Archive for February, 2007

eirtaku will be down for five hours.

Posted February 23, 2007 * Comments(0)

The site will be unavailable for about five hours between 8AM and 1PM this Saturday 7AM - 12PM this Sunday thanks to maintenance which needs to be carried out at the datacentre of our primary host.

The chat room will still be available, but that’s about it.

http://eirtaku.net may still will be available as well as http://nirvash.eirtaku.com (our two servers waiting in the wings, in case you didn’t know).

Update: I have a couple of days to work on it, so I might be able to avoid this outage by moving eirtaku to an alternate server temporarily. Though the chance of anyone even being awake during the hours the site is down is very low. :)

Tower Records, Wicklow Street, Dublin

Posted February 22, 2007 * Comments(0)

Tower Records on Wicklow Street (off Grafton Street) in Dublin City Centre, has in recent years become the best stocked store in the country selling anime.

The anime section of the shop is, appropriately, upstairs at the back (right next to the porn - classy!). Despite the internally out-of-the-way placement of the section, from the outside of the store anime posters can be seen plastered across the first floor windows.

As usual, prices are a little uncomfortably high for most individual DVDs; but the prices of boxsets are generally becoming more reasonable. They also tend to stock the newer series; a prime example being the first few Eurkeka 7 DVDs, which had only recently become available in region 2, or the thinpack release of GiTS:Standalone Complex.

There are quite a number of region 4 releases (Australia, NZ and Latin America) stocked there, which generally means a different distribution company to what we’d be used to from American and UK releases, so be wary. Some of these releases are of a lower quality than their region 2 and region 1 counterparts (2.0 audio instead of 5.1, 4:3 aspect ratio rather than 16:9, etc), which is reflected in the price.

There is a selection of “Essential Anime” sets, repackaged ADV releases of various classic shows. This repackaging means forgoing fancy boxart, slips, and extra DVDs, but it brings down the price of a boxset significantly.

Trigun in Tower Records, Dublin.Evangelion in Tower Records, Dublin.Bebop in Tower Records, Dublin.

As far as merchandise goes, there are a small slection of plushies and figurines; I recall Inuyasha, Naruto, Spirited Away and Laputa, as well as a few different anime wallscrolls.

As usual, you will always get better deals online, but if that isn’t an option (it really should be, considering the introduction of 3V cards), then this is the best reality-bound place to get anime.

Japanese eating habits - Unlocking the Mystery

Posted February 20, 2007 * Comments(9)

Okay. So you know Japanese food generally comes in a bunch of different bowls on a tray to disguise the fact that they’re actually giving you feck all food, right? Now the typical custom is to go back and forth between bowls; it’s generally rude to, say, eat all of the rice, then all of the tofu, and so on. This, like most Japanese cultural quirks, apparently has some cultural significance that a Westerner could never hope to grasp. I, of course, have a different theory.

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EirtaKon aftermath - part 1

Posted February 11, 2007 * Comments(3)

Just a quick update, EirtaKon has finished, we had a great weekend and there’ll be a full writeup and podcast (possibly even some video!).

For now though, here’s the thread where people are posting up their pictures from the weekend. If you have pictures, make sure to post them up, and feel free to make use of the Eirtaku Gallery.

Edit, Feb 12th
Still working away at the audio ;)
Edit 2, feb 18th
Eh, taking longer than I expected, but we’re getting there!

Last staff call for EirtaKon 2007

Posted February 8, 2007 * Comments(0)

According to EirtaKon staff manager, Hybridchild, It seems that they still needs a few more staff members, so if you’d like to staff the event, find him at The Hub in DCU at 5PM Friday, or 9AM Saturday.

EirtaKon 2007 - What you need to know

Posted February 7, 2007 * Comments(1)

EirtaKon is coming up in a few days and, as usual, it’s a mad dash to make sure everything’s prepared.

This is as true for the attendee as it is for the staff member, and so here is your quick guide to EirtaKon 2007.

Time and Place

EirtaKon 2007 is being held in the same place as it was in 2005, the Hub in Dublin City University (map).

The Hub is the student centre of DCU, and contains two bars, a main hall, and several seminar rooms, where the screenings will be held. Here’s a simple map of The Hub itself:

The Hub Floorplan

The date for the convention is Friday the 9th of February to Sunday the 11th of February.
Starting times:

  • Friday - 7PM, Old New Bar, The Hub
  • Saturday - 10AM, The Hub
  • Sunday - 11AM, The Hub

Getting There

Once you’re in Dublin City Centre, it’s an easy task to get to DCU. If you’re bussing it, you should take the 19A from Westmoreland Street, or O’Connell Street. You can also take the 13, the 13A, the 11 and the 11B
; the timetables for which are all available from dublinbus.ie.

If you’re driving along the M50 northbound, DCU is the third exit after the Westlink toll bridge (€1.90 charge for the toll bridge).

From anywhere else consult this map.

What’s Happening?

There will be a traders room running all during the convention, with a “Barter Table”; ie, a place for you to sell or trade your own anime/manga/toys etc with other congoers. The committee warn that the onus will be on attendees to look after their merchandise, as they cannot provide secure storage for them.

On Friday the pub quiz will be running in the Old Bar from 7PM ’til late (No minors, sorry guys!), there will also be anime showings upstairs.

On Saturday:

  • Anime all day
  • console games all day
  • Lolita Fashion show 4pm
  • Cosplay walk out, 6pm
  • Anime and games til close

On Sunday:

  • Anime all day
  • Console gaming all day
  • Giant robot melée
  • Closing ceremony

Food & Drink

There will be ample food and drink available from the local Spar shop, across the road from DCU, a 7 minute walk from The Hub.
The Restaurant and bars are not open over the weekend (for those familiar with the layout of DCU), but there is a local bar Matt Weldon’s (The Slipper), which should sate the thirst of attendees during the day.

Aprés Con

Nothing official set, but I imagine there’ll be an after-con venture into town when it wraps up in the evenings; you can count on eirtakus to have a party ;) Or at least a few drinks!

Help : (

If there’s still something that you need to know, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.

There is a thread in the forums dealing with accomodation if you’re late on the bandwagon and looking for places to stay.

EirtakuMeet Spring ‘07

Posted February 7, 2007 * Comments(1)
The first Eirtakumeet of 2007 saw a few new members embarking on (what I know can be) the somewhat intimidating venture of meeting people from the Internet.

How will I recognize people? Will they recognize me? Is this all an elaborate hoax designed to make me appear somewhat foolish?
Well, perhaps the last one is not so likely, but we did stand around for a while at The Spire unable to determine who Raito Yagami was in the crowd! True to his namesake, we didn’t know it was him until he introduced himself.

Myself, DrPepper, cade, MarkMI6, Daitokuji, I_forget, AskwinK and Raito made the traditional run to the Oriental Emporium to stock up on asian junkfood like Pocky and a bunch of random other samples that invariably taste atrocious. While there nadir joined us, then ZeroQI, who was utterly exausted from carrying his gargantuan, anime filled, 4TB hard disk array.

Raito Yagami
engrish
“pleasant to the palate give first choose treasure.”
We spent longer than usual in the shop, browsing around and laughing our asses off at the hilarious engrish on the various packaging. Myself and daitokuji were momentarily exicted upon our apparent discovery of fireworks in the form of sparklers deeper in the store; we were disappointed when it was pointed out that “joss sticks” are, in fact, incense. A brief smelling of which confirmed the unfortunate fact. With Pocky, strawberry-koala-things, and an array of foods that would later turn out to be utterly inedible, we made our way towards our democratically elected eatery: Ukiyo.
Ukiyo were thoroughly accomodating hosts; they even pushed their two large tables together for us, wherupon I_forget decorated the table with an assortment of girly manga magazines and DVDs, shortly after which she began dispensing. Enthusiastically I was handed a copy of Shojou Beat, which I took and opened warily; looking around to ensure my manhood was not in question. Forunately, I was sitting next to nadir, who I dragged with some confusion into flipping through the magazine - a visual assault of flowers, smiles and gentlemen of extreme height - to satisfy our young newbie. Eventually I purloined a copy of Neo from cade, which contained the much more comforting visage of boobs and blood courtesy of the Ghost in the Shell manga.
Having sated our palate (and purchased some sake), we made our way towards DrPepper’s courtesy of Dublin Bus, daitokuji doing a good job scaring various passengers with his documention by photography (will update the article with these when we have them!). We quickly arrived at DrP’s and everyone began to set up their equipment. ZeroQI, as ever, the centre of interest setting up his hard disk array. Experience from many previous meetups has taught us that there is no such thing as too many power adapters, and we were well set; several laptops, external drives, routers, switches, and - of course - the HD projector and surround system.
We started off watching Riding Bean, which was well received all around. Throughout the evening we watched a variety of other first episodes, mostly the best of the recent seasons; Black Lagoon, etc, as well as AMV Hell Championship Edition, and several AMVs. Coming up to midnight myself and Hybridchild paid a visit to the local chinese (just before closing) for some hot food, and some discussion of the upcoming EirtaKon for which I’ll be presenting the Friday night pub quiz et al. At this stage we had picked up a few extra people, and jtang had come and left (thoroughly unenthused at the prospect of watching the Evangelion parody Redeath).
Later, as people began to doze off (and ZeroQI had left and returned several times), daitokuji exposed us all to the hilarious Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series. If you haven’t seen this yet, you should see it :) Thoroughly redeems Yu-Gi-Oh. The filesharing, sake-drinking, pocky-scoffing, and anime watching continued well into the wee hours of the morning, but my memory of the events in those hours is somewhat hazy as I was busy drifing and out of sleep. All in all, a thoroughly successful meet, and one I hope some of the newer members enjoyed as a sample of the eclectic nature of eirtaku.

Oh Japan, you and your bikes.

Posted February 2, 2007 * Comments(7)

y helo thar all, this is Pazuzu, Eirtaku’s (resident?) Japan correspondent, here to post nice cynical rants about Japan just to remind everyone out there what exactly it is you’re not missing.

First off the bat is a nice rant about bikes. Yes, bikes.

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