Broken headphones, connections, and a little bit of angst

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Grr, my headphones finally totally broke this morning on the way to school. They were at least usable before, but now the left headphone doesn’t work at all and the outer part of it is like GONE…what a horrible time for my headphones to break, now I have to live with these all week until I go home for the weekend. My mom’s going to buy new headphones from the Apple Store, but yeah, I still won’t get them until the weekend.
I use my headphones so much during the week too- I can’t fully wake up in the morning unless I listen to my iPod from breakfast straight through until assembly, and since I have such weird music tastes (well, to the normal American world =P) that once I’m back in my dorm room I have to listen to my music with headphones rather than just using my computer speakers. This is definitely going to bug me all this week…

Connections: Well, I just had teh uber shocking discovery. I was listening to Ibu Shinji’s first character single from the Prince of Tennis anime, Can See the Light, and looked it up on Yesasia to add it to my cart cause it’s a great song, and then I noticed that Yesasia said that it was by Moriyama Eiji. Ok, I definitely recognized that name, so I went to look him up on Wikipedia, and I found out- he’s Momo’s first-cast actor in the Prince of Tennis musicals!
What the hell…? So then I redownloaded the full single (I lost it when my hard drive crashed a while ago, but the song was still on my iPod) to listen to the voice message, and sure enough, as soon as the seiyuu started talking I immediately recognized him as Momo. It’s so hard to tell though, when he’s actually voicing Shinji! I definitely would -never- make that connection…
Moriyama Eiji as Ibu Shinji in the Prince of Tennis anime – Can See The Light
Moriyama Eiji as Momoshiro Takeshi in the Prince of Tennis musicals – Ore wa Momo-chan ~ Seigaku no Abarenbou
Seiyuu Voice Message from Shinji’s CD- the first voice is Moriyama as himself (which is basically his voice for Momo) and then he has a ‘conversation’ or something with Shinji (aka, himself but with a different voice)…xD
Moriyama also plays Renji in the Bleach musicals, but I haven’t watched that yet. I seriously need to, cause NAGAYAN (aka the cutest Eiji actor ever) PLAYS HITSUGAYA ASASDFKAJESLRIJASDLKFJASDKLFJ

And last but not least, I’m having an angsty moment on the inside cause my Yesasia order with my precious 3 copies of Mikan hasn’t even shipped yet. It’s been almost a week since Mikan was released~! DDD:
And since I chose free shipping, it’ll be another week after it ships before it arrives at my house! And knowing my luck, it’ll end up arriving on like a Monday and then I’ll have to wait until the weekend before I actually get it. *sob*

Bleach games coming out in the US

YAAAYYYYY
So I finally got my copy of the October issue of Shounen Jump today. I still have yet to figure out why the hell they come so early; it would make so much more sense if it was the September issue. But whatever…
The first thing that caught my eye was the fact that there’s SO MUCH DRAGONBALL Z THIS ISSUE. DDDDDDDDDD:
But anyway.
Then I flipped open the magazine, stared at the ad for Naruto: Rise of a Ninja for a few minutes (why oh why do I not have an Xbox 360), then flipped past it, and something else immediately caught my eye.

Flaming Hot DVD
Comin’ at you next month is Vol. 3 of The Prince of Tennis Box Set! Ryoma and his teammates at Seigaku Academy are now competing at the Metropolitan Tournament, and their “golden pair” in doubles is forced to resort to an unusual formation. Contains episodes 27-38. Special features include: original Japanese trailers and original Japanese opening and ending credits!

So I’m gonna break this down a bit, I guess…
“Flaming Hot DVD!-” (you mean they actually care about Prince of Tennis?) “Comin’ at you next month-” (ok, I squee-d for a second before realizing that they meant October; it’s still August so I thought they meant September) “-is Vol. 3 of The Prince of Tennis Box Set!-” (already? didn’t the second one just come out? speaking of which, it STILL HASN’T ARRIVED. D:) “-Ryoma and his teammates at Seigaku Academy-” (ok, this line is fail. Seigaku is short for Seishun Gakuen, which basically is Seishun Academy or w/e. Seigaku is a team nickname. Seigaku Academy makes no sense. It’s like…my school is Noble & Greenough School; the nickname is Nobles, but we don’t call it “Nobles School”, that makes no sense) “-are now competing at the Metropolitan Tournament-” (to be honest, I stopped there to take a minute to figure out what the hell they were referring to, cause there’s no “Metropolitan Tournament”. The Prefecturals?) “-and their “golden pair”-” (no, no quotation marks. Golden Pair.) “-in doubles-” (no duh. what, do they think that people think a pair could be in singles?) “-is forced to resort to an unusual formation.-” (the Australian Formation? It’s unusual, but I wouldn’t really say they were “forced to resort” to it…) “-Contains episodes 27-38.-” (St. Rudolph arc, right?) “-Special features include: original Japanese trailers and original Japanese opening and ending credits!” (NO. NO. NO. The original OP/ED shouldn’t be “special features”. If they’re going to brag on the cover about the episodes being “uncut”, the OP/ED should be fully intact! WTF~ Especially because they use the original opening and ending for Naruto boxed sets…I wouldn’t mind as much (well I’d still hate it, cause the American PoT OP/ED are crap, but…) if they didn’t say on the box “UNCUT”. They say it’s “uncut”, but it’s not- it’s the exact same thing you see on Toonami/Toonami Jetstream- the American OP/ED, and the American title screen. Seriously, wtf? I was really hoping they’d use the original OP/ED…I wanna see Driving Myself and KEEP YOUR STYLE. DDDDD:)
Lolz, I needed something to rant over, and this was perfect. =D The English version of the anime is crap, and the manga’s not too good either.

BUT ANYWAY
YAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYY
I totally freaked out on one of the Bleach pages. For two reasons. The first being…
YAAAAAYYYY THE BLEACH WII GAME IS COMING OUT IN AMERICA
and a DS game that I’ve never heard of before.
I’ve actually really wanted to play the Wii game for a while, but I don’t think there’s a Freeloader for the Wii. This is great~ I’m really surprised though, it’s way farther than the American anime is. Not that I’m complaining or anything.
The second thing is that they had a thing at the bottom of the page going all “SOUL REAPER ALL POINTS BULLETIN”. It was a fake “warning note” or something. Pretty lame, but then…
THERE WERE PICTURES OF GRIMMJOW AND ULQUIORRA
@_____@
Wowwwww, the English manga is pretty close to where the Japanese manga is~

And then way later on in the magazine, they decided to make an announcement…
BLEACH IS BEING SERIALIZED IN SHOUNEN JUMP STARTING NEXT MONTH
YAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
YAYYYYYYYYYY
I think it’s a good decision. Bleach is one of the top 3 Jump manga in Japan, and I’m so glad they’re putting it in the magazine. I think they’re starting from the Arrancar arc, so…

So now the only thing left that would make me uber happy would be if they put PoT in the magazine. 100% never gonna happen though. I always thought it was really popular in Japan, but it seems like it’s been near the bottom of the Jump ToC lately. And it’s not popular in America at all, so I’m not gonna get my hopes up.

By the way, I noticed something slightly amusing when I was putting away some of my manga the other day.
On the inside cover for Bleach volume 1, there was an ad for other Shounen Jump manga. The main one they were advertising…was Prince of Tennis volume 13.
So…well, both series have 20 volumes at the moment in America. Does that mean that in the time it took for Bleach to release 20 volumes, Prince of Tennis only released 7?
O___o
*goes off to ponder this thought*

[Scans] HOME MADE Kazoku’s Nagareboshi, nobodyknows+’ Hero’s Come Back, Hoshimura Mai’s Sakura Biyori, ELT’s Grip!

Explanation and music list

Ahhhh, I scanned these yesterday but I totally forgot to actually upload them and everything. xD
So I actually got a request yesterday, and since yesterday was my last day of school, I was more than happy to go down into the basement and spend an hour or so scanning some j-pop CDs. xD It’s annoying, cause we can’t find the installation CD for it and the only computer it works on is my mom’s laptop…which doesn’t have internet. Thankfully, I have a small flash drive I’ve been using to bring the scans up to my computer.

The request was for HOME MADE Kazoku’s Nagareboshi ~Shooting Star~. And I’m not going to go downstairs and hook the scanner up and everything just to scan one single, so I grabbed some other CDs too. Since I was scanning Nagareboshi, the first Naruto Shippuuden ending, I figured I’d scan Hero’s Come Back!!, the first Shippuuden opening too. If I’m scanning those, I might as well scan my other anime OP/ED singles, so I also scanned Sakura Biyori, the 11th ending for Bleach, and Grip!, the 4th opening for Inu Yasha. I also brought down Aruiteru by Morning Musume, but it took me longer than I thought to scan the others, and I figured it’d take me forever to scan the entire single including the photobook…so I’m leaving that for another time.

So, first up is Nagareboshi ~Shooting Star~, by HOME MADE Kazoku. Not only do I love this song, but it’s the first ending to Shippuuden. (I don’t like the chibis in the ending video, though. Cute, but it just doesn’t fit Shippuuden.)

Download the .rar file for the rest of the Nagareboshi ~Shooting Star~ scans

Next up is Hero’s Come Back!!, by nobodyknows+. I absolutely looove this song~ xD And it’s the first opening to Shippuuden. To be honest, I like the TV size better than the full version…but the full version’s great too.
This is the CD+DVD version. I have no idea if it’s limited or not. xD I don’t think there’s a difference with the cover or anything, but I have no idea.

Download the .rar file for the rest of the Hero’s Come Back!! scans

Next is Sakura Biyori, by Hoshimura Mai. It’s a slow song, which I’m usually not too much of a fan of, but I love this song. ^^ (I was actually going to sing it at karaoke at Anime Boston, but I forgot until we had already left. xD;;) It was used as the 11th ending to Bleach.
This is the first press edition, which also included a 2007-2008 Bleach calendar. It starts with April 2007, and ends in March 2008, and features one character on each page, which takes up two months. I included those scans in the .rar file.

Download the .rar file for the rest of the Sakura Biyori scans

Last (but not least) is Grip!, by Every Little Thing. It was used as the 4th opening to Inu Yasha, which used to be a huge obsession of mine. This was actually one of the first j-pop singles that I owned…it was from the first online purchase I made, which was Grip!, Moments by Hamasaki Ayumi, and Shine We Are! by BoA. This is still my favorite song by Every Little Thing~

Download the .rar file for the rest of the Grip! scans

So if I don’t get any requests, my next scans post will probably include the rest of my current Morning Musume collection- Do it! Now, Ai no Dai 6 Kan, Rainbow 7, SEXY BOY, and Aruiteru.

New Amazon order~

Yeah, Amazon, not Yesasia. Yesasia bugs me at the moment. They don’t have any Ore Ska Band. DDD: Amazon doesn’t have too much Japanese music, and most of the j-pop they do have is overpriced, but they actually have Ore Ska Band…and it’s not too overpriced, either.
So I ended up getting:
Ore Ska Band – Tsumasaki
Ore Ska Band – WAO!!
Naruto Uncut Boxed Set 3
Morning Musume – Aruiteru (limited edition type B)
Morning Musume – Kanashimi Twilight (limited edition type B)

Tsumasaki is the current Bleach ending, not to mention a great song~ I’m on a mission to get all Naruto and Bleach opening/endings, so…
WAO!! is Ore Ska Band’s first album, and it has Tsumasaki and Pinocchio, the 14th Naruto ending. It was just released last Wednesday, and it hasn’t been uploaded onto Jpopsuki yet, so…I figured I’ll grab it and upload it. I absolutely love Ore Ska Band right now~
I actually decided on the normal edition for the 3rd Naruto boxed set. The limited edition has a sound headband and a sound “id bracelet”…I don’t think it’s really worth the extra ~$20 or whatever.
For the Momusu singles…actually, I was really surprised that the limited editions were still available. They’re all sold out on Yesasia… It especially shocked me that they still had the limited editions of Aruiteru. That was a hugely popular single, and it was released back in November…but Amazon had both limited edition versions. I was planning on getting both these singles anyway, but I just had to get the limited editions as soon as I found out they were still available. See, back in 2005, when I got my first Morning Musume single (Chokkan 2), I decided from then on I’d pre-order the limited edition of every single/mini-album/album they release. I got up through Ambitious!, but then I kinda fell behind when I started straying away from j-pop…now I’m back into it, only to find I missed 3 singles, a mini-album, and an album. xD; The mini-album and album were pretty expensive on Amazon, and the limited editions were still available on Yesasia, so I didn’t get those…and the limited edition of the other single, Egao YES Nude, was sold out on Amazon. >< I’ll get the normal edition from Yesasia at some point.
Actually, starting from Aruiteru, the Momusu singles have had two limited editions…one with a DVD and one with a mini-photobook. It kinda ruins the surprise of what’s actually going to be in the limited edition…before this, it was different depending on which single it is. Chokkan 2 and SEXY BOY had photocards, Ambitious! had a DVD… Not to mention it’s hard to decide now. D: For Aruiteru and Kanashimi Twilight, I got the ones with the photobook. It was a bit cheaper, and I figure I can always download the ISO online and burn it to a DVD…
I dunno, having a DVD with the limited edition kinda seems a bit generic to me. xDD So many artists do the CD/CD+DVD thing… I liked the photocards the best…I currently have 20. xD 5 from Chokkan 2, 5 from SEXY BOY, 5 from Goto Maki’s Sayonara “Tomodachi ni wa Naritakunai no”, and 5 from Abe Natsumi’s Koi no Telephone Goal…

Anyway, I can’t wait until Morning Musume’s next single. I really want to hear those new Chinese “exchange students”, Junjun and Linlin…I saw a video of their self-introductions during Yossi’s graduation concert a few weeks ago, they’re so cute! <333 They’re still learning Japanese, and I could actually almost fully understand one of them since my Japanese skills are pretty basic too~