Recent content by Hiroyuki

Nurse Angel Ririka SOS ナース エンジェル りりか SOS 35 episodes Genre: Shoujo, Magical Girl, Action, Adventure, Comedy Year: 1995 Studio: Studio Gallop Manga originally published in Ribon Magazine ftv's picture gallery (ep.1) ftv Blurb: "Ririka Moriya received the biggest shock...

Cosplay has been popular in the west at cons though not on the streets like you would find in Japan, where people gather and promenade themselves in costume. But an article on the bbc news site, Japan's fashion rebellion goes West, shows that the dying (dyeing?) art of Ganguro ("black face", aka...

It seems to me that "terrorism" has become an excuse for politicians to exercise their natural inclinations towards fascism, ie. to arbitrarily control the population and stop anything that might hamper the authorities doing whatever they please. Next week sees the enactment of a new law in the...

I just saw this film, 亀は意外と速く泳ぐ (Kame wa igai to hayaku oyogu, Turtles Swim Surprisingly Fast, aka "Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected" (fansub title). I found it on the newsgroup alt.binaries.multimedia.japanese though I expect it's available on torrents etc too (see link at...

Anime-Wiki.org is a wiki-based anime encyclopedia project. It currently has over 1000 entries including over 200 anime series, which means it has reached a stage where it is quite useful but not yet comprehensive enough; basically it needs more contributors! It works in the same way as Wikipedia...

I'm suddenly getting Error 403 when trying to view any ftv blog page other than the recent updates page. It was working fine up to about 10 minutes ago.

There are a lot of encyclopedic anime reference sites online, for instance Anime News Network, Animenfo.com, and of course the general encyclopedia Wikipedia. Every site has its pros and cons and I was wondering what sites people think are worth contributing to. Let me explain where I am coming...

For a few days now, if I log in whilst trying to reply to a topic, I get a 404 error of the form CODE The requested URL /act=Post&CODE=02&f=26&t=6676 was not found on this server. when it tries to redirect me back the to the forum reply I was going to do.

Mysterious Girlfriend X (謎の彼女Ｘ Nazo no Kanojo X) is a really weird school romance story by Riichi Ueshiba that finally started getting scanlated. Originally a short story of two chapters, it got picked up as a full serial a while ago by Afternoon. Akira Tsubaki is an ordinary...

I just wanted to wish everyone a happy solstice! The summer solstice (or winter, if you live in the upside-down parts of the world) is at 18:06 UTC today (19:06 BST in the UK) and revered by pagans and nature lovers the world over, a time for a few minutes quiet reflection about the enormous...

Is anyone reading Kobato? I looked at a couple of chapters but I don't really understand what it's about, it seems kind of like PitaTen, with a klutzy girl (who looks rather like Sakura Kinomoto, typical CLAMP!) who doesn't know anything about the human world but has to pass some kind of test...

Has anyone been reading this manga? The title means something like "Castaway on Blue Orchid Island". It's by Fujishiro Takeshi / Gangan Comics and was originally scanlated by Choco Does It and now by ZG-Fansubs. It’s a fun ecchi story about a boy who's washed up on an island populated only by...

A recent UNICEF report says that Dutch children are the happiest in the developed world, and British children the unhappiest. In short, in Holland, children are brought up to be happy, in the UK, to be full of angst. But is this good or bad? It's easy to say happiness is the right route, but if...

Something that has puzzled me from time to time is what the difference is between a "hot topic" (orange) and an "open topic" (blue), it doesn't seem to be written down anywhere. Anyway I'm bored today so I looked more closely at a few pages of headers to see if there was a pattern and it seems...

The inventor of instant noodles, Momofuku Ando, has died in Japan, aged 96, of a heart attack. His first instant noodles, Chicken Ramen, came out in 1958. His most famous product was Cup Noodle (1971), popular with otaku the world over. His company, Nissin, sells 85.7 billion servings of noodles...