The Blog of Xbolt

Pranking Uncle Allen with Silly String

I participated in this event. It was rather fun. And messy.

I wonder if he’ll be wary of presents in the future…

Cytokine – Reincarnation

This is a remix of Mima’s theme from Touhou 3: Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream.

Mima is one of the many unfortunate characters who simply dropped off the face of the earth at the end of the PC-98 era. I would say there’s no hope of her return, but Alice and Yuka have made appearances since The Windows Cleaning. So who knows what Touhou 13 might bring…

ZUN’s description of the song says he tried to not make it sound too epic, since in that game, Mima was a normal character and not a boss. But I feel it does show a certain power behind it, and Cytokine’s arrange brings it out. Befitting of Mima-sama.

DYE2

After a brief disappearance, AVTechNO! is back in action, bringing a sequel to the song he released last February.

Unlike most sequels, it’s EVEN BETTER.

In other news, it has been a whole year since I started this thing. So now when the “This Week In History” segment of the WVR comes on, I can go: “Hey, I remember that…”

Just a quick note, there probably won’t be many reviews this time around. I haven’t been feeling motivated enough to watch a whole lot of shows… That said, anime ho!
To kick off this season, we have a movie I’ve been waiting for over a year to see.

Disappearance was announced at the conclusion of the second season of Haruhi. That was October 2009. It is now January 2011. Fifteen months of (im)patient waiting made my excitement all the more giddy. And so I was worried that the film would be a huge disappointment after all the waiting inflated my expectations to unreasonable levels.

Such fears were totally unfounded.

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is now one of my top 10 favorite animes. Pity I didn’t watch it last week…

December 16th. Christmas is one week away, and Haruhi decides to throw a Christmas party. She’s going to bring home-cooked food.

December 18th. Haruhi has apparently vanished from the face of the Earth. Kyon is the only person who retains any knowledge of her existence.

Kyon actually impressed me a lot in Disappearance. After the series, where he was a mostly reactionary character, here he’s actually the main guy who drives the plot forward. And what a plot it is. I’m not sure how much I can talk about that without spoiling something important. I will say there are a couple interesting twists you need to watch out for, though. And the final climax? PURE. EPIC.

Some people have complained that the movie was too long. At 2 hours and 40 minutes, it is the length of half a whole season of Haruhi. But I feel that that time was put to good use.

You might want to re-watch the series before watching Disappearance, though. I, who watched the series twice (including Endless Eight, making Endless Sixteen,) was able to follow the story along nicely. But someone who has forgotten a lot of the series, or has not seen the series at all, will have a hard time following what’s going on. (Endless Eight is optional.)

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya Trailer

You know what? I think I’m going to make it a point to watch this movie every year around Christmastime. Maybe right after It’s A Wonderful Life… Yep, it’s perfect.

Normal people do fireworks on New Years. I watch Touhou Soccer.

The ball is my hero. Read More

sisimai-brothers – A Pinch of Poetry

Hi, and welcome to the first second post of 2011!

If you’d been paying attention last week, you’d’ve noticed that I added a new category for Monday’s “Bestest Songs” post. Every Monday, I’m going to post some music that I happen to be listening to. (A challenge! Let’s see how many I can scrounge up that are not Vocaloid and/or game related!) Until now, I had been sticking them in YouTube Tuesday, but that’s supposed to be my video column. So…

ANYWAY! So, what better way to start off the new year than with a party! A party hosted by Miko Miko Suika! Free sake for everyone! Please donate!

Surprise!
After five year-end ‘best of’ posts that were year-end only by the fact that I posted them the last week in December, let’s do a REAL best of 2010 post! What did the Vocaloids do this year that was really cool? Click “read more” and find out! Read More

Well, why not? I needed one more post in order to fill out the week, and since everyone’s curious, (not that they actually asked) I’ll talk about my favorite Touhou characters. (And post a video of them.)

100+ characters. That’s a heck of a lot for a single game series, is it not? So who are my ten favorite? Click “read more” and find out. Read More

Monotone Collector

Win guitar is win.

In other news, the Kagamines had their birthday this week! I expect lots of songs to show up in the next ranking, and there’d better be some Append in there too.

I think I’ve seen enough animes by now to be able to make a list of favorites, yeah? (And another cool and/or funny video to go along with them, since a lot of my original ones have been removed from Youtube…) Read More