Oh my....

Well, THAT was meteoric.

After receiving a huge infusion of cash and clout following their acquisition by Navarre back in 2005, Funimation spent the last 5 years gobbling up the rights to a huge number of R1 releases, many of them from other distribution companies that were going under in 2005-7. Funi has been very very good about punctual, high quality  and respectful translations.

Now Funimation is reportedly up for sale.

I gather that the parent company, Navarre, is looking to focus primarily on software and...whateverthehellelse they do. Funimation is reportedly  taking money away from their primary business model.

As I understand it, Funimation is making money but that they require resources that Navarre doesn't want to develop. 

This is not necessarily the end of the world for them. In these scary economic times companies need to focus on their core competencies (assuming those competencies have a future) and husband resources.  Assuming Funimation is in fact doing well, it is possible that they could continue as they are given a buyer that wants to invest in the areas that Funimation needs development in.

 However, this sounds a lot like what happened with Geneon U.S.A., which was ultimately closed down (and became the source for many of Funimations region-1 acquisitions).

I know there are occasional readers of this blog who are far more knowledgeable of the industry than I am...so have at it in the comments please.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste links to this article which contains this  passage :

Navarre is pursuing a more focused strategy. Now that we have substantially reduced debt and improved operating margins, we are focusing our efforts on driving revenue, particularly in new product lines. We are concentrating all efforts on our distribution and software publishing businesses where we have significant expertise and considerable systems and physical assets that can be leveraged. The Punch! acquisition announced last week strengthens our software publishing business and demonstrates a step in our execution of this strategy," stated Cary L. Deacon, Chief Executive Officer.

FUNimation Entertainment's strategy and capital requirements are distinctly different from those of the Company's core business. While FUNimation's recent results have generally met expectations, the strategies required to grow the business include co-productions of original anime content, social networks and digital broadcasting. The Company anticipates that those plans are best executed with ownership that has assets or expertise in those areas.The Company will be discussing its going-forward strategy and financial outlook in greater detail next week in connection with its FY 2010 year end conference call.

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I am currently unable to do anything with my banners due to having broken my blog some time ago. This has left me stuck with 2 uncredited banners up top.
So in lieu of adding watermarks.....

The artist of the  'fishy' dame is Tenhiro Naoto .

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Nearly two weeks ago I attempted to expand the Windows 7 partition on my iMac. This resulted in a total failure to expand the partition, loosing all data therein and having an inaccessible empty partition on my hard drive....which prevented me from making a new partition from scratch.

I finally ended up taking the machine to the shop, and while I was at it I upgraded to the TB drive. Upon unpacking it, I placed it on my desk to check it out and make sure it was working OK. However I need the desk for homework, so Saturday I moved it up to the shelf where it lives and made an important discovery.



 In the back of an iMac is a vent. Here you can see it very clearly not marked near the upper edge, above the Apple logo.

That vent is extremely sharp edged. So sharp that after the resulting cut bled profusely...into the vent. The machine began to make a really....odd...noise, which I took to be blood congealed on the fan.

Yikes!

The cut bled for 3 days and I ended up going to the emergency room, where I had it lashed up securely, was given a tetanus shot and was informed that I was not to do anything with my left thumb for a solid week. ( No work and associated monies for Ken). As an added bonus the tetanus shot knocked me on my heels.

Of course I also had to take the computer back to the shop and sheepishly explain this fiasco.
Here's the thing: The Mac guy mentioned that this had actually happened to some of his other customers and he'd sent a consumer alert to Apple.

Now Steve Jobs has the most crackerjack industrial design team in the whole frickking world. Therefore it beggars belief that this is actually a design flaw. Thus I can only conclude that this is deliberate and iMacs are actually designed to collect DNA samples as part of a bloody biometric phishing scheme or perhaps they simply feed upon the blood of the unwary.

Anyway, beware. Steve Jobs wants your blood.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that some of my fellow Mac users may take violent and murderous offense at my post. Rather than proselytizing in the comments section of this post I suggest that you instead go here and ask yourself, 'where is your Jobs now?'

UPDATE2: Although it is ready, I still don't have Holo back yet due to the fact that I was not able to get through yesterdays obnoxious southeastern Virginia traffic before the store closed.

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Shocking revelatory revelations to be revealed within 24 hrs...if I still live.

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Frank Frazetta has died.

Few had as big an impression on the look of our fantasies as this man.

May he rest in peace.

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I'm appalled, but not surprised...not one bit.

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The upcoming Space Battleship Yamato movie continues to look like it could be one of the most awesomest things in the history of awesome!

^{I see that Dr. Saito Sane is female now but she's still got 'spring water'. They've even got Mimi!}

People often wonder why this old show made such an impression on some of us.

 To a 10 year old, adrift in the vast wasteland that was the UHF programming of 1980, Starblazers ( the American title of the show) was nothing short of astonishing. It was a 'cartoon' that did not pull its punches, had an intelligent and engaging story and was a science fiction show that had the space battles that Star Trek often lacked. The translation while not literal was very good and because it wasn't on the major networks it was able to slide things past standards and practices (like characters dieing dramatically). It was a show about honor, courage and heroes who willingly faced genuine peril. This was something almost nonexistant at the time.

Now why then is a 40 year old going all full metal fanboy over this? Well, partly because I'm a nerd, but also because this film looks to be a very faithful adaptation. This means it is aimed at least in part at those of us who ran home from school to see this show some 30 years ago.

 _{In other words it's aimed at my age bracket...so for once I need feel neither dirty nor old.}

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UPDATE: All day long we waited while they poked her and did tests. The biopsies were completed today and between that and the additional pictures they took it appears that the mass that showed up on her X-ray is in fact fluid and scar tissue from the previous surgery.There is still some concern due to the fact that the incision is still experiencing fluid build up and additional scarring 9 months after the surgery, however, the scaring does appear to be just scar tissue and not cancerous.

No cancer.

Yay!

This does suck as it is causing her intermittent pain....but damn that is a relief.

*********************************************end update

My car  auto-cannibalized itself last week, the internet has been twitchy, due to utility line work , I managed to screw up my iMac when I tried to increase the size of the Windows 7 partition and school started today...except that my teacher didn't show up.

All of which is utterly trivial now...

 Last Thursday my Mom, told us us that her vision was blurry. She then  complained of stabbing chest pains and developed great difficulty breathing.

She was rushed to the hospital and after a day of tests she was determined to have...a severe kidney infection...which did not at all jive with her symptoms, but her heart was OK.

Today, she went to a doc-in-the box for a follow-up on her infection, and it seems to be well on the way to oblivion. The duty doctor was still perplexed about the pains and asked the Hospital to send over the X-rays they took the other night. They had been focused on the heart and so had apparently missed the gall stones...and the huge mass in her left breast.

She had a close run thing a while back with cancer on her right side (which is still clear after her second surgery last year). This thing is big and has come on very fast. (Since January)

We contacted her surgeon and he's seeing us first thing tomorrow. We won't know anything until then but he had the X-rays forwarded to him and he said to make preparations to go under the knife very quickly. I'm guessing Friday is the soonest because of the Kidney infection. 

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Squaemous, cyclopean, non-euclidian, eldritch, ghastly, foetid, tenebrous, rubbery, grinning madness.

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 As I type this Times Square is evacuated due to an unexploded car bomb. Not much info right now other than that the bomb was incompetently fused.

 Oh...and there is no terrorism here, no sirree.

A federal official said that domestic security officials had been informed that the event did not appear to be a terrorist threat.

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   This girl has them.....

Because of Kerner's alleged sexual activities with other men and animals, the informant, who had dated the woman, and his Jack Russell terrier both contracted sexually transmitted diseases, court documents state.

 

^{Completely unrelated...and there is much rejoicing over that fact}

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...but I agree with the sentiment.

Update: Oh yeah....the actual solidarity part.

^{Cox and Forkum...hitting on all cylinders with this one}

More from Zombie who, in this rather interesting post, takes a moment from blaspheming to point out that this particular bit of asshattery (no images of  Mohammad) is actually a very recent development.

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Via Instapundit: Some really neat pics of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano which has so disrupted European air travel.

Meanwhile, as she sits back, eats her chips and watches the fireworks, one of the Brickmuppets's Crack Team of Science Babes takes the time to point out that his could be of more than passing interest.

 New Scientist reports that there is a nontrivial possibility that this could be a long term problem as the last hundred or so years have seen Iceland atypically quiet. If this becomes a periodic occurrence I wonder if cruise ships might be rerouted for transatlantic duty. This would be a suboptimal solution. Cruise ships are not liners as they are fairly slow, though Cunard might soon find it even nicer to have three new vessels on hand, that, being designed partly as liners, can make 28knots.

In the longer term if Icelandic ash is periodically disrupting air travel with Europe, might we see a return to piston engined planes?

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 Carl Macek, died of a hear attack Saturday. 

Most of today's anime fans have probably not heard of this man, but he was  important in bringing anime to the mainstream.

In the 1980's Maceck  acquired the US rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross and attempted to market in the US. His company produced an excellently dubbed, quite accurately translated and very respectful US version of this hit Japanese mech show. It found no buyers except for a brief video release of the first few episodes. The reason was that the syndication market of the time required 65 episodes, minimum. Maceks response was to get two more less successful series, dub them and market them as a 3 series package...which went nowhere. At the time, no one would buy three separate series....so he rewrote and re-dubbed them  as one series, keeping the shows plots basically intact but linking them together by an overarching storyline and a somewhat awkward narration that made the shows a trilogy.
For reasons not entirely clear, he also produced an original BGM that was passable and even innovative by the standards of US cartoons of the day but was vastly inferior to the soundtracks of all three series. Most of the (very few) anime fans of the time sneered...but the show was a huge hit.

I would say that most younger fans  (and those who discovered it in the last decade or so ) would not be aware of Anime today if not for Robotech, which, for all its imperfections, introduced a lot of people to the art form.

Perhaps more importantly, the huge marketing buzz around Robotech in '86-'87 proved that licensing extant anime series  for American audiences other than pre-teens was economically viable.

This is not to say that there hadn't been Anime shows brought over before, but with the exception of a very few like Starblazers, all had been edited for viewing by US pre-teens, which standards and practices considered to be an exceedingly fragile species.

Robotech was certainly heavily edited, but the drama, death and romance were kept largely intact which caused it to stand out as quite a novelty and attracted a high school and college age demographic. The success of this show started a flurry of interest  by fans in Anime....at a time ( the mid to late 80's) that Japans anime and manga industries were in one their most productive and innovative phases ever. Robotech's success also made pitching subsequent US TV animation projects aimed at audiences other than children...such as Batman...vastly more viable.

Macek not only did Robotech, he was instrumental in promoting and popularizing Hayo Miyazaki in the US. He directed the original US dubs of Totoro and other Ghibli films which were as good or better than the later Disney versions.

 Jerry Beck has a good rundown of Maceks career here.  Current fans may not know his name, but Macek brought over Naruto and Bleach, two shows that most will have a passing familiarity with.

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Well, see, there I was, minding my own business, reading comments about loli-panchira, and suddenly a copyright discussion broke out. Were the panchira copyrighted?

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One of the Brickmuppet's crack team of science babes dances with joy at the news that astronomers have discovered a new star.

While new stars are uncovered all the time this is exiting as it is less than 10 light years from Earth.

The new find, UGPS 0722-05, is less than 10 light years from here. But sky-watchers missed it for so long because it’s a brown dwarf, a member of the murky class of celestial objects that linger between gas giant planets and low-mass stars. Brown dwarfs have so little mass that they never get hot enough to sustain the nuclear fusion reactions that power stars like the sun. Still, they do shine, because they glow from the heat of their formation, then cool and fade.

This dwarf’s temperature is somewhere between 266 and 446 degrees Fahrenheit, making it the coldest scientists have even seen. With its minimal activity, the brown dwarf gives off just 0.000026 percent the amount of light that our sun does.

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...But even that context wouldn't have helped.

"Anime is a prime example that two nukes just wasn't enough," NH State Rep. Nick Levasseur said on Facebook.

A pro-gun rights New Hampshire resident decides to get involved in the political process and sends Levasseur an e-mail asking him to clarify a statement he made while serving in his capacity as a state representative, and Levasseur threatens to report him to the authorities for his "threatening" and "harassing" behavior.

All the while, Levasseur's MySpace profile page lists as one of his interests the "hunting of neo-conservative Reaganites", by use of firearms

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Dad is now walking (and has even graduated from a walker to a cane) and can get around the house on his own. He won't be 100 percent for six weeks or so but the surgery looks to have been a complete success. 

Also, I'm able to go back to work.

Wo0t!

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The official Funimation page for Spice and Wolf features an ad that is deeply misleading.  The commercial seems to utilize EVERY SINGLE SCENE where Holo is nekkid in the entire 13 episode series.

A large percentage of fanboys that decide to buy the show based on this ad alone will be deeply disappointed.

Likely many of those who might enjoy the series will  be put off by it.
 _{(In fairness, the Opening Credits are only a little better in this regard)}

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