This time Big Bang was in KBOOM magazine which discussed their “Big Show 2010” concert they held in Korea.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Armed and Ready
Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Partially because I’ve spent the past few weekends earning money and having fun while doing it, but mostly because I’m just lazy.
But I’m taking the time now to put a few words down.
So, the thing I just want to mention is that after 2 months of having issues contacting anyone at Gundam Store and More, I finally got the issues with my gift certificates worked out and received the absolutely stunning Gundam 00 Exia 1/60 scale model in the mail yesterday that I only had to pay shipping on.
I’m a big fan of the Gundam universe and have done a several 1/144s and one 1/100, and this is by far the most complex model I will attempt to date.
It’s for this fact that I decided to actually do this one right. You see, I’ve never taken the time or made the effort to paint and fully detail any of my Gundams. But when you have a shiny new 1/60 sitting on your desk, you have to consider getting off your ass and doing it right.
Therefore, I spent the evening running around town to every hobby and craft store I knew of, which isn’t many at all in Tuscaloosa. But I was able to come away with $25 in spray paints that aren’t perfect matches for the plastic, but they’re so close that I’m sure I’ll barely notice…I hope.
I can be such a perfectionist about things like that and it’s becoming detrimental to my mental health. So if they aren’t spot-on, fuck it. I’m by no means a professional model builder, so I just have to do it and if it isn’t perfect just let it go.
Wow, that’s going to be difficult.
This will even be a chance for me to really break in those special Gundam panel lining pens I bought last year and never used.
So tomorrow will be an interesting day of me standing in the back yard hanging bits of plastic from the porch and meticulously spraying them down and having a fit over whether or not it looks good enough.
Considering the 1/100 Gundam 00 Dynames took me about 6 hours, I imagine this will take me an entire day of uninterrupted work, which probably won’t happen until Monday. Ugh! The anticipation.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
[PHOTOS] Big Bang featured in Japanese Magazine
Big Bang was featured in Japanese magazine while they were getting ready backstage at their Budokan show for their Electric Love tour.
Taeyang has such a nice side profile! What a hottie! ^^ and jiyongie looks so fine in those clothes~
Today’s Lunch Box/Bento (’10/15)
The Missus made this bento today because she is having her annual check-up tomorrow morning, meaning she will have to eat dinner before I arrive back home. Since I’m on a diet, I will do with a protein drink tonight!
In such cases she opts for “open sandwich” bentoes, with the result of an easyand healthy lunch.
She toasted English muffin and provided me with a small pot of salmon paste.
As for the garnish, it included lettuce, red radishes and their leaves and dip (I always eat the leaves!), seasoned salad of celery, cucumber and red cabbage, raw ham, cheese and walnuts and plenty of fruit: pink grapefruit, kiwi fruit and benihoppe/red cheeks strawberries. the latter two are grown in Shizuoka!
Colourful and plenty of Vitamins (real ones!)
RECOMMENDED RELATED SITES:
Warren Bobrow, Bread + Butter, Zoy Zhang, Hungry Neko, Think Twice, Frank Fariello, Mangantayon, Hapabento, Elinluv Tidbit Corner, Tokyo Terrace, Maison de Christina, Chrys Niles,Lexi, Culinary Musings, Wheeling Gourmet
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sake, shochu and sushi
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Monday, February 22, 2010
I *heart* Japan Final
It feels like I have been afk for a while now. Christmas, getting sick, lots of work, sick again then for some reason every game company decided they were going to release all of the big names this year in the first part of the year. Plus there hasn’t really been any new movies out that have peaked my interest. Now that I’m out for fresh air I should finish talking about my wonderful trip to Japan.
My nice wife let us spend a whole day at Otaku heaven, Akihabara. Its the nerve center for Anime, TV,Games, Manga, and Toys of Japan.
You know your there when you see this sign. This building is freaking huge. It’s the size of a department store, seven stories high, and full of hundreds of geeky stores and hobby shops.
See the gamers sign on the left? Another store thats seven floors high expect all about games.
Since there isn’t a lot space laterally, they take full advantage of storing things vertically.
There are more than enough to buy, but there are also cool things for you to drool over.
cool rare figure sets like this one from the anime Beck
Some stores were just packed full of collectables for every taste.
Seriously I could this whole post about them.
Ok this one was too cool not to show. The armor in Final Fantasy 12, life size.
Into cosplay? There was a six floor store all about it.
yes of course there was a club Sega there too.
Next day we went to Tokyo tower!!
getting closer
Took a shot looking straight up from the base.
Great view from the tower. It has a complete 360 view of the city.
Lots of crazy and artistic buildings. Wish I could have seen them at night.
My wife read online that somewhere in tokyo there is a statue of the king of monsters himself GODZILLA. Its really hard to find, but somehow we found it.
Godzilla can be found behind the Tokyo Toho building (duh), but right beside American fast food joint and the art park.
We weren’t the only ones in awe of Godzilla
So ends my adventures in Japan. It was a trip of a life time that will only be topped by another Japan visit. My next dream is to learn the language and one day go back absorb as much as I can.
Hopefully you enjoyed reading about Japan as much as I had reliving it. Now thats out of my system hopefully I can get to more movie reviews before the summer “blockbusters” get released.
Arrow
by Nao
ya, shi
An arrow is “ya” in Japanese. Arrows are also “ya.”
Yumiya means a set of a bow and an arrow.
If somebody asks you to do something ceaselessly, you are suffering from “ya no saisoku,” literally meaning a request like arrows. Saisoku means demand or a request.
“Time flies” is translated as the proverb, “kōin ya no gotoshi.” Kōin means the sun and the moon. The proverb means that time is like an arrow. As this example tells us, an arrow is analogous to a quick mover.
When you shoot arrows, you fit an arrow to your bow. This action is described as “ya wo tsugu.” The verb tsugu means “to fit an arrow to a bow.” If you do something like a rapid-fire series of actions, you do it in a pace of yatsugibaya. Yatsugi maens fitting an arrow to a bow; baya means rapid. This expression implies that when you shoot arrows, you need to fit arrows to your bow very quickly.
- Draw the sweeping stroke from the top.
- Draw the horizontal line touching the previous stroke.
- Draw the other horizontal line from left to right.
- Draw the curve. Make the line thinner gradually.
- From where the second and third strokes intersect, draw the shorter curve.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Australia threatens Japan over whaling program
Good for the Australians!!!
Refer to story. Source: Associated Press
By KRISTEN GELINEAU, Associated Press Writer Kristen Gelineau, Associated Press Writer
SYDNEY – Australia’s prime minister on Friday set a November deadline for Japan to stop its research whaling program that kills hundreds of whales a year in Antarctic waters, or else face legal action.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Australia would prefer to use diplomatic means to persuade Japan to end its hunt.
“If that fails, then we will initiate court action before the commencement of the whaling season in November 2010,” he told the Seven Network. “That’s the bottom line and we’re very clear to the Japanese, that’s what we intend to do.”
Australia, a staunch anti-whaling nation, has threatened international legal action against Japan before. Two years ago, it sent a ship to Antarctic waters to follow the Japanese whaling fleet and collect videos and photographs it said might be used as evidence in an international forum. So far, the threats have not been followed up.
Japan hunts hundreds of mostly minke whales — which are not an endangered species — in Antarctic waters each year under its whaling research program, an allowed exception to the International Whaling Commission’s 1986 ban on commercial whaling. Whale meat not used for study is sold for consumption in Japan, which critics say is the real reason for the hunts.
Rudd’s threat came on the eve of a visit to Australia by Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada. Whaling is expected to be a key topic of conversation when Okada meets with Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith this weekend.
On Wednesday, a group of conservationists clashed with Japanese whalers in the Antarctic Ocean, the most recent in a string of increasingly aggressive confrontations between U.S.-based activist group Sea Shepherd and the whaling fleet.
Sea Shepherd activists threw bottles of butyric acid at Japanese whalers and blasted their ship with paint, while the Japanese returned fire with water cannons. No one was injured, but Japan condemned the conservationists’ actions as dangerous and violent. Sea Shepherd officials said they are simply doing what is necessary to protect whales.
Sea Shepherd has long used butyric acid, produced from rancid butter, in their annual fight to stop the whalers and maintain the substance is nontoxic.
Earlier this month, Japan claimed three crew members on one of its whaling vessels suffered face and eye injuries from an acid attack.
On Monday, Sea Shepherd activist Peter Bethune jumped aboard the Shonan Maru 2 from a Jet Ski with the stated goal of making a citizen’s arrest of the ship’s captain and presenting him with a $3 million bill for the destruction of the Ady Gil.
He was taken into custody by the whalers and will face charges in Japan of trespassing and assault.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully said officials had spoken with Bethune by telephone on Thursday and were assured he was being treated properly. Bethune indicated he was happy to remain on board the Shonan Maru II and return to Japan with the vessel, McCully said.
On Feb. 6, Sea Shepherd’s ship the Bob Barker and a Japanese harpoon boat collided, causing minor damage to both vessels. And in January, a Japanese whaler struck Sea Shepherd’s high-tech speedboat Ady Gil, which sank a day later. No one was seriously injured in those incidents.
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Wednesday, February 17, 2010
A Japanese Adventure- Before It Even Starts
Well Chris has made it safe and sound to his final Japanese destination—Niseko. His journey wasn’t without its bumps, though. After finding out that he had booked his connecting flight from New Chitose to Niseko on the wrong day (arrive in Tokyo Sunday afternoon, but booked connecting flight for Saturday, rookie mistake), he had to do a bit of reconfiguring.
Anyway, after the mix-up he managed to rejigger the schedule so it looked a little something like this:
Depart JFK, arrive in Naritu
Stay at K’s House Hostel
Depart Haneda, arrive in Niseko Village
Looking at that schedule, and thinking about traveling alone, in a country where the language is not my own, combined with that subway map from my previous post— I gotta say, I don’t know if I could do it on my own. Chris’s ability to travel on his own, such long distances, to such foreign places where he doesn’t even speak the language, it amazes me.
Other than the fact that the hostel was great, and that he went on a short adventure with some people he met there for sushi and to see some ancient temples and ruins (I seriously cannot wait to see those photos), so far, the most I’ve gotten from Chris’s emails is that the people in Japan seem very friendly, and that everything is extremely punctual. He also was surprised at the lack of technology he’s found so far. There was no internet hook-up in the airport or the hotel, which seems crazy to me. More to come on that later…
Back on the home front, Steph and I finally did end up booking out flights and hotel in Rome. We’re flying out on a Sunday in May and arriving in London Monday morning. We’ll stay with Chris’s sister Monday and Tuesday night, and then board a sleeper train to Rome on Wednesday. We’ve got a cute little B&B booked for our Rome stay (at least we hope it’s cute!), and then we’ll fly out Monday.
But I don’t want to talk about flying out yet! For now, I want to talk about all the fun day trips we’re going to plan, and all the lovely sisterly bonding we’ll do while there.
Till next time, bis bald my friends…see you soon!
First time
Hey all, this is my first blog ever so i dont really know how to start… Guess i start abit about myself and we see where it goes =)
My name is Daniel (Will be using Dan though) im a 26 year old guy that has a brain that goes on auto shuffle so i might sound wise sometimes or just plain stupid, either way i am still me! I live in Sweden and for some of you that dont know it´s in Europe =P. I have 2 older sisters and a mother and father. A few of my intressts are: Listening to music, melbourne shuffle, playing games sometimes. Being with friends and just living is a must.
In two months i will be going to Japan to study the language, and i suppose i should be much more excited then what i am right now… In the beginning when i first started all this a year ago i saw it as an escape of my life, i was not very happy with my current situation… Maybe if i explain some more? Have tons of things going on in my head so i think some things may sound random but bear with me =)
My life up to winter 2008 wasent really anything special, just a ordinary guy living on. I admit i did play to much computergames because it was my way of getting from reality. My family have been broken in many ways and well, sometimes it just felt as a ship going down. I know everyone did their part to try to keep up the mask of an happy family but anyhoo that winter my girlfriend broke up with me for another guy (Which she didnt have feelings for at first but one month later apperently did, shocked? I think not!) And that´s when i actually were going to take my life, cowards way? Yes it was, but i was to chicken to actually do it. I was depressed and this hit me harder then anything before. I was really depressed, turned to alcohol alot as it made the pain go away, atleast for a while but it still counted. But to get to some kind of end to this post lets just say that i managed to get a grip of life and i have always wanted to go to Japan so why not go on a study trip? Was an impuls decision but i did it. I wanted to go away from the painful memories, leave this sad place behind and prefebly just leave for good… So i thought and here we are at present time when i quote myself: In two months i will be going to Japan to study the language, and i suppose i should be much more excited then what i am right now… Yes why am i not more excited? I have always wanted this so why do i feel incredibly sad about going? I tell you people why: I started to like what i have. I started to hang out with an old childhood friend, i got a new work coullege (mind spelling…) that make me happy, we laugh alot togheter. All my instalment´s have been payed, i am actually having a good economy now. Lots of mixed feelings going around and i cant talk to anyone about it because i dont really have anyone that would understand. Been trying to talk to a few but let´s just say i gave up on that. So i have all this feelings inside of me and now when i am getting closer to the depart i am asking myself: Do i really want this? I will be gone for a year, will my friends still be here, will the girl from work still be here? We have only been talking for like 5 months give or take 1 but she really could make me feel happy when i was down… I am going to Kyoto with a guy i have never met, but talked alot on the phone with. Yeah he feels like a great guy, i think i will have good fun with him over to the east. But a year… 12 months, 365 days, 52 weeks do i really want this? I still dont know and it bugs me like hell. I dont really know how to handle this because it´s like in the lyrics of a really cool song i have been listening to the last couple of days: So fine this day, all your problems have gone away but tommorow, when you wake up, all your problems are back to stay! (If you want i can give you the group and track name ;p) I just feel helpless right now, watching time go as it draws closer to the trip but i dont wanna cancel it either. Dammit i hate this….
Well atleast i feel abit easier now when i got to spill out abit of my thoughts into words, if anyone found this intressting just drop a few comments or something =) I gonna go to bed now i think, got work tommorow and it´s rather late now so take care everyone!
Monday, February 15, 2010
Full Metal Alchemist:Brotherhood Review
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, episode 1 dub.
As expected, the new Fullmetal Alchemist series kicked EPIC ASS.
One of the big concerns people had was the performance of Maxey Whitehead as the new voice for Alphonse Elric, the co-protagonist for the series. My personal opinion is that she does an amazing job. She’ll never replace Aaron Dismuke, the original voice actor for Alphonse, but she certainly does a bang up job of it! Alphonse sounds a little more mature now, with a somewhat noticeable feminine tinge to his voice you would obviously expect since his new voice actor is a woman. For a relatively unknown voice actor like Maxey Whitehead to play the role of a very popular character in a very popular series like Fullmetal Alchemist and risking the wrath of the fans for a poor performance took guts and i’m glad to say she pulled it off!
All in all, a beautiful job! Mike McFarland (ADR Director) and the crew made another amazing anime for all. The most painful part of the entire episode was all the damn commercials!
Some critique: Unfortunately, for the TV version of the series they cut the intro song short to about 30 seconds, as opposed to its original minute and a half. Personally, I think they should have shortened the commercials instead of the intro.
I didn’t like how the first episode is complete disjointed from the manga series, where Brotherhood is supposed to be almost 100% based off the manga. I suppose the logic behind that was the copyrights behind the first episode of the original series, which would have been the logical start for the first episode of Brotherhood, followed by the Lior arc as the first manga happens. For anyone who hasn’t seen the subbed episodes yet, this will be an initial source of confusion, since they’ve been told for months that the series is manga based. But if they stick around for another few episodes, it’ll become clear that something rare and magical has been achieved in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood: an anime that is almost 100% true to the manga that inspired it.
True to manga
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Buy these three items for $75 and you’re saving over $400 from retail price.
Tehama Golf shirt: Retail $90. (remember tag says Med, its a Large)
Alfani black sport jacket: Retails at Macy’s for $250,
MEK Jeans St Barts Boot Cut Size 36W x 32L Mild distress: Retails at Nordstroms for $165
If you buy the pack, all three items, your total cost will be $75
Tehama Golf Shirt - Clint Eastwood's golf apparel line.
MEK jeans St Barts 36W x 32L Button Fly-Zone. MEK St Barts are extremely rare.
Authenticity tags
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destroyed patch-backside upper right
MEK St Barts backside
Friday, February 12, 2010
One of those 'Only in Japan' Moments
A few days ago my partner and I went to the Vietnamese Embassy in Tokyo to apply for a visa (which we failed at doing because they only issue visas a month prior to entering Vietnam. Paul called but apparently the person on the other end of the phone was sure that we could do it now, even if we wanted to enter in May, so) and on our way back we passed a garbage truck… with this attached on the back.
I love the fact that garbos can get away with this kind of thing here. <3
Have a close up:
AWWWWWWWWWWWWW.
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