End of year edition

Here we go again, eh?
Another 12 months in my life and the history of this blog, we've travelled through the highs and lows.


For instance music lovers have been treated to some great limited edition re-issues from MoFi and Audio Fidelity taking in artists such as The Cars, The Band, Rod Stewart and Joe Walsh etc.
On the other hand the AF issue of the Pretenders first album was a mess and that was even admitted by the Mastering Engineer responsible!!!
Apple/Capitol-EMI came up trumps in September with their stereo AND mono re-mastered Beatles albums exceeding all expectations for sound quality and packaging. Full review in September's 2009 entries here.
Also EMI made a great start on the Duran Duran deluxe re-masters starting with Rio - reviewed on the blog - and are scheduled to issue S/T and Seven and the Ragged Tiger on March 15 restoring never before available on cd material to the catalogue even adding valuable DVD's too.
'Bones' loved them all. (shh!)
Some great anime sets were issued last year such as Pretear, Spiral, Moon Phase and Clannad.
We were cordially invited to indulge at the Ouran High School Host Club where all 26 episodes were issued in two sets at a discounted price in a move that helped to keep piracy under control.
Crunchyroll having gotten legit on the internet streaming side got better with exciting titles like K-On! and Skip Beat and expanded the Asian Drama collection. They even made a start on J-Rock! Princess Nisa kept us entertained at the 'Weird Person" CR group too.
I got many otherwise unavailable in the West anime titles from these guys dvdanime Home Page who had all 51 episodes of series 1 & 2 of Shuga Chara as well as series 1&2 of Vampire Knight.
Amazon helped too with getting a DVD player that could be made to play 'all regions' and it was easy to order stuff from the States where the local distributor here hadn't gotten a license.
NEO never had a less than essential issue with loads of well written features on anime/manga and J Life.
UK television became multichannel as default as more areas include mine went digital only but the amount of anime shown dropped . We even lost the Anime Network on satellite so we are dependent on online streaming that brings issues of regional licensing/lock outs very much to the fore.
Personally Dani entered my life (Hello dear!) of whom it should be said is one the very few who really understand me from the inside out.
I'll stick a thank you at this point to the 'angelic place' for your support over the year, Linda at Imwan for the shoulder to cry on, the 'Skeleton crew' at CK Forum, The Crunchyroll folk and an other place for being around where a group of people tried to shut me down earlier in the year.
They didn't count on my strength with YOUR support to come back stronger than ever with this blog radically improved or stop me posting on site either!

Wishing everyone all the best for 2010