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.