Mobile Suits a Reality

As I was reading through some of my RSS feeds this afternoon I came across an interesting article. It looks like Masaaki Taira, a member of Japan's National Legislature, has announced that Japan's Liberal Democratic Party will consider adding in efforts to create "piloted two-legged mobile suits" to the party's platform manifesto.

Much of the design ideas for something like this seem to be coming from anime and manga such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Patlabor, Appleseed, and Ghost in the Shell. It seems that the technology to create something like this is in place, however, the markets to sustain it as an industry are not present yet. Creating some of these suits on a 1:1 scale such as Gundam (18 metres) might not be a feasible option yet, however, 3-5 metres like Patlabor is a potential possibility. It has also been noted that to minimize the robots falling over, a six legged model might be more practical such as the Tachikoma model from Ghost in the Shell.

All I can say after reading this article is that my dream of being able to pilot a Gundam is coming closer and closer to reality. Although I doubt that a foreign government would allow a Canadian anime blogger to pilot a Gundam or mobile suit of any nature, the fact that these mecha can be feasibly created is amazing.
Check out the original article HERE

The Polls Are In

Back at the beginning of January we decided to try something new and get some feedback from our readers. Because we believe that the ideas and opinions of all anime fans are important we wanted to know a little bit more about each of you. Our first poll included two questions, one about anime, and one about videogames. Our first poll closed this weekend and the results are as follow.

We asked which Gundam Series were your favorites and you responded with Gundam Seed and Gundam Seed Destiny. It looks like we have a tie for our first category.

Our second question asked which Pokemon game was your favorite. You responded with Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow.

Thanks to everyone who took the time out to vote and stay tuned, we will have more anime surveys coming soon.

Imitation Gundam!?!

So normally I post reviews on anime and anime videogames, but every so often I come across a news article that I feel has to be shared with our readers. As you all know by now I'm sure, I am a huge Gundam fan. Naturally when I first heard about the 18m (60 foot) tall Gundam statue that was erected in Japan I decided that my next big goal in life was to go see it. With that being said, I came across an article in my RSS feeds this morning about another Gundam look-alike statue that was put up in China.

Now normally I would be happy to hear that there is another Gundam statue that I could make a goal of going to see, however, this one looks like a piece of crap. On top of that, the park where it was built denies that they ever even had the statue when they were called out on it. They even went so far as to remove the statue.

The best part of the whole incident is that in an attempt to make the statue "original" they added a bunch of tubes and spikes to it. Now the statue looks like a quasi GOUF model; but much uglier.

At the end of the day, I don't think I will be making too much of an effort to see this "imitation" Gundam statue, but as a Gundam fan, I can appreciate the effort.

We're at 100!!!!!

So we finally did it. Silent Divergence has reached its 100th post. It has almost been a year since we created SD and there has been a lot of ups and downs. We would like to thank all of our readers for their support in helping us to keep pushing and providing a reason for us to continue writing.

There have been a lot of additions to Silent Divergence over the last 100 posts. We have added a number of new channels and writers to our group; most notably Super Ksian and Scallywag. You guys have been awesome contributors to SD!

I hate all this mushy stuff, so lets just leave it at Thank You to everyone who has contributed to SD, either writers or readers, and stay tuned for the new improvements to the site and added services that we will be offering in the future.

And with that I leave you with an awesome Naruto AMV. Strong and Strike, which says a lot about us at Silent Divergene. ENJOY!!!