giving it the hard sell

I've got to go to a thing tomorrow and basically it's going to be a company spending all day giving me the hard sell - as in trying to make me buy their product.

I'd really rather not go, but the problem is I don't want to seem overly negative. It's free and I think my boss thinks it's actually like a mini-course or something. I don't want to have that thing of me just pessimistically going "I don't want to go, it'll be rubbish." I worry about doing that as in I'm not a "team player" or something.

I mean, it may be useful, maybe I am being overly negative, but I've a feeling it won't be much fun. It also seems like a rather long day. It's up in London so I have to put up with the train journeys, so I doubt it'll really be any shorter than my normal work day.

some new artbooks

I know I kinda promised I wasn't gonna buy any more artbooks until I'd scanned the ones I've got, but I couldn't resist, I'm afraid.

One of the things I got was the latest edition of megami deluxe (volume 11 I think it is). It's the usual collection of cute girls from recent megami posters, with a few clean animedia spreads thrown in for good measure. It'll take the usual age to scan, I'm sure :/.

The other two books are a bit more interesting - they're both for Toshihiro Kawamoto, who was the character designer for things like Cowboy BeBop and Golden Boy. They're retrospective books on his career - each covers 10 years, from memory, and they're quite interesting.

It's one of those times I wish I could read Japanese as the commentary seems like it would be quite interesting. One of the big surprises for me was how much Gundam stuff he did in his early career.

I'm considering not scanning these books - they're really quite nice, thick books, of a high quality and it would be a shame to de-bind them. Also, most of the stuff in them is not big spreads, and it's almost a "sampler" book. Some shows have only one or two images.

I've a strong feeling I'll leave them as-is.

I also received the latest issue of normal megami while I was away. There's some lovely posters in it, so I'll need to scan that too.

I did some scanning last night, actually. I'm into the books that have a lot of pics in them. Last night was the Nagasarete Airantou artbook, and even though I scanned nearly 50 pages I only got half way through the book, so I'll finish it off tonight, I hope.

I also watched some fansubs while I scanned of course:

• World Destruction - okay. I gotta say this didn't really do much for me. I mean, it wasn't actively bad or anything, it's just it felt a little tired and cliched. It appears to be based on a sega video game property, so maybe that had some impact, but it's a show I had little interest in.

return of the tris

Well now, it's been a while since I posted on here. As mentioned that's because I've been away on holiday--I went down to Devon to visit my Dad, as it was his birthday last week.

It was a pretty expensive w/end all things considered. My new car has really great fuel economy. I can get around 50 miles per gallon if I "eco-drive" it, but of course if you're having to do around 400 miles, that still means you're going to use about 8 gallons, which is a full tank of petrol and so costs the best part of £40 or so :/.

Then there's eating on the road - unless you pack a lunch, which I can never be arsed to do, you'll inevitably have to get something to eat (the journey is the best part of 4 hours) and prices in rest stops are never cheap - I must have spent about £10, total.

Then there's the fact it's his birthday, so I spent about £35 or so on gifts. Plus I paid for a meal at the local restauranty-pub place, which was about £40.

So, all things considered that's about £125. Not the cheapest of week-ends :/.

And speaking of expensive, I've come back and seen some annoying news this morning. I've been buying the individual volumes for ADV's releases of Welcome to NHK and Red Garden.

However, a few months back, ADV essentially went tits-up. They've not actually folded, but, from what I've read, what happened was they made a dodgy move with a backer/investor in Japan. That all fell through and (for some reason) they lost all of the titles they'd licensed during that period.

Which included NHK and Red Garden.

But then, Funimation swooped to the rescue, picking up the licenses. Now it's taken them a while to catch up with stuff (they also picked up distribution of all the Geneon titles) and the announcement they've made is that they're releasing both series as collected volumes.

I must admit I was kinda expecting that as most all of the stuff they've released that they picked up has been in the form of collected volumes (sometimes as "part 1" and "part 2" sometimes as the full series) but it doesn't make it any less annoying.

I wouldn't mind so much if either series had only been at the 1 or 2 volume stage, but both were 1 volume away from completion. Factor into that the fact that the number of eps per disk always starts higher and then reduces and it means that in order to get the last 3 or 4 eps I have to not only buy several disks I've already got, but I have to pay a huge whack for just those last few eps.

It's pretty annoying, and pretty expensive too.