Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Noir Year's Eve

Well, after some time away, I'm returning to my "tradition" and watching the rest of Noir for New Year's Eve. I've even got some pasta-related program activities queued up for a MADLAX followup on New Year's Day. If I can make it... Don't know yet.

Past 'Eves have been marked by my inevetible "Posting While Intoxicated". And it may be that this evening is no exception. Though it really shouldn't be, considering that I'm supposed to give all that up. But the reality is, I don't know if any real change in lifestyle will avert my fate. And I remember my father's last words to me; the summary being that he wouldn't have given up all of his little pleasures if he knew it was going to end as quickly and badly as it did.

Poor justification, and not exactly a postive method for continuing down this path. But a little bit of Pinot Noir, a little bit of Samuel Smith's -- how can I not enjoy these things on special occasions while I'm still able to enjoy them? With Noir of all things??
I haven't been feeling well for a long time now, and now that I'm a bit better, I'm damn well not going to miss out on celebrating!

I've continued where I left off when I last thought I'd do this, and I've just finished our little journey to Taiwan. It's early, yet, and I'll probably finish up before the calendar rolls over. There have been a few very high quality animations released of late, and Noir is having a hard time living up to those. Yet, there's still the whole notion that it's greater than the sum of it's parts, that what it's doing is quite well constructed in its own right, that I'm not at all disappointed. After all these years of thinking and worry about that, I'm happy to say that I'm still enjoying it a great deal.

Let's hope that I feel the same in all of the "Noir" Year's to come!

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Travelling...

Driving 6 hours east for a few days. No grand excursion planned, just a bit of simplicity.

I've still got writer's block, go figure. I don't think this break will change that too much, even though I've got a couple of little things I actually want to write about for once. We'll see.

Enjoy your Generalized Solstice Observances!

Monday, December 15, 2008

"Phantom" character designs

AnimeNation's blog links to a Dengeki Online article with character designs for Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~...




...and a few more. But gee, do they look familiar?

Phantom speculation over on the forum, as always.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Broken images

One of my older webhosts has gone and changed everything around, and now all the little icons and banners I've been using are hosed. Go figure.

Blogger doesn't make it easy to batch-edit, so I'm evaluating now if I just want to move this entire thing to my kineska.com holding place, or just fix up the images. Not that I really have time to deal with either.

Oh well, "pardon our dust" as they say...

Sunday, December 07, 2008

New Bee Train in 2009: "Phantom 〜Requiem for the Phantom〜"

Subject: Noir

I had been halfheartedly scanning my usual news sources for any hint of any kind of Bee Train news, and it turns out I completely missed it when it finally showed up. D'oh!

Forum member AlexShadow spotted this on ANN loooong before I did:

The January issue (on sale on December 10) of Kadokawa Shoten's Newtype magazine will announce that the multimedia studio Nitroplus and writer Gen Urobuchi are adapting their Phantom of Inferno visual novel software as a television anime series. Phantom 〜Requiem for the Phantom〜 will feature the director Koichi Mashimo and series script supervisor Yousuke Kuroda.

Yoshimitsu Yamashita, Mutsumi Sasakir, Yoko Kikuchi and other artists will adapt the game characters for anime. The anime studio Bee Train will be in charge of production. The original game was previously adapted in 2004 as a three-volume video anime series, Phantom - The Animation.


Yousuke Kuroda! Ah, that's excellent news! Hang on for more info as to whether or not we can expect a Yuki Kajiura soundtrack or not. Fingers crossed!

The official site isn't up just yet.

More Phantom anime news and speculation in the Forum...

UPDATE: Scan of the announcement; guess there's not much news there: