Madrid.- Tras tres exitosas temporadas en la televisión, el ninja justiciero del Siglo de Oro, "Águila Roja", amplía sus aventuras a la gran pantalla en una película que, con el mismo equipo que la serie pero con nuevos fichajes como Martina Klein o Antonio Molero, asaltará las pantallas el 20 de abril.

Con seis millones de euros de presupuesto, seis semanas y media de rodaje y un director conocedor de las tramas televisivas, José Ramón Ayerra, este "Águila Roja. La película" abrió hoy sus alas en Madrid en una presentación con 17 miembros del equipo para presentar una trama independiente a la de la serie, en la que el héroe tiene serios problemas para compatibilizar sus hazañas con su papel de padre.

"Es un conflicto que no se da en la serie o al menos no de manera tan ampliada: elegir si quiere poner el acento en su vida familiar o en la de héroe", explica David Jener, rostro -y también cuerpo- de este héroe creado para el mundo catódico y que tiene "ADN español", según el productor Daniel Écija.

A ese conflicto central, en el que su hijo sufrirá las peores consecuencias, se suma la difícil situación que vive la España del siglo XVII, cuyo rey Felipe VI se enfrenta a una conspiración por parte de Portugal, Inglaterra, Francia y el Vaticano.

Cine de aventuras con toque local, entonces, en el que Águila Roja, con su katana de ninja y la ayuda de unos "desgraciados que tienen la oportunidad de ser héroes", en palabras de Écija, intentará poner orden entre tanta intriga palaciega, ejercer de padre viudo y, a su vez, abrirse de nuevo a la atracción física que siente por Beatriz, a quien interpreta la modelo Martina Klein.

"Las primeras veces nunca se olvidan", ha comentado la modelo, presentadora y ahora también actriz, que debuta en la gran pantalla con este título y ha agradecido a sus compañeros haberle dejado, pese a su calidad de novata, "acaparar el papel de chica de la película más de lo que yo hubiera querido".

Efectivamente, la mayor parte del reparto de "Águila Roja. La película" es heredado de la serie: además de Janer, Javier Gutiérrez asume la parte más pícara y berlanguiana como Satur, Inma Cuesta asume la nobleza de Margarita, Francis Lorenzo es el comisario, y Miryan Gallego insiste en las trapisondas amorosas de la marquesa.

Roberto Álamo -quien interpreta al médico- está más acostumbrado a mostrar su faceta más intelectual sobre los escenarios para las obras de la compañía Animalario o actualmente en "Un tranvía llamado deseo", pero ha reconocido que aunque no es muy fan del cine de aventuras, se emocionó viendo el resultado final de la película.

"Se me puso la piel de gallina y tuve que disimular la lagrimilla", ha confesado, a pesar de que, según su compañero, Javier Gutiérrez -también en el teatro ahora con "Woyzeck"- es "cine de palomitas, sin rubor".

"Es cine como el de Errol Flynn y espero que la gente mayor, como mi madre, que ve la serie y no va al cine desde hace muchos años, se anime para ver 'Águila Roja'", ha añadido Gutiérrez.

Para el director de la película, a pesar de tener ese equipo ya conocido, ha sido "un gran reto" en el que, aunque ampliaron la duración del metraje y el rodaje, las cosas se complicaron. "Queríamos contar tantas cosas que hemos ido con el agua al cuello", ha asegurado.

Águila Roja, que también edita estos días una colección de libros de "Elige tu propia aventura", tendrá como película su prueba de fuego el 20 de abril, víspera de Semana Santa y día en el que llega a los cines.

"Estamos expectantes y creemos que es un regalo para los seguidores de la serie", ha dicho el director. Écija, por su parte, ha añadido que "no existe una regla matemática para llenar un patio de butacas", pero que el equipo "lo ha puesto todo" en un filme realizado "con la mejor arma que tenemos: la seriedad", ha concluido.

Mateo Sancho Cardiel

Today's highlights:

• Valve is releasing a Portal comic tomorrow filling in the series' backstory.
• A Mass Effect anime movie is coming next year.
• New details on the in-development SSX game, which is no longer called Deadly Descents.
• Comedy Central is getting into the game-making business.
• Get in shape like a UFC fighter.
• This Guy Makes Awesome Video Game Props

GameStop Begins Selling Games Through Facebook

Reddit is a thriving online community which often surfaces memes as well as questionable content.

Christopher Poole, a.k.a. Moot, founded 4chan, the mother of all memes-and-controversy boards, and has a startup to promote, called Canvas, which is basically "4chan with its pants on."

So Moot went on Reddit and started a thread to let the community interview him.

You can read the whole thread but we've decided to take the best bits, and edit them into an easier to read Q&A format.

Reddit: How old were you when you invented 4chan?

Moot: I was 15 years old when I founded 4chan.

Reddit: How did 4chan get started?

Moot: On the day it was founded, 4chan was posted to the anime sub-forum of [huge forum] Something Awful and so many of the first users from from there, but the site itself is 100% based on a Japanese site called Futaba Channel, or 2chan.net.

Futaba Channel is in turn based on 2channel, which is a huge text BBS that's inspired a lot of the anonymous and otaku culture in Japan.

I had the opportunity to meet 2channel's founder, Hiroyuki Nishimura at SXSW Interactive this year, and it was a real treat.

Reddit: What made 4chan so popular?

Moot: The community. 4chan's culture is unique and spreads and draws people in like no other. It's also important to realize that 4chan wasn't some overnight success, and there was never "hockey stick"-like growth. Its growth has been entirely organic (we've never advertised, past posting it on day one to IRC and a forum), and has been a slow steady build over seven and a half years.

Reddit: How have you gotten away with hosting a site that consistently has child pornography posted on it? Have there been serious attempts to shut it down? How is the site monitored - do you forward illegal material and IP info to the FBI?

Moot: 4chan gets almost one million posts per day, hundreds of thousands of which are images. As with any large [user-generated content] site a very, very small percentage of these posts end up being contraband or questionable content. We have a team of volunteers who do an excellent job removing prohibited content, including [child pornography], which is then automatically reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline.

NCMEC acts as a clearing house and forwards reports to the appropriate law enforcement. This is how all major ISPs and online service providers do it.

Reddit: Has anyone gotten arrested for posting illegal content?

Moot: Yes. Anyone who posts illegal content on 4chan is an idiot.

Do you ever feel bad about all the peoples lives who have been ruined due to the ruthless antics of the people on /b/?

Moot: Yes, it's extremely unfortunate and regrettable.

Reddit: Have you become 100 percent immune to the horrors of the internet over the years?

Moot: Not entirely, but there isn't much that fazes me at this point.

Reddit: How many people does 4chan employ?

Moot: None. It's just me, a volunteer part-time developer, and a handful of volunteer moderators and janitors. The volunteers all do an incredible job, and don't get nearly enough credit for their hard work. Hats off to them!

Reddit: What do you think, 10 years from now, the lasting cultural legacy of 4chan will be?

Moot: That it shaped 'Net and [real life] culture in a way that few other communities/websites have.

Reddit: What aspects of 4chan do you wish people knew more about?

Moot: [That infamous troll-board /b/ isn't the same thing as 4chan] but also that the "15 year old hacker nerd" stereotype isn't very accurate. People often confuse the entire 4chan community with /b/. We have ~50 boards, all with their own amazing sub-communities and cultures. And tons of normal, functional people use the site. Our (first!) meetup at Barcade a few months ago was proof of that—everyone who showed up was extremely sociable, nice, and we all had a great time.

Reddit: Has anyone ever recognised you on the street?

Moot: Yes, it happens regularly, depending on where I walk. Areas with lots of college students/young people can be a minefield, so I tend to avoid them.

Next: Everything about his latest startup Canvas and the future of online identity →

Reddit: Can you explain Canvas to us. What is it for and what makes it different?

Moot: Canvas is a place to share and play with images. We're trying to reimagine forums in a world where everyone has a fast, modern browser.

Where are we now? The site is a fast paced collaborative image editing community. Post a fun picture and within minutes there will be multiple remixes of it. Sticker the ones you like. The frontpage works a lot like Reddit but with stickers for upvotes.

Where are we going? More realtime. Much more discussion. More image editing features. More types of content on the site. Better ways for groups to share and have conversations together.

What we've launched so far represents just a kernel of the long-term vision we have for the site, and we're extremely excited to grow the community and explore what's in store!

Something that's central to Canvas is the idea of "play." We love media and the idea that nothing is set in stone any more—and not just text—but photo, video, and audio is all interactive, malleable, and participatory. Think 4chan, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Reddit user FractalIP added this, which hits the nail on the head: I think the best description I've heard is "4chan with pants on", which is pretty much spot on. It's very similar to 4chan at it's core, but it has a few things which set it apart, such as a much, much better design, the ability to tag ("sticker") posts and a built-in image editor. Quite an awesome place, I must say. Oh, and monocles. S---loads of monocles.

Reddit: Do you think the forum medium is on its way out?

Moot: I think you'll see some radical changes in the future. The medium just can't hold, since it hasn't changed for decades. Canvas is our attempt to re-imagine them, starting with a focus on media-sharing.

Reddit: On Facebook and whether anonimity is on its way out:

Moot: I want the public to understand the importance of having the option to contribute anonymously. At SXSW, I focused on anonymous authenticity, and the creativity that anonymity allows for. The ability to fail quietly without having that failure associated with your name/identity allows for more experimentation and limit pushing. People also contribute in a totally raw, unfiltered way, that I'd argue is more authentic than real-ID.

That said, there are times where you do want to know who that other person is, and where real-ID is preferable. A good example is news websites and YouTube, where the comment quality is often terrible.

So to sum it up: There isn't one way of doing anything. I'm not saying everywhere online should be anonymous, nor do I think everywhere should use read-ID. I just want options! And for people to understand how valuable anonymity can be, and why it's worth protecting.

Facebook does social really well, but continues to fail at community.

Reddit: Would you fight Mark Zuckerberg to the death?

Moot: I've met Mark a couple times, and we've messaged before. Every interaction has been positive. I don't agree with everything Facebook does or his stance on identity, but he's a nice and extremely smart guy who believes in what he's doing.

Click here for the whole thread →

Don't Miss:

• REVEALED: Inside 4chan Founder Moot's Secretive Startup Canvas →
• THE SEEDY SIDE OF REDDIT: Porn, Racism And Nazi Memorabilia →

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• 4chan Founder Moot's New Startup Canvas Goes (Semi) Public
• Mark Suster On Why He's "Very Long Twitter", What Silicon Valley Is "Hypocritical" About And Much More
• THE SEEDY SIDE OF REDDIT: Porn, Racism, And Nazi Memorabilia

Japanese animators had tried to address fears of the force of nature long before last month's earthquake struck

In September 2008, Hayao Miyazaki, the author of Spirited Away, attended the Venice festival to present his most recent full-length film, Ponyo. In this city so closely connected with the sea, the Japanese director explained why he chose to end the film with a tsunami, and why the Japanese celebrate nature in spite of its destructive power.

"There are many typhoons and earthquakes in Japan," he said. "There is no point in portraying these natural disasters as evil events. They are one of the givens in the world in which we live. I am always moved when I visit Venice to see that in this city which is sinking into the sea, people carry on living regardless. It is one of the givens of their life. In the same way people in Japan have a different perception of natural disasters."

True enough, in Miyazaki's animated films nature dictates its terms on mankind. Ultimately the tsunami in Ponyo is beneficial for the country it wrecks, which with its ageing population and small coastal towns closely resembles the real Japan. But not all the pictures in Japanese films, whether animated or not, are underpinned by such environmentally aware animistic harmony.

In most feature films the sea round Japan is a deadly enemy, stirred by subterranean forces. Alain Schlockoff, who organised the Paris Fantastic Film festival for many years and now edits L'Ecran Fantastique, a specialist magazine, was particularly impressed by Tidal Wave, a 1974 science fiction movie that caused a sensation in Japan. Based on Nihon Chinbotsu, a disaster novel by Sakyo Komatsu, the story hinged on the disappearance of the archipelago due to tsunamis and volcanic eruptions caused by shifting tectonic plates. "Japanese film technicians are very good at building scale models and the pictures in the film were exactly like what we have just seen," says Schlockoff. It was remade in 2006, as The Submersion of Japan, testimony to the enduring appeal of such nightmares.

Since 1945 and the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the awareness of the threat from the natural environment has been compounded by fear of nuclear war. The manga Barefoot Gen in Hiroshima was made into a film, but most cartoons depict the cities' destruction without explaining the cause. A typical example is the 2001 anime Metropolis, loosely based on Fritz Lang's eponymous work. Similarly Steamboy, by Katsuhiro Otomo, is set in a parallel world where neither the internal combustion engine nor nuclear power have been invented. Technology does, however, represent a deadly hazard for the community.

The approach to these disasters is not so much premonitory. It is more a way of exorcising fears. Godzilla is the oldest instance, and the most famous. The monster was born in 1954, less than 10 years after the atom bombs, at the Toho studios, where a statue still stands. The giant lizard came into existence following experiments by American nuclear scientists. It was sufficiently powerful, tough and radioactive to destroy the whole of Tokyo and unlike King Kong prompted no sympathy at all, just terror.

The film was such a success that about 30 follow-ups were made. In 1998, Hollywood commissioned Roland Emmerich to shoot a remake. In this version the mutation was caused by French nuclear tests in the Pacific. Yet another remake is on the way.

Japan's nightmares are contagious. On 8 March, the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro announced that he was starting work on Pacific Rim, in which a fault in the ocean floor releases swarms of monstrous creatures that destroy Tokyo and Los Angeles. But some doubt the project will ever happen, given the fearful reality of the disaster that has now struck Japan. Watching the pictures on television Schlockoff admits to feeling "somehow ashamed at having enjoyed these films". They were, after all, a chilling premonition, not an exorcism.

Driven by destruction

Apocalyptic events, regardless of the form they take, are a central theme in mangas such as Ken the Survivor, Akira or Neon Genesis Evangelion. The threat of an earthquake or tsunami appears in many series, serving as a driving force in the narrative, a backdrop to romance or a remote starting point justifying the existence of a post-disaster world.

The theme is also tied up with the various forms mangas may take, depending on their readership, with seinen, for adult readers, addressing "serious" topics, shojo for young women, shonen for their male counterparts and a host of other sub-genres.

In Tokyo Mew Mew, a lightweight story for girls, the main character acquires magical powers and a feline appearance after an earthquake. At the other extreme Tokyo Magnitude 8 offers a realistic account of the consequences of a massive quake that devastates the archipelago. A fairly conventional rite of passage, the story centres on two survivors in the ruins of a man-made island wrecked by the tremor, but also describes rescue operations in considerable detail.

Spirit of the Sun, by Kaiji Kawaguchi, is an outstanding manga, which starts with a gigantic quake, so severe it breaks Honshu, the largest island of Japan, in two. A tsunami follows, devastating what remains of the country. Under the pretence of providing humanitarian aid, the Chinese army takes over what soon becomes North Japan, whereas the US army occupies the south.

Though at first sight a fairly typical example of the post-disaster genre, Spirit of the Sun offers a critical view of Japan in the 2000s, using its description of the living conditions of Japanese refugees in Taiwan to make barely veiled allusions to the strict immigration policies enforced by the government in Tokyo.

Although earthquakes and tsunamis are recurrent motifs in many books and films, they are far from neutral. Publication of X, a fantasy inspired by the Bible, in particular the Apocalypse, was suspended for several months in 1995. Its recurrent tremors, purportedly announcing the imminent end of the world, upset many readers at a time when Kobe had just been hit by an earthquake that claimed nearly 6,500 lives.

Several similar series are likely to be suspended in the near future. On television the rerun of an anime version of Tokyo Magnitude 8 has already been shelved, and other animes containing tsunami sequences have met a similar fate or are being rewritten. Damien Deloup

These articles originally appeared in Le Monde

Medium: TV Anime (26 episodes)
Genres: Adventure, Fantasy, Military, Science Fiction
Director: Koichi Chigira
Studio: GONZO
Release Date: Apr. 7 – Sep. 29, 2003 (JP – TV Tokyo), Nov. 18, 2003 (Geneon/FUNimation – NA)
Rated: Not Rated

Ed. Note: Welcome to the second of our four "Anime Secret Santa Reviews." Our reviewers were given review requests as gifts from their Secret Santas, and are now unveiling their opinions of the shows they chose. For more information, check out our 2010 Anime Secret Santa introductory post.

You know you're in for a polarizing show when one of the biggest pieces of praise people can give is "it's one of the few shows by this studio that's actually worth watching!" Unfortunately for anime studio GONZO (Gankutsuou, Welcome to the NHK, Linebarrels of Iron), that's basically the compliment granted to any relatively successful series that they create, and for better or for worse, Last Exile (2003) sits among this short list of "not terrible" GONZO series.

The show begins in a vaguely steampunk era in which giant airships have become the primary tool of war. Our heroes are two young pilots who make their living as couriers on the wings of their small fighter plane-esque craft called a "vanship." Claus Valca is a quiet, kindly pilot with a penchant for finishing everything he starts, while Lavie is his hot-headed, impetuous, and intelligent navigator. As the guy piloting the vanship, Claus is naturally the hero GONZO chooses to focus on, while Lavie serves simultaneously as his childhood friend, romantic interest, and moral compass.

These two couriers are living a simple life in the shadows of their legendary fathers (couriers who flew together until their untimely deaths) when they find themselves tasked with transporting a young girl named Alvis to the "Kill 'Em All" Silvana, a notorious mercenary airship thought to suck the souls out of anyone who comes aboard. After narrowly escaping attacks from the Guild, a shadowy organization that exerts subtle control over all the world's militaries and governments, the two vanship operators end up joining the Silvana's not-so-scary crew in a mysterious mission to strike the very heart of the Guild.

On paper, Last Exile seems like an exhilarating modern military tale, set in the skies of a unique world bound by strange rules — and it almost is, too. Unfortunately, GONZO's execution is painfully uneven, to the point that I often wondered if the writers knew where they were going when they created the original concept. The story is roughly split into three acts: 1) introduction of major cast and factions, 2) the Silvana wanders around doing things and battling some people, and 3) final confrontation with the Guild. As you might be able to guess, the second act features no central narrative or even an attempt at a formula (which would have made it much easier to follow). Instead the characters just meet a few unrelated challenges and overcome them, all the while developing ever so slightly as both individual characters and as a team.

Unfortunately, that individual development often leads to dead ends, as with two of the show's seemingly important romantic threads that simply die out before the introduction of the third act. The overall development of the cast, however, is one of the Last Exile's defining characteristics. The sense of cohesion between the Silvana's crew might not be apparent at first, but the motley crew of pilots, mechanics, and bridge personnel really start to feel like one big team by the end of the series. The most apt comparison that comes to my mind is original Gundam, though Last Exile certainly doesn't pull it off quite that well.

Despite the compelling sense of overall camaraderie, some of the individual characters can get truly grating after 26 episodes. Let's start with Claus: his personality is so meek and boring that he is effectively the same as any of the cookie-cutter protagonists in harem anime. Underscoring this unfortunate truth is his harem of girls, including Lavie, Alvis, the cold-hearted pilot Tatiana, and even the strong-willed Vice Captain Sophia. To make matters worse, Tatiana turns into a mushy little lovestruck schoolgirl when Claus so much as lends her his jacket, and Sophia's romantic encounter comes from so far in left field that you'll likely be throwing things at your screen in frustration. To be honest, by episode 15 I was convinced that Last Exile was a harem show in disguise.

Meanwhile, there are a few characters who really shine despite their disappointing company. Alex Row, the stoic captain of the Silvana, rocks all kinds of socks with his grumpy demeanor and tortured past, but cracks begin to show in his emotional armor as we learn more about his history and see him lose control near the end of the show. Dio (no, not that one) and Lucciola, two runaways from the Guild who join up with the Silvana, and Mullin Shetland, a musketeer-turned-mechanic, provide an interesting counterpoint to the rest of the crew as outsiders coping with the stress of turning away from their previous loyalties. On the bad guy's side, the sinister Guild leader Maestro Delphine comes off as a poisonously sweet version of Gundam's Haman Karn.

But as far as I'm concerned, the real star of Last Exile is Lavie Head, Claus's energetic navigator. Originally she seems like nothing more than an obligatory bossy love interest, but by episode 8 or so it is clear that her personality reaches depths far beyond those of her lame childhood friend. Even when she decides that she doesn't want to be Claus's navigator as long as he is flying in combat (a brave and unexpected decision that throws a fascinating wrench in the works), she remains one of the most well-developed members of the crew. Lavie feels with a magnitude that nobody else in the show does, careening between nurturing love for Alvis, passionate concern for Claus, and unexpected bravery in the face of danger. Through it all, she manages to be both completely admirable and believably flawed, a feat that I'm frankly surprised GONZO managed to pull off so well.

While Japanese voice actor Chiwa Saito's performance as Lavie certainly gets the job done, Kari Wahlgren truly makes the role her own. Especially compared to Johnny Yong Bosch's typically overwrought Claus, Wahlgren's Lavie is always believable, no matter where she is on the emotional spectrum. In terms of the rest of the English cast, despite some clunky deliveries they mostly stack up well, especially thanks to spot-on Japanese-to-English voice matching by Bang Zoom.

Nearly all of the technology in the show (intricately researched and designed by character designer Range Murata and Gankutsuou's Mahiro Maeda) is animated using GONZO's notorious CG style, which only rarely blends with the two-dimensional character animation used throughout. Movement is also irritatingly choppy during the fight scenes, undercutting the clear quality of the original concepts. The skilled 2-D animators who realized Murata and Maeda's beautiful character and costume designs likely could have transformed most of the storyboards for the battle scenes into thrilling dogfights, but as it stands the 3-D fights are merely passable (though GONZO gets points for including ZERO Gundam-style monologues or pilot-to-pilot arguments during fights).

While I don't usually comment on such things, Last Exile's sound design is actually one of its greatest strengths. The sound effects used to represent the creaking and turning of machinery and the movements of the wind are far more visceral (and frequent) than the effects used in most other anime. This, combined with Maeda and Murata's unique and complex designs for clothing and machinery, makes for a lot of fascinating world-building potential. Unfortunately, spotty explanations of the factions and technologies often make it difficult to understand who is fighting whom and for what reasons. By the time the series reaches its exciting finale, it might still take a Wikipedia visit or two to understand just what was going on in the skies of Claus and Lavie's world.

Last Exile, like many GONZO series before it, is a valuable lesson in wasted potential. It's clear that the concept designers put a lot of work into the series during pre-production, and the animators' love for their material shines through in rare moments that belie Last Exile's most glaring flaw, which is that it doesn't really say or do very much with its own material. In the end, the exquisite presentation, the attempts at world-building, and the moments of genuine humanity come together to produce a work that is nothing more than the sum of its parts. We are left with a vaporous story about people in airships who fight each other.

[Passable]

This review is based on the Hulu streams (both dub and sub) of the series, provided by FUNimation.

The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net.

Public media is facing the same pressures as commercial media when it comes to digital: How can they transition to a new age of social media, collaboration and audience interaction? From today until Thanksgiving, MediaShift will have a special in-depth report on Public Media 2.0, with analysis, case studies, a 5Across video roundtable and coverage of this weekend's national PubCamp in Washington, DC.

Public broadcasters have been facing intense heat this fall, from dodging flak after the Juan Williams firing to rebutting calls to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to defending the diversity of their news programming. But the negative coverage often misses a deeper story -- of the transition of this sector to a more innovative and varied set of Public Media 2.0 organizations that are finding fresh ways to network with users, partners and one another.

Over the past year here in the Public MediaShift section, Center for Social Media researchers and practitioners from the field have been covering varied public media experiments -- including youth media, government transparency tools, community-level collaboration and a converged national newsroom. These explorations reveal five emerging trends that are helping to reshape and broaden the public media sector so that it can better inform and engage users.

1) Learning to COPE

Adopting a COPE strategy -- "create once, publish everywhere" -- is making public media more modular and flexible.

"I don't know about you," CPB's vice president of digital strategy Rob Bole told the audience at a FedTalks event in mid-October, "but my life is split between my home, the train, work, meetings, going back on the train, playing with my kids, paying bills, and actually trying to spend some time and converse with my wife. So, I need a public media that is built for me -- that continues to be essential, to help me navigate through troubled times, to be interesting and surprising, but built for my somewhat crazy life."

Here's a video of Bole's talk:

Bole went on to explain how public broadcasting organizations are repurposing content for distribution across multiple mobile and digital platforms to reach people where they are.

Breaking content into portable digital pieces is in turn powering other capabilities. For example, the newly redesigned PBS site offers greater visibility for local content by providing a shared platform for video exchange between stations and national producers.

In the long run, aggregating locally produced content online will increase users' access to a rich supply of diverse stories and perspectives, along with cultural and historical gems that rarely appear on commercial broadcast outlets. "There's something there for everyone," Bole said.

Similarly, public access TV centers are developing the Community Media Distribution Network, which allows for content sharing and archiving of citizen and independent productions -- an often-overlooked source of grassroots public media. If all goes as planned, both independent media and public broadcasting from previous decades will also be made available to both users and outlets through the American Archive project -- a sort of COPE-retrieval mission.

This is a complex and daunting multi-year undertaking that will involve hundreds of stations and digitization of materials across both analog and digital platforms. An analysis of the scope for the project, released in June, laid out the steps and related challenges.

2) Sharing Knowledge with Peers

Registration now is maxed out for this weekend's second annual Public Media Camp, which the Center for Social Media is organizing with NPR, PBS and iStrategy Labs. Organized by their attendees, PubCamps are designed to help public broadcasters, tech developers and public media users share best practices and work together on community engagement projects.

Several local PubCamps have taken place at stations around the country since last October. The gatherings are proving to be valuable opportunities for trend-spotting within the field, and venues for introducing stations to national platforms, tools, and funding sources. Proposed sessions so far address tips for sustainable collaboration, previews of coming apps, such as the one from PBS' "Antiques Road Show," and suggestions for what public media makers can learn from anime fandom.

NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin, who has been central to organizing the events, said more than 300 people have registered for this weekend, representing 40 different public media organizations.

"Public media has a long tradition of public support, especially in terms of people making donations to their local station," Carvin told me. "With PubCamp, we're working with stations to develop new ways for them to engage people who want to become even more involved, donating their expertise to help strengthen the station's role in the community. I'm most excited about the fact that the majority of attendees won't be staff -- they'll be people around the country who simply care a lot about public media, and are willing to donate their time to help us in one way or another."

The PubCamps reflect a broader surge in journalism-related unconferences, such as the Media Consortium's Independent Media Mobile Hackathon, or the numerous participatory meetings hosted by Journalism That Matters. These events incubate new projects by connecting attendees first face-to-face and then through an array of social networking tools. The flow of participants across the various gatherings and platforms is bringing fresh approaches and constructive critique to a previously cloistered sector.

3) Boosting Community Engagement

Peer learning has proven to be particularly popular in the area of engagement -- a fast-growing but controversial priority for public media makers still adjusting to expectations for greater participation and interaction set by social media. Public engagement has been built into the DNA of community access centers for decades, through production training and ascertainment processes designed to figure out communities' information needs. But public broadcasting stations often feel trapped in a double bind: They are simultaneously expected to provide "balanced" news and analysis, and to actively involve users in civic issues.

To the rescue comes the CPB-funded National Center for Media Engagement (NCME), which has been hosting a series of webinars that bring producers, station staff and online innovators together to discuss engagement experiments and opportunities. Accompanied by lively sidebar chats among attendees, the webinars offer real-time snapshots of effective projects in process.

For example, one featured the Wisconsin Public Television's Vietnam veterans "welcome home" event, a multi-platform model for engaging tens of thousands of local veterans who felt alienated by their stateside reception. The project grew from veterans' strong responses to a documentary, War Stories, and now several other stations have hosted or plan to host related events. Portraits and oral histories from the veterans are available here along with transcripts, related maps, educational resources, the full documentary, excerpts from the companion book, and a digital honor roll of Wisconsin vets who died in Vietnam.

By capturing and analyzing the stories of such successful engagement projects, the NCME hopes to provide both inspiration and concrete prototypes. They offer a related guide, along with training and fundraising resources, to support public media outlets in such efforts. Staffers are actively reaching out to producers from other sectors for lessons and models; they recently announced that they'd partner with the Integrated Media Association, which is hosting a track at the next South by Southwest Interactive Festival for public media makers.

4) Building Strategic Partnerships

"Collaboration" is a rising buzzword in public media circles, but finding successful ways to match projects, capacity and strategies is not always easy. In a December MediaShift piece, Amanda Hirsch laid out some of the complexities, including getting buy-in from top managers at each partner organization, assigning staff to the collaboration project itself, and establishing formal communication channels.

"Don't assume that working together means saving time -- that's not the value proposition of collaboration," she wrote. "The value proposition is about quality."

For these reasons, it's often easier to start with time-limited collaborations with clearly defined outcomes. In Philadelphia, such an approach will be tested via the Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Awards. Announced in late October, the awards are supported by the William Penn Foundation and administered by J-Lab. Fourteen projects received grants of $5,000 each, designed to both support in-depth reporting projects and to explore whether it's possible to connect the "silos of journalism throughout the city." The idea is to provide more entry points to expose news consumers to public affairs content and "create a 'knowledge network' among the region's news initiatives, so they can add to, amplify, link to or broadcast news that is being created but that their niche audiences might not otherwise come across," according to the Awards site.

Public broadcasting station WHYY is involved in three of these projects -- Anatomy of a School Turnaround, in conjunction with the Philadelphia Public School Notebook; the Power Map of Philadelphia, in conjunction with the Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.com and an institute at the University of Pennsylvania; and ArtBlog Radio, in conjunction with theartblog.org. Two of the collaborations intersect with WHYY's newly launched NewsWorks project (more on that in tomorrow's piece on public broadcasting news experiments). Community media producers, including cable access station PhillyCam and media training center Scribe Video are also grantees, as well as digital citizen news projects such as Phawker.com and Metropolis.

Besides being interesting in their own right, this array of projects highlights the strengths and goals of various nodes in Philadelphia's news ecosystem, suggesting how non-commercial public media might help to fill key gaps.

5) Paying Attention to Policy

Historically, public broadcasters have lacked the resources, expertise or coordination to regularly track and intervene in the policy-making that supports them.

Public broadcasting ignores most media policy research, whether it originates in academia, think tanks or federal agencies, and it often seems out of touch with major national policy deliberations until too late. That disengagement is highly dangerous because it allows others to set the national legal and regulatory agenda for communications without assuring adequate policy attention to public-service, non-commercial and educational goals. Such policy initiatives also can negatively affect the funding and operating conditions of every public licensee.

However, two countervailing trends are now capturing the attention of both public broadcasters and the broader public media sector. On the one hand, a series of high-profile reports and agency hearings have proposed reforming public media and expanding funding as a corrective to the loss of reporting capacity across the country.

On the other hand, calls to cut or abolish public broadcasting are on the rise, both from members of the soon-to-be-Republican House and from President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (the commission on reducing the deficit).

Productive reform will be complex and contentious, but not impossible. As Steve Coll, the president of the New America Foundation, observed in the cover story of the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review:

The problem is that the media policies that govern us in 2010 -- a patchwork stitched from the ideas of Calvin Coolidge's Republican Party, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and Ronald Reagan's deregulatory wave -- have been overtaken by technological change.

From the country's founding, American media and journalism have been continually remade by technological innovation. Political pamphlets made room for industrially printed newspapers, which made room for the telegraph, which made room for radio, which made room for broadcast television, which made room for cable and satellite services, which made room for the World Wide Web, which is making room even as we read this for the Kindle, iPad, and mobile phone applications.

When such technological, industrial, and economic changes dislodge the assumptions underlying public policy, the smart response is to update and adjust policy in order to protect the public interest. And politically plausible reforms that would clearly serve the public are within reach. It is time to reboot the system.

These myriad political pressures are driving public media to a tipping point, in which the case for a new social contract with the public will either be made or will fail to convince. While the non-commercial and digital public media sector is larger than the public broadcasters, the broadcasters are the most well-funded and visible players. As Rowland suggests, it is time for them to step up, demonstrate vision, and tell their own story of the shift to Public Media 2.0.

Jessica Clark directs the Future of Public Media Project at American University's Center for Social Media, and is a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation.

The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

In a literary battle between vampires and werewolves, who will be victorious? You be the judge!

Play Family Feud: Vampires vs. Werewolves. Sink your fangs or teeth into the sumptuous Blood Bar. Compete for prizes in the Costume Contest or go for the gusto in the Howling Contest, if you dare. Enjoy Twilight sock-puppet theater, vampire and werewolf anime films, a Vampire Knight and Hellsing manga and anime discussion, and so much more.

For more information, call 512.974.9940.

For those lost in translation, Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage is a third-person beat-em-up based on the 1980s anime series that begot cartoons, animated features and (ta-dah!) video games. The central campaign follows the conquests of its titular hero, Ken, a battle-axe with a heart of gold and a thing for purple-haired ladies.

Gallery: Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage (10/1/10)

Continue reading Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage review: Going south

Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage review: Going south originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

This week brings Kinect to the 360, along with a bunch of Kinect related games. Also God Of War: Ghost of Sparta hits shelves, along with a special edition PSP-3000. On the Games side of things, we get the remake of Goldeneye and another Bond game, Blood Stone. Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage and Dragonball Z: Raging Blast 2 and PokePark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure to help sate your anime themed game hunger.

• James Bond 007: Blood Stone

• God of War: Ghost of Sparta
• Megamind: The Blue Defender
• PSP EyePet with Camera
• Ys: The Oath In Felghana

• Blood Drive
• Dragon Ball: Raging Blast 2
• Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage
• James Bond 007: Blood Stone

• Blood Drive
• Dragon Ball: Raging Blast 2
• Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage
• James Bond 007: Blood Stone
• Megamind: Ultimate Showdown
• Monopoly Streets
• Sonic Free Riders

-Kinect

• Adrenaline Misfits
• The Biggest Loser Ultimate Workout
• Dance Central
• DanceMasters
• Fighters Uncaged
• Kinect Joy Ride
• Kinect Sports
• Kinectimals
• MotionSports: Play For Real
• Your Shape Fitness Evolved

• Digging for Dinosaurs
• James Bond 007: Blood Stone
• James Bond 007: GoldenEye
• Jeopardy
• Megamind: The Blue Defender
• Minute to Win It
• Noah's Ark
• The Penguins Of Madagascar
• Petz Nursery 2
• Wheel of Fortune
• Witches & Vampires

• Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader: Back to School
• Babysitting Mama
• The Biggest Loser Challenge
• James Bond 007: Blood Stone
• James Bond 007: GoldenEye 007
• Jeopardy
• Megamind: Mega Team Unite
• PokePark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure
• Wheel of Fortune

20-year-old Zachary Adam Chesser, the guy who famously warned South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker about depicting the prophet Mohammed on their cartoon show, will plead guilty to (unrelated) terrorism charges in federal court today.

Chesser was on his way to Somalia in July, to join the terrorist group al-Shabab — the group responsible for pub-bombings in Uganda over the summer that killed 76 people — when FBI agents arrested him on charges of "providing material support to terrorists and distributing information about the construction of explosives." This didn't get him nearly as much attention as when he wrote online that the South Park creators could be killed for depicting Mohammed in a bear suit, prompting Comedy Central to censor the episode. But it finally got him arrested, and today he'll plead guilty to those July charges in an Alexandria, Virginia court.

How did Chesser even get into extremist Islam, by the way? You know, some girlfriend.

Childhood friends who knew Chesser at Oakton High School recalled him as "freakishly intelligent" and a fan of Japanese anime who played basketball and football as a freshman and rowed crew. He became interested in Islam after dating a fellow student his senior year.

[via Spencer Ackerman]

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Pulitzer-Winning Cartoonists Slam Comedy Central Over 'South Park' Censorship
• Meet Your New "American Idol" Judges: Steven Tyler And Jennifer Lopez
• Glenn Beck Wishes Jon Stewart And Stephen Colbert "Great Success" With Their Rallies Making Fun Of Him

La presente edición tiene un presupuesto de 50.000 euros y contará con más de 25 expositores

GRANADA, 7 (EUROPA PRESS)

El V Salón del Manga de Andalucía, que se celebrará del 12 al 14 de noviembre en Granada, estará centrado en el papel de la mujer como creadora de este género. Para ello, se hará un recorrido desde la visión de las primeras autoras de manga en Japón hasta la situación actual, con publicaciones españolas donde la mayoría de las autoras son féminas.

Así lo ha dado a conocer el coordinador del Instituto Andaluz de la Juventud, Guillermo Quero, durante la presentación del cartel que pondrá imagen al Salón del Manga de este año, elaborado por la dibujante granadina Belén Ortega, la cual ha desarrollado para la ocasión un trabajo de alta calidad en el que representa a una guerrera dibujada a lápiz.

Quero ha destacado la importancia de un evento como este para "promover la lectura, fomentar formas de ocio alternativas y servir de punto de encuentro entre jóvenes dibujantes y editoriales para fomentar las relaciones laborales".

Para la presente edición, que cuenta con un presupuesto de 50.000 euros, se instalarán 25 expositores de editoriales y tiendas, además de stands no profesionales de asociaciones y aficionados.

El Salón está organizado por la Asociación Juvenil E-Veleta y cuenta con el apoyo de la Junta de Andalucía a través del Instituto Andaluz de la Juventud, el Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer y las delegaciones provinciales de Cultura e Innovación, así como con el apoyo de Ediciones Glenat.

DIBUJANTE DEL CARTEL

Estudiante de Bellas Artes en la Universidad de Granada, Belén Ortega (1986) es una apasionada de la cultura japonesa, lo que le ha llevado a vivir durante un año en Japón.

Realiza trabajos de ilustración formando parte del colectivo de autores Kamikaze Factory Studio, desde el cual ha realizado trabajos de ilustración para multitud de soportes (revistas, carteles, webs, libros), de los que citaremos el libro colectivo didáctico Kodomo Manga Paso a paso (Monsa). También vale la pena mencionar las ilustraciones que ha realizado para varios discos relacionados con el manga y anime: Vitek Anime Music Experience, Melodía Eterna de Ailyn, En lo profundo del bosque de Charm o Maison Ikkoku: las canciones de la serie.

1. People you know
   It may not seem intuitive, but your immediate circle of contacts is a great way to meet like-minded people. Have you heard of the 6-degrees of separation? It's the idea that anyone on Earth is connected to each other via 6 degrees of contact, or less. In fact, with the internet, it's probably less than 6 degrees. How does this idea help you meet like-minded people? Firstly, if your friends have similar interests as you, they probably know many other people who have the same interests too, since birds of the same feather tend to flock together. Secondly, even if they don't share your interests, they might know someone who does. Even beyond that, word of mouth is an excellent referral tool - by just asking around and extending to 2nd degree, or 3rd degree contacts, you might find yourself a list of like-minded new friends.
   
   
2. Your Workplace
   The second place which most people overlook is their workplace (or school, if you're studying). This is applicable if you're in a career that you enjoy, and a company which you like. Why do I say so? Every company, especially long-standing ones, have a regimented set of recruitment criteria, which includes certain personality traits and hard skills. For you and others to be recruited in the same company, that means all of you share core similarities. Not only that, being part of the same company means you're part of a bigger culture, sharing same knowledge and thinking patterns (to a degree).
   
   Many of my best friends today came from my previous workplace. Before I started working there, most people I know had passive, negative orientations toward life. I wished to know more people who were more forward looking. My previous company was specific in recruiting people who were driven and self-motivated, so when I entered the company I found myself surrounded by a sea of people who were very talented and driven. It was like a dream come true. In the end I forged many valuable friendships in my 2 years there, which continued to stay on even after I left later on to pursue my passion in personal development.
   
   
3. Clubs and Communities
   Existing clubs and communities are a great way to quickly meet like-minded individuals. See each community as a central hub that attracts people with the same interests. For example, a writers club would attract people who are interested in writing, whether on a recreational or professional level. Online forums and communities on Linked in and Facebook are a great way to start off. Offline communities will include meet-up groups, recreational clubs, interest groups, related classes and membership societies. I took up Japanese as a third language when I was in school and later when I graduated, and each time I met a group of people who were passionate about Japanese language, its culture and also anime. It was fun connecting on a deep level on those areas, where the regular person wouldn't know much about them. Check out Meetup.com, which is a great resource for interest groups. If you're shy about meeting new people, these 10 useful tips to make new friends might come in handy.
   
   
4. Start a blog
   This one isn't exactly instant, and it's probably not a tip most people will use, but it definitely works. I started The Personal Excellence Blog 2 years ago, sharing my best advice on how to live life in excellence. While it started off with 0 readers (as with all websites), it quickly grew. With each person that visited the blog, the ones who were interested in personal growth and conscious living stayed on and subscribed to the newsletter. Many of them would silently read my articles, while a small handful would reach out to connect, via the comments, email, Facebook or Twitter.
   
   Today, I'm lucky to be connected with a buzzing community of over 10,000 like-minded readers who are passionate about personal growth and living a better life. In the past 2 years, I've been contacted by over a thousand different people, some for business purposes, some for networking, and many just reaching out to connect. I would meet up with a small handful of them, even international readers (who fly in to Singapore, where I live). In fact, this week I'm meeting a fellow reader and blogger from overseas, and next month I'll be meeting a reader-turned-friend from Thailand as well! Many of these new friends are amazing people that I'd never have had the opportunity to know otherwise, if not for the blog.
   
   When you run a blog, others know about how you are like, based on what you write and how you write. The like-minded individuals who enjoy and appreciate your thoughts will stay on for more, while those who don't will eventually leave. Before you know it, you're in the company of a huge community of like-minded individuals, who are diverse in their own ways at the same time.
   
   
5. Networking events/Meet-Ups
   I've been to a number of networking events and some of them can be quite pointless, degenerating into empty mingling and name card exchanging. However, there are valuable networking events out there, and it's about picking the ones that meet your needs. Different networking events attract different audiences, so carefully choose the ones that you go to. What are the kind of people you are interested in? Who are the people you'd like to meet? Pick the events most relevant to them.
   
   
6. Attend a related workshop/seminar
   A workshop or seminar is essentially a gathering of like-minded individuals who wish to achieve a common objective. Else, the individuals wouldn't invest time or money in the workshop. Check out the workshops out there, whether on the internet, online communities or newspapers. If you're reading Dumb Little Man, you are probably interested in personal development. There are many hundreds of high quality self-help workshops out there - simply attending to any one will allow you to meet other people who are passionate about personal development as well. I've only attended a couple of self-help workshops to date, and just from the workshops alone I've befriended over 30 like-minded individuals and have developed great relationships with a number of them.
   
7. Reaching out to them
   Direct, 1-1 contact is a targeted and efficient approach. With social media and internet today, it's now extremely easy to do this.
   
   
   • Linked in: You can search within a certain industry or specialization, which will bring up a select group of people. After that, you can read more about their profiles and connect with each individual on a personal level.
   • Facebook: Browse interest groups and check out members in the groups.
   • Blogs: Check out blogs on topics of your interest. See if the writer is someone you'll be interested to connect with.
   
   While some might feel weird doing this, it's quite commonplace today, and many use it for networking purposes. You probably won't get responses from all of them, and it's okay too. Be genuine and polite in your message. Introduce yourself, how you know about him/her, your interest in connecting and why. You never know who you might meet in the process.

Written on 9/27/2010 by Celestine Chua. Celestine writes at The Personal Excellence Blog, where she shares her best advice on how to achieve personal excellence and live your best life. Get her RSS feed directly and add her on Twitter @celestinechua. If you like this article, you will enjoy one of her top articles: 101 Things To Do Before You Die.

Photo Credit: Kiran Kumar G

Ce moteur V6 3.0 TDI Common Rail qui anime notre modèle d’essai n’est pas un inconnu chez Volkswagen. Fort de 240 chevaux et 550 Nm disponibles dès les plus bas régimes, il reçoit dans le cas présent toutes les innovations Bluemotion Technology qui lui permettent de se monter particulièrement économe en carburant sans rien sacrifier au plaisir.

Preuve encore de la part belle faite à la technologie, ce nouveau Touareg a droit à la toute nouvelle boîte automatique à… huit rapports. Une boîte douce et rapide qui se marie très bien avec le tempérament du moteur, dont la puissance n’arrive jamais brutalement mais fait preuve d’une belle onctuosité et linéarité. Les rapports s’enchaînent avec facilité et sans le moindre à-coup, et la réponse à l’écrasement de la pédale de droite est quasi-immédiate. Du très beau travail.

Mais pour ceux qui aiment pousser l’auto un peu plus loin, et bien que le Touareg de par son gabarit et son architecture n’aime pas particulièrement ça, la boîte est également dotée d’un mode Sport (qui laisse le moteur prendre quelques centaines de tours en plus sur chaque rapport) et même d’un mode manuel. Malheureusement, ce dernier se révèle toujours aussi peu intuitif à manier en raison de son fonctionnement «à l’envers» (pousser pour monter un rapport, tirer pour descendre).

Bien que ce ne soit pas son terrain de prédilection, le Touareg peut s’aventurer assez loin des sentiers battus puisqu’il se dote de tout le baroud technologique nécessaire à une escapade en forêt (ou presque) : boîte de transfert, blocage de différentiel central et arrière, tout y est. Et pour le peu que nous avons pu y goûter, le Touareg n’a pas l’air de trop mal se débrouiller lorsque le bitume s’arrête.

Le Touareg pourrait (espérons-le) bien faire taire quelques «écologistes» anti-SUV en contrôlant au plus juste sa consommation de carburant par le biais, entre autres, du dispositif Stop&Start fourni sur ce Bluemotion. Au terme de nos quelques jours d’essais, et sans ménager spécialement notre monture, la consommation moyenne s’établissait à 9,0l/100km tout ronds. Pas mal, pour un engin de 2,1 tonnes à vide !

Conclusion

Equipé comme une Audi, fini (presque) comme une Audi, motorisé comme une Audi, agréable à conduire comme une Audi et… inspirant ses tarifs de ceux d’Audi, ce Touareg impose sa supériorité tant technologique qu’en terme d’agrément sur le segment des gros SUV «non-Premium». Un véhicule qui devrait aider Volkswagen dans sa quête vers le titre de N°1 Mondial qu’il s’est fixé pour 2018.

Première partie : Essai Volkswagen Touareg 3.0 TDI Bluemotion : à bonne école (1/2)

By Taylor Short Killeen Daily Herald The inaugural GeekFest continues today and Sunday at Central Texas College's Mayborn Planetarium and Space Theater - three days of gaming tournaments, costume contests, anime, science fiction and all things nerdy.

Urban Planner is Torontoist's guide to what's on in Toronto, published every weekday morning, and in a weekend edition Friday afternoons. If you have an event you'd like considered, email all of its details—as well as images, if you've got any—to events@torontoist.com.

Laugh Sabbath celebrates its fourth anniversary this weekend. Photo by Joe Fuda.

This weekend in Toronto, check out revenge of the nerds at Fan Expo, a reading festival for kids, the Toronto Chinatown Festival, a green street party at DuSpa, Lou Barlow and Wye Oak at the Horseshoe, an interview with curmudgeon Ken Russell, and Laugh Sabbath celebrating its fourth anniversary.

FESTIVAL: The nerds are back in town for Fan Expo Canada, the annual summit for all things fandom. The convention was first held in 1995, where it was devoted only to comic books, but it soon expanded its mandate to include five genres: comic, anime, sci-fi, horror, and gaming. During this year's festival, which runs from Friday to Sunday, over six hundred exhibitors and fifty-nine thousand fans (some most in costume) will pour into the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Joining them will be this year's roster of celebrity guests, including Stan Lee, William Shatner, Batman (Adam West), Robin (Burt Ward), Catwoman (Julie Newmar), James Marsters (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer), David Cronenberg, and many, many more. Metro Toronto Convention Centre (255 Front Street West); Saturday 10 a.m.–7 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; adults: Saturday $35, Sunday $29; kids: $10.

MUSIC Summer's wrapping up, and opportunities for outdoor music enjoyment are becoming fewer and farther between. So Lexus is sponsoring a series of outdoor concerts this weekend in the Distillery District, featuring performances by velvet-voiced songstress Lily Frost and piano-based pop-rockers The Midway State on Saturday, followed by Charlottetown's exuberant indie outfit The Paper Lions on Sunday. (It's all in honour of the new CT200h.) Distillery District (55 Mill Street), Saturday (Frost at 12 p.m., The Midway State at 5 p.m.) and Sunday (Paper Lions at 3 p.m.), FREE.

WORDS: So, the kids go back to school soon, and chances are that in the heat of their summer shenanigans, they've forgotten how to read. To refresh their memories, the Toronto Public Library has organized a Book Bash. The bash will be packed with a line-up of children's authors like Kenneth Oppel, Eric Walters, Barbara Reid, and Barbara Nichol. The party doesn't stop there—there will also be a plethora of fun activities, including crafts, storytelling, puppet shows, and face-painting. North York Central Library (5120 Yonge Street) and Mel Lastman Square (5100 Yonge Street), Saturday 11 a.m.–4 p.m., FREE.

FESTIVAL: There are six Chinatowns in the GTA, but you're probably most familiar with the flagship location at Dundas and Spadina, which will be holding a festival on Saturday and Sunday. There will be Chinese opera performances, folk art, calligraphy exhibits, and sports such as cuju (Chinese football) and featherball. The biggest draw will be a food carnival, where delectable treats like Mongolian barbecue, dim sum, Chiu Chow fish balls, and Shanghai pot stickers will be available, along with Taiwanese bubble tea and Hong Kong–style egg puffs. Chinatown (Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street West); Saturday 12–8 p.m., Sunday 12–6 p.m.; FREE.

PARTY: Back for its second year, Light Up Our Alley is a project organized by the Duspa Corner Collective, a group pushing for green cultural development in the Dupont and Spadina neighbourhood. The all-day street party will include a number of family-friendly attractions, like a recording booth, bouncy castle, mural painting, hula-hooping, face-painting, a clothing swap, bike repair, and services from local vendors. Bands like Run With the Kittens, Barn Owl, and Honest I's are scheduled to perform, and there will be DIY workshops on subjects including henna, dance, massage, yoga, and build-your-own-instrument. Alley at southwest corner of Dupont and Spadina avenues, Saturday 1–9 p.m., FREE.

MUSIC: Lou Barlow likes to invent genres. His first big success came with Dinosaur Jr., the influential '80s and '90s alt-rock trio that made waves with their innovative use of distortion and feedback. Sebadoh, an indie rock outfit, was originally formed as Barlow's side project, but eventually emerged as a pioneering influence in the advent of the lo-fi subgenre. Barlow, also a renowned solo artist, will be taking time out of his busy schedule this weekend to perform alongside punk rock trio The Missingmen. Also on the bill are indie-pop duo Wye Oak and alternative four-piece band The Caraways. The Horseshoe Tavern (368 Queen Street West); Saturday 9:45 p.m.; $13.50/advance, $15/door.

FILM: Ken Russell's The Devils thrust the British filmmaker into the spotlight in the '70s, shocking audiences with its graphic horror, sexuality, and church-bashing. Sounds awesome, right? Lucky for you, the Bloor is screening an uncut version of the film this Sunday as part of Rue Morgue's Festival of Fear. Even better, the evening will feature a live interview between Richard Crouse and Russell, a notorious curmudgeon known for his frustrating interviews (see his monosyllabic exchange with Philip Brown from this week's issue of Eye Weekly). The Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor Street West), Sunday 9 p.m., $15.

COMEDY: Since the '80s, The Rivoli has been one of Toronto's best-known hubs for live comedy. It's famous for giving The Kids in the Hall their big break, and other famous performers have included Lewis Black, Janeane Garofalo, and even Robin Williams. One of the Rivoli's more recent traditions is Laugh Sabbath, a weekly Sunday-night show that brings together a group of Toronto's leading alternative stand-up and sketch comics. Laugh Sabbath celebrates its fourth anniversary this weekend with performances by Nick Flanagan, Sara Hennessey, Tim Gilbert, and more. If uproarious entertainment isn't enough to lure you away from your Sunday night TV schedule, early birds get free food with admission. The Rivoli (332 Queen Street West); doors (and food) Sunday at 8 p.m., show at 9 p.m.; $5.

• The Ex continues until September 6th.
• 
  
• Scotiabank BuskerFest is on from Thursday to Sunday in the St. Lawrence Market area.
• 
  
• Fan Expo Canada brings a ton of special guests and exhibitors from the realms of sci-fi, horror, anime, comics and gaming to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from Friday to Sunday.
• 
  
• The Live Green Toronto Festival will be at Yonge-Dundas Square on Saturday and Sunday.
• 
  
• This weekend's Harbourfront Centre World Routes 2010 Summer Festival is the Telus TAIWANfest Crossover on from Friday evening through Sunday.
• 
  
• The Chinatown BIA is holding the Toronto Chinatown Festival on Saturday and Sunday.
• 
  
• This Saturday's Book Bash! was already mentioned on the blog this week, a children's literature festival being put on by the Toronto Public Library at North York Central Library.
• 
  
• The Blue Jays are in town this weekend.
• 
  
• On Saturday night the Death Track Dolls and the Gore-Gore Rollergirls of the Toronto Roller Derby will be duking it out at Downsview Park.
• 
  
• This is your final chance this year to take advantage of Free Summer Weekends at Toronto's Historic Sites.
• 
  
• And from User-Submitted Events for August, King City is having a music festival while the PawsWay Pet Discovery Centre is having three special events this weekend.

If you're an event planner hosting something this weekend, feel free to tell us about it in the comments section below. For later events, learn how to submit an event listing to About.com: Toronto.

Medium: TV Anime (24 episodes)
Genres: Drama, Political, Science Fiction
Based on: Alexandre Dumas's novel
Director: Mahiro Maeda
Studio: GONZO
Release Date: Oct. 5, 2004 – Mar. 29, 2005 (Japan), Oct. 16, 2007 (Geneon/FUNimation – N.America)
Rated: Not Rated (appropriate for 16+)

Adaptations are one of my favorite types of stories to review due to their ability to show one story from multiple perspectives and through the eyes of multiple generations of writers. Thus, Gankutsuou, Gonzo's 2004 anime adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' seminal novel The Count of Monte Cristo, is simply irresistible to my sensibilities as both an anime fan and a fan of the original novel.

Unlike many others of its ilk, Gankutsuou goes above and beyond slavish imitation, changing a number of relatively important parts of the story from the get-go. Naturally this can confuse most readers of the book as they try to figure out how the plot could possibly work out with all of the changes. When I began watching, I, too, was a skeptic. Though I am certainly not a total believer now, the 24 episodes of Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo have shown me a fascinating approach to adaptation that maintains (and in some cases improves) the depiction of the central theme while not fretting over the nitty-gritty details of the original work.

On the topic of omitting grit, Gankutsuou skips Dumas's entire set of introductory chapters, which serve to construct the tragic back-story of the mysterious, fantastically wealthy Count of Monte Cristo. Instead, scriptwriters Natsuko Takahashi (Fullmetal Alchemist, Romeo X Juliet) and Tomohiro Yamashita (Afro Samurai, Red Garden) drop us into the Carnivale on Luna, a strikingly science-fictiony replacement for the original setting of Rome. As if the book purist in me wasn't already crying out at the omission of Edmond Dantes’s/Monte Cristo's unjust 15-year imprisonment, giant CGI blimps and reveling space colonists seem to state immediately that this is not Dumas's original (and, very importantly, that it is not trying to be).

The switch in the starting point, however, actually serves to set up the first of many important narrative shifts; the focus of the story is transferred from the Count of Monte Cristo to the anime's new protagonist, Viscount Albert de Morcerf (who plays an important role as a side character in the novel). While partying on Luna with his best buddy Franz d'Epinay, Albert finds himself in trouble with bandits, only to be saved by the Count. Before long he becomes close friends with the rich aristocrat, who ends up living in Paris, forging bonds with many of the most influential families in the city (including Albert's).

But as tragedy befalls Albert's friends, acquaintances, and enemies, it becomes clear that something sinister is afoot. Some see the Count as a prime suspect, but Albert cannot believe that the man who once saved his life would be out to cause harm to him or any of his friends.

The true strength of director Mahiro Maeda's (Blue Sub Six, "Second Rennaisance" portion of Animatrix) retelling lies not in simple translation. He might miss essential pieces of what Dumas was trying to say, but through these changes he creates an entirely new story, rooted in the basics of the original but not necessarily tied down to its themes or messages. Indeed, this contemporary version of The Count of Monte Cristo has its own moments of storytelling and aesthetic brilliance. Textile designer/digital director Yasufumi Soejima (Last Exile, Ristorante Paradiso) captures the opulence of Parisian aristocratic life using a fascinating and unique visual technique involving brightly colored textures that seem to remain stationary as the characters and objects they are attached to move around the frame. The effect is disorienting at first, but it lends the series a distinctive air of gaudiness that suits the setting. Meanwhile, the Count himself is the most striking image of the entire anime, with his almost vampiric blue face, pointed ears, and protruding canines. In the novel he is described as being so intriguing that he is the center of attention whenever he enters a room, so it is impressive that character designer Hidenori Matsubara (Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, Sakura Wars) was able to maintain this feature while not adhering strictly to Dumas's other descriptors.

Unfortunately, Gankutsuou's anime trappings don't always work to its advantage, especially when it comes to an overuse of exposition. The original Count of Monte Cristo revels in its mystique, never making an explicit connection between the Count and Edmond Dantes (nor with his own revenge plot) until the novel's final act. In Gonzo's version, the connection is made within the first episode, and though Albert is given an incredibly wide swath of incriminating information regarding the Count, it takes him around 20 episodes to finally discover the (then quite obvious) truth. Admittedly this kind of exposition is necessary due to the omission of Dantes's back-story, but it doesn't make the dramatic irony any less frustrating.

Geneon's dub doesn't exactly help matters either, with Johnny Yong Bosch's predictably overwrought performance adding a bit more intensity than necessary to Albert's character. The Count, however, finds a quietly sinister portrayal in Jamieson Price, one that I would even say fits Dumas's original version of the character. Backing up Bosch's occasionally effective performance is Ezra Weisz, mucking up nearly all of Franz's lines with mood-crushing wooden acting. Luckily, he's one of the few stinkers in the cast, but that doesn't diminish the damage Franz does to the dub version every time he's on screen.

Gankutsuou's most effective moments come when Dumas and Maeda's sensibilities play off of each other. A scene of a girl suffering from poison, lit only by lightning bolts, expresses Dumas's supreme melodrama with a profound visual language not available to the author. Even scenes with sweeping changes, such as the aftermath of the duel near the end of the series, carry emotional weight thanks to Maeda's choice to continually compound his own calamitous plot threads and Dumas's own acute sense of tragedy.

At its best, Gankutsuou can produce just such moments of silent collaboration between Maeda and Dumas, but in between the high points are scenes of bland anime exposition and maddening, poorly executed dramatic irony. Through it all, the series maintains a quick pace, fueled in part by Takahashi and Yamashita's propensity for cliffhanger endings in each episode, which pulled me along in much the same way that Sunrise's Code Geass did. This might not be hailed as the kind of timeless classic that its source material is, but Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo is certainly a compelling, firmly above average anime melodrama, not to be missed by any genre aficionados.

[Recommended]

This review is based on a Netflix streaming video version of the series provided by FUNimation and viewed through the reviewer's personal Netflix subscription.

With brightly colored plumes, an army gets ready to lead the Nebuta Festival through Little Tokyo's Nisei Week Grand Parade. Photo by Ed Fuentes.

Little Tokyo’s 70th Nisei Week Festival got underway this past weekend with a set of events highlighted by the Grand Parade. The large crowd was ready for a long night.

That’s what happens when a parade is timed for a 5:30 start, hoping to hit dusk as the lanterns for the parade within the parade, the Nebuta Festival, turn the first corner at Central and 2nd.

Families staked out spots by placing chairs along the opening part of the route.

“It’s more about my daughter’s grandparents,” said Rachel Itano, who dressed her 4-year-old in a kimono. "I say that, and then I am the one having the great time."

While the parade is a mix of Japanese tradition and pop-culture, it's the Japanese-American war veterans that lead the procession. They are placed before the civic dignitaries and visiting courts of queens and princesses from other Japanese-American festivals around Southern California.

“They let us up front so we can get to bed early,” joked a Korean War veteran to his buddies, all waiting in a jeep before rolling into Little Tokyo.

Larger army vehicles carried the remaining elders who served during the years Little Tokyo was emptied by government relocation. As always they were welcomed with a big cheer. Behind them, still youthful, the men who served in Vietnam marched down the route.

Then came the mash-up of old and new Japanese traditions: dancers with kimonos made to shimmer in the sun, Taiko drummers in the back of flatbeds, Anime fans dressed in costume, a club for the Japanese-bred Akita, a car club with their souped-up imports and enough mikoshi shrines carried on the shoulders of volunteers to ensure divine spirits stay in Little Tokyo.

As dusk began, the newest tradition of the Grand Parade made its awaited appearance: the lanterns of the Nebuta Festival. Smaller lanterns lead two fierce warriors that bobbed and weaved down the street, leaning into a crowd who cheered and took photos.

The Nebuta float circled Little Tokyo as if looking for someone suited to match its strength. At 1st and Central, the final bows went to a last batch of parade watchers waiting at the end of the route near the newly restored Fire Tower.

In that group is a war veteran who decided to wait on his bedtime. The warrior made of paper floats to where he is sitting. As the lantern approaches with a frown, the veteran stands with a smile. They bow to each other.

Nisei Week festivities continue this weekend with Competition Day events on Saturday and the Ondo and Closing Ceremony on Sunday. More information at niseiweek.org.

Photo Gallery

By Ed Fuentes.

Beckii is 15 and famous in Japan for dancing on the web. Isn't that a little bit odd?

Rebecca Flint, or Beckii Cruel as she renamed herself, has big eyes, a sharp chin, fluffy hair and slender limbs. It's a look that, in the cartoon worlds of anime and manga, is about as cute as it gets. So when Beckii posted a video of herself dancing to a Japanese pop song in her bedroom at home on the Isle of Man, she became an instant internet sensation 6,000 miles away in Japan. She's the subject of Beckii: Schoolgirl Superstar at 14 (BBC3), a fascinating but worrying documentary.

Beckii's parents' first thought was: "Hang on, what's going on here then?" But then a couple of things persuaded them that it was all actually OK. First of all, there's the fact that in Japan it's perfectly acceptable for pretty young girls to be worshipped in a way that is a bit creepy anywhere else. Cultural differences: you've got to accept them, haven't you? And when you factor in Beckii's earning potential, suddenly it all becomes absolutely fine.

So she goes over there, gets a manager, does a photo book, dances on TV, does a shoot with a sumo wrestler. And the YouTube hits stack up. We don't find out who exactly is watching Beckii's dancing videos, but another British girl trying to make it over there, 16-year-old Gemma, has done some research into her own YouTube demographic. Of her male fans, which make up 53% of her audience, a tiny proportion are in the 13-to-17 age range; the biggest are in the 45-to-54 group. That's a bit alarming, isn't it?

Apparently not. "Any mother of teenage daughters knows they're going to get a bit of extra attention, so what can you do about it?" giggles Gemma's mum.

Beckii, meanwhile, receives gifts from her fans; one in particular sends her boxes of noodles and a Fender bass guitar for her 15th birthday. They've met him on their trips to Japan. "He's very quiet," says Beckii's mum. "Very nice, very shy, as most Japanese men are." She doesn't say how old he is, but admits there's a massive gap.

Beckii's dad, policeman Derek, has thought seriously about how much he'd like his daughter to earn to make up for her school work suffering. "The GCSE year has to be worth £50,000 to compensate for the deterioration in grades," he says. "It would be a tragedy to miss that 15 minutes of fame. And not maximise it to the extent that she could set herself up very comfortably."

Quite right. What are children for, if not for cashing in on? No, it's her money, he says. "If she wants to buy me a nice car, I'm not going to turn it down. Or pay my mortgage off, that'd be great – thanks Rebecca."

They don't say how much they've made so far, but it's clearly not enough, because Derek's now getting involved, bringing in new people to help her record singles, stuff that might appeal beyond Japan. I'm not convinced it's going to work. Because while she may look like a character in a Japanese cartoon, she doesn't have the greatest singing voice in the world, and isn't even the greatest dancer. Why should she be? She's just 14. OK, 15 now.

Beckii seems remarkably level-headed, and doesn't seem to need advice from anyone. But I'm going to offer mine anyway. Maybe don't give up on the old GCSEs, just in case the noodles stop coming through the letterbox (as the ancient Japanese saying goes). And dad can take care of his own mortgage. Well, at least until you're 16.

There's something of teen drama The OC about Natural World: California Sea Otters (BBC2). A troubled otter – or "arder", because this film has a syrupy narration from Bonnie Greer – from the rocky coast of central California takes up residence among the gleaming yachts of a luxury marina in Monterey Bay. There are problems and misunderstandings. She (the otter, not Bonnie) doesn't know that, in polite society, it's not on to crack open your shellfish against millionaires' boats. There are problems with the other posh marina otters, too – fights and jealousies, love across the tracks. Somehow, she struggles on, against the odds.

The ones who stay put in the wild seem to have it easier, now that they're no longer hunted for fur. They lie in the kelp, sunning their bellies; it looks lovely. A sea otter floating around on its back is a very cute thing. Some of them have posted themselves on YouTube. Check them out. Unless you're a dirty old man.

Join DJ Trent as he freaks out to his two favorite movies:

1) David Byrne's TRUE STORIES, starring John Goodman and Byrne, with music by Talking Heads, exploring the changing world of central Texas in 1986
and
2) Daft Punk's INTERSTELLA 5555: THE 5TORY OF THE 5ECRET 5TAR 5YSTEM, an insane anime adventure into the year 5555 set to Daft Punk's “Discovery,” possibly the best album ever made.

Since both movies are set to music (but avoid the awful cliches associated with, you know, musicals) it will also be a dance party with $2 Brooklyn Beer all night long. If you can't make it in person, join the fun from home with live audio/video broadcasts at 91.1fm and wfmu.org.

It's Otakon time again! The boys and girls at Japanator are all over the show looking at all sorts of anime things. Exciting! Check out Jtor to keep up with all your Japanese needs.

Jim takes on the Medal of Honor Al Qaeda issue, Matt checked out the gaming scene at a Ritz-Carlton, HAWP does Ico, Ben reviewed BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, GoldenEye controller comes with the game and more happened on 07/30/10.

Destructoid Originals:
The Jimquisition: Al Qaeda, Medal of Honor, and idiots
Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin': Ico
A VUE to a game: How Ritz-Carlton is stepping up its game

Community:
Simplicity
Community blogs of 07/30/10

Reviews:
Castlevania Puzzle: Encore of the Night
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift

Previews:
Impressions: Time Crisis: Razing Storm on PS Move

News:
University of Central Florida developing abstinence game
Our gaming history is threatened by antiquity, copyright
PS3 firmware 3.41 allegedly causing system crashes
Rock Band DLC: Single song explosion!
Bethesda dev doesn't 'get' Facebook games
Rare responds to fan site's closure
Call of Duty: Black Ops Hardened & Prestige editions
Class up your Guitar Hero/Rock Band cheap on Amazon today
Earthworm Jim hits North American PSN next week
Free App of the Day: Zombie Shock
Team 17: PSPgo's problem was price, not digital content
Gearbox boss reconfirms more Borderlands DLC
Medal of Honor Limited Edition packs Battlefield 3 beta
Dragon's Lair Trilogy packs in the classics for Wii
Much better: $70 GoldenEye controller comes with game
Former Infinity Ward heads to talk at QuakeCon 2010
First DiRT 3 image is here, trailer coming this weekend
Meet the zombie that replaced Michael Jackson
Spend the weekend devouring villagers in Worm Food

Offbeat:
Have a seat on a Space Invader
Adorable and terrifying Okamiden papercraft
GONNA TAKE YOU FOR A RIDE (with a Street Fighter condom)
That was quick: Limbo recreated in LittleBigPlanet

Media:
Fractured Soul has a deceptive trailer
The environments of Two Worlds II
People stand in line, go crazy for Need for Speed in NY
Creepy digital Tiesto to appear in DJ Hero 2
Hammer, lightning: Yup, this is Thor: The Video Game
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days trailer and screens
Not even half-naked Japanese girls make Kinect look good

As the Wii library expands and amasses progressively more "hardcore" game experiences, it begins to resemble a PlayStation 2 more with each passing day. That image is helped with the number of traditional Japanese roleplaying games that have been popping into the pipeline lately.

Arc Rise Fantasia is one of three significant JRPGs that have been readying themselves for a Wii release, along with Xenoblade and The Last Story. It's also the first one out of the door, launching in North America while the others still haven't confirmed a Western release. 

So, as the first major JRPG to hit the Wii this year, does Arc Rise Fantasia have what fans are looking for, or would they be better off waiting for something else? Read on for our review.

Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii)
Developer: Imageepoch, Marvelous Entertainment
Publisher: Ignition Entertainment
Released: July 27, 2010
MSRP: $39.99

Arc Rise Fantasia tells the story of a mercenary called L'arc Bright Lagoon (seriously) and a prince called Alf (seriously) who become sort-of Jesus Christ and fight with a God while trees turn into crystals (seriously). In case you haven't guessed, this is a JRPG storyline through and through. Silly, convoluted, yet taking itself absolutely seriously, Arc Rise has a narrative that only this type of game could get away with. 

Surprisingly, it's actually not terrible either. While it lacks any real emotional impact, the story is a pretty decent yarn, especially as the game rises in tempo roughly ten or so hours into the experience. There are the obligatory plot twists and a number of characters even risk being rather interesting. At one's most negative, you could say that Arc Rise Fantasia's plot is no worse than any other RPG's and sometimes it almost becomes a bit better than the norm.

Any good the story does, however, is quickly undone by one major flaw -- the absolutely atrocious localization. Whoever they got to provide the voices in Arc Rise, I can tell you right now that they weren't actors. Lines are delivered by people who make it abundantly clear that they don't care, making dramatic scenes instantly feel flat and dull. It's frustrating to finally reach a climactic moment and fail to enjoy it because the actors ruin the mood with their apathetic delivery and inability to convey more than one emotion. To its credit, you can mute the voices, but silencing the game completely isn't an answer as far as I am concerned, and the localizers ought to feel ashamed of setting the whole game back. 

With the story undermined, it all hinges on the gameplay, and Arc Rise plays it safe with a game that never veers from the beaten RPG path. Everything that has come to define the genre is found in Arc Rise Fantasia -- turn-based combat, grinding, optional quests, a world map, towns with new weapons, it's all preserved like a time capsule in ARF, and I actually approve. In many ways, Arc Rise's total lack of ambition is its saving grace. There are no convoluted gimmicks or needlessly complicated leveling system. It's unpretentious and familiar RPG fun, and that's just fine. 

That's not to say there aren't a few little twists. For one, all characters in a battle share a pool of Action Points rather than take individual turns, which allows for a level of strategy. For instance, you can have one character use all the points to attack solo, or share the AP equally. After a few hours, the party earns the ability to chain attacks together to create more damaging blows, making for extra strategic uses of AP. When conditions are right, characters can also sneak in additional attacks, allowing players who are spatially aware to make quick work of common enemies. Nothing Arc Rise does is revolutionary, but the blending of traditional turn-based combat and light strategic elements at least makes every battle just that bit more interesting. 

The use of positioning, timing and stacking is central to Arc Rise Fantasia, especially since enemies can stack their moves as well. Having to think just a little bit more about each battle is one thing that really helps the game along, despite the combat being inherently pedestrian.

The weapon system also keeps ARF  more engrossing than it otherwise would be. Weapons don't have inherent attack values on their own, but rather contain special enhancements and abilities. Some of these enhancements are passive, such as stat boosts and special attack effects, while some of them grant new selectable moves. When these weapons are leveled up with Weapon Points earned after battle, the special abilities become unlocked and can then be shifted to other weapons to create an inherently more powerful armament. The only real drawback to weapon customization is the rather poor menu layout, which makes the moving of abilities far more complicated and hard to keep track of than it ever needed to be. 

One major flaw in the gameplay is the random difficulty spiking that occurs. A lot of Arc Rise is pretty easy, and it should be impossible to die at the hands of common enemies without trying to do so. However, the game is a big fan of throwing totally unexpected and powerful bosses at the party, sometimes at the end of a dungeon without a nearby save point. It's a common and rather petty tactic employed by JRPGs to create a forced sense of difficulty and it's simply not welcome. Losing a considerable amount of progress because the game randomly felt like notching up the difficulty several places isn't really fun, and it's a shame that Arc Rise felt it necessary. 

When the game isn't employing cheap "get hard quick" schemes, however, what we have is a very competently presented, well crafted roleplaying game that never tries to starts a revolution, but never sets it back. From its anime look to its conventional combat system, Arc Rise Fantasia is a game that most certainly wouldn't look out of place in the PlayStation 2's library, and I don't mean that as an insult. I actually respect that. Arc Rise Fantasia doesn't apologize for being a straight laced JRPG simply concentrates on giving fans of the genre what they like. 

It's just a shame that the localization was so badly done. With better efforts made for the Western market, this could have been a truly great RPG, but the voice actors somehow manage to make the story seem more boring and absurd than it actually is. Deep down in Arc Rise's narrative are some pretty damn interesting themes of religious intolerance and segregation, but most gamers won't read that deeply into it thanks to the shoddy Western performances.

As it stands, Arc Rise Fantasia still manages to be pretty good. If you can ignore the acting, then what you have is a solid JRPG that remains enjoyable throughout and has enough to satisfy fans of good old fashioned roleplayers without the frills and complications that many developers desperately include nowadays in a desperate bid to appear "innovative."

Arc Rise Fantasia is the perfect RPG to play "between" RPGs. Something to pick up before the next big AAA experience hits and scratch an itch that one gets during the genre's common dry periods. You'll not have your jaw drop in amazement, but you'll leave the experience with a feeling that you've had your time thoroughly wasted, and that's an accomplishment in its own right with JRPGs these days.

Score: 7.0 -- Good (7s are solid games that definitely have an audience. Might lack replay value, could be too short or there are some hard-to-ignore faults, but the experience is fun.)

Comic-Con 2010: Creative director Frank O'Connor talks with Greg Bear, Karen Traviss, Peter David, and more discuss upcoming novels, comics, and animated films set in Microsoft's acclaimed franchise.

Who was there: 343 Industries' creative director Frank O'Connor was joined on stage by a host of contributors to the Halo-dedicated establishment. Among them were novelists Greg Bear and Karen Traviss, Tor Books editor Eric Raab, and famed comics writer Peter David. 343 Industries producer Alison Stroll and managing editor Kevin Grace rounded out the panel.

Halo won't end after the fall of Reach.

What they talked about: Bungie's Halo: Reach panel, which delved into user-generated content and new modes for the September 14 release, wasn't the franchise's only presence at Comic-Con 2010. Microsoft's 343 Industries was also on hand to provide a deeper look into the developments and people behind the Halo universe, in a panel titled, aptly enough, "Halo Universe Panel."

The session opened with a brief trailer recounting some of Halo's non-gaming exploits, ranging from Halo novel The Fall of Reach to the Halo Legends anime. Of course, it also showed previously released footage from Halo: Reach, the final Bungie-developed installment in the franchise.

Stroll, who moderated the session, asked panelists what it was that kept them wanting to contribute to the Halo universe. Raab led off, saying that world building offers the ultimate sandbox, because it lets a writer take a universe that is self-contained, and then flesh out the limitless stories within it. David concurred, saying that the nice thing about Halo, in particular, is that all of his contributions are canonical, and its satisfying to be part of something that's bigger than himself.

Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author Bear then discussed what brought him into the fold. He said that the Halo universe offers the classic hard-boiled military sci-fi that he grew up on, and that it is entertaining for him to carry on the tradition of writing about extraordinary characters accomplishing extraordinary feats.

Traviss, who is also a primary contributor to Microsoft and Epic Games' Gear of War story, noted that her draw to the universe is that there are very dark, disturbed characters in the Halo universe, and those are exactly the type of stories that she likes to tell. She said that she feels like a tribal storyteller, and feeds off of the way people react to her stories.

David was then asked about the process of taking the Halo universe from the realm of games and bringing it to another medium--in his case, comic books. He said that it was actually quite easy, because Halo was born as a visual experience and was geared for being conveyed in such a manner. The Halo universe is especially nice, he continued, because of the massive amount of feedback he receives from the people who created the lore.

The conversation then turned to some of the upcoming releases in the Halo universe, with Raab noting that Tor will be reissuing all of the Halo novels with bonus content, the first of which will arrive by the end of August. He also said that a new collection of short stories will arrive in November and December.

The next new novel, which is being penned by Bear and focuses on the Forerunners, is expected to arrive this holiday. Delving into what fans of the novels can expect, Bear said the story focuses on humanity's origins in the Halo universe, as well as the construction of the massive space rings themselves. The story will be told over the course of three novels.

With Reach due on September 14, Grace said that gamers can also expect to get more information on Dr. Halsey, who created the Spartan program, with the game's limited edition package. Included in the release will be Dr. Halsey's journal, which will recount her experiences with creating the super-soldier program, of which the iconic Master Chief was a member.

Stroll then queued up the next animated film in the Halo franchise, which will be titled The Mona Lisa. The brief trailer showed a group of humans happening upon a pod structure near the remnants of a destroyed Halo space station. On full alert and guns raised, the soldiers pop the seal, and out bursts a humanoid figure, blood-soaked and screaming. Stroll indicated that the Flood will be central to the film.

Quote: "We would have to be the world's biggest a******* to not follow through. You're all applauding, but I didn't say we weren't the world's biggest a*******."--Frank O'Connor, responding to whether Master Chief's story will continue after the cliff-hanger ending of Halo 3.

Takeaway: The Halo universe is one that offers near-limitless possibilities for those who want to play in the Bungie-created sandbox. And Microsoft has certainly tapped some of the top sci-fi writing talent around to ensure that those stories come to life. Those who want more Halo beyond just the games should have a lot to busy themselves with for some time to come.

Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot

Last week, Chad Concelmo told you all about all the stubbly, brown-haired game protagonists that have glutted the gaming scene of late, and how we could use a few less of them. We've got nothing against stubbly Caucasian males, of course. Radical cartoon characters with attitude may have owned the gaming scene in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, but after the CD-ROM came along with its capacity for voice acting and detailed cut scenes, it was time for "Hollywood leading men" to take over games as well. That's just the way trends work. They tend to beat things into the ground until they aren't interesting anymore.

The Ben Affleck-looking action star isn't the only visual archetype that has made the leap from movies to videogames. We've also got the busty leading lady, the funky urban sidekick/pimp/arms dealer, and the colorfully coiffed anime star, among many others. The closer that gaming gets to the mainstream, the more it's bound to get infected by mainstream entertainment's least interesting qualities. In other words, generic, lowest-common-denominator heroes are inevitable in any art form that's made for profit.

That's the bad news. The good news is that there will always be game developers that make it a point to give us an alternative to that. Whenever there is a mainstream, there is a counter-culture, and gaming's counter-culture protagonists have never been more interesting.

Here's a quick list of some of my favorite atypical videogame mascots, none of whom look anything like Ben Affleck.

10) The Viewtiful Joe series

On the surface, Viewtiful Joe doesn't seem that different from a lot of mainstream anime/action stars. He's basically a super-deformed Power Ranger with a goatee and tight abs. It's only when you see him alongside more standard game characters in something like Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom that it becomes clear just how weird Joe is.

Combining big-head-little-body cuteness with Western superhero muscles and a pink scarf is not normal. Made up words like "Viewtiful" are also not normal, and Joe exclaims them on a regular basis. Although it's easy to trace the influences that went into creating Viewtiful Joe, it's pretty hard to think of another videogame character that looks or plays quite like him.

If Ben Affleck played Viewtiful Joe, he'd have gone from a bizarre tribute to both Western and Eastern geekdom to being just another random superhero. There is no way his adventures would have been as memorable as "Viewtiful Ben."

9) The LEGO series

The LEGO games get a lot of crap for being uninspired. That may be true now, but when LEGO Star Wars first hit the scene, it bucked a lot of trends. The game was released at a time when game adaptations of live-action properties were focusing more and more on realism. Then the LEGO series came along and turned that notion on its head.

Developers that are in love with the idea of making their games look "real" have to resort to creating lead characters that look like the primary demographic (Ben Affleck look-a-likes) in order to assure that their games will appeal to a wide audience. The LEGO games (and most Facebook games and Nintendo's Miis) prove that developers who are willing to forsake realism can go on to appeal to an even larger demographic: everyone with two eyes and a mouth.

8) The BioShock series

I guess the general consensus is that BioShock 2 isn't as great as BioShock. I could never get into either game myself, so I can't really say. That's not to say that I didn't want to like them. Upon first sight, I really though I was going to love the game, and that has everything to do with the series' figurehead: the Big Daddy.

There was no reason to think that a game about gigantic deep-sea divers who live to protect creepy little girls would take off. Deep-sea divers are not what's "hot on the streets" right now, and they never were. Ken Levine and company could have just as easily made the Big Daddy with a more time-tested enemy design, like a zombie or a Nazi, if they wanted to assure some mainstream comprehension of their work.

Instead, they stayed true to their Delicatessen/City of Lost Children influences and created the Rapture and Big Daddy that we know and love today. Good show, 2K Boston! If you're going to rip off a movie, it might as well be something from Jeunet and Caro, sans Ben Affleck.

7) Scribblenauts

The star of Scribblenauts is a brilliant example of truly effective character design. He's simple and easy to relate with, but still has personality. Though it's likely that Scribblenauts would have gotten some critical acclaim regardless of how Maxwell looked, it's hard to imagine that the game would have gone on to be as famous and profitable as it has without such a memorable and likable lead character.

It's all in the accessorizing.

If Scribblenauts starred a "wacky" anthropomorphic animal, or a handsome leading man, or a generic anime protagonist, it would have had a much tougher time gaining people's trust. Before you play a game, you have to have some faith that you'll enjoy it. You have have to be curious about what it has to offer, while also feeling some immediate kinship with the game and its world.

Maxwell pulls all of that off, and he does it using just one thing: his rooster hat. It immediately tells us that he's weird, he's creative, and he's up for something different. He's the kind of little dude that most gamers want to be, and represents what a lot of us want our games to be.

Can you imagine Ben Affleck wearing a rooster hat? That might even be worse than Daredevil.

6) The Katamari series

Katamari Damacy is weird on every level. The way it looks, the way it sounds, the way it plays; everything. Given how drenched Katamari Damacy is with insanity, it's understandable that its protagonist, the Prince, actually looks somewhat normal in comparison to rest of the game. Compare him to other videogame characters, though, and he he's clearly doing something different.

The Prince lacks almost all of the features that are present in most "cute and cartoony" videogame characters: no funny sidekick, no catchphrases, and no arched eyebrows. He doesn't have eyebrows, let alone arched ones. He barely even has eyes. No Pixar movie, no fast-food chain mascot, and certainly no big-budget videogame character would ever dare look like the Prince. Someone like him might end up on some bizarre Japanese stationery at best, or as a "common enemy" in someone else's game at worst.

That's what makes the Prince different; unlike almost every other central character, he's totally unassuming. His games are never named after him. In fact, he's barely seen for the majority of his own games due to the size of the giant clump he's packing. Where most games make a point to constantly drive home the fact that their lead character is the most charismatic and personable creation ever, the Prince is lovable because he is truly an underdog.

That's the real reason I'm happy that Ben Affleck doesn't play the Prince. Big-chinned guys like him just can't believably play underdogs. As a big-chinned guy, I know this from experience. People automatically assume we're good at sports and can destroy planets with our bare hands. Affleck could maybe pull off the King of All Cosmos, but for the Prince, he's a no-go.

5) The Meat Boy and Bit.Trip series

These two characters are about two very different things, but from a design philosophy perspective, they are similar enough that I'm lumping them together (also, top ten lists are always more enticing than top eleven lists.)

On the surface, Meat Boy and Commander Video both appear to be throwbacks to the forced-minimalism era of gaming: a time when games simply couldn't give you characters that had more detail than two hands, two feet, a body, and a couple of eyes (or in Commander Video's case, one eye). The difference with these two is, the minimalism here isn't forced. The minimalism is part of their messages. Sometimes, these messages are obtuse and fuzzy; sometimes, they are crystal-clear. But at all times, they defy expectations of what a videogame mascot can mean.

Don't believe me? Do you think it's meaningless that Meat Boy is constantly expelling blood, and that Commander Video is always gushing rainbows? Then maybe it is for you. That's the beauty of using minimalism and abstraction to send your message. It's up to you, the player, to figure out exactly where the meaning is.

Would Ben Affleck work in the role of Meat Boy or Commander Video? Trust me, I'd love to find out. I'd love to play a game where Ben Affleck is constantly bleeding and/or shooting rainbows out of his ass. Sadly, though, that would probably get old fast, and wouldn't work to express anything other than goofy good times.

4) The Chibi-Robo series

Chibi-Robo is a lot like the Prince in that he barely demands your attention, and he lives to make others happy. And like Meat Boy and Commander Video, Chibi-Robo is almost completely featureless. He's got two eyes, a head, two arms, two legs, and a body. That's it. No face, no color; nothing. He's the very definition of un-design.

As for his adventure, it's a journey into the world of minutiae. It is the anti-blockbuster. Where most games work hard to give you an experience that's larger than life, Chibi-Robo takes you to all of the smallest things that life has to offer. Cleaning stains, washing dishes, and watering flowers; these are the big moments in Chibi-Robo's world. These are the moments that define Chibi-Robo. These are moments that could only work with a character like Chibi-Robo.

Can you imagine a little Ben Affleck running around your house, cleaning up stains and picking up after your pets, with no quips to quip, no Phantoms to fight, and no Armageddons to Armageddon? I don't think it's possible. If cast as Chibi-Robo, I don't think he could resist blowing up a giant meteor and/or mouthing off a few one-liners. A little Justin Bieber could maybe make it happen, but not Ben Affleck. He's just too alpha.

3) The Okami series

I've been playing videogames for a long time, and Okami and its upcoming sequel are the only two games I can think of that star non-verbal, four-legged animals. Sure, there are tons of games that star anthropomorphic animals, or have "realistic" animal sidekicks, but Okami and Okamiden are the only games I can think of that star animals who are totally incapable of talking, walking on their hind legs, or doing any of the things that people do.

I've always thought that casting a dog as its lead character is the main reason that Okami didn't sell that well. People may hear all about how great the game is, but when it comes time to put their money down, they just can't wrap their heads around playing a massive action/adventure game as a non-human. The concept is just too foreign. People even balked at a few wolf-moments in Twilight Princess. A full-on wolf game was just too much for people.

This is one entry on the list that might have done itself some good by getting in on some sweet Affleck action. There's no way in hell I would have preferred that the game star a handsome man like Affleck, but I bet it would have had a much easier time finding an audience (but only if he put some pants on.)

2) Retro Game Challenge

Retro Game Challenge is one of the only games that truly pays tribute to the gamer. While there are hundreds of movies about movies, and thousands of books about books, there are only a handful of videogames that are about videogames. Among those few, Retro Game Challenge sits close to the top of the list.

In the game, a guy in his late 30s named Arino relives his childhood by tasking his pre-adolescent self with playing a variety of fake videogames from the late '80s and early '90s. You play Arino's friend, but in reality, you're just playing yourself, hanging out with Arino in a virtual living room, and playing some awesome new videogames.

The game presumes that you, the player, love videogames more than other forms of entertainment. It's not such a strange thing to suppose. Why else would you spend your time and money on the game in first place? It also presumes that as a videogame fan, you like videogame fans. Logical, right?

Sadly, if the game's U.S. sales are any indication, the developers were wrong. In the United States, gamers aren't always so proud of the fact that they love videogames. There is an ongoing chase on the part of many gamers to find a game that's as legitimate and important as movies are, that closely resemble that more culturally accepted art form. Maybe that's because most gamers have been made fun of for at least a portion of their lives, just for being gamers. That kind of prolonged mockery can lead to internalized shame that doesn't go away overnight.

Personally, I love Arino. I love the gamer archetype, despite how many times I've been mocked for fitting into it. I think gamers deserve to be celebrated, more so than most athletes and movie stars do. That's why I'm probably in the minority when I say that I think that Arino is much more awesome than Ben Affleck. That said, I still would have bought Retro Game Challenge if it starred Ben Affleck. The games it contains are too fun to ignore. In fact, I'd probably like Ben Affleck more if I could associate him with something awesome like videogames, and not something not-awesome like Reindeer Games.

1) The Uncharted series (no, seriously -- hear me out)

In case you haven't noticed, I'm not a fan of most Hollywood hunks. I've always been this way. The first time I saw Star Wars, I thought to myself, "Jesus, that Han Solo guy is a real dick. Glad I'm not forced to hang out with him in real life." The first time I saw a James Bond movie, I thought, "Man, I hate guys like that, always pushing you around and making you feel small." As you might have guessed, my real-life experiences with "the popular kids" have not been so great. Of course, there are exceptions to that, but in general, the super-confident, super-good-looking, super-outgoing men of the world have not been easy for me to be around. They may be fun to watch in a movie, but hanging out with them in real life can really suck.

That's one of the reasons I don't like the fact that those "leading men" are taking over videogames. The other big reason is that they're just... boring. Seeing a good-looking, athletic guy climb a wall, beat up a bad guy, and get the girl is just so... expected. Of course he can beat up the bad guys! Of course he can get the girl! Just look at him! What can't he do?

It's much more interesting to see a regular guy, or a kid, or better yet, an irregular guy achieve the same goals. That's why I love Donut Drake.

In case you don't know, Donut Drake is the code name for a fat-guy mod created for Nathan Drake. Who's Nathan Drake, you ask? That's a matter of opinion. To me, Nathan Drake is the epitome of the dull, predictable, wanna-be Hollywood movie star that I don't want to see in a videogame. Everything about the character -- his look, his voice, his lines -- is all textbook Hollywood, by-the-numbers mediocrity made to appease the lowest common denominator in the Uncharted series.

Once Drake gets fat, that all changes.

Sure, his dialogue is still pretty sitcom-worthy (in a bad way), but there is something about a 400-pound guy hitting on two beautiful women that I can get behind. Just add a thick layer of blubber, and Drake stops being Brad Pitt and starts being Angus. He starts being relatable. He starts being likable. More importantly, he starts being exceptional.

It's a given that a good-looking athlete will get the girl, climb the brick wall, and take out the hordes of trained mercenaries. Seeing an action-movie star act out action-movie cliches is the antithesis of evocative. Seeing a 400-pound man do the same stunts (particularly the one about climbing the brick wall) is something else entirely. Even though I know it's fake, it's still amazing, inspiring, and exciting.

Yeah, I love Donut Drake. I want more videogame characters to be like him. I want more gamers to pay tribute to their imperfect selves, instead of dreaming of being the captain of the football team.

But will we ever get there?

It's nice that certain games' alpha males, like Solid Snake and Max Payne, have grown into more physically flawed, "human" characters, but that's just two guys out of the hundreds of dull-but-pretty male bimbos that current populate the majority of non-Nintendo AAA games (the difference between Nintendo's AAA games and everyone else's AAA games is worth noting, but that's probably best saved for another post). For the most part, it looks like the male-model game protagonist is here to stay.

How about you? Who do you prefer -- sexy and predictable regular Drake, or fat and amazing Donut Drake? Do you want to play a game that pays tribute to you, flaws and all, or a game that stars characters cast by the values and standards of a Hollywood talent agent?

So who knew you could make music with a typewriter? Pretty neat! Spotted on The Awesomer.

Sean Carey looked at choice and consequences in videogames, Jim reviewed APB, win Junpei's hat from Persona 3 Portable, Alpha Protocol 2 ain't happening, Hulu Plus won't require PlayStation Plus and more happened on 07/06/10.

Destructoid Originals:
Videogame cosplay at Anime Expo 2010
Pipe dreams: Real choice and consequences
Game SERIES Debate to the Death! Fallout series

Community:
Community blogs of 07/06/10
Forum of the day: Sin & Punishment: Star Successor

Reviews:
APB

Contests:
Win Junpei's hat from Persona 3 Portable!
Win Joe Danger for the PlayStation Network!

News:
Fight Night Round 4 sticks, moves to Games on Demand
Rayman Origins out for Christmas, might come to 3DS
Guitar Hero DLC for July brings Queen, Disturbed, more
Sega says there will be no Alpha Protocol 2
Japan to get Move bundles with Resident Evil, Time Crisis
Rumor: War for Cybertron DLC revealed
Plain Sight coming to PlayStation Network, supports Move
Obsidian wants to make Chrono Trigger
Sega to skip Gamescom for commercial reasons
Free App of the Day: Mr. Space!!
Survey says: Family Feud coming to PSN today
Wondering about Ignition and Samurai Showdown Sen?
Zombies DLC teased for Fat Princess
Crackdown 2 paid DLC revealed
Alan Wake original score available now
Destination Arcade: A new, smarter way to find XBLA games
Hulu Plus won't require PlayStation Plus, preview will
Rage, 3DS, Dance Central steal Game Critics: Best of E3
Rock Band 3 trailer reveals Faith No More, INXS tracks
Blizzard will require real names for forums going forward
Sony already talking to devs about the next PlayStation
Deal North: Gamestop sale, FIFA and other goodies
LucasArts producer would 'love' Super Star Wars on 360
What is this Dead Space 2 image teasing?
Team Fortress 2 Engineer update: Manual sentry control
Limbo, other 'Summer of Arcade' games dated
Study: Influence of review scores on game purchases

Offbeat:
Hot Toys' Ezio figure is freakishly accurate

Media:
Soul of Darkness is more Castlevania than Castlevania
BlackLight: Tango Down hits Xbox LIVE tomorrow
Archetype on iPhone looks pretty rad
These Killzone 3 screens look like Killzone 3 screens
Castlevania: Harmony of Despair hits on August 4
Destroy Destructoid with a Firefox add-on because you can

VALENCIA, 30 (EUROPA PRESS)

La consellera de Cultura, Trini Miró, ha asegurado este miércoles que la decisión de no abrir este año La Nau de Sagunto (Valencia) para el Festival d'Estiu de Teatres y representar todos los montajes en el Teatro Romano supondrá un ahorro de 400.000 euros, al tiempo que recalcó que para el público "el recorte no existe", puesto que podrá presenciar prácticamente la misma cantidad de espectáculos, tanto de calle como de escena, y todos ellos "de calidad".

La titular de Cultura ha realizado estas declaraciones a preguntas de los medios después de que Teatres de la Generalitat diera a conocer ayer la programación de 2010 del certamen, que se desarrollará en el Teatro Romano saguntino y no en la antigua nave siderúrgica.

Miró ha explicado que la decisión se debe al actual "período de crisis" e incidió en que no se van a hacer actividades en La Nau "este año" y "ojalá el año que viene se pueda remontar la crisis" para volver a utilizarla.

La consellera ha insistido en que el ahorro será de 400.000 euros, "que es prácticamente el 50% del presupuesto" del encuentro aunque aclaró que el festival "no ha sufrido recortes" sino que se ha preferido ofrecer el mismo número de espectáculos de calle --que ha aumentado-- y de escenario --que se reduce en dos-- en vez de utilizar el dinero en infraestructura y montaje y contratar así a menos compañías.

"Para el público el recorte no existe y para nosotros internamente es la medida que tocaba", ha aseverado. Asimismo, y preguntada por la posibilidad de que el ajuste pueda implicar una reducción de las cuentas de Teatres del ejercicio próximo, la consellera ha contestado que "de los presupuestos del año que viene ya se hablará".

Respecto al cambio de denominación del encuentro --de Sagunt a Escena a Festival d'Estiu de Teatres-- Miró recordó que el pasado año ya se dijo que había que darle "una denominación más amplia para que la gente sepa que es Teatres el que organiza este festival". "Ha cambiado la denominación, como cambian los logotipos y como los tiempos; nos tenemos que ir moviendo para que la gente se anime y acuda a los festivales que se organicen desde la Generalitat", ha aseverado.

La representante del Ejecutivo autonómico ha dicho que espera que el sector teatral reciba bien las propuestas. Ha agregado que no ha hablado con ellos "pero tienen que entender --ha continuado-- que hoy más que nunca se está haciendo un esfuerzo importante desde la Generalitat para que el mundo escénico esté más fortalecido que nunca, y de ahí decisiones como las de ampliar el número de ayuntamientos del Circuit Teatral y la dotación presupuestaria hasta un millón". Además, se ha contratado a diversas compañías de teatro y danza valencianas para que puedan mostrar sus trabajos en el festival de verano.

Trini Miró ha criticado que el festival "lo lleva la Generalitat sola y lo paga íntegramente desde Teatres" y ha considerado que si el evento "tuviera la ayuda del Gobierno de Zapatero como la tiene el Grec, a Almagro o Mérida, no estaríamos hablando así".

"Sólo con que nos diera una ayuda para llevar adelante Sagunt a Escena, nosotros abriríamos la Nau, pero como, desgraciadamente, aunque lo llevamos con mucho orgullo, es la Generalitat la que tiene que hacer frente siempre a todas las actividades en materia cultural, hemos tenido que tomar estas medidas", ha añadido.

"TIRÓN DE OREJAS" DEL CVC

Por otra parte, e interrogada por el "tirón de orejas" dado por el Consell Valencià de Cultura (CVC) en su Memoria de 2009 por la inversión en cultura, Miró comentó que "si el tirón de orejas se refiere a que haya recortes presupuestarios, las orejas le pueden llegar hasta el suelo a todo el mundo".

"Lógicamente hay recortes presupuestarios puesto que estamos viviendo una crisis debida a la mala gestión del Gobierno de Zapatero y hemos tenido que recortar los presupuestos. Pero es que hay gente pasando hambre y mientras esto suceda tendremos que ver cómo se palian estas situaciones en las que nos encontramos", ha declarado.

En esta línea, ha considerado que "si el Gobierno central hace unos años hubiese visto venir lo que pasaba y hubiera puesto medidas, hoy en día posiblemente no habría que sufrir estos recortes presupuestarios" y ha lamentado que el Consell lleva adelante sus proyectos "sin ayuda del Gobierno central, se hable de lo que se hable". "En el caso de cultura, no me cansaré de decir que el Ministerio no nos sirve para nada a los valencianos porque nos da miseria y con eso no se puede trabajar", ha apostillado.

Finalmente, y sobre sus reuniones con el CVC, ha recordado que hace muy poco tiempo que estuvo reunida con este organismo para dar a sus miembros "todas las explicaciones" que le pidieron.

I've told you when to go and what to pack, and in this installment of A Geek's Honeymoon Guide to Japan, I'll tell you what you should see. There're more awesome places to hit than I can list here, but we'll visit a few of my faves, and give you a rundown on renowned locations you'll want to add to your must-see list.

• Akihabara - The central gadget district, lovingly known as "Electric City," Akihabara is a short subway ride away from any location in Tokyo proper. There you'll find all of the electrical and computer components you could ever need, along with stories-high gaming arcades, electronics shops, and duity-free gadget hunting.
• Studio Ghibli Museum - Anime geeks will find a stop at the Studio Ghibli Museum to be one they'll never forget. Found just outside of Tokyo in the town of Mitaka, the Hayao Miyazaki-founded Studio Ghibli Museum features interactive displays based on the studio's famous works - Laupita, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, and many more. Plus, you'll get special screenings of short films you can't see anywhere else. It's a magical and whimsical place that I didn't want to leave! Here's a quick tip: get your tickets before you leave home. Residents of Japan usually have to reserve their tickets months in advance for admittance, but through your local JTB travel agent, you can choose the day you want to go, and get ushered right in.

Learn about a few more must-see spots after the break.

A Prophet
DVD, Optimum Home Entertainment

You can never really call time on a movie genre. Westerns, musicals and, in this instance, prison movies have all been written off over the years, yet all come back into view when someone tackles the conventions, explores the possibilities and uses the well-worn tropes to create something new. Director/writer Jacques Audiard is one for taking care over his work: his filmography has regular four- to five-year gaps between releases. With faultless performances on both sides of the camera, we follow young French/Arab petty crook Malik (Tahar Rahim) as he enters a six-year stretch. The outside world has taught him little, the constant threat of death provides the impetus he needs to learn, fast. This is not one of those nice movie prisons: here you're sure to be shanked with no redemption. While it's Malik's (true life) story that's central, it's the resident Corsican crime boss César (Niels Arestrup) who casts the longest shadow. The film explores the complex dynamic between the two men touching on social standing, race, hatred, fear and power. The DVD covers the story behind the production showing how nearly all of the prison extras were ex-cons. Alongside the deleted scenes there's a short feature on the director organising a screening of the movie for street kids and people from both sides of the law – probably the toughest focus group in the world; they all come out singing the film's praises.

A Single Man

Colin Firth and Julianne Moore star in fashion designer Tom Ford's immaculate film debut set in 1960s LA.

DVD & Blu-Ray, Icon

Ponyo

Cute magic fish anime from Studio Ghibli master Hayao Miyazaki.

DVD & Blu-Ray, Optimum

Decoder

Cult German freakout from a William S Burroughs short story.

DVD, Shellshock

The Wolfman

Benicio Del Toro howls at the moon in this horror remake.

DVD & Blu-Ray, Universal

RoboGeisha

Geishas with orifice weapons.

DVD & Blu-Ray, Showbox

Curb Your Enthusiasm Series 7; 1-7 Boxset

Pretty, pretty good collection from Larry David.

DVD, Warner Home Video

The original NES was released in the USA in 1986 when I was all of 5 years old, and although I don't remember exactly when the console was first brought into my home, I pretty much grew up with the thing. Everyone who had one remembers the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo cartridge that shipped with the system and likely spent countless hours trying to defeat both. While at some point I was able to defeat all eight worlds in Mario, Duck Hunt was forever a confounding and frustrating experience. In today's links, Collegehumor explains what was really going on with that cackling dog and his feathered friends.

• Manofest has video of the greatest drummer in the history of drummers.

• HolyTaco reveals all of the signs that will let you know if you are at a shady flea market.

• Unrealitymag has a gallery of the best cosplayers Anime Central 2010 had to offer.

• In an example of life imitating art, Ong Bak star Tony Jaa is quitting acting to become a monk. Details on FilmDrunk.

• Ever wondered what was controlling the difficulty in NES classic Duck Hunt? CollegeHumor knows the dirty little secret.

The sun beams fiercely on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and even as evening approaches, the humidity is relentless. Backstage, costume makers prepare to show off their best to a circus tent loaded with strangers who share their eccentric hobby. I glance over my opening speech one last time before noticing a veteran cosplayer sweating bullets through her eye shadow, shaded cheekbones and full-body jumpsuit.

Though she has been modeling her homemade costumes for over six years, earning over thirty awards from conventions across America, Caitlin Beards is sweating through her skintight pleather and spandex one-piece. This is her one-hundredth costume to date, and she has poured three months of her skill into sculpting the seven yards of metal chain and the eighteen-inch tall wig strapped to her head to become the video game heroine Bayonetta. Beards, like many others, belongs to a previously underground sub-culture of geeks that has blossomed in recent years.

The selected nineteen cosplayers standing with me under the tent are accustomed to posing for photos at conventions, but never for an audience of magazine and radio personalities, and never after having their make-up applied by personnel from MAC Cosmetics. For the first time in New York’s history, fashion-centered video game and Japanese anime fans have been pampered and prepped by internationally acclaimed make-up artists. 2010 has so far marked a new step in public exposure and professional treatment for cosplaying, and the community is still rising in the public eye. The hobby of cosplay is easy to explain but difficult to execute: it is the act of dressing like your favorite character from a TV show, movie, video game or comic book. In some social circles, cosplay is a competitive sport, to others it is a challenge to prove their sewing skills, and for some it is purely for fun and an excuse to meet other fans.

Cosplay was arguably birthed at Star Trek conventions, where Trekkies posed as Starfleet officers, Klingons, and Vulcans alike to display their fandom. It was taken to a competitive level in Japan and spread itself worldwide through anime conventions. The hobby latched on in America in the early nineties, but skyrocketed with the domestication of the Internet. Dedicated cosplayers create online personas and profiles on forums to display their various fashion innovations, using materials from sheer linen to duct tape to altered Armani suits.

For the past three years, I have been touring anime conventions with attendance numbering anywhere from a few hundred to over twenty-four thousand. One of my recurring roles as a convention guest is to host a quintessential event: the cosplay masquerade. The largest event I ever hosted was at Anime Boston this past spring. Initial performance submission was so massive that the lead coordinator filtered all entries just to narrow down to forty performances that would fill the three-hour time block. Convention attendees waited outside the main events hall for hours beforehand, hoping for a spot in a room that fits five-thousand, or the spillover room that accommodated another thousand using state-of-the-art video equipment. The convention itself boasted a new record high of attendance of nearly seventeen thousand, despite being held during Easter weekend and competing for its audience with the Penny Arcade Expo East, the largest video game convention on the East Coast to date, which was held the weekend before at the same convention center. It seems neither recession nor religious holiday can deter us nerds.

Cosplay is rapidly blossoming under the public eye in New York, because while the anime industry is evolving from DVDs to streaming websites like Crunchyroll and Hulu, convention attendance (and with it, cosplay exposure) is on the rise. Interest in cosplay has taken hold of a younger, more ravenous generation of anime fans, and with new anime series coming over every season from Japan, the fans are increasing their efforts to respond. The New York Anime Festival, held each fall at the Jacob Javits Center, saw its attendance increase dramatically in its first three years. Between 2007 and 2008, Reed Exhibitions reported attendance swelling from fifteen to eighteen thousand, and for its third straight year, attendance capped just above twenty-one thousand. The event has such immense interest behind it that now corporate sponsorship has moved in to reward the elite cosplayers. At their headlining competitive cosplay event, the winning team is handed a free trip to Japan, which is quite impressive compared to a dollar store trophy and a boxed set of Hayao Miyazaki DVD’s.

New York’s dense population and entertainment industry help stoke the flames of cosplay awareness and provide the perfect environment. Just by Bryant Park is the largest Japanese bookstore, Kinokuniya, spanning three floors, the top one dedicated to Japanese comic books and art books from anime. Other stores such as Image Anime by Penn Station, often hold holiday competitions and offer prizes, which only encourage fans to come out of the woodwork to present costumes they have worked on for as long as three years. These constant events are pulling together a community regularly enough that the experienced can now mentor and encourage the newer fans, not to mention trade off cosplay war stories. Cosplayers now gather for regular public outings in places like Central Park and karaoke bars just to meet up in and show off their newest costume designs. Some go for realism, some for sight-gags like “cross-playing” (dressing as a character of the opposite gender), but all have a great time doing it.

Events like the Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival (a.k.a. Sakura Matsuri) at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Japan Society may be elevating the public’s knowledge of cosplay as serious business. Only two weeks after the Fashion Show at the Botanic Garden, another major cosplay event has been scheduled: a competition at the Japan Society, right nearby the United Nations building.

As I prepare to host and present the participants, I see someone standing off in the stage wings: a young girl, fifteen at most, wearing her first cosplay. Even with the eight-foot Styrofoam sword slung over her back, she is shaking noticeably. She’s worried the audience will notice her wig’s ponytails are too short, or the crude stitching around her foam armguards. Moments ago, she approached me backstage and asked to be pulled from the masquerade due to her stage fright. I asked her what her character would do in the face of fear; since she is dressed as a demon-slayer, she might as well play the part. Her eyes grow in reassurance and realization, almost to the Bambi-eyed ratio of the comic book character she portrays. I wink from the podium and announce her name as she steps into the light confidently: a new cosplayer is born. And the tradition goes on.