I am doing a TEMPORARY Shutdown of Cartoon Leap main site pretty soon, probably before this month (January 2012) ends. I want a new hosting company, fresh layout, reboot, whatever!

Meanwhile, I will be updating and posting news on Facebook. Feel free to subscribe if you wish, for the time being.

Until then, Bye World…Hello Facebook.

Thanks for your understanding.

Back to my old days, when internet was just surfacing and I was interested about getting anime “online”, I remember the time when people bought several VHS tapes from fansubbers in the U.S.A. Titles such as Rayearth, Card Captor Sakura, and many more were available for a cheap price, paying only the shipping and the VHS…Yeah, you read that well…VHS, when there was no DVD! God, I am old!

Then, IRC came and it was a blessing. People can download anime / movies / games / etc. instead of  “buying” them. That´s evolution but of course, not exactly legal. It was not an easy task because people had to be there to ask the bot every single episode.

Next step in the evolution process…Direct links and Torrents…Wish Darwin was here to see it!

But now, times are changing and for what I see now, sharing might end as We know it now.  Good things are NOT free.

Megaupload was closed, many direct links sites (Filesonic, Fileserve, etc) are falling and probably will close…Torrent probably will follow…Everything is happening and probably the Mayans were right about 2012!

We are going back to the old days…Not a bad thing at some points. Try to guess which ones!

I asked the question among my friends,  What to do if you cant get your stuff (torrent, direct links, sharing sites, etc) and many replied silly answers:

1- Sell my computer and instead buy a playstation.
2- Order illegal dvds from Asia (the old fashioned way)
3- Go to underground channels like MIRC (Again, the old fashioned way)
4- Quit Hollywood, Quit Anime, QUIT THE FUC.*. Internet
5- HAVE A REAL LIFE…

Of course, there are other alternatives. You can pay for it. You can Crunchy roll it. You can get expensive import anime that you can´t review before you buy. Bandai and other companies who quit selling their stuff in the US might come back and you can buy again….or simply, You can just QUIT it.

Don´t get me wrong on this. I own several DVD´s and some blu ray (including dissapearance of Haruhi) but at this point, when big Hollywood companies, the MPAA, BIG BROTHER, etc are pushing people to buy their stuff and sometimes a really bad product, I don´t feel the spirit or the motivation to buy, especially when economic problems are rising all over the globe. This is just bad PR!

It seems We are going back to the 30´s when prohibition was imposed, when the government banned liquor and people had to drink underground. Are We going back to the old days?

Truly, I don´t know and frankly, I don´t think too much about it. Priorities are changing and now, I am a family man, first and an Otaku second.

The only thing I know, and sure all this situation pisses me off is that this is truly a DE-EVOLUTION!

Demographics

Over the 25th and 26th of November 2011 1,074 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 57.4% of the sample were female, 11.6% in their teens, 14.7% in their twenties, 26.9% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, 11.1% in their fifties, and 10.7% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

Q1: What do you wish your girlfriend would quit doing? (Sample size=458, male)

Rank		Score
1	Slagging off other people all the time	100
2	Uncouth use of words	96.0
3	Too violent mood swings	88.0
4	Moaning all the time every time we meet	79.2
5	Checking her mobile all the time during dates	73.6
6	Poor table manners	72.8
7	Being arrogant with shop staff	65.6
8	Going out for meals with other guys	60.0
9	Talking about stuff I’m not interested in	56.8
10	Wild driving	55.2
11	Slapping the make-up on thick	55.2
12	Forever asking “Do you love me?”	53.6
13	Soon appearing to be two-timing me	50.4
14	Pretending she understands when she doesn’t	39.2
15	Being too particular about beauty, fashion	34.4
16	Ogling other guys while on dates	33.6
17	Getting lovey-dovey in public	28.8
18	Asking if I sympathise with her talk	24.8
19	Always talking about herself	24.0
20	Randomly wanting to talk about stuff she has a vast knowledge of	20.0
21	Asking for a bite of my food at restaurants	18.4
22=	Always wanting to go for ramen on dates	16.8
22=	Slow to reply to my email	16.8
22=	No punchline to her conversation topics	16.8
25=	Looking like she’s hating every minute of the date	10.4
25=	Checking herself in the mirror at shops	10.4
25=	Going out with no make-up on	10.4

Q2: What do you wish your boyfriend would quit doing? (Sample size=616, female)

Rank		Score
1	Poor table manners	100
2	Being arrogant with shop staff	99.1
3	Slagging off other people all the time	97.3
4=	Uncouth use of words	96.8
4=	Spitting on the street	96.8
6	Wild driving	93.2
7	Moaning all the time every time we meet	91.0
8	Checking his mobile all the time during dates	80.5
9	Talking about stuff I’m not interested in	80.5
10	Pretending he understands when he doesn’t	78.7
11	Too violent mood swings	76.9
12	Getting lost in computer games when we’re together	71.9
13=	Soon appearing to be two-timing me	65.6
13=	Going out for meals with other girls	65.6
15	When out shopping, hanging about outside looking bored	62.0
16	Ogling other girls while on dates	61.5
17	Forever asking “Do you love me?”	57.0
18	Randomly wanting to talk about stuff he has a vast knowledge of	53.8
19	Always talking about himself	53.4
20	Being too particular about beauty, fashion	50.2
21	Getting lovey-dovey in public	46.2
22	Checking himself in the mirror at shops	40.3
23	Looking like he’s hating every minute of the date	32.6
24	No punchline to his conversation topics	27.6
25	Always wanting to go for ramen on dates	26.2
26	Asking if I sympathise with his talk	19.9
27	Asking for a bite of my food at restaurants	19.0
28	Slow to reply to my email	16.7
29	Using dialect	12.7
30	Going to a cafe for meals on dates	1.4

via What Japan Thinks /Goo Ranking (Male) and what girls wish their boyfriends would quit (female).

My girlfriend wishes I quit collecting anime and buying anime figures. Strange that it is not on that list…

Location: My office! Background: My PC!

I will stretch this figure and make her suffer, posing this figure on difficult situations and postures. This is level 1, beginners shoot! Any suggestions?

The site’s founders have been charged with violating piracy laws.

Federal prosecutors have accused it of costing copyright holders more than $500m (£320m) in lost revenue. The firm says it was diligent in responding to complaints about pirated material.

The news came a day after anti-piracy law protests, but investigators said they were ordered two weeks ago.

The US Justice Department said that Megaupload’s two co-founders Kim Dotcom, formerly known as Kim Schmitz, and Mathias Ortmann were arrested in Auckland, New Zealand along with two other employees of the business at the request of US officials. It added that three other defendants were still at large.

“This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime,” said a statement posted on its website.

Third-party sites

The charges included copyright infringement, conspiracies to commit racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering.

A federal court in Virginia ordered that 18 domain names associated with the Hong Kong-based firm be seized.

The Justice Department said that more than 20 search warrants had been executed in nine countries, and that approximately $50m in assets had been seized.

It claimed that the accused had pursued a business model designed to promote the uploading of copyrighted works.

“The conspirators allegedly paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded infringing content and publicised their links to users throughout the world,” a statement said.

“By actively supporting the use of third-party linking sites to publicise infringing content, the conspirators did not need to publicise such content on the Megaupload site.

“Instead, the indictment alleges that the conspirators manipulated the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function on the Megaupload site and by not including popular infringing content on the publicly available lists of top content downloaded by its users.”

Before it was shut down the site posted a statement saying the allegations against it were “grotesquely overblown”.

“The fact is that the vast majority of Mega’s internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay,” it added.

“If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch.”

Blackouts

The announcement came a day after thousands of websites took part in a “blackout” to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa).

The US Chamber of Commerce has defended the proposed laws saying that enforcement agencies “lack the tools” to effectively apply existing intellectual property laws to the digital world.

Industry watchers suggest this latest move may feed into the wider debate.

“Neither of the bills are close to being passed – they need further revision. But it appears that officials are able to use existing tools to go after a business alleged to be inducing piracy,” said Gartner’s media distribution expert Mike McGuire.

“It begs the question that if you can find and arrest people who are suspected to be involved in piracy using existing laws, then why introduce further regulations which are US-only and potentially damaging.”

via BBC

Just yesterday, many websites joined a protest against the SOPA and other laws that will affect the internet and us…Is this a coincidence? Well, probably not, but it is just the beginning of something much darker. I hope this website is not the next target….(Just kidding)

Dear readers and visitors:

This is an special post. I am writing this to inform that CARTOONLEAP is going to shutdown its current anime blog. It has been a wonderful pleasure to write about anything Japan for you.

Some of the reasons why I am doing this shutdown are described right after this lines:

• Google Adsense says this blog is not “family oriented” so I limited the ads just to the main page.  I will do a massive clean up of this blog taking down the “offensive” pages. Of course, it is a little bit ridiculous considering that if you write “porn” in Google, you might find quite a lot of sites. Talking about double morality. This blog don´t have THAT kind of material, just some pics of girls in bikini…but I will do a clean up anyway because….
• This blog is not very organized. All this years, I experiment with this blog and learned quite a few tricks. During the learning process, this blog gathered too much “garbage” code that I need to clean. This garbage is affecting the servers and it is quite expensive to keep this rhythm. That´s why I will do a fresh installation of the blog with a well defined layout that is friendly for the different browsers (iexplorer, firefox, chrome. etc) and healthy for the servers.
• The massive amount of information this blog has is amazing. Three years of information from Me and different guest bloggers are now in this blog and that has a price. It overloads the server and everything must be gone. Of course, for respect of our guest bloggers and readers, I did a backup of the site and I hope someday, I will put all that information as an archive in our future hosting provider.
• I am paying 60.00 every month for VPS and it seems I need to pay more to keep server´s stability. Something I cant afford.
• REAL LIFE is taking me a lot of time.
• The lack of guest bloggers is another fact that push forward my decision. It is not an easy task for just “one” man to handle an anime blog, especially when that man has two children now… I was looking for help for anime series blogging but guess no one answered. I appreciate all the guest bloggers that helped this site during the time this blog had and want to say thanks to all of them.
• The lack of comments…Well, that mentions a lot.
• Copy + pasting: Yeah, I simply got tired of copy and pasting some news. Thats a bad habit I need to fix for the new anime blog I want to do. Many bloggers has that bad habit and I dont want to follow that trend.
• Competition? Well, I don´t see bloggers as rivals or something like that. I think there are quite a LOT of anime blogs that are doing a better job than this. They report quite a lot of anime news and anime series episode reviews so I took the choice of closing this blog and will take a different approach this time around for the new blog.
• Facebook is THERE. I will write my ramblings and thoughts in Facebook and it does almost the same thing. Not exactly a nice web design but it serves my purpose. Also, it receives “likes” and “comments” Of course, that will be temporary until I can figure out what to do for the new blog. You can check it out at FACEBOOK.COM/CARTOONLEAP
• My english is really bad. I can´t describe how bad it is until you read this blog. I want to “delete” bad english on this blog…seriously and improve it for the new blog. (This might sound ridiculous but it is true)
• New Year, New blog…Time to clean up the mess for this year.

This are some of my thoughts. Of course, there are more, but this are the basic, most important ones. The list does not include SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, BURNOUT, etc.

Just for the record, I am not TIRED of this hobby, but I need a new direction so I can keep up.

Finally, I want to say thanks one more time to our readers and guest bloggers. This situation is not permanent and I plan to do something special. You might want to read updates at Facebook and Twitter for the time being. The blog will shutdown on January 30, 2012 or even before and will reopen probably a few weeks later.

Lets hope this blog will do the “phoenix” act.

Thanks for being a visitor, a reader and a loyal customer….and thanks to all guest bloggers as well.

Thanks for your support and see ya.

Image source

A robot that appears in the movie “ROBO-G” is paraded outside the Shinjuku Piccadilly theater in Tokyo. The Japanese film stars Mickey Curtis as an old codger grandfather who finds new life as an entertainer inside a robot suit. Things turn bizarre when a young female student falls in love with the robot.

via Japan Today

I was curious about the movie, so I browsed for some information and just saw the trailer as well. It is really amusing and it is just a trailer, which is a good sign. The movie is now in theaters in Japan. I think it is one of those few japanese movies I would love to see in a movie theater…bad thing that I dont live in Japan, so I will have to wait.

On a curious note, this movie reminds me of that Simpsons episode…and I enjoyed that.

You can check out more pictures at the original source, Akibablog! Talk to the hand!

Comic Natalie reports that a collaboration campaign of Berserk Ougon Jidaihen I: Haou no Tamago with a fast-food restaurant Lotteria will be held from January 19th. An original plastic folder will be given to the customers who ordered a special combo. Guts eating a hamburger and Griffith drinking a cup of juice through a straw are drawn on the folder.

The first movie of Berserk will be premiered on February 4th.

Source: Comic Natalie via MAL

I wonder what Pizza Hut thinks about this…After, They appear almost in every popular series.

It is not a perfect figure and has its flaws like her WRS counterpart. I am just going to mention the good, bad and ugly facts of this BRS 2035 figure.

The good:

• Her details are really cool. Her clothes, hair, facial expression (2 faces) and her wings are fantastic.
• She has her sword and Black Rock Cannon, two great battle items that will allow you to do interesting poses.
• She has two facial expressions, the usual face and the battle face.
• Her blue flame looks great on her.

The Bad:

• Placing her hand in the Cannon is a pain. You will need a few attempts before success.
• You need two FIGMA arms to hold BRS with her cannon. Sadly, looks pretty bad if you do a photoshoot. (Thats my opinion)

The Ugly:

• You can remove the White Rock Shooter wings or whatever She has on her back. The BRS wings are awesome but They limit her range of movement and of course, it is tough to put her on her figma bag. You can unplug the wings, but be very careful. If not, you might break something back there and  end up with a broken, uncool BRS figure.

Well, that are my first impressions on this Figma. Since I got both figures, the WRS / BRS, I wonder what cool battles I can plan for them. Any ideas?