Haha, okay, so, as from my last post, I’ve given it some thought, relaxed myself, and I have come to a “final conclusion” about spending $46.17AUD for the “Higurashi no naku koro ni Character Illustration Book”. So, first of all, I would like to present to you the firm, and essentially, the un-opinionated points. First of all, the book cost 2,381 Japanese Yen. The current exchange rate, translates to $38.80AUD. Shipping the book from Japan would have cost at least $10AUD and there is no guarantee that it would arrive on time, or at all for that matter. The book contains 128 pages, 84 original full colour artworks, along with an artist Q&A, one sided poster, and a 12 page merchandise list. That’s all assuming I can count properly. All artworks are textless, full color, and are done by the original artists from both seasons of the series. Any text is in Japanese.
Okay, so opinionated things now. We shall start with the negatives just to be a little pessimistic. Now, the main reason I thought I wouldn’t like what was inside, I knew that there was going to be a lot of fan service. Now, that was from some blog or something (I don’t remember the web address or anything) and from which, they had said a lot of the images had already been leaked on to the internet, of which I had trouble finding. They were not kidding when they said that it had a large amount of fan service! The poster is definitely fan service as it has Rika as a “catgirl” and in a pose that makes her look vulnerable? I don’t know, but I’m not the type that would put up that sort of a poster. I was much rather hoping for the famous “Rika and Hanyuu in front of the moon” pic but noooo… Approximately 28 of the artworks are “material that is designed to amuse or excite the audience with sexually-derived content”, and I would not be surprised if people disagreed with me and said that there was less than 28 designed that way. Personally, not high enough quality art with too much fan service from the artists of the first season. Some of the art from the first season artists are rather low-res, felt kinda rushed and not very detailed. The first season artists were cheap. It had all the DVD covers from the first season but only one from the second season?
The positives? The book is nice and large, has a decent number of original artworks. It is nice, thick and high quality paper that it is printed on, and generally well ordered and presented. The art from the second season artists was a lot better, was more detailed and high-res. Much less “sexually-derived content” by the second artists, and overall the second half of the book was what I was looking for. Much like any Higurashi fan, more Rika and Hanyuu pics would have been better but nevertheless, it does have a fair image gallery of them two.
Price wise, judging by quality of paper, amount and content of art, the current exchange rate, and the fact that it was official merchandise of a series I now seem to almost(?) have an obsession with, it wasn’t that bad. Had I known what it contained detailedly, I would not have payed the amount I did pay for the book. I get paid standard about $8 an hour, buying that book cost me 6 hours of work. Although I’m regretting spending $46.17 on such a book, I’m not kicking myself anymore. I am not mad, nor am I happy. I am just plain confused now… I am very confused. Now, I am unsure of what to do with my money… I do plan on buying more Higurashi merchandise, (I have my eyes on things already) but where’s the money? *cries* I’m so confused right now…
Haha, Well, aren’t I smart? My sister got new RAM over the weekend, and so she had no use for her old spare 2GB of RAM. Since my computer only had 1GB at the time, I decided to “upgrade” since we had no other real use for the RAM. I pull my old RAM out, put the new RAM in, turn computer on, doesn’t load. I put old one back in. Won’t load. I tried all sorts of different combonations and my computer failed to load. So, I left my computer alone for the rest of that night, and took my computer to my local computer guy yesterday to see what was wrong. Turns out, my slot was made for the older DDR, while the new RAM I was trying to put in was DDR2. Haha. Fun… So, now I have to get a new motherboard and I’m computerless… (I’m on my sister’s computer right now)
So, while I’m here, and since I’ve been unable to make a blog post recently, I was unable to say Happy December! Last month of 2008… Haha, Cameron managed to visit my blog recently! *Is extremely surpirsed*. Shame on you Matthias, for not have visited my blog yet. Shame… Although he did provide me with this awesome fact/theory and how cats have 9 tails. “No cat has 8 tails. Cat has 1 more tail than no cat. Therefore, Cats have 9 tails.” GENIUS! Oh, and Coby managed to disprove the theory that “What you don’t know can’t hurt you”. Damn Coby thinks! (That’s a good thing by the way… despite the use of the word “Damn”) Although, under the right circumstances, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you” doesn’t work, however, when relevant, I will continue to use this phrase!
Oh, since Jesse bought himself a 2GB Samsung S2 a while ago,(the one also nicknamed “the pebble”) he has recently been testing out the battery life, and was disappointed to find that it didn’t last much longer than 6 hours, despite the fact that it says 10. Since my pair of earphones have died recently, I needed a new pair. And as a result, I thought; “meh, what the hell?” I like Creative’s products. They can occasionally be unreliable, however their designs I find are mostly very nice and smooth! Thus, in our household, we only seem to have Creative products when it comes to Mp3 players. No iPods! =) I have the Creative ZEN Multimedia Player, my sister has the ZEN Neeon Mp3 player, and the newest addition, my Creative ZEN Stone! =D
Since they were cheap, I bought myself the Creative ZEN Stone. Buying the stone itself would have cost $36, while for some reason, at the same store, the ZEN Stone + Travelsound kit cost $35… Heh, so I got me a pair of portable speakers for the ZEN stone too! Along with the indednted earphones that I had planned to buy. =D I really like the design of the ZEN Stone, and I struggled to choose Black or White. I ended up choosing black, and so now, I shall have to test the battery life of the ZEN Stone. It claims 10 hours but we’ll see. Although another thing I am excited about, is how the speakers come with batteries! Most batteries that are provided, are crappy ones that last less than 5 minutes, but Creative provided Energizer batteries! =D So, I’ll have fun with my Creative ZEN stone for now, while my computer is dead… Fun.
Yeah, okay, so, some of you may already know that but oh well… Anyway, while I’m writing this, I have brownies in the oven that are so gonna turn out as a FAIL but oh well. I fail at so many things š„ . I don’t get it! *cries some more*. I can’t Photoshop, Flash or draw! *cries even more* Oh I am so stupid… I don’t even know how to use my phone properly! š„ š„ š„ And what’s worse is that WordPress has this crappy š„ emoticon! <insert MSN cry emoticon> There is a bigger reason than this for why I so fail (apart from my grammar as well…) but I don’t plan on writing about it today…
Well, at least I know that I’m not the only one who fails… My parents have been watching this very wierd chinese drama thing. One of the main characters is a flight attendent… And like, almost once every month or something, there is always some incident involving her flight. Whether this happens all the time with this airline I don’t know, but it is really, really weird, stupid and fail… Now I don’t understand chinese so I asked my parents to translate the parts that I bother to watch. So there’s this incident on the plane. The landing gear is not going down. So the plane flies around the airport to burn it’s fuel. While this is going on, the passengers are all panicking and to make things worse, the flight attendents hand out paper to the passengers to write their wills! I mean seriously! What kind of an airline would do this! That’s giving the message that there’s no hope for these people and they are all going to die! So then they show the plane landing, and guess what? THE LANDING GEAR IS DOWN! And the plane lands, shows a few shots of the pilots in the cockpit (only their hands using the engine throttles and control coloumn) and the plane just overshoots what to me seemed like a rediculously short runway, and crashes into the lights at the end of the runway. Minimal damage. Everyone lives! Yay!
…
MEGA FAIL
Anyway, the timer for those fail brownies just went so it’s time to take them out of our fail oven (It’s kinda like falling out of it’s place under the stove…). *headdesk* I am so fail…
P.S. Sorry about all the pesimism…
Note that this was a post from my blog at an older location: Posted June 18 2008
Heheheā¦ Well, as you may have known after reading what I posted yesterday that I had a science test thingy todayā¦ Well, I donāt think I did too well in it and Daniel said he probably didnāt do too well in it either but stillā¦ That science test seemed to ask us questions about things that we havenāt learned about yet(?). Or it was just our stupidity that was making us think thatā¦ What a waste of $3.70 for a Flat White when it didnāt do me any goodā¦ But at least it tasted alrightā¦ Well, the results of that should be interesting, along with us getting our half-yearly reports on Fridayā¦
I find it very strange that I had not found this nifty tool in Photoshop earlierā¦ Previously, I have had much frustration and trouble when it comes to text and co-ordinating them to match the image (stand out or fade in the background etc.). Then I came across this tutorial telling me about stroke and inner glow and all that stuff, and so I found out that I am a total amateur at Photoshop! To get better text effects, all I had to do (instead of changing the background and font colours and types etc. just to get text to stand out) was right click on the text layer, and select blending options! Okay, now to me, this just showed me how terrible I am at Photoshop and how little I know about itā¦ Think about how many more āobviousā features of Photoshop/Flash/anything else I could be forgetting/donāt know about/donāt know how to use etcā¦
Well, tomorrowās Thursday and I have a few boring subjects at school tomorrowā¦ Fun funā¦ Probably wonāt post anything tomorrow depending on how lazy I amā¦ Iām very lazy when it comes to my website as I havenāt really added anything new for a whileā¦ Should make a new comicā¦ and add new ānewsāā¦ and finish up my new design of the Worst Airlines thingyā¦ and create usergroups thingies for The Corny Paper Boards, and upload the newest episode of The Random Showā¦ and do that English assessment task thing tooā¦ Thereās probably a whole lot of other things I should be doing but oh wellā¦ Canāt be bothered to list them I guessā¦
Note that this was a post from my blog at an older location: Posted June 17 2008
Well, it took some time and I feel rather stupid after I had a lot of trouble trying to install this into Freehostia and Thomas told me that there was an easy install thing provided by Freehostia or somethingā¦ Well, at least I now have this (hopefully) fully installed for my website! Now people who can be bothered to read this will find out how (much more in some cases) stupid I am/can be!
Yes I like confusing people and a lot of the times, I confuse them unintentionallyā¦ But anyway, I have a Science test tomorrow, a chemistry topicā¦ Acids and Basesā¦ Well it should be fun. I should study for it and I think I will once I have finished writing thisā¦ Our schoolās athletics carnival was supposed to be tomorrow, but thanks to the weather, our carnival was canceled and so I have to do ten pin bowling again just like I have done for the lastā¦ 10(?) weeksā¦ Should be funā¦
Well, since I do Food Tech as a subject for school, (if you didnāt know alreadyā¦) we had a prac today and we were to make a āpineapple up-side down cakeā thingyā¦ So, working with my friend Nick (not the Squiggley Inc. oneā¦), and another friend of mine known as Alex, made a veryā¦ ummā¦ wellā¦ cake thing. It was better than doing theory for Food Tech. as Food Tech. theory is terribly boringā¦ Well, most of my friends liked the cakeā¦ I thinkā¦ but anyway, should study for science thingy!
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