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The Null Set Reaches 1,000,000

Posted by Author | Anime, Anime Review, Manga Review, The Null Set, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, manga, meta, meta/office keeping, new banner, slow and steady wins the race, the best part of Kamisama Dolls is the faces | Thursday 15 September 2011 8:22 am

There are many ways to measure the success of a blog; any honest blogger would rightly say that numerical standards are not the best judge but that same honest blogger would admit that having good numbers is a nice thing. So, I’d be lying that I’m not psyched that The Null Set reached such a lofty level as getting a million hits (or page views, if you swing that way) because it must mean I’m doing something right but this elation is tempered with the knowledge that I still see much room for improvement before I’m satisfied with my work here.

My most heartfelt thanks goes out to everyone that’s stopped by over the years; I’m glad The Null Set was able to be of some use to you.

And now since I’m making a meta post, I might as well mention a few other items. The first is that I finally broke down and decided to make an account at MyAnimeList. I realize MAL is so 3 years ago but it finally dawned on me that I’ve watched loads of anime and the point is approaching when I won’t remember everything I’ve seen. I’m still getting use to all that I can do with MAL but I have finished my list. The other benefit is now I can add the nifty widget so people can see what I’m currently watching because the world has been desperately curious about what anime I’m watching .

The second starts after I got tired of how limited the Archive widget is. I decided to create my own because I wanted to include a way to pick out my best/favorite/interesting posts so they could be found by newer readers and others that may have missed them. You can click on the link in the top bar to see the result. For each month it states how many posts there were and links to a listing of all the posts for that month. Additionally, within each month’s block is the title and link of my best/favorite/interesting posts that were written in that month.

The third is to mention my new banner. Like the one it replaced, it includes Alpha from Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou – my favorite manga – and it uses a picture I took. I don’t know if I believe what I’ve heard about how the sunsets over Lake Erie are some of the prettiest in the world but they are definitely, at least, beautiful. I can just imagine Alpha sitting, contemplating and enjoying them.

Filed under: manga, meta/office keeping

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Yokohama Shopping Trip – Best Manga Ever

Posted by Author | Anime, Anime Review, Manga Review, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, manga, science fiction | Wednesday 29 October 2008 6:56 am

Today I got my hands on the soundtrack to Somedays Dreamer’s Season 2 and as I was playing this most awesome cd, I started wondering if music made for a slice-off-life anime would sound good while reading slice-of-life manga. To test this hypothesis out I opened up my scanlation of Yokohama Shopping Trip and started at volume 1.

If you’re not familiar with Yokohama Shopping Trip, aka Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou or YKK, it’s a fusion of two genres that normally don’t intermingle much: slice-of-life and SF. The story is set at some point in the future, in Japan, after some sort of cataclysm that has raised the world’s oceans by dozens of feet. This future Japan has only a small fraction of the people of today so even with less land, much of countryside is reverting back to how it was before humanity (with a twist). It appears that science advanced enough that human-like robots where created because our main character is a robot named Alpha that runs a coffee house in the sticks. This sounds like a recipe for either a very depressing story, a story meant to admonish us, or a chest-thumbing tale of how humanity will always preserve over adversity. None of these are the case though, instead we get a relaxing, slice-of-life story about Alpha’s life as she runs the coffee house. In fact, the manga is told with such warmth that it makes me wish that I could live in the world and have the chance to visit Alpha’s cafe, even if I don’t like coffee.

Getting back to my experiment, I found that listening to the soundtrack to Somedays Dreamers Season 2 did enhance my reading pleasure. I actually couldn’t stop reading and after about five hours, I had read all 14 volumes of the manga in one sitting with the soundtrack looping the entire time.

This marks the third or fourth time I’ve read YKK in it’s entirety since discovering it about a year ago and because it hasn’t lost any of it’s greatness or impact, I can easily say this is the best manga ever. Which is why I find it astonishing that this title is still unlicensed for the US. I’ll leave an actual full review of YKK for some later point, though you can probably guess how I’ll rate it.