Anyways on with it.

#1 Kino – Kino’s Travels

The Protagonist of Kino’s Travels.

Occupation: Traveller

If you’ve ever seen the series, then it’s not hard to understand why she’s my favourite character of all time. To sum it up, she travels alone with her talking motorbike hermes to different countries to experience their cultures. Able to dodge bullets and sling guns and completely disconnect herself from a country and any moral oblgiations makes her one of the most independant characters ever. Does it help that she looks like an androgynous boy?  Yeah.

#2 Fate Testarossa – Lyrical Nanoha

BFF of titular character.

Occupation: High level Mage

There isn’t much to say about here that isn’t self explanatory. The picture should already win you over but if it doesn’t, her relationship with Nanoha only awaits the word of canon. Yes. That’s exactly as it sounds.

#3 Hinagiku Katsura – Hayate no Gotoku

Side Character

Occupation: Student Council President

Tsundere for Hayate, she is the most popular character in the show and for good reason. Not including her great looks, she wields the trusty wooden sword masamune capable of taking down giant robots. She’s awesome because of her tsundere personality though.

#4 Tomoyo Sakagami – CLANNAD

Side Character / Main Character of her own story

Occupation: Student Council President

Finally a proper character. It’s hard to explain why I like her without really going into plot spoilers but to sum it up watch CLANNAD ep 24 – Tomoyo After – which luckily requires no backstory. To put it simply, she’s on my favourites because of the way her story progressed which is actually really sad and sympathetic.

#5 Setsuna – NEEDLESS

Minor Villian

Occupation: Pretty Girl Squad Leader

Yay! Finally, A familiar name to many people. Why isn’t she #1? Well it’s fairly obvious, she’s just not as good as the other characters. To be on my list itself is still a feat though. What she has going for he is a pretty level-headed mind and an awesome ability to move at the speed of sound and also looking like an androgynous boy with tits. Yeah.. that’s totally the reason.

Gee that completely incoherent non-sense making article that requires telepathy to understand, took a long long time to write and ended up being pointless. Oh well, now next time you hear me ranting on about how awesome my waifu is, you can take a potshot guessing which one I’m mentioning. Yes, I was that bloody bored.

Runner’s Up

#6 Lain – Serial Experiment’s Lain

Requires a watching of S.E.L to understand.

#7 Kurau – KURAU Phantom Memory

Taken over by a supernatural being which splits her into 2 physical bodies which she bonds to. Supernatural powers cause her to be able to pretty much be superman.

#8 Kotarou – Wanko to Kurasou

Pet dog (YEAH I KNOW RIGHT?) of the local pet shop owner. Fights a tiger 1v1 and WINS.

So with the release of Windows 7, JP decided to release a custom anime-style theme with the pre-orders. Naturally, this has been leaked, so me being the otaku hikkikomori I am, It’s fairly obvious that I would grab it.  It’s pretty much just a couple of wallpapers and a soundpack by Nana Mizuki (Fate – Lyrical Nanoha, Touma – Minami-ke, Utau – Shugo Chara etc..)

Windows 7-tan

As you can see your PC has to be pretty damn good to handle the epicness that is windows 7-tan.

Personally I think that this isn’t that great of a theme, but I probably had way too high expections for this. I was expecting a visual makeover with it but it’s nothing that great (If theres any changes to the taskbar or desktops, I dont notice because I’m using a shell). The wallpapers are ok but I would rather use the wallpapers of my master. The highlight of this is the soundpack though I think it’s kind of lacking. At least it outclasses the windows soundpack though.

TL;DR – It’s ok, not what I expected but I like it.

Yay I used all 3 wallpapers in this post.

I’ve been learning Japanese for a little while now and I’ve found a few things that help me learn in my daily use of the internet with Firefox.

There are a few plugins that I would like to share that make learning Kanji a lot easier because I find that reading Kanji in context is easier than trying the impossible task of memorizing all the various characters.

Furigana Injector

This is one of the best I think, it puts the furigana for the kanji next to it letting you read it phonetically. It helps me to learn the various forms of Kanji in context when reading without having to look the character up all the time. It can be configured with a list of Kanji that it won’t add the furigana for so that you can remove the furigana on characters you know well.

Get it here.

XHTML Ruby Support

Using the Ruby Support with the Furigana Injector puts the furigana above the kanji on the web page instead of next to it. It can be nearly impossible to read on smaller font sizes but still works nicely and with Firefox you can always zoom in. It also can expand any common acronyms you come across in your adventures across the internet.

Get it here.

Rikaichan

Last one. Came across Rikaichan fairly recently and it provides a popup dictionary lookup when you mouse-over the kanji. It has the benefit of providing lookups in English, German, French and Russian.

Found over here.

All Three plugins running on dannychoo.com

I hope someone else finds these as useful as I have in learning Japanese and overcoming the obstacle that Kanji provides in browsing the internets in 日本語.

Holy shitsticks! Ever wanted news anchors to be from anime?!

Your dream has come true!

“A Cellius voice synthesis engine is used to have Misato read said news in real time on this Nerv News 24 television program.”

Thats so awesome…

Now I long for a Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha one…where Nanoha is sent to warzones to hopefully get killed while Fate and Hayate sit around looking swell :3

These lovely posters created by na-insoo (lineart) and starshock12 (colouring) nicely cover the base Kana and I can see myself refering to them in the future just for amusment as I learn. It would be nice if they offered them as prints in the DA shop but I guess we will just have to be content with these digital versions.