Otacool~

When I meet people for the first time I make sure to keep my powerlevels low, like sub zero low, until I find out we similar interests. Now I'm just a big a nerd as the next guy at an anime convention, but I've been around the block enough times to know what is socially acceptable. No one wants see or talk to someone dressed up like an anime character speaking faux-Japanese ("OMG sO kAwAiI bAkA nEkO dEsU yO nE") anymore than someone in full football gear talking about football in class.

Theres nothing wrong with the hobbies people have, so long as it isn't legally or morally amiss or being an unhealthy obsession, and I've always believed that people who are true to themselves are the coolest people to know. However, all things good should be done in moderation and after coming across this magazine I'm stuck with the conflicting emotions of awe and disgust, hell, thumbs up and facepalm even.

I never had any anime wallscrolls/posters or figurines, Ninja Turtle ACTION FIGURES don't count thank you very much, as I never found any of those to be particularly interesting. I have however built Gundam models, have a bookshelf full of manga and a few gigs worth of unwatched anime on my desktop so you totally can't call me a poser. So whats the point of this blog entry? Its balance.

While its totally cool, in my opinion, for people to play card games, cosplay, go shark diving, go out drinking, watch anime, sew, made totally sweet graffiti, go to strip clubs, read comic books, or go shopping.

It is NOT COOL to throw cards at people, cosplay in the office, go shark diving naked, take advantage of people while drunk, watch hentai in campus center, sew together body parts, made totally lame bus stop vandalism, be a creepy 40 year old dude in a strip club, nerdrage over movies based on comics or go shopping for your wedding while forcing your fiancee to come along when his friends clearly want to throw him a bachelor party since its our first bachelor party ever for one of our oldest friends and theres no reason to worry about us because we're all video game nerds but you won't let him go out with us.


Yeah Mika, I'm talking to you.

Winter Matinee (Bro tip)

Everyone knows about the Spring fling, but winter is another season for lonely lovebirds looking to spend the holidays being not so alone. However you should also keep in mind that the months between Nov-Feb is called breakup season for a reason.

The study shows we are now in National Break-Up Season, the period between the Winter holidays and Valentine's Day when people are more than twice as likely to think about breaking up than at any other time of the year...

...the two primary reasons leading to a break-up were not having a shared view of the future with a partner (48 percent) and feeling unfulfilled or in a rut (41 percent).

While the 8Ball's signs point to yes, take a step back and asset the situation. That girl across the room is giving you all sorts of signs because shes most likely looking for a rebound, and you've just activated her trap card.

So heres a list I've complied myself from other sites, take everything with a grain of salt and eggnog, for my bros looking for someone to spend the holidays with. Now I'm not saying not to go out and date, I'm just want my bros to be safe and to not end up with a life sucking succubus. No matter how desperate you are for a relationship, same goes for girls, red flags are there for a reason.

Red Flags

Avoid any girl who frequently blogs or talks about her sex life. You know how that one goes.

Be wary of any girl who follows you on twitter or sends a Facebook friend request after your first meeting. She may already be stalking you.

Avoid any girl who is still angry because her last boyfriend cheated on her. She'll be tracking your every move, and in her mind every missed call means you've been with someone else.

Avoid any girl who lives within two blocks of you. It's too soon for that kind of proximity.

Avoid any girl with tattoos in Chinese or Japanese. Unless, of course, she's from China. If shes from Japan, she may be Yakuza.

Avoid any girl who wears jewelry given to her by her ex-boyfriend on your first date. She is still in love with him, and only him.

Be wary of any girl whose best friend just got dumped by her boyfriend. Together they are a committee of manhaters and you are the next target for hate.

Avoid any girl who cries when she's drunk. Her self-pity will destroy you.

Avoid any girl who tries to come off as more emotionally unavailable and cavalier about relationships than you are.

Be wary of any girl who tells you she wasn't interested in you when you first met but has now developed feelings for you. She's just been dumped and is desperate.

Avoid any girl who likes to brings up the topic of marriage. Chances are she had her whole life laid out like clockwork and with a timeline to give her the perfect life, only to find she hasn't met the perfect man and her biological clock is counting down.

Avoid any girl who gets hurt and dwells on the most tiniest criticism or the most innocent of comments. Before you know it, you will be spending your whole life apologizing, saying sorry for all the things you did, didn't do and for the mere fact that you came into her life.

Be wary of any girl with massive make up applications. If she can't stand her face without making sure everything is absolutely perfect, she has issues.

Avoid the girls who don't have anything smart to say. Not to ego trip, but you'll be face palming every time she opens her mouth.

Be wary of the girl who send mixed messages. Shes already has two other guys shes interested in.

Avoid the girl who flirts with everyone. Don't confuse them with social butterflies, as a flirt will go around until someone reels her in. Shes looking for a one night stand, not a relationship...unless thats what you're looking for in which you probably won't have the experience to be able to satisfy her.

The Major Folly of Batte Mangas

Powerlevels, absolute speed, plotkai, death scene flashbacks and then those delightful quotes, "Now to face my true form", "Looks like I have to use that...", ect. Theres nothing wrong with the battle genre per say but there has to be a limit and there has to be some changes. A manga which comes to mind? Bleach.

Sure it has some really entertaining battles the art is godly and Kubo's fashion sense is always on point but the manga itself is stagnant, bloated with too many characters (the few awesome characters never get the character development they deserve) has a paper thin story, and it's most recent battle arc has been going on for AN ENTIRE year, hows that for pacing?

Does it sound like I'm hating on Bleach? Probably but no need to be offended, I'm just being critical on certain aspects of the manga that I wished Kubo would elaborate on or rework. Its not a bad manga and I do read it, but there are lots of ways to make it more engaging instead of spending a few months having two people zoom back and forth near death only to switch to another pair of people and then repeating the process.

Invisible Manga

http://io9.com/5383540/dragon-ball-spice-and-wolf-and-low+class-filth-in-manga-nsfw

Manga can be funny and cynical as hell but there is something refreshing about most manga's earnest attitude, its lack of hipster irony. It makes for great stories. (Sadly, it also attracts fans who have no sense of irony about things like changing the cover of Spice and Wolf.) At this moment, while manga is engaged in a battle between mainstreaming and marginalization, it's defenders mostly consists of outspoken anime/manga fans who are overprotective wingnuts that insist it is better than any form of animation and art and comic ever, and the rest of the masses who think otherwise are ignorant slobs and sheep.

Impact of Class Film

Heres a screen shot of my computer with Spaces Activated.
5/6 spaces and 2/5 internet tabs and a 4Gig folder dedicated to the class film. I didn't realize how much time I was investing into it until I got back my midterm exams ._.

I'll be kicking into high gear from this week on, shit will be Bananas. B-a-n-a-n-a-s.


Oh and for those wondering, here's the two characters of our film. The little girl who lives on top of a flying monster, whom both shall remain nameless.

World of Golden Eggs

(Skip to 6:40 for a delightful tennis match)

Its been a while since I found out about this series, but its amazingly entertaining and always gets a chuckle outta me. Its all in Japanese but its easy to laugh along with each skit, plus its fun practice.

Clear Asthetics

Clear Asthetics

A station to really relax to. It clears your mind, uplifts you and sends your spirits elsewhere familiar yet otherworldly. Pianos, soothing synthetics, airy vocals, all toward creating a calming demeanor. Perfect for studying, meditating, brainstorming, napping and as I like to use it, as a music bed while you work.

Sneaky Cameo in Drama

So I was watching this Drama, to practice my Japanese of course, called Attention Please which is about a rocker chick trying to become a flight attendant and who do I spot in the background of an arcade scene? The Beast himself, Daigo Umehara. Who is he?



The very same Daigo from the video thats seen like over a gazillion times over the internet. SF4 world champion via EVO2009 and 1st place winner at over a dozen different venues. Seriously, what the fuck is he doing in my drama?!?!

Some Concept for "The Story"

Tried the silhouette technique for rough concepts to work with, thanks to Rick for the squid and spider idea. The next two are just quick photoshop mock ups with pictures from the internet but I did draw the spider. Since I suck at rendering clouds I just filtered everything to make it look more painterly ha ha. The cloud spider isn't going to be ridden on, it's more like part of the sky ecosystem that gets eaten by the monster (whatever the class chooses)

The next three are ideas I liked from my sketch book. Crystal didn't like the idea of beached whales at the end of the story so I steered away from typical fauna. Of course the first two are still animals but I tried to add more earth to them. The bonsai tree is my newest idea after spending a few hours in Sinclar library. It's the least animal like and more flora/monster so thats a plus.

The squid propels itself with by using it's tentacles as a propeller, and it stays afloat with gas sacks (ala SoTC). The flying fish has some gas sacks inside it's mountain cave and it flaps around to stay afloat, swimming in clouds to breath. The Giant Bonsai tree glides around, like an unbrella in the wind. It uses it's roots to suck nutriants/water from clouds and also has propeller roots to keep it afloat. It also has multiple eyes to keep track of it's surroundings and to make it more monster like.

Theres lots more concept art I wanna push out before Thursday, those would be more theatrical shots/compositions for the movie and to give an idea of what the environment would be.

Summer Adventure

Second story I came up with during summer. I was inspired after Up came out, and I've always felt that old people were inheritably cool because they have such awesome stories if you have the time to listen to them. Back in high school one of my classmates had a penguin living in her bathroom (no names) and I always thought that penguins in places where they don't belong was as a funny thought so naturally I had to combine the two.

There were two more stories I had in mind, one about a guy with an umbrella and a girl who followed him and how he dealt with more and more people under it until a whole crowd was gathered underneath. The other was about a boy running late and was chasing after the school bus so that he could get to school on time to present a project he spent all night working on. In the end he makes it to school at the same time after dealing with lots of different obstacles.

Umbrella story never got past concept, bus chase was stuck in storyboarding hell. Was fun coming up with these, ha ha.

Pincer Attack

One of the stories I was working on during summer. Quality of drawings changes because I'd add/remove shots and since I spent ~1 month per story, things change and I move things around. Characters look generic so that others could make totally sweet character designs for these two. Whichever story my class decides on doing, the storyboards aren't concrete so they can change depending on what the class wants.

Cheering up

After hearing about my mom and me being under the weather, my Ex sent some videos and pictures my way to make me feel better. Amusing and random, it really did cheer me up.

District 9 and Director's earlier work

Alive In Joburg - Neill Blomkamp from Spy Films on Vimeo.

So I'm totally stoked to see District 9 by Neill Blomkamp. I haven't followed this much viral marketing since Cloverfield, and while the mock-umentary may turn a lot of people off, its these kinds of films that I love. Putting people in these 'What if this happened in real life' situations and watching raw fear, hate and uncertainty unfold in true form.

The video above is Blomkamp's earlier work which would become the fore runner of District 9. Aliens are stranded, wanting to go home but good old Uncle Sam has other plans for them. As with Cloverfield, there'll be a lot of people who know they arn't going to like the movie going to see it and unsurprisingly hate it afterwords. XP

Preping for Japan: News

Being able to know whats happening around you in a foreign country could make or break a vacation. (Maybe not, I'm just trying to make this sound important) As boring as the news is, its still a valuable source of information which has its uses. I stumbled on this while surfing 2ch and its a very good news site. It's updated daily and it has a transcript of everything in the clips next to it, which helps IMMENSELY when trying to translate. Its all in moon runes so having the 辞書 extension on firefox speeds the translation process up.

Very useful when mining PL3 and PL4 sentences.

FNN

Bad end for the (whole) team

I don't really have much to say about all the stuff thats happened this month, other then I WISH EVERYONE WOULD STOP TEXTING ME ABOUT SO AND SO DYING I ALREADY HAVE LIKE A GAZILLION TEXT MESSAGES THAT SAY THE EXACT SAME THING AND YES IM SAD SO QUIT REMINDING ME.

May the force be with each and every single one of them.

Those Silly Folks at 2chan

I trust you know enough of the スポンジボブズボンは四角 intro to find this as amusing as I do.

Browsing 2ch's pages, I've come to realize that I'm learning and not learning at the same time. For ever new thing I learn, it's immediately nullified by the unsurprisingly consistent internet jackassry typically found all over the internet. As it stands, everything I've learned on 2ch is non applicable to the real world. wwwwwwwww

Back when we used to play pros

Totally forgot I had this. The summer after high school ended was when me and my friends were at our prime at video games. Playing Counter Strike 1.6, raiding in WoW, and of course, going to Video game tournaments for smash. We went out to OC2 hosted by Ken in California, showed them what Hawaii was all about and managed to place into brackets. Of course we couldn't compete with the pros, but we all had fun. Before we left I had the crazy idea of getting signatures from all the professionals there, and I did. It was great to play players from around the world too. Europe, Australia and Canada made a showing, learned a few French words during our time there too.

Ken - Ranked #1 in the world for a few years
Captain Jack - Was #1 in Japan at the time
Gimpyfish - Bowser player extraordinaire, been in interviews and used to go to UH (would always come over to my dorm to play)
Isai - Undesputed #1 in Smash64 and most awesomest guy in the world
M2K - Frame counter, took #1 spot for a while and was #1 in Brawl
PC Chris - Super cool and popular. One of the best Falcos
KillaOR - Was on MTV's True Life: I'm a pro gamer
KoreanDJ - Thought he could understand Hawaiian, a top player from East coast
Chudat - Ice Climber player, a top West coast player
HugS - Another top player from West coast, made some 1337 Samus strats with him

Theres so much people who are a lot better now, I wish I could compete but they're all just too good ha ha.

Light novels are HEAVYWEIGHTS

While reading manga RAW is awesome for practicing speech patterns, contextual usage, sentence minding, (And being awesome in general) somewhere along the line I was going to have to read actual books and read actual sentences. I would have avoided it if I could but we're aiming at non sucky level Japanese fluency here, so it was time for me to man up.

I was able to download The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya light novel from the internet the other day. When I found it I thought, "WOAH!" but when I opened it a sea of Kanji greeted me with furigana nowhere to be seen. Gonna buy one of those DS Kanji dictionaries at ToysnJoys sometime during the week and then spend the rest of summer trying to finish the book. If I could manage that, it would bring honor to my family.


Oh, and on a somewhat related note. I've been having dreams where people are speaking Japanese lately. I've even had one where Obama was telling me his life story of when he was growing up in Hawaii. He even told me that he learned how to speak it from talking to an old lady near some train tracks, IN JAPANESE. Shit was so cash.

Night Pictures of a Real Life Gundam

Its...beautiful...
Now if they made an Armored Core Statue to scale, I'd be nerd-gasming all over the place. And it wouldn't be pretty, I'll tell you what. Link

Eyeshield21 ends

One of my favorite WSJ series ended this week ;_;

This is a sports shounen focusing on a football player named Sena. He was introduced as an ordinary bookworm who excelled at running, specifically running away from fights and was basically the errand boy for bullies throughout his school career. Forced into joining the football team, the team captain gives him a visor to hide his identity and title of "Eyeshield21" so that he could create a new persona completely opposite of his real self. Its really good, like a 'Prince of Tennis' of Football.

The manga started 7 years ago and has 333 chapters to it's name. I began reading it during Junior year of high school and was seriously considering trying out for my school's football team during Senior year. Glad I didn't, I'd snap like a twig ha ha.

First Cyborg

They've connected a biological "brain" made of rat neurons to a robot, with a two-way link.

Mind = Blown

Its pretty sad seeing this rat cyborg scurrying around looking for a place to hide. Actually, this sends some chills down my back.

Anime clichés you say?

- Childhood friend moves away, years later returns but with a different personality. But she still remembers all the nice things he's done for her when they were younger,then falls in love with him all over again.

- Hot spring / Beach / Public Baths

- Guy has many different girls to choose from, childhood friend loves him the most, but he is stuck with an eccentric girl that is a different species (demon/monster/goddess/alien/mythical creature/etc.)

- Men who are shoved into situations where they end up living with a bunch of gorgeous and beautiful women

- That generic Japanese high school.

- The annoying loli that loves the main character.

- "ONIIIIIIIIII-CHAN"

- Guy trips and falls on top of girl in a compromising position.

- Guy and a girl get locked up in somewhere (gym storage, elevator, abandoned temple during storm etc.)

- The moeblob schoolgirl with glasses who is really clumsy and airheaded.

- If you lost your memories, you're a prince/princess with an awesome power

- Enemies explaining their attacks, moves and special abilities before they use them.

- Nobody except the main character understands the situation at all. Nobody.

- Dodging any attack by jumping 20 feet into the air.

- "Looks like I'll have to get serious. I'll use... that..."

The Project Ep. 2

The Project Ep. 1

Reality Show/Final Creative Piece from Mrs. Kewley's group. As their project kept going it turned more and more into an episode of The Office, which isn't a bad thing. I pop in a few times in the background, which means they were actually working on their project whenever they were in that room filming. I was surprised because every time I popped in to check up on what they were doing, everyone had their DSs out and were playing Pokemon.

Summer Season

Its a good thing that I'm only interested in watching just a few shows this season, but in all likely hood I won't ever have time to even watch them till the semester after. I've still got 3 anime series from spring, 2 from winter and 2 from last summer all downloaded on my desktop that I haven't even touched yet.

On the plus side, Bakuman volume 2 and the rest of the Mx0 series I ordered from ebay came in today. Now I can read my RAWs without having to lug the laptop around n______n

Awful handwriting has a message

From Sophomore of High school (I shit you not) another cringe inducing message for myself. A timeless phrase, unfortunately rendered almost unreadable by my god awful penmanship.

I remember spending the summer before College working on my handwriting like crazy. It was a very embarrassing flaw that I wanted to change about myself because even though I had a lot to say, I wouldn't dare show anyone what I had written down because I wasn't up to par. Hence why this is going to be a very important summer for me in terms with my animations.

I smiled and made confusing faces as I looked over my old handwriting, its my first victory toward improving myself. While how decent my handwriting is now is still questionable, I like how it looks and it has a distinct style I like. More importantly, I'm proud that its actually legible.

Rugrats Storyboards

Shit just got REAL.

Losing things

As I was uploading new photos I lost track of what I was doing and ended up digging through old photos. I came across these three photos with stuff I've lost or given up over the past two years. I remember being super depressed losing my duct tape hat because it was a very special gift from one of my friends back in high school. Plus it had duct tape all over it so it was automatically awesome to begin with. My brown hat was also an important gift that was lost to the wind as it blew out of my car last year.

I've had two long boards stolen since college started but losing them wasn't as depressing as giving away my bamboo board
as "reassurance" to a later to fail long distance relationship.

But none of those could ever be as bad as to what happened two semesters ago. After finally buying my own 'vintage' jeans for $160 bucks, the week thereafter I couldn't find it anywhere. Upon asking my mom if she had seen it anywhere she simply replied,

"Oh, I sent those and your other old pants to your relatives in the Philippines"

I cried, I had never worn them once and it was the first (and last time) I've ever spent more than $40 on an article of clothing. Serves me right for falling right into Abercrombie & Finch's clutches.