laceblade | Entries tagged with anime: honey and clover

The Honey & Clover DVDs are gorgeous! The casing is gorgeous!

I'm a bit bothered by the subtitle choices.....throughout the show, the characters usually refer to each other by surname, as is common for the Japanese. However, even though the characters, when speaking Japanese, refer to each other as Morita/Yamada/Takemoto/Hanamoto/Mayama, the subtitles keep translating it, so that it seems as though they are referring to one another with their given names, Shinobu/Ayumi/Yuuta/Hagumi/Takumi. Why would they change that?!

Anyway, now is a bad time for me with consumerism. I had to choose between Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season 2, NANA DVDs, and Honey & Clover DVDs. I ended up going with Honey & Clover, obviously. It was the cheapest one. Still, I feel like I have betrayed the other two. Shows! Why are you all released at the same time?!

I won't go into spoilery-depth, but I will say that I'm working on catching up on Fringe, and am liking it. Olivia Dunham is pretty bad-ass. I love the autumnal New England-ness of it, and I love the opening song that's played on piano/sleigh bells. The plot is becoming surprisingly rewarding to its audience, and I didn't think that it would be.

For thoughts on Dollhouse, I'll direct you to

aycheb here, and

meganbmoore here.

Yesterday, I was a consumer-whore, and I'm okay with it.

Firstly, in the realm of cheap things, I purchased a flower vase, cheese grater, and plant shelf at St. Vincent DePaul, which were obviously cheap.

I also used a Barnes & Noble gift card that I had received for my birthday to get two xxxHolic manga.

The largest purchase, of course, was my iPod.

I ended up getting an iPod Classic. I figured that if I was going to spend $200 on a 16 GB iPod Nano, I might as well spend $50 more, and get a bigger screen and 120 GB. By the way, my laptop has about 38 GB (I am still using the same laptop I purchased the summer before going to college), so my iPod has 3 times the amount of space as my laptop!

I think that this is the most amount of money I've spent in a store at once (obviously, I spend more on rent, car insurance, etc.).

I struggled a bit with what to name the iPod. My laptop is Watanuki, being basically a house servant. My Internet connection is Himawari, so that every time my laptop (Watanuki) connects to the Internet, it says, "You are connected to Himawari." BECAUSE I AM A SAP.

So at first, I was going to name the iPod Doumeki. But then Antoine pointed out that my iPod is small and black, so I named it Black Mokona instead. [I am waiting for something super badass to name "Yuuko."]

So far, for free, I have downloaded:
Episode 1 of Honey & Clover
A preview special for Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Episode 1 of Naruto: Shippuden

I am a fan of free stuff! Unfortunately, anime seems to be only available via iTunes in English dub, so that is pretty annoying. In the Honey & Clover English dub, all of the voice actors refer to each other by their first name, and it is skeeving me out. Like, "Shinobo." ~~Yuuta~~ Takemoto should not be calling him Shinobu, he should be calling him "Morita-sempai."

I am working on investigating podcasts next, in addition to putting my own music on it. I don't think I've ever listened to podcasts before, aside from Ron Moore's pretentious Battlestar Galactica ones.

Current Mood: excited

As reported by Anime News Network....

Hulu.com is hosting the first 12 episodes of the anime series Honey & Clover, and the first 11 episodes of the anime series NANA.

If you click the ANN link at the beginning of this post, it will take you to ANN's pages, hosting both shows via Hulu.

Further proving the awesomeness of Viz, all of the episodes are sub-titled, and not dubbed.

As I've mentioned before, these are two of my all-time favorite shows; so you should watch them!

Current Mood: impressed

All you lucky bastards who have this movie playing in your city had better blog about it!!

Watched "The Prestige" last night. It was bad-ass. I preferred Hugh Jackman's character to Christian Bale's, but then Bale's mostly just yelled a lot during the movie. Still, I was unspoiled for all of the turns and surprises, which made things fun. Also, the presence of David Bowie increases the greatness of any movie by 10 points.

You can get the first episodes of the animes Honey & Clover and NANA on iTunes for free now through August 31. Both of these series are examples of realistic (they're still dramatic, but there are no transformations to magical school girls) shojo, and they are two of my favorite series of all time. An article with more information on Honey & Clover is here, while there is also one on NANA here. I have been waiting for these to be released in the U.S. for a long time!

Today's Kate Beaton comic is about the Bronte sisters, and it is glorious.
I bought a used copy of a book claiming to be a metabiography of the Brontes today at a bookstore. OM NOM NOM.

Current Mood: ecstatic

What the hell, I'm already up late, so I might as well write in my blog, right?

Today was all right. Despite this weekend's weak stomach, and I guess overall weakness, I had a better disposition. This is due in part to the fact that I had my internship today, which is always a lot of fun. I am so lucky this summer, especially compared to last summer. I love both my job and my internship, every single day. Last summer, once in a while, I liked my internship, and I liked the few afternoons when I got to watch Danny, and that was it (aside from time spent with friends/family, of courses). I do miss my family a lot. I miss stopping by Olivia's soccer games, and now this summer Dylan is playing, too. I miss renting Studio Ghibli movies and cackling because they like them so much. I miss relying on Mom's cooking, and watching the news with Dad and arguing about politics. It's weird to think that I'll only live with them again during Christmas break. Or, who knows, maybe life will fall apart after I graduate and I'll move back in with them. It's my goal not to do so, but you never really know with life, do you?

Well, that was a tangent. My cousin (cousin's daughter; whatever) Molly was driving through Madison today, on her way from Milwaukee to Iowa. We met for dinner and ice cream, and it was nice. I guess that I really do miss that about being home with my parents - seeing friends and family who I'm used to seeing this time of year. Instead, it seems like I'm endlessly catching buses, trying to get to bed on time, and trying to remember to win at life by doing necessary things like laundry and buying groceries (neither of which happened today!).

If anyone is interested, there is a showing in Madison this weekend of the movie Serenity. I intend to attend, as does Antoine. Proceeds for the showings, which are taking place in multiple cities on Saturday, Joss Whedon's birthday, benefit Equality Now, which "works to end violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world through the mobilization of public pressure." Specific information on the Madison showing can be found here. Wiscon Madison friends, are you going? Or Gretchen, Kristen? I have a car, although one seat will be taken by Antoine. Three more are open! Or we could plan to meet there and freak out. Or something.

Lastly....OMG I started rewatching Honey & Clover tonight. IT IS SO GOOD. That is all.

Current Music: Motorcycle Drive By - Third Eye Blind

This little blog of mine....which will make more sense over at my actual blog
Yeah, I know, the color scheme sucks. But I wanted my new banner up, and I think that I can get Antoine to help me pick better colors tomorrow evening. The characters in the banner are from Honey & Clover, one of my most favorite anime series (or series of anything, for that matter) of all time. I highly recommend it if you have ever fallen in love, ever had friends, or have ever had feelings of any kind. Even if you've never watched anime before, I think you would like Honey & Clover.

In other blog news, after my blog reached over 97,000 hits, I remembered that FastCounter sent me an email saying that their hit counters would no longer be free. I've used them for over 4 years! (I had someone else before that) Does anyone know of a free hit counter service I can use, and enter in a starting number? I'd probably put in 97,000 as the starting number, even though I know I had a few hundred more than that. In the grand scheme of life, hits on a web page aren't very significant, but they are a status symbol for webmasters and bloggers. And I was very much looking forward to reaching 100,000 if only for bragging rights.

Sludge
Getting to class in the aftermath of the weekend's blizzard (and the continual accumulation that's been going on all day, and is forecasted to continue throughout the week) wouldn't be so bad if both the city and the university didn't suck so much at plowing. The sidewalks and footpaths on campus were terrible today. I literally had to jump across two feet of water to make it from Park Street to the sidewalk. I nearly lost my footing on icy patches at least 9 times, and I'm surprised I didn't fall and get my pants soaked with disgusting, dirty slush/water. I'm sure that that will happen tomorrow when I have my dress pants on to work at the Capitol. I haven't quite decided how to engineer my footgear yet, but I think that in order to catch the bus after work (I would prefer *not* to walk down State Street in the slush), I'll have to wear my brown leather shoe-boots with my black dress pants. Awesome.

At least work will be interesting tomorrow. I think that the Senate is set to discuss extending bar-time in Wisconsin due to a much early turning-clocks-forward federal Daylight Savings mandate (I think that's how the clock is turned? Not sure. It supposedly saves energy.).

Preemptive Woe
Speaking of work, I should go to sleep seeing as I need to get up at 6:00am and should have been asleep at 10:00pm.....but first! I am really afraid for this Sunday's episode of Battlestar Galactica. Rumors have been flying around for months that my favorite character is going to get killed off, but I refuse to believe it, and I think it's a ruse. We've been promised that one of the main characters will die (and one is a Cylon, and one will find Earth, blahblahblah), and I think *my* character is a red herring. They can't kill my character! I will be inconsolable if they do.

Current Music: A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture - Felix Mendelssohn (Featured in episode 19 of Princess Tutu, which also featured characters from the Shakespeare play of the same title! Have I mentioned that I love this anime?)