Internship: Joomla skills wanted for Yuricon site project

June 27th, 2010

I have a real need. We have a lovely new Yuricon website all ready to go, but it’s created with Joomla and I am absolutely flat-out too busy at the moment to take the time I need to move everything over to populate the new pages.

I am looking for someone with complete confidence in their Joomla skills and good communication skills who can take what is currently on the Yuricon website and shift it over to its new home. I’ll be doing updates at that point, but I just cannot find time in between my jobs right now to get everything moved over. (It’s been on my to-do list for like 5 months…time is not magically appearing.)

This is a project-based paid internship. Here’s what I need from you if you want to apply. Send an email to anilesbocon01 at hotmail.com. Use the subject line: Yuricon Internship and please include *all* the following information:

1) Your name and an affidavit that you are over 18. No applications from under-18 will be accepted, as some of our content contains “adult” material.

2) A *brief* description of your school and/or work experience with Joomla.

3) Take a look at the current Yuricon.org site and guestimate what you think is a reasonable estimate for how long it would take you to move the content to a new, already-built home.

4) IMPORTANT – contact information. Email AND phone. I will call you for a phone interview if you fit my criteria. (I ask for a phone number because I would prefer to find someone in the same or near time zone. I know there’s Skype and all that, but it would be much smoother if  we are on the same hours, as opposed to one of us being off by many hours. It just makes it a simpler project to manage. I won’t toss overseas applications out of hand, but will give preference to applicants in my time zone.)

We do have a deadline on this project, so I need someone quickly.

I will be paying for your work and I will also provide you with a portfolio piece and a recommendation (if your work is satisfactory, obviously.)

Mostly, I need someone who can work on this *right now*. Not sometime, eventually, when you get around to it.

I’ll look forward to hearing from you!

Posted in Yuricon | 1 Comment »


Yuri Network News – June 26, 2010

June 26th, 2010

Yuri Manga

YNN Correspondents AudioErotica and Erin S. remind us that the first of the Tsubomi collections are coming out in August, starting with Ebisu-san and Hotei-san, Shimaism and Hoshikawa Ginza Yon-choume.

Also out on the same day is Tsubomi, Vol. 7.

For folks that like our Yuri a little more mature, Rakuen Le Paradise, Volume 3 is due to hit the streets next week. I know that I will never turn down more Nishi UKO.

Winner for this week’s oddest title is Rokuroichi’s Yuri Hime collection, Kuchibiru ni Saketa Orange.

***

Snatches of Yuri

There’s a series I haven’t looked at at all called Nishiburi, but a number of the Japanese Yuri lists mention that Volume 3 is totally Yuri, 5 out of 5 stars!! And in this statement lies the crux of the matter – this zOMG Yuri? One character says she likes the other character. This is exactly why I blog. Because that moment that, to so many of the male Japanese Yuri fans is the apex of Yuri is not, to my mind, the climax of a relationship, but the beginning. That, in a nutshell, is why we get so many “Story A”s, in case you ever wondered.

An illustrator that has done some work for Ichijinsha, and has done Sonohanabira and Strawberry Panic! illustrations, Sakai Kyuuta has an artbook coming out this summer called candy rain. One expects the Service quotient to be rather high, so if nekkid girls are what you’re after, save up your money and buy yourself a present. :-)

And for folks who like Hakamada Mera’s style, Yamaguchi Maiko’s Futari Poppo seems like a good bet.

***

Maria-sama ga Miteru Movie News

A week without Marimite news is a sad week, so I’m glad to tell you there is now a photo book available with photos from the filming of the Maria-sama ga Miteru live-action movie!

***

Twitter News

I shared this on the Yuricon Mailing List and thought I’d share it here, as well. And I may make Twitter News a semi-regular feature, since there’s a lot going on there. This week’s Twitter news is idiotic. :-)

For those of you who are fans of Hayate x Blade (that’s all of you, right?) joining Twitter just got even dumber than before. You too can befuddle, annoy and confuse a number of the HxB characters by talking to (or about) them on Twitter.

amachi_hitsugi
minori_bot
kurea_bot
Yuho_SHIZUMA
kugajunbot
mudou_ayana
mikado_akira
inorbibot

Kurea threatened to call the school guard on me. ^_^;;

***

That’s a wrap for this week.

Become a Yuri Network Correspondent by sending me any Yuri-related news you find. Emails go to anilesbocon01 at hotmail dot com. Not to the comments here, please, or they might be forgotten or missed. There’s a reason for this madness. This way I know you are a real human, not Anonymous (which I do not encourage – stand by your words with your name!) and I can send you a YNN correspondent’s badge.

Thanks to all of you – you make this a great Yuri Network!

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Maria Watches Over Us Anime, Season 4, Disk 1 (English)

June 25th, 2010

In Maria-sama ga Miteru, Season 4, it’s time for the Lillian school festival and once again, the Student Council, known as the Yamayurikai, is putting on a performance. This year, because of the unusual resemblance Fukuazawa Yumi has to her younger brother Yuuki, the play that is chosen is the Torikaebaya Monogatari, a play that deals the with two siblings who switch gender roles in the Heian court.

But Yumi is only half worried about the play, because it comes to her attention that Touko has had some trouble with the Drama Club. In typical Yumi fashion, she resolves the issues by being irresistibly sincere. And to top it all off, Yumi and Sachiko finally learn the truth of Kanako’s issues with her father. The story is both much, much more horrible and much, much less horrible than we could have imagined.

Yumi and Sachiko don’t celebrate their one-year anniversary, for perfectly good reasons, but I still think Sachiko ought to do *something* nice for Yumi.

And Sei and Youko make an appearance that reminded us of just how wonderful they are. I’m glad to have been able to read the novels to enjoy all of their future appearances. I also admit to having been fascinated with the way Youko’s blouse was drawn. There was a lot more attention to detail in the way that buttoned shirt lay against her than probably was warranted. :-)

At the end of the disk, Yumi, having been commanded by Sachiko to find a soeur and Yoshino, pressured by a rash promise made to Eriko, set out to hold an “audition” for the open positions. This is, possibly, the novel most chock-a-block filled with zOMG amazing plot points, that the anime couldn’t hope to do more than scrape the surface, but damn that surface is awfully busy. :-)

The one striking this about this 4th season to me was that there was no way you could start with the first disk of this season, and start to watch. Quite often with anime series that continue for a few seasons, the first episode summarizes what has gone before, at least enough for a relative newbie to sit down and watch it. Not so for this. If you had no idea who these people were or why they were doing the things they were doing, it would be a slightly befuddling story. And, of course, the real in-jokes would be lost. There would be no way to appreciate just *how* much Sachiko had changed when she proposes the double gender switch for the play if you did not know what kind of person she had been. As a staunch obsessive fan, it kind of felt good. This anime is not for the off-the-street, “who is this? what’s going on?” person. It’s for *us.* :-)

The DVD includes the “Maria-sama ni ha Naisho” and liner notes as extras. The physical extra for those pre-orderers among us is a fetching writing pad.

Art – 8 for Youko’s button-down shirt
Characters – 10
Story – 10
Yuri – 1
Loser Marimite Fan – slightly less than a million

Overall – 9

In this life that I have created that focuses so much around anime and manga, this series, Maria-sama ga Miteru, along with Sailor Moon, has profoundly affected my life. I really just want to say thank you to Nozomi/RightStuf for allowing me the pleasure of seeing this series in English.

Posted in Anime, English Anime, Maria-sama ga Miteru | 16 Comments »


Yuri Manga: Pure Yuri Anthology Hirari, Volume 1 (ピュア百合アンソロジー ひらり)

June 25th, 2010

2010 has been good for Yuri in one way – there are even more Yuri Anthologies than ever before. Alongside of Yuri Hime, Yuri Hime S and Yuri Hime Wildrose we now have more recent additions Tsubomi, Yuri Shoujo,  eclectic Rakuen Le Paradis and now, Hirari.

It will not probably come as much of a shock to learn that the bulk of the stories are focused on schoolgirls, with a few stories that touch upon the adult world. And, also not so surprisingly, the art doesn’t really ever communicate any adult sensibilities. In fact, one story made no sense to me until I realized that it was not, in fact, about schoolgirls, but about teachers. The certainly didn’t look like grown-ups, which complicated things for me.

Hirari, Volume 1 (ピュア百合アンソロジー ひらり) can be summed up in the line, “You don’t understand my feelings.” In many of the stories, one character thinks that the other does not like or love her the same way as she feels about her. In all of the stories they are wrong. This doesn’t mean every story is nothing but mindless repetition and I feel that there’s an actual effort to provide some variety in set-up and style. Unfortunately for readers such as myself, the lack of resolution beyond forehead touching/hand holding/smiling at one another means that, even though the stories are not *actually* the same…they still feel it.

Through no fault of its own, Hirari also lacks any really strong artists (I’m long past hoping for strong writers.)  Where Rakuen, Yuri Shoujo and Tsubomi (not to mention the Ichijinsha publications) all  have some popular doujinshi artists-turned-professionals, Hirari looks decidedly second-rate in comparison. I don’t hold that against the publication, though. There’s only *so* many excellent artists out there and everyone deserves a chance to pay their dues and learn how it works.

I admit that I did have to read the anthology through three times before any of the stories stuck with me, but a few have. The two teachers, one of whom is still dealing with a kiss between them from years earlier, a girl who needs sleeping pills to go to sleep, concerned about her friend who is happily sexual and seems kind of flighty, a story about pop idols that are forced to switch staff and a story in which the most visually striking piece is the cover page, as a girl arranges her shadow to make it look like she and her sempai are kissing.

While I did not fall head over heels in love with this anthology, I’m always willing to give a new publication the benefit of the doubt. So, if a second volume is published, I’ll probably get it.

Not “recommended” per se, but I’m not warning you off, either.

Ratings:

Overall – 6

The rating is a little lukewarm, and so was the anthology. I’m still looking for those stories between “Story A” and porn. A little passion wouldn’t kill this book.

Posted in Hirari, Yuri Manga | No Comments »


Shibaraku Omachi Kudasai

June 22nd, 2010

Sorry for lack of posts this week. Work is kicking my butt in several directions and I’m in the process of shifting everything over to a new computer (nicknamed “Balsa.”)

I’m out the next few evenings, as well, so please excuse me while Okazu goes into some forced downtime.

In the meantime, please entertain yourselves by following two roundtables in which I have the pleasure of participating this week:

The Manhwa Movable Feast, July Edition. This month, hosted by Melinda Beasi of Manga Bookshelf, we are covering The Color of… Trilogy. I took a stab at the third book in the series, The Color of Heaven. *So* not my kind of book.

And on Hooded Utilitarian, I am pleased to be part of a roundtable on marketing “arty” manga. My “Solution” article has been reworked slightly to address some of the many excellent comments that appeared in the comments here and make a few points relevant to the issue there. The rest of the roundtable folks are going to have a lot to say, so follow the roundtable all week long!

I’ll be back with reviews asap.

Posted in Okazu News | No Comments »