With all the craziness of starting a new job, I haven’t been able to update much this week, so it’s all getting lumped into one big update. Going from having basically unlimited free time to only a few short hours after work has been quite an adjustment.

Work is going well and now I have a fairly good idea of what I’ll be doing once I get done with the training. Everyone on my team seems really nice, although everyone is fairly young. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve seen a single person with gray hair at NI except for Dr. T, the co-founder. It’s pretty crazy, almost like going to college again. It does make it easier to get to know people though because they are around your age and have the same interests.

We went and saw Red vs Blue season one at the Alamo Drafthouse on Friday night. It was pretty cool, before the show there were a few games of Halo played on the movie screen. Then after the show a couple of the guys that do the voice acting were there and did a Q&A. Overall, it was a good waste of the wee hours of Saturday morning, since the show didn’t start until 12:30 or so. Who needs sleep anyway?

The big news in anime is the third Inuyasha movie is out. It’s actually very good quality and it’s got a pretty good plot. Plus there is a LOT of Sesshoumaru in this film, so that never hurts. <fangirl raving> I mean damn, even his voice is hot! ;) </fangirl raving> Like the other two movies, I believe a different studio animated this film than the studio that does the TV episodes, since the movie has a slightly different look to it. On a separate but related note, the other two movies are supposed to be out in the US (selected cities in theaters) on DVD later this year. Two movies is about all I can afford from the Inuyasha series. Viz is trying to get rich off this series alone, I think. If you calculate it up at the official 3 episodes per $25 DVD it’s $1333. [160/3 * 25] And the series is not even finished yet. Yikes!

If you’re having trouble getting the .mkv to play with the software included with the movie, download Windows Media Player Classic and the full Matroska Pack from the Matroska download page. It has slightly more than the bare minimum, but it works. I had problems getting it to work with the files included, but this solution fixed everything.

The third Inuyasha movie has finally been fan-subbed!! I have no idea how the quality is, since I just found it and have not had a chance to download and watch it. However, it is a joint project from two groups that always do a pretty good job: SaiyaMan and IY4Ever. IY4Ever’s site appears to be missing, but you can find the torrent at SaiyaMan’s BT page. Remember, since this is a 1.5 gig file, to leave your Bittorrent windows open for as long as possible after you get the file. You can still watch the movie while Bittorrent is running. Now go forth and download!

Now that I’m back in Austin it’s time for a slew of updates. Slew. What a great word. Anyway, lots of things happened while I was stuck in the land of the very slow internet.

SideTrack is one of the first things I noticed. For those of you using SideTrack 0.8, you’ve probably noticed that the beta ran out and it’s no longer working. You need to grab 0.9 which has a couple minor bug fixes but mostly just extends the expiration until the end of November. If you don’t know what SideTrack is, see my previous review.

Chrno Crusade has ended at episode 24. Both Animeforever and Anime-Kraze have already subbed the last episode and it’s available for download. As endings go, it’s alright, but it’s not what I was hoping for. I can’t say more without giving away some major spoilers, so you’ll just have to watch it for yourself. If you enjoyed this series, and have money, you should buy the official DVDs when they (probably) come out later this year from ADV Films. One thing to note, ADV changed the name to Chrono Crusade for the US release.

Samurai Champloo has been subbed up to episode five. So far the show is pretty entertaining, but there hasn’t been a lot of development on the main “sunflower samurai” story line. However, it’s definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already. Animeforever is still subbing it but it looks like Anime-Kraze has either dropped it or is just really far behind.

A new anime series is out in Japan called Samurai 7. It’s loosely based on the old black and white movie, “Seven Samurai” by Akira Kurosawa. Surprisingly enough, I’ve actually seen part of the movie, but not really enough to do comparisons with the anime. The first episode of the anime is pretty good, although it’s mostly story introduction and setup. Anime-Kraze and InuYasha4Ever (as well as others, I’m sure) are subbing it, and though InuYasha4Ever already has episode 2 out, they are apparently having trouble with their bittorrent tracker.

I start working next Monday. Yay! The only sad thing is that Tuesday is my birthday. Oh well, can’t have everything.

AnimeForever just released Samurai Champloo episode two. Right now their irc bots are pretty swamped but the torrent is ok. Head over to their new site at animeforever.org and hit their downloads page to find the torrent. If you are watching the Anime-Kraze version, it should probably be out sometime soon as well and a couple of other sites have picked up the show if you don’t like either of those versions. :) Head to downloadanime.org and do a search to find who’s subbing it.

If you aren’t watching Samurai Champloo and you think you might like it, there is an official site at SamuraiChamploo.com. The site is in Japanese, but the main section names are in English, so navigating isn’t too hard. If you have the evil RealPlayer installed, then you can watch a trailer. Otherwise, you can check out the gallery to see the animation style. If you really want to know what the site says, you can always use babelfish to translate it, just beware that it does a pretty terrible job.

Samurai Champloo just came out in Japan last week and, in fact, today is when episode two should be showing. Samurai Champloo is the latest series from Shinichiro Watanabe. Why should you care? Well he is also the writer/director of the Cowboy Bebop series, which if you haven’t seen yet, you should definitely check it out (try Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim).

Anyway, two of the fansub groups I keep up with are currently subbing the series. Animeforever was the first one that actually came out, followed shortly by Anime-Kraze. These two subs are actually quite different–Animeforever’s sub seems more refined and definitely contains less cursing while Anime-Kraze’s sub seems more gritty and probably closer to what the characters are actually saying (lots of cursing). When it comes down to it, I prefer the sub from Animeforever, but I encourage everyone with lots of bandwidth to download both and decide for yourself.

About the actual show–it’s good! This will surprise you if you watch the intro which is horrible. The english opening song is pseudo-rap and pretty bad, so don’t judge the show based on the opening. The animation style is darker and murkier than what I generally watch, but some people will argue this is the true anime style. The show sort of reminds me of Cowboy Bebop in the animation department but the flow is fun and crazy like FLCL, although this ends up making a lot more sense than FLCL ever did. ;)

The bittorent tracker page for Animeforever can be found here and the one for Anime-Kraze can be found here, also both sites have channels on irc.rizon.net (alt. server: irc.rizon.org) with really fast xdcc bots. I can download an episode in under ten minutes from irc and it’s only that long because that is the max of my cable modem speed (this becomes untrue when new episodes are released and the bots are swamped, just a warning). If you don’t know how to use irc to download stuff, there are a couple of good guides available: guide one and guide two.

Edit: Updated Animeforever’s links to point to the new site at Animeforever.org.