wp2000

blarg

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:50:57 GMT

Well, this account is officially useless. I don't really use this at all, and my deviant art site has a journal entry section too.

Pale Cocoon

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 18:41:02 GMT

MAJOR SPOILERS

Pale Cocoon is an independent anime film, lasting only 22 minutes. In the future, man has been relegated to the depths of the moon because he has destroyed Earth. Because of issues with the environmental generators, humans haven't been to the surface of the moon in a long, long time. The main character is a man who works in a historical restoration project and has a great interest in decoding all the archives, which are old computer data from Earth. Recently, he ran into a video archive that holds some promising information about life on Earth.

Aside from himself, there are two other characters who remain in the restoration project. He has a friend named Rika who constantly skips out on the restoration project because she, like the rest of humankind, has gradually lost interest in Earth. More importantly, everyone is afraid of being reminded of human stupidity. Rika represents the collective thought of humanity on the moon and tries to convince the main character to stop researching because all the research will not change their situation. You don't see the second person, but he quits the project in the end. So, the main character is pretty much the only person left researching Earth and humanity's past.

Well, as expected, the hero finishes decoding the video data and finds out it is a music video and commentary on some of the first colonization ships to reach the moon. The lady speaks of looking up at Earth and seeing it rusted in the sky. The rust represents, I assume, the destruction that man has brought about. She expresses hope that, one day, Earth will recover and that humans will be able to return. In the music video, you see the woman looking up at the Earth from the moon, and the sky is clear and beautiful.

The main character decides to climb to the surface of the moon to witness the sky himself. He takes a rocket elevator to the top and sees wreckage and smoke everywhere; basically, nothing of what he saw in the music video. It's a disaster. At this point, though, the cable to the elevator snaps, and he begins to fall. The clouds and smoke clear, and he sees the Earth. It is nice and blue with no signs of rust. Earth has recovered completely.

The End.

Pale Cocoon is one of the saddest animes I've ever seen. Well, ok, I don't typically watch sad animes, but it was sadder than AIR, I thought. With AIR, there seemed to be at least some hope of redemption, at least eventually. In Pale Cocoon, the only person who believes in a better future for mankind dies, and he's the only one to witness the hope for humanity. Since Earth has recovered fully, man can go back and start anew. Well, so much for that.

The ending is very open to interpretation, however. As the hero is walking to upwards to the rocket elevator, he drops his archive book, which falls and lands next to Rika. Rika goes to his cubicle at the restoration project and sees the music video and commentary for herself. Perhaps she will realize that there is hope and continue to strive for Earth. If only we knew.

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 01:09:52 GMT

I just finished reading a scanslation of the manga Aishiteruze Baby, and, boy, was I dissatisfied with the ending. The manga is about a playboy named Kippei who is assigned to take care of his abandoned little cousin Yuzuyu. Having a playboy give up his womanizing ways and adopt such an innocent and pure task is a pretty interesting concept, but the there doesn't seem to be much resistance, and Kippei slides into the role quite easily. That's pretty much the whole of it. Even though there are various obstacles in being a mom, the problems are more or less tame. Which is the point, I guess, since the manga is supposed to be sugar-coated through and through.

Up until the ending, I loved it, though. It's a light read and the characters are pretty (if you like the "waif" look). The pacing can be best described as "slow" and the anime version should probably be avoided because the pacing doesn't transfer well. This manga was scanslated (scanned and translated) by the Dragon Voice Project translation group and is now licensed by Viz Communications. Go buy it!

So bad at this journal thing

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 04:51:22 GMT

I've never kept a really good journal, as you probably can tell. In 7th grade, we had this class where they would grade us on our "assignment notebooks." Basically, we had to fill out all of our assignments for our classes that week and it was supposed to teach us organizational skills. Well, I got a C in that class, and 12 years later, I would probably get the same grade--or worse.

Anyway, school has hit hard, and I'm still stuck with doing research that I never finished during the summer. Hopefully I can rope myself another item on my CV so I can get a better job in the future. The annoying part is that research is not really my thing. In other words, I haven't touched a scrap paper in 2 weeks to even start on a comic, so there's going to be a delay. Quite expected, but I never really figured how I would deal with it, comic-wise. I get so little feedback these days I don't know if people are glad to have a comic everyday, or if they want something that passes as effort (I really do spend a lot of time on the pages even if it doesn't look like it). I'll continue to ink, but I don't know about that crappy screentone thing I've been trying to pull. It really doesn't look that good. It would save me a lot of time if I just inked the comic and left it at that. I won't go any less than inking since I just bought myself a set of Sakura Pigma Microns, and boy do they rock. I love using them since they don't bleed on my crappy, used printing paper.

Another thing that has been occupying my time is online shopping. I've had my sights set on an mp3 player these days, and it is so hard to choose a good and CHEAP one. The iRiver H10 was pretty good in terms of design and sound quality but it locks up all the time, and it's not cheap. That's a no-go. I was considering the iAudio x5, but the stupid store I was buying it from was completely dishonest about shipping dates, so I cancelled. Unfortunately, it was also the cheapest place I could find, and x5's aren't really even that cheap on eBay since people are willing to spend a lot. Next item next is the Archos gmini 402. It's also above my price point, but anything lower just doesn't fulfill my sudden urge for portable video. Funny thing is, I was so sure I didn't want the x5 at first because I thought I was paying extra for video I would never use. And suddenly I have the craving for video.

Not having drawn for two weeks is like a death sentence for my already meager drawing skills. I swear I have actually gotten worse since two years ago. Any slight hiatus in drawing drastically degrades any pattern recognition and reproduction. I had to resort to some drawing tutorials online again, just so I could figure out how the arms met the torso. To think I took a year of anatomy and actually got an "A."

Running out of time

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 03:23:28 GMT

I have so many things I want to draw in addition to the comic, but school is going to start on Monday! Argh. The Comic Genesis site administration is down, so I can't update my comic manually. If something wrong happens, then I won't be able to fix it until the next automatic update. So annoying.

Testing

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 02:24:54 GMT

Er, never really used something like this before. I joined LiveJournal mainly so I could talk about Naruto in the leafsand_tango group here on livejournal.com. Unfortunately, it died very quickly, and now I have an account with nothing to do on it. Fortunately, I have a webcomic called M-Theory on Comic Genesis (formerly Keenspace). I guess I'll use this to post detailed descriptions of comic updates...