It was rather interesting that I happened to chanced upon this video clip again in 2, no 3 years:
Bluebirds are commonly associated with happiness, but I’m not sure it is the case for this Visual Novel (I haven’t had the chance to read it yet). From what I heard so far, all does not end well for the Elric brothers…
Woke up at 11 due to the nice cool morning, it was raining earlier apparently. Only to realize I missed the solar eclipse!
As one of the longest total solar eclipse recorded in the 21th century, this lasted from 08:40:51 AM to 09:43:55 AM (Singapore 8+GMT).
Looking at the pictures of the eclipse, the TV series Heroes kept popping into my head. Season 4 anyone?
Deciding I have to look at the eclipse no matter what, I YouTube-ed (is there such a word?) and found a nice clip showing the eclipse, it was covered by a Japan TV station NHK.
The view was spectacular! It was dark like the evening and you can see everyone was taking pictures of the eclipse. Looks like it will be a while before we can see one of those again.
I think the constant reminder of the upcoming solar eclipse has made me go read this visual novel (Really!).
Not sure how a Solar became a Lunar in my mind, but this was definitely a great read.
Translated as part of the al|together 2008 “CROSS THE RUBICON” festival, this short (30min - 1 hour) visual novel weaves the reader into a story of the narrator and the ‘girl’ Mai, with the narrator diagnosed as incapable to work in a office, he had found a job as office boy at a pub called ‘Shanty’, there he met Mai and everything began from there.
I don’t think I can say more without spoiling the visual novel.
One of the best thing in this visual novel is the way the writer describe things and how they built up the atmosphere by slowing letting bits of information out, plus it’s small but brilliant soundtrack does it’s role perfectly. For a freeware visual novel I’m rather surprised they had a voice over for the character Mai, plus a voiced song too!
Do visit the website for downloads and more details: Moonshine
This visual novel scores a 8 out of 10 points on my scale :D
I’m listening to the song: ~Moonshine~ (a.k.a Mai’s song) as I write this post.
Drum roll please! Ha ha. I finally made the trailer for my visual novel: “Long way home: Delusions & Happiness”.
Err.. It’s a just a collection of still images.
That’s mainly because I have no idea how to make those fantastic videos that involves texts zooming here and there… I’m thankful for my previous experience in Windows Movie Maker, all is good. At least for now :D
Oh yeah, many thanks to www.incompetech.com where I found this beautiful yet haunting track: “Dark Walk” for the trailer.
That’s all for now XD. Thanks for reading/watching.
CosFest (Short for Cosplay Festival). It’s back again once more! This time they call it “A very happy event”, and a happy event it sure was.
Well, this is the third time I’m went the CosFest, the very first one I went to was CosFest VI , one of the very first cosplay events I blogged about.
Everyone’s costumes looks a lot nicer this year! Don’t believe it? Try playing the photo slide show above!
I’m so glad I was able to attend this wonderful festival, there seems to be more doujinshi stores this time round, I’m looking at those pictures and wondering if one day I could draw as well as them...
For those who hasn’t realized that this group Anti-Sec has hacked imageshack (That would explain the wackiness of my blog ).
Thanks to those “revolutionaries”, they has successfully destroyed my pictures on my blog. Well well… Kudos to you, Anti-Sec. You didn’t like the disclosure of exploits on the net?
Go through other medium to get the message across!
What you are doing now is like stopping violence with violence, see how great it’s working out? History has many records of its failure.
You don’t see anti-gun people going around to shoot people to prove that it is dangerous to do so… Why? Because it contradicts their ideology, this too contradicts yours too.
It’s not that I don’t understand your concerns, but the way you did it is wrong!
People grow through the sharing of information, you came down the same way… Don’t forget your roots, Mr. I-am-the-Celestial-Being.
Sorry to my usual readers for having to see this rant.
Remember the story that I wrote in this post: What!? Another story? Well, I was toying around with the idea of making a visual novel for a while now, and suddenly it struck me: I should make that story into a visual novel as a test run, before I move on the make the real deal.
So I took the do-first-clean-up-later approach, and went to MorgueFile to look for the pictures I needed and started editing it, within a hour or so the images were done(title included). Deciding it was enough for a prologue, I dived into the story and converted it into a script, firing up the RenPy engine to combine everything together, well everything took longer than expected (Whole process took 5~6 hours) all the rewriting, placement of the pictures. Giving it a test run, it ran for less then 10min (6 hours work for a 10min read, LOL) to reach the end of the prologue.
To remind myself of what could be done if I tried, I decided to take a few screenshots:
I’m tipping my hat off to those successful Visual Novel makers, now I know how hard it is to make a Visual Novel.
Looks like it’s still a “long way home” for my visual novel, oh well… At least I started!
I like reading light novels, they are short but interesting. I recall that some has called it text anime, and that term is correct(Since many light novels end up being made into an anime). Well, the problem is that most of the great stuff are in Japanese T-T, save for a few that is lucky to get translated to other languages, but even in translation it may lose it’s original meaning/flavor.
So to spur myself to learn the Japanese language, I bought… No, not a Japanese for dummies book or any of those teach-yourself-language type. But rather I bought a Japanese light novel, 狼と香辛料 also known as Spice and Wolf.
Great idea eh?
Maybe… If i started reading it that is. Somehow the book ended up collecting dust for me, and until recently(ok, today) I picked it up and tried to read it, couldn’t even get pass the synopsis ( 行商人ロレソスは,麦… ) which reads “The merchant Lawrence,…”, it’s a slow start at least now I know how to pronounce those words “Gyoushoujin roresosu”, maybe by the end of this month I could read a whole full page ;).
Anyway, I found that light novels are typically smaller than a normal book. It’s a mystery why the translated book don’t retain the original size, you could argue the translated text is longer, but it shouldn’t be the case for the Chinese language. You can see the Spice and Wolf book is even smaller than translated novel on the left.
Let me end this post with a shot of my bookshelf of light novels :D
Yes, I’m talking about the popular green hair leek wielding Vocaloid :D She been around for quite sometime, and honestly at first I shrugged it of as just a fad(it’s not :D). I think people round started growing more aware when composers become more proficient at creating songs with her, so apparently her fame increased.Then along came manga and perhaps a few steps shy of an anime series ^^.
Miku even has her own PSP game (Which I am hooked on at the moment, that explains this post doesn’t it ;) ). Songs I believe, are things that becomes nicer after hearing for a period of time(regardless voluntary or not) and especially after attaching meaning/memories to it.
There is a documentary(i think) on Miku Hatsune : here
Seeing how Miku’s songs has topped the charts more than once, I am convinced Vocaloid singers does have a place in the future music industry, a Sharon Apple perhaps?
I had been reading the manga: Bakuman , a story which focuses on the 2 manga authors who tries their very best to reach the top of manga world. In that journey, the readers will come to know it’s not all play for the mangaka(refers to manga authors), getting published in a weekly manga magazine is just a start as they need to continuously maintain the reader’s interest to not get booted out.
What does that has to do with blog writing? Both involves grabbing the reader’s attention so as to survive in the manga/blogging world( a blog is officially dead if no one reads it), no more the “I think, therefore I exist”, rather it’s “They think, therefore I exist”.
Looking my 3 year old blog, I realized it hasn’t been too successful(duh). For one thing, my blog don’t attract many visitors it doesn’t have any "specialized content” as those pro-bloggers would say…