Christopher Poole also known as moot, is the founder of the highly successful English image board 4chan based off of the Japanese image board, 2chan. 4chan is probably best known by anime fans or otakus as a place for discussing anime and manga related topics. Poole has recently appeared on the prestigious TED Talks giving a brief lecture introduction on 4chan and some of its relevance on how it has affected the American culture. Poole appeared to have avoided any mention of any anime or manga references despite 4chan's significance to in the otaku community. Other people who have lectured on TED include former US President Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Bill Gates, and the founders of Google. Video included inside.

My private email address was hacked earlier this morning around 9:40 AM PST leading to all sorts of spam emails sent to friends, business contacts, and affiliates. I have already notified all affected parties. Please do not click on the link within the email!

I have taken steps in order to prevent further problems, and am in the processing of creating a new account. I apologize for the inconvenience.

The main gallery is undergoing maintenance. We are also in the process of migrating the gallery into a new one.

Our first year at Sakura-Con and what a convention it was! The staff is currently slaving away offloading and editing images, videos, compiling articles, transcribing panels, and working on interviews. We'll have the full report hopefully ready soon sometime early next week! Stay tuned!

Thank you to the readers who pointed out that the game does in fact have a fast forward feature which is unlocked after a first play through. A few typos and layout issues with the Sakura Wars Review has also been corrected.

Just as a reminder, there's approximately 3 1/2 hours left before our Winter Holiday Giveaway comes to a close! If you haven't entered yet, ENTER NOW!!!

While working on the site and watching my routine television shows on the internet video site Hulu, a commercial featuring the different themes of Google's internet browser Chrome popped up. The commercial flashed through around 50  themes including the popular voice synthesizer idol character, Hatsune Miku. Chrome users can download this theme from Chrome's theme homepage here. As an added note, a Good Smile Company theme and K-ON! theme is also available.

Continuing from my previous post, we headed off to Akihabara main street after stopping by Yodobashi. We visited the Taito Game Station and pleasantly impressed how the arcade business is still booming in Japan. First floor is mostly filled with UFO catchers, while the upper floors are devoted to games. As a quick note, most stores in Japan do not allow for photography apart from some larger department stores and company stores like figure makers Kaiyodo and Kotobukiya.

An adult adaptation of K-ON! was release recently by TMA titled Keion!, and oddly enough they recreated the ending credit sequence for the series and at least 15 minutes of other scenes from the series. Check out the videos inside.

Continuing our journey in the land of the rising sun, we couldn’t resist heading off the famed holy land, Akihabara. After a brief stop at bank to exchange more money and the local bakery for some breakfast goods, we ventured off on foot. Took us roughly 15 minutes to reach the eastern edges of Akihabara and realized that most stores do not open until 10AM or 11AM. We went inside the giant department store, Yodobashi (Akiba branch) and was quickly overwhelmed by all the electronics on the first floor. The building itself has about 11 floors of goodies including one floor that sold nothing but video games, model kits, puzzles, and gashapons.