And randomly out of nowhere: here is a Paradise Kiss opening and ending theme screen capture gallery! I’m working on a new theme for this anime blog, and I want to improve the look of the gallery. Instead of just having a bunch of images, I’m going to be styling the automatically generated WordPress galleries. So, enjoy the cute eye candy as I work things out!

So, about that blog post about Anime North 2009…

I attended the convention with xxStephy, dressed in cosplay as Mario and Luigi! We wanted to do a group badly, and ended up with a Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach cosplay group. The twist? We genderbent the characters, so we had female plumbers and a prince! It sounds so bizarre when written in text.

The Mario and Luigi costumes were both sewn by me, sans the hats. xxStephy bought the hats for us on ebay (oh, the wonders you can find on there). My favourite parts to make were the buttons! They were these fun metal contraptions that you covered with fabric and by pushing it through a small set of tubes, it became a button. FUN!

I acted as an assistant/gopher for xxStephy’s youtube video about AN. It has interviews with people we met at the con (some of them are real personalities). Nearly everything that could go wrong with our equipment did go wrong, but we kept our outlooks positive for the most part:

Of course, a convention blog post isn’t complete without posting a gallery of cosplayers and random shenanigans! I never feel like I take enough photos at these events.

I’ve tried to identify the series as best as I can, but I wasn’t certain about some. Please comment on the photo pages if you know a series or any information about the costume/cosplayers if you happen to know! Or correct me if I’m wrong! ^_~

(more…)

Anime North season is almost upon us! I’m participating in a small reverse-gender Super Mario Brothers cosplay group. It sounds like it will be a lot of fun! I’m short and a little squishy so I’m being Mario, while my tall and thin friend is going to be Luigi. Maria and Lucy, anyone? One of her male friends is going to be Princess Toadstool / Peach for us.

I’ll be using the NewLook 6789 pattern to make Mario and Luigi jumper skirts. They’ll be made out of blue twill with giant buttons on the straps to emulate overalls. We didn’t just want to be girls in boys clothes – we will be completely girlified!

The length will probably end up being justa few inches above the knees.  Under the jumpers we’ll just have plain red and green tshirts.  We’ve found hats on ebay because neither of us are skilled hat makers.

I’ll be posting progress pictures as work gets done on this project! Yay for cosplay!

Over the past few months, I’ve been getting notifications once in a while alerting me that my anime music videos have been removed for violating the terms of service.  Since the videos are made with both copyrighted footage and copyrighted music, it makes sense that they would be removed.

At the same time, it’s sad to see them go!  A few Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne videos are now gone, and sadly, one of my videos from The Final Fantasy VI Project.  This was a short video series which depicted Final Fantasy VI characters in new plots.  The video which was removed was episode 3.  It was removed because it contained about 20 seconds of the Nine Inch Nails Song La Mer.  20 seconds?  Really?  I read online that NIN was cracking down on people using their stuff.  So I guess I was targetted too.  Oh well!  Though it was a really weird episode in any case.

Here is episode two, randomly, which I actually think is the only good one in the series that I made.  I made them so long ago that it is kind of embarrassing (memories!):

I haven’t updated this anime blog in a really really long time.  Mostly because of laziness, hee.  (Sorry! =O)  I’ve been wanting to update Sparkle Sparkle, so I updated to the newest version of WordPress through Dreamhost’s one click install….and then was locked out of my site.

After disabling all my plugins I’m able to log in again!  I’m still going through my plugins one by one to get the site working at full throttle, so if you stumble across something that doesn’t work, that could be the reason!

Lately, I haven’t purchased any new anime or manga because of money problems.  This year has been really stressful money wise, most likely because of the trip I took to Japan last year.  (Wow, my last blog post was about that, I never actually ended up writing about it.  All my photos are lost now too – the harddrive that they were stored on crashed.)   I miss Shoujo Beat magazine!  Since I haven’t been able to buy the new ones, I’m thinking of selling my old ones… I have them all from the very first issue.

I’ve watched some non-shoujo series with my boyfriend recently (Onegai Teacher, Full Metal Panic), along with movies like Appleseed.  It’s pretty fun, but I still love my shoujo fluff!  I have a huge urge to rewatch Fruits Basket!

I’ve been reading Fruits Basket fan fiction a lot lately, especially Tohru X Kyou stories.  They are one of my favourite couples from the series.  Whenever I read fan fiction, my urge to participate in the fan fiction community grows!  I used to write Fruits Basket fan fiction a lot, but I haven’t in a few years now.  My old fanfiction.net account ~runicknight is getting dusty!  I really would love to pick up some of my incomplete fan fics and finish them up, because I still get review notifications for them once in a while.  It’s just sad, because all the online friends I made in the ff.net community don’t update their stories anymore either.  I guess we’re all growing up and moving onto other hobbies.

Punishment is the story that I want to work on the most.  It’s a romance story between Sohma Haru and Hanajima Saki.  I’m kind of fond of bizarre couplings!  I had this story completely planned out, and I found the old outline, so I could pick this up again, I think.

I’ve returned from Japan!  Well, I actually returned almost half a month ago, but I upgraded WordPress and ran into a few problems with my admin panel.  I haven’t been able to make a post since then, but luckily it seems to be fine now!

I have lots to say and lots of images to share from my trip, but for now I’ll just have to leave it with a few photographs. I have three exams left this semester, one a day for the next three days, so I want to focus on them before I go blog-happy. So this will act as a teaser before the large post(s)!

Recently I bought an external hard drive to make my laptop a little happier – it was exploding from all sides with anime and manga downloads because I seem to have a problem keeping up with my files.  I’m not that attached to anime downloads, (I pretty much delete them as I watch them), but I have the hardest time getting rid of manga files!  I reread manga a lot because I tend to enjoy it 10x more than watching an anime, plus I find it nicer to read when I’m taking a break to chat with friends online.

The hard drive is really nice. ^_^  It’s 500GB, but it surprisingly not that expensive.  The 80GB harddrive on my laptop was not large enough for me so it is a good investment.

I wish that I was a better organizer as I download manga series. Sometimes I’m a good girl and create a folder for each series, but I’ve been bad lately, and just shoving all my new downloads in the base directory of my manga folder, telling myself I’ll do it later when I have time. I’ve been sorting out my manga by series for several days, putting all zip files into those series folders. Then I’ve been putting those series folders into three main category folders: Completed Series, Incomplete Series, and Oneshots. It’s a pretty good system, and I’ve sorted 32GB of manga so far, and only have just over 2GB to go. Whoohoo!

I’m trying to keep all unread chapters on my laptop, then moving them over to the external drive when I’m done. Yay!

I am so excited! There are just seven days separating myself from Japan. The months since the flight was booked have just flown (har har) by! I’m fairly certain that I have everything in order… I’m at a loss for words!  I fail at blogging due to excitement and the sheer amount of work that I have to complete before I leave.  Seven assignments in seven days, two of which are ten page research papers – I’m unsure how this is going to go down.

But… Japan!  ^_^

Last weekend I travelled to Ottawa for some random fun as a break from school.  It was a five hour bus ride all alone but it was definitely worth it to meet up with my long distance boyfriend (teehee).  I’ve been to Ottawa one time many years ago but I was never able to stop for any shopping, so this was my first opportunity to experience that.

 I went to a comic shop downtown where I fell in love with a series of ultra cute bags, most of which were pink – my weakness! Whenever I travel, I seem to not be able to fit my stuff back into my luggage on the trip home. In my case, I only had a backpack to survive for three days worth of clothes and accessories. I decided to take the excuse to purchase a new bag. I had originally packed my laptop in my backpack and had to stow it below the bus because it is a weird shape. It strangely can’t fit inside the overhead compartment, woe. I found one that was just barely large enough to fit my beaten up laptop into with an image of a bunny and a bunny girl with cute words on it, like “Sweet Strawberry” and “Sweet Filling”, and of course lots of Japanese text that I cannot read.

My favourite part is the back, which contains fake calorie information about the strawberry treat. So cute and fun! It was also fun that although it said $29.99 on the price tag, it actually cost $22.99 so it felt like a great deal for a fully lined zippered bag. Whoohoo!

It listed the URL adeline.com on the corner so I was hoping that it would have more Adeline bags on display there, but no such luck. It seems to be one of those fake spammer websites. I even tried to search for personal sites and random blogs that mentioned them, and I had no luck.  Next time I’m in Ottawa, I’m tempted to purchase another one in a different colour or style if they’re still for sale. :D

Random information found on the bag: Copyright belongs to Makescents, Licensed by AA Products. Adeline.com Adeline Desserts. Illustrator by 1013. That is their bad grammar, not mine. (Mmm, Engrish!) Product Name: Adeline Strawberry Sweet.

And the really fun ingredient list, just for the heck of it!

• Strawberry Juice – 40.00%
• Sugar – 20.00%
• Milk – 15.00%
• Egg – 15.00%
• Strawberry – 10.00%
• Etc.

I enjoy that it lists “Etc.” when the percentage already adds up to 100%. Also, the fake snack on the package was packaged in January 2006 and expires September 2009. Let’s hope that doesn’t mean that is when my vinyl purse will wear out! ^_~