You had to have seen that joke coming. (If you're not sure, that's the Codec frequency Solid Snake uses to contact Otacon in Metal Gear Solid. Yeah, gamer joke.)

Episode 7 of Card Captor Sakura, "Sakura's First Attempt as a Thief?!", apart from being punctuated, deals mainly with Sakura and Tomoyo infiltrating an art gallery to, as usual, capture a card. There's a lot of use of the word "kaitou" here, which is often translated to "phantom thief". (Literally, the kanji are "strange/mysterious/suspicious" and "thief/robber".) I would assume that this refers to the sort of gentleman thief who uses smarts and tricks and illusions to effect near-magical getaways, and which seem to be a fairly popular anime trope, on both sides of the protagonist/antagonist line.

The kaitou in Yoshinaga-sanchi no Gargoyle, Hyakushiki, states (whether he personally believes it or not) that the duty of thieves such as himself is to "liberate" various valuable items and put them "where they belong". I suppose in this case, it kind of fits.

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I come to you through the iniquities of slow loading times and unjust server errors to inform one and all that apparently Dreamhost, the hosting provider for much of AnimeBlogger.net, is having some sort of problem that's affecting more than a few users. When I (among other AB.net bloggers) can't access my own Wordpress Dashboard without timing out with an Internal Server Error, it becomes a mite difficult to update anything on the blog.

Hopefully someone at Dreamhost will realize that this is, indeed, a problem that is happening right now, and figure out a way to fix it. Until then, updates will be sporadic, as I sneak as much time as I can through the windows of connective opportunity in order to actually post something.

Yeah, I'm out of ideas on what to blog about next. So here's another advertisement, this time for a blogger sempai and one of the inspirations for me to start my own blog.

Impz, the owner of THAT Anime Blog (the backronym for "THAT" is still under debate), is looking for a new blogger to add to the team. Details available through the link, but in summary, as long as you're prolific (two or three entries a week, and I would assume that these entries be at least somewhat substantial), and can communicate passably well in English, you stand a good chance of being chosen. No prior experience is needed, and even if you already have another blog, as long as your entries to THAT are unique (ie no copy-and-pasting wholesale), it's perfectly fine.

To enter, send an entry, any entry, that is the sort of thing you will blog about, to their GMail address (ie @gmail.com), username thatblog. (Yes, I'm trying this out to avoid the usual spambots, even though my own GMail experience shows that it's pretty good at eating spam.) The closing deadline is 30th March 2007 12:00am GMT+8 (basically midnight Singapore time, 4pm/1600h London time, 11am/1100h EST, 8am/0800h PST, going backwards in time without the aid of a flux capacitor). It's unsure whether he means that 11:59pm/2359h on the 29th of March is the last minute, or if 11:59pm/2359h on the 30th of March is, but to be safe, send it in earlier. Screenshots or other pictures for use in blogging are recommended. After all the entries are collected, they will be posted up, and the one which gets the most hits/comments, and passes the approval of the other existing team members, will be the winner.

If you'd like a source of images (the vast majority of which is non-worksafe, but there are several gems in there), I recommend the tag-searchable Sagubooru, which is the now-defunct Danbooru's somewhat self-proclaimed official successor. (No guarantees on how long its bandwidth will hold out.) Grabbing screencaps of your own will obviously enhance how much control you have over the pictures, but sources will probably be the problem then.

Basically, I think it's a good way to start in blogging anime if you'd rather not go through the hassle of maintaining your own blog. I'd advise that basic knowledge of HTML (linking and posting pictures and bold/italics) will be very helpful, if only so you know how to prettify your entries. (XHTML compliance is not really that hard to achieve, until you get to more complex stuff like aligning images and text.)

You can probably find Impz in #AnimeBlogger@IRCHighway, around evenings and such Singapore time. He does hold the record for most smilies so far, as well as a reputation for liking green-haired girls and being a trap. (Don't look at me, I haven't a clue.)

Am I the only one curious about the nekomimi ghost? Oh, really? Never mind, then.

Volume two of Card Captor Sakura, as mentioned in my previous post on episode 5, is called "Everlasting Memories", probably based on the events in this episode, and contains episodes five to eight. Since I deferred talking about the DVD itself last time, I'll get around to it now.

The blurb for this volume is as follows:

As if capturing 40-foot tall plush dolls (the Jump) wasn't hard enough, now Sakura has competition! Li, her new classmate, has come from China to capture the Clow Cards for himself, so their relationship isn't entirely friendly… Still for ten-year old Sakura, everything else pales in comparison with meeting her mother's ghost! Can her heart take it?

This makes it sound as though Sakura has a cardiovascular problem or something.

Extras in this DVD are scarce: there's only really the creditless first ending animation. With this many DVD volumes to fill (eighteen in total), there's not a lot Geneon (then Pioneer) can do to make up for it, I would think. We have the various creditless openings and endings, and, um, that's probably about it, really. Especially considering the gap between show production and DVD release.

Episode 6, "Sakura and Memories of her Mother", has the appearance of not one, but two battle costumes. Also, there's a lot of flashy lights, although not really up to epileptic levels.

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It's a bit late, but it's been about one month since I started this blog, and I've thus far had a great time of it. (No, really, it's been just over one month; the first post in this blog was made on January 26th, and I originally planned to post this on the last day of February.)

From various well-worn chestnuts of wisdom from more experienced bloggers on #AnimeBlogger, the litmus test of whether a blog will survive to prosper for at least the foreseeable future is that one-month mark: if a blog is still being worked on and actively updated after one month since creation, it has apparently passed some sort of trial by the unrelenting fires of apathy, and will live happily ever after or something like that. Now, considering that I've decided to undertake the Card Captor Sakura Project and blog the entire 70-episode series (and two movies), that gives me over two months' worth of posts at least, assuming I suddenly lose all need for sleep and post once a day like unto clockwork. Taking into consideration all the missed days and such, I may well be here until next year posting nothing but CCS episode summaries and still not be done.

It is a terrifying thought.

But one month is one month, and to celebrate this momentous occasion, I'll use this opportunity to ramble on about various statistics for this blog up to this point, in a dastardly and cunning plan to nonchalantly segue into something that almost nobody cares about.

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