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Last Friday was the opening of the Richmond Olympic Oval, which is the venue built for the long track speed skating event of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. There was a ceremony held there with various performances. The admission was free. So my sister and I went to check it out.
I always had the thought of attempting to bake melon bun in mind. Bupo loves them and I like them as well. Last month or so, I came across a post on DC.com of someone making melon bun. I asked for the recipe and today, I finally found some time to attempt it. Some pictures might be blurry since I’m taking the photos while my hands are a mess.
My sister and I saw this miniature toy at the candy store last weekend and decided to get one. The glass bottle drinks is a nostalgic snack back from elementary school. I loved the hot Vitasoy during winter months. But the breaks we get are usually too short to finish the drink because it’s too hot.
Originally, we thought the items were all setup already in the box but it turns out we have to put them together ourselves. And that was a pain.
“Finished”. I gave up on the lolipops. The stickers were too hard to put on.
The drinks.
The lolipops. Look how badly the stickers were done. haha.
Sometimes, don’t you wish ctrl-z worked in real life?
Image Source: railean.net
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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.
Over the years, I’ve watched several sports animes, two of which involve baseball. Those are Major and Ookiku Furikabutte. I enjoyed both series, especially the latter one which had become one of my favourite animes. When I was looking browsing the list of anime starting this season, I noticed another baseball anime called One Outs. I read the description and decided I wasn’t going to bother with it. A guy playing baseball with a ridiculous contract didn’t seem to interest me. Also, there were so many other more interesting animes waiting to be watched this season that One Outs didn’t stand out. However later as I was talking with backlash, he mentioned that this anime is produced by the same team that did Akagi and Kaiji, both of which are related to gambling and involved a lot of psychological tactics. Since I enjoyed those animes, I changed my mind and decided to give One Outs a try. It didn’t disappoint.
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.
I mentioned earlier that I started fansubbing an anime. The group has a website at b2e.wootevi.com, where people can find information about our releases such as torrent files, script files, notes. As we continue onto our 7th episode release yesterday, I wanted to collect some stats for the site. I found a plugin for that and installed it. The plugin provides several statistics: number of visits, referral links, number of reads per post etc. One of them, which caught my attention, is search terms which shows what term did the visitor used to arrive at the site. As I browse through the list, I noticed the term ‘b2e’, which surprised me. While that is the name of our site and group, b2e is also a very general term, which can be an acronym for many things. Other terms on the list were more specific like ‘b2e subs’, and ‘b2e fansub’. And this general term ranked second on the list, tied with ‘b2e fansub’. I remember not long ago, a bit after our first release, I googled ‘b2e’ and our site didn’t show up until page 10. After seeing the stats, I tried the term again today and it came third!! Also, just before the next page, at the end of the first search result page, is our group listing on AnimeSuki.
[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.
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