Purchasing Power
Well, I’m back from Tokyo. Admittedly I would have posted this sooner but the crippling lack of internet in my first few days back has been a bit of a setback. (This was due to the earthquakes in the area that I managed to sleep through and hear nothing about until I hear it all over the news.) It has however, given way to incredibly slow internet. Which is better than nothing, but completely frustrating to work with. In any instance, I have a picture of my purchases I managed to get this trip.
I guess the economic downturn unexpectedly yet somewhat expectedly lowered the number of CDs my money was able to buy me since I brought the same amount last year and managed to buy more CDs and still have enough money to travel around and eat decent meals everyday. This meant by the time that Comiket came around, I only had enough money to buy a handful of CDs.
But enough about that.
The three CDs on the top are Tanpopo’s Tanpopo 1, Lia’s 時を刻む唄 (Toki wo Kizamu Uta) and Final Fantasy X-2 Vocal Collection Yuna with vocals provided by Mayuko Aoki.
First row of five consists of the X-Treme Hard Compilation Vol. 2, Bastard Pop Terrorists Vol. 7, Kaori Utatsuki’s Spyglass (this came with an accompanying B2 poster, which was obtainable if you bought it in person in shops in Akihabara), The Day of Hardcore Vol. 4 mix CD and M-Neko’s Nekology.
Second row consists of Hardcore Tano*C’s latest Comiket offering of Hardcore Syndrome 3, Bastard Pop Terrorists Vol. 9, AVSS’s offering for Comiket in the form of Electlogue 02, a DJ Shimamura b2b DJ Rightwing mix CD that was given away at the Happiness event in Utsunomiya and Cycheouts Ghost’s Prapanca with surprise bonus disc.
Third row consists of REDALiCE’s first solo album Crimson Hardcore, good-cool’s latest album Crazy Operation, M-Project’s second album Hardcore Illusionist, Lia/LIA’s collection of recorded performances entitled Live Best 2005-2009 “The Moment” and 真・凌辱Hardcore (Shin Ryoujoku Hardcore), the 18+ themed CD compilation produced by MC Natsack.
And the last row consists of DJ Shimamura’s SX, a DJ Shimamura mix CD called Essential Happiness Vol. 5, the digi-up and Hardcore Tano*C collaborative album of Digital Generation EP and Thanatos’ Sunscape Ocean and Sunscape Ocean 2 – two CDs which I have been trying to track down for ages.
I am disappointed in my self with the lack of CDs I purchased, but one way or another, the CDs I have been unable to get this time I will be able to get at a later date. (Veil ∞ Denpa, I am looking at you.)
But hey, at least I managed to buy one of these babies while I was in Japan. It was mocking me throughout my entire trip, and I finally have one in my possession.
Losing My Comiket Virginity
This coming August, I will be going to Comiket 76.
… I’m not sure why, but I’m kinda dreading and yet happily anticipating the experience.
For those of you who might not know about Comiket, it is basically a giant… market, really for doujinshi artists and even well established artists and more to sell stuff (enigmatic LIA 2 was a Comiket 71 release for example). It’s expanded now to encapsulate music, manga and various other things. Most of the items that are available at Comiket are very often limited edition and while they go for relatively reasonable prices at the actual event, when they’re resold on places like Yahoo!Japan Auctions or shops such as Toranoana, the price gets a hike a lot of the time and often become ridiculously rare collectors items.
Since so many people go to Comiket at Tokyo Big Sight, there will be lots of lines and lots of people there. It will be like sardines and hence the reason I’m almost dreading the experience.
The last time I went to Japan, I sort of did my own preparation by going to the Touhou only event Reitaisai (mainly because of REDALiCE’s CDs, coincidentally his booth was right beside the IOSYS one, which was clever). I’m not a big Touhou fan, but it was probably the closest experience that I had prior to actually going to Comiket.
But some people have reported going and actually enjoying the experience. Mind you, they probably mapped out their route before they went there. (it is possible to do this, the organisers of Comiket release a CD catalogue containing map information and you can plot out a route beforehand! This is nifty.)
But what am I going to Comiket for? Well, I’m not sure just yet because I have yet to find much information about who is producing anything for Comiket. Hopefully there will be more information closer to the event.
Unfortunately, I haven’t taken much interest in Comiket prior to relatively recently and thus, my knowledge of who and what releases at Comiket is relatively sparse. I hope that something from Hardcore Tano*C will get released at Comiket and that there will be something from Visual Arts and queens label.
Sadly, due to this unfortunate brouhaha of eroge websites blocking non-Japanese IPs I have a feeling that available information will be hard to come by… 
