World War II, 1945, the war ends not with nuclear warheads, but with an invasion, as “Phantom Beasts” arrive in huge numbers to wreak havoc and drive humanity towards extinction. Jump to the turn of the century, after a particularly brutal battle wipes out over 3/4s of the remaining JSDF, the age of conscription is lowered to 14 in order to refill the ranks as quickly as possible, with no more than 6 months of training before shifting to active service. This gives us our excuse for a squad of teenagers, but at least its a fairly reasonable one given the sitation. But then they go and give our stars some new, top of the line, mecha, rather than letting the vets have it, ah well, there goes the grounded logic. To be fair though, they initially train with older models, giving the suggestions that there’s a number of them out there, so it could be normal in this divergent timeline.

However, it looks like its rapidly becoming something of a harem series as well, filled with an improbable number of cute girls of various stereotypes, and the lead female’s emotions running wild whenever the lead male does something with one of the other girls. Still, while the characters themselves are (so far) fairly bland in and of themselves, Sanadura manges to provide some nice interactions between them. Particularly, the moments where they stop working against each other and put the groups interests ahead of their own were really nicely done. Additionally, it was nice to see that by the end of the volume the male and female leads actually figure out they’re interested in each other and make it known, which spawns possibilities down the line.

Art’s nice and crisp, lots of variety to the character design(though I was getting mixed up with the males from time to time, the lead seems to vary in height…), and a promise of nasty military vs monster fighting. The mid-sized mecha are a bit generic, but I like the lines on them, and there’s something about them when they’re that big, a certain something that sparks possibility in their use/application. There’s some potential with the series, kind of hard to tell after one volume, its not great, but its not complete trash either, sitting somewhere in the middle. The best thing I can say about it is that its doing some stuff that brings Valkyria Chronicles to mind, particularly the overall focus of their status as a squad with people covering various roles. Between that and the character interactions, I’m cautiously optimistic about the next volume, will have to see about that.

Hmm. Seems that Sanadura also keeps a blog with a decent amount of sketches mixed in with other postings. Digging through a few pages, it seems to be a worksafe affair, though it seems that he(she?)’s also done some ero-doujins that are somewhat prominently linked to at the top of the site, so there could be some surprises popping up as you dig through the site. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

It seems that in addition to Falcoon coming back to life, Ryu’s Form Site, last updated in early October, has also started updating again. As he’s prone to posting a one-off and disappearing again, I held of on mentioning it, but with 3 updates in the last 10 days, it seems like its going to continue to be active, hooray. Like Falcoon, he’s prone to occasionally going into NSFW territory (actually, he’s probably more prone to doing so than Falcoon), and the full version of the above would probably be questionable in a number of workplaces. Unfortunately, like Falcoon, he also doesn’t have an RSS feed in place, so you’ll need to regularly check it or use something like page2rss.

Just found myself pointed at the Shorpy Photo Archive, a collection of high-res vintage photography, great stuff and the feed’s getting added to my reader straight away (with updates several times a day).

I don’t know if this means he’s done with his gig at SNK or what, but Falcoon started updating again! He seems to be updating daily, and you can find the older sketches linked at the bottom left corner of his site, but I recommend either keeping a close eye on it or using something like page2rss to make sure you don’t miss an update.

Update: Paying a little more attention here, he’s added the header “Rehabilitation – 7200sec Theater” to the top of it, so it seems he’s getting himself back into the posting/drawing habit with daily 2 hour sketch sessions.

After a long day at work, I’ve come home to find news that Ian Talty, better known to me as MundaneJoy on the White Chapel forums and Twitter, died today. I never met him in person, but he was an absolutely amazing local photographer that I’d hoped to hook up with in one of his always impressive urban exploration expeditions. Adding to it, it looks like it happened blocks away from my apartment and just before I was headed to work this morning, and its just striking me now that the police car with its lights going that I almost took a photo of because it looked cool in the rain(but didn’t because I didn’t want to bust out the camera in the rain) had to have been headed to the scene as it turned off Marshall in getting to my side of the bridge. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Wow, its hitting me pretty hard here and I’ve only known him for a brief time online. He had a great personality, a true passion for his art, and an outstanding capability to make even the worst decay look beautiful. He was also doing a pretty good job of being an inspiration to my own photography and my baby steps into getting off the beaten path to finding the hidden gems all around us. He always had a kind word for my own shots, and was nice enough to let me take my pick of his photos for part of the new layout I’m working on when I asked him about it just last night. Sadly I don’t have more words for him as I knew him in such a limited capacity, so I’ll shut up and let some of his recent photos speak for themselves:

He’ll be missed greatly, seeing new shots from him always made the day a little brighter, and he always came across as someone I’d enjoy hanging out with.

Updated: Star Tribune and Pioneer Press articles on the accident. I was really looking foward to linking you all(however small the number) to his newest shoots as a part of getting my blog going again, and knowing that I won’t be able has been bumming me out all day. And, as I carelessly failed to mention it last night, my thoughts are with his friends and family, this can’t be a pleasant time for them by any means and I wish them the best as they deal with it.

First, some really cool architecture in the form of water towers converted into homes. 1, 2, 3.

Secondly, made my way to the Walker last week to see the big Picasso/American Art exhibit before it left, and I was fairly impressed. As I’m fairly uneducated in the ways of Western art, I couldn’t really do a good job of describing it, but this blog will probably give you a fair idea of what was there to be found. As it was also my first time actually getting to go through the Walker, I came away impressed with a few other things, and am resolved to bring a notebook the next time I go, as I forgot so much of what was there.

A couple of pieces did stick in my head though, the first is this awesome piece, Visions in Paper by Olafur Eliasson:

He’s done a number of other cool pieces as well, as seen on his site.

The second piece is Zak Smith’s Illustrations For Each Page of Gravity’s Rainbow. Essentially illustrating the events of each and every single page of the book, this monster project is on permanent display at the Walker, with all 760 or so pages taking up a pretty hefty chunk of wallspace. While not quite as impressive, you can go through its entirety online or get ahold of it in book form as well, all 4 pounds of it. On second thought, it might actually prove to be an awesome experience to go through it side-by-side with the original story.

And that’s that, more writings at some point.