Jean Snow [.net]

Month: September 2016

  • New Galak-Z T-Shirt

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    My buddy Jake Kazdal runs his 17-BIT studio from Kyoto, and the latest game they launched was the fantastically fun shooter Galak-Z: The Dimensional (out on PC and PS4, with a mobile version on the horizon). I love this new Galak-Z t-shirt that just launched on Fangamer — you can bet I’ll be adding it to…

  • Fall 2016 Anime Season

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    Towards the end of 2004 I started writing two monthly columns for a culture site called Tokyo Q, and one of them was about anime. Each edition was usually made up of reviews of shows, as well as news items, but at the start of each Japanese TV season I’d usually do a round-up of…

  • Koya Bound on Kickstarter

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    Last month I mentioned Craig Mod and Dan Rubin‘s upcoming photography book, Koya Bound, while pointing out a great interview with them that was published in The Japan Times — a talk about the walk that inspired the book. Today marked the launch of a Kickstarter project to get the book printed, and to also…

  • Ani-Kuri 15

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    I just watched a fantastic collection of animated shorts called Ani-Kuri 15. Produced for NHK back in 2007-2008, it’s comprised of 15 1-minute shorts each directed by some of the top names in the animation field, including Kon Satoshi (pictured), Mamoru Oshii, and Makoto Shinkai (in fact, it’s while searching for works by Shinkai that I…

  • Picross 3D Round 2 (Demo)

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    With the release of Picross 3D Round 2 last week, and my newfound love for Picross thanks to the My Nintendo edition I’m currently playing, I was excited to give the 3D game a try thanks to the demo they’ve also released. Having played through that demo, I gotta say that I think I much…

  • My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

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    I’d unlocked this through the My Nintendo account I have with points a while back, but had forgotten to download it, something I finally got around to doing this past weekend. Boy am I late to this party. This is the first time I play a Picross game – I’m not particularly attracted to puzzle…

  • Voices of a Distant Star

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    The last of Makoto Shinkai’s works I’ve watched so far is this 25-minute OVA, which tells an interesting story of two young lovers separated by a war in the galaxy, and how the light years of distance between them affects the way they can communicate. You can tell it’s an earlier work, as it doesn’t…

  • Dareka no Manazashi

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    After watching Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters Per Second film, I followed it up with this 6-minute short. Like with 5 Centimeters, it incorporates a hyper-real world, beautiful scenery and colors, all in a fun little near-future tale of a woman dealing with growing up and the relationship she maintains with her father. I recommend watching…

  • 5 Centimeters Per Second

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    As I wrote yesterday on my personal blog, I’ve just discovered Makoto Shinkai, and started my viewing of his works with this film, which is made up of three interlocking chapters. The story of young love didn’t really grab me, but what did grab me was the stunningly beautiful animated world we’re presented with, both…

  • 2005

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    This weekend I managed to finish going through the posts of 2005 (all 1063 of them). As I was going through these posts, I could see that it was a really important year for me. My first professional writing work started in 2004 as I became editor of MoCo Tokyo (a spinoff site to MoCo Loco, where…