Anime London Blog

I applied the changes in php menus for Masquerade videos for Anime North. One thing I did noticed that I somehow missed Baron Wallace Rap when going through the data for the menus. That injustice has been corrected.

It was also was a test to see how portable the code was from con to con. Not only that from online video service. Since Anime North was only posted to Youtube and not yet Dailymotion, things worked as they should.

It comes down now to uploading the videos and inputting the data into the menu system.

Now if I can just get the gallery part to work as smooth.

Our second meeting of the year was also our first using the basement of Worlds Away with a TV set I found a few months ago. In spite of a low turn out and the furnance noise, the meeting was a success.

We watched Ghost Hunt as our one shot.

“Ghost Hunt is based on a book, and having just watched the first episode I have to say it really shows. The pacing is odd, and it feels more like a movie than a normal anime, with a lot of film techniques being used, and more cinamatic characters.”

“Any ways. Ghost Hunt, as the name suggests, is about a psychic researcher called in to check out a haunted school. However, if you’re looking for the latest Demon Hunter story (and god there are a lot of them!) then don’t look here because so far this is actually pretty realistic. More X-files and less Buffy. I have no doubts we’ll see some ghostly action, but in the first episode it’s about character drama, and a few mysteries.”

“My only complaints are that it really tries to cram too many characters in the first episode, and isn’t very good when it tries to be funny. But, when it’s not being funny, it’s a fascinating show and I’ll definitely watch more.”

— Ultra Rob

For more reviews of Ghost Hunt check our review section.

Yes it’s been over 5 months and I finally got around to posting the masquerade videos on our site. They have been up on both Youtube and Dailymotion for months. It was the problem on how to setup pages for 69 videos from two online video sites. That would mean encoding hundreds of pages. Not an easy task.

This year, I’m been trying out PHP and other software. With mixed results. I still don’t have seperate pages for each video. I’m still trying to program it so one page for each video service can be written. Not easy I must say. Once the head banging is over and the new pages to work, it will be alot easier to get both images and videos posted.

In fact, I will be able to post the videos as they are uploaded as oppose to waiting until they’re all done to make the pages.

Until then, enjoy the Fan Expo Canada 2006 Masquerade… finally!

Even though I cancelled the Cosplay Skate, I decided to dust off my old pair of skates and head down to the Covent Garden Market rink away. My music was from a CD player and pair of PC speakers I stuck in the side pouches of my backpack. I lasted about 30 feet on the ice before my feet cried no more for pair of skates I haven’t worn since I was a teen. Just as well, my CD player batteries died faster in the cold.

I headed to Tanakaya for some warm miso soup then went back to rink. As I was coming back in, I notced a table of girls with some familar dolls I been seeing at anime conventions more and more.

The top group of pictures were dolls about 18 inches tall while the bottom picture was dolls only 6-8 inches tall. The trio of girls were just meeting together showing their dolls when I came by. They had mail ordered all of their dolls, their clothes and the wigs.
It seems to me this hobby is growing that there is relatively none or little North American suppliers. Though I not certain if the regular North Amercian doll collector crowd has really looked at this current trend. Maybe because the dolls are not that of traditional dolls. Still the local doll stores should look at this new injection of new blood for it’s future.

This might make things easier if a existing doll stores takes up cause of bringing imports of doll parts from Japan. Enough stores might help get a distributor for these products.
It was fun to meet another segment of the anime community. No doubt, we’ll be seeing more of these dolls in the conventions this year.

- editted Jan 27, 2007

Well I’ve taken the leap into converting over to PHP. With the blog and forum as well as gallery script I’m going to be using written in PHP, it made sense to use this new language.

Not without some pain….

I manage to get the basic page navigation for convention event uploaded and debugged. Not bad for haven’t programmed for a decade or more. Mind you it took most of the evening to workout greying out the buttons when switching pages. Damn syntax. Not to mention learning how to mix html coding with PHP.

I was surprised on how smooth the internal page navigation works now though most of the pages have nothing on them yet. Well that is until I hit the contact button on the bottom.

Okay, I need to code some more.

Until then, you can check out what will be this year’s Spring TAC pages …

Spring TAC 2007

No doubt as I add the gallery script there will be even MORE errors.

… or is it ‘up in the air’.

It seems every year that I start preparing how the coming year’s convention pages will look. What it usually means for the most part is re-writing alot of webpages. This year, video put a dent into the website with Youtube and later Dailymotion. I started looking at making changes to way the whole process of posting convention reports, photos and videos.

One of the ways is Qdig or Quick Digital Image Gallery. It has been anything but quick in trying to get it work. We’re still running tests and along with it, I’ll be posting March or Spring Toronto Anime Con or at least, a mock up of the section leading up to March 17th.

Also we’ll be include intergrating blog along with PHP rather than the old hardcoded HTML pages. Also a friend is interested in helping making the change happen. I still have alot of coding to do before even uploading the test pages with last year’s pictures as a test bed.

We release the test directory name once we have it up and running.

As I convert another section, Hot Links, of Anime London main site over to blog, here is a link to an exceptional papercraft website.

As posted in Forums links section ….

While checking out 4chan’s papercraft section, I found a link to anime character papercraft. This site only has recent and couple of past paper models. This one of Belldandy is in the ‘Re-Up-Loading’ section.

Pretty impressive model which also has parts for a standing version.

Unfortunely my ink printer is giving me grief by not printing magenta to get flesh tones. Shouldn’t have let it sit. I should know better.

It’s a pretty complicated model. Not something you bash together overnight. Still when I bought my inkcarts at refill place on Richmond, I told him about papercrafts and our club. He wanted to do a link exchange. While I haven’t finalized that, I did hand him my card with the freepapertoys.com site URL

You can find Belldandy paper model along with others at http://mizuirogakuen.hp.infoseek.co.jp/.

Please note the site is in Japanese only.

DISCLAIMER: Anime London can not issure that any offsite content is ‘kitsuneko’ safe. Please browse with care.

When I started to Worlds Away, it was snowing. By the end of the meeting the snow was gone. We had a good turnout with little interuptions.

Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohaniheto is a mouthful to say but this period anime during the last years of the Shogunate is still interesting.

Heekun
“Nicely animated, set in Meiji era Yokohama. Main characters somewhat uniquely designed. This first episode introduces the background story. Looks interesting.”

Check our review section for more reviews on this anime.

With the instable weather, I’m cancelling the Cosplay Skate here in London. I know it rained last night making it unpredictable to guess if the weather will be even within an hour let alone a week. For the sake of some who were planning to come as far as Sarnia, it was pointless to take a chance.

There is a planned Snowfest in February being put on by Covent Garden Market with a snow sculpture contest. Maybe some of the high school groups can plan an anime related sculpture.

At least, there is the Anime Film fest April 21st as listed below.

Gomen

Once again The London Public Library and Sci-fi London is sponsoring another Anime Film Day on April 21, 2007 as well their own film day on May 19th. Three films will be shown. Due to licensing agreement, we can’t post the names of the films.

What we can say is it will be again at the Central Branch on Dundas street on April 21st starting at 9:30am. Films are directed byHayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo and Satoshi Kon will be shown.

Judging from last showing, you be best to get there early for a good seat though the room might be able to expand to allow more seating. This is not guaranteed if someone else books the other half of the room.

Posters should be out soon at the library. We’ll keep you posted on any changes.