle, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, mentioned that she was a bit jealous of some of her white colleagues who got to wear beautiful period dresses but there were never any roles like that if you weren't (completely) white. And that stuck with me and convinced me to be excited about the film, even if historicals aren't usually my kind of movie.



Belle


Monday, October 20, 2014

Fall 2014 Anime Round-UP

It's that time again, time to talk about way more anime than is healthy! This one got pushed back a bit late since Mushi-shi: Zoku Shou started oddly late, even the noitaminA shows started a full week earlier than this (and suddenly I am already scared for the show's production schedule). And before I get to the meat of this post, I (thankfully) only have two shows carrying over from the summer, Sailor Moon Crystal and Happiness Charge Precure, I'm ridiculously behind on PreCure since I just ended up getting behind on everything this summer but when I last left it I  liked how the show felt a bit like a throwback to 90s magical girls with it's subplots and focus and I really liked the humor in it. SMC is still only every 2 weeks so staying caught up with it is easier but the show is having all kinds of ups and downs, the art varies wildly even within a single episode (which they thankfully seem to be fixing for the DVD release but it's currently competing with Samurai Flamenco for "most obviously had schedule problems in 2014") and sometimes the direction of the episode itself has been strange. But they've kept in nearly everything I wanted to see from the manga and I still have no urge to see the original tv series so I don't think I'll complain excessively about it yet.



Saturday, October 18, 2014

Book Review: Everlasting

Yet another book from my near-eternal to-read list but this one actually had an interesting sounding premise when I looked it up on my library's website! Well, it actually had a premise which is a bit of a rarity in and of itself, but DC you are very strange in so many ways, but what it sound did seem interesting and after a couple of duds I was ready to read something I really liked.



Everlasting by Angie Frazier


Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Manga Review: Paradise Kiss

This series falls into the "I've been trying to read this for years but have had the worst luck finding it!" category of this blog which seems to be exclusively dominated by well-regraded shojo stories (heck, I've got a post from years back when I got ahold of the first volume again so that I could finish it!). I did discover reading this that I must have gotten quite far along in one of my previous attempts since there was less new material than I remembered but even if half of this was a reread it didn't diminish just how good this story is.


Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa


Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Anime Review: Monthly Girl's Nozaki-kun

These days I get most of my manga recommendations from tumblr, although "recommendation" makes it sound as if people are specifically telling me to read them. This time around I was following a blog for another series altogether, saw them posting a group of strips from this series and fell head over heels for it, I had to make sure I didn't just reblog every single one I came across! I immediately started hoping for an anime since I knew it would be a tough sell to convince my friends to read scanlated 4koma and thankfully one was announced quite soon after I first discovered it and I then proceeded to hope that I wasn't hyping up the series too much. Fortunately it seems like my friends have all fallen harder for this show than I did and I'm still seeing new people every week, people who don't even watch a lot of anime, picking up the show and falling in love.



Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun (Gekkan Shojo Nozaki-kun)



Friday, October 10, 2014

Book Review: Crossing the Tracks

Lately I've been working on some knitting projects, well honestly I started one project in mid-June, finished it in time for Otakon in early August, and then started another project in late August, and the thing is that I do most of my knitting on my commute. I take public transportation and, if I'm lucky enough, can get a seat for both the morning and evening and sitting while knitting is infinitely easier than trying to stand and balance knitting. Unfortunately this is also my biggest chunk of free time in the day to do reading so I'm starting to get dangerously close to the end of my book list for reviewing here and honestly even if I was reading on the metro it might not help, it's surprisingly hard to hold a book and turn the pages one-handed if you're trying to use the other hand to stop yourself from creating a human line of dominos. So bear with me if I have to skip an update or two in the coming months, especially since I'm starting a few new series and these days I'd almost rather review an entire series at once instead of talking about the series two or three times in three months or so, thank goodness not everything I'm reading is a sequel!


Crossing the Tracks by Barbara Stuber


Thursday, October 9, 2014

Movie Review: Ernest and Celestine

In case people didn't see Monday's review, between my library woes getting this silly DVD unlocked and the fact that I spent half of last week helping out at a con I was just too bush-wacked to both watch this movie and come up with a review for it, even if it's rather short. So without further ado, a short little review for a short film!


Ernest and Celestine


Monday, October 6, 2014

Anime Review: Haikyuu!!

In case anyone is wondering what happened to the movie review last week, a combination of my library woes and Anime USA just left me with no time to watch the film let alone think about it and talk about it so it's happening this Wednesday instead. Sorry folks, I had like a month of no missed updates there!

Moving onto this review, this year has been an odd one for me anime-wise so far and I realized that might be the case when I looked at my upcoming spring shows and noticed tha I wasn't, over the moon excited for any show and the only one I was confident would be good was a volleyball manga I hadn't even read. Thankfully I did enjoy some of the other shows like Captain Earth and Mushi-shi: The Next Passage but I was right to believe the tumblr hype for this show and thanks to how early it aired I always had something to look forward to during lunch at work on Sundays!

Haikyuu!!


Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Book Review: Incarnate

Having to change up the schedule this week a little bit since it's been quite a while since I checked out a DVD at the library and forgot that they "lock" their cases so between that and being so happy that this branch finally had a self-checkout machine I haven't had time to actually watch my movie yet! So instead I'll talk about a book I read for an author signing earlier in September, Sarah J Maas of Heir of Fire is doing her book tour and had a stop quite close to me with two other authors joining in, Leah Cypress (I liked Mistwood quiet a bit but not Nightspell) and then this author whom I'd never heard of before! That's as good a reason as any to try out a book, even if I got the impression that at least half of the room had only read Maas's books judging by all the questions directed at her (yes it is her tour but it was still a lot of questions!), plus my library had it on kindle and that really is the best way for me to read when commuting in the mornings, much easier to do one-handed that with a hardcover!


Incarnate by Jodi Meadows