A Short Ode To White Coffee

Happy Halloween! In celebration, I present to you a short ode for one of my favorite drinks.


Oh white coffee when I stare into your eyes, do you stare back at mine?
For where on earth should I taste an ambrosia as divine?
3 parts milk to one part coffee you be,
Sleep tonight I may, but I'd rather be with thee.

The Unknown

There are times as a gamer when something so unpredictable, so horrifyingly foreign, so hideously absurd happens that one knows that they'd be a madman to press that 'save' button. Yet the save button is there, offering passage into a completely new world, a completely new experience. People like me often hit that save button, as a smaller act representative of our journey towards the banishment of ennui. Nowadays, there isn't as much of a dilemma since you can just save it into a separate save file, but on older games you didn't have this option.

Now, I'm not particularly proud that I play The Sims. On the contrary, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I play it, though my elitist frozen heart is slightly consoled by the fact that I'm still playing The Sims 1 when everyone else has moved on to The Sims 3. Until just recently, the only version of The Sims I had played was the original, expansionless. My friend also owned House Party and I think I got to borrow that for a while as a kid but lost the disk shortly after burning it from his copy. I recently (*cough* legally *cough*) acquired all of the original Sims expansions in the form of The Sims Complete Collection, and I was a bit disappointed that I was unable with the Complete Collection to install the add-ons one by one. Since that was the form I wanted to try them out in, I was slowly building families specialized to take advantage of all the features that I perceived to be part of each individual expansion.

As I was going through the House Party expansion, one of the moments that I described in the first paragraph happened. I had gone about building my house to gear it towards throwing parties, with a small section for my Sim and his wife to live in and the rest containing massive dance floors, a large pool and hot tub, buffet tables, a single bathroom with both male and female doors on them, a karaoke bar, and a volleyball court. Now, I didn't know precisely what everything I bought did, but you can usually figure it out without too much guesswork in The Sims. One of the items I bought for parties was a firework stand. I naively thought it would innocently give a firework show and all the partiers would sit around blindly clapping like the dumb Sims they are. So here I was, throwing a party with tens of Sims at my house, and I think 'Lets set off some fireworks, woohoo!'. Well it turns out, the fireworks can fall back down to the ground and start a fire. Okay, not a big deal, except I had the fireworks next to the volleyball set. Anyone who's played The Sims sees where I'm going with this, but the ENTIRE volleyball set caught fire. The volleyball set is easily the biggest item you can buy in all 7 expansions, at 9x5 squares. Immediately after, the main female Sim whom I spent several hours on, killing her dog, making the main male character marry her, etc, caught fire. This blew me away. The sheer odds that an item that I thought was safe would cause a fire WHEN there were tens of other Sims at the house and make the biggest fire physically possible have got to be a hundred to one.

The Sims is largely a big RP game, and the concept of saving the game to the devastation that occurred and thinking of feasible reactions each of the different families involved in the fire would have was a very large challenge that I chose to take for the sheer hell of it and because the concept appeals to me aesthetically as an actual realistically unpredictable event happening within the confines of a video game. I failed to get good pictures when the fire started, but below are some pictures of after it happened with the subtitles I gave the pictures(And some with the default subtitles). Keep in mind what I said about The Sims being an RP game; I had to be a bit dramatic with some of the subtitles.

As an aside, this was the first time I really noticed the Grim Reaper system that I think the 'Livin Large' expansion introduced. I found it a little strange that Sims were not programmed to automatically plead for the lives of people who they cared for.

"Claire has burned to death!"

"Cornelia has burned to death!"

"Ester has burned to death!"

"Fanny has burned to death!"

"Cameron has burned to death!"

"Trip has burned to death!"

"The aftermath of the great fire..."

"Of course, the men from the Fire Department didn't arrive until it was practically over..."

"As the Grim Reaper claims his grotesque prize, the last of the horrified onlookers leave."

"The aftermath
exit Grim Reaper, aand curtain!"

"His wife Claire Train now a zombie, one can only wonder how poor Crazy will handle the stress."

"How fitting that the cause of the fire should be forced among the ranks of the living dead for all of eternity."

Apathy Series

So there's this series of Visual Novels that I'd like to introduce. They've never been translated to English, but from what I've seen of them and what I have been able to play of them, I've been lead to believe that they're brilliant.

One day I was innocently trying to ID eroge cg as I often do when I came across a blog containing this picture and the caption "MiColle's Arai-san's 'Nice Smile☆'----Too cute! lololol" in Japanese.

ミッコレでの荒井さんの　ナイス・スマイル☆ ----可愛すぎるｗｗｗｗｗ

This image fascinated me greatly. For one thing, the art style is eerily flat and non-revealing yet detailed and proportional, and the expression on Arai's face is incredible. After much searching, I found that the game in question is called Midnight Collection, and is a collection of horror stories presented in Visual Novel form. It comes from a set of games sharing the same characters and is called the 'Apathy' series. The series started with the 1995 game 'Gakkou de Atta Kowai Hanashi'(lit. A scary story that was/happened at school school) for the super nintendo and has had several releases. The Visual Novel Database shows 4 games, but Japanese Wikipedia shows a couple more. After scouring Youtube for videos of gameplay or fan videos I came across a couple videos which continue to fascinate me. One of my main purposes of this post is to shows those videos to you, but I also hope to introduce you to the series, and perhaps also drive up demand for a translation of the series, by however little. In all honesty, games like this motivate me to study Japanese in my spare time.

Imagined Poetry Now 'Mature'

In anticipation of tomorrow's post I just flagged the site as mature. In a spirit of celebrating the occasion I present to you:

Futanari!*

Groping!**

And Adorable Little Kittens!*

*This image in no way, shape, or form represents or condones beastiality.
**The fictional people depicted in this image are definitely, definitely not in any way, shape, or form related by blood or otherwise.

Fall 2009 Anime

It's been a long run guys, but I'm finally quitting blogging due to real life commitments. I sincerely hope that those of you I've made friends with through these means will keep in touch after I leave.

Thanks for putting up with me through my gaming posts and seemingly pointless rants about Seinen classification not being based on the magazine it's serialized, plotless anime being okay but most of them being not for me, and saying that J-pop sucks. I hope I haven't made too many enemies. Well then, until we may meet again. Ja.

So, what anime of the fall season is worth watching? It's too early to tell, give me some space guys, geez.

"We're from literature, so we're allowed to commit suicide intelligently!"

Aoi Bungaku(Blue Literature) - I haven't seen many literature adaptations in anime, but the ones I have seen all suck. They usually have terrible-average animation, slow pacing, unwillingness to diverge from anime norms, unwillingness to diverge from the original script, and they're usually based off of source material that isn't too exciting itself. Aoi Bungaku is a refreshing change from this. The animation of the first episode has been compared by many to Kurozuka(That show that suckered me into watching it with a brilliant first episode and was Seinen weirdness from the second episode on). I tend not to remember music from shows, but I just remember that the mood was always where the music was, and vice versa. In particular there was a very short electronic piece about 9 minutes into the first episode that really drew my attention. I'm a little scared that the animation style won't be as novel when the animation staff changes, but only Watanabe can tell what the future will bring(For indeed, he is a creator of the future).

Armed Librarians; Our anime is so cool we needed a subtitle in English - Only watched the first episode. Doubt I'll continue past the second. I just couldn't get excited about the action scenes, and it looked(to me) to be another show with great plot, but that just couldn't transcend past standard anime conventions.

Darker Than Black: Ryuusei no Gemini(Darker Than Black: Gemini of The Shooting Star) - Phew, took long enough to type the title that now I don't wanna talk about it. Okay okay, it looked interesting. Interesting enough to make me want to go back and watch the original show. I don't really need to give you my opinion on a sequel. If you saw the original you know what to think of it, and if you didn't you should be checking out the original.

Kampfer - Dropped after episode 2. Not too into the art style, and the plot progressed pretty slowly too. If you're hardcore about gender swap yuri, take a gander at it I suppose. I'm just not too into that kind of humour and plot.

Kimi ni Todoke(Getting Through To You) - I dropped this after one episode, but plan to return. I thought this would be one of those Shounen romance drama I hate so much(more on this later), but it turns out it was serialized as a Shoujo. This doesn't make it much better, it just means that the main characters should actually have a clear relationship. This doesn't bug me nearly as much somehow.

Seriously, how can you not fall in love with that smile?

Kobato - Currently debating continuing watching it after two episodes. Kobato's the sort of character that guys like me fall in love with instantly, and it's animated by Madhouse, who brought us such classics as Akagi, Chobits, Dennou Coil, and Paprika(Notice the omission? Good for you, now go wank off to your Light x L doujin). What could go wrong, right? Using a stuffed animal as your only source of intentional humour, that's what. Not that the series would be significantly better without that...stuffed animal thing, it's just that it would take itself so much more seriously. We'd be left to derive our humour from Kobato's silliness and her lack of knowledge about the human world. This would, in my opinion, be a large step up from the constant yelling/cowering act that we're supposed to laugh at.

"I will get annoying, even if you might not realize it yet."

Kuchuu Buranko(Trapeze) - I'm looking forward to the second episode, but can't help but think that the little doctor guy constantly popping out of nowhere and lecturing on psychological terms was anything but helpful. Maybe if you wanna be a psych major, but I don't, and don't really care about the formal names of disorders shown in the show either.

Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu: Purezza(The Secret of Haruka Nogizaka: Purity) - This is the sort of show I seem to get suckered into watching the most. I hate it, because there's never any romantic development, just pandering to people who don't understand or care what it's like to be in a relationship, and a perfect example of how society in general panders to males pursuing relationships but never teaches them how to keep relationships going(Got that one from my shrink, hehe). All-in-all, a purely typical Shounen romance drama(serialized Seinen). The concept was unique though, so it prompted me to watch the original show of which this is a sequel. After 12 episodes, I was ready to be done so I deleted this show and don't plan to return.

Seitokai no Ichizon(Student Council's Judgement) - Dropped after ep 1. The sort of plotless anime that relies instead on the personalities of it's characters is not always bad, and the numerous references to Haruhi and Lucky Star in the beginning I can Ignore. It just didn't have any other redeeming qualities I felt. I guess I just don't 'get' the humor, but then I was never much of a Lucky Star person either.

PLOT!

Sora no Otoshimono(Heaven's Lost Property) - Dropped, probably. The first episode really did it for me in terms of comedy, but the montage of flocks of flying panties in episode two to sentimental music was a little over the top. In episode two they also reverted to a lot of fanservice and anime cliches, although I feel that the series had a lot of lost potential. Naturally I can't really say that unless I've watched it to the end, but that's my prediction.

Inner thoughts: "Finally, I thought he'd never ask!"*

Tegami Bachi(Letter Bee) - Looks good so far. I'm into devastated worlds, cold weather AND homosexual undertones, so this one has a chance at being my show of the season.
*Funnier in context

Yumeiro Patissiere(Dream Colored Patissiere) - Dropped after 1/10 of an episode, no comment.

As always, I continue to watch One Piece despite my better(worse?) judgement. Also:

Akikan OVA - MUST WATCH MUST WATCH MUST WATCH