If the title of this blog post isn’t obvious enough, I’m going to restate now that the details that follows is unconfirmed because it has not yet been verified or even announced on shakugan.com.

Basically, the deal here is that we now have some online shopping links for the first DVD volume of 『灼眼のシャナ II』. I will use my limited Japanese skills to translate the text in question.

• 発売日: 2008/01/25
• 価格: 6825円(税込)
• 収録時間: 72分
• 商品番号: GNBA-7550

• DVD片面2層 組枚数2 リージョン2
• 16:9 カラー MPEG-2 日本語ステレオ

＜初回限定版特典＞
●いとうのいぢ描き下ろしＤＶＤ収納ボックスI（1巻〜4巻＋特典ディスクの５枚組収納）
●特典ディスク
1新作ミニアニメ「灼眼のシャナたんII」
2特典映像「劇場版灼眼のシャナ：蔵出し映像」
3ノンクレジットＯＰ・ＥＤ
4特別ラジオ「かりもふ！スペシャル」
5プロモーション映像
6ＣＭ集
7アニマックス特別番組再録
8インタビュー映像
●差し替えジャケット１〜４（原作版権）
●完全再録小冊子「ゾートロープ　第１章〜第４章」
著／高橋弥七郎、イラスト／いとうのいぢ、漫画／笹倉綾人
「電撃hp」＆「電撃大王」のコラボ企画として集中掲載された原作小説＆コミックを、特製冊子で先行収録！全４章から成る中編ストーリー！
●スクールカレンダー（ケース＋４、５月）
●スティックポスター

＜通常版共通特典＞
●映像特典：なぜなにシャナIIその１（フリアグネとマリアンヌ）
●音声特典：オーディオコメンタリー（第１話のみ）釘宮理恵・日野聡
●ピクチャーレーベル仕様

• Release date: 2008/01/25
• Cost: 6825円 (with tax)
• Recording time: 72分
• DVD serial number: GNBA-7550

• DVD dual layer with two discs, region 2
• 16:9 colour MPEG-2 Japanese stereo

First press limited edition contents

• Illustrated DVD box by Noizi Ito (for volumes 1 to 4 and the special disc, fitting 5 discs)
• Special disc
1. New animation production “Shakugan no Shanatan II”
2. Special video “Hidden scenes from Shakugan no Shana movie”
3. Creditless OP / ED sequences
4. Special radio “Karimofu! Special”
5. Promotion videos
6. Commercial collection
7. Animax special rerecording (translation is sketchy)
8. Interview videos
• Replacement jackets 1-4 (original copyright)
• Complete miniguide “Zotrope 1-4″ (I really don’t know what that means

Work by Yashichiro Takahashi, illustrations by Noizi Ito, manga by Ayato Sasakura
Dengeki hp and Dengeki Daioh’s special collaboration, revealing details of the original novels and manga! All four chapters into one story! (very sketchy translation)

• School calendar (case + April / May)
• Stick poster (what the hell is a “stick” poster?)

Regular edition content (that comes with the limited edition)

• Theatrical feature: Naze Nani Shana II, part 1 (Friagne and Marianne)
• Audio feature: Audio commentary (for episode 1) by Rie Kugimiya and Satoshi Hino
• Picture label

What’s most shocking here is that they only mention the first episode in the product description. Does that mean that the first volume will only include the first episode? It’s quite possible, other shows have done it before. BLOOD+ ran for 50 episodes and its first volume only had two episodes on it. Given the amount of specials that’s coming with this DVD, it’s a “fair deal”, per se. I mean, it’s kind of like buying an OVA when you think about it. You could also argue that only the first episode is mentioned because that’s the only episode that is going to have audio commentary track on it, I’ll take that I guess. The running time is listed as 72 minutes, so assuming they’re not counting the bonus stuff, it could very well be three episodes except that it’s not listed because the full details have not been revealed to the stores. Anyway, I’ll report back as soon as I get more information.

I have a CS midterm and a history paper due on Thursday so I’m putting blog entries on low gears for now. The usual program will resume after the fact. A review of episode four of 『灼眼のシャナ II』 will probably go up tomorrow though. In the meantime, you should check out Mami Kawada’s new single, JOINT. Both it and triangle are awesome tracks.

Well, nothing much really happened in this episode besides the revelation at the end with Chihiro. That was a little shocking as I was having a lot of difficulties deciding on who or what she exactly was. I figured that there might be some kind of a parallel world thing going on or maybe the Chihiro that Renji was meeting this whole time wasn’t actually her but just an image or something. This episode’s thrown that theory out the door though, of course.

Now how does Chihiro remember about her sister or Himura, though? I guess she sees or hears from them often enough to have it hardened or carried over to the next minute in time? Technically, I guess Renji could do the same if the two will forever be together but that’s a pretty lame solution so that’s probably not how they’ll conclude that arc.

We got to hear a nice violin track when Hiro was running up the stairs and I’m hoping that we’ll we’ll get more in the future. The ending theme got swapped with the track that’s played on the website although that’s supposedly the actual opening theme. This track is tons better than the ending theme that was played on the first episode. The animation sequence in question was also really cool. There weren’t too many artistic liberties taken this episode but that animation sequence more than made up for it. :)

According to the Touhou Wiki, Touhou games are supposed to pretty much work straight out of the box on Wine 0.9.45. At the moment, only version 0.9.39 is marked stable on Gentoo so I decided to give that a try but things didn’t quite work out. There was no sound and the sprites weren’t being rendered properly.

Thus, I decided to go with the unstable ~x86 ebuilds and emerged 0.9.45 instead. The game ran just fine without any graphical glitches but I still had no audio. Following the instructions presented at the end of the emerge, I decided to use winecfg to configure my Wine environment. I was told that I didn’t have anything configured when I clicked on the ‘Audio’ tab but it would go ahead and configure a recommended driver for me. I let it do its thing and the tab went about and populated itself.

And now I could hear the awesome music of Imperishable Night! Thanks, Wine!

The Japanese characters isn’t being rendered properly but I guess that’s not really a big deal. I’m not even sure if it’s a system thing and/or a Wine thing anyway because I’ve had rendering issues on quite a few Japanese sites on Linux. :(

Yesterday, I decided to take a little break and watch this special OVA episode and I have to say that it was well worth my time. It gave me a very nostalgic feeling seeing the characters of sola in motion again. Even though I don’t generally have an opinion for Mamiko Noto’s role, I just can’t help but love her voice as Matsuri here. It’s slightly different from her usual voice and I think that it’s very fitting.

This episode was just absolutely hilarious. I didn’t want to cause a ruckus over here (as I’ve been told by Sam that I can laugh pretty loud) so I covered my mouth throughout most of the episode, but let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. I particularly liked the part where Takeshi first meets Yorito at the pool. The way Takeshi just starts fighting and then suddenly stops once he realizes that Matsuri wasn’t with Yorito was just so funny.

Watching this episode was a painful reminder to me that sola has ended. At least there’s still the final OVA from the fifth DVD and the manga. I definitely need to get my hands on the manga though I need to first double check to see if my cousin secured a copy of it or not while he was in Japan. If not, it’s totally going onto my list of items that I want my cousins to get me when they go there next month.

The final version has officially gone out the doors! Take note that this doesn’t imply that the team has shifted into low gears at all. Dominik has actually already started working on improving the code completion (with images, for starters,) and I’m hoping to commit some code to allow us to plug into the Common Navigator Framework some time before the end of the week. :) Stay tuned!

This episode was alright. It had some good laughs and kept you interested until the end of the episode. Unsurprisingly, nothing firm was settled with regards to just what exactly is Fumina doing here. I knew they wouldn’t just settle it in one go although I do hope that it’ll get resolved quickly though since I’m for some novel material here.

The fight in this episode was “rather” one sided. While we only saw a glance of him in the last episode, he seemed to have come off as someone that would pose as half a challenge…but I guess not. I’m pretty sure that the show isn’t going to degenerate into something like『地獄少女』, though.

Personally, I don’t think that Fumina is affiliated with the bad guys. They drop a pretty obvious hint at the end of the episode with Bel-Peol noting that all is well but I don’t buy it. At least, I don’t buy the fact that she’s referring to this incident anyway.

GARNET CROW will be releasing their 26th single next month on the 14th entitled 『世界はまわると言うけれど』.

1. 世界はまわると言うけれど
2. 彼方まで光を
3. Argentina
4. 世界はまわると言うけれど (Instrumental)

I’ve only seen a commercial for the song thus far but it sounds like it’s going to be another killer track. Though, since I’m a die hard fan, you should probably wave it off and check it out yourself when it gets released.

One of the best things I like about GARNET CROW is that they’ve been consistently releasing two B-sides with their singles since their 15th single, 『僕らだけの未来』. This obviously translates into more new songs to listen to whenever they make a release (as most artists tend to only include one B-side or none at all in place of remixes of the A-side). I just laid an order with Amazon on Friday but I’m probably going to have to slap down another one in the near future for this single.

This first episode essentially covered most of the stuff that I went through in the demo and then some by delving into Chihiro, Renji, and Yu’s story. Miyako and Hiro’s story seems a little weak here as nothing out of the ordinary really happened in contrast to how Chihiro and Renji’s story concluded in this episode.

I don’t really remember much about the music of this episode as I watched it a little while ago but I will say that the ending is pretty bad. With regards to the art, I’ll say that I’m pretty impressed by it. Of course, it might just look good because it’s the first episode, but I’m really liking some of the stuff that SHAFT has done this episode. I really hope that they’ll keep this up to the conclusion of the series.

I don’t really know how the anime series is intending to wrap up the story of Renji and the others as the first tale. doesn’t really cover their stuff too much (as far as I know). I guess it would work out if they do end up releasing the latter tale. at the end of the year. However, I’m sure we’ll all agree that knowing the story behind a visual novel beforehand vastly degrades the reading experience. So, will they put an alternate ending in the animated series? I sure as hell hope not.

As you can see from this article, the OSI has approved the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL). It’s a shame that we now have two more open source licenses out in the wild (as people really should be using existing ones whenever possible to reduce confusions), but eh, what can you do?