I'm co-maintaining a new community with toshirodragon and I thought it might be a good idea to let people know. :)

paintedshoji is an anime and manga focused desktop wallpaper community. Any genre goes, shounen, shoujo, yaoi/shounen-ai, yuri/shoujo-ai, whatever. Fanart based wallpapers are accepted so long as the poster is the artist. Because my co-maintainer and I are coming at this from the yaoi/yuri angle the community is friends locked and adults only.

I've been chatting with someone about cosplaying Kaede (from Inuyasha) and came up with this idea for her friend with lots of long dark hair.

( Diagram behind the cut )

The basic idea is that for a person with a lot of hair a wig might be a bit of a hassle. Since Kaede (and several other characters I can think of) ties her hair in a very low ponytail there's theoretically room for a snood (a cloth or net sack to hold a person's hair) above the tie.

Now if someone were cosplaying Kikyo and already had long dark hair (long in this case being sufficient to bind into a tail at the appropriate point) this is overkill. If their hair is dark and long enough then all they really need is a (possibly modified) Halo frame (if they don't want to cut fringe) and some wefted hair to match their own hair to add length to the ponytail.

Getting back to the snood-wig, it could also be used by someone with shorter hair if they wanted to have something lighter than a full wig (since even old lady anime characters have huge amounts of hair it seems). They could just add some stuffing to the snood (and possibly a small weight in the bottom to make the hair behave more naturally).

Disclaimer: I have not built a snood-wig so this is all theory based on my knowledge of things like wigs and sewing.

ARGH! You can't do that to the politically clueless long haired bishie geekboy!

Loveless episode 12 - Endless

Talk about an appropriate title. I hope that the ending is an indication of another season or OVAs being forthcoming at some point.

Sometimes the English broadcasts of anime annoy the hell out of me. And I'm not talking about poor casting or translations, or even "editing for content" (though I have rants for all of those topics). No, I'm talking about something that fansubbers usually do that apparently the "professionals" never think of doing, translating the written Japanese in scenes.

Now I'm not saying that everything in text in an anime needs to be changed to English, I rather enjoy matter-of-fact appearances of Japanese text (newspapers, books, posters, etc) but there are times when it is obvious that the viewer is supposed to pick something significant out of the text in a scene. I think zooming in on some text and displaying it for several seconds is a fairly good indicator that Something Important is there.

If a character writes down something that she conceals from another character but we get a nice clear shot that lasts long enough for us to read the text (if we can read Japanese) then it's probably significant to the story and it should be translated. Likewise, when a character is reading something and the camera zooms in and stops on the text it obviously means we should read it and therefore it should be translated. I might forgive missing some of the instances within an episode, but they don't even bother with the episode titles or location notes in some of the stuff they broadcast. I don't think there's anything more frustrating than knowing that there's something important to a story that you're missing because someone did a sloppy job in translation.

If they can turn cigarettes into stick pens (Yu Yu Hakusho) and lollipops (One Piece), and minimize or remove blood (Yu Yu Hakusho again) then they can certainly translate a few frames of text (Paranoia Agent, .hack//Legend of the Twilight Bracelet).

If I were in the market for .hack or Paranoia Agent on DVD I would be very leery of buying them, based entirely on the broadcast version. I'd have to rent them just to see if they bothered to translate the text in the DVDs. The bitter and cynical part of me says they probably didn't bother. It's "just cartoons" so the text can't actually mean anything after all.

( If LiveJournal were an anime... )

toshirodragon would be a appropriately cast.

[Current music is sung by two voice actors from Gravitation (Yuki and K).]

Yoko Kanno currently owns my soul. The openings for GitS:SAC* and GitS:SAC 2nd GIG (and the ending theme of GitS:SAC) are just.... *squee!*


*Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

I'll hop in the bandwagon for this one. And expand it a bit.

• I shall list 15 fandoms I'm involved with.
• You shall guess my favorite character/person and my favorite pairing/One True Pairing.
• I shall update the list by:
  • putting the fandom with correctly guessed characters in bold
  • putting the fandom with correctly guessed pairings in italics

( See the list here. )

I'm not going to thumbnail this one. It's just too... weird? Embarrassing?

Though I am sort of happy with the basic anatomy....

Anyway, blame this post/thread in joisbishmyoga's LJ.