Whether it been interesting outfits or make up, Tokyo's Harajuku is famous for its inventive fashion. The latest trend, according to the Japanese media? Cat ear hair.

For years, "cat girls" have been popular in Japan. The trope is ubiquitous in Japanese video games, manga and anime. But now, otaku (geek) culture is melding with gal culture to create "neko mimi hair" (cat ear hair).

According to Harajuku's female fashionistas, the look supplants the need for ribbons or hairbands. One of the girls interviewed by Japanese TV said she wears cat-ear hair instead. Another noted how the look was "moé", a word that's typically used by Japanese otaku to describe cute characters. No wonder one of the girls that was interviewed had a Puella Magi Madoka Magica smartphone case.

The cat ear look does look purrdy good, and the trend does show how the influence of Japanese otaku culture spreads has spread beyond geekdom. Meow!

さすが社会現象やで！ 「魔法少女まどか☆マギカ」 原宿ギャルにも人気 [アルファルファモザイク]

Professional crook Fujiko Mine has her own new Lupin anime. In it, she looks sexy and fantastic. This new life-sized Fujiko figure, though, does not.

Online retailer AmiAmi lists this life-sized Fujiko's price at ¥504,000 (US$6,300) and calls it "high quality". I call it "overpriced garbage".

Pre-orders for the figure start this summer. It goes on sale in December.

ルパン三世 峰不二子 ハイクオリティ等身大フィギュア [AmiAmi via Otaku.com]

Unity Technologies and Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd announced last month of an agreement which will allow over 400 million Chinese Internet users to access Unity3D-powered 3D games through 360 browsers.

Qihoo's 360 browser along with its 360 anti-virus software are immensely popular in China. So popular in fact that according to Baidu.com's statistics that were published last month, Qihoo 360 ranked among the top three most popular web browsers in China, the other two being Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0.

According to a press release put out by Qihoo, the addition of Unity's Web Player will "enable Unity games to be played seamlessly in the 360 Safe Browser on any website, including 360 Game Center, one of the top web game portals in China."

According to the same press release, Qihoo will first add the Unity Web Player to their Qihoo 360 "Safe" browser which has somewhere up to 250million users.

Ludovic Bodin, Co-founder and CEO of French gaming company CMUNE, says that the news of Qihoo and Unity's partnership is great. Based in Beijing, CMUNE is most known for the hardcore free to play Facebook FPS Uber Strike. Bodin says he believes this is a great opportunity for Unity3d games and his company, and now they are accelerating the release of their game in China.

"The appetite for web-games in China, being one of the fastest growth markets with mobile/tablets, is just going to accelerate even more with the announcement of Unity-360 partnership," said Bodin. "UberStrike being the largest Unity3d game on Facebook & the largest free to play browser-based First Person Shooter worldwide, made in China, is going to launch even harder Better Faster Stronger in China."

Qihoo 360 Announces Partnership with Unity [Pr newswire]

Yahoo! Japan is running an auction that will give one lucky winner the chance to virtual pilot the one-to-one scale Gundam in Tokyo's Odaiba. Don't get too excited just yet.

You don't actually get to sit in the cockpit. The winner will get his or her image displayed on the one-to-one scale's virtual cockpit. Thus, the lucky winner will need to provide pictures so the Gundam wizards can insert him or her onto the cockpit screen.

Did I say "lucky"? I meant wealthy! The auction is currently at close to ¥800,000, which is nearly US$10,000. The money does go to a good cause: rebuilding those areas hit hardest by the Tohoku Earthquake.

［チャリティ］ガンダムコクピット内 [Yahoo!]

China has some very interesting culinary habits some of which folks from the west will find just outright whacky. One slightly normal but definitely strange habit is the Chinese love for pork products, and in particular the ham sausage (火腿肠). Now Rovio and Chinese pork products producer, JoyCome, have partnered together to bring Angry Birds and ham sausages together to create Angry Birds meat snacks.

Originally the partnership between Rovio and Joycome was only promotional, where if you bought some bacon you would get some Angry Birds sausage. Now it appears that they've taken the partnership further with an assorted meat pack.

Sold at nearly every convenience store in Beijing (I bought mine at my local 7-11), the Angry Birds snack packs go for about two dollars. What you get in each bag is three packs of what looks like a condom but really is just fatty ham, three packs of fatty ham with a jalapeno, two packs of breakfast sausages, two regular flavored sausages and two packs of black pepper sausages.

Each meat product is individually packaged, once opened it feels like the meat has a thin film of grease covering it. Conventional wisdom tells me that if meat smells weird don't put it in my mouth, but there is something special about the way the Angry Birds meat smells, a tangy peppery pungent smell of pork, that oddly entices me to consume it.

The "red bird", jalapeno ham slices, probably is the best tasting of the five. Like a slice of bacon where the fat is on the outside the "red bird" was particularly chewy. Getting past the fatty gelatinous ring and actually hitting the meat, it begins to feel like eating a slice of thick pepperoni. The only downside is how ridiculously spicy the jalapeno is. The "yellow bird", regular ham slices, on the other hand were just plain old disgusting. Unlike the "red bird" the "yellow bird" slices wasn't flavored. Without the jalapeno flavoring the gelatinous fat taste gives the meat an oily taste that just tastes sick.

While the ham slices were interesting, the sausages were the star of the whole bag. The "black bird" black pepper sausages were an instant winner. Unlike the bland tasteless original flavor "pig" sausages, the black pepper adds a different dimension, it makes it more like something I would actually eat. It tasted like a good Slim Jim. The "white bird" breakfast links were good too. In fact if the packaging didn't read pork, I could have sworn it was biting into a chicken/turkey sausage. Eating the sausages gave me a big hankering of eggs.

Now if I only had some eggs, I could finish the rest of the bag.

Because the folks at PlayStation Japan kindly posted one! Here is the Soul Sacrifice presentation in English for your listening pleasure.

In it, there is game imagry, Japanese game people, and flashing lights. Who doesn't love flashing lights?

It looked like Grand Theft Auto, but it was very real—and almost very deadly.

Last week, a Hyundai YF Sonata pulled out of traffic and went tearing down the street, weaving through traffic, and piling into a stopped car. Ten people were injured (the driver broke ribs, while the passenger's vertebrae was damaged), and the crash entangled six cars. Thankfully, no one was killed.

The accident has been called the result of unintended acceleration, but the way the driver pulled out of his lane does make that claim suspicious. Black box footage has gone viral, and much of it resembles like 1976 French short film C'était un Rendez-vous (and pretty much every street racing game). That is, until the horrifying collision.

Korean authorities are looking into the accident, and according to LiveDoor News, they still do not know the cause.

ヒュンダイ車が突然150キロの猛スピードで疾走し激突、あわや大惨事に [韓フルタイム]

As previously posted, Namco is working on a new Tales role-playing game. Here is the countdown clock if you are into those. I'm not! Namco]

On May 12, a 54 year-old junior high school teacher spent the evening at anime shop, Animate, in Osaka's geek district, Den Den Town.

The teacher, Manabu Wakita, was a regular, but he wasn't looking for DVDs or anime goods. He supposedly had something else in mind: trying to snap photos up a woman's skirt.

When Animate staff noticed something was up and called out to him, the teacher apparently tried to get rid of the evidence—by chewing it up.

Wakita apparently put a tiny camera up a 20-something year-old female's skirt. She was shopping at Animate at the time.

After being called out, Wakita put the camera's SD card in his mouth, and, according to shop staff, it made a "crunching" noise. According to some reports, the man didn't just chew up the SD card, he ingested it.

Wakita admits that he was following the woman, but added that he "absolutely did not take peeping pictures."

If the suspect did eat this SD Card and did take these illicit photos, the proof will be in the poop, rather pudding—ah, forget it.

スカートにカメラ入れる　盗撮容疑の教諭、ＳＤかみ砕く [MSN Japan]

盗撮教諭、証拠のＳＤカードのみ込んだ記事を印刷する [NikkanSports]

For the Final Fantasy role-playing games, the logos are iconic. You can spot them a mile away and immediately recognize them. Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIII is no exception, which makes this kwinky-dink all the more noticeable.

Level-5, which has developed several titles for Square Enix, is working on a new multi-platform game called Time Travelers. Online in Japan, people are pointing out that the Time Travelers' logo "looks like Final Fantasy". While it's not a straight up knock off, there are certainly shades of Final Fantasy in it.

But, honestly, it's difficult to make a role-playing game in Japan without having shades of FF in it. It seems the same is true of logos.

このロゴＦＦっぽいよね [2ch]