holy shit yes win!

I have just discovered the most awesomest news ever!

Just now, I discovered legit existance of With the Light volume 8 (15)! I cannot believe this! I'm so excited!

Apparently, while Tobe-sensei was sick, she did enough work to be compiled into one last volume which is being released in Japan in January 2011. Yen Press will be publishing the American version and it should be released in September 2011!

I am beyond excited! Finally, we have a chance for the series to get a true ending! Maybe this time, we will be left with a 'and the future looks bright for Hikaru' feeling, or maybe even a glimpse into the future (if we're lucky).

Maybe we'll even get a memorial thing for Tobe-sensei, to acknowledge her life and that because of her, autism now has a face among fans and information about autism has been made available to a different demographic in a completely new format.

I cannot wait!

Dinnernet

Because I can't pronounce my words... yeah.

So, new news. I managed to find the first two seasons of Digimon with Japanese audio and English subtitles for download. This is great news! Digimon is a series I've loved since childhood, but it hasn't aged well. I keep saying that my biggest problem with the series is that the dialogue sucks. It's corny, full of puns, and obviously made for very young children. It hurts to listen to. In my opinion, the Japanese dialogue is far superior (I realized this after I discovered fansubs to the three first movies and compared them to the American release).

In other news, I have to do a project for school. It's a totally self-directed affair and the project can be anything I want on the topic of my choice. I wanted to do something with the With the Light series (since they cover autism and I'm in that kind of field). I got the go ahead this morning so I'm starting on that now. First thing I'm doing is scanning the entire series (not only for the project, but to have a digital copy of it). After I finish that I can gather information and pick out the images I want to include in my project. Should be interesting.

Last bit, I just got the first Chobits omnibus edition in the mail that covers the first four volumes. And oh my God, it's even thicker than my With the Lights, which were the biggest volumes I own. This thing's a monster! And it's shorter than the others so it's a weird shape. It's nice to look at though, and it's got coloured pages inside so it's got that going for it.

old person moment

I was just looking back through the first volume of With the Light and I had forgotten how cute Hikaru was when he was small. I've been reading volumes 6 and 7 lately and in those volumes Hikaru is in junior high. Now I'm reading the first volume and he's just so cute and tiny.

And Nobuaki with a superhero blanket/cape just cracks me up.

It's like that time when I watched the first Harry Potter movie for the first time in years, everyone's just so cute!

Now instead of feeling sad that the series is over (booooooo), I can go back to the beginning and see the beginning of the Azuma's journey and remember how cute everyone was.

Manga Roundup #2

Time for another manga roundup. I did my first one in January and my collection has grown muchly since then. Onward, ahoy! (this is gonna be so long...)

• Absolute Boyfriend (Watase Yuu) 1-4 (My friend recommended this one to me. She told me to read it because she thought it was funny. I read it and agreed, so I started buying it. The main point of the story is that a girl buys accidentally buys an android off the Internet to act as her boyfriend. This manga is awesome, most of the humour comes from the interactions between the characters and the characters themselves, mostly Night and the salesman.)
• Aishiteruze Baby (Maki Youko) 6 (This is the story of a high school playboy named Kippei, who suddenly finds himself caring for his 5-year-old cousin Yuzu, who was abandoned to Kippei's family by her mother. This is sweet and funny story and I read it online before putting it on my buy list. I found volume 6 for sale at Animinitime and it was cheap so I bought it.
• Baby and Me (Ragawa Marimo) 1&2 (11-year-old Takuya's mother has died so he is put in charge of taking care of his baby brother Minoru. The online scanlations are only available up to volume 5, so I don't know the whole story, but what I have read so far is Takuya's adventures as he takes care of Minoru and interacts with the people around him. This manga gives me a fuzzy feeling every time I read it.)
• Beyond My Touch (Maeda Tomo) (This is a shounen-ai oneshot volumes containing one multi-chapter main story and two shorter oneshot chapters. The main story is about a boy who visits a classmates funeral and brings his classmates ghost back home with him. It seems that the dead boy had a crush on the live boy and regrets never kissing him in life so he follows him as a ghost. It's a really sweet story and made me laugh. The other two stories are both shounen-ai and one is about a boy's first kiss and the other is about baking, I think.)
• Confidential Confessions (Momochi Reiko) 2, 5, 6 (I think this is the first serious manga that I read. And by serious I mean containing adult themes. There's six volume in all and there's no main plot. Instead, we have a bunch of oneshot stories about different girls each talking about a different serious topic. Such topics include suicide, prostitution, sexual harassment, and drug abuse, to name a few. I have volumes 2, 5 and 6, so I got sexual harassment, stalking, rape, AIDS and bullying. I have a weird love/hate relationship with volume 2. It's about sexual harassment and the story takes up the whole volume. I want to kick every single character in that story in the face, with the exception of the main characters parents and that one girl who kicked the gym teacher in the face.)
• Croquis (Takanaga Hinako) (This is a yaoi oneshot, the story of which I forget about after I read it. Every time. I know the main story is about a... I think he's a transgender, who works in a bar and an artist and they fall in love... and stuff. There's three oneshots after that. One of them is about two boys and astronomy, and the other two are about the loss of a first love. I didn't like the one about the stars, the ones about the lost first love were bittersweet and made me sad, and the main story just made me laugh. I think I just bought it because it's only one volume long and by Takanaga-sensei. I love her art.)
• Deadman Wonderland (Kataoka Jinsei) 1 (This is a relatively new manga and I found volume 1 at Animinitime cheap so I just bought it. The series starts off with a massacre of a class of high school students by some weird monster thing. Everyone in class is dead except for Ganta Igarashi, who is then charged with the murders. He is sent to Deadman Wonderland, the prison/circus that houses criminals in post-major-fucking-earthquake Tokyo. And stuff happens. Ganta gets new powers that allows him to shoot 'bullets' made up of his blood, and he finds others who can manipulate their blood into weapons. They are called the Deadman. This manga is like a horror/action/sci-fi thing, which I'm not usually into, but I like it quite a bit.)
• Detective Conan (Aoyama Gosho) 1, 25, 26, 30, 31 (I love Conan. Growing up I always watched shows about murder mysteries and detectives and all that. Detective Conan is like a Sherlock Holmes story, with a twist... and it's in Japan. Kudou Shinichi is a famous high school detective who gets in over his head when he spies on two men in black doing a shady business deal. He gets fed a poison that's supposed to kill him but instead makes him age down about ten years. So he has to go around solving crimes as a child while trying to find the men in black who shrunk him and keep his identity a secret from those around him. Along the way he solves a butt-ton of cases and meets a few colourful characters that make each case interesting to read over and over.)
• Dining Bar Akira (Yamashita Tomoko) (I discovered this yaoi oneshot volume on a manga review site and read it online before deciding that I liked it and buying it. The main multi-chapter story is about two older guys, in their 20s and 30s, who work in a bar and enter into a relationship with each other. I read it for the humour, any deeper meaning is pretty much lost on me. There's also two unrelated stories after that. One about a gay high school student who can't find the courage to confess to his straight friend, and another one that made absolutely no sense about a man who had a wet dream about a coworker of his, or something, and tries to pick him up the next day, or something. I never got it.)
• Dragonball (Akira Toriyama) 1-16 (I grew up watching Dragonball Z, starting when I was 3 or 4 years old. I discovered the manga in Shonen Jump magazine when I was a kid. I discovered the Dragonball manga a few years ago. I never knew much about the story and events of Dragonball, but I had a great time learning about it and reading it. It's mainly about fighting, which is fine but it's not really my thing, but it contains many humorous elements. Also, a lot of the characters I know and love from Dragonball Z are in there and they're always fun to watch.)
• Eerie Queerie! (Shiozu Shuri) 3 (I discovered this title while looking at a picture of someone else's manga collection. The title is what caught my eye, it's just something that requires an explanation. So I read it online. Giggle fit. It's a story about one high school boy who is sensitive to spirits, and another who manages to make all other guys fall in love with him, or something. Can't really remember, it's been a while since I read it. I don't remember there being a set storyline, I just like watching the characters interact with each other, makes me laugh. I found volume 3 for 4$ at Animinitime.)
• Fruits Basket (Takaya Natsuki) 1, 4-7, 11, 18-23 (Fruits Basket 18 was the first manga volume that I bought for myself, it was the official start of my collection, though I didn't know it at the time. The series is 23 volumes long and I've read through it about 3 or 4 times already and love it every time. It's the story of a family with a cursed and tortured existence and a young woman who hopes to free them. I keep saying that this series could be material for someone's college paper, with all the themes and tragic pasts and moral and ethical dilemmas. I love the story and I love the characters. We get to learn a lot about every character in the series and we learn about what made them who they are. It's really a great series.)
• Fullmetal Alchemist (Arakawa Hiromu) 1-3 (Me and my two friends were way into this show when it first came on TV in our area. We thought it was one of the best things ever. We watched the anime first and halfway through I discovered the manga. For the record, I've never seen the Brotherhood anime, just the crappy first version where Ed dies at the end. The manga is waaaaaaaay better than the anime. It goes on longer for one thing. I tell ya, I got so attached to these characters. And bad shit keeps happening and you just keep hoping that something good will finally happen. It's great, the final battle at the end completely blew me away.)
• Godchild (Yuki Kaori) 1&2 (This is the sequel to The Cain Saga. I kept telling myself that I wasn't going to buy this series. It's full of religious junk and all that and I just hated the ending. But then I found it for sale in the store, and I just loved the art, and I couldn't find anything else by Kaori Yuki anywhere, so I bought it. The story follows Cain, his little sister Merryweather, and his manservant Riff, as they go around London, or whatever, and get involved in crazy cases. There's a main plot under everything that gradually comes to a head as the story goes on. It gets crazy near the end.)
• Hana Kimi (Nakajo Hisaya) 1-3, 5-7, 14, 16, 19, 20 (I found this series in a SIMS2 forum thread, funnily enough. Someone had made SIMS of the characters and had mentioned the manga. I was bored so I decided to check it out. Holy shit I was not disapointed. The main plot is Ashiya Mizuki travels from California to Tokyo and disguises herself as a boy to attend an all-boys high school with her high-jump star idol, Sano Izumi. I realize that this plot is completely ridiculous, but don't let that stop you from enjoying it. Enter for the novelty, stay for the characters. I love the characters, they're what really make the story work. Like Fruits Basket, I've read this series many times over and I never get tired of it.)
• Hands Off! (Katsumoto Kasane) 5&6 (Found for cheap at Animinitme. This series is about three boys with psychic-type powers. I've only read the whole series once, so I don't really remember the whole plot. I do remember that there is no shounen-ai in there and I was waiting for there to be shounen-ai. I was disapointed that there wasn't, but the awesome story made up for it.)
• Hikaru no Go (Hotta Yumi) 1, 2, 14 (I discovered Hikaru in Shonen Jump magazine when I was a kid. The manga is just about a bunch of people playing go, but the characters make it very interesting to read. The main character, Hikaru Shindo, is a beginner at go at the beginning of the manga, but we get to see him grow as the story goes on. You'd think reading a manga about a bunch of people playing go would be boring, but it's very interesting and suspenseful.)
• InuYasha (Takahashi Rumiko) 1, 2, 6 (InuYasha 6 was the first manga I ever owned, bought for me by my mother somewhere around the 7th or 8th grade. I watched the show a lot, and eventually moved over to reading the manga online. When the manga ended, I decided to start buying it. It's a fantasy/romance/adventure manga with a suspenseful storyline and very colourful characters... and one of the most annoying enemies ever.)
• Kingdom Hearts II (Nomura Tetsuya) 2 (As far as I know, this is a manga version of the Kingdom Hearts II game. I've never actually read the whole thing, or played the game, so all I know about it is that Sora goes around with Donald and Goofy to different Disney movie locations and beat evil bosses. And there's Roxas and all that. Which is great. I only started buying this because I found it in the bookstore and the online scanlations were dropped and it was cheaper than buying the game.)
• Koukou Debut (Kawahara Kazune) 1 (I don't know much about this one because I only read it once a while ago. But I know it's a fun story to read. The main character was a real sporty girl in middle school and is now in high school and wants a boyfriend. So she gets a guy from school to coach her on how to fall in love with a guy. It's a sweet story and the characters are pretty fun to watch.)
• Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Otsuka Eiji) 1, 2, 5-7 (This manga entertains me to no end. It's about a group of college students with supernatural powers who deliver corpses to their final resting place, for a fee. As far as I've read, it's mostly episodic events with a jumbled plot somewhere underneath everything. It's still entertaining though. Each member of the delivery service has their own unique personalities and special power, which makes for interesting story development.)
• Liberty Liberty (Takanaga Hinako) (This is a shounen-ai oneshot volume about a independant TV station person worker thing and a young runaway. It's a light and cute romance story. It was the first of Takanaga Hinako's works that I bought, mostly because it was her only lisenced work with no sex in it.)
• Little Butterfly (Takanaga Hinako) 3-in-1 omnibus (If no one's caught on by now, I'm a big fan of Takanaga-sensei's work. Little Butterfly is about the romance between Kojima and Nakahara and all their troubles. And of course, it's cute and funny. It's three volumes long and they released all three volumes in an omnibus edition in February, so I bought that. Cheaper than buying all three books separate.)
• Love Round (Takanaga Hinako) (Heeeeey, Takanaga-sensei :D. This is another yaoi romance. I love this one, I laugh out loud every single time I read it. It's hysterical. Most of the book is just Komatsuna beating up his pro-boxer crush over stupid comments. Eventually, they get their act together and finally come together as a couple. But until that point, hilarious knock-outs!)
• Mail (Yamazaki Housui) 1-3 (Even though I have them listed under different mangaka, I'm pretty sure that Mail and Kurosagi were both done by the same people. The art is the same, and Akiba Reiji, the main character from Mail, shows up for a cameo in Kurosagi at one point. Mail is just a series of mostly unrelated ghost stories in which Akiba goes around and finds restless spirits and shoots them with his spirit gun to send them to their final resting place. And it manages to scare me every time I read it.)
• Only the Ring Finger Knows (Kannagi Satoru) (This is a shounen-ai oneshot volume about two boys who slowly realize that they are in love with each other. This was the first really realistic shounen-ai manga I read, and I like it for that. Plus the art is nice and the extra chapter at the end makes me giggle every time.)
• Ouran High School Host Club (Hatori Bisco) 1-3 (Omigod this series is made of crack. It's about the shenanigans of a group of rich boys, and one cross-dressing normal girl, as they entertain their female schoolmates. There really isn't a set storyline. Time doesn't even move properly, I'm pretty sure it's always spring or summer, unless it's Christmas or Halloween or something. Every time there's a lull between the volumes, I keep asking myself why I'm even buying this series, then I read the next installment and laugh so much I wonder why I even asked in the first place.)
• Pokémon Adventures (Kusaka Hidenori) 1-7 (This manga is based off of the Pokémon Gameboy games. Volumes 1-7 cover the Red, Blue, Green and Yellow games, which is all I was really interested in so I didn't even bother going past volume 7. I was mostly interested in this manga for the nostalgic value, that and it's much better than the anime that was butchered by 4kids.)
• Ranma 1/2 (Takahashi Rumiko) 5&6 (From the creator of InuYasha comes another fantasy tale with fighting and awkward relationships, among other things. Ranma is just plain fun to read because there's really nothing that serious about it. Every character is some degree of crazy and when they interact with each other there's just a whole load of crazy going on.)
• The Tyrant Falls in Love (Takanaga Hinako) 1 ('Eeey Takanaga-sensei! A yaoi romance about Morinaga and his at-the-moment unrequited love for his sempai, Souichi, who is straight-for now-, and homophobic, and tyrannical. The best part of this series, so far, is the interaction between Morinaga and Sempai, it just makes me laugh soooo much. I wasn't going to buy this series at first because there're a lot of graphic and rape-ish sex scenes in it. But it's really funny, and it's by Takanaga-sensei, so it has two things going for it.)
• Totally Captivated (Yoo Ha Jin) 1-3 (This one's from Korea and is a yaoi story about a mob boss type thing name Mookyul Eun... I think I spelled that wrong... and Ewon, his maid/slave thing. Once again, this is a funny story with nice art and zany characters. Mookyul and Ewon are in a very weird relationship, and I'm pretty sure that they're both aware of it. I just fell in love with this one after the first time I read it, it's just so different from what I usually read.)
• Wallflower (Hayakawa Tomoko) 3 (The main point of this one is that it's kinda like My Fair Lady. Four boys get to stay for free in a big house if they can turn the owner of the house's niece into a proper young lady. The young lady of the house happens to be a horror-obsessed loner who is determined to avoid being turned into a proper young lady at all costs. This one is pretty funny, and it entertains me enough, but the only real reason that I bought it was that it was 75% percent off.)
• With the Light (Keiko Tobe) 1-7 (OMYGOD I LOVE THIS SERIES!!! This series was recommended to a forum community so I decided to check it out. I couldn't find it anywhere to read on the Internet, but it's the only manga that I know of that deals with autism, so I decided to go ahead and buy it. And I've never looked back. Seriously, I love this series. I love the story, I love -most of- the characters, I love the information, I just love the whole thing. It's a very inspiring and touching story about one family's dealings with autism, and how they try to connect with a lovely little boy who loves sparkly objects and trains.)
• Yotsuba&! (Azuma Kiyohiko) 1&4 (This series is mainly comprised of episodic chapters about the daily lives of 5-year-old Yotsuba and her father and friends. They're very simple little stories, but they make me laugh every time and they leave the reader with a warm and happy feeling after reading.)
• Your and My Secret (Morinaga Ai) 1, 3-5 (This one just makes me laugh. Two classmates, a boy and a girl, accidentally switch bodies and must now cope with living life as the opposite gender. Roles they are actually well suited for. This one's just made of crack, probably more than Ouran. But the art is really nice and the story is very humorous... and totally made of crack.)

...well, that turned out a lot longer than I thought it would. Just think of it as a replacement for not posting in August or September.

yeah... so

Okay, I know I said I was gonna do reviews/recaps/whateverthefuck, and I will, eventually. I'm just really slow.

A few things to report, uhh... one of my classmates from elementary school was killed in a car accident in August. I was never really close to her so this doesn't really affect me in any way. So I have nothing else to say about that.

Also, my summer job ended without any major mishaps, and thanks to that I got a ton of new books this summer. But now the paychecks have stopped, so I can't get more books every other week. I got my last books in the mail on Tuesday, and I probably won't be able to buy any new ones until December (when Wandering Son 1 and Tyrant 2 come out).

I was at Wal-Mart the other day and I found Roxio Easy VHS to DVD program, which can record VHS tapes to DVD or to the computer. Awesomest thing ever, now I can finally record my family's home movies to DVD/computer. I've been wanting to do that for years, and now I can. :D It's really easy too, which helps.

I finally got the last volume of With the Light (volume 7) and I finished reading it in about an hour. I am sad. It's over! I can't believe it's already over! Hikaru's only in his second year of junior high! It can't be over! But, it is. The author died so there's really not much else to do on that front. Hopefully, she left behind notes or something so that someday maybe someone else can finish Hikaru's story. I wanted to see him as a happy working adult, now we don't even get to see him in high school.

And the end of the last volume doesn't help either. The last chapter ever is about Hikaru's grandmother-who-I-hate and how she goes to visit a friend and meets someone with ADHD and Asperger's syndrome. Really, the end of the volume doesn't give off a 'and Hikaru's future is looking bright' feeling. In fact, it doesn't even give off a feeling of a completed series. It feels like something else is supposed to happen when the grandmother gets back home (Hikaru and his family are living with her now, bleck). She felt bad about the way she treats Hikaru so you're set up for some kind of resolution, or something. Instead we get the end.

On a lighter With the Light note, Hikaru is going through puberty. This is only really addressed in the beginning of the volume, and it was funny because there was a panel of Hikaru and Sachiko on the snail bus where it explained that Hikaru didn't want to sit next to his mother. I must've giggled for about five minutes. I mean, most of the series is about dealing with Hikaru's autism and how it makes him different than the other kids his age. And then he goes and does something like this, which is something that most normal teenagers do. I had to laugh, gave me a happy feeling.

And then the ending came and the happy feeling fucked off somewhere. I seriously hate that grandmother. She even insinuated that Hikaru should be put in an institution, instead of living at home. All I can do at this point is shake my head sadly. What the hell, Azuma-obaasan, what the hell? But Hikaru did hit her in the face at one point (by accident), so that was cool. Frankly I was hoping that she'd have an accident on her trip and die, which I suppose is harsh. But I just reeeeeeeeeeally don't like her.

I mean, if she feels that way about her own grandson, then how is she going to treat other disabled people that she knows. She was kinda awkward around the person she met with ADHD and Asperger's (which is understandable), but I wonder how she would've acted if she had known beforehand that he was autistic. Would she have treated him the same way she treats Hikaru (like he's a nuisance)?

Jeez, Sachiko's parents are much better people for Hikaru to be around, why aren't they in there more?

On the upside, Hikaru is now in his second year at junior high, and he's starting to take more notice of the people around him and what they are doing. That does cause some problems, but it means that he's growing. Too bad we don't get to know how well he does in future *gloom*.