I’m still alive. Don’t know what Nagi is up to, but I have the first of my three exams (Pattern Recognition) for the semester tomorrow… or rather, later today. After that, I’ll be blogging again more regularly.
The folks over at Raspberry Heaven convinced me to give Monster another try. For some reason, I just couldn’t get through episode 1. Now I have, and it’s great stuff. Got 5 and 6 stashed (oh, what I wouldn’t give for that unlimited broadband back… 
) and hope to watch tomorrow evening.
As far as tracing, about the only worthwhile content here, goes… I have something special in the works. It may possibly be my best work to date. At the moment, the lines are only half-done due to lack of time. What’s done has taken me the same amount of time an average trace from an anime frame takes. Here it is.
DigitalPanic are an awesome subber. Not only did they pick up the pieces and start subbing Zipang, an excellent series which was woefully ignored last year, they recently subbed the first of the new UFO Princess Valkyrie OAVs. I love UFO Princess Valkyrie (actually, I love Kaishaku’s stuff in general), and was really upset when the whole MFI debacle happened last year because Valkyrie was affected, and A-E decided not to touch it. While the episode wasn’t that great (Catgirl vs Meganeko :o) and I was hoping for a bit more plot… I can’t complain about getting more.
In other news, I’m trying to work though my massive anime backlog. Finished Mysterious Cities of Gold on the weekend (what a trip down memory lane that was) and started Planetes last night. If I work to plan, then next in line is Gankutsuou, then Aishiteru ze Baby, Beck, and some oldschool with Fushigi Yuugi. Of course, I’ll also continue to follow current stuff and give my thoughts. Those have been sparse of late simply because there’s really not much going at the moment that deserves to be talked about.
Also, it seems a spinoff or sequel or something to My-HiME is planned. My-MAiD (or Mai-MAiD or Mai-star-MAiD or whatever the fuck the fansubbers end up arguing over calling it). Details can be found here
I’m up to final projects, pretty much. Basically, this is my last week before summer break, and I’ve got a Critical Thinking final exam, two 3-D Modeling projects (a still life with materials editing and an object of our choice…I’m doing Darth Vader’s lightsaber ^_______^), and three Advanced Drawing for Animators projects (9 muscle studies, 2 shading studies, and 4 pages of animal sketches) to get through. Not really all that hard, but a bit on the time-consuming side.
However, I will be updating later this week with the first of what will likely be many reviews of Adult Swim’s current anime block. New Inu-Yasha, Samurai Champloo, Paranoia Agent, & s-CRY-ed in one go (yeah, FLCL & Trigun are there too, but I’ve already seen those enough for a few dozen lifetimes and don’t really feel like writing about them). This week’s will cover the past 2 weeks, as I kinda wanna start from the beginning on Paranoia Agent. That show has me hooked, suffice it to say.