Morning Musume OPV Contest Entry

I’M FINALLY DONE WITH IT. FREEDOM.

Um so if you’re wondering why my blog has been dead for about two weeks, it was because of this music video contest that I entered – the Morning Musume OPV (Official Promotion Video).

My friend Mike and I worked on it A LOT, especially in the last four days before the deadline. We only started two weeks before the deadline (before the end of 6/19 JST or 7:00 AM over here in California), and even then we only got serious toward the end.

We’re given raw footage (82 videos) of the members dancing in front of a greenscreen, and it’s up to us to make the cuts, add the backgrounds, and put it all together.

We worked on it almost day and night, and we got the whole project done ten hours before the deadline. FINALLY. (I didn’t even feel relaxed after final exams were over because I had to finish this thing.)

So if you’re interested, here’s the final work. Please give an honest opinion after watching it!

Morning Musume – 3,2,1 BREAKIN’OUT! (OPV)

The drawings took forever, honestly. Let me stress – FOREVER.

So yea Chun, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry I couldn’t get your Vocaloid video up sooner. I’m working on it right now.

But after finishing it, I got that huge sense of accomplishment. More accomplishment sense than all my school projects combined, maybe?

And I might as well be a fan of Momusu now since I can now recognize each of them by their hair and secondary facial features O_o I listened to the song they sang for the OPV like 29845792 times… Morning Musume, banzai.

Fanime 2009

Fanime 2009 was awesome. –mainly because of three things:

1. the cosplayers (I have so much footage of cosplayers)
2. what I bought: a set of Hetalia pics ($10), a large K-ON! pic ($6), Suzumiya and L☆S pencil boards ($10), and HATSUNE MIKU and YUKI NAGATO figurines ($65) — TOTAL: $91 plus tax for Dealer’s Hall items
3. panels: the Miku and the Momoi panels

I’ll definitely go over these things. And I’ll definitely get the videos uploaded.

Debuting Anime: Spring 2009

I found this nice picture list of this spring’s debuting anime, and I figured I should put this here for you guys. (It’s a bit too late for me to write a post introducing all of them.)

(click to enlarge)

Enjoy!  c:

K-ON!

けぃおん！ゆるやか部活ライフはじまる！

Right, let’s dig right in.

K-ON! (けぃおん！)

• Music, slice of life, comedy
• Based Off Original Manga (BOOM)
• Studio Kyo-Ani (Kyoto Animation)!!
  
• Pure awesomeness
• すっごくかわいい
• Did I mention awesomeness?

The first thing you should do right now is watch or read K-ON!. If you’re a hardcore all-otaku, watch it. Now. No, don’t finish your report for your professor. No, don’t go save that man dying outside your window. Read (or watch) K-ON!

Probably the coolest slice-of-life to come out since Lucky Star and Sketchbook (those were pure gold), K-ON! is about four girls entering high school and creating their own keiongaku (”light music” doesn’t do the word justice) club. Yui doesn’t know how to play guitar at first (though she does improve dramatically by her own genius). Mio is the bassist, Ritsu the drummer, and Tsumugi (nicknamed Mugi) the keyboardist.

lol maid Mio-moe

The OP song is catchy. The ED is just awesome.

Since I don’t really want to spoil much (unlike those other anime bloggers out there!!) I’ll leave it to you to watch/read K-ON!.

Now go, seek happy manga to happy anime~ >]

Sonnet: Our Dream

My English teacher made everyone write a sonnet (Shakespearean sonnet). If you don’t know, a sonnet is a form of poetry with rhyming scheme

a-b-a-b–c-d-c-d–e-f-e-f–g-g

and there are three quatrains and one couplet at the end. The lines are in iambic pentameter. The sonnet usually presents some problem in the first two quatrains, deals with it in the third, and concludes with the couplet. Here’s mine.

Our Dream

by Joshua Wu

You might remember still that fateful day,

When married ‘midst of vibrant autumn leaves,

The future shining bright with hopeful days,

You wished a dream upon a crimson leaf.

And now your tragic grave stands bleak and gray,

For ne’er for her this wondrous world was meant.

And frosty death does chill the soul away

And shatter minds in desolate lament.

But now the light that brightens up the heart,

The dream who radiates her mother’s gleam,

Who taught the father bliss and grief apart,

Our daughter means forever more to me;

Though she had taken ‘way my cherished wife,

Our dream was she, my gentle fire of life.

Anyway, since this is my first time writing a poem, I figured I should post it here on my blog.

I really need an A in English ><

Saki 04 and K-ON! 1-5

Holy smokes I may be right about my prediction of shoujo-ai elements in Saki. Nodoka is showing some awkward nervousness while around Saki. She even has fantasies of “I and Saki”…

more to come later… especially about K-ON!

but that’ll come after I go to sleep real soon and come back from school.

Saki (Intro and 01)

Saki

• Game, Comedy, Psychological, Drama, Yuri-harem (does not classify as harem)
  
• Based Off Original Manga (BOOM)
  
• Studio Gonzo (Samurai 7)

First take a look at the title splash image:

Saki (Title)

Hey, that looks pretty cool, doesn’t it? They’re skilled art designers. Nice.

Anyways, Saki is a new anime series, an adaptation of the original manga. It began airing in Tokyo this April 6th (Japan time). So that would mean there are four episodes (April 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th) that have already aired.

This anime is produced by Gonzo Studios (famous for several shounen titles). The main character, Saki, is voice-acted by Kana (Ueda Kana). You may know her from Sakuya in Hayate no Gotoku! (awesome anime!) and Anna in He is My Master (very fanservice-packed).

Saki is waiting for you! ☆

*****

Saki is about a high school student named Saki (咲) who is dragged into the mahjong club at her school. The members of the mahjong club are all very colorful characters, including Nodoka, a mahjong genius who is surprisingly sensitive; Yuuki, an upbeat bubbly girl who pretty much represents the loli-moe world; Kyoutarou, a nice guy who acts like he doesn’t know how to play mahjong in order for the others to teach him (in other words, to teach you); Hisa, leader of the club, also finding a chance to act cool and say some very knowledgeable lines of dialogue for the viewers; and Mako, Hisa’s friend, a computer techie.

Hayate no Gotoku!! Season 2

As Hayate no Gotoku!! season 2 of the anime adaption has been running for almost a month, I thought that it might be worth the time to blog about it. After all, I haven’t really blogged about anything for the past several months, and I thought that I should revive my habit of updating my blog (which no one probably reads, but hey, who cares) and bring people up to date.

Hayate no Gotoku! TV Anime 2nd Season starts this summer!!

Up to now, four episodes have been aired in Tokyo. The fourth episode aired less than two days ago on April 24 (Japan time). I haven’t watched any of them yet. Why? ‘Cuz I got manga to read, that’s why.

Hayate no Gotoku! Volume 19 (Japanese)

I just bought the latest volumes (18 and 19) from Japantown today. Yes, it’s in Japanese. No, you can’t find the scanlations for this, at least not yet. (You can get started in Japanese here.)

I find it a bit weird to be watching the anime when I know exactly what will happen since I’ve read the manga completely up to the latest volume, but I will definitely be watching it. Who doesn’t like an animated, colored version of a manga anyways, seriously? (Unless, of course, the studio sucks. XP)

Well, time to finish reading the manga and then start watching the anime. Then I might write another rant on how the anime/manga industry is declining, why, and how we can prevent the end of the mangaka’s world. In truth, it’s more about how most manga are now targeted towards the wrong audiences these days. Or rather, they just have the wrong ideas about what is good and what is not.

The Meaning of Life:

to know that what you are doing is interesting.

Japanese Lesson 6: Declarations – “This is a blog.”

Objectives:

• to learn how to declare a state-of-being
• to learn its negative and past forms
• to learn their polite forms and understand that です is not a declarative
  

Introduction

So far, I have gone over hiragana and katakana, introduced kanji, and shown some basic sentence structure. If you still don’t feel comfortable with them (especially with hiragana), I suggest that you go back to those lessons again. You should also be using rikaichan and perapera-kun for easy reference.

This time I will show you how to declare things into a state-of-being. You already know that this is achieved with the だ particle:

• これはペンだ。 (About this, (it) is pen.)

However, how can we declare things in the past tense? And how can we declare that something is not (negative)?