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In Houston, Texas, Anime Matsuri takes place this weekend, taking over the convention center. This event is huge, and if your browser can handle it be sure to log into the Flash version of the site; one of the best Con web sites I have ever seen. In Seattle, Washington Sakura Con is another monster Anime event with a ton of guests including High and Mighty Color as the featured musical GoH. In Boston it’s Anime Boston, still another large convention, while in Ohio the event is Anime Punch. Why all the big-time Anime cons at once? Part of it could be because there are a lot of artists, actors, and musical groups in the US right now, gearing up for Sakura Matsuri next week, the Cherry Blossom Street Festival in D.C. In fact, the National Cherry Blossom Festival started this past Saturday and runs until the 10th.

In San Francisco, WonderCon is a fair sized Comic Con, and a lot of media folks are going to be there, right down to io9 and G4TV

If you haven’t put your votes in yet, you only have a bit over a day to put in for your favorites for the Locus Awards. If you are not familiar, Locus Magazine is the closest thing the science fiction publishing community has to a professional trade magazine. Voting closes April 1st. Just opened up is the initial set of nominations for the MTV Movie Awards, with their usual off the wall selection of categories. This is you chance to put in for some of the movies that got slighted at the other awards, like District 9, Star Trek 11, or even Avatar. Go out and make your voice heard! For those of you who are members of the SFWA, you have until midnight tonight PST to vote for the Nebulas this year.

I have been waiting quite a while for this one; the 800 pound gorilla in the movie theaters this weekend will be Clash of the Titans. A remake of the original 1981 Ray Harryhausen classic, the changes in technology between then and now promises good things for the movie going experience. I do have to say though that watching the Owl in the original on the big screen brought the kind of sense of wonder that is rare (and it also helped solidify an already strong life long addiction to robotics that I still haven’t outgrown).

In more limited release (NY and LA the first weekend, expanding out over the following several weeks) is the epic period piece The Warlords, in the tradition of Hero and the House of Flying Daggers. Staring Jet Li, it will be available on VOD (Video On Demand), Amazon, and X-Box Live on the 4th, so everyone will have access.

The main entry for this weeks list has to be Sherlock Holmes; with Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes, Jude Law as Watson, and Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, this was the Steampunk treat of the holiday season. If you happen to pick up your copy on Blu-Ray and have a BD-Ready player online and a web browser connected to the internet (so you can ask questions), you can join the live event on April 1st and hear Downey answer your questions about the movie.

On the Anime front, Negima? Season 2 appears to be a bit different than season 1, which to my mind expands the range of the show. It still has all the magic, but not as many sneezes.

There is a new entry in the US-released Lupin the 3rd collection, Lupin the 3rd Episode 0: First Contact. It has been a while since the last new episode we have gotten, and the fact that it is Subbed rather than Dubbed indicates the new North American distributor may be an independent operation.

And then there are Strike Witches, an elite aerial combat team that blasts aliens out of the sky, wearing propeller boots and wielding weapons, but with one rather noticeable missing item.

Other releases worth noting include Neo Angelique: Abyss and Six Strange Tales of Liao Zhai 2. There are also a few Complete Collection releases that had previously released each season as a box set, like Aquarion, Kannon, and Otogi Zoshi.

If you are a fan of animation, one program you should try to catch every week is Digista, or in English the Digital Stadium. Each week they have a guest who is a professional in the digital arts field, usually but not always animation. That guest, referred to as the Curator, nominates four works by unknown new talent for the panel and the audience to review and judge. One piece each week is declared the winner and goes into the permanent collection of the Digital Stadium Hall of Fame. Once a year all the entrants to the stadium become part of the annual competition, at which the DIGISTA Awards are handed out.

This program is a wonderful showcase for new animation talent, giving them world wide exposure. You can watch each weeks program anywhere NHK World is available. If your local cable company does not carry them (mine does, if yours doesn’t start calling and writing them to tell them to add it, or you can get them off a satellite), you can watch the animations online from the hall of fame page. Other NHK programs I never miss are Imagine-Nation for the weekly Anime, Gaming, and Manga news and features, and J-Melo for news and performances from the Japan music scene. The animation that won this weeks Digital Stadium entry is called Confessions of Fumiko; enjoy.

One of the talents it takes to produce animation is Voice Actors; I know a number of them (and used to be one), and they have a unique skill set. Crunchyroll has a nice presentation on the topic called Adventures in Voice Acting, staring a huge assortment of the best in the business. Now that I have watched the first section, I have to flip a mental coin and decide if I want to buy and download the other segments, or just get the DVD for the permanent collection.

For some eye candy gone wrong, stop by SFX’s It’s Gone a bit 2001, a humorous review of ten movies that tried to imitate the psychedelic ending of that classic film and failed miserably.