Now that this is the third year that I’m doing this, I guess it actually is becoming the Token End of Year Post. Well, more traditional than Token, where I to be pedantic, but given that I’ve not really posted much this year gone, I suppose I need to make up for that somewhat by spamming a few thousand words about cartoons.

Not that I’d actually managed to watch as much as I’d have liked over the last year. Not to moan too much, but the ol’ bad back did put paid to me watching great chunks of anime through the middle third of the year, and resulted in me not finishing off a bunch of shows that I probably should have (I’ve still not got around to seeing the conclusion of Kids on the Slope, for example). TV re-runs of Star Trek:TGN and Futurama ended up consuming way more of my evening media viewing than I should probably have let them, too – and I didn’t even get around to making a blog post about Star Treks Ambojistu either (tl;dr – there’s lots of old anime references in the arena in which it takes place).

In terms of post-related house-keeping, I’m going to have to confess that, for the third year running, I’ve still not gotten around to starting on those Gundam Unicorn BDs I’ve been collecting. I’m sure the punchline to this is that I’m going to absolutely loathe it, but at this point, waiting until the whole series is done and watching it in bulk is looking increasingly preferable.

Okay, so on to the usual specifics with the Beta-Waffle Entirely-Pointless Awards for 2012 Anime Existence, AKA me making up reasons to write about things I want to write about.
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Girls und Santa
Well, OK, we’re still about an hour or so out based on Blighty time, but, hey, it’s close enough, and it’s been Christmas Day in Japan for a good few hours now. Also, I kind of want to go to bed. Sleep and all that.

Anyway, have yourselves a Merry Christmas and an Acceptably Amusing New Years. I might actually try and update the blog a few times this week with content of… well, it’ll probably not be anything exciting, but it’ll be something. Maybe.

(P.S. It was nice to get another episode of Saki to watch today, but can it please be March already so we can have more Girls und Panzer? Thanks).

Oh my, doesn’t time fly when you.. aren’t updating much. I mean, by gum, this was the first time I’ve drawn anything vaguely-proper in about five months (apologies for any cack-handedness and lack of ambition as a result of that). I suppose I should really force myself back into some kind of regular update pattern.

But probably not drawing, because throwing this together just reminded me that it’s still murder on my spine. Not the same degree as murder as it was a few months ago, thankfully, but, alas, I’m still not up to putting up with that three times a week. It’s better excuse than last years explanation for not having updated regularly, which is that I’d just been playing Xenoblade for an indecent number of hours (a lot more fun that suffering a back injury, let me tell you!).

Anyway, that’s probably enough for the token seventh anniversary update. I’ll try and update more frequently going forward – honest!

(P.S. For the readers residing in Blighty, Scotland Loves Anime tickets for both this years Glasgow and Edinburgh events went on sale this week. As per usual, I’ll be dragging myself to both events to see all of the weekend films at least, even those which I’ll end up seeing twice. Also, the full schedule for the London Film Festival was released today, and includes three screenings of Mamoru Hosoda’s Wolf Children mid-October. Clashes with Glasgow SLA, unfortunately, so I’m going to have to wait a whole additional week until Edinburgh for that one!)

Previously, in the last instalment of Beta-Waffle…

I’ll get around to it one day (probably when they do a 3DS redesign, that being a convenient way to justify to myself buying a Japanese 3DS)

Then, the very next day, Nintendo goes and announces a new 3DS variant with a significantly larger screen. This is leaving me feeling a little like a politer but considerably less attractive Suzumiya Haruhi. Still, I suppose I’m going to have to be true to my word and actually get around to playing Dearly Stars sometime soon.

In other related news, the first details of the new set of PSP games Shiny Festa came out a few days ago. I’m not going to write about it to any length at this specific point, as the first of the iM@S 7th Anniversary live shows is going on as I type this. Those events are going to mark the first showings of the promotional videos for the games (which probably goes someway to explaining why they’ve been so aggressive with the whole “live viewing” thing – they’re live-streaming the event to a number of cinemas all over Japan), so both those videos and the website for the game will likely go live over the next couple of days, providing additional details as to what it actually entails.

Still, I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to be doing about the games, in a similar fashion to the whole DS/Dearly Stars situation. My PSP is old – first generation PSP old. So old that I had to mod the D-Pad as many of the original model PSPs shipped with pretty much broken, unresponsive D-Pads. I should probably replace it. I mean, I’ve got a Vita, but that’s rigged to my European PSN account, and I use it to play the PSP stuff I never got around to buying on UMD (it’s full of Falcom, Atlus and NIS games). The problem with wanting to play Shiny Festa on Vita, even if it would be the optimal experience, is that, aside from probably having to buy another Vita, it’d mean I’d have to buy the games twice as well – I’d going to be picking up the physical releases regardless, and having to rebuy three games again in digital form gets into the ‘ludicrously expensive’ category (as would, you know, buying another Vita just to play Shiny Festa).

I suppose I should really just replace my PSP, though I’m a little loathe to do that in a sense. I suppose I’ve got enough UMD software that having the console redundancy would be somewhat useful. They’ve stopped selling the PSP-3000 in favour of the way-cheaper-but-less-nice E1000 over here, though. Probably still better than my old 1000, though.

You may not have failed to notice that I haven’t exactly been updating on my usual regular basis. Or you may not have noticed anything, because whatever you use to figure out that I have posted some kind of update hasn’t triggered itself – it’s not like I actually expect anyone to be proactive in checking for updates or anything. In any case, what I mean to say is, I haven’t updated in the last week or so.

So… yeah, turns out I did myself something of a back injury. Nothing particularly serious that I shouldn’t recover from in short-ish order, but does in the short term require the consumption of pain-throttling medication. As a result, I spent part of last week slipping between drug and/or pain induced delirium, and watching the Australian Denno Coil DVDs I picked up a couple of weekends ago.

More significantly, whilst I’m now at the point where I can (mostly) go about my normal business, maintaining a drawing position for a prolonged period of time is, shall we say, an undesirably uncomfortable situation. So I’m going to take a few weeks off from the whole comicking thing. I’ve a few things to do in the coming weeks that it would have been awkward to arrange continuity of comics around anyway, so the timing is curiously convenient in a sense.

I suppose this does mean that I should actually, you know, start writing on this blog some to make up for the lack of other content, or something equally crazy. Maybe.

(On the subject of Denno Coil, I’d give that show an A. The first half of the series is totally A+++ stuff, but the second half is merely B+ quality. It’s all good stuff, but I feel the marginalization of a number of characters and the lack of the first halfs playfulness in the shows tail-end does it something of a disservice. Still absolutely worth seeing, though).