By the way, the huge Christmas tree in Ngee Ann City is completed.
Shiny…
By the way, the huge Christmas tree in Ngee Ann City is completed.
Shiny…
Unknowingly, I have fallen to the dark side. I bought Ichigo Mashimaro Vol.1 today out of boredom. And it’s good. Too damn sugary good. The cuteness! It hurts my teeth! Azumanga Daioh has nothing on Ichigo‘s sugar level. 甘ã™ãŽï½ž
The story uhhh… book (at least the first volume) is about Nobue Itoh, a 16-year-old chain-smoking highschool girl, her 12-year-old sister Chika Itoh, their neighbour and Chika’s childhood friend Miu Matsuoka and 11-year-old Matsuri Sakuragi. A fifth girl, Ana Coppola, is yet to be introduced. And that’s about it. Just like Azumanga, this thing has no plot whatsoever and revolves 100% around the interactions between the girls in various daily situations.
The art is very cute, though the characters all look too young for their age. Nobue looks like she’s twelve (that is, if 12-year-olds drive and smoke) while the rest look like they are seven… This makes me feel incredibly guilty when I read the book and start chuckling in front of others. _|ï¿£|O But despite the lolilicious cover, the book actually contains absolutely no ermmm… incriminating material. Just don’t expect the people around you to know that. Hey, at least it’s better than the time I read Kannadzuki no Miko Vol.2 (which, I admit, is basically softcore yuri porn) in fullview at McCafe.
My favourite character is Nobue of course. She reminds me of Mamimi from FLCL in a way. Probably the smoking part.
I’m getting Vol.2 as soon as I can.
I wasted spent the whole day attending Macromedia MAX 2005 at Meritus Mandarin Hotel. It’s basically one huge product plug for Macromedia with talks by various Flash designers. I attended the Designer Track, which costs S$120 for students (paid for by the school), with four other guys. Today’s line-up for the Designer Track consists of Marcos Weskamp, Drew Trujillo and Joshua Hirsch, the Minister of Technology at Big Spaceship. (By the way the pictures are devoid of audience because I took them during break times)
I was most impressed with Mr. Weskamp’s work on using Flash to present complex data graphically. His Social Circles project uses circles and lines to represent activities within a mailing list, allowing you to very easily visualize who in replies to who and who talks the most. The Newsmap is also a very impressive program that generates a colour-coded table based on Google News feeds and resizes different cells according to the importance of the news topic. Thus, the user is able to compare how different countries (based on the selection available on Google News) place different importance on different types of news. The algorithm used to resize the cells is very advanced. His latest work, the Flickr Graph is also quite neat. His presentation was the only one that I really enjoyed. Oh yeah, he studied in Tokyo and is currently living in there.
The live demo of Macromedia Flex during the keynote speech was pretty intriguing too. The use of “states” instead of a timeline with keyframe makes it much better for application development. Damn, almost everything uses XML to parse data and provide API for 3rd party applications these days.
It appears that Macromedia is quite serious about making Flash an all-purpose tool for interactive applications and user interfaces…but I think they need to implement full 3D rendering support for that to happen. They are also pushing Flash Lite quite strongly but I’ve yet to see a fully working commercial Flash Lite application…even though my phone supports it.
One more day tomorrow…
It seems that I have reached a stage where I no longer watch any anime that I can get my hands on, because 70-80% of the new shows just don’t interest me. I’m really only actively following five series and only two of them are from the new season… Maybe I need a new obsession. Don’t feel like going back to 3D gaming though, because that requires some heavy investment all over again, especially since my processor (P4E 2.8ghz) is very close to death and my graphics card (Nvidia FX5200) is the minimum requirement on some current games.
For now, I’m waiting for To Heart 2 to be released for PC on 09.12.2005. As much as I loved the original To Heart anime (which most people hated for its lack of plot), I have always been somewhat put off by the vintage and never did play the game. Hopefully To Heart 2 will be good, although I am not expecting too much of it, based on the first two episodes of the new series. Then again, the game probably won’t last me long even if it’s really good, since I’m only interested in Tamaki‘s path.
Maybe I should pick up some Japanese novels in the meantime. But it’s kind of hard to figure out which ones are interesting without someone to give me recommendations. I’ve been reading mostly “light novels” (ライトノベル), which are more like manga in text form than normal novels, and I think it’s about time I move on to something heavier…
I’m still alive. Thanks for (not) worrying. Reached home in the afternoon. took a shower and went right back to my regular schedule of non-stop internet time. A lot of catching-up yet to be done. Spent most of the afternoon playing Tick! Tack!. Managed to finish the Nerine (Blue) Ending. The story is way better than in Nerine’s original path in Shuffle!, but it’s stll rather short. Oh well, I’ll do a review after I’ve tried out Nerine (Red) and Sage’s paths.
So anyway, for the two of you out there who cares, I was stranded on Pulau Ubin , which is not a very fun island to be on, and returned to mainland Singapore yesterday at around evening, after which I was to be confined within the school walls for one more night. Yes, this is one of those “school camps” thingies that you often hear rumours about around the net. The horror.
It’s a leadership-training camp where they throw you and a bunch of guys into the wild and hold tribal councils at the end of every episode to eliminate one participant until one is declared the winner and walks away with a million dollars force you to backstab depend on one another to overcome various obstacles. Well, except that in our case, it was not really that “wild” considering how half the paths are paved with asphalt and there are shops selling canned drinks (not that we had any money with us) all around the island…but I digress.
There were ten of us in a group and two tents that looked like they were designed for two. In total, we probably covered enough distance (walking around in circles) to go from the north end of Singapore mainland to the south end. Sadly, it was just a lot of walking and not much adventuring. The most dangerous things we came across were probably the mosquitos, although that sleeping domesticated boar that looked half-dead in the heat was certainly very frightening too. Really.
Other than the sauna tents and the twenty-over bite marks on my four limbs, the camp was quite fun in a way. 生ãã¦æ®‹ã£ã¦ã‚ˆã‹ã£ãŸãƒ»ãƒ»ãƒ»
P.S. My penpal finally replied! イエー~ï¼
I won’t be blogging at all for the next few days because I will be stucked in the middle of nowhere without internet access and fending off attacks from wild beasts and possibily savage cannibals. 幸é‹ã‚’祈ã£ã¦ãã‚Œï¼
I suppose I should sleep early to prepare myself for tomorrow…but I just can’t stop playing Tick! Tack!. I like it more than Shuffle!. Nerine(s?) is cute as always, but Sage and Cineraria are pretty interesting too. ^^;
Of course, you can choose to mess up history and Nerine will be replaced with a red-hair version of herself complete with a 100% different personality (but she still loves you anyway). Or you can even end up with Sage…
So… This blog is now 100% XHTML 1.0 Validated. Well, WordPress is supposed to be valid out-of-the-box, but I messed around with the layout a bit and screwed up. I never knew there were so many rules! No <p> or <div> between two <li> tags and what not. What a pain. Amusingly, the code for the XHTML Validated link caused the page to become invalid again… Until I figured out that I wasn’t supposed to place it between the <ul> tags. Bah, humbug.
Can’t stop listening to Andante… Kotori sounds so sad in this song. ;_; I haven’t done this for some time, but here’s the lyrics:
Andante
Lyrics/Compose: rino
Arrange: Kaoru Ookubo
Vocal: Yui Horie
soyokaze no HARMONY kokoro ni toketeku
omoide wo tsumugiau youni
hitomi wo tojireba hora hidamari no keshiki
anata ni meguriaeta kara
sotto koboreta ai to iu shizuku
mune no oku nukumori ni kaete
ima todoketai shiawase-iro no negai
anata no egao no soba ni itai zutto
sora ni saita hikari no hana ga yami wo kaketeku
shiawase to utau youni
hontou no watashi tte, watashi wa shitteru?
tomadoi to yureru setsunasa
toikaketa mirai eto habataku futari wa
kogarashi to yorisoeru kana…
zutto omoeba ai ni narimasu ka?
yozora chiru kagayaki namida
motomeru hodo kogashita mune no itami soredemo
hoho wo someteku itoshisa tachi
kotae no nai omoi to anata ga iru soredake
suki dakara arukidasou
ima todoketai shiawase-iro no negai
anata no egao no soba ni itai zutto
sora ni saita hikari no hana ga yami wo kaketeku
shiawase to utau youni
kono omoi anata eto
Read on for the translation and original:
Continue reading
My playlist has finally hit 3000. The 3000th song added was Andante by Yui Horie from D.C.S.S. Vocal Album Vol.1. Possibility the only good thing left in the show. But anyway, click to see the entire list. Mr. FBI agent, I swear that I own the original CD for every single song. D:
After watching 15 episodes of Shuffle!, I decided that the anime is trying too hard to tell the stories of all five girls instead of concentrating on one of them. Although this was done to appease everyone, I don’t like how the overall story ends up forgotten and the whole thing becomes a series of under-developed substories for each character. Based on prior experiences, I figured that a lot of “shuffle”-ing must have been done in order to fit all five stories into one timeline (since they usually take place in lieu of one another in the game), so the creators must have cut out some details from each path in order to maximise airtime. Turns out I was only half right… (foreshadowing!?)
So, I dug out the original Shuffle! for PC (thank god for Windows Desktop Search) and finally installed it, just to find out if the series missed out anything about Nerine that I should know… (*cough*)
Read on for my thoughts after playing…