Merry Christmas Moonies!

☃ Hey Moonies! We wanted to take this very quick opportunity in between our much needed holiday break to share are warmest wishes for the holiday season and the New Year to all our readers! As you can tell, we haven't updated during this holiday season, and we are pretty much going to hit the reboot button come January since it's becoming too much to bring everything we wanted to you all :(. We are currently working on better ways to solve this (such as, not letting my computers get trashed over and over!). We didn't get around to doing a Christmas special set of posts this year, but we'll link you to last year's!

♨ While we would have really appreciated some sun since it is colder than usual in our parts of the world this year, we got the biggest present already - and it's each and every one of you! Fans gave us a lot this year that we didn't expect - from announcements of our major news stories at cons, to links on other websites, to the several emails of how much you enjoyed reading our site. Every day that I check the stats I am always surprised to see where all our readers are coming from all over the world - it astounds me that Sailor Moon had such an international audience beyond what any of us ever knew and especially how much support there were for the stars! The day we hit 50,000 hits , we finally realized that we did actually have a place among all you fans which was something that we struggled with from day 1. We didn't know how this project was going to be received when I first planned it out with my staff and friends, and the support has been overwhelming. We thank all of you for that - this was a record year for the site and we owe it all to you!

Nonetheless, we know some of you are waiting to hear at least SOME NEWS...

☽ We have some very exclusive Alisa Durbrow (Kuroki Mio) news which has come to us all the way from her family in Japan (Domo Arigato Ed and Yukari Durbrow)! We were a little concerned when we didn't see any mention of Alisa on Junes Agency pages and thought she might have quit the entertainment industry altogether (though her blog still remained). Ed and Yukari told us that Alisa parted ways with her agency in September - she had been with them for 13 years and she wanted to "graduate" and look for an agency that she can do some more music with, among other ventures! In our last post about her, we featured some old songs of hers from when she was much younger (and way before her PGSM time) and we all agreed that she is multitalented - she can sing, act, and model! We were relieved to know that we have not seen the last of her, and ecstatic to learn that she is practicing with her band and getting better at playing her guitar! She is still getting some modeling jobs directly from stylists at magazines. Ed and Yuriko shared this with us too (and we quote): "She thanks very much the fans who supported her for a long time. She hopes to see them when she get a new agency some day." We look forward to seeing you too Alisa and we really hope to hear more about your band some day!

☽ While Toei's OnDemand service in North America still doesn't have as many series as any of us wanted to see, their Japanese counterpart AniBB, continues to do well. On December 17th, they added a new plan allowing for unlimited views a month for ¥ 998 (about $11.04 USD) , and they have thrown the first month in this plan for free! Toei, we really want to see Sailor Moon here in the new year. Please bring it back to North America in 2009! Speaking of Sailor Moon, the "lost" season (Sailor Stars) made it's way into the article Top Five Things Anime Companies Did Wrong in 2008 under incomplete releases. And we have to agree with every one of their points.

☽ And we have a couple video links for you! CBS has done a really good job with their promotion for Flashpoint which will be returning in January, and Sailor Moon fan CloverPhuu has made a wonderful AMV of Usagi/Serena and Mamoru/Darien to Amy Jo Johnson's Dancing in Between which was used at the end of the episode Attention Shoppers. Enjoy!