Maaya Sakamoto Photo Essay

Posted on December 8, 2005 by DarkMirage

やった～！
My preorder for Maaya-sama’s photo essay just shipped today!

この度は、ビクターオンラインショップ“Vemall”をご利用いただき
誠にありがとうございます。
ご注文いただいた商品を本日発送させていただきましたので、
ご連絡申し上げます。

[注文番号]
お客様のご注文番号：[snip]

[購入商品]
商品番号：MAAYA-1
商品タイトル：アイディ。
数量：1枚（本）

[お届け先]
お名前：[snip]様

And yes, I’m still playing To Heart 2. I’ll post a review later.

Posted in Blog, Money, Music | Tagged | Leave a comment

To Heart 2 PC

Posted on December 6, 2005 by DarkMirage

I wasted one whole day at the National University of Singapore Computer Centre “learning” about grid computing and posting on MegaTokyo forums. I returned home quite late and noticed that… ZOMG someone has ripped To Heart 2 and posted it on Hongfire even though the official release date is still three days away!

To Heart 2

The average peer progress is about 42% right now. Looks like I can look forward to playing this game in maybe two days. TAMAKI 4EVA!

But before that, I have to spend another day tomorrow “learning” about grid computing. ＿|ï¿£|O

Posted in Blog, Games | Tagged | 11 Comments

More money-spending

Posted on December 4, 2005 by DarkMirage

Went to Kinokuniya on the way back from the JLPT test centre. The paper was quite okay. Vocabulary section was easier than previous years, but grammar section was harder, so it balanced out. More or less.

But anyway, Kinokuniya is having a 20% sales again, so I couldn’t help but spend more money. T_T Forgive me, my poor (in both sense) bank account. Finally picked up the limited edition of NHK ni Youkoso! vol.4 (with Misaki figurine…) and also collected my order for Suzuka vol.9.

NHK ni Youkoso! and Suzuka

Suzuka vol.9 was ZOMG good. Can’t wait for the next volume. Interestingly, it has sort of broken out of the “Love Hina” (i.e. like but don’t like) phase, which is quite unexpected. Looking forward to the next volume… to be released at the end of eternity.

NHK ni Youkoso! continues to be hilariously deranged or perhaps insanely humourous. But you get the idea.

Misaki

Misaki is currently located above my subwoofer with Lacus from Gundam SEED Heroine DX.

But anyway, I started playing Tomoyo After today. Holy shit, it’s hilarious. lmao. But I suppose the story will probably start getting all dark and angsty soon. I must also add that I prefer the art style over the one used in Kanon and Air.

Tomoyo

On another note, Tomoyo is just too guilible… XD

Posted in Money | Tagged , | 7 Comments

JLPT 2005

Posted on December 4, 2005 by DarkMirage

Leaving for JLPT test centre now. ＿|￣|O
Be back in a few hours…

On another note, Kinokuniya is having a 20% sale. Maybe I should get the limited edition of NHK ni Youkoso! Vol. 4. I’ve overspent this month as usual. There’s still my Gundam SEED Heroine Vol. 6 figurine order that I have yet to collect…

Posted in Blog | Tagged | 1 Comment

Australian Drug Trafficker Executed

Posted on December 2, 2005 by DarkMirage

Singapore executes Australian drug trafficker. I suppose this will bring about another round of anti-Singapore nonsense just like the time that American brat was caned for vandalism.

(CNN) — Singapore’s government hanged an Australian man for drug trafficking early Friday, hours after making an exception to prison policy by letting the condemned man’s mother hold her son’s hand one last time.

Van Nguyen was hanged at 6 a.m. (10 p.m. Thursday GMT) as a dozen friends and supporters, dressed in black, kept an overnight vigil outside the maximum-security prison. His twin brother, Nguyen Khoa, was dressed in white.

“The sentence was carried out this morning at Changi Prison,” Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry said in a statement. The statement said Nguyen had failed in his appeals to the Court of Appeal, and to President S.R. Nathan for clemency.

Continue reading →

Posted in Rant, World | Tagged , , | 16 Comments

New PC and Desktop

Posted on December 2, 2005 by DarkMirage

Desktop

I’ve been busy for the last few days. Wasted the better parts of yesterday and today buying and configuring my new PC. Spent more than expected as usual. It’s not particularly good, but at least the dual PCI-e slots allow for easy upgrading unlike my old AGP rig. Specs are MSI K8N SLI-F, AMD 64 3500+, 1 GB Kingston PC3200 DDR RAM, XFX GeForce 6600GT and Creative Audigy ZS 2. And being the harddrive whore that I am…

HDD
Almost reaching one terabyte～♪

And my new desktop…

Desktop
Guess who’s waiting for the PC version of ToHeart2?～♪

Seven more days till ToHeart2… mmmm.
Three more days till JLPT… ＿|ï¿£|O

Posted in Blog, Tech | Tagged , , | 13 Comments

Anime for Fun and Profit

Posted on November 30, 2005 by DarkMirage

Fortune.com has recently published an article about the rise of anime in the states over the last few years. It’s quite a comprehensive article.

Interestingy,

Once the Weta-ADV partnership hit the news, the company’s in-box started overflowing. “We get a lot of e-mails, a lot of letters from people around the world about Lord of the Rings. But we get 25 e-mails about Evangelion to every one we get about Lord of the Rings,” says Taylor. “And Evangelion has not even been made yet: It’s just a whisper in the corridors of ADV, and it’s a suggestion in the hallways of Weta.”

LotR, in your face!

Posted in Anime | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Re: Singaporean Netflix

Posted on November 26, 2005 by DarkMirage

I was at SITEX 2005 for most of the day. Picked up at GeForce 6600GT.

Anyway, as some of you might remember, I blogged about Video Ezy, a new online DVD rental service in Singapore, sometime ago and also sent them a suggestion e-mail. The reply (from the General Manager himself no less) took 10 days which is not bad especially considering that they sent me another e-mail before this telling me that my suggestions had been forwarded to the relevant people (and no, that wasn’t a auto-replier either).

Now, the surprising thing is that they mentioned my blog in the reply… I used a Gmail account and I made no mention of my posting here, so they must have really done their research. XD

Hi,

Thank you for signing up with Video Ezy Online and blogging us on your blog, we appreciate your support and interest in our “beta” online rental service.

Your comments and observations on our online rental engine & title selection are truly appreciated and you will be happy to know that we are working feverishly to address the Firefox compatibility issues. Our buyers will be adding more titles to our online library in the weeks to come.

You also noted our lack of Japanese anime titles and again you are right. We have found difficulties in sourcing for legitimate DVD products (non-pirated or from the rights owners) and getting censorship clearance from the MDA for a majority of the anime titles. If you have a list of titles that you think that we should have as a foundation, please email a list to our buyer at [snip].

Thanks again for supporting Video Ezy Online.

Sincerely,

David Yip
General Manager
Video Ezy Singapore

Rent It. Buy It. @ Video Ezy

My original e-mail:

Hello, I just signed up for your company’s video rental service. While I am very happy that there is finally a local solution to NetFlix, as an amateur web designer I must say that the website feels quite unpolished at the moment.

The website is quite buggy and lacks a lot of features common to online shopping websites, such as the ability to sort the movies by ratings, age group and vintage. The bugs I have noticed so far are:

1. The search function is very inflexible. Searching for “usual suspects” or “the usual suspects” will return no result, but searching for either “usual”, “suspect” or “suspects” will return the result “The Usual Suspects”. This is not very intuitive, especially when searching for the full title doesn’t get you any results.

2. On the main page, press the enter key defaults to submitting the sign-up form, regardless or where your typing cursor is currently located. On other pages, it defaults to the sign-up form. This means that when the user types in a keyword for searching and presses enter (as it is common practice with most other website forms), the user will be redirected to the sign-up page or the page will simply reload and does nothing. This applies to all browsers. This is most likely because the text fields are not associated correctly with the submit buttons assigned to them.

3. Whatever Javascript the site is using to update certain information does not work with Firefox. For example, clicking on the “update” button in the rental queues page to update the queue order does not work. Clicking “rent” on any page does not update the DVD count at the top right corner automatically unless you click it twice. These two problems are unqiue to non-Internet Explorer browsers. Although IE has a major market share, commerical sites like Amazon always make their sites work across all platforms. The first people who adopt your company’s new online service are going to be the tech-savvy ones and I believe the number of users using alternative browsers is going to be relatively higher than the overall market distribution.

Thank you for your time. Hopefully this e-mail will reach the relevant people and help to make Video Ezy better.

Man, not only did they address my original complaints, they also read my blog entry and address those complaints as well. I’m scared of what they might do next. XD

Seriously, I have just received my second batch of DVDs yesterday and I’ve been quite happy with Video Ezy’s service so far. ^^

Now, I think I’ll accept his suggestion and e-mail them a list of my anime demands~

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

NHK ni Youkoso! Vol.1

Posted on November 24, 2005 by DarkMirage

I finally bought the first volume of NHK ni Youkoso!. Man, it costs ï¿¥560, which is ï¿¥170 more expensive than those standard Kadokawa shounen stuff. To this day, I have yet to figure out how this pricing system works. But anyway, ï¿¥170 makes it S$4.40 more expensive (after going through Kinokuniya’s markup, another pricing system that I shall never understand), which is a lot of money considering I can get a volume of Chinese-translated manga for S$5.00 ($4.50 after Kinokuniya’s membership discount, a system that I understand all too well).

NHK ni Youkoso! Vol.1

The story is about Tatsuhiro Satou, a hikikomori, and the girl who makes it her “project” to turn him back into a normal man, Misaki Nakahara. In Japan, there’s a segment of the population known as the hikikomori (引き篭り). They are unemployed people who are afraid of or do not like coming into contact with others, or to put it simply people who suffer from acute social withdrawal. These cases are usually school dropouts and they are often associated with addiction to manga, anime and games.

Of course, although it uses a real social issue as its theme, this is a comedy after all. Gags poke fun at the stereotypical akiba-kei and yet often involve in-jokes about anime and ero-games (逃げちゃダメ逃げちゃダメ逃げちゃダメ), which means that akiba-kei are probably the ones who can appreciate them best. Delicious.

And as for the title… NHK, or Nippon Hikikomori Kyoukai is an organization that Tatsuhiro imagines to be the one responsible for turning him into a hikikomori. He also believes that the NHK (you know, the TV station) is a secret front for this conspiracy against him.

Posted in Manga | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Exclusive Invitation

Posted on November 24, 2005 by DarkMirage

Pffft. Who cares about Gmail invitations anymore. I received an commenter invitation after much begging for the Gawker Media network, which includes blogs like Lifehacker, Gizmodo and Kotaku.

You’re invited to sign up for Gizmodo Comments. It’s as easy as clicking on the personal invitation URL below.

Not interested, or already signed up? Pass the invitation along to a friend. Just forward this email. (Each invitation link works only once.)

============================================
GIZMODO COMMENTS INVITATION
Click this link (or paste into a browser) to accept the invitation:
[yoink]
============================================

Once you’ve registered — which takes about 30 seconds — you’ll be able to post comments on all Gawker Media blogs that allow comments. If you wish to remain anonymous, use a pseudonym as your screenname.

Actually, it’s not so exclusive anymore. They are giving away invitations like train station pamplets. Heck, I received two of them. I guess they realized that a comment system limited to an exclusive few is a really boring place.

Posted in Blog, Tech | Tagged , , | 8 Comments