Cats with Wings and District 9

Ok today I discovered something extraordinary on the internet and its honestly just wtf. Cats with wings, actually to be specific Chinese cats with wings, both of these cats were found in China. The wings actually has bones in them but cant use them to fly. Scientists claims it is genetic defect or skin condition but come on face it, it's evolution!





Also watched District 9 today, directed by Peter Jackson, epic Lord of the Ring director. It was about aliens who got stranded on Earth and Humans treat them as prisoners. The movie started and ended with a documentary style and the story of the movie went in the middle. The story itself wasnt bad, quite bloody and some bits are disgusting though. The ending wasnt complete, I mean it left us questioning but I guess thats an effective ending, let the audience imagine their own ending. The thing I found weird was how did the humans understood what the aliens were saying in the first place? lol

Taiwanese Tap Dance

Went to watch a Taiwanese tap dancing group performing at Manukau tonight. Took us an hour and a half to get there, I was so frustrated. First of all it was rush hour and second I think an accident happened on the motorway, well at least thats what the sign said. The show was suppose to start at 7 but we got there at 7 and the theatre wasnt even half full so the show had to postpone half an hour to wait for more people to arrive.

The show started with important people saying a few words. That is the part which I hate, it's never a few words! Always a friggin speech. Afterwards the real show started and theres like 7 dancers dressed in old fasion American costumes came up and started tap dancing. I soon realised that this was broadway style instead of the usual Irish tap dancing which is more familiar in NZ. The first act was about the the style of Taiwanese, in terms of tap dancing. There was nothing Taiwanese about the way they danced lol, the only thing Taiwanese were the songs they used, it was like remix of very old Taiwanese songs.

The 2nd act was about another cultural group which also lives in Taiwan. This time they included ballet in the act. The 3rd act was about Aboriginals in Taiwan. Each act, depending on the theme, the 7-9 dancers had to switch their costumes and dance to a different style but in tap form. It was pretty cool how they could integrate tap dance into those traditional cultural dances. At the end of the 3rd act, the host for the show described the Aboriginals in Taiwan and how they're related to Maoris. Then she asked us what are Maoris good at since she didnt know. People then started laughing and gave answers like drinking! My sister said she heard someone yelled stealing! LOL

The last act was about Chinese culture. I liked this one the best cause they brought out one of those huge traditional chinese drums. At first one girl solo played it then later another girl and 2 more dudes came out and it was a 4 way combo beats + tap dancing. Like 2 ppl will drum then 2 ppl dance or 3 ppl drum and one person dance. Afterwards the drumming section, 3 dancers came on the stage and started teaching the crowd to do some beats like clapping hands and tapping with our feet. One of the combination was clap fast 3 times and tap 3 times with your feet and like 80% of the crowd could not get it. It was like they were all retarded or something. Even the 3 dancers on the stage could not believe that the crowd could not do it lol. They tried repeating it like 5 times and the crowd still fails lol.

The show ended with more tap dancing. Overall I reckon the show wasnt bad but not super great. I reckon they were trained well, they could get to their different positions and creating different formations, they executed that really well. But in terms of tap dancing skills, average compare to the rest of the world. I still prefer Irish tap dancing.

Pearl Harbour and stuff

Been watching Pearl Harbour on tv since Sunday and just then finished watching it, thought I'll comment about it. I reckon it was a good movie overall, although online critics says different. It was a very lengthy movie, lucky they split it into 2 days. The war scenes were fantastic, the explosions, the fighting, pretty realistic. Oh and the hospital scene too, was well done, all the burnt people and people who were bleeding heavily and doctors and nurses had to choose who to save. The romance in the film was weird but perfectly understandable.



So Im into the 2nd week of this semester. All the test and assignment marks from last term have came out. I did average, like really average, not my normal percentage I felt, have to try harder this term. Hardly working out now but instead focusing on basketball more. Been rewatching Slam Dunk and it just motivates me to keep practising and get better. Due to committed practises, I can play the Yui song pretty well now, although not as fast but at 80% of the speed, just nearly there. Next song that I will be practising will probably be the FMA ending or one of Naruto's theme.

Macross Frontier

Started watching Macross Frontier at the start of this week and today I finished watching it. Here is my review/thoughts: (CONTAIN SPOILERS)

Macross Frontier is an action/romance/mecha/musical anime, the story revolving around 3 characters, Alto, Sheryl and Ranka. Each of them has really different background. Alto is a pretty boy who came from from a famous Kabuki performing family and himself was quite a famous one too. However he did not like it and his dream was to fly in the sky. Sheryl is a super famous singer across the galaxy, she is a strong willed girl who never gives up. Ranka is an ordinary girl who simply loves Sheryl and enjoys singing also.


(wtf at the pizza hut logo lol)

Humanity is constantly under attack from these alien insects called Vajra. Humans defend themselves by piloting jets which can transform into robots. In order to prove he will not act, Alto becomes a pilot. He saves Ranka or Sheryl at various times and this creates feelings between them.

From the introduction given above, you can see how this anime falls into the genres I mentioned. The first thing you know when watching this is that a lot of songs has been used during the anime, well I mean 2 of the main characters are singers. Various songs sung by Ranka and Sheryl were used during fighting scenes or performance scenes. The thing I like the most is that they would have different endings most of the time. They varied it to suit the story, like a sad song when the episode ends in sadness or an exciting song when the episode was an epic battle. Since this anime was only came out 2 years ago, the drawings are awesome, it's very clean and stylish.



The story is kinda confusing at the start but the general idea is shown clearly. The romance, comedy has been laid out and its enjoyable to watch. There are some real funny wtf moments and the songs are always nice to listen to. The entire plot is pretty good I reckon, better than Eureka 7's. But like Eureka 7, although it is a mecha anime, it is more focused on story besides the robots. In Macross Frontier, it shows the robots action scenes but they're not the important part of the story, the romance is. However this does not mean it is a girl's romantic anime, I recommend this anime because there is plenty of action, nice drawings and music and a good story.

Yui

Well as mentioned before Im gonna write about Yui. Yui is another one of my favourite Japanese artist. The first Yui song I heard was Life, it was used as Bleach's 5th ending. Immediately after listening to it, I thought it was a good song and that she has talent. Luckily I introduced Bleach to In Hwan and he then became familiar with Yui and started downloading her songs. That was how I got my collection of Yui, from In Hwan lol.



Well since I am going to write about Yui, I did some background research. I found out that she was just 3 years older than me! Her music only started recently, first album was released at 2004. Since then she had been releasing albums every year and every one of them was successful, various songs were choosed for movies, anime and dramas. She also starred (is it starred? I dunno XD) in a movie called Midnight Sun, Taiyo No Uta where she was the main character, a girl with a rare skin condition.



I havent heard all of her songs but I've heard all of the famous ones. I do recommend Yui since she has got a great voice and her songs vary from rock to like really soft. The only thing I found which was a bit negative was that hmm how do I describe it... like sometimes I find that her voice just always sounds the same, no variation. But thats just sometimes and thats just me, I still think Yui is great! Here are some songs I recommend:
Life
Namidaro
Love and Truth
How Crazy
Remember
Tokyo <-- Nice soft song
Jam <-- Good rock
Highway Chance <-- Probably my favourite, tying with Again though lol
Again <-- Her fastest song yet and CURRENTLY my favourite Japanese song. This song also inspired me to play the piano again. I've been practising to play this song almost everyday, getting better and better!

Aion

So for the past 4 days I had been trying out the new MMORPG game Aion open beta. It is made by NCsoft, the creator of Lineage. The files were big and takes a while to install. After launching the game, you realise it takes a lot longer to load compare to other games. After entering the game, the login page has a really beautiful scenery as a background, it then plays a movie showing some sort of battle taken place. It's different compare to l2 or wow since they showed a gameplay movie instead of what we usually expect, a movie-like cinematic.

The character creation page has definately been upgraded from l2. The amount of details you can put on your character, from eyes length, angle, width, height to how long your legs can be. It has got more features than sims 2 I reckon. I created a female scout "Ayaka", reason for a girl cause I thought its only going to be for 4 days so just playing around and I wanted to name it Ayako first but it was taken grr.



Upon entering the world of Aion, I realised the ingame graphics was pretty amazing. The landscape is similar to wow's but more refined and the characters were more like l2's except more smooth. The entire game's graphics gives you an impression of 'nice'. Oh and the water looks really realistic. The music was really well used, it's hard to describe music but it just owns thats all I can say. When you enter combat, the music switches to an intense drum beating fighting music which is a neat feature. The first thing I realised when playing was the amount of people on the server. When you first start theres gurantee 5 other people standing beside you also starting. Everywhere you go there are people, there are never empty cities or training grounds.



Like all mmorpg games, this game requires you to kill monsters, level up and buy better gears. An easier way to get past the annoying thought of grinding is to do quests. Quest rewards gives exp, money or items which can only benefit you. There are 2 types of quests in Aion. One is campaign quests, they are the ones you have to do in order for the story of the Aion to move on. The other kind is just random quests which gives you additional exp, money etc. They are not all just kill X no. of mobs and find this item (I do hate those ones though lol), they vary from leading a pig home to delivering flowers to someone within a time limit. A new feature I found in this game was that there is a collecting skill, like collecting plants or mining for ores and you have to level it up in order to collect better things, it's a pain.



An exciting new ability in Aion is the ability to fly. Yes you have wings! At level 10 you can unlock this ability. You have like 40 seconds of flight time then you have to return to the ground to rest otherwise you'll fall and receive damage or even death. You can only fly in places with lots of Aether energy? or something like that. You might be thinking oh wtf I wanna fly everywhere I go, I hate walking. Well the answer to that is gliding! Even though we cant fly, it is still possible to spread your wings and glide from high places like jumping off a small hill. It really beats walking and it also takes some skills to bounce off and catch more air and try not to touch the ground. There are some places or quests which forces you to fly in order to get there so dont worry about not be able to fly much.



When you approach higher levels, the game forces you group up with others in order to complete your quests otherwise the mobs are too strong for you to solo. Luckily I had Jason playing with me, with his Spiritmaster, summoning different element spirits. I was a Ranger, one who uses bow. It was fun group hunting, I guess that is the real deal of mmorpgs, have fun with friends. For trading/buying/selling, Aion has combined features from wow and l2, an auction house and afk shops so take your pick and find the best bargain. I earned lots by selling items just a bit cheaper than everyone else.

Jason and I couldnt finish our quests last night and was about to do more today but the server was down and a new patch was released. No way I could download 620mb so I guess this is the end of my open beta. I played for 4 days and have not regretted one bit (ok except for 1 hour which I wasted trying to find this damn necklace). 70% chance I will play official server but it will have to wait until I finish exams at the end of the year. For people who are currently playing WoW or L2, I really recommend you to move to Aion. You'll find stuff you are familiar with and also new things to try out. :)

G.I. Joe, Nobless and FMA songs

Yesterday in the afternoon I was trying to complete my nobless quest on l2. I finally farmed every material required and did all the mixing (never want to do that again, clicking for more than 100 times). My final challenge was to kill the raid boss Barakiel. I went around each town and shouted for people to help. Just when I assembled my party, the server decided to restart! By the time the server was back up, we couldnt have killed him in time since I had to leave soon to go the movies.

I was first to arrive at Hoyts car park, Adam and his dad followed me in a second later, 2 seconds later Shawn came in and Shuhan arrived 10 seconds later. It was suprising that everyone was on time lol. We were gonna watch GI Joe, the tickets on Saturday was quite expensive...like $15.50 or something. There was hardly anyone in the theatre, only like 2 rows of people. The movie was a standard action hero movie, lots of cool technology though, they also mixed some martial arts in there. Quite a few known actored appeared in the movie, the good and bad guy from The Mummy, main character is from Step Up 2, the general commander dude I've seen him a lot in other movies.



After the movie, we went to Narita Japanese restaurant. Adam and Shuhan saw their AU classmate working there. It was freezing so the guys wanted to drink warm sake so we ordered a small one and shared it. After one sip indeed it warms you up but alcohol still taste bleh. Dinner at Narita is more expensive than lunch, lunchtime they got the $10 bento but during dinner its all $20 or more. I got a combo of fish, chicken, fish katsu. I reckon Shuhan's one was best value, for $24 he had way more stuff than us, like sushi, tempura, weird looking fried pastry. Afterwards. we were about to leave then their classmate offered us free dessert LOL so yeah we sat back down and enjoyed it (green tea ice cream and hard marshmallow).

Later, we went to play pool at the tenpin bowling place. It was a good game for me and Shawn, Shuhan and Adam need to play more. Felt wasnt enough so we had 2 games of air hockey, it was intense, at one point Adam put too much force into his hitting thing and it went flying across the table.

When I got back home, went to check Barakiel and found a party. I called Adam to come heal for us, we were with 3 Hisatsu. We failed the first time cause our tank was only wearing A grade armor. Succeeded the 2nd time and this morning I got my nobless. Watched fma while eating lunch today, man fma just gets better and better, the storyline is just :O awesome. Here is the 1st opening and ending, they are my favourite Japanese songs right now. First Yui then the other one. Will talk about Yui later on.

Again - Yui



Uso - SID

Go Kart-ing

Had to wake up at 8am today to go go kart-ing. My first experience of go karts was at year 6 camp where there was only one on the field and we get to do a lap around the field each. Sherman picked me up and we went to Ming's. From there, the 5 of us Ming, Sherman, Albert, Shimeen and I took Shimeen's car and went to the go kart place. I never knew it was right next to Snow Planet. We were the first people to arrive there, we even arrived earlier than the event organisers.

After everyone arrived, we were sort into groups, each group had 9 teams, we were in the first group so we got to race first. The rules were, 125 laps per team which means 25 laps per person, first round was qualifying round, the starting position for the actual round was judged by your time during the qualifying round. Go Kart rules: Try to avoid contact, if the refs catches you deliberately hitting the other kart, they will signal you with a black flag which means you have to pull into the pit stop and recieve penalty time. Blue flag is when you are going too slow so you should move to the left and give way to people behind you. Yellow flag or light means slow down, someone has crashed and the service people are trying to get him out.

Our first driver was Sherman since he was the captain of the team. They started with 2 laps of warm up and Sherman crashed during the 2nd lap LOL. Everyone was just waiting for him to get unstuck so we could start the race. Then the race started. It was the most intense event I have watched in a while. Motors whirring, tyres screeching, people cheering, it was very exciting. It was really funny when people blocked others while turning corners and made them crash. Sherman was doing pretty good but then he got a black flag. We didnt see what happened but that was a bummer.

At 25 laps, we have to hold out a sign to signal our driver to pull into the pitstop because you cant hear anything while you were driving. Shimeen was next, he was doing good until his kart broken down lol which caused us more time. Albert went next and then it was Ming. It was cool seeing how concentrated our team members were, cheered them on as they drove past and laughed at them when they crashed. That is what a team should be.

When it was my turn, I was pretty nervous because it seemed like everyone got the hang of it but what if I didnt. Well after getting on and floored the accelerator, not only was I suprised about how fast the go kart was but also how easy it was to drive it. You dont even need to use the break, even around corners but during my laps I found out that you skid after leaving corners if you dont use the break and that slows you down by a bit. The coolest part during my laps was when i overtook 3 people at once, the first kart was going slow which was blocking the other 2. However I saw a gap between them so I weaved through and got past all of them, man it felt really good. Another memorable part was when I was behind this girl and I tried to get past her around a corner but the gap wasnt big enough so I hit her side on which caused her kart to become perpendicular to the track and she had to wait for the service people to put her back straight. I waved my hand to apologise but I still felt guilty afterwards because it was completely my fault yet my kart was fine lol :/

After the qualifying round for group 1 finished, it was the other group's turn which means we had to wait for another hour or so. There was suppose to be a sausage sizzle soon but they still hadnt set it up so we decided to go out for lunch. According to Albert, there was a Wendys just 'down the road'. So we went down the road, went past Silverdale town centre, turned right heading towards Shakespear Park, searching and hoping that there was a Wendys. We made ridiculous bets to what happens if there was one or there wasnt one cause we were just driving towards no where and we wouldnt stop until we saw a Wendys. Then we finally reached this more civilised place and there it was! All of us were cheering and relieved, Albert was like "See! See!", Shimeen was like speechless.

Went back to the race track after lunch, what it seemed like a 20mins driver before was actually like a 5 mins drive. When we got back, group 2 still hadnt finished so we just chilled. Then after it finished, they sorted us out into division A and B. A was the fastest 9 and B was the slowest 9. We were in division A, they decided to let division B to race first which meant more waiting for us. We were all fairly tired so all 5 of us just squeezed into the car and listened to music, talked, slept, just trying to kill some time.

After like an hour of waiting, it was finally our turn. We knew we werent that fast in division A and we were right, we were 8th out of the 9 team to start off lol. Albert went first and he had an awesome start, during the first 5 laps he overtook like 3 or 4 people, he was 4th at one time but the he crashed which was awww but still got us up to 7th by the end of his laps. Ming went next and during his turn, quite a lot of crashes happened which boost made us kept fluactuating between 6th and 7th. It was funny when Ming bumped onto the safety tyres really hard one time and his hair net fell on top of eyes so he was basically driving blindly LOL. Sherman went next and did good too by the end of his laps, we were 6th. Shimeen was great, he kept us at 6th and he held the record of the fastest lap in our team. Our greatest target was kart 2, they were 5th. We were a lap behind them and then a miracle happened, they crashed which allowed Shimeen to caught up and was half a lap behind them now.

Our plan was when kart 2 do their driver change, we let Shimeen go an extra lap and make up for the lost half a lap. Then when it was my turn, the seatbelt got stuck and we fumbled for like 30 secs which meant our plan didnt work as well as expected. When I was in the kart, I felt like my vision narrowed, all I could see was the kart in front of me and all I thought about was how was I going to get past him. I didnt even pay attention to flags or lights and lucky I didnt get any. I skillfully got past one guy and I found myself chasing no.2, he was right in front of me. He was trying to block me all the time but during the S curve I managed to fight through a narrow gap he left opened while turning and bumped him out of my way. Luckily I didnt get penalised but then afterwards I could feel him chasing me, trying to regain his position. I stood strong and did not let him past me and the result of that we got 5th!

Today was one of the funnest day I've had in ages. It was worth the $40 I had to pay, since normally it would be $40 for only 20mins. Today's event, there was teamwork, individual skill, excitement, thrill all pack into one. But driving a go kart gets tiring since a lot of strength is needed to turn the steering wheel, I felt like I've just went to the gym. Anyway, this was the longest update I've ever written and Im really tired now so just gonna leave here.