After watching the recently subbed episode 31 of Kemono no Souja Erin, I felt inspired to go listen to some of its music.

I chose the OP Single -- Shizuku by Sukima Switch. On the CD there’s 4 songs: Niji no Recipe, Shizuku, A Angle, and Niji no Recipe (Backing Track). The one that I like the most and will probably have on repeat for awhile is Shizuku, which is the OP to the anime. A likely reason is that I’ve heard it countless times while watching the series and it grew on me. So whenever I hear the song, it reminds me of Erin and of the visuals from the anime.

This isn’t the version on the CD, but it’s both the same song and the new OP for the series beginning at episode 31:

Personally I like the old version better, but it’s still okay.

The image at the beginning of the post is from the inner back case cover. I don’t know what’s happening there, but it looks cool.

I decided to learn Japanese a while ago, but never really got around to doing so. Then I heard that the Genki books were pretty good for those aspiring to learn the language, which resulted in my purchasing of them.

I got the Textbook 1, Workbook 1, Answer Key, and Student CD 1. The latter two items were added on since I would be self-learning it and they seemed useful.

An insert in the textbook says going through the material should take roughly 200 hours for the 23 lessons. Seems like I have to somehow make time to go through a lesson a week.

So when I was in high school, they didn’t offer Japanese courses at my school. This resulted in me continuing from my 1 year in Spanish courses in middle school to have taken a total of 4 years in Spanish (3 in high school). Then the school decides to expand its horizons and offer Japanese courses the year after I graduate. I still can’t believe it. At least I learned Spanish, although I would have preferred Japanese.

Anyways, anyone else learning or want to learn Japanese? It’s always useful to add more languages to your repertoire.

It is quite possibly the hottest day thus far this summer here in the SF Bay Area. So hot that I lounged around the house all day and didn’t feel like doing anything.

I haven’t talked about manga lately, so here is a new series that I recently added to my reading list.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am proud to announce the details of a side project that I have been working on. Figure Haven is an online anime figure store that I started with my brother.

Read the rest of this entry »

While I was watching recent anime, I noticed the use of timeskips in two of the series I was following. Timeskips can be effective when used correctly to push forward the plot in order to bypass uninteresting details while characters are aging or events are being developed.

The first example, Kemono no Souja Erin, makes use of this twice and does an excellent job of it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I set up my Twitter earlier today, but then had to run to class afterwards. So here I am posting about it now.

I’m sure almost everyone already knows what Twitter is, so the short explanation is that it is micro-blogging with one sentence updates. While I am using melative to micro-blog about anime episodes I watch, my Twitter use will cover a more general area and be somewhat random.

You can read my updates or follow me at Reltair. I’ll probably add a Twitter widget on the sidebar once I get a few tweets going.

Try it out if you are hesitant about doing so! Then you can be like the cool kid in the picture above.

Image Source: reddit

Subterranean Animism is the eleventh Touhou Project game. The games are mostly made by a person called ZUN, who does all the graphics, music, and programming. Quite an impressive feat for one person to create this game AND compose catchy music. The Touhou Project games are bullet hell shooters, a concept that can be most easily explained by watching the video below.

The character being played in the video is Reimu. When I first started playing this, I mostly used Marisa but now I use the same Reimu shown in the video. However, I am nowhere near as good and I only just recently beat it on Easy mode. =/

It runs on Windows and is a fun game to distract yourself with when you need a short break or you’re waiting for an anime episode to finish downloading, which are the times when I occasionally play it.

Image Source: pixiv

Here’s an anime from the Summer 2009 season that I didn’t talk about yet. Princess Lover!

It seems like a lot of anime series have somewhat random or eccentric titles. Princess Lover? So someone that loves princesses? Hm, I wonder which girl the main character is going to end up with. >_>

Read the rest of this entry »

My Profile Pic on melative

I first heard of melative from Seinime and then decided that I would try using it after reading a post about it.

My thoughts so far? I’m new to the micro-blogging world since I still haven’t used the ever increasingly popular Twitter yet. Melative seems to have many neat features all bundled together. You can make quick updates on your stream like Twitter, you can friend other people, look up info about anime series, and etc.

Furthermore, there’s a nice Firefox plugin that lets you update and read your stream. Get it here.

I look forward to seeing everyone on there, give it a try if you haven’t already. Feel free to follow/friend me as well and I’ll do the same. It seems like it’ll be fun reading each other reactions/thoughts to an episode of anime after watching it.

On another note, I’ll probably set up my Twitter sometime in the near future…

Line to pick up badges

Just got back from Blizzcon today. Here are some photos I took during the two day convention.

Read the rest of this entry »