There goes our Health Minister, being forced to tender his resignation due to a sex scandal - he was videotaped having sex with a "personal friend" of his, but that's off topic. School's starting for me tomorrow so I won't be able to be active online anymore, but that's off topic again. Nevermind.

Oh and yeah, Happy New Year 2008 to all readers of Yamaki's Anime Blog.

What I am supposed to do right now, is to think of a few resolutions for the year 2008, hoping that I can actually achieve them by the end of the year, and that means that I have around 365 days to complete whatever that I have added into the resolutions.
Oh and by the way,I was in camp the last week so I had to cancel the Remedial Anime Awards for December 2007. Let's hope that nothing would happen to me when it comes to the last Saturday of this month so the January 2008 awards can take place.

(I know it's a bit early but who cares?)

Merry Christmas to all of the readers of Yamaki's Anime Blog!


P.S. Feel free to use the above video for next year's Saimoe. Fuko definitely deserve a place in the tournament.

I only got to know about it when I was reading my livejournal's friend-page. redwolftamer wrote about it in pokemon, annoyed and pissed off. Indeed like what he had said, those pages in Wikipedia used to have the meanings of the names of the Pokémons, information, appearances in the anime, the trading cards and such, sometimes even trivias but since Wikipedia has a rule that trivia sections are not encouraged, they have been removed.

Personally, I'm not really pissed or angry or what. Okay, maybe a little. It is just that I feel more... "ohmygodwhatamIgoingtotellthem". That's right, anxious, worried. I don't know how to describe it.

Still remember my trip last year to Singapore? There I lived with my uncle's family, and they had two children, a boy and a girl - my cousins. The two are avid Pokémon fans who would go down to Northpoint where they lived (down in Yishun) every now and then to buy this "Pokémon cracks" thingie and would collect them faithfully, hoping to get some rare Pokémon. I, for one, think of those "cracks" as plastic UFOs at first, but as they play, I realised that it is somesort of clicking game... aiya.

Yes, they also watch the anime - on TV, something I don't get to do since NTV7 stopped showing Pokémon a long time ago. They always compare their Pokémon knowledge with mine, where one night after dinner in Bishan, we had compete with each other to questions like "name five steel type Pokémons?" and "What is the name of the gymleader of the steel gym in Johto?". Sounds childish, didn't it? But they're really happy and proud of themselves as they are able to answer those questions; so was I.

Then, since they have wireless internet at home, I had taught them how to use Wikipedia to search for more information on Pokémons. I told them, 'just add the name of any Pokémon behind "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/" and you shall have all the information you would want about the Pokémon'. They're really happy to know about it, I can say.

But now, it's all gone. Most of the pages are now redirected to lists of 20 Pokémons per page in Wikipedia. I can still see that Bulbasaur and Pikachu as well as a few other Pokémons survived the merge, but both were stripped off their Featured Article and Good Article status respectively, with Bulbasaur going down to B-class and is still in discussion whether to be closed or not. Pikachu was recently renominated as Good Article but it's just a matter of time before the title is stripped off again. Torchic and Mudkip, on the other hand, an example of Featured Article and Good Article classes articles before the merge, were totally removed and merged into one of the lists without even a mention being a former FA/GA.

See what I mean?

People are saying that Bulbapedia is still there and it also contain quite an amount of information. Personally, I don't use Bulbapedia and I don't plan on using it either, yet.

However, I notice something fishy behind all this. I heard a rumor that the house of the webmaster of a prominent Pokémon website, Pokémon Palace Network (better known to visitors simply as PPN), has been raided by the US government at the request of Pokémon USA. His possession were seized, including a Nintendo DS, and the reason given for it was due to "copyright infrignment". Got this rumor from Bulbapedia as well. The writer has said that it is wise to be skeptical as other Pokémon fansites are not going anywhere.

Humph. I can see Pokémon articles disappearing away from Wikipedia. Now, should I continue to be skeptical? But I guess what he meant was that his Bulbapedia can be an alternative to those article in Wikipedia. We'll see. Who knows whether Bulbapedia would go down anytime soon? Time will tell.

Feel free to tell me something I don't know. I'll give you credits.

Edit: I found out that even Digimon articles are having the same fate as Pokémon!

Let me start by congratulating Nayuki to have qualified for the second round in Group B just now!

Then, let me go into the main topic of this article.

( Read more... )

Edit: As far as I can see, Ben was "one of the few runner-ups" and not "the winner of the second place". This is a mistake. And on the other hand, there's only 3 comments and not 4 as previously stated, from 2 different IPs. My apologies for the mistake. It was my birthday on 3rd of July and I was in a rush to go out for dinner.

Last week I read about that a Malaysian had won the second place of Japan's 1st 'Manga Nobel Prize' on a local newspaper. "Yay" was my only thought at the moment since someone from Malaysia could actually win the prize. The newspaper did not stated the manga's title so I just blah-ed.

However when I read this, everything that I have thought of changed. The Malaysian Manga that won the second place was actually Le.Gardenie by Ben which was featured in the Gempak Manga Magazine which I had reviewed last year! I was surprised to see several comments on the post all of a sudden just now when I checked my email inbox. 4 comments from 3 different IP in just one day! One of the commenters had even wrongly thought that I was Ben!

Congratulatons, Ben! Way to go! Prove that we Malaysians are also able to produce high quality mangas!