Unlucky☆Star

Life is a stern teacher. And some of the hardest lessons life can give come in the form of missed opportunities.
All right, enough with the melodramatic lead-ups. Here’s the dirt on what happened just a short while ago.

Close encounters of the K-ON! kind

When I saw K-ON!’s complete opening sequence for the first time, my eyes latched onto the very brief scene capped above.
I’ve seen that place before, I thought.
Rifling through the photographs I took during my stay in Kyoto earlier this month, I found the evidence to back up my sudden realisation.

The place in question?

The famous Meiji-era [...]

A balm for weary eyes: Amano Kozue’s Alpha (artbook review alert)

Hop on over to Wolf Hurricane and read my new review of Alpha – a hardbound artbook featuring the work of ARIA manga author and illustrator Amano Kozue.
Note: This is one of the three artbooks mentioned in my 06 April post describing the stuff I purchased from Akihabara. Reviews of the other two [...]

Methinks Kagami doth protest too much

Prithee, good sirrah, take heed of these glad tidings which unto thine ears I hasten to bear.
I learned, a little too late to take part in the festivities, that yesterday was Talk Like Shakespeare Day. (It still is, depending on one’s time zone.) We’ve had unofficial observances of this kind before – remember [...]

Japan 2009: Day 2 Report, Part 2 (25 March)

Note: Click here to read Part 1 of this report. Click here to access a customised Google Maps chart on which the walking routes described in the report have been marked.
Our next stop: the East Garden of the Imperial Palace and the ruins of Japan’s largest castle.

Read manga for free in Manila – and we’re not talking bootlegs

A couple of weeks ago, the Japan Foundation (Manila) announced that its library has recently acquired a collection of Japanese manga in English. They’ve had a sizeable selection of raw manga for ages but this is the first time (to my knowledge) that translated volumes will make an appearance on their shelves.
I haven’t had [...]

Mapping one’s footsteps

View Larger Map
I’ve got a number of real-life concerns to grapple with this week, so the next installment in the series of reports chronicling my recent trip to Japan won’t appear for a while. In the meantime, I’d like to share a little side project I’ve just started using Google Maps: an annotated [...]