Just finished watching Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora, i guess you better add this to the exclusive handful of anime that has made me cry, lol.

This so needs to be licensed for release over here. Such a great story, which is slightly tragic, but also happy. It also inspired me to buy a few of the novels that were mentioned in the show (all of them except for that 3 volume long WWII book… screw reading all that, lol!), one of which i mentioned a little while back (Night of the Milky Way Railway).

Overall, an excellent story. Altough the doctor acted like a twat throughout the whole show, but you do eventually learn his motivations and reasoning behind the way he acted (altough, you may have already guessed the reason earlier).

I advise anyone with access to the internet to go watch it!

Ok, after that positive review, here’s something i finished watching that wasn’t so good…… Koi Kaze….. the show was boring throughout, and the ending just plain sucked to hell.

Koshiro should have listened to Chidori, she was trying to help you, you god damn retard!!! But instead he decides to be a coward, and choose the option that will only cause everyone else pain. I mean, he quit his job, how’s he gonna pay for his house?? I assume he’ll move back in with his father, but how can their “relationship” work out when they’re living with their father?? What does he think’s gonna happen a few years down the line, does he think everyone would live happily ever after?? Of course not. The path he chose will only lead to hurt. He should have listened to Chidori, but instead he decides to throw everything away. What a crappy ending.

Koi Kaze did have one saving grace though, and that was the amazing voice acting (Japanese of course… god knows how crap the dub sounds in comparison), it was easily the best i’ve heard in a series. There was just a great sense of “realism” in everyone’s voice, especially the intense arguement between Chidori and Koshiro in episode 11.

Other than that, don’t bother with the series, unless you like to be bored to death, and enjoy watching retarded endings. >_<

Stuff to look forward to next month:

• Love Hina Novel 1 (Tokyopop releasing it)
• Disgaea TV series (I am so gonna do a Laharl cosplay at some point, lol. )
• School Rumble season 2
• .hack//roots (Yay, more .hack!)
• Nana TV series (must watch the movie at some point)
• My copy of the Wonder Momo-i tour DVD (and other misc music CD’s and DVD’s) will be arriving!
• Anime-all-nighter sometime towards the end of the month somewhere in london (Details seem sketchy at the moment, lol.)
• And much, much, more….. (well… maybe not)

So i’ve just finished reading Pita Ten… and it was bloody amazing!!! It’s now my second favourite manga.

When i first started reading it, i was fully expecting to sit there enjoying Koge Donbo’s beautiful artwork, and the storyline would just be something superficially tacked on as an afterthought. But boy was i wrong…

It starts out really cute, but by the 5th volume, it begins to get quite deep and intriguing. There were several occasions in the last few volumes where i was almost left crying on the train to work, lol. And the ending is just so meaningful and perfect. It might not be the ending i was hoping for, but what i hoped for just wouldn’t have been right.

The way Koge Donbo has handled the storyline in this, her first “extended” manga series is simply masterful. So now in my mind, not only is Koge Donbo a superb artist who can capture all sides of a characters personality, but she’s also a wonderfully intelligent storyteller, who can keep the audience intrigued and interested all the way to the end.

So i just wanted to say… thankyou Koge Donbo for producing such an excellent piece of work, which is not only cute, but is meaningful too. Keep up the great work, hope you come to England sometime!

Now i’m off to go buy Kamichama Karin… bye!

Finally after almost a year, i’ve bottled my Dandelion wine (the gorse wine is still waiting to be bottled). And here it is (click for full size):

Yes, i realise it looks somewhat like urine, lol. But it is made from dandelions, and that’s the colour they are! As for the taste, well, it’s certainly strong, definately not a table wine. It probably still needs more maturing, can’t really taste anything distinctively “dandelion” yet, and it’s a bit rough still. But definitely an improvement since i last tasted it in December!

Now for some more RF Online pics. Sunday was the first chip war i participated in, and it was certainly fun. It all started out so well for the Cora, we had a small group, headed towards the Accretian’s chip, hung back a bit and watched the Bellato fight it out with them. Once they’d both done killing each other we moved in to attack their chip:

That didn’t last very long though, the Bellato and Accretians came back… with force (a Black MAU, which single handedly pwned us!), it seemed the Bellato and Accretians had formed some sort of alliance against us, we were being pushed back.

It is at this point that i was invited into a party and we decided to run off and try to gank people in the core… that didn’t turn out too well either:

(AAaaa!!! The pain!!!!! )

So after we failed at ganking people in the core, the party dissolved, and we were left to return to the battle. By the time i got back, the Black MAU’s (there were now 2 of them) now had us pinned against our own portal while the Accretians were attacking our chip. Things were not looking good. Eventually with some direction from our race leader (At bloody last!!! God knows where he was for the rest of the battle!) we managed to push forward and get to our chip. We took out as many of the enemy that were attacking our chip as we could, and we somehow managed to defend our chip till the end. The battle was over, no-one was victorious.

Overall, 3 hours of non-stop action. Just wait till i’m lvl 30, my caster will pwn the damn Bellato MAU’s!!

Just something i was thinking about on the way home from work today…. which of the Mai-Hime (yes, i mean Mai-Hime, not Mai-Otome) characters best fits your personality? There’s enough variety there for everyone to be able to fit with someone right?

Well, i’d say my personality is most like Yukino’s (obviously), but maybe with a splash of Alyssa Searrs (in an… “i’m superior to you inferior people” kinda way ).

So who does everyone else most closely resemble? Post your replies using the “add comment” link at the top of the page.

Hmm, well i kinda neglected updating my site due to spending too much time in RF Online lol.

I bought it like a week ago, and i must say it’s one of the best MMORPG’s i’ve played (definately one of my favourites along with Ragnarok Online and Dransik).

Here are my thoughts on the game (pictures at the bottom):

Graphically it’s on a par with ffxi, altough the lack of in-game anti-aliasing is kinda stupid… but anyone with half a brain, and a decent graphics card can just set it to force the game to anti-alias stuff….. no jaggies… yay!!

The gameplay itself is pretty fun, and the whole PT levelling instead of focusing on your main level is kinda interesting (altough shield PT is slower to lvl than an OAP on crutches!). I’m actually having fun grinding my PT levels (which is more than can be said for some other bore-fest 24/7 grinding mmorpg’s *cough*ffxi*cough*). And the quests (altough slightly repetitive) add to the variety of the whole levelling system.

The economy is pretty good too… for once in an mmorpg you can actually afford to buy stuff, lol!! A few hours of afk mining and you’ll be raking in the money (that is… so long as you’re not killed during a chip war).

I’ve not had a chance to participate in the chip wars (big battle between the 3 races for control of the central mining core… happens 3 times per day) yet, as i’m too low a level to survive, lol, but i’m getting closer… lvl 21 currently. Just you wait Bellato and Accretia till i get to lvl 30… your ass will be mine!!

The way the race leadership, and race rankings works is pretty cool too… it gives you more incentive to participate in the chip wars and kill more of the enemy! The top 5 with the most conquest points (earned by completing quests and killing the other races) are granted the race leader positions… they’re the ones in charge of directing the battles during the chip war.

One final thing about this game that’s great….. everyone’s so friendly!!! There are like no screaming n00bs everywhere shouting stuff along the lines of “GIMME FREE STUFFZ OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!!1111″ every 10 seconds, like you get in other mmorpg’s *cough*WoW*cough*. In fact, earlier, everyone was having a fairly in-depth discussion on theology over the map chat on my server, lol.

Only bad things about it are… there’s quite a lot of translation dodgyness, grammatical errors, and other bits of the UI (such as item descriptions) that are just plain wrong. And the tutorial is buggy (and kinda rubbish anyway), and froze on me also. And it’s pretty impossible to alt-tab out of fullscreen in this game, and if you do manage to, then the music turns off when you go back to it.

But overall an excellent MMORPG, with an amazing community! Earth Server Cora FTW!!!

My character, a Cora Spiritualist called Lehou (click for full size):

The Cora Race Manager:

The bunny invasion failed:

Lots of people mining:

The Giant Bunny Of Doom (aka the Holystone Keeper):

It’s a pretty cool game… any Korean MMORPG fans should buy it!

Hmm… so what other stuff have i been doing eh? Well… i finally finished reading Imperfect Hero… quite funny, and an absolutely perfect ending. There’s not many manga you can say that about!

That’s all for now i guess.

So i’ve been doing a bit of reading recently, and i thought i might aswell mention it here.

The first thing i’ve read recently is a wonderful book called “Night of the Milky Way Railway” by Kenji Miyazawa (yes… that was the book from episode 3 of Hantsuki… i just had to buy it, lol ), i must say it’s been a long time since i’ve read a book that provokes the imagination in the ways that this book does, it’s simply great (i can imagine Mr. Heaton would have a field day on this! ). It tells the story of one boy (Giovanni) who, feeling lonely from the taunting he receives from his classmates runs to a nearby hill to seek some time alone. He is then whisked away onto a train for a nighttime journey alongside the banks of the Milky Way, and sitting opposite him for the duration of the journey is his only friend… Campanella.

I don’t want to give too much else away, but it is such a brilliant, fairly short book, it deserves to be read by everyone. If you do want to buy it, don’t buy the recent version of this book… apparantly the translation is all screwed up, and they changed all the character names and stuff. The 1991 version i linked to above on Amazon is regarded as the best one, as the translation is accurate, and it includes some nice extra notes at the back of the book giving deeper insight into the writer’s life, thoughts, imagination, and motivations. (P.S. if you do buy that version, *DO NOT* read the introduction at the front of the book, or the blurb at the back, they both spoil the ending of the story)

The other thing i read recently was this rather insightful article on virii, and the part they play in the evolutionary puzzle: http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-06/cover/

Please read both pages of that article, it’s very interesting, especially the fact that most of our DNA is just made up of virii that are “just persisting”.

Are virii “living” things?

What defines something as “living”?

Are we “living”?