強く儚い者たち

This started out as fanart of Hetalia's Matthew but I actually don't like his design that much. So it's a random person instead in a Habs tshirt on a balcony. Pretend there is jazz music in the air. Also, it's hot. Presto, Canada Day!

There's a spoilery Umineko fanart under the cut. ( Read more... )

Now that this Japan trip thing seems slightly like it's actually going to occur, I started to work on the important part - planning for Comiket.

And as I've done so, a terrible realisation has slowly been dawning. ( Read more... )

I finished the existing 4 Umineko episodes last week, and the anime adaptation starts this July, so I thought I'd write a review. Warning, this contains spoilers for the concept and flow of the story for all four episodes! This is more an in-depth commentary than a spoiler-free introduction; I recommend the Wikipedia entry for that. I'm of the mind that some judicious spoilers can encourage people to get into something, but up to you. ( Read more... )

I finally got around to borrowing the camera to photograph my Kaito Nendoroid... Unfortunately the photos are quite bad and some didn't come through.. and then it ran out of battery power! :( Here they are anyway! ( Read more... )

Something that makes me happy:

Golden Sun is getting a sequel on DS! I really liked the first game but never got around to buying the second one... And I lost the game cartridge ;_; But yay! A new game where you can run around reading peoples' minds and using ESP to save the world <3 I just hope they cut the dialogue. Like, in half. They didn't stop talking in the original.

Yes, that's pretty much the only news I care about from E3 XD;

Happy birthday, peachifruit!

I have a new computer! And it works! I CAN DRAW AGAIN. As well as 日本語で話せます。

So without further ado, ART MEME. raethes has a reserved space since I didn't get around to drawing hers last time.

Tell me a character and an action (like "Date Masamune shouting at the top of his lungs", "Kyon grumbling", etc.) I'll do 10 (+1 for Rae I guess) :)

My sisters & I went to see Star Trek yesterday! I'm not a Star Trek fan and can count on one or two fingers the episodes I have watched (I always liked Star Wars better. C'mon, lightsabers, seriously.) It was GREAT! ( No spoilers - okay, some mild spoilers but just in case. Also, this is fairly long. )

Oh, and:

*I'm looking for a coffee cake recipe that can either be turned into cupcakes or a straight-out cupcake recipe. All the recipes I find are on chic blogs with photos of cute cupcakes with five inches of icing in a clever shape... I'm not making icing, people, it has to be tasty by itself or I won't bother!

Plus they're all milcheg so then I can't eat them after dinner :/ Maybe I should try buying soy milk and see if it works instead of regular milk...

Happy birthday, maiki! And happy birthday to kajiwara_saku too!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Look look Rae and Maiki both drew my Konrin!! (Rae-chan's is here and Maikicchi's is here.) They're both gorgeous!! I love Rae's version's hair and Maiki paid so much attention to the tiny silly details on his clothes...

Okay I have to go make a pixiv blog now ;_; There: http://pixiv.cc/narukamikun/ It doesn't have anything on it yet though.

Also thanks vureoelt for coming to look at my comp.. Hope today goes well for you!

And happy birthday suboshiyui!!

Random stuff:

*A political column supposedly written by Kaiser Wilhelm II: http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_12300517

I have no opinions on the article one way or another (the term 'czar' as applied to an American official certainly didn't start with Obama), but Hetalia fans who like Prussia may enjoy this since half the article is just dissing the Romanovs. "I nearly swallowed a monocle" etc etc.

*On a similar note I started a new class yesterday, and the teacher's laptop had a sticker with the Austrian coat of arms on it. Interesting how I notice small things like that now OTL

*Pixiv is the land of insanely great artists! Look at this Dissidia fanart, with characters drawn in the style of different Shonen Jump artists: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=4113215 The Reborn!style Zidane and Kuja (FFIX) are amazing (and you have Garland drawn in the style of Fist of the North Star too XD)

*Oh and Sengoku Basara Heroes for PSP is at the top of famitsu.com's sales ranking. I wonder if the anime has anything to do with it. XD

*I am kind of frustrated with Kid Nemo (online figure store). Give me my Kaito already, it was ready to ship April 13 and only now they're processing it? Give me a break.

Oh look, I can post polls with an ad-supported account.

I'm trying a new cookie recipe and in 10 minutes I expect abject failure. I'm therefore spamming the internet instead of panicking in the kitchen!

Poll #1394229 I wanted to try this at least once
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

I'm trying a new recipe from a badly translated site. This is a recipe for:

Happy 61st, Israel~

Now for some talk about Kingdom Hearts 2! I've been replaying it on Proud mode so I can get the special ending, and I just passed the legendary battle where Sora destroys 1000 Heartless all by himself in something like 10 minutes (ladies and gentlemen, this game has Mickey Mouse in it) so I thought I'd blather about it a little. Spoilers for the whole game, &c. ( How many years has it been since I used this tag? )

*Happy birthday Mura! :)

*My dad has been watching the Israeli Independence Day celebrations online (with famous singers like Yehoram Gaon, Sarit Hadad, etc) all day. Yet here it's still Yom Hazikaron so the parade is tomorrow..

I can't find any of it on youtube yet though... OH here is a song Yehoram Gaon sang on the show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9E8HG-6kWk&feature=related

*Sorry for being so quiet... I'm very infrequently online lately since my computer is so weird. I haven't watched any anime lately either. ( AAGH. Sorry for talking about my own problems )

Thanks to everyone who commented on my previous entry. :)

I am so tired. And behind on commenting as usual :( So I am just going to link to some cool news: the key visual for the anime version of the sound novel series Umineko no naku koro ni was released! You can see it here: http://playlog.jp/sendenman/blog/2009-04-22-1 Battler looks like a red-haired cross between Lelouch and Phoenix Wright! XDDD Which I guess is a fair description. I really like the clothing designs in Umineko, even if the original art is rough ;)

Today is Yom HaShoa, or Holocaust Memorial Day. I don't usually write about it because what can you say? It's impossible to wrap your mind around the Holocaust. It defies comprehension.

My relatives escaped the Holocaust (the Americans beat the Nazis to Morocco, so it didn't reach them) so I don't really have a personal frame of reference for it. Instead I tend to think of the Holocaust in terms of Purim, a holiday which celebrates the miraculous survival of the Jewish people when a high government official, Haman, in the Persian Empire tried to wipe us out. In effect, it's a Holocaust that didn't happen and Haman was a wannabe Hitler two thousand years early (400 BCE, very approximately). To borrow Chabad's translation of the Book of Esther, which is read twice on that day:

3 Queen Esther replied and said: "If I have found favor in your eyes, O King, and if it please the King, let my life be granted me by my plea, and the life of my people by my request. 4 For my people and I have been sold to be annihilated, killed and destroyed! Had we been sold as slaves and maidservants I would have kept silent. But indeed the persecutor is not bothered by the King's loss."

I'll make a confession. The reason I'm writing today is not because of the Holocaust. It's because of another Persian Haman, another wannabe Hitler. This man, who has previously called for the State of Israel to be 'wiped off the map' and said the Holocaust never happened, today, on Yom Hashoa, came and spoke at the United Nations anti-racism conference in Switzerland. This is like giving the fox a key to the chicken coop, to put it mildly.

This Haman is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, whose government is building nuclear weapons at the same time it denounces Israel as "the most cruel and repressive racist regime". This is the same regime responsible for the death of Iranian-Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zahra_Kazemi), among others, which calls Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel a 'Zion-Nazi' (seriously! http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1079949.html). I don't know how you can say in the same breath that the Holocaust never happened AND that Jews are the new Nazis, but they pull it off.

A lot of nations, including Canada (and, at the last minute, the US) boycotted this conference, and gratifyingly a large number of delegates walked out on Ahmadinejad's speech, but this bogus resolution was still passed, unanimously even.

Thanks for reading this far. Tomorrow we will return to regular programming.

I apologize in advance for spaming you guys with a totally irrelevant post.

But.

LUKE IN RADIANT MYTHOLOGY 2 IS TOO. DARN. CUTE!!!!!!

I just randomly watched a few videos so I don't really understand the setting, but the Tales of the World games are crossover stories in which your favorite characters from the Tales of RPGs get together to have funny conversations and hit things. In Radiant Mythology 2 it seems that Luke, Asch, Guy and the other Abyss characters are alternate versions, which mostly seems to mean that Luke's conflict with Asch is a bit different. ANYWAY.

So there's apparently a sidequest where you help Luke out. And so you get the following skit, which doesn't have major spoilers that I noticed, though the other videos in the uploader's channel might.

</span>

( Attempted translation under cut. )

Who do you think this is?

Answer: I have no clue, but it isn't Sora, it's the main character of Sega's new game, which is not at all related to Kingdom Hearts. Square Enix hasn't sued them yet, at least. Sheesh.

On a related note, I've been meaning to post this for a while, but here are two shogi players from Shion no Ou and March Comes in Like a Lion: ( Read more... )

Happy Passover! (and happy Easter to those of you celebrating that. Hurray for freedom of religion!)

To celebrate my classes finishing I finally finished my Pixiv Fantasia 3 character design and uploaded it here: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=3852387 See it before I delete it! :P Now to answer emails...

EDIT: I know this has probably been said by people before, but.. regarding the Tales of Vesperia port to PS3: ( Read more... )

yachinami asked me about my icons:


(If you want me to do the meme go ahead and ask, but I won't otherwise since I'm busy, sorry OTL)

The first one is from a Minna no Uta video, the second is an icon of the Kaito Nendoroid figurine that thelovemafia made (thanks!!), 3 and 4 are from Clannad After Story (I probably shouldn't use them since they're technically spoilers), and the last one is from Tokimeki Tonight. I've talked about Vocaloids and Clannad before, and I'll make my big Tokimeki Tonight post sometime later (Ikeno Koi laughs at your genres and throws in another five hundred plotlines; if she has a throwaway side story with aliens, it's because she already used up every other trope in the book.)

To make a long story short I'm mostly using this post as an excuse to talk about Minna no Uta. ( Read more... )

*Hey skuldnoshinpu, did you know you have a clone in Rune Factory? Look at this:



As you may guess I picked up the first Rune Factory for DS (on sale at Yesasia + close-to-expiring-coupon + been meaning to try it anyway but it's been too expensive..) Incidentally, I picked this one because I like to play series in order and Raguna is more moe than the hero of RF2. >>; I've never played a Harvest Moon before so I keep getting sidetracked by all the farming stuff I'm supposed to do (only played half an hour). Can't I gain levels? XD There are also some weird errors in the script (random capitalization in the middle of sentences, for instance)

Also I feel like peachifruit would make some great comics out of it since the main heroine is completely nuts. You have someone about to faint from hunger and dehydration, don't give him a hoe and a watering can!! Although if she weren't crazy she wouldn't give a house to a total stranger.. XD;

*I owe thelovemafia (should I be linking to that journal or to the other one?!) a meme response about my siblings.. heh. It's hard to say how my life is different because of my brother and sisters since we grew up together and are still pretty close. I always felt sorry for kids who didn't have siblings though - yeah, so you get more toys, but it's more lonely! And my family moved around a fair bit when I was younger, so my brother and sisters were automatic allies. Of course relationships change when you grow up so now it's more of a relationship of equals than what my mom used to call "rivaling" (yeah we sibling-rivaled so much my mom made a verb out of it). It's really good to have people you know you can absolutely count on..

*I've been feeling pretty sick for the last couple of weeks as you may know if you read my twitter (feel free to add naruisatwit if you're ready for a ton of emo and complaining that I don't put on LJ) but today I had a blood test and I have another test scheduled in a few weeks so hopefully with God's help if there's a problem it'll get fixed. Of course, it'll be even better if it's nothing! XDD

*I want to say thanks to charmwitch... it feels like every time I talk to you on MSN it turns into an emo session. Thanks ;_;

*I would comment on the ridiculous continuing saga of Suzumiya Haruhi's second season but I'm too exasperated at this point. Please don't turn this into another Munto TV, Kyo-Ani...

*Self-reminder: Sunday morning go there, Monday reschedule test, haircut 12 Monday, exam Tuesday, hand in final project Erev Pesach)

EDIT: The language laws on games in Quebec are coming into effect (some obnoxious comments in that link).. It's hard to guess what this will change, though some games already come with dual-language. Time Hollow lets you select either English or French, which is good since it's a text adventure! ^^; But since, for instance, Square and Namco already don't include dual voice tracks for their RPGs, I wonder what they'll do. Though there should be no excuse for lack of space on next-gen systems, especially PS3...