Yes, you read that right--Matt "Legion" McClellan, one of our first additional reviewers, is back after a six-year hiatus. Welcome back! More reviews from all three of the above are on deck.

We also have a very belated announcement (held up by those same health issues) of our Make Us Look Bad FIWAJC! winners: Chris Hooper, for finding the "best" mistake (a millenium-old error repeated in our Trigun review), Jon Perry, for finding a whopping 53 errors (among which was misspelling the word "embarrassing" in the definition of the word embarrassing, runner-up best mistake), and Lizzie Coster, who got randomly selected among remaining entries by the gremlins in the computer. Congratulations!

...sort of. See, the delay is in part because we haven't yet been able to get ahold of two of them (I have a feeling it's because of all the "You've won a million dollars and a trip to the moon!" spam). So, if you are Lizzie Coster or Jon Perry (or know one of them), please get ahold of us so you can tell us what prize you want and where to send it!

Finally, happy Halloween!

And on that note, two new reviews today, both of rather goofy comedies: The crazy, funny Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge and the weak Itsudatte My Santa. Also fixed the review search, which was somewhat broken.

And third, our first two reviews to include Blu-ray info: Yukikaze and SOS Tokyo Metro Explorers: The Next. We figured that, since the silly next-gen format wars finally ended it was time to get on the boat, in particular reviews of the ridiculously expensive not-quite-imports from Bandai's Honneamise label, like these two, to help you decide if it's really worth quadruple the price of the DVD for a high def version.

More stuff and reader reviews to follow in the near future.

Also at work on plenty of other stuff, but we'll wait until it's more finished to talk it up.

Aside from the (hopefully obvious) total re-design of the front door (plus the addition of an RSS feed for those who like that sort of thing), we're officially adding (although it's actually been there for a while) a news feed (with up-to-the-hour anime news from ANN) for those who follow that sort of thing, as well as the re-launch of our deal tips feature, also here on the front page.

Further, we're going to give the blog thing a shot with Akemi's sort-of-blog What's Happenin' in Japan, some random news and pop culture commentary from the woman herself. Also, just in case that wasn't enough, the first couple of Japanese lessons now have audio samples to help with your pronunciation, with more to come.

First, congratulations to our February 1st FSWAJC winner, Li-Mei, and our February 15th winner, Alice. Bit of a delay in selecting the winner for the first of March, but we'll catch up momentarily. Remember, you can't win if you don't enter.

Second, as is rather obvious (I hope), we've been adjusting and improving the site's layout. On the positive side, we've made the look more consistent from section to section by getting rid of those funky righthand index boxes and combining them with the lefthand menu. On the potentially negative side, there's a stripe over to the right reserved for in-site plugs, shopping, and ads. The US medical system is extraordinarily expensive, so I'm hoping this'll help my own bottom line a bit, but fear not--I hate annoying, useless ads as much as anybody, so I'm going to be doing my darnedest to put direct-to-product shopping links that are relevant to the reviews over there so it might actually help you out. This'll take a while since I'm handpicking them, but you can get an idea of how it'll work if you pop your head into the more reviews section.

Third, due to popular request (and despite the "anime" in the site's title), we're going to try adding some manga reviews--most anime is based on manga, after all. Being that I'm only an occasional manga reader, however, it remains to be seen if some of the folks who expressed interest in writing manga reviews will follow through. If you have any suggestions on format or information the reviews should include, by all means let us know.

That's all for right now, but since these major format changes often cause some funkiness, if anything looks funny, try hitting reload. If that doesn't do it, let us know so we can fix it. And stay tuned for a few more new things still in the works.