Looking at the back of the box for Funimation's US release of Adachi and Shimamura, it appears to be an import-friendly region A/B set. I'll be ordering it soon anyway so I'll report back on whether it's really region-free once I have it.
Meanwhile, A&S light novel 8 came out recently and was another good one. After the alternate universe side-stories of the previous volume, this one did something even more surprising: it's not the final volume, but it includes the series ending! The bulk of the volume is about the characters going on their high school trip, but it's book-ended by scenes set ten years later when the characters are in their late 20s. The author states in the afterword that they had decided what the end of the series would be, and published that part now in case they die before having a chance to write the rest of it! It kind of works, since the future scenes leave some things ambiguous.
I also read Whisper Me a Love Song manga volume 4, which has changed gears quite a bit after the developments in the previous volume. It's at its best when it focuses on the romance angle, but this volume starts to put more emphasis on band drama. It's still good; I just hope it doesn't get derailed as the series progresses.
On the anime front, I've watched a few episodes of Strawberry Panic and I'm having trouble getting into it. Part of the problem is the distractingly bad formatting of the subtitles on the Anime Works blu-ray set. I've never seen such chronic overuse of ellipses. When a sentence stretches across more than one screen of subtitles, the first screen ends like this...
...the middle looks like this...
...and the end looks like this.
Worse is that there appears to be a coding error where the subtitling software doesn't recognise the accented É in Étoile, the title of a character who is mentioned several times in most scenes, and it turns into another ellipsis, "...toile".
They even use additional ellipses when the main character stutters, which happens often early on. Add all those together, and there's one screen that literally just looks like this, ".........to..............."
I've also really been enjoying the soft yuri vibe of Amanchu, their bond is so touching and sweet, and I'm gradually working my way through what is mostly a rewatch of Maria Watches Over Us (I've seen all of Seasons 1-3 before and about the first half of Season 4 - I'm on Season 2 of the rewatch) 
