Corusca

I’ve had a pretty busy week so far which explains me kind of slacking with posts. Several things are changing in my life, some for better, some for worst, and some I’m still unsure of and will have to wait and see what life brings.

I started looking at wedding dresses last week over at Chiado, and the ongoing adventure of finding me a dress that I actually like and that looks good on me will continue this weekend. x_x This time we’ll need to be there in the morning as the stores which had more affordable stuff (meaning: stuff that does not require selling my liver to purchase) were closed in the afternoon. Boo.

Tonight we’re going to pick up our new World of Warcraft expansion Collector’s Edition. Yay! I’ve been informing myself and with some luck it will only take 15-20 minutes to install on my laptop. I’m hoping there’s no new patch after that. Of course playing tonight will be as painful experience as it gets in an MMO: people camping everything, hellish lag, server queues and quite possibly servers going down. In other words: a normal launch week day.

As you may have noticed I’ve posted some photos of Sintra and of BD Amadora on my flickr account. The Sintra photos were taken in the evening we got locked in the Pena Palace Garden, and we went to BD Amadora the following week. It was a good and bad expo at the same time. I enjoyed the sci-fi decoration, and I loved some of the art sections there, such as the Tara McPherson one, and the section with chinese artists’ work which were the best in the expo. I also liked the fact that Richard LeParmentier a.k.a Admiral Motti in Star Wars was there signing autographs, like he’s doing for us in the photo below.

This year I managed to resist buying anything (except for the autographed photos), and even refrained from buying a Sasuke gashapon (or trading figure? I couldn’t tell with the distance) I saw being sold there. I’m hoping my usual anime merchandise dealer get some at his store someday so I get the coolest-looking character in the show (so far). Yes Gaara also looks cool, but I’ve never seen him do anything in the show, plus he’s not as stylish. :p

[ Side note: dear 'Naruto' fangirls/boys who may be thinking of replying to this post: refrain from hate commenting on my personal taste. I hardly give a rats arse about the show and could not care less if your heart belongs to Gaara or another imaginary character with whom you'd like so sleep with ( since you obviously can't with a real person). I simply like the quiet, cursed dude who dresses in blue, has a sad repressed past and who kicked ass whenever I saw him fight. Thanks. ]

Not sure what the next weekend will entail as we’re waiting for some input on some friends who are installing some software far up North on whether they will be back this weekend. Worst case scenario is still good; Staying home/going out with just my sweetie, and arrange some movie-watching at home with a couple of friends on Saturday or Sunday. I’d also like to go to IKEA to buy a couple of glass closets I saw there a while ago, so they don’t sell out and I get stuck with something not as good.

I also need to go to Jikai! pick up my anime purchases and possibly some new paints and brush for some model kits or miniatures. Yesterday I was at my parents’ place and was looking for the Eva 00 (kai) model kit I bought about 8 or 9 years ago, and once again I didn’t find it. It’s too bad because since I’m going to have the Revoltech one, I was thinking of doing some painting experiments with the old kit, and maybe make it a metallic medium/dark blue instead of the regular blue. It would also allow me to relearn about the assembling and painting tricks, which is something I need to do before I start assembling my more recent Eva 01 model kit (don’t want to screw it up :P).

I’ll be going to visit my grandparents in Porto for a few days in August, when my other half is off to Croatia. That way, not only do I get to see my grandmother, and revisit Porto, but I’m not simply bored at home alone. That way, since I don’t have internet access there, I’d spend most of the time when I’m not out, reading. And considering the enormous amount of unread novels, comics and manga I have waiting at home, it would be very nice. It’s stupid really that I can’t seem to just read at home, even when I’m not chatting away happily on the web or browsing. I don’t know why I’ve been in this inertial status, but it’s annoying the hell out of me.

Oh yeah, a couple of weekends ago, when I was off somewhere on a birthday celebration with some close friends, I watched the first three episodes of Gundam Seed. Unfortunately, it didn’t impress me. For now I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt, since a friend told me it’s a ’slow start’ series which gets better later on, but I don’t really feel motivated to watch more right now after my disappointment. For some reason, I usually don’t like most mecha-centered anime series I see. I loved Evangelion and liked Escaflowne, but those were pretty much it.

On a completely different subject, I’ve been realizing more and more lately that in general, I’m pretty happy with my life. One year ago I was suffering from a major depression and felt like crap pretty much every day, and I took steps to getting away from those feelings, and they worked. My self esteem is way up. Go me! :P

As promised yesterday I uploaded photos of some of my Evangelion stuff.

The one up there is a photo of my Eva Unit 01 gashapon taken with only a dark light lamp I have at home on.

You can find the rest of the Eva photos here. Feel free to check the rest of my photos.

My usual anime merchandise dealer has told me yesterday that the Revoltech EVA-00 I had ordered has arrived. Not only that, but he got his hands on a box of these Evangelion gashapons. As you can imagine, I’ve already asked him to save me one Kaworu figure (he’s the gray-haired kid, for those who don’t know him). Ayanami Rei and him are the two characters I like the most in the show and Pen², but they never seem to make a separate figure of that lovely penguin [oh crap, after googling for him I found the cutest version of Pen Pen now I want one ;_; ]. Anyway, as I was saying, Rei and Kaworu are pretty much my favourite characters and although I have around four versions of Rei (they’re all very different from each other, okay? :P – I’ll take photos of all one day so you see ), I don’t have a single Kaworu figure. Speaking of which, rumours say that Kaworu will pilot Eva-04 in the second Rebuild of Evangelion movie. If that’s true I may also want to get Revoltech’s Eva-04. It’s silver, so it would look awesome near the blue of Eva-00.

I also have an Eva-01 model kit to assemble. That should only take me several years, considering how little free time I have. The good thing about this one is that it seems to be more or less the same size as the Revoltech Evas, and it is articulated, so it would look nicely near them on a shelf, or near the PC.

Since this is a post mostly dedicated to Evangelion stuff, I’m taking the chance to say I’ve been taking photos of some of my Eva figures and manga, and I should upload them to my flickr account soon-ish. I just want to take some extra experimental photos of the Eva gashapons. I was messing around with my camera’s settings and I almost got the result I wanted. Stay tuned!

Over ten years ago I watched the first episode of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, and was instantly hooked. Gainax, the studio responsible for the series and the movies recently decided to make Rebuild of Evangelion, which constitutes of four movies. The first two are going to retell the story of the series, the third will retell the movie ‘The End of Evangelion’ and the fourth and final movie will be a more definitive ending to the story.

Yesterday I watched the first movie, YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE, and I loved it. I had refrained from watching the anime again so the good memories I had of it would not be ruined – I’ve watched episodes of shows I used to love as a kid, and ended up being very disappointed. Rebuild of Evangelion is the perfect chance to (sort of) rewatch Eva, and avoid the possibility of disappointment. Not only because the animation is improved, but because Gainax managed to get most of the original Evangelion cast back, and this makes Rebuild not a simple ‘milking the cow’ kind of thing. Oh and even though you may remember the show, you’ll still get a couple of surprises in the movie, especially the end (spoilers for the rest of the sentence), where Kaworu Nagisa appears *squee*.

I’ll stop yapping now and leave you with a short video clip with scenes of the movie, which contains one of the new music themes made for Rebuild of Evangelion – Angel of Doom. Lyrics after the cut. And no, I’m not turning this into a weblog where I post the best lyrics EVAR!!!11 – these are short and capture the sense of impending doom you feel throughout the show.

(continue reading…)

I was seriously impressed when I saw this image of the live action movie based on the manga ‘Death Note’. What’s impressive? The way Ryuku (the original shinigami in the manga) looks exactly the same as the manga version. Exactly the same.

If you want to compare them, here’s a couple of images over at TOKYOMANGO that include him (in case you’re wondering who he is here’s a tip: he’s the funky looking demon floating in the air). anyway check out the images in this post and this one. Then compare him with this image here.

Slightly disappointing was L not looking even half as crazed as he should in the movie’s poster. Maybe in the movie itself it’s different.

The TV is set on AXN, and even though I’m not really watching it or paying attention, I reach the conclusion that Excel Saga still deserves the award for the silliest animation series of all time. And I’ve seen pretty weird ones.

For those of you who have never watched, and even though you may not find it amusing at all, I leave you this link to the ending theme/animation of the show (subtitles are in spanish as I didn’t find any in english) and also with the ending theme/animation for the last episode of the series.

So very, very silly…