After the huge success of Vocaloid 2 "Hatsune Miku" (more than 25.000 units sold in 3 months) that stormed the Japanese music software industry, this week two new "manga" music products has been announced:
Audio Control 1 "Producer Pack" and Music Maker "Jam Band". The first one features an official collaboration with Crypton (Vocaloid 2 producer) and will be sold with an official Miku mousepad. Audio Control 1 an a high-end audio interface, with assignable buttons and a controller knob combined with advanced MIDI key commands, gives for full control of software applications (and of course can be integrated with Vocaloid 2).

"Jam Band" seems a customization of the popular Music Maker software from Magix.

(via Haimaki) Wow! It's impressive to watch how otaku culture  was already alive and kicking in Japan more than  20 years ago when the western geekdom was still trapped into the Marvel super heroes universe...  1985 was a special year for Comiket since in that year Yoshihiro Yonezawa established the Comiket Ltd. to better manage an event that was already getting big and in the same year the female presence among attendees started to rise thanks to the success of Yaoi phenomenon linked to Captain Tsubasa parodies...

Kaiyodo has just release a series of gashapon magnet toys of micro-organisms from Tales of Agriculture (Moyashimon) a manga/anime about a college student at an agricultural university who got the ability to communicate with bacteria and other micro-organisms.
I think these toys (and the manga Moyashimon) would be featured in the Whole Earth Review magazine if it would be still published or maybe I'm just an etnobotanic otaku, tripping on plastic toys, who spent countless childhood days programming botanic simulation softwares on his Commodore 64...

I just found out that also the cult Akiba shop M's Pop Life Department got a great selection of sexy Christmas costumes. (old "sexy xmas" post here). M's is my favourite audlt shop in the world. What makes this shop unique is that it has been created to attract  sukebe oyaji like me but also couples interested in discovering new ways to have fun sex. The Japanese artist Mizuno Junko has collaborated with several project produced by M's (actually I think this kind of collaborations are way cooler than the "traditional"  marketing projects made by KidsRobot or other so called streets brands). 
If you don't know this Akiba sex temple you should take a look to this  great reportage by Akibamap (translated by Sweat Pink blog).