Krunk4Ever!

Someone had posted this video at work: 【3DCG】くるっと・おどって・初音ミク【ねんどろいど】 (【3DCG】 Kurutto - Odotte - Hatsune Miku 【NENDROID】) (mirror). It stars 初音ミク (Hatsune Miku) a character from Vocaloid.

I had previously uploaded another Miku video, which I guess I never got the chance to post it: 3DみくみくPV (3D Miku Miku PV). The tune’s pretty catchy.

Anyway, back to the video. The little 3D characters are SO CUTE!!! Apparently it’s a 3D animated version of くるっと・おどって・初音ミク (Kurutto - Odotte - Hatsune Miku) / くるっと・うたって・初音ミク (Kurutto - Utatte - Hatsune Miku). The first one was sang by the original artist, while the latter is sang using Vocaloid.

If you didn’t know, Vocaloid is a singing synthesizer application software developed by the Yamaha Corporation that enables users to synthesize singing by just typing in lyrics and melody.

According to WWWJDIC:

• おどって (Odotte) refers to dancing.
• うたって (Utatte) refers to singing.

The animation above is actually a parody of an ending sequence in ケロロ軍曹 (Keroro Gunsou) anime: Keroro Gunsou ED 9 - Kurutto Mawatte Ikkaiten. The music is actually called るっと・まわって・いっかいてん (Kurutto, Mawatte, Ikkaiten) by Kigurumi.

Someone actually posted a comparison video of all 3: 【Comparison】Kurutto・Odotte・Hatsune Miku【NENDROID】

I’m not exactly sure what NENDROID/NENDOROID, or ねんどろいど refers to, but given that nendoroid.jp is selling cute little plastic chibi figurines, I’m going to guess it refers to that. And they do indeed sell Vocaloid Hatsune Miku figurines.

At the end of the original video, they have some bonus footage where the gang does Caramelldansen / U-U-U-Aua Dance (Full Version).

Did I mention how cute the little dancers are in the video? Now I want some Nendoroid figurines for myself!

Tera recommended me this series 2 weeks back and it’s been awesome: 精霊の守り人 (Guardian of the Sacred Spirit). The enunciation of the Japanese name is: Seirei no Moribito. It might even qualify as one of the few that makes it into my favorites list. Typically, I take what Tera recommends with a grain of salt, but given that it had a very high AniDB rating, I decided to give it a try and I was amazed at how beautiful the graphics and animation were. The fact the storyline was great was also impressive. I was so hooked that I finished all 26 episodes in less than a week. May not sound impressive to some, but when you’re coming home at 1am and finding time to squeeze in 3 episodes is not easy.

Story

The story is about a young prince of Yogo named Chagum. A water demon/spirit apparently has possessed him and the emperor and his advisers believed that it is in the countries best interest to kill off the water demon/spirit as the stars are foretelling a drought is nearing. They have no idea how to separate the water demon/spirit from Chagum, so the only thing they can do is kill both the boy and the spirit.

However the mom does not agree, but can’t really persuade the emperor to do otherwise. She hires Balsa, a female bodyguard and entrusts her son to her and probably will never see Chagum for the rest of his life. Balsa agrees as this will be the 8th life she would have saved and completing her promise.

The story goes on from there. I don’t wont to reveal much more as it’ll bound to spoil.

*** BEGIN SPOILERS ***

Thoughts

Was there really any reason why both Tanda’s and Balsa’s hand had to be used to remove the egg from Chagum? They never really explained how the “spell” was suppose to work for removing the egg.

I assume the bird (Naji) that ultimately came to take the egg was the same bird that Sagum and Chagum injured when they were small and ended up taking care of afterwards. Later on Sagum set it free and it returned to take the egg. I’m also thinking the fact the bird realized that Chagum knew how to get stuff into the bird’s mouth played a role in the egg being implanted in Chagum.

What exactly are those furry animals in Torogai Shaman’s hat? I’m thinking along the lines of rabbits, puppies, and guinea pigs. However, what piqued my interest was the fact that in a flashback during Balsa’s story of Jiguro, her hat was filled with these little furry animals. However, now she’s down to one. The only part of the story that this little furry animal comes into play was Torogai Shaman was trying to sacrifice it in order to save her own life. I’d hate to think all the other furry animals were sacrificed.

When the swordsmith described the ultimate sword being one that cuts one free from one’s karma and does not cut people reminded me of Kenshin’s sakaba sword, also known as the reverse blade sword. A sakaba sword is one where the dull edge is the edge that comes in contact with your enemy, therefore not sharp enough to cut into them. They never did go into details on how this ultimate sword was made, but episodes later when Balsa was fighting against another bodyguard, what appeared to be her slicing her opponent in half only resulted in his shirt being ripped apart, while the body was not harmed at all.

Halfway through the series, I realized that the blue glowing ball during the intermission/interlude was actually representative of the egg, when I saw and realized that there was this little worm that was getting bigger inside it episode after episode.

Very late in the story, they brought up the fact that there can be multiple carriers of the egg (such as the young bear cub), but they never really did explained what would happen if multiple water spirits were born. I thought it was very arbitrary for them to add that.

The fact that there weren’t many deaths (I mean how can none of the 8 elite assassins not get killed during the fight with the La Lungas) made the story less emotionally strong. None of the good guys died either. The only deaths in the story that I can recall was Chagum who died of over-stressing himself from work as the crown prince; Jiguro who died basically of old age; and the 8 spear wielders that came to kill Jiguro and Balsa.

*** END SPOILERS ***

Music

The music was also amazingly done. The soundtrack was composed by 川井 憲次 (Kenji Kawai) and I’m addicted to one of the songs which has been playing on repeat for the past 3 days: The Song of Naj. There are 2 soundtrack CDs that have been released: Seirei No Moribito Ongakuhen V.1 and Seirei No Moribito V.2 and the music is just astoundingly beautiful.

I also uploaded the clip where the song was played during the anime (BIG SPOILERS):

I’ve also uploaded a lower quality version. For some reason the quality seems to be quite diminished, but that’s probably because I converted from h.264 (mkv) to xvid to wmv. Windows Movie Maker doesn’t like mkv files for some reason.

So awhile back, I watched an anime series recommended to me by Tak Wai: Planetes. I definitely recommend this series if you haven’t seen it before. It ranks among my favorites and I’d probably give it 9 out of 10 stars.

The series is standard length, 26 episodes long. In short, the background story is about how humans were reckless in the future and started dumping trash into space. Later down the road, they realized that all this space debris would ultimately come back to haunt them as even tiny debris coming at you at 50 miles per hour can cause major damage to your spacecraft. Therefore, a new division in the space agency was created and their purpose is to remove debris from space. Like the janitorial position, no one sees this new department as anything that great, but because of them, space exploration can continue with a lot fewer accidents.

The story begins with Tanabe joining the space agency and getting assigned to the space cleaning department. Hachimaki is assigned as her mentor, guiding her along and the episodes are a series of missions they go out on. Hachimaki’s dream has always been to one day end up owning his own spaceship. As the mission continues, Tanabe slowly reveals Hachimaki’s past, and that’s when things start to get interesting.

The description above doesn’t really do it justice and I can’t really say much more without spoiling something.

For more details, visit Wikipedia or AniDB.net. You can also check out the trailer on YouTube.

Ohfuee had introduced me to House, M.D. a long time back, but I was never really a fan of hospital shows like ER or Grey’s Anatomy, so I never really bothered looking into it. However Xyon convinced me to give it shot and it has turned out quite interesting.. The fact that Xyon owns both season 1 and season 2 on DVDs gave me another incentive to watch. It meant I didn’t have to go “procure” them some other way.

You can blame House for my absence in posting blog entries for the past 2 weeks, but who besides Gregory House can make words like “me likee” and “thingies” sound cool.

I was also very intrigued by the intro music. Apparently the song is called Teardrop by Massive Attack. Once again it has that dramatic feeling that I like.

There was a funny thread going on at work. Someone had claimed they missed Monday’s episode of House. Someone replied saying he’d save him the time from watching it:

Someone was sick.
House tried to cure them but it was only 20 minutes into the show so the cure made them worse.
Then someone else tried to cure them, and House got mad. The second attempt was at 30 minutes so it didn’t work either.
Cuddy got mad, House made a pass at her and was rejected again.
The patient got worse and they couldn’t figure out why. Someone said it was an infection, someone else said it was a fungus, someone else said it was a tumor. None of them could prove it.
House came up with some great idea and everyone said it wouldn’t work but he did it anyway.
The patient got better and everyone was happy.
13 still doesn’t have a name.

Then there were these responses:

That must be a unique episode from the rest, neither MRI nor lumbar puncture was involved.

You forgot Lupus.

And of course someone shouted:

Spoiler space man!!!

I will admit that it does get repetitive, but then again, I watch Detective Conan religiously, which is 500+ episodes in and the theme is basically:

• Someone gets murdered
• Conan looks for clues
• Conan figures out how the culprit did it
• Conan tranquilizes Mouri Kogoro (Ran’s father)
• Conan uses Sleeping Kogoro to explain the case (who would believe in a elementary boy?)

I sort of got screwed over watching Season 2. For some reason Media Center had listed them out of order (partly blamed by the My Movies plugin, partly blamed by the fact my file server doesn’t list files in alphabetical order). Apparently the 1st disc I watched was disc #5. When things started to not make sense like why *cough* needed an HIV test or how *cough* miraculously got cured with no explanation, I realized I wasn’t watching the DVDs for Season 2 in order. After resorting them, I was still wrong and actually ended up watching disc 2 out of 6 2nd to last.

I’m down to the final disc of season 2 and then I’ll have to decide if I want to continue watching House instead, or should I resume blogging. ;p

So as I mentioned yesterday, I’ve started watching Shakugan no Shana (灼眼のシャナ) and I can’t stop thinking of how much it reminds me of Zero no Tsukaima (ゼロの使い魔).

Not only do they both star a prepubescent girl who’s supposedly very powerful, but her power hasn’t been fully awaken yet, they also feature a clueless guy who basically follows her orders. And of course they both somehow fall in love with each other, but have a hard time expressing so.

Anyway, I did some extra research and it turns out the voice actors for both the main female and male characters are the same!

Hino Satoshi (日野聡) voices both Hiraga Saito (from Zero no Tsukaima) and Sakai Yuji (from Shakugan no Shana).

Kugimiya Rie (釘宮 理恵) voices both Louise (from Zero no Tsukaima) and Shana (from Shakugan no Shana).

If I had to guess, the story/manga is probably done by the same artist/company too.

I just watched Makoto Shinkai’s latest masterpiece: 5 Centimeters Per Second (秒速５センチメートル). You might remember Makoto Shinkai from his previous works such as Voices of a Distant Star (ほしのこえ) or The Place Promised in Our Early Days (雲のむこう、約束の場所).

This animated film was so beautiful, yet so heart wrenching, and I think I’m going to be depressed for some time. The drawing was just spectacular and the music/soundtrack was nothing short of Tenmon’s best. The storyline was so amazingly beautiful, I’m not sure exactly how I feel with such an open ended ending.

Continue reading the review…

(Click thumbnail to watch video clip)

In one of the recent episodes of Naruto Shippuuden (Naruto: Hurricane Chronicles), I found Naruto’s dialog to be quite touching/emotional and wanted to share.

Sai:

Why do you go so far for him?
Why are you trying so hard to bring him back,
willing to risk your life by going up against Orochimaru to do it?
Why? You haven’t been ordered to do this.

Naruto:

Sasuke is my friend.
Someone who I was finally able to form a bond with.

Sai:

A… bond?
But still, against Orochimaru, you…

Naruto:

I don’t care who I have to fight!
If he rips my arms off, I’ll kick him to death.
If he rips my legs off, I’ll bite him to death!
If he rips my head off, I’ll stare him to death!
And if he gouges out my eyes, I’ll curse him beyond the grave!
Even if I’m torn to shreds, I’m taking Sasuke back from Orochimaru!

Then today I saw this on Digg: The Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), referring to Obama vs Clinton. I thought it resembled the quote above, but in a totally different context.

So I finished watching Welcome to the NHK recently and it was just PURE AWESOME!

Based on the covers, if you think the anime is porn or hentai, you’ll be highly disappointed. That’s what I thought at first, but it wasn’t until Tera told me that Welcome to the NHK and Mushi-shi were the best 2 animes of 2007, that got me interested. Mushi-shi is another awesome anime which I haven’t had time to post my review yet. Looking around, it appears that Welcome to the NHK is about a NEET (not in education, employment or training) who is a hermit that hides in his apartment all day long. Somewhere down the line, he has come to the conclusion that there’s an organization called N.H.K. (basically the TV station’s name) that has a conspiracy to create hermits/NEETs and has sworn to take it down.

That was my assumption of the anime before I began watching it and boy was the anime SO MUCH MORE!

I’m going to take a step back and give you a little introduction that CrimsonAngel told me over my vacation. By the way, he got me this really cute deer (Japanese shrine charm), which I originally thought was a reindeer:

Back to CrimsonAngel, he’s currently doing his Masters in Japan and he did an essay on Otakus/Hikikomoris. Today, most Americans think otakus are people into anime, while other some people whole know a bit more assumes that otakus are hobbyists. However did you know the phrase お宅 (otaku) originally was a term used to mean you (honorific), your house, your home, your family? Later on, since the term could mean your home/house, it began to refer to people who would stay home all the time. His story continues with some serial killer loose in Japan and proclaimed himself to be an otaku. Even though the serial killer was caught, the term otaku had a very bad connotation associated to it and it wasn’t until recently when it became popular again. Nowadays, オタク (otaku) can refer to geeks, nerds, enthusiasts, basically someone who is very into something, and are most likely introverts or at least not very sociable.

The other term is 引きこもり (hikikmori) which means a shut-in, a stay-at-home, or people who withdraw from society. I’ve used the term hermit as I believe that’s our slang for it. Anyway, the story is about Satou, a hermit and how he overcomes hikikomori ways (oh, did I just ruin the ending?). He was a college dropout and after he was expelled from college, he basically became a hermit, living off what his parents transfered into his bank account every month. Misaki, the main female character appears soon with the intention of helping Satou get rid of his hikikomori ways. However, you learn very little of Misaki, but you can feel that her past is very painful. At first Satou of course denies he’s a hikikomori, but the first step to fix a problem is of course accepting the fact you have a problem.

The anime has it’s light moments, poking fun at the otaku/hikikomori culture, while it does have it’s very dark and deep moments that question the purpose of life itself, why do hikikomoris fear, how people get lost in fantasy role playing games (mmorpgs), how a child’s upbringing affects their view on life, why people commit suicide and what goes through their mind, etc.

Speaking of suicide, you’ve probably heard that it’s quite common for Japanese people to jump in front of trains to commit suicide. And you’ve probably heard that Japanese trains are really packed. Imagine the train conductor taking one of those riot shields and pushing people into the train. That’s how pack it is. Anyway, when someone kills themselves in front of a train, this causes major delays and problems on an already overloaded transportation system. Imagine thousands or ten thousands of people getting delayed 30mins because of your stunt. That’s a lot of lost time. That’s a lot of lost money. The train company will then send your parents a letter saying they’re sorry for your lost and a BILL for the damage/delay you’ve caused. Just imagine that! I’m not saying it’s a bad or good system. Someone has to be held accountable for it and I don’t blame the train company for holding the parents responsible.

Anyway, back to the anime. The story goes on as Misaki tries to help Satou, but curing hikikomori isn’t an overnight thing and it takes a lot of patience and I applaud Misaki for sticking it in there. However, it’s when you learn of Misaki’s true past, where you feel a very deep sadness and why she is trying to help Satou so much. Satou of course takes Misaki for granted. One thing you have to realize that is a hikikomori lifestyle isn’t sustainable without outside support, but getting a hikikomori to adapt to society is a very difficult task. All in all, I have to say Welcome to the NHK is a very touching roller coaster ride.

So I was cleaning out my downloads folder and I found an anime music video that Artemyst had shared with me awhile back and I wanted to share it with you guys.

It’s titled Reflections by ukms[z]:

(DivX/Stage6 mirror)

This AMV was first submitted to AKROSS, which I’m assuming is a Russian anime convention. It actually won quite a few awards.

The music video features scenes from Haibane Renmei and Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien. I’ve never watched Haibane Renmei, but if anyone out there recommends it (or not), please do tell. I watched Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien recently (also called Rumbling Hearts) and it was rather heart wretching to watch due to the love triangle.

Then there was the music, which was just awesome! After digging around and as some of the text suggested, the song is indeed Russian. The song is by Maksim, titled Do You Know? You can watch the music video on YouTube.

Belldandy asked if there was a version with the lyrics translated available, and searching on YouTube, I found: Reflections (HR) (Subtitled). I expected the lyrics to somewhat suck, but I was surprised. The lyrics actually matched and watching the video with the lyrics translated made me look at the video in a completely different angle.

Got this from Digg: Cowbell Hero

That was just so awesome I had to show it to you guys. It’s a parody on Guitar Hero, but instead of a guitar being the instrument, you’re playing a cowbell. If you haven’t seen the SNL skit on this, here it is: More Cowbell! As Christopher Walken says, “Guess what! I’ve got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell.”

The original song was of course Blue Oyster Cult - Don’t Fear The Reaper.

Apparently this clip was taken from AMV Hell 4. I’ll see if I can get a better quality clip and share it. AMV stands for anime music video. The anime this is from is Azumanga Daioh (あずまんが大王). The one banging the pan is Kasuga Ayumu and the one in bed is Yukari sensei (confirmed with Artemyst).

The Cowbell Hero logo appears to be taken from a T-Shirt logo designed by SplitReason: Cowbell Hero T-Shirt

While searching for the SNL skit, I found this: GH2 Custom - Don’t Fear the Reaper 5* (Better). Someone had actually made a custom Guitar Hero 2 track. Sometimes in the background, you see a guy clapping, which at first I thought was someone banging a cowbell.

Update:
I managed to rip a higher quality version:

Enjoy!