As a way to help kick off a new year and a new era for Pop GO, we are publishing POPcast, the official podcast of Population GO!

Now this isn’t a one time, special podcast type of deal. The goal is to publish new episodes at least once a month with different staff members taking part each time, and hopefully it’ll help connect you with our writers a bit better.

In the debut episode, Erin (solarstory), Ian (thatninja) and Steve (elitist-movie-snob) kick off the launch of POPcast by sharing their own favorite origin stories, answering reader questions and talking general Pop GO nonsense.

Hit the break to listen to episode 1 of POPcast!

We can’t have the plot moving too fast now, can we?

It’s a little late, and the sentiment is completely wasted anyways.

Hey, you’re not the plot point from the last episode.

Oh sweet lord, please don’t try and strangle her. I may be desperate for a change of pace, but that’s a little much.

But… it’s so hot outside…

You’d think so, but we’re just over halfway through the season, so there has to be something else.

Aren’t you girls a little young to be going to Comiket unsupervised?

No.  Apparently no one in this show has any sense of the situation, the chain of command, or basic freaking propriety.

I’d really hoped we’d seen the last of this hat, but oh, how wrong I was.

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It’s easy to play favorites when you have a seasonal list of anime and that one series that really stands out. You prioritize it, you wait for it in great anticipation and you get heavily involved in collecting images and taking part in discussions and whatnot. But what if we offer here the biggest surprise instead? 

Yes, I know, there is a bit of a loophole in this attempt to try something new, but who said it couldn’t overlap? While it may not be our favorites, we do (and have listed previous biggest surprises) have some shows that have caught us off guard and fascinated us. In fact, these might as well be favorites, but it’s hard to make that final judgment call just yet halfway into the season. 

So here it is, our most surprising anime of this summer season. 

Because he’s really weird and making me really uncomfortable.

I wonder what it is about Akari that attracts so much harassment from animals.  Poor girl.

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It’s that time of year again!  After going through the truckloads of images, I’ve selected my top five picks from Summer Wonder Festival 2012.  There were plenty of gorgeous figures from the current anime seasons, and you’ll find one of them in here, but most of the figures that really took the cake either don’t come from anime period or are blasts from the past.

Well, that’s certainly one word for it.