What A Wave Must Be

We had the final graduation practice today. We’re so close to being completely done with high school. The good news is that I will likely be able to walk without my brace by the time graduation rolls around. At least for what little walking I’ll have to do during graduation. Luckily I’m not giving a speech or anything, so I don’t have to worry about standing much.

We got out yearbooks today, which was fun. I kind of wish they didn’t make you write the little blurb for the senior pages so early in the year. Looking at it now, there’s a lot more stuff that I would have liked to add to it. Also, I have more pictures now that I would have liked on my page in place of the ones that are there. The whole yearbooks thing is rather disorganized, and I think I would have been a little happier with my page had things gotten together more quickly. Nevertheless, I do like the yearbook and it is nice to have it. My goal this year is the get signatures from the entire class.

In other news, I finally sat down and watched Advent Children. The story was interesting, somewhat, although it was sort of piecemeal and not really well put together. The whole Geostigma thing was sort of always just in the background, even though it seemed as though that was the major plot point for the whole story. And I never managed to figure out who the “Mother” that Kadaj was constantly referring to was. The animation and fight scenes, however, were very nice. I especially liked the scene where Cloud is fighting Kadaj and those two other guys on the motorcycles on the freeway and in the tunnels. All the spinning with the motorcycles and jumping around was really cool. The final battle with Sephiroth was really cool too.

Also, I must say that Nomura must have been really high on aerial battles and chopping up buildings, because there was a good deal of jumping and “flying” around and a great deal of slicing pieces of buildings in half, not only in Advent Children, but also in Kingdom Hearts. The final scenes where Sora is making his way to Xemnas were very reminiscent of the final scenes where Cloud is fighting Sephiroth. Of course, I’m not saying that all this is bad in any way. It’s just that Nomura seemed to have went overboard with it.

In travel news, it seems I’m going on two trips this summer. Around the end of June, I’m going for two weeks to Italy with Mom. We’ll be going to Venice and Rome and Florence and all those fancy places. I’ve wanted to go to Venice for a long time and I’m really excited that I finally get to go. Then at the end of August, I’m going with Dad to Japan and Hong Kong. Hong Kong isn’t terribly exciting for me as I’ve been there several times already and there’s not really all that much to see. This time, I would like to walk around the city a little more. I don’t know how easy that will be seeing as we are going in the summer and Hong Kong city streets turn into a veritable soup of perspiration and humidity in the summer. However, I would like to go to some outdoor markets and take some pictures of the shops and whatnot. Japan will be nice and interesting too, even though I’ve already been there once. I want to go back to Kyoto and walk around the city a little more. I’d also like to walk around Shinjuku and Ginza in Tokyo more, simply because of all the shiny technology. Then I’d like to go to some other parts of Japan like Osaka or Hokkaido. All in all, the summer’s looking like it’ll be fun.

Sometime really soon I’m going to need to prod all of my friends to get current e-mails and screennames and whatnot from them. I definitely plan on keeping in touch with at least Jon and Chuckee, if not other people. I got rather lucky as a lot of my friends are going to UCLA too, so I won’t have much trouble keeping up with them.

One weird thing I noticed a few days ago: After graduation at UCLA, I’ll have been going to school with Keegan for 17 years. We’re both thinking that, what with the majors we chose, we’ll both probably end up going to graduate school at UCLA, making it 21 years. And then by some strange coincidence, we’ll somehow move into apartments next to each other and then end up living our entire lives in really close proximity to each other. That would be really cool but also really weird and kind of scary at the same time. And then we’d have kids and they’d end up going to school with each other forever as well and it would result in a permanent intertwining of our families. That would be really weird.

Didn’t get a chance to post individual reports on the subsequent two days I went to Fanime, so I’ll do them all as one big post. I have pictures now to, so I’ll put those in as well.

We went back on Saturday at around noon. The day was essentially the same as Friday, with the wandering back and forth between the game room and the dealers’ room. I bought several more things, including a Domo-kun sweater, a plush of Jack Skellington, a VooDoo Baby, and that eye test shirt I was talking about before. I was a little disappointed that the booth had run out of them in my size; luckily, the person operating the booth was offering to ship the shirts to people with free shipping, so I did that. The shirt should be coming in the mail in a few weeks. I went back to the artists’ alley for a bit and looked around again. I picked up a bookmark from one of the booths that has these cool stylized clocks all over it. I was also thinking of getting an anime caricature done, but I didn’t think it was worth the money or the time.

When it came to the afternoon, we left the convention and went to a nearby theatre to see X3. The movie on a whole was alright, nothing terribly spectacular. It felt more like it was a just an attempt to squeeze more money out of the X-Men line, as there wasn’t much of a story and it was mostly watching big fights and special effects. Jean’s transformation into the Phoenix was not explained very well either and they didn’t even reference the Phoenix much at all. I believe her name was said only once. After that, she was just referred to as Jean. I didn’t really like her costumes and such either, but then that may just be personal opinion as I haven’t actually read any of the comics with Phoenix so I don’t know how she’s supposed to be dressed or look.

Another thing that bothered me a lot about this movie was that a whole slew of mutants were introduced for Magneto’s brotherhood, but only a handfull of them actually had names. There was one girl who had lots of tatoos and piercings and that actually played a somewhat major role for a supporting character, but she was never given a name in the entire movie. Magneto always just sort of gestures to her but never calls her by any name. There was also one particularly transvestite-looking mutant who could control sound waves. It turned out that she was a girl, but her costume and facial structure really did not suggest that at all.

My favorite line of the whole movie would have to be Juggernaut’s “Do you know who I am? I’m the Juggernaut bitch!” It’s priceless because of the accent and that he’s talking to Kitty Pryde, who is something like 13 years old. There is apparently a pop-culture reference that I don’t understand that makes this line even funnier, but I’ll leave looking that up to some other time.

After we watched X3, we got something to eat and then went back to Jon’s house. We dropped Adam off at his house because his parents are apparently still really controlling and overbearing on him, even though there’s pretty much nothing left to be controlling and overbearing about. Kevin came back to Jon’s house with us, though his dad dropped by to pick him up soon after. I found it amusing that when Kevin told his dad about the Warcraft 3 tournament he was in, his dad asked me if I played Warcraft, to which I answered that I didn’t, to which he responded, “Oh, good.” We all had a good laugh about that.

For the rest of the night, Pat, Jon and I played various imported PS2 games, including the FMA fighting game Dream Carnival and the third Naruto fighting game. Dream Carnival was great fun, especially trying to figure out how to actually play from the Japanese instructions. Every character in the game has a special attack that can be triggered after you charge up enough of your alchemy gauge. The attacks look really devastating and we had fun going crazy over using them and trying to avoid them when the NPC’s used them. It was a lot of crazy fun, especially playing with Armstrong and watching his artistic alchemy devastate everyone. I concluded that Roy was the most imba character of them all as his alchemy skills include a really long-range and damaging three-hit aerial and ground combo of multiple explosions. I would basically just stand in a corner and spam that to soften up the enemies and then go in with normal physical techniques and then finish everyone off with Roy’s special fire-dragon technique.

The Naruto game was equally fun. After playing around with some of the characters, I settled on one name Itachi. I haven’t watched the series at all, so I don’t know anything about the characters. I chose Itachi simply because he wore this long black trenchcoat with a flower pattern on the bottom and that he was really really fast at attacking and had an infinitely-ranged and pretty damaging special attack that I could use anytime, as long as I had enough chakra charged. Itachi can basically just land a couple of combos and then retreat to a corner and use this technique where he calls up a water-clone that teleports right next to the enemy and explodes. Once I’m out of chakra energy, I go back in for some more combos and charge up slowly and then retreat and do it again. It was pretty fun, but takes a while to do. That means that Jon would pretty much always beat me in the last stretch because I’d run out of chakra and he’d never give me a moment to charge up enough for another bomb to kill him.

The other character I played was a girl with a flute. I don’t know her name. Her main attacks all involve playing her flute and sending enormous shockwaves to the enemy. The attack is pretty fast and I managed to trap Jon in a long combo of about 57 hits using that attack exclusively. To balance it, the attack does barely any damage at all. For one battle, Jon and I both fought as her and got into this crazy frenzy of teleporting and attacking. The game mechanic allows you to teleport behind the enemy if you gaurd an attack at the exact same time the attack is being executed. This flute girl’s attacks are rather slow and easy to see coming, so Jon and I got into this loop of teleporting and executing the same attack over and over. Jon would charge in for an aerial, I’d teleport out of the aerial and into position to do my own aerial, which Jon would then teleport out of and so on and so on. I wish that teleporting didn’t require you to have chakra energy, because then that whole exchange would have gone on forever.

The next day, Sunday, we all woke up pretty early because there was a showing of Nescaflowne, a parody of Escaflowne, at 11:00 at the convention. I dropped home to take a shower and then we all met up at the convention. The line for Nescaflowne was pretty long, so we were waiting for some time. The movie itself wasn’t particularly funny, though it was pretty hilarious at times as well. After that was done, we went to the game room to try to kill some time. Pat and I played the Naruto game at the PS2, while everyone else went around and did other stuff. We went to Johnny Rocket’s again for lunch. After that, we milled about the dealers’ room until 5:00 when there was a Warcraft 3 tournament again. Things were actually looking pretty good for Kevin and Adam, though they both lost in end. By the time the tournament was over, it was around 9:30-ish. Pat had to leave earlier because his parents had decreed that he should be home that night. I really wanted to go get something to eat, but Kevin wanted to watch this Korean movie instead. That was done at around 11:00-ish. By that time, all the restarants were closed so we all decided to just go home. I got dropped off at the house and was surprised to not find anyone there. So I cooked some noodles and ate those and then went to sleep.

I’m not going back to the con today, as there is literally nothing left for me that would be interesting. Instead, I’ll just be sitting around and not walking. This is an activity I have not indulged in for a while.

Fanime Con, day one report behind the cut!

Yesterday was the first day of the Fanime Con anime convention. I went with Jon, Adam, Pat, Jeff and, much to everyone’s surprise, Kevin. The original plan was to meet at Jon’s house at around 10:00 and then carpool over there. I woke up a little late and then had to prod Dad out of slumber to get me there, so I was a bit late.

We got to the San Jose convention center sometime around 11:30, I believe and walked in to the registration desk. Somehow, the pre-registration lines were a lot longer than the normal registration lines, which is very unheard of for a convention. We got out badges and picked up some informational flyers and whatnot and then headed onto the floor.

Because it was so early, not many of the interesting things were open yet. The only thing that was open was the game room, so we went in there. The game room was divided into three little clusters, based on type of game. There was a PC cluster, a console cluster, and an arcade cluster. There actually should have been a fourth cluster for tabletop games, as was listed on the Fanime flyers, but there mysteriously wasn’t. We went over to the console cluster and pretty much everyone immediately gravitated towards the ‘Cube that had Smash Bros. loaded. The people who were there were pretty bad at the game, so Adam and Kevin managed to make quick work of them. I scouted around the rest of the console gaming area for other interesting games, but didn’t really find anything. They had a bunch of different Naruto games, one for ‘Cube and the other for PS2, which were perpetually crowded by herds of overweight, white, male cosplayers. It was very odorous.

I checked out the arcade section next. Again, they didn’t really have much that was terribly interesting. There were two DDR machines and also a Para Para Paradise machine, as well as several other Bemani-brand machines. They had numerous fighting games, including Soul Calibur II and something that looked a lot like Marvel vs. Capcom. There were also a good number of FPS games. I was disappointed that they didn’t have a version of Raiden. Raiden has to be my favorite game of all time. They had one top-down jet game, but it looked rather stupid. I was also rather annoyed that they hadn’t gotten the machines rigged to be free, so you still had to pay money. I suppose that this was a business move, as the convention wants to squeeze as much money out of you as it possibly can, but still, considering the cost of admission, I think that forcing you to pay quarters was pretty rough.

So we tooled around in the game room for a while until it was lunch time. Searching around the vicinity we found a Johnny Rocket’s and went to eat there. Hopefully, the bandaid-guy from my last experienece at Johnny Rocket’s hadn’t been transferred to this one. I ate some chicken strips while Adam had a BLT and everyone else had a hamburger. We tried to use the little jukebox thing but came to the conclusion that it was just a ploy to steal people’s nickels as selecting a song didn’t actually work and there were no signs around saying that the jukeboxes didn’t work. After lunch, we walked back to the convention. I bought some batteries for my camera on the way.

When we got back the dealers’ room was opening up, so we decided to go there. The room was filled with tons of little booths selling all manner of anime-related merchandise, mostly plushies and keychains, but also action figures, clothing, and even real swords. I splurged all of my cash on a set of three mini-keychains modeled after the Kingdom Key, the Ultima Weapon, and Sora’s crown-charm keychain charms, as well as a proper keychain shaped exactly like a Kingdom Key. I was intending to use the mini-keychains as ornaments on my phone, but I found that I couldn’t fit the little clasp through the hook on the phone. So now I’m just going to hook them to my backpack or something. Even if I can’t use them for what I wanted to, they are still majorly cool.

Among the other things that I wanted to buy were a plushie of Jack Skellington and another keychain-charm-thing called a VooDoo Baby. The VooDoo babies are these little dolls that are supposed to act like good luck charms and such. They’re all shaped like voodoo dolls and have really cool designs. When we go back today, I’m definitely buying one. There was also a really nice T-shirt that had a mock vision test on it. But instead of the normal random letters, it had letters spelling such classic phrases as “OMG”, “ROTF”, “UR EYES R TEH 1337″, etc. I am also definitely going to buy one of those when we go back today.

After mucking around in the dealers’ room for a while, we went out and checked the artists’ alley. I always like looking at the artists’ alley beacause all of the stuff is really really shiny and cool looking. There was one artist whose work I had seen online before, but that was about it. A bunch of the artists were drawing custom convention badges. I was tempted to buy one, but this was after I’d sepnt all of my cash, so I didn’t have anything on me. I am consistently amazed at how much artistic talent can be developed in such a short period of time while one is still so young.

We went back to the game room after that and Adam, Jeff, and Kevin signed up for a WC3:DOTA tournament. Kevin and Jeff were on one of the winning teams, so their photos are up on the Fanime website now. I played some of the PS2 Naruto game. It is pretty fun and the stylized fighting is pretty cool. The special attacks are pretty awesome as well. I suppose that if I’d actually watched the show, I would like it a whole lot more. REgardless though, the game was pretty cool.

After the first round of the DOTA tournament was done, the swap meet started up. We looked around there for a bit, but then decided that it was probably a good idea to go get something to eat. Jon, Pat and I went on our own, while Adam, Kevin and Jeff stayed behind for the second round of the tournament. We found a place that is essentially a combination of Tapioca Express and a Hawaiian barbecue to eat. I had some spareribs and a milk tea with boba. I have now concluded that milk tea is not so bad and will perhaps commence to order it more at restaurants. I sort of want to try the hot milk tea that my parents drink now. I fear that I am becoming more Hong Kong-ish every day.

We went home after that. Pat and I rode in Jon’s car. Somehow on our way to the freeway, we got horribly lost. So we just drove up 82 the whole way back to Jon’s house. When we hit Mountain View, I actually started recognizing streets that we could have turned onto to take us to the freeway, but I figured that it was safer to stay on 82 which was certain to lead us back to where we wanted to go, rather than trust some vague directions. This time, we should probably get directions for coming back as well.

So now I’m at Jon’s house. We all spent the night. Originally, it was just going to be me and Pat, but the Kevin decided he wanted to stay over too and then Adam decided he might as well also. I woke up sometime around 6:30, despite the fact that I went to sleep somewhere around 2:00. I think my sleep rhythm has finally been restored, after having been screwed up for quite a while. By sleep rhythm, I mean my ability to wake up consistently earlier the later I go to sleep. I believe it’s some notion of not wanting to waste the day by sleeping that makes me do this. I suppose my body figures that because I’m going to sleep so late, sleeping for any long period of time would waste a lot of precious hours in the day, so it must wake up earlier to save those hours.

Pictures of the con will come soon. I have yet to upload them. Since I decided to go back to free services instead of self-hosted, I have to watch my bandiwdth usage. Flickr restricts free users’ upload usage on a monthly basis, and I think I’m already at around 70%. Luckily, the month’s almost over, so I’ll be back at fully again soon.

To christen this new blog, here's a poem I wrote after reading through the Lit Mag.

four (the six and eight)

O ancient sea, shore, wind and flame

Ragining tumult, wood frame with ease
you snap. Bluest calm, tease me not.

Barren waste, the air hot and heavy–
you choke. Green grass, hold me gently.

Formless force, a city of stone
you crush. Flight, birds have known. Teach me.

Raging heat, I flee your sight–
you burn. Sun by your light I see.

O ancients four, through thee we begin.