Category: Anime, Manga, Etc

Might as well begin the week with some shameless self promotion! Here’s a little Google Gadget that I originally wrote for their recent gadget contest. It’s really a lightweight version of its .Net big brother, Proliphus JFC, but this one includes the diacritics too. I’m hoping to add sound and card printing once I get some more time. You can also get this and more on my Widgets Etc. page. Enjoy!

Description

The Japanese flashcards gadget displays the Hiragana and Katakana character sets. Clicking a card will display its Romaji name. Cards may be displayed in order or optionally shuffled.

This gadget uses unicode to display Japanese characters and should work on any system that supports Google Desktop and unicode.

Click here to download.

During a provisions run for this past week’s hospital drama, I had the pleasure of finding that Pocky is now on sale at the Dominick’s on Roosevelt Road. Oh joy! In just a couple of short years, Pocky has gone from that special treat only to be found (by me at least) at anime conventions and Mitsuwa Martketplace, to being nearly mainstream in the Asian foods aisle of the local grocer! With only chocolate and strawberry, it isn’t quite a full scale Pocky invasion just yet, but I for one still welcome our new Pocky Overlords!

This has been a day of pretty good news so far. First, my youngest son may be coming home from the hospital in time to trick or treat afterall! Today he seemed very much himself, and the doctors seem to think that he can come home soon. Yaaaaaay! 😀

And some news of lesser magnitude is the completion of the Inuyasha costume for my oldest son in time for Halloween. What he didn’t tell me until last night was that he was hoping to win best costume in the afterschool program he goes to. I certainly wasn’t thinking about any competitions while I was working on it! Anyway, he’s pretty pleased with the results, so I took some pictures this morning to share with my wife and his younger brother and now I’ll share them here as well.

It could still use some tuning up, but so far everyone who’s seen the pictures has had a favorable reaction, including the mostly costumed staff at the children’s hospital who have been fantastic! Oh so much drama over the last few days… Anyway, on to the pictures!

Oh yeah! He made the ears, the Tetsusaiga, and the necklace. This little guy was also the one who was the spiritual spark that ignited my costume making and my own entry into cosplay! I love the way he thinks too. It was his idea to use Inuyasha plushie dolls to solve some of the design problems I ran into making the costume, genius, pure genius!

I just got my pictures from Reactor 2006 up. Just click the link below. Enjoy!

Reactor 2006 Cosplay Pictures

I attended Reactor this weekend at the Purple Hotel and the first thing I’ll say is that I had a good time, a better time than last year. So today, back at work is a bit of a let down, so on that note, I’d say Reactor was a successful convention.

After years of taking pictures of cosplayers, I finally joined the parade as a cosplayer myself. Was it successful? I do not really know. Personally, I don’t think I make a very good Kagome, though I did get some compliments on the costume. The first reaction I got though was a very loud WTF from an unseen hotel staffer, who probably wasn’t familiar with anime conventions or cosplayers. But I really didn’t feel insulted by any of this at all. Indeed, I was quite pleased to have inspired any reaction at all, particularly a strong one. The first day, Friday was the toughest in terms of being nervous because there weren’t that many cosplayers about so it felt a little awkward. Saturday was much much better! There were so many people in costume, that it seemed almost compulsory to be dressed up.

Saturday was the best day for me. I met up with some cool people I’d met over the summer and I got a lot of cosplayer pictures. I even had a few people ask to take mine. A couple of women even said that I looked cute! Later that night I got a “don’t you look sweet” comment from a “normal” guy checking into the hotel, which was probably not a compliment, but I thanked him for the comment and continued on. Again, I think I got a real kick out of inciting any kind of reaction. It actually felt quite good, and very very naughty to be doing this.

The delicious naughtyness reached its peak at the Meltdown dance, which, like last year, got started late, though not as late as before. As I’ve written before, dancing today isn’t what it used to be. Most people end up watching people show off their moves solo, or dance solo, perhaps near some other friends. One girl to one guy dancing seems to have become rather uncommon at these conventions. So I didn’t waste time looking for any dance partners. I just wanted to dance, so I found a spot and just started to shake it. Dancing in drag turned out to be a lot of fun, and I guess a few other people thought so too, as before long I seemed to have a number of guys show up nearby. I really don’t know how many thought I was a real girl because no one asked, but I did have the impression that people were checking me out. Sorry to disappoint, but I did appreciate the consideration. It was dark, they were drunk, nuff said…

In the end, I think I may have had enough fun to last the next couple of months. It was especially fun to get a little taste of how the other half lives. I’ll post some pictures and write more later. I got a lot of good shots of really good cosplays. I only have one of myself and I really don’t like it very much…heh heh… so I probably won’t post that one! Aren’t I just a little biatch? :3

First let me get just one thing out of the way. Painting your face is a helluva lotta fun! Guys who have not tried some make-up do not know what they are missing. I got some help from this really nice lady named Linda at the State Street Macy’s and after some practice at home, I’ve got it down! So I’m all packed and ready for a little cosplay at Reactor! This is going to be an interesting weekend indeed. And the double bonus is finally finding something that weirds out my very liberal wife, crossplay. Though in her defense, my enthusiasm for the project may be slowly winning her over! I am a baaaaad man!

There’s such a thrill making something you can wear from what starts out as a bunch of unconnected bits of cloth! Last night I finally finished the cuffs for the costume I’m working on, and the end results are pretty good, which says a lot considering that I know I made a lot of mistakes! The next time I make a schoolgirl uniform, I’ll do a much better job. Something seriously wrong with that last sentence I think… Hey, it’s just cosplay! /wink

There are just a few more weeks until this year’s Reactor and my first foray into cosplay, and now I find myself with not just one cosplay project nearly complete, but two! Once I started making things, the JoAnn’s fabric store I get supplies at took its place alongside the Microcenter and Home Depot as places that fire my imagination and inspire me to create new things! My second project is a more modest mini cosplay of Yukino Miyazawa’s dad Hiroyuki in Kare Kano. I like the silly “I Love My Daughters” shirts that he wears, so I decided to make one of my own. Unfortunately, the kanji on the shirt are translated in the English version of the manga and I don’t have the anime episodes or anything online to use as a guide. But I did see the first kanji, musume (daughter) in a manga panel that was not translated. So using that little scrap of info plus a Wikipedia entry that said that the shirt says “Daughter Love”, I used my limited Japanese skills to guess that the front of the shirt probably says musume ai. The back of the shirt is translated as “My Daughters Are My Life”, which I took to be musume no seikatsu. I checked the kanji with my Chinese wife, so even if it isn’t exactly what is on the shirt, the meaning makes sense, so the character should be recognizable to fans of Kare Kano. I made a simple stencil to form the kanji painted with white fabric paint on a black t-shirt. So far it looks pretty good. I hope to finish the back tonight and then I’ll get to work on a Pero Pero plushie as an accessory. Maybe I’ll make him a bag.

Despite reminders everyday of the selfishness that humans can express, I think that fundamentally we want to share ourselves with one another. I think everyone wants someone to understand what they are about, even if we aren’t sure of that ourselves.

To that end, it was with great pleasure that I got the chance to watch Mobile Suit Gundam III with my wife last night at the Columbia College Asian Animation Film Festival. She only tolerates my love for anime, manga, and various elements of Japanese pop culture, in part because she’s Chinese. So getting her to go see a feature length production with me was no small feat, but I think she’s been trying to be nicer to me lately. <3 The good news is that she didn't totally hate it at all. She said it was interesting, and I really had fun filling in the details of the various characters for her and expounding on how many of them are repeated in the many parallel Gundam series. I hope that maybe she has just a little better picture of what makes me tick, through the things I like. We've been married for a long time, but even now there are so many things left to learn about each other.

Over the last week I’ve witnessed not one, but two downtown Chicago promotions that involved lots of people dressing up in costumes and making a commotion. The first had people dressed as fruit shouting and carrying picket signs for Naked Juice (and giving away samples, yum!). The second featured perhaps hapless employees dressed as orange and white cows (yes it was cowsplay) for ING Direct. I got a bad cell phone pic of the hapless cowsplayers. The people were probably not regular employees, but it still takes some guts to get dressed up like that even if you’re getting paid. I wonder how many of them actually do cosplay for fun? Hmmm, I wonder how many may actually be turned to cosplay after this gig?

Morning time is not the time one expects to get one’s socks blown off. Indeed, during most of the morning one usually isn’t wearing any socks at all! Nevertheless, I find myself having go and put another pair on at what I just witnessed.

I got a rare (for me anyway) peek at one of my youngest daughter’s drawings in progress. She’s a little smarty-pants perfectionist who usually won’t let anyone look at her drawings before they are completed, and perhaps not even then. But this morning, I was allowed a peek and was totally blown away. Looking at her drawings of scenes with various Naruto characters, I could easily mistake them for the work of her older brother. So in a very short time it looks like she’s caught up with him! I can’t wait to see how her own unique style develops as she continues to draw!

Perhaps it was only vanity if not cosplay per se, nevertheless, I think I may get some more years on the planet out of the deal. It all started with the crazy idea, fueled somewhat by my experiences at Otakon this year and the creative enthusiasm of my son, that I should do cosplay. So one of the first things I thought about was weight. I’d been trying to lose weight for a while previously with limited success, but now I was doubly motivated to do so. I got really serious, and the pounds have begun to come off. Next, the character I’m doing doesn’t wear glasses, so it was time to get contacts. I hadn’t been to my eye doctor in ages, so I was overdue. Little did I know what this would lead to.

My doctor checked me out and she noticed that my prescription had changed significantly in some weird ways. So she said I should go get a physical and some tests. This didn’t seem to be good news at all. But, I had been planning to do that sometime this year anyway (yeah right…) so I went ahead. To make a long story short, the doctor found some things that needed attention that are being addressed. So the cosplay can go on, and I get to live a few more decades in good health! Yeah, I’m putting a nice spin on this, but I really really hate being reminded like this that I’m not a kid anymore!

I had some extra fun on the way to work this morning. I was poking around in iTunes 7 when I remembered that I thought I’d seen something somewhere that said that Ayumi Hamasaki albums were available on the iTunes US store now. So I checked it out and w00t! Ayu albums on iTunes! So I bought one of the RMX remix albums and the Fairyland EP. Then I quickly burned the RMX album to a CD to play in the car on the way to work. Yes! <3