Dropping in to the discount store across the corner on the weekend, I was wandering around its rack of cheap Blu-Rays when I saw two "previously owned" copies of Star Wars: The Force Awakens on display. A moment I'd imagined might arrive back when I hadn't bought the movie on its home video release had indeed come to pass, but I walked out of the ( Read more... )

There are problems and problems, and "starting to feel a bit lost getting deep into a manga series" seems pretty far down the list. As I read through the ninth volume of Arpeggio of Blue Steel, though, I did wonder if my thoughts on this matter were becoming articulated enough to solve the different problem of "coming up with one more post," even ( Read more... )

Makoto Yukimura's Viking manga Vinland Saga has been through enough "this volume had better sell" squeezes staying published in English that hoping the story's next instalment will arrive can feel as harrowing as reading through some of its "Dark Ages" action itself. At the end of the seventh double-thick volume, I did react with some extra relief ( Read more... )

Over the course of its two dozen official Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD collections, Shout! Factory has kept finding different ways to add jokes to the back cover copy; this time, there's a "Wikipedian" flavour to it. As for the actual selection of episodes, I was looking forward to them, even if I knew that to watch through it in the usual ( Read more... )

I had taken note of the news that SpaceX said it had worked out just why one of its Falcon 9 rockets had exploded on the launch pad (well short of actually trying to launch, not the moment you'd most anticipate unexpected shocks) and was preparing to launch another rocket. Not having worked out the exact moment it would happen, though, I was ( Read more... )

I've bought a pretty good number of the "girls' love" (or "yuri," to use the more in-the-know term) manga that Seven Seas publishes, and as I began picking up they were about to begin another series I supposed I'd take a chance on "Bloom into You" as well. The reviews I read as part of that process, though, made it of particular yet perhaps ( Read more... )

It's a lot easier to start buying a manga series than to come to its conclusion (save perhaps for "reissues"), and thinking of that has begun to place a certain weight on picking up first volumes at the bookstore these days. However, I did manage to come to one conclusion just lately, and almost by surprise ( Read more... )

Buying anime faster than I can watch it, in large part through the penny-wise, pound-foolish desire for "free shipping" turning most every casual interest into another title stored away here or there, does seem to have brought me to the point where every so often I just shrug off "getting through it" and go back to watch a series over again. The ( Read more... )

Getting through this year happened to mean I've accumulated ten years' worth of posts to this journal. Some months short of that early in the year, though, the steady routine of coming up with still more posts seemed to become enough that I started up a "Tumblr" with the thought it just might provide an easy source of post-like substitutes. After a ( Read more... )

Over my last few "quarterly reviews" of anime watched I did start dwelling on how, for all that these three-month intervals correspond to the way new anime series roll out, I was playing less and less of the modern game of watching those series through online streaming. It wasn't the obvious and oft-proclaimed tragedy of "falling out" with anime ( Read more... )