Wrong About Japan

Posted on November 5, 2005 by DarkMirage

I picked up Wrong About Japan (ISBN: 0571224075) by Peter Carey today. I’ve been eyeing this book for months, but somehow never managed to bring myself to buy it until today. Basically, it’s an account by a New York author about his trip to Japan, after being introduced to manga and anime by his twelve-year-old son. Judging by the first thirty pages, this book isn’t very heavy on facts and details, but it does provide an interesting perspective to the relationship between Japan’s traditions and its modern pop culture.

What's she looking at?

Although it kind of ticks of my inner fanboy when this guy is able to let his son meet people like Tomino Yoshiyuki using his contacts as a professional writer when he didn’t even know what Mobile Suit Gundam was… ._.

Posted in Otaku | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Plugins

Posted on November 4, 2005 by DarkMirage

WordPress plugins are really convenient compared to installing seperate php scripts for various functions and hardcoding them into the layout manually. I’m a bit overwhelmed by the options available, but for now I’ve added a Now Playing script. Well it’s not actually “Now Playing” since it retrieves the data from my last.fm user page instead of directly from Winamp.

I’m too lazy to set up an external tagboard script and formatting it to suit my layout everytime I need to change anything, so unless someone makes a tagboard plugin for WordPress, you guys will have to make do with the comment system instead…

Posted in Tech | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

坂本真綾

Posted on November 4, 2005 by DarkMirage

I totally forgot to check Maaya’s site for her November update. I’m a failure… But anyway, here’s the latest I.D. message and translation.

Continue reading →

Posted in Music | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Sony Aids Cheaters

Posted on November 4, 2005 by DarkMirage

A few days ago, Sony released a CDs with a DRM protection that installs a rootkit on your system. This “protection” hides all files with names starting with “$sys$” from the operating system. Of course a massive boycott was launched and Sony released a patch that allows the user to disable this spyware.

Now in an ironic turn of events, the rootkit is being exploited by cheaters to hide their cheating tools from detection by renaming the exe files to contain “$sys$”.

Continue reading →

Posted in Games, Tech | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Death Note

Posted on November 3, 2005 by DarkMirage

I finished reading all the Death Note that I can get my hands on yesterday… It’ll be a while before the next volume. Sigh.

Money down the drain~

Now that I’m out of manga to read, I finally started playing Shuffle! (for PC). Nerine owns my heart and soul. ^^

Last day of school tomorrow. Liberation at last~ (well, not really) I might be catching Doom tomorrow, just to see how bad it really is.

On another note, my penpal has yet to reply. I guess she’s really ignoring me… ＿|ï¿£|O

Posted in Blog | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Summer Days

Posted on November 3, 2005 by DarkMirage

I have a lot of catching up to do… I didn’t find out about this till yesterday.

Summer Days
刹那ちゃん、可愛すぎ！

Summer Days is a story based on Overflow’s fully-animated School Days. There doesn’t seem to be a tragic love triangle this time, instead it has been replaced with Setsuna and more Setsuna! I’ll get this out of the way first before I elaborate: Whoever thought of this is a goddamn genius!

Although Summer Days shares the same setting as the original game, it is actually one of those “What if?” alternate universe stories. According to the FAQ:

Ｑ：どんなゲームですか？スクールデイズとは違うのですか？

Ａ：誠が、２学期が始まり世界や言葉と親しくなる前に、もしも刹那と出会っていれば・・・というお話です。
ゲームシステムは「スクールデイズ」と同様のリアルタイムフルアニメーションシステムです。

Basically, this is what would have happened if Makoto met Setsuna first and the love triangle with Sekai and Kotonoha never happened. Setsuna tied with Sekai as my favourite character in the original game, so you can guess that I’m pretty damn happy with this new arrangement.

The current release date is January 2006. But considering how the original game was delayed for months, I’m guessing it’s probably closer to March. This is going on my preorder list… D:

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Kannadzuki no Miko Vol.2

Posted on November 3, 2005 by DarkMirage

I dropped by Kinokuniya to pick up this order today. This is the second, and also the concluding, volume of Kannadzuki no Miko, with 100% more yuri than the anime its based on.

Yuri-licious

The second part of the story has been drastically altered, perhaps even more than the first volume. Chikane’s motivation is shown more explicitly (not that) than in the anime, so it won’t really make you go WTF? (unless you can’t read Japanese).

Perhaps the biggest difference in the manga is level of explicitness depicted (yes, that). The anime isn’t exactly something you watch with your family, but it is certainly far from receiving the 18+ label (at least not in Singapore). The manga on the other hand has nudity and more obvious softcore scenes. The fact that the manga isn’t 18+ either tells you a bit about morality in Japan… (not that it’s a bad thing)

That aside, the ending sucked. I don’t recommend getting this unless you are that desperate for some Chikane x Himeko scenes. Then again, I’m sure that you can find some high quality doujinshi out there that better suit this purpose.

Posted in Manga, Reviews | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

First Post

Posted on November 3, 2005 by DarkMirage

I finally upgraded to WordPress. First of all, the import-b2.php script sucks. It’s supposed to reformat the b2 database so that it becomes compatible with WP, except that it doesn’t. Maybe I’m doing something wrong here, but I won’t know because the documentation for the import function is non-existent! The official site FAQ points to a Wiki guide which then points to some random guy’s blog entry (which has been taken down) on how he managed to get the import script running.

I’m not going to manually format the entire goddamn b2 database and risk royally screwing the whole thing up, so I think I’ll just leave my old b2 script in another folder and let people read my old entries if they want. I figured that this shouldn’t affect many people, since most of my old entries were rubbish anyway.

Other than this little annoyance, I’m quite happy with WordPress. I’m too lazy to do anything with the theme right now, so I’ll just leave it as it is… More blogging later.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | 2 Comments