Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Samurai Champloo
I snaked the first 7 episodes of Samurai Champloo off of ebay (english subtitles) and am super excited. If you don't know its done by Shinichiro Watanabe of Cowboy Bebop fame. Think Samurai epic + Hip hop. If you search for it on Google you can find the official website (Japanese) where tey have a demo video of the show. I think its the opening credits movie but I'm not sure. Check it out, its awesome.

Also on the Cartoon front, new episodes of Justice League start July 31st (Sat) and are going to incorporate all sorts of DC characters in the stories. It should be pretty good.
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Monday, July 19, 2004

Help?
OK, so most people have the dollar theatre I'm assuming, where movies go to die. This is one of the best things ever though because you only have to pay $1.50 or so to see movies on the big screen which is cheaper than renting. This opens the door to seeing movies you normally wouldn't go to (Mean Girls for example). So at the dollar theatre you can go to see a bad movie no problem.

But are there movies that are soooo bad that you wouldn't pay $1.50 to see? Howabout if they were free?

OK, so my problem is that I bough the Batman Animated series DVD the other day which happened to come with a free pass to see Catwoman. Catwoman!!! It looks so obscenely horrible I can't beleive they made it. (Not to mention it basically shits on any resemblance to the comic book character)

So do I go see it? If I brought my wife then we'd have to pay for a ticket? Do I just toss out the ticket?
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Thursday, July 15, 2004

Cheating
I posted this on Tony's site so I thought it was a big enough rant to swap it over here too (cheating) :_:


Ha, off topic completely but I had been hooked on FF11 for a while and now I have completely fallen out of love with it. I imagine you had a similar experience, so I thought I'd chime in too. At some point I realized that I spent 3 hours trying to a very specific kind of monsters in a cave hoping for one to drop a key. Nobody would help out much and I realized just how crappy it was. The only draw most of the time is level building, but then you do that so that you can get an advanced job and start from 1 again. I am 100% disenchanted with that game now :) After my vacation I fell out of step with the one guy I played with often too, so I'm 90% sure I'm giving it up. I've been playing Way of the Samurai 2 and I just got Front Mission 4 and they're a lot more fun.

(maybe I should've posted this on MyOtaku?)



Really I just want to go back to Japan again....It makes me sad to see places I've been in Toyko from watching anime and stuff like that. I really miss that place, it was great. Imma start saving up money again for the Japan fund.

Hey are there any FF7 fans? I have extra Sephiroth figures I don't know what to do with, anyone want one?
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Friday, July 9, 2004

Cost
I paid about $700 for a round trip ticket, $410 for the Japan rail pass which is free tickets on the bullet train anywhere in Japan and also free rides on the JR line which is an above ground train that circles Tokyo essentialy.

After that I converted $2500 to Yen which covered Hotels (split cost w/my wife) food, toys, admissions and everything else. I spent this money VERY loosely and I was actually trying to spend all my money before I got back. I still came back with $300 though.

Really good hotels for tourists cost about $70-80 american, with showers and very small rooms.
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Wednesday, July 7, 2004

Yeah...so I'm slow
Well it takes me a while to get moving, but I've found myself with some good free-time. 14 days in Japan was spent primarily in Tokyo. I'll talk about the first part of the trip.

The plane ride was horrifically boring. There's a 16 hour difference from where I live so I essentially missed a day (came back to haunt me later). 10 hours on a plane I wish on nobody. They forgot our vegetarian meal so they had to whip up a conglomerate of the side dishes from standard and first class. (it was actually really good). Anyway we arrived in Narita airport and went through customs, got our bags and whatnot and the first impression was interesting. There were a lot of Japanese men doing work at the airport in funny suits and helmets, which I wish I had a picture of. The airport was like any other airport, and we got on the express bullet train to Tokyo.

It was pretty easy to do, and as I would find out there are english signs for almost all of the train stations which made getting around pretty easy.

Our first 6 nights were in the Sakura Hotel, which is hot pink outside. Our room was half the size of a dorm room. It was nice though, and the staff spoke english.

The fun really started when we wandered sround the city. Its 99.5% Japanese people and we almost never saw tourists except at the really popular tourist places which we didn't see much of. The big shopping districts are packed with people once things open up, and there are always kids handing out fliers and advertisements for something or other. I got some great Transformers toys from toy stores in Akihabara, and one of the most fun things I found to buy was little figures. You can get them from capsule machines, but also different ones sold in little boxes where you don't know what you're getting til you open it. I spend some good $$ trying to collect all of the individual Naruto and Final Fantasy figures, but it was a lot of fun.

Along the same theme was the Bandai museum, which was especially cool because of the Gundam exhibit which is 3 or so floors of big models and TV screen showing super-detailed info on how they "work". They have 2 lifesize gundam heads which are great photo-ops and some cool scenes set up with tons of action figures in a huge battle.

(more later...cultural stuff)
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Wednesday, June 30, 2004

I'm back
Back and Japan was awesomely awesome. I'll be posting about it in a few sessions, when I can scrape up some time to do so. Can't wait to tell y'all bout it.
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Thursday, June 10, 2004

Ratatat
Yeah, posting has become sparse as I'm starting to figure out what I waste of time it is. I'm going to be gone the next two weeks to Japan too, so its not going to pick up anythime soon either. What I did want to mention is two CD's that I picked up recently. The CD that I had been looking for a while now was Steriogram and the impulse buy was Ratatat.

Steriogram had a really cool song and video on MTV's cheesy advance warning show. The song, "Walkie-talkie man" had a cool video that was Yarn-based, and the song was strong. It was almost rock and roll beastie boys-ish but descriptions are tough. Problem is that the album is pretty forgettable when I finally found it.

The upside is Ratatat. Its pretty much indie/instrumental music, and there are no vocals at all. I really don't bother much with instrumental bands but this one is very good. I believe they used to be called Cherry and its just two guys. The music is just fantastic is all, and holds up really well without having any words. Its almost like the music invokes enough emotion to make up for the lack of lyrics.

If I had to draw a comparison, its going to be an obscure one but they kind of remind me of the Nintendo-music cover bands (the Minibosses/the Advantage). Anyways if you can find music samples of theirs check them out. They's damn good.
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Thursday, May 27, 2004

Breath of fresh air
Ah, the stressful scinece stuff is over. I have just today successfully advanced to candidacy for my PhD in chemistry. This basically means tenure for me as a grad student. I'm feeling pretty releived and happy that all of that writing and research has paid off for me. I can go back to the normal routine and probably be on OB more often. I haven't really been here much, and only posting in the Videogame section anyway. I'm going to celebrate tonight, then this saturday going camping in the redwoods (CA). Good stuff.
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Wednesday, May 19, 2004

HOOO-weee
Finally finished with this big writing project. Next week thursday is my advancement exam where my knowledge will be tested. Yeah, well it IS scary as hell but I'm sure I'll manage through it. I'm going to be soooo glad when its over with. Then on Memorial day weekend I'm going camping in the redwoods under some fantastically giant trees. After that is JAPAN! Thats going to be wild, crazy and expensive. I'm going to be bringing back a mad bag of goodies that transform from robots into various vehicles. I can't wait! Hopefully I don't eat too much fish, but I can only do my best to order vegetarian items in a language I know very little.

Other than all that, I've been playing FF XI a whole lot. I've leveled up to 14 by playing in parties with people. Its funny cause sometimes a group will be very cautious and professional, and sometimes you get people who err towards running around and attacking when the other members aren't ready. It fun til you get killed. Losing XP from dying is frustrating. It great though, I'm starting to break out into other parts of the world further from town, and I haven't scratched the surface. The world is just HUGE!
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004

mweh
Haven't really been too motivated to post here or do anything on OB lately. Not that I've been spending my time exclusively in the real world.

FF11 is still a blast, and I'm figuring out things like how to act in a party and how to make money. I went out with a higher level party and battled some tougher enemies, but I got killed a few times near the end and lost the love. I also wasn't getting much XP because a L12 person joined up at the end and I'm L8. (The higher level people get more XP)

I think I'm going to start doing the craft stuff in the game more, going fishing and mining and such. The game messes with my sleep cycle though, because when I quit playing my brain is still all wired and I can't sleep. Maybe thats killing my motivation?
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