As of a few days ago I put my anime business revenue to good use by upgrading my work station here at home. I upgraded to a nice 19" LCD monitor, got a new video card and I kept my old monitor for the duel monitor setup. I'm loving it it and though I wish I got more done, with my job only going to be about two full days a week, the day has come for most of my efforts for here and my anime store plus the continuation of my artwork, Flash animations and games, anime.fm, my personal blog, contests and many more. Damn job has been such a pain so I do hope I can fire my boss once and for all soon. Loving being able to work from home and hence this new setup.
The figures up on top of my desk are (from left to right) Needa, Kotobukiya Tifa, Mirei-san and Yuffie by Kotobukia. On the shelf you can see Figma Mikuru and a few other small figures.
Next I need a wiredless mouse (again, my last one broke) , an oppai mouse pad and I should use my regular camera for these types of pics...not my iPhone.
There's no surprise that these amazing figures needed a second wave of shipments. I was able to snag only a few of these simply stunning Haruhi figures. Mikuru in particular is my favorite (saved one for myself ^^;) and she's also sold out everywhere. All of them have real (and real delicate) fishnet stockings and stand, well... sit or lay roughly 13 inches across or tall. As you can see, I was also able to snag the new Emiri and Ryoko bunnies as well.
I'm proud to announce I have them (Mikuru and Haruhi) w/the others (Emiri & Ryoko) in shipment right now. Click HERE to order Haruhi, HERE for Mikuru, HERE for Emiri Kimidori, and HERE for Ryoko Asakura . Since they are over $100, the shipping is automatically free. Grab them while you can or just gander at their beauty in these pics.
Well, its that time of the year again, Black Friday. This is a year everyone is scared that sales won't go as usual due to the world economy being screwed up (because American realtors thought it was funny to double house prices every two years) but we otaku are different. Proof that we stray from the norm can be seen by the fact that my anime store's sales have doubled from last year; take that economists! When we want our figures, games and manga, we want them. I have to thank you guys for the support so far in both the threee branches of my store and the site of course. The site is now 250K+ in hits as of a few weeks ago and although I'm not 100% free from my job like I wanted; I only go into there now just on Mondays and Wednesdays w/my time being at my newly upgraded home office (more on that in a future post).
For some time you have heard me say that I have loads of anime figures and have many on pre-order but have not seen much in figure posts nor many additions to either the Amazon, eBay or OsCommerce branches. Granted this was due to my job up until last week still holding me hostage and the good old running life throws at you.
I simply have to do a big thankyou for all the support. The pictures shown here don't even do justice to the amount of anime figures I currently have in stock. As of this post I have $10,000 of anime figures in stock with about $30K-$40K pending in preorders. I completely doubt ANY store here on Long Island has as many anime figures as I do.
Starting later today and into the entire weekend plus Cyber Monday I will be posting and blogging these wonderful figures I have here and the ones to come.As a thankyou, for this holiday season all anime figures will be free shipping for US customers. For overseas customers, I can't do free shipping but if you shop in the main store, shipping is very low to begin with for you and you automatically get free shipping if your order is over $100. Please note, the shipping will be refunded to you via paypal if you shop here and if you shop my ebay branch, you will already see the discount.
So relax this holiday season and don't try to beat the crowds. Also, don't listen to what the news is saying about "people not having any money." I was just at the midnight opening at KayBee Toys here to get skateboards for my siblings and the place was simply mobbed with people 0_O. So if you'd like, shop at my store or just gander at the cool anime figures as I post them. I so badly want to keep a bunch of them so grab them before I do ^^;;
Looks like the latest Dragon Ball Z movie, Yo! Son Goku and His Friends Return!! is now live, subbed and in HD on youtube. We can thank user, dbzantossj for the uploads. Below is a sample clip. Don't know how long they will be up for though as with the licensing and stuff. We can all be thankful for this movie this thanksgiving and hopefully forget that Fox is trying to mock the series with the very sad looking Dragon Ball Hollywood movie. Many DBZ fans can be happy to see that Akira Toryama is back. Enter into youtube from the video to see more.
Looks like as of a few days ago the site finally reached the 250,000 hit landmark. Nothing too special nowadays but a cool landmark nonetheless. The site has been around since March of 2002, and I've been tracking the hits since 2003 so its had some time to reach this mark. I can say though that the past 100K hits has happened faster than the first 150K. Anyways, just want to thank the fans of this site for all the page views and here's to much, much more in the coming year and years to come ^_^
Good news! Looks like the error was fixed and I don't see the store being falsely marked as an "attack site". It was definitely not a message I wanted to see right as I'm about to start redoing figure posts with links to the store and when 40 or so items got sold in the store at the same time @_@.
Hey everyone. Just when I thought things were back in gear, this had to hit me. Here's the story, over a few months back there was a hack into the site. It busted the old forum and thus screwed up all the old posts on there. Since then I made the new forum (which is more dead than the old one ~_~;;) Also, at that same time, the same random java code was in many of the .php pages of the store. If any of you are customers of the store or plan to be, no worries at all since this was just apparently a weird counter tool from a stupid site called statun .com. None of your information was taken at all since I use Paypal for payments. Only if Paypal ever gets hacked would there be any need to worry.
As of today, there must have been something still there in the store and of course google had to catch it and mistake the store as an "attack site" In the mean time you can always use the amazon and ebay branches of my store or do special orders by requesting items from either aaaanime.com or yesanime.com. Again, nothing to be worried about...just a big annoyance and I'll be added an SSL certificate to the store pages, just for extra protection...though again all payment info is on Paypal so, it'll be like putting a bullet proof vest on top of armor.
Once this issue is fixed, you should soon see more anime figure posts with links to pre-order or order them. Now excuse me while I burn down statun.com ~_~;;;;;
Enjoy this picture today. Finally got things ready for the week at hand with all the working from home that I will do. Soon you'll all see more video game blog posts and I'll be sure to add the anime figure posts with better a link for preordering them.
Hey everyone. So sorry for the gap in blog posts. I had a vehicular situation that turned out to be a big blessing in disguise. I didn't get into an accident or anything. My good old 1995 Buick Regal acted up on me again. The car is my very first car ever that I got back in 2002. Need to say, the old girl has 228K miles on it and her fuel pump decided to go after I drove to work 33 miles from my house. I had to do the train thing again and go without a car...which sucks for anyone who's been in a similar situation. I lucked out thanks to my father and what would have been a $700 fix was just $400.
So why is this a blessing? Well, this wasn't the first time this happened and it gave me fuel to ask my job for less commute time. As you guys know, I was going to quit my job due to the success of the anime store but my boss was uncommonly nice by giving me medical and now due to my dying car, I'm working from home most of the week! That's right, only Monday and Wednesday do I go into my job. The other days in the week I still work on my job's projects but from the comfort of the anime base itself...my room.
What's even weirder about this was that I was suppose to start this new schedule next week. I instead started it yesterday because the phone and internet systems at my job have been down until a few hours ago. I hope my timing doesn't make it seem like I had anything to do with it ^^;;.
I of course will do my job projects first since I've been rather grateful of the opportunity to be more at home. The additional time gained from not having to commute 33 miles one way most of the week will give me more time for here and the biz so to pay for Danielle and I's house and wedding. The economy is bad now but we seem to be on the winning side, which is not very crowded as of now. This brings my question for you guys;
Do you think you'd get more work done at home or at the office?
I'm a few days late on posting this but on Thursday Danielle and I went to a neat event hosted by one the local radio stations here, Party 105. as some of you might have remembered from the past posts, we became finalists for the "Get Hitched on the House" contest where we could have gotten our wedding for free. I do thank some of the fans here for the votes but unfortunatly we didn't win. The winning couple got over 1100 votes which I would assume was waaaay more than what we got. No matter. It was a cool event were we were able to mingle with some of the radio celebes here. Danielle and I did mangae to grab a quick spot on the radio though. Three couples were chosen to answer this question during Nikki At Night's Lady's Lounge; "Do you kiss on the first date." We were the last couple to answer and while the other couples stated that th guy tryed, I just said "She kissed me." All in all in was cool to get a few seconds on the radio. It's true Danielle actually kissed me on the first date. I guess I should ask you guys this qustion, do you kiss on the first date?
For the past few months I've had the 3G iPhone and yes, I do love this little device. I know there is a fervor out there on which phone is the best but I'm not here to claim that the iPhone is the best phone but for those who have it, chances are you love it and it those wonderful apps allow it to be ever more useful. Here's a list of Apps for you otaku who own an iPhone. I'm sure you have seen these apps or tried them. If not, check them out:
1) iKoto:
This wonderful app is perfect for the little musician in you and a possible annoyance to others around you. With this app you have control of a virtual Koto (Japanese harp). Just recently an update was done to the app where you don't just record your attempts at otaku musical bliss, but you can now listen to 3 examples like Sakura, Rokudan and For Elise. The new version even has the ability to create pinch tone effects and you can change the tone to the koto as well.
2) vSnax:
Anime Fans cannot live without watching anime episodes and thankfully you'll find that with vSnax. On top of have a bunch of cool channels like G4TV, Discovery and more, there is channel dedicated to anime of course called Anime!. On Anime! you can watch episodes of Saiyuki, Azumanga Daioh and more. Granted the pickings are slim but at least otaku have something to watch on the iPhone outside of youtube.
3) LadioTouch:
With this app you can listen to a large list of Japanese radio stations. Black Angel Radio in particular is pretty good with game music and j-pop played. It does crash sometimes and you wont understand many of the talk shows if you don't speak Japanese, but to me that's not an issue...well I don't speak it fully yet but otaku don't mind listening to Japanese.
4) Pandora Radio:
This app is great in finding commercial free, streaming music based on what you look for. It's still a bit rough to find what anime fans want but searching "Euro beats" will nab a bunch of Initial D music and you could get a decent amount of J-Pop by searching "Gackt" or any other J-Pop artist. As great as this app is, it will repeat almost as bad as some of the local radio stations here on Long Island but if you set it up right, you can have a bunch of cool streaming songs. A must for your iPhone if you an otaku or not.
5) iTalk
There are a few voice recorder apps out there. I started to like this one since you can download a program from their site in order to download your recordings on to your computer. I've been using this to prep for my anime voice acting auditions and to see what I can do plus where I need to improve. A very useful app indeed whether you use it like me to record your different voice impressions or just to keep a voice memo.
6)Ah...Moemory:
No otaku can also be without cute moe images of anime girls. This program is a simple memory match game with you getting a picture of a cute anime girl. Thankfully the images are indeed real quality anime and not some fake fanart ripoff. In the paid version I believe you can save the photos and I would assume there is more then the 5 or so in the lite version.
7)MotoChaser:
One of the top paid apps as f this blog post, MotoChaser is a perfect example of why the iPhone is a contender in the mobile video game industry. The characters have an anime-ish style to them but the more important aspect of this game is that it is a solid motorcycle racer in which you can even beat up enemy racers, almost like Road Rash, but not quite. (Speaking of Road Rash, that needs a current gen makeover) MotoChaser is a bit tough to get use to but it is a cool game indeed.
8)Fire Drop:
This app is one of your typical 3-pair Tetris-type games. This one can appeal to Otakus since it has an Asian tone to it with good proverbs between levels. Its a very casual, easy going game and its for you if you must have an asian tone to your iPhone apps.
9) Vay:
Many Otaku are fans of RPGs and thankfully Vay is available on the iPhone. This classic anime RPG from back to the year 1994. Its the full RPG in here with the cut scenes and all. Its no Final Fantasy but a great addition to your list of apps. I still have to play trough it actually ^ ^;
10) iPhone Manga:
With a little bit of searching you can find some manga apps. Most are in Japanese and a few are in english. As of this date, I have yet to find any of the big time mangas on there but one the one pictured above that I have is a nice read and allows me to show off that I'm an anime fan.
11) IGN Reviews:
We otaku are mainly gamers and most of you like to get an idea on how good a game might be before you drop some dough and playtime for it. IGN Reviews is a great app to quickly see a review on the latest games. Personally, I don't really go with reviews so much. As long as its not a Barbie game or the like, I'll be sure to have fun playing the game. I even had fun playing the game Night Trap years ago and to this day its considered one of the worst games (not just because it got that evil old fart Joe Lieberman to create the ESRB). Anyways, this is good if you are iffy on what game to get.
12) World 9:
This is a novelty if anything else but I know people cosplaying as Mario or Luigi will make great use of this. World 9 is an app you use to create the Mario jumping sound. So, basically, you turn it on, put your phone in your pocket and if you jump, you'll sound like Mario jumping. There is also a map on there to see people jumping across the country. A novelty to some but to many otaku and gamers, a must.
13) Tap Tap Revenge:
Tap Tap is to the iPhone what DDR is to games. In this game, you tap 3 separate points at the bottom of the screen to match the song playing. I haven't used it too much but you can download many new, popular songs and have fun tapping away. As a long time DDR fan, I do love this app.
14) Free RSS Reader:
On the go yet want to see the latest posts on your favorite anime sites like Dannychoo.com or here?(most likely Dannychoo.com though) This simple app is what I use to check the RSS feds of my favorite anime sites without using the sometimes slow Safari app.
15) Koi Pond:
Need to relax? This wonderful app allows you to look over a Koi pond and interact with the fish and environment. I hope to have a Koi pond at my home one day but with this app I can right now. Its a novelty but it does relax you when you have a stressed day.
16: Light Saber:
Last but definitely not least is the app all otaku have to love. Light saber turns your iPhone into a virtual light saber with sounds that react to your swinging of the phone. Don't be too rough or you might throw the phone though ^^; I haven't done it but I can see it happening. Just recently an update was added that allows you to create a character, their light saber and story in it. I chose Gurren Lagennn's Yoko since I just had to have a hot anime girl in there.
Hope this list was useful. Of course there can be and will be more apps that will be great for us otaku or just good in general.
Not exactly a new WTF moment but this one of course had to be on the list. These images caused many otaku to leave a palm print on their foreheads. James Marshers was a great choice for Piccolo but it seems like the production crew will be recycling his old Buffy costumes and they must be out of green paint ~_~
You know, I was at one point looking forward to the Dragon Ball Movie. The concept of a Dragon Ball live action with the financial backing of Hollywood could have been such a good thing if done right. The cast that was set up seemed not too bad of choices in my opinion...lacking a more realistic, more Asian cast, but still sounding well. After this image surfaced and the other aspects of the upcoming movie, I had to start this new segment aptly called Dragon Ball Movie WTF?! Moments. Leave it to Fox to mess things up ~_~
This first image is actually the newest WTF moment. What you are seeing is not some sort of weird Photoshop prank by somebody, but instead real footage from the movie. This my friends is what Fox's equivalent to Goku's Oozaro transformation looks like. Rumor has it that the CG needed to create the real Goku oozaro transformation was too much for them. I understand it takes lots of work to make good CG, but we are in 2008 not 1998. How that can be confused with this below can only be rationally explained if we think that possibly the group of people who first took (and butchered) DBZ are in charge of this one.
I was a bit late in posting this but here it is with audio, the Dragon Ball Movie Trailer. If I never saw Dragon Ball I would think this is cool but for many of us otaku, this is going to be a movie to watch for laughs on how bad Fox messes it up. Director James Wong states he wants this to be a "family film" so expect even more bastardization of the Dragon Ball saga than the horrible first english dub was ~_~ Chances are, I will still see it but I'll have to watch it with the thought that is not a Dragon Ball movie and has nothing to do with the anime.
This is a few months late but I just had to write about this. After reading Sanjo-chan's blog on it I had to put in my two-cents. Many of you otaku know that Toonami stopped airing in late September. Many of us can thank Toonami for turing us into otaku. I started right at the very beginning in 1997 and I've seen up until about a year or two ago when Toonami only had Naruto as their only anime.
When I stated in the past that it was Final Fantasy VII that helped me become an otaku after years of just being a gamer, that was just half the story. I am still upset of the downfall of Toonami and anime in general on Cartoon Netwoork so I feel I have to let you know my story and where I'm going as an otaku because I might have a hand in what is to come. If you'd care to read on, here's my story:
Back in 1997, which was now 11 years ago, I was in the 7th grade. (Yeah, I turned 25 as of last Saturday so I'm an older otaku). Back then my days were basically that of playing baseball, hockey and football watching the New York Ranger's hockey and playing lots of video games after school. In September of 1996, Pokemon came to the US and I would watch it every morning at around 6am. I watched it not because I was an anime fan but because I was a fan of the game, which BTW still holds my record consecutive play time of 13 hours. Yes, I one day played Pokemon Blue for 13 hours straight. Sure wish I could have that kind of free time now. Anyways, anime's height in America at the time was the rare showings on Sci-fi channel and the occational Miyasaki runs on pay-per-view (Princess Mononoke to be exact). Finding anime was tough here at the time and as both a jock and a gamer, anime wasn't something I really knew of.
The popularity of Pokemon woke up the execs of Cartoon Network and thus Toonami months later came to be with its first host, Moltar from Space Ghost Coast To Coast; Cartoon Network's only in-house production at the time (more on those in a bit). During the spring of that year I was introduced to Final Fantasy VII by my long time friend, Tiago Barros. He had a Playstation and I was just a Nintendo boy so I went to his house often to fight him in Dragon Ball GT Final Bout, Bust-A-Move and of course watch him play FFVII. He would tend to leave mid game to watch Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z on Toonami. I didn't know what the appeal was and I just played the games while he watched. Shortly, I began to watch Toonami with him and with my love for Tifa in FFVII, I was all over the internet (aka the World Wide Web at the time) looking for more info and getting into Toonami and anime. It was then I became an otaku. I of course went beyond Toonami in terms of series to watch since not all anime was shown on there, but it was Toonami that got me into it in the first place (along with FFVII).
Fast forward to 2001-2002, I was in the 12th grade and I was in Miss. Beris' Web design class in New Field High School, mainly to kill time. A project was due to create a full working website and thus this site, Chuck's Anime Shrine, was born. Thanks to Newgrounds.com, in which alot of the design ideas came from, my site became popular with otaku since it was one of the few places pre-You-Tube to have AMV videos to view. Because of this site and my anime fandom, I met Danielle who is now my fiancee and turned this site into a business that is on a roll. Sales will be double of last years, very close to $100K and as of last month, my profits matched my job's income...even when I only listed and sold a fifth of the items I have on hand and not even a tenth of items on the way. I can safely say that my job is now completely expendable and my originally failed plan to escape the 9-5 rut is only a few months away or less.
As you see I owe a bunch to Toonami and have lots to be upset for them being gone, but here's the surprise you get for reading through this very large blog post; I'm going to use my newly gained anime presence to try to bring back something like Toonami or Toonami itself. Remember my good friend Tiago who I thank dearfully for converting me into an otaku? Well, for the past 5 years he's actually been working in Atlanta with Adult Swim and more recently with Cartoon Network headquarters. Toonami's death and anime's slowdown on Cartoon Network can be blamed for Adult Swim's transformation to Cartoon Network First Party Only shows but once I'm freed from the chains of a 9-5 job, I'll make this one of my big goals. So, Tiago, if you are reading this, I'll be in touch with you soon on some things.
Anime.fm is a site I recently aquired that even got the attention of our favorite blogger, Danny Choo and if you are reading Danny, turning Anime.fm into what Toonami was would be a great idea for us on it if you still want to work with me on it ^_~. Let's also not forget that I'll be training to be an anime voice actor along with making video games for Flash, X-box 360 and Apple iPhone so very soon my dream of being a force in the anime/game industry will be a reality. In other words, I have connection in the right spots.
Hope you guys like the new look of the site and the lack of updates was because of the huge number of anime orders I had to deal with so check up on my updates as they will be more frequent again. Though I didn't quit Berger-Bros like I wanted to a few weeks ago, the time is soon and with all that is in front of me now, my days an a meager employee are almost done. Below is the final broadcast of Toonami but I'm using this blog post to let you all know that anime won't die if I have something to do about it, since I might be in the coming months.
(Also, don't forget that Toonami still lives on with its Jetstream website)
As you can see by looking at my posts, I was able to finally embed the comments. This was thanks to a some-what new update via Blogger and big thanks goes to bloggerbuster for the code that I needed since my blog is rather custom and needed some tweaking. for anyone who is running into the problem of getting the comments embedded, use that code on bloggerbuster and place it where your comments code is in your template. The code that you have to replace doesn't have to be the exact one they mention, just place it in your comment area and test it to see if it works. Next Blogger coding hurtle...Related Posts.
(note: picture featured is not mine, I modified it via Photoshop but I might use it for other technical fixes and additions)
I know, there I go again, buying more time. I will be getting back to doing more diverse and more frequent posts. I'm still kind of swamped at work and preping for x-mas. I still have loads of anime figures sitting in my storage that I have yet to post along with $40K or so of pre-orders coming. Lots to do so hopefully this post will be the last time I simply post just these random anime girl pics. I know that some like this and I'll make this a feature if I can ^^
I know many of you Otaku were indeed rooting for Obama just like our friends in Japan and others across the world did. Just take a look at Grant Park and you will see something to behold with that amazing crowd. Congrats to Barack Obama from all of us Otaku here. I know my vote in NY went through and now it is time for America to be the country it was meant to be. We Otaku have seen for years how the conservative mindset has poisoned anime, video games and other items we enjoy. We have more importantly seen how that type of negative mindset has hurt global relations, human progression and the lives of the young, the future of this country. For too long has America been to some respect, a more modern, western version of the middle east extremist views, bound by the old human flaws of racism, sexism and religious tyranny toward common sensical life. I hope now that this win for Obama will be a great thing for the world and I think Otaku both here and in japan knew that before hand. Let's hope we were right.
Just a day before election day and like the two candidates I've been swamped with work. I have loads to do at my day job. At home I have to continue the CAS 4.0 upgrade, post more items I have and am preordering, box another bunch of figures, get my xbox 360, iPhone, and Flash development kits for my video game (yes, I can now code games for xbox; more on that later) and not to mention fix up anime.fm @_@. Good news is that even with only a 5th or so of my anime figures posted, I'm officially making the same money in my anime biz as in my job based on some major number crunching I've been doing. So, even if my boss catches me here posting this.... I can care less. It's such a great feeling to know that your job is now just extra income...next is to delete the job once and for all.
Anyways, enjoy this image that looks very similar to that old Sera-chan figure.
