I’ve made the long hop from Japan to the U.S., this time to Atlanta, Georgia, where I’ll be attending Anime Weekend Atlanta. If you’ll be at the show we hope you’ll come by our humble J-List/JAST USA booth (#100, very easy to remember) and say hello, and check out the English eroge and visual novels we have for you. (We’ve got far less stock than at our normal shows since we flew in directly from Japan, so if you’re looking for J-List T-shirts, cosplay products or snacks from Japan, it’s best to get them from the site directly.) We also have an awesome panel on Saturday night at 8 pm, which we hope to see you at!
We’re getting ready to party in Atlanta, CNN style, but without Georgia Coffee.
This is my first time in The Peach State, except for domestic transfers through Atlanta. I already took my employee Yasu to Varsity, a drive-in restaurant that’s been around since 1928, and after the show we plan to visit some of the highlights of the city, including CNN and the Coca-Cola headquarters. Without a doubt the most famous image of Georgia to the Japanese is one that doesn’t actually exist here: Coca-Cola’s long-selling brand of canned coffee called Georgia Coffee, which it started marketing in 1975. (Back in the early 90s there was a cool line of Twin Peaks advertisements for Georgia Coffee, and one of my first business ventures on the early Internet was, ah, “liberating” these posters and selling them on USENET.) Georgia is also famous in my family because a friend of my son’s couldn’t pronounce the word properly, despite attending an immersion school for learning English. He pronounced it “Ji-ro-gia,” so that naturally became his nickname until the end of time.
We’re happy to be working with NitroPlus in releasing Steins;Gate to the world in English, something we feel is an important event for the genre of visual novels and unique games from Japan. Steins;Gate is a hardcore SF story about an amateur science lab that inadvertently creates a machine to “time leap” into the past, which naturally causes a large number of problems with an evil organization called SERN that could destroy the future. We’re happy to report that the official U.S. site is up, filled with information on the story and characters of steins. The URL is http://www.steins-gate.us, we hope you’ll browse it and preorder the upcoming limited edition. (If the site doesn’t come up for you it means DNS is still propagating, try again in a couple hours.)
We have lots of awesome new and restocked J-List products on the site, from “moe” anime magazines to artbooks to wonderful Japanese snacks and of course plenty of “naughty” products. Visit J-List or JBOX.com to browse these great items now!