[16 images - click for larger view]

I actually have the headgear on wrong here. The golden part is put on lower than it is supposed to be and thus the eyes are covered. This is fixed in latter photos.

Box art. Side text says “onihige no daibuyou” which I’ll loosely translate to devil-bearded warrior.

Included with the Gundam is a 4 page comic in Chinese as well as a coaster looking thing.

Stealing Bupo’s background cardboard from another Sangokuden set she bought, I took a few shots of Kanu on my laptop surface.

Although I enjoy putting these models together, I’m terrible at applying the stickers. Also, I lack the markers to do extra colouring. Hence, the Ooga Ryuugetsu Dou, Kanu’s weapon, is a bit plain-looking.

A back view of Kanu.

Headgear is now fixed and eyes are more apparent.

This background is supposed to be the Peach Garden where Ryuubi, Kanu and Chouhi sworn their oath of brotherhood.

This next background is just a random battle field, raged with fire.

The last picture and this picture are taken in the same position with the lighting moved.

Borrowing bupo’s transparent version of Kanu, it’s a shot of Kanu twins!

I think the transparent weapon looks better but otherwise, I like my Kanu.

Macro face shot. Check out the devil beard! It looks kind of ugly in my opinion. haha.

Lots of ‘antlers’ everywhere. This one on the right shoulder is a bit loose and falls off often.

These two are the same shots with different focus.

Even with macro, the focus went to the body. I had to keep the body out of view, focus and then move the camera over to include the body to take this shot.

With my Gundam 00 2009 calendar! This is my first anime calendar purchase. Gundam 00 is the latest series in the Gundam franchise. I’ll admit that it’s actually the first Gundam series I’ve seen. It’s on its second season right now and I’m enjoying it. In particular, I liked the mecha designs, the quality of animation, fighting sequences. At the moment, I find the storyline a bit confusing. It involves a lot of politics and many characters, which I ain’t that good at keeping track of.

Anyways, here are the inner pages of the calendar.

Setsuna with 00 for the front over, which I’ll be looking at for the next month or so before 2009 actually starts.

Setsuna with 00 again

Fake Lockon with Cherudim (I’m going to pretend it’s the real Lockon since he’s my favourite character.)

Allelujah with Arios

Tieria with Seravee (Will he look better in a dress?)

All four Gundam Meisters with Lockon in front!! (Yes, I consider this as the real one too :D)

The Meisters along with some Celestial Being crew. From left to right: Ian Vashti, Mileina Vashti, Feldt Grace, and Lasse Aeon.

Very pleased with the calendar. Although I was a little disappointed that Sumeragi, my favourite non-Meister character, wasn’t in it, the Lockon pics kind of make up for it. xD

If you think One Outs is just about baseball, you’re completely wrong. In fact, I think baseball is just a medium to show the brilliance of the main character, Tokuchi Toua. The anime starts with a professional baseball player, Kojima, training in Okinawa with a pitcher and a trainer in the off-season. Due to the pitcher getting injured, they needed to find another pitcher for Kojima to train with. By chance, they came across this gambling game called ‘One Outs’ where a pitcher and batter play one-on-one. If the batter hit it to the outfield, he wins. Otherwise, pitcher wins. Toua was the star pitcher in this game, having an undefeated record. Long story short, Kojima played against Toua and lost to him. Kojima requested a second game and forced himself to take a dead ball to win over Toua. Because he lost, Toua joined the Lycaons, Kojima’s baseball team, as a pitcher. And this is where the real story starts.

Toua suggested a ridiculous contact of getting paid $5 million yen per out and paying the Owner $50 million yen per run scored. The Owner is another very interesting character. He’s all about money and profits. He does not care whether the team does well or not as long as profits is generated. Naturally, he agreed to the contract since he calculated that the average amount he has to pay Toua cancels out to $0 and may even earn some money. But to his surprise, Toua kept having perfect records. In the pre-season games, Toua had already accumulated a salary of over $200 million yen. You might think that Toua must be a very skilled pitcher. It’s the exact opposite. He only throw fastballs and the speed of his pitches is only around 120km/h. So how does he achieve that? Psychologically. Toua is a great mind reader. His ability to analyze people’s emotions and then use it to his advantage is amazing. What truly makes this anime such an enjoyable watch is that it’s not only about Toua’s dominance. Toua uses his abilities to influence his own team players as well. In one game, he kicked the shortstop off the field to create a sense of urgency for the team. In the end, it worked! Team members were more alert and performed better than usual. Because Toua continue to play without giving up any runs, the Owner added several conditions to his contract, such as the ability to change the payment rate for each game.

The latest episodes were about a series of three games against the Mariners, the top team of the league. Another major character was introduced, Takami Itsuki. Takami is the best batter in the league. He’s also a perfect opponent for Toua because he too knows how to use psychological tactics. During the first game, no one was able to get a hit off Toua. It was Takami who noticed that Toua’s fastballs aren’t as simple as they look. He pitched a type of fastball which has a very low spin count, causing to it dip lower than expected at the plate. Takami devised a strategy against it which basically involved limiting the movement of the batter before an at-bat. The less movements, the harder it is for Toua to read into the batter’s mind. And it worked. Batters started to get hits off of Toua’s pitch. However, in the end, the game finished with Takami getting struck out because Toua threw a pitch that spin more than normal causing it to rise up instead of dip low. In the second game, Toua imposed fear into the pitcher’s mind and manipulated him to throw an easy pitch, which resulted in a walk-off home run for Kojima. In the third game, the level of brilliance had risen! I was so amazed by this game. Since Toua was forced to pitch in all three games, his stamina is low by the third game. He started giving up runs, threw a lot of bad pitches, and took a lot of timeouts. But, it turned out these were all part of his plan because there is a rainstorm warning for the area. If the rain gets heavy before the 5th inning, the game will be cancelled. Toua was purposely delaying the game. It was, none other than, Takami that realized this. The game became a battle for time. While the Mariners’ batters broke rules to get thrown out, Toua broke rules to put batters on base. Then using the carelessness of the Mariners’, created from their impatience to strike batters out, to their advantage, the Lycaons were able to catch up to the Mariners. The game took a turn at this point. The Mariners no longer has an advantage if they move beyond the 5th inning.

I’m loving this anime. It’s so unpredictable. The mind games are intriguing. The manipulations are realistic and believable though a little obvious at times. So far, I enjoyed it more than Akagi and Kaiji. Akagi had a lot of cheating involved, such as switching tiles, which I didn’t like. Also, I wasn’t familiar with Japanese Mahjong and that probably took some awesomeness away. Kaiji, on the other hand, was too emotional. Plus, the main character was kind of a wimp. If I had to compare Toua with another character, I think Yagami Light from Death Note would be a good match. Both are extremely smart and analytical. Too bad Takami isn’t as good as L. That would make things more interesting. Nonetheless, it reminds an unexpectedly good anime. Sometimes, people don’t like it when there’s an overly dominating character in a series but I think it’s not the case for One Outs. Not only are there good ‘villains’ in this such as Takami and the Owner, there’s also the fact that winning does not depend on Toua alone. He must get the team to help him out, which he is doing an excellent job of. I’m definitely looking forward to the rest of the series.

[Disclaimer: I did not touch any of the SearchWiki stuff that Google recent rolled out to personalize search results.]

I thought it was quite impressive. I’m praising myself here. Haha. But the releases are products of a lot of hard work from every member of the group. We have expanded some more since my last posting, adding a quality checker, a visual typesetter, as well as staff for helping with the effects for the opening and ending songs. We had moved our IRC channel from the irchighway server to the rizon server, which is more popular among anime watchers, groups. From this move, we were able to find us several more xdcc bots which will help distro our releases in our channel. This is especially welcomed by those who are unable to use torrents for whatever reason. We started releasing SD version of the episodes in addition to the HD version. The SD version, in exchange for quality, is smaller in file size and runs smoother on older computers than the HD version. I also made some fabulous banners for the site filled with Toua awesomeness. The group is evolving and I think it’s for the better. Despite spending endless hours doing translation checks and timing, which is sort of my official position now, I still enjoy it. I think one of the reason is for that is the sense of satisfaction (and relief) from the support and positive feedback we get from our viewers. Also I can’t neglect the fact that One Outs is just an AWESOME series. I think I’ll do a review on the first few episodes later to show you how awesome it is.

I’m Alive by Becca. I’ve taken a liking to this song recently. Most of the songs I listen to are the opening and ending songs from animes which means they are usually in Japanese. Although this is the ED of Kuroshitsuji, the biggest difference between this and other songs is that this is in English. While I still like Japanese songs that I have no clue what’s being said, this songs has a bit of added value since I do understand it. I like the lyrics too, especially the first verse. The chorus is good too.

Nothing I say comes out right,
I can’t love without a fight,
No one ever knows my name,
When I pray for sun, it rains.
I’m so sick of wasting time,
But nothing’s moving in my mind,
Inspiration can’t be found,
I get up and fall but,

I’m Alive, I’m Alive, oh yeah
Between the good and bad is where you’ll find me,
Reaching for heaven.
I will fight, and Ill sleep when I die,
Ill live my life, I’m Alive!

I was introduced to this song by Missa. Apparently, it was being played all over Akihabara as a promotion for the single. I don’t actually watch the anime. It’s about this butler and his master who’s the head of a noble family despite being only 12 years old. The setting is in the Victorian era and these old English type animes just doesn’t interest me. Here’s a preview of it anyway:

As mentioned in my last post, I went to see the latest James Bond yesterday. I haven’t pay attention to any reviews prior to the movie. It’s a Bond movie so naturally I’ll go see it like all the rest of them that I’ve seen. I still haven’t read up on any critiques but for me, it was somewhat disappointing despite being a decent movie overall.

*Warning: Possible spoilers*

My disappointment is mostly from the lack of exciting action, gadgets and nice cars. In terms of action, there are plenty of fight scenes, a car chase plus a boat pursuit. But those were nothing new or special. Nothing jumped out from them that made me think “Wow, that was cool.” Leaping large gaps. Running on roofs. Fighting sequences. Shooting guns. Can’t they do more with these scenes? Maybe because so many of these action scenes are dependent on the actors physically that there’re not a lot of variation. And this also brings me to my next point – the lack of gadget. There were essentially no gadgets for Bond except his phone and the guns (does this even count?). I did like the computer system they were using at the headquarters (or wherever that office place is). It was very interactive and visually appealing. If only I had one haha. As a technology enthusiast, I was hoping to see at least some innovative inventions regardless of how unreal they would seem. Lastly, what happened to the car(s)?! There was an Alpha Romeo that was racked in the chase scene in the very beginning of the movie. After wards, you see some tiny compact car, a run-down old model Beetle, some Land (Range?) Rovers, and a Ford SUV. Seriously, Ford?! What is up with that. One of my friends pointed out that the Ford is an electric car or hybrid. If they want to promote environmental awareness, I would love to see the Tesla Roadster instead. hehe. Speaking of environmental, there was a hotel in the movie that runs fully on hydrogen fuel cell. But the whole building went up in flames after a car crashed in the underground parking. Not so safe, is it?

Compared to Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace did not provide the same level of enjoyment. That’s not to say it wasn’t enjoyable. I just liked Casino Royale a lot more. One of the reason for that might be I prefer Eva Green over Olga Kurylenko. And maybe because my hearing is deteriorating or I am too used to watching things with subtitles, I had trouble hearing some of the dialogues, especially the ones with accents. I would rate this latest Bond at 6.5/10. Just for comparison sake, Casino Royale was an 8/10.

Still in the box.

Various transformation shown on the side and back of the box.

Out of the box but still stuck in the inner packaging.

After 5minutes of painful untwisting.

Wall-E!

Transforms into a box.

Compacted wheels.

Peeking.

With the Wall-E and Eve my sister bought at the Disney Store.

Wall-E with Kallen.

Wall-E with Eve.

Wall-E with NGE girls.

Each set have extra components to create a setting by itself for those buying individual ones.

There’s a button at the front that shoots a canon / missile out of the mouth when pressed.

<3 bupo for these.

Last week I took on a somewhat unexpected project – fansubbing the anime One Outs. Fansub is basically a term used to describe subtitles of video create by fans. It’s very common with animes. Having said that, there wasn’t any One Outs fansub release since it aired in the beginning of the month. (There is now and that group is a bit bitter about us releasing.) This anime is created by the more or less same team (mangaka excluded) that made Akagi and Kaiji which both my friend, backlash, and I enjoyed. He was particularly enthusiastic about the series and really want to watch it. Unfortunately the only subs we found was Chinese ones, which he couldn’t read. Therefore, I decided to translate it. He joked about releasing the subs at first but we ended up actually distributing it.

Being a long time support of anime fansubs, I knew it was hard work to make subs but I didn’t realize it was really THIS time consuming. Translating the 20minute episode takes from 4-6hrs. Maybe my Chinese nor English just isn’t that great. I had a tough time finding the correct adjectives to describe the words in the Chinese subs. Also, this anime is somewhat about baseball so I had to figure out what the Chinese baseball terms were saying. And even had to consult Kyph on “Americanizing” commentary in a game. Then there’s also the subs that didn’t make sense. I had to download a different Chinese sub and compare. There’ll be lines that are translated completely different between the two Chinese subs. This is when our Japan correspondence, Missa, come into play. I record the audio of the sentences and she’ll ask her Japanese colleagues. Also, at some parts, notes have to be added to explain some terms in the video although, I’m kind of against them because it covers up more area of the screen. I think we’ll be keeping them to a minimal.

After the initial translation, it was timing, which means to time the translated line to the correct period in the video. Thank god there is software that simplify that process. We used Aegisub which has an audio analyzer. This makes selecting the time period of a particular sentence much easier. Then comes the endless editing. Changing some words to make the sentences smoother. Picking out typos or grammar errors. The timing and editing job is shared between backlash and I. Bupo helped out in editing a bit too. During the editing, we also added in the typesetting, which is to translate any Japanese settings in the video and place them inline.

For episode 1, backlash tried to encode the video into a smaller size than the raw file we obtained. That failed. Therefore we only muxed the subtitles, chapters into a mkv container and ended up with a 400MB file. Typical HD files is around 350MB but what can we do? Before releasing, I quickly threw together a website for our group on my own hosting so we can post about our subs. Then backlash made the torrent and uploaded it onto NyaaTorrents, which is the tracker we were using. Almost immediately, someone posted it on Tokyo Toshokan, which is a torrent library for Japanese media. Distro (distributing) was a big problem for us since both backlash and I have terrible upload speeds. It took a very long time to get the first copy of the file out. I had to get another friend, Luffy, to help out with the torrent seeding. We were quite overwhelmed with the response at first. A lot of people started downloading it. There were over 2500 downloads in the first 24 hours.

Since then, we’ve received a lot of thanks and offers to help out. We got ourselves an encoder and a typsetter now. Someone put a xdcc bot in our IRC channel and an admin from an anime distribution site, Anime Me offer to host direct downloads of our episodes on his site. We’ve released episode 2 now as well as a version 2 of episode 1, based on feedbacks from those who have watched it. The plan for now is to finish the series. Some have asked us to sub other series. I can only shrug and say that’s not really possible time wise.

So far, on torrents, there had been around 4000 downloads of episode 1 and about 500 downloads of version 2. As for episode 2, it’s sitting at 3000 downloads now. It seems our first fansubbing efforts is a success.

So cuteeeee. Too bad I don’t have a Gamecube. The Wii is a little thin for a Wall-E mod. Maybe a EVE mod would do. Since it’s all white already.

Source and more images at Resurrect Your Gamecube With the WALL-E Case Mod.