Skip to main content

The post-Armageddon series God Eater took a 3 month break between the biologic battles of episodes 9 and 10, now they are back to finish up the first season. Episode 10 just posted to Crunchyroll this past Monday, with new episodes each Monday. As with a number of other series, God Eater aired first on Daisuke, so you can watch 10 through 13 there already. Both sites have both free and paid accounts you can sign up for, and you can watch anything they stream with a free account. The paid accounts have some added benefits, like watching the shows a week earlier or getting them without commercials. Both streaming services also have free iOS and Android apps you can use to watch your favorite shows on your smart phone or tablet, and each service has pros and cons with different aspects of the account set up.

The most interesting thing about Daisuke is the titles they carry. They are a consortium of 6 Anime companies based in Japan, rather then a North American distributor like Crunchyroll, Funimation, or Viz. Which means they have a mix of some of the shows the other 3 carry, they show some titles a week or more before any of the others have them, and they even have some shows that aren’t carried by the North American distributors at all. Of course, there are more than 6 Anime companies in Japan, which means each of the others carry titles that Daisuke, nor their local competitors, have. Personally I can’t afford to have paid accounts with all of them, plus Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Acorn, etc, on top of my cable company bill (best broadband bandwidth for the buck, bar none). So I am evaluating who has what, and which titles in each ones library I can not live without. If I can only afford a couple of monthly service fees, I want to make sure I end up with the best ones.

The My Hero Academia launch party will be streaming live online over at Funimation beginning at 1AM Eastern Time this Sunday, April 3rd. Usually when a new show launches they just play the first episode an hour or half a day after it airs in Tokyo. This time, there will be live pre-show and post-show programming, complete with a chat/IM interface allowing you to talk to the hosts and guests. They will be throwing in some giveaways, although they are vague about what that entails.

Of course, you need to subscribe to their service to get access, but you can use their 2 week free trial to check it out (along with everything else they offer), and then cancel before the regular payments start if you didn’t find anything you were interested in.

I haven’t previously seen Funimation do anything like this to launch a new series, if it works out for them perhaps we will get more of these kind of events. If they put the time and effort in to do it right, it could be an excellent Value Added feature of their subscription service, becoming worthwhile for their business model and their subscriber’s entertainment both. I look forward to seeing how they do on this one, and am keeping my fingers crossed.

The animated short Roadkill Redemption was created by Karl Hadrika. Or most of it, at least; he did the story, animation, modeling, rigging, compositing, editing, lighting and sound design, but the voice was Lidia Labuda. This one made him a 41st Annual Student Academy Award Finalist, which is fairly impressive for a single person production. He did go on to join Warner Bros, where for the last year he has been on the team creating Bunnicula (yes, about a bunny vampire), which is now airing on the Cartoon Network.

Shout it Out is a J-Rock band formed in 2013; the first song here is Light Of The Song from December of 2015, the second is 17-year-old from about 6 months earlier, and the third is from just last week or so, Backlit. This band has some promise and potential, so I had to share them here.