Category: Miscellaneous

Welcome to Random Curiosity version 4.0!

This site is now powered by Wordpress 2.0.4, and the theme has been changed to Water, created by The Undersigned. This is a much more minimalist theme than the previous Boredom! , but I rather like it. Some of you may recognize that the header image is Louise Françoise de La Baume Le Blanc de La Vallière from Zero no Tsukaima – specifically, it’s an image from the second novel.

But I’m sure the question on everyone’s minds is what I’m doing transforming this site after I went on my “Break.” The answer is simple: I’ve been incredibly bored. The first week of school has been relatively uneventful and so I’ve been sitting around twiddling my thumbs for most of this time. I did manage to finish Xenosaga III, and that’s partially what motivated me to work on this. That game had such a great ending that I really wanted to blog about it, but I felt like I couldn’t because I had put this site on hiatus. In retrospect, my mistake was probably thinking that it was better not to write anything at all rather than to cut back on the writing.

Anyway, I am back now, but in a limited form: I am both cutting back on what I write about and how much I write. In other words, less series and shorter entries, though it depends on the show and how much free time I have on any given day (for example I doubt my Blood+ entries will get any shorter). Some shows may just get screencaps along with a few summary points and my initial thoughts. I can’t say yet what shows I’ll still be writing about and what I won’t be; it’ll all depend on how my schedule for these next few weeks works out. In addition, I won’t be making up for everything that I missed – think of it as me literally having taken a break/vacation for the past week. And the warning here is that as the months progress, entries may or may not become sparse. Basically there are no guarantees for anything like there was before. I still really don’t know how much time I’ll need to be spending on my classes and my research work yet, but it’s probably going to be a lot. Still, the point is that I have free time right now that’s completely going to waste, and I hate sitting idly with nothing to do.

I also realized that it would probably be best for the site and my readers if I didn’t do this alone anymore. So, if you’ve wanted to write about anime and you think you have the time & motivation, then consider this an opportunity to blog on a site that has an established readership in the tens of thousands. I’m going to be a bit lenient on language skill, so if you really are a good writer with a lot of time & motivation, I won’t necessarily ask you to write about raw anime. Interested? Send me an email (see the Contact Me page). Please include a sample entry on the series of your choice: no screencaps needed, just a write-up – you could follow my format and do a summary + thoughts, or you could do something creative. Surprise me. 🙂

Back when I had surgery in mid-June, I had taken a few days off from blogging even after I had gotten back from the hospital. During those days, I thought a lot about what I was doing and the future of this site. It was a struggle about whether or not continuing to write was worth the time and effort.
Taking my personal life out of the equation for a second, I have to explain that for me, running a site like this has had its ups and downs. On one hand, I love introducing people to the latest and greatest bleeding-edge stuff. I’ve always said that my favorite times of the year are at the beginnings and ends of seasons. Finales are exciting because they are the culmination of so much time and emotion invested into a series, but even more exciting for me is exploring new shows and then being able to share my thoughts with a community of people. And aside from anime, I also love talking about the newest music videos or whatever crazy thing the Japanese variety shows are airing.
On the other hand, however, blogging does take a lot of time. The advice I always give to new bloggers is to not write summaries unless you’re really really motivated because there’s nothing that will kill your interest faster in blogging than that. For me personally, I didn’t mind so much because I was both highly motivated and I had plenty of time to kill. But just like everything else, there were times when I hated writing summaries (such as almost every week of Fate/stay night) and times when I just couldn’t write them fast enough because of how much I wanted to tell people what happened (the latter half of Mai-Otome is a good example of this).
However, I’m at a point now that I don’t have quite as much motivation and I definitely don’t have much time. In those days after I had my surgery, I had decided not to stop and instead to continue blogging until I went back to school. Well, today is finally that day – the first day of my final year of college. I have a lot of work ahead of me, especially since I’m going to be applying for graduate school soon. Still, that alone wouldn’t have stopped me. The truth is that I really just feel like I need to take a break from blogging. I’ve felt this way for a while now and the school factor is what made that day today.
Does this mean that I’m quitting for good? Probably not. I’ve been blogging for some four years now (not all on this site), and so I can say with almost 100% certainty that I’ll be back to doing it again eventually. But how long that “eventually” turns out to be, I don’t know. It could be a week, it could be a month, or it could be a year. I also don’t know if I’ll come back to this site, some new anime site, or even a site on a completely different topic.
What I do know is that Random Curiosity is the most successful site I’ve ever created. To put it in numbers, I’ve written 1056 posts which have gotten a total of 19,680 comments. This site averages about 18,800 visits/51,000 page views per day, and during this past July, it logged around 147,000 unique visitors, amounting to over 300GB of bandwidth used during that period. It’s thanks to Maestro that this site exists with AnimeBlogger‘s free hosting, and it’s thanks to the support of the community and thanks to readers like you that this site became this popular.
In closing, I have to say that while writing this entry, I felt the urge to scrap the entire post and rethink all of this at least three times. But for now, I really am going to take a break. And so, to each and every one of you who reads and relies on this site, I’m sorry. Who knows, maybe I’ll find myself longing to blog again when next season starts or maybe even sooner, but there’s no way I can guarantee that.
All I can say now is つづく…? (To Be Continued…?)

This past Sunday, the popular music and variety show Utawara, hosted by Matsumoto Jun and Matsuura Aya, had a two hour summer special that featured Arashi, KAT-TUN, and Koda Kumi. What I’m writing about today is the segment that featured Koda Kumi: it was called the 「チビっ子エロかわダンス選手権」 (Chibikko Erokawa Dance Senshuken). Apparently, the show announced that they were holding such a competition and they got 1,419 applications. They eventually narrowed the field down to nine teams and those teams are the ones who performed in this roughly half-hour segment. Basically, each group does a dance to a Koda Kumi song, and they get judged by Wada Akiko, Tomochika Tsuyako, and Machamacha.
Warning: Proceed at your own risk. This post includes links to videos that I would probably label “Not Safe For Work.” In showing those to my friends, the responses I got were “OMG,” “Vade retro, satanas!” and “I have a feeling any chance I had to go to heaven just went down the crapper.”

Some random thoughts in my head for this first day of August:

Thanks to jj, I found out that the guy who made the Suzumiya Haruhi Gundam Parodies of the OP and ED has been up to a lot recently. This person, named plamo on YouTube, has not only made a parody of Touka helping Hakuoro in episode fourteen of Utawarerumono, he’s also made a Gundam parody of the end of the episode two of Suzumiya Haruhi and the God knows… song from episode twelve.
In addition, this guy has created Gundam parodies of several OP and ED sequences including:

Gokujou Seitokai’s OP, Koiseyo Onnanoko
Joshi Kousei GIRL’S-HIGH’s ED, incl.
Magikano’s ED, Magisuki MAGIC
Mai-Otome’s ED, Otome ha DO MY BEST desho?
Suzumiya Haruhi’s OP, Bouken Desho Desho?
Suzumiya Haruhi’s ED, Hare Hare Yukai

And that’s just a portion of all the videos.
I found all of them incredibly entertaining. I love the attention to detail, such as the way Strike Gundam’s Aile Pack comes down after defeating the enemy Gundam just like Touka’s hair floats down after she kills the enemy general. The Gokujou Seitokai OP made me laugh so much and reminded me of how much I liked the opening song.
plamo’s homepage can be found at http://ugougo.gejigeji.jp/. It includes a page for the “cast” of the videos and a page of production notes for each video.

Update: plamo has uploaded a new video, NHK ni Youkoso’s ED, a parody of Odoru Akachan Ningen. It is freaking HILARIOUS. You really have to watch it alongside the actual ED animation to appreciate how good it is.