row, row, fight da powah!

So the big plan for the w/end was to do lots of scanning, and for once things pretty much went as planned.

Over the w/end I'd estimate I did 150 scans. But here's the thing - I didn't scan any artbooks, as such. Obviously, the first thing I scanned was the new megami, but instead of then tackling artbooks I polished a few related things I needed to do.

One of them was scanning anime and manga covers. I do this partly because I sell a lot of things off on e-bay, but also, I like to use them as pics for my reviews over at trigsmugistus.com. There were quite a few to do. Over the last few weeks I've written reviews of Ai Yori Aoshi, GUNxSWORD, Witchblade, Girls Bravo (manga), Eiken (manga) and Genshiken (manga) and they all needs pics to accompany them, which meant scanning all the covers.

The other thing I scanned was megami deluxe 10. Megami deluxe is an odd mag - it's six-monthly and collects together all the posters in megami over the preceding months, plus a few things from animedia. So you're getting stuff you've already got and they're smaller, but they're also cleaner (i.e. there are no folds).

It's a huge undertaking scanning wise--there were around 80 pages to scan, so you can see why I didn't get any artbooks done as well.

Anyway, some long sessions scanning mean I've also been watching fansubs:

• Ikkitousen: Great Guardians - fairly good. Watch the 2nd ep (the fansubs seem to end there due to licensing) and it seems to continue being fairly decent. The decision to go with an original story seems to work better that when they're adapting the manga.
• Chocolate Underground - okay. I think this is a kid's show, actually, as it seems to have educational stuff in it about where chocolate is from, etc. It was fairly decent, but not hugely engaging.
• Chiko, Heiress of the Phantom Thief (Nijuu Mensou no Musume) - okay. I was only able to watch one episode of this, presumably due to licensing stuff, and it was also subbed in Italian (No, I don't speak Italian) :/. From what I saw it seemed okay, but as I say I couldn't really understand the dialogue, although the basics of what was happening were fairly clear.
• Gosenzosama Banbanzai! - this was awful. It's a really old show that happened to get some fansubs, but it was really poor. The problem was that the characters tended to stand still babbling on about crap for ten minutes at a time. And I really do mean ten minute stretches of them just standing there jabbering away and me falling asleep.
• Soul Eater - fairly good. I'd read somewhere this was just an animu version of Harry Potter. Now, I can't claim to be hugely familiar with Harry, having only seen the movies, but it didn't really seem that way to me. Overall, I'd probably buy it, tbh--some very funny stuff and the animation was really lovely.
• Slayers Revolution - good. More slayers, basically. Tonally it's the same stuff, character designs are unchanged. Voice actors seem different, but then I'm more used to the English dub actors, tbh. If you like other slayers stuff, you'll like this; and since I do, I did :).
• Penguin no Mondai - not very good, sorta. When I watched the first episode I initially thought I'd stumbled across a hidden gem. But after that first episode and an initial novelty factor, it really annoyed me. I think this might also have been a kids show, but what I do know is it's actually computer animation (it's filtered to make it look flat) and it didn't really look right.
  

But the other big thing I did--and the reason for the title of this entry--is I finished watching Tenden Toppa Gurren Lagann. Oh. My. God. What a truly awesome show this is. I must admit, the second 'arc' (episodes 10-18) had me a little worried as they were a bit all over the place, but this last 'arc' (episodes 19-27) was back to being totally awesome.

Row, row, fight da powah! indeed.