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Back from the land down under.

I’ve spent the last 10 days roaming around in Australia, half the time in either a car, bus or plane. Drove from Sydney all the way up to Lismore for my graduation and back down to Sydney again within 3 days. Can’t remember the exact distance between the 2, but I think its around 600km and it would take around 7-8 hours to get there.

We took about 10-30 minutes break every few hours, and the sky starts to turn dark by 5pm (and you can see plenty of stars by 6pm) so it took us 1 1/2 days to reach our destination. Coming back took us about 12 hours, but my aunt was more familiar with the areas closer to Sydney so driving in the dark was less of a problem.

Aus is fun and I’m probably the only one who truly enjoyed the entire trip. Everyone else, including my relatives who lives there, kept complaining about the cold weather and my sister often complained that I could still work out a sweat wearing a single T-shirt out in the cold. I’m definitely made out for cold weather XD

More pictures and back to normal posting again soon.

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Just a quick reminder, there’s only 4 days left before the nomination for the Anime Blog Awards is closed off and voting begins. Nominations can be made by anyone, as long as you run an anime blog that was created before February this year and have been maintaining it or at least made a few post since March.

For the rest of you, start preparing your votes because it will be your turn to decide who wins the awards once voting starts on the 25th of this month!

The banners to help promote the Anime Blog Awards is finally out. A bit late IMO, but nonetheless, let’s start putting them up all over the anime blogosphere

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The Anime Blog Awards is an interesting concept. According to the organizers, the Anime Blog Awards seeks to achieve 3 goals:

1. To serve as exposure for new bloggers.
2. To objectively measure a blog’s achievements by means of peer review.
3. To encourage readers to move out of their comfort zone by discovering new blogs.

There has been some issues raised over the conception of the awards, most of which has already been directly addressed by Impz, one of the award organizers.

To my knowledge, this has been the first time an award to recognize anime bloggers of this scale has been attempted, one that will provide strong recognitions to those who are nominated. The organizers are some of the most well known bloggers amongst those in the anime community after all. If they can’t achieve what they set out to do, it would be difficult for any others to do the same.

One of my greatest concern was that, regardless of how the organizers attempt to be fair, nominations and votes would inevitably go out to the more popular and well established blogs and bloggers. Not to mention that the awards would get very little recognition and promotion outside this circle of the anime blogosphere. That would have defeated the first and possibly third purpose of the awards in the first place. Fortunately, Impz managed to come up with a satisfactory response to this, while at the same time showed that he is trying his best to get the word out to the rest of the anime community.

Right now, there are still so many other blogs out there who aren’t aware of this effort at all. That is a real pity, which is why it would be a great idea if everyone could help spread the word out to help make the awards a huge success. Even for non-bloggers, this would be a great opportunity to check out new blogs which you might not have been aware of before.

Despite the tagline being “by bloggers, for bloggers“, in my opinion this is really for all anime fans. While it’s true that the greatest benefits goes out to those who were nominated, but half the fun belongs to the more casual of fans, those who do not blog but lurks around within the blogosphere.

There are more readers then there are bloggers, so ultimately you have the greatest influence to determine the winners, especially within the Readers’ Choice awards. Even within the Bloggers’ Choice, chances are those who have the greatest following among readers would end up in the spot light, which can also be argued as a good thing or not

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It’s White Day in Japan today…

Dango, dango, dango, dango… That’s actually my current SMS tone and damn, it’s addictive…

And I’m back home in the Cat City for a few days.

Back to my own, comfortable bed in my near zero temperature room with my warm and fluffy blanket and my trusty ol’ desktop PC.

Sure, my laptop has newer, more advanced technology compared to my 3 year old desktop. But overall my laptop still feels much more powerful and nicer and to use. Then again, I was never that big a fan of laptops in the first place. I only needed one because I needed the mobility.

Been rather pissed for the last couple of days and I would have saved myself plenty of stress and came home yesterday if it weren’t for some really effed up circumstances I found myself in.

Chocolates from Sakura is the best cure for stress, depression and pretty much anything!

But now that I’m home, all is well again.

That is, until it’s time for me to go again.

Originally wanted to write a post for White Day during my flight back, but apparently being 33,000 feet above sea level, cramped in a cylindrical carriage with a few hundred people in very tight seating arrangement along with a large and heavy laptop doesn’t do very much for my creativity or thinking in general. So I ended coming up with nuts.

And instead, this post turned out to be more of a rant. I must be too tired. It’s time to get a very good night sleep after almost an entire month of restless nights.

Yeah, I love the sound and feel of my keyboard a lot better than my laptop.

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Some pics of what I’ve bought during my short trip to Singapore as well as my brand new laptop.

My new “home”

My original plan was to get one from Singapore during my trip, since I thought it was going to be cheaper and better there. But luckily, I did some scouting here before I left, and found out that while Singapore laptops are in a way cheaper and better, they do not fit my needs. They have good processors and memory at a low price, but they have terrible graphic cards. In the end I settled for this Dell Inspiron 1520 black. It’s actually black on the outside and silver inside.

Took me nearly 4 days to get it up and running as I liked it (in between my anime and CabalSEA closed beta) and I’m not quite done yet. I have yet to install a few other softwares which I’m still looking around for.

After waiting for so long, Fruits Basket Vol. 23 finally arrived…

There were so many new manga’s I wanted to buy, but due to lack of funds (read: money spent elsewhere) I only came back with 2 manga. The final volume of Fruits Basket and the first volume of .hack//G.U.+

And they’ve been sitting in my bag since, haven’t had the chance to read them yet.

Mine… All mine!!!

Okay, maybe not all… But I won’t really say which are mine, because while I own 2 of what’s in there, technically others could be mine too. Confusing, yes? But true.

So, based on my previous shopping list I posted before leaving for Singapore:

1. A laptop that is at least on par with my desktop which is ~3 years old. (Checked)
2. PSP Slim & Lite. Or Lite & Slim. Whatever. (Checked)
3. External HDD Casing, to house my anime-infested hard drive so I can use it on my new laptop (See #1). (Checked)
4. Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice for my NDS. (Objection! Checked)
5. A few other new Wii/DS/PSP games to keep me busy until I get my PS3. (Pata Pata Pata Pon! Checked)

Yay! I’ve managed to complete my shopping list!

Pon Pon Pata Pon!

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