Tuesday, August 24, 2004

I hate sauerkraut so much, I don't even care if I spell it right.
Yesterday felt like the first day of fall. I had remained inside most of the day, as per usual, but I went out to get the mail (My friends have started getting their standardized test scores) and it was actually brisk. That really came as a shock to me, even in a rather warm T-shirt (It just came out of the dryer!) and denim jeans.

But I'm always happier in fall and winter than spring and summer, it seems. I like the cold, and the feeling that you have when you finally get indoors, away from the rain, and grab a warm blanket and a cup of hot chocolate.

..Okay, it hardly ever rains here, and I generally don't run inside for hot chocolate, but it's still a nice feeling.

Last year I was all alone fine-tuning some yearbook pages after school. The room was dark, and the lights would turn off if I didn't get up and dance around for a minute so the motion sensors would turn the lights back on. The rain was rather loud, if I recall, and I was on Mobile AIM participating in the OB v7 Launch Chat. Soon enough I tossed my duties aside, called for my ride home, and stood on the corner in the pouring rain, waiting for my ride. I was cold and wet, but I still loved it. The smell of rain, and the atmosphere made by the little droplets made up for it all.

(And I didn't change out of my sopping wet clothes when I got home because of v7's launch. I got sick. Thanks a lot, OtakuBoards. >:| )

--

Literati is a hell of a good time, and anybody who dislikes any incarnation of Scrabble does not deserve to take part in the vocabu-licious greatness. It's sort of boring if you're just playing it to play, but if you're messing around with friends and putting up the most dirty words you can come up with. The conversation that is started by Scrabble is the best part.


I don't really have much to say today. Bah, I'll come up with something better tomorrow.

Teh SillyCircus Day 9- Sweatin' to the Oldies at age 13.
Comments (2) | Permalink

Monday, August 23, 2004

White Stripes versus Black Sabbath- Which has a nicer color?
I found myself awake at 8:00 AM today, after falling asleep at two forty-something. Oddly enough, I actually felt like getting up, instead of the regular "Just give me another ten minutes" mentality. That really surprised me. After reading Shin's mO today, I have come to the conclusion that a mad scientist sent a 40-megaton bomb of happy into the sun, causing a chain reaction, and today is our day of warm and fuzzy reckoning.

--

My brother spent all of Saturday doing a Gundam model he got, and I was extremely impressed with the end result. Normally he puts it all together very quickly, and puts on a relatively sloppy paint job after it's assembled, but this time he took his time, paying special attention to every little detail. This one, however, has everything near-perfect. Each little crevace is painted (Thanks to the almighty powers of the wipe technique) and he even used my little "battle-scarring" technique where you get some paint in the middle of a piece where it's not supposed to go, and you wipe some of it off.

The Gundam's legs, arms and head don't seem to be the plain old white, either; this one is Burning Gundam (Of the G Gundam series, if I remember correctly), and he seems to be this very light gray.

I used to be really into Gundam models. I was in late third grade or early fourth when Gundam Wing came to Toonami, and it took me a little while to warm up to it, but soon enough I had five or six little 1/144 (And two 1/100) scale Gundams sitting on a shelf in my room. I would normally do them over school breaks when I had nothing to do, and recently I found an unfinished one under my bed and worked on it.

About two days and eight hours of detailing later, I had only the legs done and I dropped the project. I guess I have other distractions nowadays. Heh.

--

Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law is the unsung hero of Adult Swim. To be honest, it was the first Adult Swim show that I actually enjoyed- who wouldn't like a bunch of Hanna Barbera cartoons getting arrested for the most surprisingly appropriate crimes? Fred Flintstone being a mob boss, Grape Ape taking steroids, Shaggy and Scooby Doo in posession of illegal narcotics.. It's gold, plain and simple.

Last night's episode was also extremely entertaining. Peanut, Harvey's "young ward," started going through that time that comes in every superhero's life where they start to get their powers. Hilarity ensued quickly enough, with Birdman trying to tell Peanut about what's happening to his body, and the scene where he was in the bathroom shooting his wrist lasers off to pictures of villains in the bathroom.

Gold. Pure gold. I demand a DVD.

Teh SillyCircus Day Eight- I like the number eight. It's a wonderful number.
Comments (2) | Permalink

Sunday, August 22, 2004

Lymph nodes as big as cats!
I picked up the Sealab 2021 DVD yesterday, but didn't really have a chance to watch it until this morning (i.e. 1:00 PM). I only got through the first disc, and each episode I have seen before remained just as funny this time around.

The Happy Cake Oven episode owns all other episodes. Forget Bizarro and Debbie's Biological Clock, Happy Cake Oven is where it's at.

Before I ditched the DVD player to come online, though, I popped in disc two to check out the special fatures. I was most excited about seeing the Sealab pilot, and I found myself highly disappointed afterwards. I mean, I had heard that the pilot was garbage, but God did it suck. The only redeeming part was hearing the original version of the theme song.

In the end, I found that Aqua Teen Hunger Force Volume Two has the better extra features, but Sealab 2021 is generally funnier.

I still want to make an avatar of Wayne "The Brain" from the Bar Trivia episode, though.

--

A couple months back Syk3 linked me to a site that had translated Naruto manga that you could read without having to save anything to your computer. At the time, however, I was deathly afraid of catching any more spyware, so I stayed away. Eventually I lost the link, and the thoughts of reading Naruto outside of Shonen Jump left my mind.

But last night I was browsing the Penny Arcade forums (I'm not sure why), and found a link somebody put up about a dramatic climax in an arc in the story. I clicked the link, found translated Naruto chapter two hundred-something, and was intrigued. I tracked back to volume five and began reading.

I was rather impressed with the quality of the translation. Everything was perfectly done, with high image quality and accurate translations of the jutsu. Once I got to volume six, though, things declined a bit. The images were smaller and a bit more pixelly. Somebody else had done that volume, I guess, but what can I do about it? It's just an MSN image group.

I got into the second trial of the Chuunin exam last night, and I was once again reminded of how kick-ass the series is. I was inspired to do some drawing, but I haven't gotten around to that yet. Because I'm lazy.

--

My brother's off at Six Flags Hurricane Harbor, a very nice and nearby water park, with a friend of his today. I wasn't invited, nor do I think I would have said yes. I'm not a big fan of Hurricane Harbor. You run around without a shirt on sopping wet standing on steaming hot metallic stairs so you can go down a big plastic water slide. I'm a much bigger fan of Hurricane Harbor's nextdoor neighbor and bigger brother, Six Flags Magic Mountain.

There's so much more to do at Magic Mountain. The only thing interesting that comes to mind when I think of Hurricane Harbor is slowly wading down the lazy river, but then even that gets ruined by a bunch of hyperactive ten-year-olds (Like my brother, except he's twelve now) yelling and splashing and going upstream.

Roller coasters are a thousand times better than water slides. No questions about it.

--

I have been very eager to go do something social with friends lately, but anything enjoyable is extremely limited due to several variables that all seem to be against me.

A) Isolation. I have never lived near any of my schools. We have lived in the same house for over twelve years, and each school I've been to is way too far away to walk to. They don't even let us take the bus from here. Now, I couldn't walk to a friend's house, or anywhere interesting, for that matter, because they all live near the school.

B) Lack of transportation. I don't know how many times I could have gone to see a movie with people but my parents are too tired to get in the car.

This is what caffiene is for.

C) Lack of friends. Pity me.

:P Well, I have a few good friends, but unfortunately it's apparently extremely hard for any of them to call here when they go off to do anything, and none of them answer their phones.

And 90% of them are girls, and they don't want their stepfathers hearing me on their answering machine.

[/bitching and moaning]

This is the main reason I'm excited about going back to school. I miss all these people.

And Ad-Aware isn't getting rid of these damn popup ads. Where's Spybot Advanced Mode when you need it..?

Teh SillyCircus 2 Day Seven: One week and still whining strong.
Comments (2) | Permalink

Saturday, August 21, 2004

I'm all out of Jolly Rancher phrases. Sue me.
You know what irks me? Bullet-time. It was cool and cutting-edge back in 1999, but by 2002 every other action movie had some sort of slow-motion spinny scene thrown in the mix. It's almost as if action directors thought that people wouldn't be interested in a fight scene if there isn't a boring pause showing the lame expression on the awful actors' faces right in the middle of it all. There were many movies with good action far before the advent of bullet-time. Why does all of Hollywood have to follow the trend? It's not like it's ground-breaking or even entertaining anymore. Even the Matrix sequels did it so much it became stale and predictable.

*imagines Fried Green Tomatoes with bullet-time mixed in* Heh heh..

--

I'm talking with Azure about parakeets right now, simply because I saw some cool ones in Petsmart yesterday. He then started mentioning some of his parakeets' names, which include The Yellow One, Cookies 'n Cream, and- get this- Blue Blue.

And he himself, a 19-year-old college dude, named them. I'm telling you, if I had eighteen parakeets, I would give them all badass names. In fact, I'm going to make a list of my top 18 parakeet names. They're in no particular order or anything. I'm just listing them as they plop out of my brain.

- Terrance
- Fredrico
- Sergeant McMan
- s3xybabe84
- The Parakeet Formerly Known as Prince (It would be even better if it's purple)
- Tom
- Ralph Nader
- Melissa
- Janet Reno
- Loretta
- Matlock
- La Chupacabra
- Captain Murphy
- Bonnie
- Clarence
- Mary Tyler Moore
- Green Green
- THE SMASHINATOR

Hah. Green Green could kick Blue Blue's sorry ass.

Teh SillyCircus Day 6- El Smashinator versus Bonnie Hunt
Comments (1) | Permalink

Friday, August 20, 2004

They don't put enough green Jolly Ranchers in the bags. Too many blues.
Nibbles, the passive hamster that belonged to my brother, died yesterday. The rodent's condition was confirmed at 12:49 AM, in my room, where I was trying to sleep. It had been living in my room for a couple months for no particular reason, but now I'm afaraid it's going to haunt me because of all the bad things I said about it.

He was a good hamster, I guess. He was quiet and rather passive, unlike our previous hamster, named Henry, who was satan reincarnated as a rodent and would bite very hard. I never liked him, though, mostly because of the squeaky hamster wheel.

My brother has a rather humorous history with his pets dying. Two of his goldfish died on father's day a couple years back, and the hamster died on his birthday. I suppose he's dealing with this death rather well. At least he's not sobbing hysterically over it.

I don't recall ever being too terribly traumatized about pets dying.. That's probably because they have all been goldfish or hamsters. We have never had a dog long enough to see it grow old.. They, too, have all been pets from hell. Our cat has another six years on her, and the dog has fifteen, if all goes well.

--

Argh, I'm sore from all that DDR yesterday. It's a good soreness, I suppose, but still.

--

I was supposed to go see a movie with some friends today, but considering how they haven't called and I haven't the smallest idea of what time or what movie, I doubt it's going to happen.

They wanted to go see the new Exorcist flick, while I wanted to see Open Water.. Oh well. Either way, I care far more about seeing the people, not the movie. The question is mainly how we would all get in to either, but I suppose there are ways.. *cough* Theatre hopping.

Teh SillyCircus Day 5- Ew, this one displeases me.
Comments (2) | Permalink

Thursday, August 19, 2004

They could save a lot of money if they stopped putting wrappers on the 'Ranchers.
Seriously, Jolly Rancher wrappers are a waste of time and money.

My dad woke me up at ten today to mow the lawn. Such an ungodly hour, 10:00 AM.. And I'm going to have to get up at six every day once school starts. What, am I Amish or something?

My brother sat inside laughing insanely at me as my dad kept on pointing out patches of grass I had missed, but it was all over soon enough.

Today was my brother's little birthday shindig at the bowling alley across town. He had invited four or five of his friends, along with one of mine (He never showed up). Once most people got there, the bowling got underway.

And I suck at that game, haha. I was put on the non-bumper lane with my dad (My bowling arch-nemesis), and had one crappy game. I either get the ball too far to the right or too far to the left; it went in the middle, like, three times.

My best score? Sixty.

But no worries! I had heard there was a DDR 3rd Korean Mix there, but much to my surprise a DDR EXTREME was jammed in a corner and blocking a fire extinguisher. And if that wasn't good enough, it's in an empty bowling alley, meaning nobody is in there to judge or hog the game.

And so I played for a very long time. Bowling? Screw it, I'm gonna play Tsugaru on Heavy. Let's see the forty-year-old bowling league guys do that.

*lashes out against the Pin Pals*

I don't know how much money I blew today on DDR.. Five bucks, maybe. It took me a while to get back into the groove of arcade DDR, but I still do better at home on my trusty foam pad.

--

The funniest part of the day was that my brother got Aqua Teen Hunger Force Volume 2 from a friend, which is totally ironic. My dad despises Meatwad.

And that's what he gets for dissin' the meat.

--

I think that the reason the DSL isn't installing onto the PC is because the CD is scratched.. We're going to order a new one and see how that turns out. No more 128MB RAM for me. Woot.

Opposing Force installed with ease last night, and I got through Boot Camp today. I'll probably play a bit more after this.

But I like Freeman's crowbar more than Adrien Shepherd's wrench. It's so much easier to vandalize things with.

Teh Sillycircus 2- Day 4
Comments (2) | Permalink

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Why did they add blue Jolly Ranchers? It just kills the mood with me.
Hm. AIM is being strange.

--

We got a little paper from Blockbuster last week saying that using it would eliminate all outstanding fees and get us a free rental. I felt like renting a game- Tales of Symphonia, specifically- so we went off to the merry old land of rentals.

Predictably enough, they were out of Symphonia, so I walked around for about twenty minutes looking for another game or film to rent. I had been debating with myself about trying Silent Hill 3, Eternal Darkness looked rather tempting, and I had been wanting to play Wario Ware for Gamecube for a week or so.

Well, in the end, my mom pulled out the veto stamp on Eternal Darkness and Silent Hill, and I felt Warioware would lose its luster quickly, so I didn't rent any of them. Desperate to justify the fifteen-minute drive to Blockbuster, I went over to the foreign section and found Ringu, the original Japanese version of The Ring.

The checkout guy had been bothering me while I was browsing for games. I suppose he was just being an active worker, running around and asking everybody if he could help them with anything, but I don't go to a movie rental place to be served. I go to rent a movie so I can enjoy cinema without being bothered by those around me (That's my big pet peeve about movie theatres: stupid people).

Anyway, the guy told us we had a total of $40 due to the store for Psi-Ops and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. I rented those, like, months ago, and I couldn't get a ride to the store until two weeks after the due date. Thankfully, the holy orange postcard took care of the forty bucks and one of the rentals.

I popped in Ringu the second I got home, and I wasn't as thrown by it as I had anticipated. The footage on the tape itself wasn't nearly as shocking or scary as in the US version (Though the "eruption" scene was cool) and the kid wasn't all psychotic. Those were my two favorite parts of the American version, actually.

It was still good, but I think I liked The Ring more than Ringu. It will be interesting to see how Hideo Nakata's The Ring 2 will fare with the mainstream US audience.

--

My brother has been trying to reinstall The Sims into our desktop computer for two days now. He finally got all the files in and everything, but now the program doesn't start. It will ask for which resolution setting you want, do the little loading screen, and it won't do anything after that. He's rather frustrated now, and he just kicked me off the chair in front of the computer. My throne has been stolen. :|

I sort of hope he never gets it to install, heh. If it feeds the idea that we need a new computer, I'm all for it.

Unfortunately, he thinks that I'm intentionally not letting it install, on the grounds that Half-Life is in there and The Sims is not. I get this all the time from people..

Is this a worthy enough post for you, Shin? :P

Teh Sillycircus 2: Day 3
Comments (2) | Permalink

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

In fact, Jolly Ranchers are so good they deserve their own skin on Group Sounds.
I finished off an entire bag of Jolly Ranchers last night. It's gone now, and I am sad.

Where did the name "Jolly Ranchers" come from, anyway? Was there a group of cattle rustlers in Kansas who one day decided to create a delicious candy that would make them millions?

Or perhaps the candies are actually made of declious, fruit-flavored ranch hands. I smell a coverup.

--

It's Tuesday, and just for any of you who remember and/or care, I have a special treat just for you.

Why did I make this, you ask? I promised two weeks ago that I would do weekly webcomics that would update on Tuesdays. My hard drive crapped out on me last week, so all my files- including Photoshop and my scanner stuff- was lost.

So I guess you'll all just have to live with it. I'm sorry. I know how much your lives revolve around them.

Hahaha. I am hilarious.

Anyway, as soon as I get the DSL hooked up to the desktop again, everything should get back to normal.

(By the way, why is the scanner dead in the picture if it's the hard drive that was the problem? I suppose it's one of those mysteries that not even the CIA could ever solve.)

--

My brother spent twenty perfectly good dollars on Tekken Tag yesterday. I felt rather neutral on his purchase at the time, but now I regret not stopping him. Soul Calibur II is a far better game with more interesting characters, better fighting stages and easier-to-execute combos. Why the hell should you tap left, pause, hold right for one second and then press triangle just to bitch-slap somebody?

Damn button mashers. It made me want to go play Soul Calibur II.

It could at least have a nice variety sexy female characters, but no, there can only be one of them. The other ones all look like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction or Talim with a Native American headdress on.

Bleh, I don't even want to talk about it anymore.

--

I was cleaning out my closet today, and I came across this little book that I remember making in second grade. It was made out of six pieces of construction paper and three staples, and was titled, "The Boy Who Played Way Too Many Video Games."

Basically, it was a story about a kid who got a Super Nintendo and became very, very obsessed with video games. His dad decides to put an hour-a-day limit on the kid's gaming, so he decides to use his allowance at the arcade. He then stopped doing his chores, expecting to still get the money, but he didn't, and he eventually went insane.

On the back cover it showed him zombified in front of a computer, chanting "Solitaire, solitaire, solitaire.."

At one point in the book the guy said that he should maybe go online more often. It was like some sort of eerie foreshadowing of my life, six years later.

TEH SILLYCIRCUS 2: Posting spree from beyond the grave. Day 2.
Comments (2) | Permalink

Monday, August 16, 2004

Cherry, green apple and grape Jolly Ranchers are God, the rest can go to hell.
A Night at the Roxbury was on TBS last night. It's a Saturday Night Live movie starring Will Ferrel and Chris Kattan as their club-going characters from the show (You know, the purple and blue suits and the head bobbing?). It wasn't as funny as I expected, though it had its moments. The scene where they were dancing with the gold diggers in the Roxbury was definitely the highlight. That was what I was looking for in the movie.

I also enjoyed the music which was, of course, entirely dance club hits. I have come to appreciate the genre a bit more since I picked up the DDR MAX2 soundtrack a few weeks back. It's just good music to zone out to.

But I suppose that's to be expected, considering one of the sub-genres is called "trance."

--

Argh, I only got one reply to my big post that I spent hours and hours writing. I expected it to be a feedback-magnet. *shame*

I forgot to mention a couple little changes I have been throwing around for a while now. Even though I doubt any of you read it yesterday, I'm going to rant about it anyway as punishment.

I thought of grouping the more fantasy/adventure series, which is basically Quest for Time (I HATE calling it that), the little prequel, Summoners and Ronin Mech (Another crappy title), into a big story ark where they are all considered individual shows that are all tied together, like project .hack. Each story would be considered a "volume," or maybe a "book." This doesn't mean each story will just be one volume of manga or anything- the first arc of QFT would probably be around six volumes of manga- and that would probably confuse a few people.

Then comes the question of how to number the volumes. Should I go chronologically, or in order of when they were published? It would be sort of strange to put out Volume 2, then have 3 running, during which 1 would be released. It's a bit crazy.

I also decided to take out the time-freezing thing in QFT (Hey, anything is better than the full name, even an acronym) simply because it seems a bit juvenile and simple. But then what would make the series individual? Would it need a genre-shattering twist?

Heh, I don't know why I'm worrying about all this. *shrugs*

Oh, that reminds me. I forgot to talk about one of the ideas I've come up with. It's really under-developed; That's probably why.

I originally wrote it as a novel, though I only got through the prologue, but I think the concept is pretty cool. It's about this girl who was designated by the government as insane and a threat to the nation. The people sent to take her away found her in her basement, which had disturbing, sketchy images all over the walls and floor written in blood.

The rest of the thing is basically explaining the girl's life and the strange things that happen in her little padded room. I really didn't get too far beyond her actually getting taken to the institute, but I'm sure I could come up with some really twisted stuff to fill in the rest of the story.

The title? No, there's no title. I haven't come up with anything good.

Perhaps I could come up with a couple other dark, eery tales and put them all in their own franchise. Das Grim, this one, and a couple other things.. Maybe I could come up with a series of thirteen standalone episodes, each one about a different patient in the mental institute.

Of course, it will all tie together in the end. Each episode will just use a different person's story to add a piece to the puzzle, but nobody will realize it until the end. :o

...And now I'm all motivated to draw stuff.

DAILY POSTING SPREE ENTRY ONE: DOWN THE CRAPPER WE GO.

MISSION STATUS: FAILURE.
Comments (2) | Permalink

Sunday, August 15, 2004

Sen says the dumbest things.
And I do. Just ask Azure.

--

I have had the urge to do something creative lately. With school and the menacing return of piano lessons looming on the horizon I have become a bit worried about getting a few things done. The first and probably most important one is the two-year GATE (It's this school district's advanced program) project, in which we were supposed to do something to "better ourselves." As I've mentioned before, I made it my goal to add to my pretty basic knowledge of the Japanese language.

Of course I don't expect to become fluent in two years- Hell, I'll be lucky if I get all the particles down in time. I just want to know enough to write about five sentences (The ultimate goal is a page) and translate a bit (Anywhere between five words and a page) by the end of this year.

The big problem with that is that it's already been a year and I haven't done jack shit.

We're supposed to be keeping a journal of all out progress, and mine's as empty as the day I got it in the beginning of seventh grade. I'm probably going to have to spend the two weeks before school totally BSing my way through ten or fifteen pages of the little composition book and reading up a bit. I'm still really worried, though.

Of course, it's not like anyone else is much better. Nobody's done anything so far, and they don't even have challenging or even interesting topics.

I can't say I remember many of them off the top of my head, but I do recall one guy saying he wanted to figure out how to make some sort of explosive.

Is that constructive? Is that even a long-term project? I know this guy, it's not like he's even gonna do it anyway, but still, he could at leasta come up with something better than that.

But if anybody calls him on it he'll chew them out. He's a rather interesting fellow, but as a good friend of mine recently stated, "He has personality conflicts with everybody, not just Nick."

Heh. Moving on.

The other thing that's been worrying me is the return of piano lessons. My mom, when she was in her "WE'RE GONNA MOVE TO PITTSBURG!1111!!1!" phase decided to cancel my piano lessons because we were "going to fly to Pittsburg for a month or two" and such. This was a major relief for me, because I never, ever practice except for forty minutes before the actual lesson.

My teacher's nice enough.. On the surface. She acts pleasant, and is kind when you're a piano-slave and spend an hour a day practicing, but you can tell she's displeased and such when you do rather poorly.

And of course it's absolutely entirely her fault, not mine, and that's why I don't want to return.

But I will, because of the occasional rewarding feeling of playing a song I like. Plus four years of extracurricular musical education doesn't look good enough on a college application.

And the third and final thing that's made me antsy is not a requirement- it's just something that I'm really itching to do. Most of this summer has been full of computer-going and gaming, but my creative inhibitions have returned in a desire to exercise my brain (If drawing horribly violent cartoons counts as constructive brain exercise.. o_O). I have been doing my share of drawing, yes, but I also want to do more manga lately. As I've said before, I have a ton of ideas floating around that I've been developing on and off, some more than others, since fourth or fifth grade. I think I'll rant about the ideas for a little while now, just because I know how much you all want to hear it.

Psh. *can't hold in the laughter*

I'll be listing them all in order of when I made them.

Story one- "Gundam G2" I came up with this one in, what, late third grade? It was when Gundam Wing had just been released on Toonami. I was rather infatuated with the series, and one day I thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be cool if I were to make up my own continuation of the series?"

This was years before I had heard of fanfictions. *cough*

The "story" revolved around three kids (Modeled after myself and a couple friends) who "found" Gundams lying around in some mysterious building.

It sucked, plain and simple. In fact, I'm ashamed that I even decided to bring it up.

Story medium: It was a comic. Manga before I knew what Japanese comics were called.
Story's current status: Canned. Totally dead. Never let it see the light of day again.

Story Two- There have been so many titles I can't remember, but the original was "Quest for Time"- I came up with this idea one day when some fifth or sixth graders were making some characters for a video game they wanted to make (Hey, we've all been there). I sort of looked up to them, though I really didn't know them too well, and I felt that I would be able to "contribute" some "interesting" characters.

I came up with a knight that was vaguely modeled after Cloud from Final Fantasy VII in Dragonball Z form, some person in a robo-suit (a lame one) with energy-based weaponry, some person modeled somewhat after Misty from Pokemon who punched things a lot, a martial arts dude with funny hair, a cybernetic dinosaur and some weird flying reptile thing with a bigass cannon on its back.

And how proud I was of them. I would spend hours drawing them, their character stats, and writing up half-assed biographies. The next time I saw the two guys they had dropped the video game idea altogether. I then decided that my characters "deserved" a comic book.

Basically, the main character was the knight guy (David Knight was his original name, though I've toyed around with it since then), who was in training to become a master swordsman dude when this big shadow thing (I think he was originally modeled after Ghastly the Pokemon) with lame/menacing eyes came, destroyed the city and froze time. For reasons unknown to anyone (Including myself, I figured I would BS it when I got around to explaining it) the main character didn't freeze with everyone else and escaped. He then would come across the mech-suit person, the Misty-modeled one, the martial arts guy, the dinosaur and the frog-ish thing. All one at a time, ala One Piece, before I even knew what it was.

I would always get to the second or third issue, find something I wanted to change, and start over again. I don't think I ever got to the fifth, heh. Things changed even more when The Lord of the Rings came out. I saw it with my dad and found a new standard of quality that I wanted to meet.

I then changed the character designs, added some extra story inbetween the original bits, and got rid of the dinosaur and the frog-thing among two other characters (A mutated sibling of the fighter guy and a pile of sludge). They were just holding the story down.

I sort of returned to the "second generation" thing that was started in Gundam G2, and how there was a different group of four people centuries ago that sealed the shadow guy, whom I named Natoro, away in a stone in the middle of the sea.

One of the big things about this comic has always been how there were always four realms- the medievel Europe one, the thirty-first century America one, the Imperial Japan one and the "original" one (Spiritual mages and crap). Recently, however, I asked myself a few questions about that. If the future one was so advanced, why didn't they just dominate the other three? And why wouldn't the other three just adopt the superior one's ways of life? I temporarily fixed that with "They didn't know about each other," but even that seemed a bit unrealistic. I've come up with a couple solutions, the best one probably being isolate three of them, have the futuristic one's elders know but not tell anyone, and there you go, but I still think it could be better. If I could figure out an original way to make the advanced one seem a bit more earthy (Like the Al Bhed in Final Fantasy X, only different so I wouldn't be blatantly ripping them off), that would be a big help. Plus, I shouldn't say Japan and Europe. They should just be like the actual civilizations but not blatantly Japan, Europe and America. It makes things seem a bit more believeable if they're my own creations and not things ripped out of history books and glued together on a piece of cardboard.

I'm currently in the process of changing things again. I'm going to change a few of the character designs around, fill in the blanks that I've left between segments two and four, and most importantly make the script good. I want this series to be my first impressive work. I've stuck with it for almost five years now and it has changed a lot. There is still room for improvement, but I believe that it has potential.

Story medium- I currently consider it to be a manga, that way I could have total control over it, but in the end it might just become an ongoing anime. Current status- The third or fourth revision.. Time to make it interesting to read. Oh, and let's get a good title, too.

Story 3- Backstory to Quest for Time- Ugh, I hate calling it "Quest for Time," but I haven't thought up a good title yet.

This one is just the story of the four people who sealed Natoro away centuries before Quest for Time. I recently decided there only needed to be one protaganist in this one. I want variety, not four heros every time around.

Story medium- It would probably be a short, one-volume manga, if QFT ends up as a manga, but it would probably be better as a couple OVAs.
Current status- I have never put much thought into it. Let's call it "preliminary."

Story four: "Spiritual Advisor Seiki- I devised this one as a one-shot story I submitted to Tokyopop for their second Rising Stars of Manga contest. Basically, the female character Kino goes to a psychic one day and is given a mirror that she is told will bring her good luck in her romance life. As she leaves the store, she looks in the mirror only to see some other person staring back at her. It pops out in the form of a ghost (A human-looking one with the exception of feet). His name is Seiki, and he's a cynical little ghost bastard who has to help Kino with her little social problems.

In the version I actually submitted, Kino wanted to impress her crush by becoming really good at a dancing game. I believe the game was called "Boogie Boogie Dancing Hour." The hole in Kino's plan of having a ghost help her get good at a physical game in a very short period of time? How the hell is a spirit supposed to do anything?

Originally I had Seiki touch Kino's feet and make her jump- You know how ghosts are supposed to make you get really cold if they pass through you. It was a sort of weak resolve, but it worked at the time. Tokyopop gave me a cool little certificate of recognition for it.

Story medium: One-shot manga, twenty pages or so.
Current status: Dormant. This was my first take at romantic comedy, and I haven't really taken the time to develop it. I do like it, though. I'll come back to it someday.

Story five: Summoners(?)- I came up with this one last year. It's basically about this guy who is sent with his childhood friend and some guy he doesn't care about who is his self-proclaimed rival to go find some sort of.. Something, I haven't worked on that yet. The main thing is that they have some psychich abilities, and they have the power to channel spirits and people from other worlds and have them appear in a physical form as a sort of guardian/pawn for killing. I haven't developed it much, but I liked designing the world. Each little realm is based off of a religion, and each conflict they come across paralels a story from each religion (i.e. they are from the Jewish or Christian one, and they are oppressed by the Roman/Greek one, which has some sort of Roman mythology thing going on). This one will need a lot of research before I can do anything with it.

Story medium: It would probably be best as a 26-episode anime series.
Current status: Dormant.

Story six: Ronin Mech- A typical mech anime. I haven't done too much with it.

Story medium: A manga, I guess.
Current status: Dormant, undeveloped.

Story seven: Das Grim (Tentative)- A couple of you (Shin, Syk, PT) are familiar with this one. It's a very dark one-shot that I came up with a while back that revolves around a guy who is a Grim, meaning he basically kills those whose time has come. It's not like the wounds are visible or anything- most of the time he takes a tentacle (A Grim is like a shadow thing. It can stretch and change shape) and touches the victims' hearts with it, which generally leads to a natural death. To the truly deserving, however, he takes his time and does more of a painful/homicidal deal that manifests itself in the form of a bullet hole or a stab wound to a human.

In this particular assignment, however, he has to swifty send a young bedridden girl. He has some issues with this, but is forced to do it anyway. It's not too deep in the one-shot form, but I would definitely expand upon it.

I use a lot of heavy shading in this one to add to the dark tone. It looks sort of cool, in my opinion.

Story medium- One-shot manga, though I would make it a bit longer if I had nothing else to do.
Current status- It's in progress, but it's not my top priority. Right now I'm toying around with how I might draw the first few pages. It would be cool to do semi-abstract mini-paintings on the first few pages..

Story eight: Super Fun-Fun Cosplay Force: Stereotypes in Action!- I made this up right after I made the first sketches for Das Grim. This one is basically about a group of three stereotypical romantaic comedy anime characters- a way-too-cheery, loud female schoolgirl who is statutory-licious, her quiet bishounen crush and a scrawny nerdy dude who find a "severe injustice against the rights of anime fans everywhere," which was really more of a price increase for their local anime convention's admission prices. They then put on their cosplay outfits and become the SUPER FUN-FUN COSPLAY FORCE, which basically makes them fantasy anime stereotypes. The girl is a generic maho-shoujo hero with a staff, puffy pink outfit and cute floating mascot character, her crush is an angsty anti-hero with large muscles and a big sword (Interpret that however you want), and the scrawny kid with glasses becomes a Power Rangers/Ulraman knockoff, and he doesn't look good in his skin-tight rubber suit.

The rest of it is random anime refrences and satire of anime convnetions. It's a fun little thing that I haven't dug too deep into.

Story medium- I designed it as a one-shot manga.
Current status- Undeveloped. I don't think I ever did more than the cover page concept and some character sketches, heh.

--

And that's that. I applaud anybody who took the time to read all of that.

And wow, the browser didn't even crash on me halfway through! It must be a sign from God..
Comments (1) | Permalink