The following are my notes on the panel. I cleaned up the prose a bit, but this is still more in the form of notes than a proper article or blog post.
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Kyoko Hikami panel at PMX 2015
Pacific Media Expo 2015’s anime guest of honor was Kyoko Hikami, a voice actress likely best known for her role as Momoko/Wedding Peach in the anime adaptation of Wedding Peach, or perhaps as the rabbit-ear-and-dice-wearing Rabi-en-Rose from Di Gi Charat. She held two panels at PMX, as well as at least one autograph session. PMX is small enough that neither was especially crowded – the panel I made it to peaked at about 20 attendees, and the line for autographs was similarly short. Continue reading
Magic Weapon: Silencer
Silencer is a plain-looking dagger, a bit on the short side but otherwise apparently remarkable save that it produces no sound when it strikes something. When a creature is damaged by Silencer, they must save to avoid being affected by Silence (though the effect applies only to that creature and does not radiate out from them); if the creature is surprised by the blow (as with a sneak attack) they save at a disadvantage.
If Silencer is used to strike the killing blow against a creature, that creature cannot respond to Speak with Dead or similar affects (the creature can be contacted and even be present, but it cannot in any way respond), and if such an unfortunate is returned from the dead they will be mute, an effect that can be cured by only by Regenerate or effects of a similar power.
Lack of Manga in Comic Stores
These are my notes from a panel I attended at Fanime 2015. The speaker was Nick Rowe from Dr. Comics and Mr. Games.
ANNFacts Kai
This is from the Kleckbait episode – the annual interview with RightStuf founder and owner Shawne Kleckner. The format I’m using here is a number or number range indicating about how many minutes into the episode relevant comments are made, along with a summary of what’s said. As usual, I’m not attempting to transcribe or even roughly summarize everything said – just trying to pull out data and factoids.
ANNFacts NEXT
From the Big Funi Hustlas episode (2015 Jan 16)
- At about 5 minutes, the following titles are doing very well for Funimation:
- DBZ Battle of the Gods
- Attack on Titan
- Cowboy Bebop
- Bayonetta
- Fairy Tail
- Disappointments include:
- Production IG’s movie Hal (mentioned around minutes 9-10), apparently because there was basically no awareness of it, good or bad.
- The live-action feature Let Me Out (around 12 minutes in)
- Also, the Magical Index/Scientific Railgun shows seem to do better on streaming than on disc
- Around 15 minutes they mention that Future Diary on DVD didn’t do very well; they’re guessing home media collectors are holding out for the Blu-Ray
- 16 minutes: the standard limited-edition releases (discs + chipboard box) didn’t see a drop-off from the prior year – they grew.
- 19 min: Special editions are driven by availability of assets as well as projections (these are case-by-case decision). Kamisama Kiss’s special edition was diven by streaming numbers and a desire to see if those would translate into physical media sales. They did pretty well…
- 21 min: Ideas for extras tend to come from fan requests
- 26-27: the Funimation subscriber sub-only option caused a jump on without a corresponding jump-off from all-access subscribers.
- 29-30: Space Battleship Yamato has been great for Funi
- 36-38: Funi attempt to get all the rights they can. They aren’t especially focused on global streaming rights, if only because those are frontloaded (in terms of having to pay without Funi being able to gauage demand); they’re more focused on North America (???and on mobile sites?)
- 42: According to Japanese industry, streaming successes are driving further production (the large number of shows each season). This “success” may not be short-term financial gains so much as access to a borader audience.
- 56: Funi saw an immediate jump in subscribers after announcing the first broadcast dubs
- 64: Funi’s online store has been doing very well.
- 65: They’re looking at doing more retailer exclusives, for various retailers (not necessarily just Amazon- and Walmart-size ones)
- 68: The 35+ demographic is big for Funi in both sales and streaming, despite conventional wisdom
- At 70 they make a point of refuting (from data) the “girls don’t buy [whatever]” BS
- 72: They’re finalizing plans to expand to South and Central America
- 78: Download-to-own has been examined before and they look at it again periodically
- 93: Funi has a pre-order-heavy audience
From the Meat Popsicles episode (2015 May 1)
- 9: Hulu contracts are at-will
- 10: Individual TV networks want to go on their own individual platforms rather than a shared platform like Hulu; that’s the big risk that may tank Hulu (apparently a major revenue sources for anime companies these days)
- 15: Shirobako tanked in streaming
- 31: There were long-standing issues licensing Robot Carnival due to APPP being burned on their prior attempt to enter the US market (presumably this is a reference to the Jojo OVAs)
- 48: Discussing differences between ANN users and Crunchyroll users
- 49: Discussiong of “solving the discovery problem” for catalog material “for casuals” (that is, introducing older material to folks other than hardcore fans)
- There seems to have also been a discussion of anime members of the creative team who are revenue (not profit) participants?
Giving Sorcerers an Identity
Sorcerers were introduced to D&D in 3rd edition. At the time they could be best described as “Wizards, except they use Charisma instead of Intelligence, and they use spell slots to dynamically cast spells from a small static pool, rather than casting from from pre-defined loadout of spells from an indefinitely large pool”. Oh, there was some noise about where they got their apparently-innate magical ability – something about possibly being descended from dragons – but if so that didn’t seem to make any difference to their abilities – they were still learning and casting the exact same set of spells as Wizards.
Buying anime at anime cons seems strange
While at Fanime this Memorial Day weekend I realized that though I attend a number of anime conventions and I buy quite a bit of anime on DVD and Blu-ray (my DVD library software lists about 1900 SKUs, though a few of them aren’t anime…), I buy very little anime at conventions. For example, at Fanime the majority of the anime I purchased was at the swap meet; I think I only made a single retail purchase. But I don’t exactly avoid spending money at conventions…
The obvious reason for this is the internet – online shopping for anime just about as convenient as buying at-con (you might think walking away with discs in hand is more convenient, but I argue that only makes a difference if you plan to go home or back to your hotel room and try watching what you bought in the next day or two). Also, online anime tends to be cheaper – convention dealers like Anime Pavilion basically offer a flat 25% off MSRP for all anime, while online you can usually get discounts of 25%-40% on non-clearance titles – for example, Rightstuf offers 40% discounts on preordered titles. Except if they’re from NIS America, Aniplex, and (now) Pony Canyon USA – then the discount tops out at 20% – which means it’s worth buying those titles at a convention.
That leads me to wonder when it is worth buying anime at a convention rather than waiting to get it online. Here are the circumstances I’ve thought of so far:
- You plan to watch the show almost immediately after purchasing it (if you won’t watch it for as little as 2 days you can probably wait for Amazon Prime to deliver it).
- Distributor controls pricing so that maximum discount online is 20% (Aniplex of America, NIS America, Pony Canyon USA titles; a lot of Ghibli stuff rarely goes past a 10% discount).
- You can’t really purchase things online, possibly because you don’t use a credit or debit card, or because there are problems getting shipments delivered where you live.
- You get something extra for purchasing at the convention (for example, NISA and Aniplex have offered autograph tickets with select purchases at Anime Expo in years past, and the Sailor Moon set I bought from Anime Pavilion at Fanime got me a choice of “free” posters).
- The purchase is pretty much a convention exclusive (this is how my swap meet purchases work – I basically only buy things at the swap meet that I don’t think I can find at competitive prices otherwise).
- When somebody involved in creating or releasing the show is present and you can buy directly from them as a visible show of support (I’ve done this with Discotek’s booth at Anime Expo)
Any other ideas about when it’s worth buying anime at cons?
Uru in Blue (Aoki Uru) panel from Fanime 2015
A certain tokusatsu panelist couldn’t make it, so Gainax co-founder Hiroyuki Yamaga agreed to run a panel on Gainax’s pre-production film Uru in Blue. I took some rough notes – this won’t be a write-up of the panel so much as a transcription. Also, both the notes and the photos were taken on my phone; please set your expectations accordingly.
Some background: Uru in Blue (Japanese title: Aoki Uru) is a film project by Studio Gainax. Fans in and out of Japan have been seeing information about it since the 90s – Carl Horn ran a panel about it at Anime Los Angeles earlier this year. Carl also attended this panel, so if he runs his Aoki Uru panel again there’s a chance it’ll be updated with some of what what revealed here.
Odd Attribute Modifiers in d20 games
When Wizards of the Coast published the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons (and thus set down the foundation for d20 games) they adopted a new, standardized, open-ended schedule of attribute modifiers (as compared to the fixed-range and sometimes attribute-specific schedules from earlier editions). In order to be open-ended the modifiers had to be defined by a formula – mathematically it’s
Floor(attribute/2) – 5
In plainer language, it’s +1 for every 2 points above 10, -1 for every 2 points below 11. Simple enough, but there’s a drawback: the “every 2 points” bit (necessary to keep attribute modifiers from becoming completely overwhelming differences between characters, overriding most other differences in ability) means that odd-valued attributes are basically useless – a 13 is worth exactly as much as a 12, a 5 is just as bad as a 4. These values seem like vestigial bits from prior editions, and while the designers of 3E tried to ameliorate that by giving them some utility (defining attribute requirements for feats in terms of odd numbers) they weren’t very successful – for example, substandard attribute values don’t end up differentiated, and feats a player wasn’t considering can’t make their character’s odd attribute values meaningful.
To fix this without upsetting the apple cart (all the other design work in 3E/d20), we’d really like to give these odd attribute values a modifier that’s halfway between that of the even values that bookend them, so for example, a 12 => +1 and a 14 => +2, so a 13 => +1.5. Fine, except what does that mean? How do you add half a point to a roll? You can say something about using it as a tie-breaker, but that won’t come up very often, and even when it does there’s no guarantee the opposition won’t have an odd attribute and the accompanying tie-breaking modifier on their end of things.
How about this: let’s get to that “.5” modifier statistically. That is, instead of adding half a point to a bunch of rolls, let’s add 1 point about half the time. We don’t even need to do any extra work for this – the rule could be
When your die roll is an odd number, add 1 to it for every odd-valued attribute that would modify the roll.
As an example let’s look at a Paladin making a Fortitude save. They have a Con of 13 (+1) and a Charisma of 15 (+2), and because they’re a Paladin their Charisma bonus applies to all their saves. When they roll a Fortitude save, they’ll add +3 when their roll is even, and +5 when the number they roll is odd. On a roll based on Charisma alone (Diplomacy, perhaps) the Paladin’s attribute bonus will be +2 half the time and +3 the other half, averaging out to +2.5. This makes their 15 Charisma worth exactly half the difference between a Charisma of 16 and a Charisma of 14, and doesn’t require us to rewrite the rest of the game.
Percent Liar 