What are you currently reading?

Still on The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything -- I've been reading it on the train and it's nice. It puts me in a reflective, almost prayerful mood.

What did you recently finish(/not finish) reading?

Volume 7 of Ooku. I've been getting this series from the library, but I'm thinking that I'll eventually have to get my own set soon since it's so hard to remember the various shogun and their retainers and their consorts and their enemies. Blarrggh. Everyone's a Tsuna-something or a Hide-whatever that I feel I need to review the previous books each time a new one comes along. It doesn't help that the gap of time between book is so long.

Have to put Mark of Athena on pause. I'm leaving on Friday and I have to return it to the library.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I don't know, tbh. I'm putting as much stuff on the Kindle as possible for the plane ride. Maybe I'll finish the rest of the Oz books, who knows.

ahhhhhhh so much for updating more frequently!! >_<;;;

not much actually happened this month... work has been going slowly because it's AP exams soon/now and s there's no lab work to do. i've been trying to continue my tidying, but it's more or less done now and i'm just waiting around for people to reply me... so i'm just on livejournal every day :D

one amusing thing that happened was that the biology and physics teachers that were going to come to hong kong decided not to come, and now we're looking for new teachers XD;;; i guess this is karma for kicking out our current biology teacher so they could bring in the new one just for a cheaper visa?

ohhh! it was my birthday last week! happy birthday to me~~~ I was going to make this post on my birthday, but hahaha that never happens does it :P as a present to myself, i decided that i'll remove my spending ban and buy anything i want for a week... well now i have a massive credit card bill that will take ages to clear ~____~ this is why i had a spending ban in the first place!!! :( but i did have a great dinner :D we had like... 10 dishes, and it was all related to seafood! it was super duper nice *__*

as for new anime this season, there hasn't been much really. utapuri is a favourite, and i've been liking ren's song a lot *__* well until tokiya's comes out :P oreimo has been boring so i'm close to dropping it... azazel is azazel, and that's about it! i still have so much anime from the 10000 shows before it's good i don't have much new things to watch :P OH GALILEO OMG FUKUYAMA <33333

( Track List and LinksCollapse )
Baby Sailor Namieh thanks you for your time~

there's no tracklist out yet, but we have covers! bigger versions of CD only and CD+Blu-ray are under the cut.


L to R: CD only, CD+DVD, CD+Blu-ray

( Read more...Collapse )

CLICK ON THUMBNAILS BELLOW TO ENLARGE!



This scene actually appears in the 2nd chapter of volume 8, so I guess putting it as 'new' is not exactly right...

For the ones of you who have seen many of the colored illustrations of the mobile game, I'm sure you noticed that many of them were re-drawn in some parts or even significantly completed: for example, a scan of Sakura drawn up to her waist in the manga has legs added to it for the mobile game, other example that happens often is flowers: tons and tons of flowers added to pics.
That said, out of everything I've seen until now, this was the most modified. So much was redrawn that I consider it as a 'sorta new art'.

In case you're curious, this is the b&w page of the manga:( Read more...Collapse )

( NSFW image/textCollapse )

After the awfulness that was The Following, I'm happy to say that my unexplainable crush on James Purefoy is back after seeing him as Marc Antony in Rome. He's so amazing and perfect as Antony. If I were a high school student and had to read Julius Caesar for English class, I would be HAPPY to write essays and essays on Antony if I had the image of JP in my head. I mean, sure, Marlon Brando was cute in that 1953 movie, but Purefoy brings Antony's douchey yet adorable puppy dog character to life.

Just general fangirling: Iron Man 3 was entertaining. Seems to be some hate from fans who wanted something more serious, but it was a pure fun kick-off-the-almost-summer-movie-season-type movie.

Star Trek Into Darkness...drools all over screen, <3 all the characters. This is the best fan-candy interview which doesn't feature any of the main actors:



Maybe I just watch too many similar-type movies, but both movies were fairly predictable (not that that diminishes the overall enjoyment).

This was a really helpful Serious Eats (er, Serious Drinks?) article:

Cheatsheet:

• Humulus lupulus is scientific name for hops. Cue words Humulus, Lupulus, or Lupulin to denote an IPA or other hoppy beers


• Quercus is Latin root for oak tree. Barrel-aged beers might incorporate this word in the name.


• In German, Hefe means "yeast," weizen translates to "wheat," doppel is for double, rauch means smoked, and schwarz means black. See: schwarz weizen (dunkelweizen), weizenbock, kristalweizen


• If the name of a beer or brewery is French, it's a fair assumption that the beer is Belgian-inspired


• Belgian Golden Strong ales are linked to the devil (duvel) -- have trickled down to American-brewed examples such as Russian River's Damnation and AleSmith's Horny Devil

Shingeki no Kyojin 1-5! Attack on Titan...why do the translated titles not make sense? Attack the Titans or Attack of the Titans? This epic Bollywood remake of the opening song made me curious about the series.

+ original story
+/- gruesome violence
+ decent production

Quick impression~ Giant humanoid creatures, Titans, eat humans. The humans thought themselves to be safe within walled cities, but find that they aren't. Eren, a young boy, his adopted sister and another young boy from his district survive and join the military. While terribly violent and visually intriguing, I'm a little put off by the rudimentary technology used to fight the armored giants. Hopefully, they come up with something other than the ineffective guns, swords, and cannons. The way the soldiers fly through the air is pretty cool. Great cliffhanger regarding the main character in episode 5.

Hunter x Hunter 2013 78-79! The ant queen's servants start developing individual thought while hunting humans to feed the queen. Kite and gang head towards Neo-Green Life island still looking for signs of the chimera ants.

Chihayafuru S2 17-18! When will Chihaya not be totally baffled by her opponent in the first 15 minutes of all of her matches. It doesn't look very promising for the rest of her team, too.

What are you currently reading?

Still 55% on Mark of Athena. Haaaalp.

Also started on The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything; partially because I don't really know what the Jesuits are all about (despite having attended many Jesuit retreats, etc.) and partially because I've been enjoying reading books on spirituality and religion. I claim that I am a person of faith, but even in Catholicism, there are still gaps in my knowledge and I'd like to correct that.

What did you recently finish reading?

Three more volumes of Arata (vols 9-11) and Pretty Good Number One, which was worth my Kickstarter contribution.

PGNO is about living the dream of residing in Tokyo for a month, eating and sampling Japanese food at its best and most ordinary. In other foodie memoir books/shows (like Anthony Bourdain's, for instance), the author would visit restaurants that are crazy expensive and not representative of the way that 'normal' people eat. Yeah, it would AMAZING to be able to eat at Jiro's for sushi, but really, I don't have US$350 to eat a dozen pieces of sushi in one seating. Matthew Amster-Burton, on the other hand, writes about what a normal Tokyoite would eat -- ramen, donburi, yakitori, Denny's, onigiri from 7-11 -- and for me, reading about that kind of food makes Tokyo far more approachable.  I also love how he references the manga series Oishinbo numerous times throughout the text, almost as if Yamaoka was his spirit guide.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Not sure, though I still have an ARC on boozy drinks that I'd like to review before I leave.

Source: YQTravelling

I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't excited to be heading back to the PH, but I'm really not looking forward to 30-degree (C) temps.

Picked this up as a little tidbit from the book I'm reading Pretty Good Number One. He was talking about how he and some friends went to get chanko nabe in the Ryoguku district of Tokyo, the neighborhood known as the location of many of the sumo training facilities.  He then mentioned how more and more foreigners, especially from eastern Europe, were taking over the sport and becoming yokozuna instead of the native-born Japanese.

The NYT wrote up an article earlier in January this year confirming just that:

Not one of those portraits was of a Japanese. Just four Mongolians, an Estonian and a Bulgarian account for all 32 of those victories, which date to 2007. The last time a Japanese wrestler won was in January 2006. - "In Japan, Sumo is Dominated by Foreigners"

I really find it interesting that most professional sports, in most countries, the idea of a 'foreigner' entering the sport is pretty much the norm. The money obviously plays a big role -- if you're a poor kid with talent in a sport -- there are worse things to do for a living than to play ball in Europe or to sumo wrestle in Japan.

Just updating so I won't lose my account.

So, you're scrolling along Facebook, minding your own business, checking out your college roommate's 150th picture of her new baby -- and then, you see one of those posts. You know the one warning you about the dangers of xyz. I swear, those things are the 2013 version of those forwards/chain letters that circulated when we all first got e-mail.

Generally, those graphics/posts are innocuous enough, many obviously based on wacky pseudoscience that won't hurt you too much if you follow or ignore them. In the interest of posting something for Livejournal, I looked up the validity of one such health warning to see if it holds any water, so to speak.

So, the warning goes thus:

Bottled water in your car is very dangerous! On the Ellen show, Sheryl Crow said that this is what caused her
breast cancer. It has been identified as the most common cause of the high levels of dioxin in breast cancer tissue..

Sheryl Crow’s oncologist told her: women should not drink bottled water that has been left in a car. The heat reacts with the chemicals in the plastic of the bottle which releases dioxin into the water. Dioxin is a toxin increasingly found in breast cancer tissue. So please be careful and do not drink bottled water that has been left in a car.

The latent science major in me is cringing already. A quick search will reveal that the "dioxins" or the plastics additive DEHA (diethylhydroxylamine) that are supposedly leeched into the water aren't even used in the manufacturing process for water bottles (and it's not produced from the heat breakdown of such plastic bottles), and that DEHA is not classified as a human carcinogen.

Sources: http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/plasticbottles.asp
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/medical/a/bottled-water.htm

I'm sure despite these reassurances from the FDA and the medical community, there will still be people who will distrust and continue to believe these internet warnings. Personally, I'm the type that uses my metal water container not really out of paranoia about plastic/chemical poisoning, but out of cheapness. I'd rather bring my own bottle, filled with water filtered at home, than spend an extra dollar on the bottled water.