Cardcaptor’s Blog

Get a headphone. Prepare your heart. And listen to this:

My head exploded multiple times already… Arrggghhhh… Kugyuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!!!

I’m at Episode 20 of Clannad now. There’s no complaint about the animation, the comedic timing, or the emotion KyoAni could project. So, expression-wise, Clannad gets an almost perfect score. Story-wise, it has down-to-earth stories that I think many find touching and easy to relate to. However, thinking about what happen to each family, I got a feeling that having a family is hard, and it sucks most of the time. Continue reading “Clannad: A Bleak Look at Family and Child Raising”

A is for Arche Klain.

B is for Becky Miyamoto.

C is for Coquelicot.

Continue reading “Loli ABC”

I didn’t sleep last night because I marathoned chapter 152-206 of Mahou Sensei Negima. It was that good. Here’s why:

Designs
Costumes, beasts, cities, environments, and battle choreography. Detailed and beautiful.
Akamatasu-sensei sure get himself a group of assistants with l33t skillz. Continue reading “Negima is Awesome”

• wktk (wakuteka)
  Stands for ワクワクテカテカ (wakuwakutekateka). “Wakuwaku”is an onomatopoeia for being excited, and “tekateka” for gleaming. It is used to express the feeling of expectation for a good thing that’s going to happen soon, like when you’re waiting to watch a good video while it’s loading, or the state that Tama-chan is in below:

wktk Continue reading “Japanese(?) I Learned from Nico Nico Douga”

If you look at Wikipedia page on fansub, the first citation you’ll see is the article “Celebrating the Two Decades of Unlawful Progress: Fan distribution, Proselytization Commons, and the Explosive Growth of Japanese Animation” by Sean Leonard. (Grab the paper here.) I’m writing this post to record what I learned from the paper, and I hope I can help you save some time.

Why is this paper important? Well, as far as I know, it’s the only peer-reviewed article that directly deals with fansubbing and its copyright problem, exactly the quagmire that we are all in. The main contributions of the paper are as follows:

1. Despite being a legal paper, it gives a detailed history of how fansub started in the U.S. back in the 1980s, and recounts its relationship with Japanese anime companies. You might need this information to talk more deeply about fansubs. (You also get a lot of nice trivia on fansub history. For example, I was surprised to learn that an officer in the U.S. military was responsible for giving birth to a massive raw distribution network back then.)
2. It formally presents the argument that fansub helps the industry promote anime, and gives supporting evidences. This means that, when you argue with someone on whether fansubs help or harm, you can use the rhetoric of this paper in the argument. I’ll talk more about this below.
3. It suggests a practice that makes fansubbing of unlicensed anime legal, and justifies the practice in the light of theCopyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Now let’s get on with some details. Continue reading “Anime Readings #1: Celebrating Two Decades of Unlawful Progress”