Explore the possibilities.

Never be afraid to choose a road that nobody chooses.

Challenge new boundaries

Nobody knows what lies beyond.

There is always something new every day.

Pay attention to little details in your life and appreciate them.

Share the knowledge.

It is always fun to talk to someone who knows the subject as well as you do.

Be excited, and remember the excitement.

Never say you're too old to do something.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Devil and Devil

It was on mangafox's front page, so I decided to try reading it. It's a completed series, and it's quite an old-styled manga. Nevertheless, it's a good one to readby Miyoshi Yuki!

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/thumbnails/fit200x200/encyc/A2899-45.jpg

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Summary from Mangafox:
Above the Earth, there is a continuous battle between angels and devils. One devil in particular, Sword, has it in for a certain angel, Ios. In their 101st fight together, both are severely wounded. Not only that, but their clashing power causes the two to fall to earth. By chance, Sword finds a beaten, unconscious teenage boy nearby, and he is able to take over the human's body to save his own life.

Some time later, Sword awakens in the hospital, briefly confused about his whereabouts. The father of the body he possessed enters the room, extremely happy to see his boy Souma alive. Then the older twin brother shows up. Immediately, Sword recognizes his enemy's energy. Also nearly dead, Ios had joined with Kanna's body. Sword goes to attack Ios, but quickly realizes that the body is far weaker than his demon form, especially from being recently beaten to hell.

Since the brothers had been found heavily thrashed, their memory loss isn't that surprising. Their large change in behaviors is also explained by amnesia. As it turns out, Sword entered the body of the cliché nerd who can't run fifty meters without falling. Ios's new body is a terror, feared by all and constantly suspended from school. While the angel and devil have primary control over the bodies of the twins, reflex actions and memories of the other souls (still alive within the bodies) do appear. More importantly, the human bodies cannot handle the powers that Sword and Ios had used with ease. This a problem especially for Sword who is both over eager to use his powers and targeted by devils and angels.

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The ending is pretty expected, but it's still a good ending for a 15-volume atory. I like the mangaka's sense of humor - they're idiotic, but the level of idiocy is not too exaggerated. I find some storyline development a little strange and out of the blue, but overall, I like the storyline. I like the part where Sword was doing good deeds while he was actually planning to do evil things, and gradually he turned out to be a good person. Um, well, not a really good person, but... he has his good points. Yep.

And of course, fighting scenes! Clash of swords and fists! Sexy girls! Uhh... no, I mean, girls who are not as annoying as other kyaa-kyaa-useless idiot girls commonly found in many manga/anime. Heheh. Sorry, I'm not a big fan of those type of idiot girls.

My rating: 4.89/5.0

Friday, July 24, 2009

Boredom during work

I managed to cram my lunch time working on this:


Okay, damn, it wasn't supposed to be like this. I only made the silhouette of Cloud's head up till the neck, and then suddenly I became too lazy to draw his torso. I wanted to create some borders around him, but ended up using the wrong preset brush because I was too lazy to draw it manually, and... Cloud's wearing a feathery Chocobo costume! =.=;

Cloud, I'm so sorry I turned you into a disgrace.


Well, it's supposed to be like this:


It's unfinished. But, yeah, it's supposed to be like this... In the end I used a normal brush to draw those details manually. My right index finger was kinda burned by my laptop's touch pad. My laptop gets heated pretty easily nowadays.

Oh well. It's quite fun to draw this without a tablet pen xD

Firefox vs IE

I know, it's a boring old topic.

I'm bringing this up because I was somehow reminded of the problems with my HTML designs. I took a look at my private blog with interactive sushi design today. It doesn't look like it should in Firefox - everything became aligned to the left, even though I set it to the center. It looks perfectly normal in IE, though. As the designer, I feel very unsatisfied with this, although I tried my best to overlook it.

But after using Firefox for a year, I grew liking to it. I like customizable things better. Firefox add-ons are the most favorite features to me. I like the new Persona, which allows you to set a theme to the browser. IE... Well, certainly, it can be customized, but it's not as pretty and as easy as Firefox. Honestly, IE 8 looks boring to me.

In addition to that, downloading is more organized in Firefox. I like the idea where Firefox organized all the downloaded contents into one window, in contrast to IE, which causes tons of windows to appear as you download (well, they're not tons - I'm exaggerating it).

As far as safety is concerned, I'm not too sure which one is safer. My laptop was attacked by 14 malicious trojan worms before it crashed, and that happened when I was using Firefox.

So, Firefox vs IE? My choice is Firefox.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

History

History is never my forte, and yet I have to take history courses due to my school's requirement.

I don't hate history - it's part of us. What we own today is what resulted from the happenings in the past. I personally find it interesting to know the origins of many things.

What I find it difficult is that history is 99% biased. After learning much about the history of Africa, I became displeased of the West in the past.

I don't really like the idea of people influencing my impression towards others. It's difficult to only know about things without being emotionally affected by it.

And I'm pretty bad with names. Empires and places often have their names changed as time passes, and for some reason I can't connect the new name with the old name. What's more, I need a map to visualize locations. I can't just learn things with "XXX Empire was located between ABC Sea and DFG Sea, across the land of YYY". The description doesn't make much sense to me :S

Monday, July 6, 2009

DISSIDIA potion

Last December I went to Japan on transit. Since I didn't dare to go as far as taking train to Shibuya or somewhere else, I went to Aeon Mall to kill time.



That was JUSCO, Japan's hypermart. It was a really really really good decision to land there :) I found lots of DISSIDIA potions!

Thanks to the new rules of not allowing liquids brought from outside into the airplane, I had to dig a hole in my stomach to finish 4 cans of the potions before entering Japan's immigration. Yup. Just for the sake of bringing them home.

So... how does the potion taste like?

As you probably know, there are two types of cans: Cosmos (the white cans) and Chaos (the black cans). Cosmos cans contain something like lemonade, while Chaos cans contain carbonated grape juice. I personally like Chaos ones better, since the Cosmos ones taste a little bland to me.


I managed to take a photo of what's inside the Chaos can. It should look a little more purplish than the one shown in the photo above.

For something that costs 198 yen, it's a rather expensive can of soda. As far as I remember, a normal can of soda costs only 98 yen. Thus, 198 yen is more than double of a normal soda can. What's obvious here is that any retarded Final Fantasy fans (like me) would buy it even though it's pretty expensive, just because the can has pictures of DISSIDIA characters.

But I think it's okay to spend a little more money to have a little more fun :P

Friday, July 3, 2009

Can't post?

Something's weird. I can't post in my other blog. Argh.