’nuff said.

…but for some reason I can’t stop myself from saying more.

As opposed to bloggers sucking up to each other (Anime Blog Awards), this time around we’ve got an otaku eliminator who jizzes and pisses at them blogs. Looking forward to the cumming of age of this one (I think it’s already happening, actually, not in their blog but in some other parts of the ’sphere, bloggers asking for feedback on how they can improve, being their own OEG, and all that). Still, I think the OEG needs more Baka-Raptor, seriously.

Further Reading

ETERNAL’s Commentary on the Otaku Revolution
Moritheil throws his two cents on the OEG
Seinime eliminates himself from the OEG
Michael of Low on Hit Points asks readers to critique his blog.
Gargron does the same and asks for some whippin’

Related posts:

1. The Best Thing About Being an Otaku?
2. Cross Game Commercial Break: Nomo’s Picture Drawing Song~!
3. Cross Game: These are the Moments…

Inspired by some recent turn of events in the house.

Oniichan no b-b-baka!

No related posts.

ZOMG OVER 9000!!!111!!!

And what better way to take advantage of this situation but to show my weeabooness >:]

When you’re stressed, stuff like this (even if it’s a bug) can turn a drab day a whole lot better

Too bad our project leader saw my lulz remark the following day and changed it before our [formal] test results document get submitted to our Japanese counterpart. Damn!

Related posts:

1. Rationalizing the Retarded

Inspired by Nomo’s Picture Drawing Song, I managed to make myself a Nomo fanart! w00t! Ok ok fine, I lied, I was actually intimida– I mean, inspired, by koda’s Gorgeous Nomo Artwork

Due to the lack of scanner, I decided to make the whole thing ’scenic’ since I’d have to use a cam, leaving the image quality lot to be desired.

Ladies and gents, meet Mocha the squished dog plushy, Nomo’s new friend. Oh and there’s the shiny Haro too, which seemed to have pooped out of there in the picture, saying haro~ 3 creatures~ /ha.ha.ha. (I wonder who can get that reference)

As you can tell, this is a totally random fanart sketch I drew in my notebook at work. The SD Nomo shown at the end of episode 16 (this was cut in the Central Anime version ) was a LOT cuter than the normal one (sorry Nomo), so I decided to take the SD-route.

/reminiscence mode

I wonder how long it’s been since I drew a fanart — 4 or 5 years already methinks. The last one I remember making was a Chii fanart I did for the cover of my English Journal in college Before blogging, that used to be my creative outlet. See how productive I was back then. Perhaps I should ditch blogging and go fanart-ing again? …or not?

…Aaaand that’s it, this post has become incredibly self-indulgent enough as it is

Related posts:

1. A Koushien-esque Cross Game Blogging Ambition Once Forgotten
2. Cross Game: These are the Moments…
3. I Can Only Pimp So Much About Cross Game

Yui Hisakawa was once an avid fan of castanets, but the evil Light Music Club has stolen her from her childhood love. She is now a captive of munchy snacks, fluffy cute girlfriends, and her fated guitar of destiny pink love™. That’s just wrong, Yui and castanets belong together, and here are 3 reasons why.

A picture is worth a thousand words. A picture with words is worth even more.

Just so you know, that review in #3 was an actual review of the actual product and served as the inspiration for this post. This was a fun post to do, editing pictures and coming up with a good layout. Man, I’ve got too much time in my hands

No related posts.

Very hot, yes?

School is out! You know what that means? TEATIME!!!

MIOMIOMIOMIOMIOMIOMIO

S-E-R-V-I-C-E

Why the hell not?

LOLOLOLOLOL! Shyness can kill.

I blame BeLe for showing me that first picture. Back to reviewing more pilot episodes and more K-ON! love soon :P 

Sources: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Related posts:

1. 3 Reasons Why Yui Should Stick with Castanets

Inspired by the “twitter conversation” that went from this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Before I end this post, may I just ask… IS THERE STILL ANYONE ON EARTH NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO EDEN OF THE EAST (especially after seeing that *ahem* revealing trailer)?!!! We might have varying ‘levels of looking forward’ to a series, given our varying degrees of biases, prejudices, personality, etc (hence your ‘looking forward’ might be far different from mine), but heck, if we’re one in the excitement of looking forward to this, should that even matter? Let’s just await the coming of its awesomeness.

No related posts.

I had the chance to go on an escapade to my hometown together with my college classmates / barkada last December 28-30. Though to be exact, it’s like they dragged me to their planned escapade so I can be their host or something lol. Being the willing victim that I was, I had no complaints~! It’s been more than a year since we’ve had this get-together (well they had previous outings / team-building activities but I always end up not joining >_>;), so it was something I really looked forward to, not to mention it’s a chance for me to go back to my ojousama lifestyle where I simply sit and the meals get magically served onto my plate!

Most importantly, this trip made me realize how fortunate I was to have met these great people, how blessed I was to be in the company of my friends. fellow geeks untie! And being the otaku that I am, this whole ‘story’ won’t be complete without me relating it to at least one anime. I mean, I have to do that otherwise I shouldn’t be posting this in our anime blog, right?! It brought back memories of Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu (or stuff I shared about in *that* post), and of course, ToraDora!, especially after reading this friendship moments post from sybilant, ghostlightning’s waifu. ToraDora is, without doubt, one of the best ‘romantic comedy’(?) animes out there to have explored the theme of friendship — filled with Golden Moments of Friendship and Love that never fails to make me MOVE me to TEARS every single time (or make me burst into tears from too much laughter) I’ve shed much more [true] tears for this one than, well, True Tears. But I digress.

We went to Cagsawa Ruins during our trip, where I had the GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY to do something inspired by ToraDora for once. I needed help from some of my friends for what I had in mind, and the result was basically something like this…

Ta-da!

Were you expecting something else, I wonder? Something more “grand” or whatever?

I was planning to drag more people into this but it seems that only the three of us were game enough (or silly enough?) to try it out, heh. Of course my friends didn’t know that I got this idea from an anime I recently watched, ohoho~ I’m the one at the back by the way, not that it really matters.

And now for more proofs of our friendship…!

…that’s probably as much as I can show without blatantly revealing my RL persona, haha.

And for something totally unrelated, here’s a little something for people with Old Church fetish:

…and that’s it for this “ToraDora break” post!

Related posts:

1. To ToraDora with Love: Letters from the Dearly Retarded
2. To the End of Toradora
3. To All the ToraDora Girls I’ve Loved Before

I wish I could say “I’m confident I’m gonna pass JLPT1!!!11!!!”, but I’m afraid I can’t. I wish I could say “I did my best, but I guess my best wasn’t good enough~”, get over the exam and just try my luck next year, but I can’t either. Because if there’s something I realized as I was taking the exam, it’s that I can pass, right this year!!!! Then what the hell’s the problem, you ask?

Everything was going great, some of the vocabs and kanjis I studied just a few minutes before the exam actually came out (ohohoho, lucky me~), and a few ones from the previous exams too (which I just reviewed last night!). The listening was a little shaky, but better than expected. And then, during the last exam (reading/grammar)… I breezed through the grammar section, got stumped in a few items, but nothing serious. I also managed to “answer” all the items in the lengthy reading exam, BUT (a big BUT)… I wasn’t able to finishing shading my answers. Zetsuboushitaaaaaaa! *in before any dojikko jokes*

The paradox of a ‘cool Zetsubou-sensei’

There’s this ‘technique’ that I’ve come to adopt when answering multiple-choice exams to save me time, and it’s what I call ‘mark first, shade later’. This time, however, it worked against me, and I can only blame my foolishness. With only a minute left before the exam ends, I was still double checking my answers for the grammar section, instead of shading my answers for the 5-pts-each reading!!! The assistant proctor asked for my exam sheet, but since I wasn’t done yet, I continued to shade my answers (they’re 5-pts each, 5 pts each!!). I pleaded for her to wait a little longer, feeling all panicky as I was shading, until finally, the proctor gave me the holler to STOP STOP STOP. I might as well be known as “The Girl Who Haggled For Time” with what I did, and sigh… I left about 5-6 questions unshaded (could’ve been worse, I guess? -___-). That’s 25-30 points lost!!!! Give me back my points!!!! ;A;

While I’m not really sure whether having shaded (I don’t want to use ‘answered’, because technically speaking, I answered them) those items would indeed bring me +30 points (uncertain as I am as to whether or not they’re actually right), having an answer is still better than nothing. Especially in my case where I actually “answered” them, based on what I understood from the text, unlike other ones who probably ran out of time and just shaded whatever they feel like shading. ARGHHHHHH. ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Just the thought of not making it to the 70% passing rate because of those unanswered items is totally… ARGHHHHHHHH!!!

Right now, I still believe there’s a chance that I’ll pass, despite the BIG POINTS I lost in the reading section (I still have a room for ~70pts worth of mistakes). ‘guess we’ll just see about that in 3 months time, when the results come out? If I pass, then I’d say “haha! I’m so great I passed even with that stupidity handicap!”; if I don’t, I’ll have the perfect excuse, “It’s because of the reading comprehension answers I wasn’t able to finish shading ” (boy that sounds LAMEEE).

Anyways, no need to fret! I already got past this /wrist emo depressive episode, and returned to my normal sane (or insane?) self. Regardless of JLPT, my weeaboo chronicles must go on! Just don’t remind me of the possible allowance raise x 12 months that I’ll be missing out on if I don’t make it to the cut, and we’ll be fine~

So, how did everyone else’s JLPT go? :3

P.S. murasaki (紫) came out in the exam, thought it was nifty

Related posts:

1. The Final Countdown Before the JLPT1 Doomsday
2. JLPT1 Left Me Devastated

After more than a month, I finally caught a glimpse of ToshoSen author Hiro Arikawa’s interview in NHK’s Top Runner (this is actually the 3rd rerun already, the 1st and 2nd of which was way back September), thanks to the power of live Japanese TV streaming! Rawr! But one thing I realized after watching this is that my listening skill is still sucky, in the “I’m still likely to fail the JLPT1 listening section” sense. I don’t think I even got 50% of what they said >.> But since no one has bothered ripping this particular Top Runner episode (and I don’t think I’ve seen a detailed ‘report’ about it in Japanese blogs either), I’m pretty much left with no choice but to rely on the measly ‘notes’ I gathered as I was watching T__T;

By the time Top Runner started, I was still tweaking my PC so I can take snapshots of what I was streaming, hence I wasn’t paying much attention to the first few minutes of the interview. Though I did manage to catch a few things, with Arikawa-san sharing how she came up with the decision to become a novelist, something along the lines of the impact that novel has (details of which got lost in transmission because I wasn’t focusing, though I’m not really sure whether actually “focusing” would’ve made a difference orz).

The screenshot above gives away Hiro Arikawa’s gender without a question, and I can just wonder if people still don’t know that the great TS author is a woman. Arikawa-san is usually mistaken as a guy, as she said so herself, and true enough, that’s what I also thought when I first heard about ToshoSen, given its shounen-ish nature and all. People she know fondly address her as “Hiro-chan”, but when other people see her pen-name “Hiro” in kanji (浩), they usually mistake this to be Hiroshi (the same kanji read differently), a guy’s name.

Asked how she was able to conceive her masterpiece Toshokan Sensou (yes, it’s now legendary so go read it!), Arikawa-san narrates this story of how her hubby showed her the library plaque, from which the ToshoSen idea came about. Then she goes about explaining how the characters were borne out of her [creative] mind — the ‘camera’ through which she perceives how the character are going to act, and how the overall story is going to turn out. (And I sort of realized how much I fail in reading the Toshokan Sensou novels because they’re not quite “moving” the way they should inside my head, thanks to my limited Japanese knowledge orz)

Arikawa-sensei also mentioned about Tezuka, and how she finds him to be the most unpredictable character among the cast, whose most surprising ‘development’ (or sudden change in character?) was when his brother came into the picture (please please please if you’ve seen this episode of Top Runner, kindly help fill-in the details for me… 有川浩先生のインタビューを見たことある人、どうかご協力ください！).

Ok, it seems there’s a Japanese blogger who mentioned more details about this (本当に助かった！). Basically, Arikawa-san was talking about how certain characters in her story get out of control, like Tezuka, especially in the second volume where his family background was shown. Then this whole plot idea involving Tezuka’s brother sprung out of nowhere (since it wasn’t in her initial plans), and Arikawa even thought of telling Tezuka “Oh geez, couldn’t you have told me about this [family background] earlier?! I have my own problems too, you know!” (Whew, glad I managed to find that Japanese blog post!)

Then in the middle of the interview, a Doujou– I mean his seiyuu, Tomoaki Maeno, appears!! I went all “kyaa! Doujou教官!” the moment he entered the scene because it was totally unexpected! He reads some of Doujou’s lines from the novel while walking down the stairs of this library-like building(?) — the fateful place where Iku and Doujou first met, according to the caption. He was reading the portion of the first novel which shows us Doujou’s side of the ‘Iku’s heroic act / prince charming’ story, how Iku’s courage inspired him to stand up against the MBA even though he’s just a level 1 officer himself — the reason why he got interrogated by the old chaps in the Library Task Force (refer to episode 7 or 8).

Tomoaki Maeno was made to say something Doujou-esque from Toshokan Sensou, and of course, he decides to do the classic line 「アホか貴様ッ」(Aho ka kisama! – Are you stupid?!) that he often tells Iku Seeing him do it live was just amazing! Now according to Maeno, Doujou’s role proved to be a real challenge because he had to deliver his lines in a powerful (well modulated?) manner, to set the tone of the whole war/conflict mood of the series as well. I can only imagine the pressure he must’ve faced to deliver the lines of tsuntsun Doujou

According to Arikawa-sensei, the moment he heard Maeno’s voice from his audition tape, she immediately exclaimed “This is it!”, and decided that no one else is better suited to play Doujou’s role than him. Side comment: I find it great that Arikawa-sensei had a hand in the behind-the-scenes production of the ToshoSen series. Knowing well that the anime had the author’s approval = WIN. Much of what I said in my “objective” review of the series is based on what Arikawa-sensei said in this blog entry, where she takes much pride in all the adaptations of her work ^^

Later on in the interview, Arikawa-san shares that she develops her novels in such a way that it will live up to the expectations of her readers (Aww…), and I guess this is one of the primary reasons behind the popularity of her works It was also sweet knowing that Arikawa-san’s hubby (together with other friends) is like her pillar of support in terms of writing. She fondly calls her husband her “external hard-disk” because of how he keeps track of the writing ideas that pops our of her mind every now and then (Totally awww). What an ideal couple they are Her husband seems to be her constant source of inspiration in writing, considering that she bagged awards year after year after her big debut, which was after she got married ^^

The latter part of the show focused on Hiro Arikawa’s other works, including her most recent novel Hankyuu Densha, and some Q&A session which I don’t really think you guys would be interested in anymore (not that I have much of the details about it anyways ).

…so yeah, there goes my epic fail report on Hiro Arikawa’s Top Runner interview! Hurray! *facepalm* Well I hope you guys enjoyed reading nonetheless ^^;

Related posts:

1. Time For Some Toshokan Sensou Break!
2. The Soothing Chamomiles of Kimi ni Todoke and Toshokan Sensou