I'd just gone through another drama anime from the makers of Kanon, called Air TV. Once again, it was pure awesome. Its downfall was that it was only 12 episodes (and a 13th "repeat episode"). But it was awesome nonetheless. I really liked the main characters, particularly Haruko, because her role was by far the most dramatic of all to me.

Hats off to another great Key story (even though this was produced before Kanon). I'm looking forward to another one in production (or soon to be released) called Clannad.

らき☆すた (Lucky Star)

This is a new anime I'm watching (also a manga by the same name) that follows the same style of humor of Cromartie High School. The difference is that the characters are cutely-drawn high school girls. But holding meaningless conversations, or leading you one way and turning out the other, all that kind of humor is still there.

Honestly, my Japanese skills are not enough to enjoy this anime raw. D: They have so many inside-jokes, references and puns that won't be understood unless you know what they're talking about.

It's hilarious and cute, and I love it. :D

I made a sketch of a simple fan-art of Chai Xianghua from Soul Calibur (particularly, her first costume in Soul Calibur 3). I'll be coloring it tonight and tomorrow and I'll upload it here and on my Deviant Art gallery.

In Space Cowboy Online (I play on Trimus server), we went through another Mother Ship Defense. I didn't get to take any screenshots (though I wanted to). Despite what happened the last time we were defending, this time the outcome was surprisingly good. We not only successfully defended our mother ship, but our strategy was so far superior to the opponent's that even if we were outnumbered, we didn't lose much ground. We were able to stop every significant advance. We fought in Den A to stall, then there was a lot of fighting in Crystal Cave (about an hour's worth of fighting), afterward we fell back to the Desert of Ardor, in which they made no successful advance at all. With 30 minutes left to defend the mother ship, the mother ship was still at 100% health, and nobody could get past our defenses. This was when we heard that the leader of the B.C.U. had logged off, and pretty much everybody had given up.

Yeah, our rebel A.N.I. forces did what we were even musing on about just hours before as being impossible: holding a successful mother ship defense even if we're outnumbered. Kudos to all the rebels for being organized. Almost everybody followed orders and held their posts properly. Kudos to our leader Sarinaka for thinking of the layered defense strategy, and being able to organize it.

Soon after, with the momentum in our favor, and the leader of B.C.U. gone, we decided to attack their mother ship. I didn't have enough time to help out much on this one, but I have a feeling that we won that one too.

Today's MS Defense was fun, and I look forward to more big wars like this in the future.

I took a screenshot at a tame moment, because when there's actual action I couldn't think of letting go of my mouse hand. The red names are ships from the other faction. About 2-3 minutes after this screenshot I think, the screen was so full of red names and bullets and missiles flying at them. After that first wave, in which my ship got destroyed, many of them got through, and so we were overwhelmed. Nevertheless, we got our ships repaired quickly and hurried back to defend. They came in two more waves, until finally, our mother ship was destroyed. We were just too far outnumbered.

Well I've invested a lot in making my ship stronger since then. I borrowed weapons and bought stuff to upgrade the weapons. I'm trying to level up, to be more useful in wars like that (yes, including skirmishes). If we're outnumbered as rebels, at least let us be the most skilled and difficult things to do battle with!


In other news, I'm downloading two new anime right now. One is called Hayate no Gotoku (only the first episode has been subbed so far; I'm lazy to look for and download raws). This is a very funny anime, with much randomness. The main character is awesome, because he's kind, strong and cool. It's hard to describe the awesomeness of this anime lol. I'm looking forward to the next episodes.

The other anime I'm downloading is called Manabi Straight. It's supposed to be a "funny, slice of life" anime about an energetic (and a little crazy?) girl nicknamed Manabi, who charges into a school that's lost its school spirit, and runs for student council president, much to the surprise of the current president, who is the only member of the student council at the moment. D: It sounds like the formula for much win and fail simultaneously. Downloading the first episode now, but I'll have to pause it because I'm in the mood to play SCO again.

Alright, well my collection of Judy and Mary songs now isn't as big as it was about 6 years ago. Judy and Mary was my favorite band for several years, and still is to some extent (in terms of punk/pop rock, this takes it; soulful and rock & roll goes to The Yellow Monkey, though). In my first collection (before I lost my original hard disk), I had every song they made except around 8 songs, if I remember correctly, and except for remixes and alternate versions.

So anyway, since yesterday I've been longing for one of their songs that I remember, called "Goodbye". I just realized that I liked that song so much, and that I missed it, but I didn't have it currently on my computer. So I went around file share programs looking for it, and ended up finding other songs that I was missing too in my current collection, including an awesome strings version of their song PEACE.

Man... I really loved that group. I remember when they performed their farewell concert in Tokyo Dome in 2001. I was watching live on WOWOW (a Japanese channel that we got on cable back then). It was so sad.

Okay now to MMORPG news. Rappelz is a pretty cool game. I finally got to try it now that they fixed the corrupted file that the patcher was trying to download. But as early as level 15, you an already tell that it's going to be a grind game. Even the majority of quests cause you to grind. However, I'm looking forward to dungeon parties later on, which sound like more fun than wandering around killing monsters for mind-numbing hours. Because dungeon parties are supposedly hard, you need a full party with effective strategies, making it far more interesting. I have no characters high enough level yet, but I'm working on it.

As for Space Cowboy, they were having problems with the log-in server. This seems to happen often, where you can't log in.

I've been working more on my drawing style rather than the story, so there isn't much progress to talk about. My drawing style is becoming cleaner, though. I'm going through some minor adjustments with the hairstyles, and I'm also practicing to draw full body quickly. I can only draw them correctly if I spend a lot of time on it, but I'm going to have to learn to do shortcuts: i.e., not drawing a body outline first, then drawing the clothes, then erasing the body outline. I have to learn to draw the clothing directly, and still end up with a correctly-proportioned body. It's actually very tricky to me...