元日だよ！明けましておめでとう！

Featured Girl

Kudo Risa

To translate the subject – “It’s the New Year! Happy New Year!”

Everybody has New Year’s resolutions in the west, but in Japan, everybody attempts to clean away the year before passing over into the New Year. When I say clean, I mean CLEAN, as in clean the house, scrub the walls, everything. Salarymen and entrepreneurs try to complete all their work so that they can start the New Year fresh. I did the same already, by going through all my stuff in the closet last week and cleaning out whatever I didn’t need. I threw away a lot of needless junk and made room for my new stuff, which includes some very nice calendars of Japanese architecture and Japanese girls. ^_^;;

Although I’m not one to make resolutions, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve been very lazy this past year, and I want to kick that habit this year. I made a lot of money and picked up a lot more gadgets and media than I usually do, and I also bought a nice badminton racket not too long ago, but I never got the chance to use it since I was working at TS (The Source) for the past three months. Now that it’s done and over with, I’m free to attend badminton club. I’ll attempt to go this Tuesday.

I realize that I’ve been lazy when it comes to updating this blog, as well as updating the other sections (I’m also well aware that the user profile link on my user icon to the right doesn’t work either). Accordingly, I’m not going to be posting media screenshots and content as much. I want to work on my own creativity this year, not exploit someone else’s. My writing has been rather lax, and I don’t think I worked on my drawing skills for more than one session either. I can’t blame the job, because I’ve had plenty of free nights prior to my three month stint at TS. Also, I’ll be vigorously looking into airfare and expenses for my hopeful, upcoming trip to Japan this summer. No more procrastination on my part. I keep ranting on and on about my obsession for Japan and all related things, but I haven’t been there since the 80’s, and I barely remember it, since I was just a kid and all.

So, I’m not really making any resolutions, but I have goals that I want to start fresh with this year. I’m going to start exercising more, which means badminton club and maybe jogging in the morning. I already eat healthy enough, so I’ll continue to do so. I plan to work on paying off my two major bills this year – my soon-to-come RRSP loan and my HSBC loan. I plan to go to Japan sometime between this summer and before the start of December. I plan to work on my writing and drawing more often, and this site will be making some radical changes in lieu of that – no more Japanese media posts.

One side project of mine is to get my Night Elf Rogue up to level 60 in World Of WarCraft. I don’t care if it takes me the whole year, I’m going to do it. I plan to average at least a level per day or two, so ideally, I should make it to level 60 in four months. We’ll see.

I noticed that not a lot of people voted for the Idol Awards Blog I set up in the last post. That’s fine. I only did it as an exercise of my video editing skills. I hope those who downloaded and watched the videos enjoyed my filmography projects. I have another big project that I’ve had in the works for a while, so I hope to be able to complete and post it (but it will most likely be large enough to be seeded on a BitTorrent tracker).

Japanese media is a huge part of my life now, so I’m not going to completely stop posting. I’ve recently started watching SCHOOL RUMBLE again. It’s such a hilarious series, but those who say that it’s like Azumanga Daiou with a continuous storyline is wrong. It’s completely different, but falls along the same vein of comedy with lots of ridiculous references to older manga and anime, whereas Azumanga was more focused on school life among girls. In my opinion, the atmosphere and writing style of Azumanga is far superior, since the author, Azuma Kiyohiko, doesn’t use fancy references and complicated plotlines, but focuses more on the characters to drive the storyline with no convenient plot twists. This is called good writing. I love Azumanga and Yotsuba To! because of the strong characters. Not that I like Sukuran any less, I love it!

I recently caught up with three episodes of Hana Yori Dango, episodes 5 to 7. I’m just about to settle in with some tortillas and guacamole to watch the last two episodes. So far, the story is very good. I have to admit that I’ve never read the manga, watched the anime, or the Taiwanese drama knockoff yet, but it’s definitely a manga I would gladly read. It comes with great surprise that I’m more of a fan of shoujo manga than shonen manga. Shonen manga mostly focuses on strong men or teenagers fighting and getting stronger so that they can fight some more (ie. DragonBall, Naruto, BLEACH). Not my cup of tea, but fun to watch in anime once in a while. Shoujo manga focuses on human relationships and on the whole spectrum of life itself. I read these more than usual (as well as watch the anime).

Today’s schedule – watch the rest of Hanadan, get my next level in WoW, and work on some writing.

以上。。。であります！