Dreaming in anime

Here’s my random/geeky musing of the day––ever wish your life were an anime? This question is obviously more for my anime/manga fans out there.

I always imagine different scenarios or situations in my every day life becoming this really cute and comedic anime episode. I would think about an anime version of myself doing wacky or cute things that you would see other anime characters do.

I’m a very affectionate person by nature and love to hug my friends and family whenever I can. I like to be playful and I enjoy laughing at things. I would embody the anime character who skips happily onto a scene with hearts or flowers following wherever I went, a la Hunny-sempai from Ouran High School Host Club.

I'm cute and you know it!

But then I also embody the silent, mysterious type who sits in the corner of the library and reads by herself. I make people wonder about who I am if they don’t know me too well. You could say I’m a combination of playful/happy/calm/silent all wrapped into one. I wonder if there is such an anime character out there.

My cousin once said I’m almost like Chiyo-chan of Azumanga Daioh. He said whatever I do or say ends up coming out cute. It’s so cute that he wants to hug or pinch me sometimes. It’s kind of like how Chiyo-chan’s classmates view her if anyone is at all familiar with the anime. Luckily, I don’t wear pigtails and I’m not as short as her. And I’m not 10, but my guy friends like to tease me about looking like a 12 year-old than an adult in her 20s.

Living a technianime life sounds more interesting and fun. It would certainly make real life less mundane. Has anyone ever thought about this? Is there an anime character you are most like?

Game Review: Big Bang Mini

It has been a while since I’ve done any actual reviews of anything so I’m going to review a game I have been playing a little at a time.

Big Bang Mini is a cute puzzle game by SouthPeak for the Nintendo DS. This game makes good use of the touch screen and stylus.

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You know it’s the holidays when you have shopping madness

After a long weekend and pounds added to the stomach, I am back for my regular daily blogging challenge project. Hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving for those of you who celebrate it.

At midnight I made an attempt to go for Black Friday shopping and…it was a huge mistake. Ever since retailers decided to move Black Friday shopping from 5 a.m. to midnight–– it was a lot worse.

Continue reading “You know it’s the holidays when you have shopping madness”

Just one more mission!

For anyone who follows my blog or comes back to it from time to time, this will be my last post before I go on my mini-Thanksgiving hiatus. I will be back to the daily grind of blogging new and interesting things next week. I definitely appreciate anyone who has taken the time to comment on my entries or like them! Makes me really happy. I’m also happy to return the favor to other fellow bloggers. Anyway, on to the post!

I was texting my friend today like we always do and the subject of video games came up. His current gaming obsession is Modern Warfare 3. I asked him if he finished the game already. His text response was, “Oh, I finished the single player mode of the game in 5 hours. I’m just doing the online multiplayer now.”

I was thinking, “What? Five hours? How the heck does anyone manage to finish a game in five hours?” I really don’t know how long of a game MW3 is and if it can be beaten within that time, but I am always amazed when my friends tell me they have gone through their mountain of newly bought games within a short span of time. Beating a game within a week or less is pretty impressive to me. I know I take at least a month or two to finish an entire game, and that’s sticking to a game I am currently obsessed with.

I guess to become a hardcore gamer you must be willing to lose sleep over a game and be living and breathing the game every single day of your life until you reach the very end.

I know I’m not a hardcore gamer, but I do love playing video games. I am currently obsessed with playing Dragon Age Origins for the Xbox 360 as I have mentioned in a previous post before. I do have the gamer itch to want to play DAO for several hours straight, but I refuse to lose too much sleep over it. I also find my biggest obstacle with finishing most of the games I have (usually comprising of either starting a game but not finishing it or not starting it at all) is time.

I find time to be the biggest enemy for me. Is that ever a problem for anyone else? I always wonder how the hardcore gamers like my friends find the time to do anything. Most of us are in our mid to late 20s with lives outside of games like going to school or having regular jobs to support ourselves. At the end of the day I have so many other things to take care of I’m lucky if I find time to play at least an hour or two of my game.

Some may argue the weekend is the best time for games. This may be true, but I find I’m almost always on the go during the weekends too. It has become quite rare for me to be able to stay home and game. When I do stay home something always comes up to keep me from my precious game time.

I wonder how it is for everyone else? If you are gamer, how do you manage to devour a game and be on to the next? I definitely would like to be enlightened on that.

Manga and their anime counterparts

Whenever I pick up a really good manga series, I immediately try to see if their is an anime to go with it. Almost all the series I’ve read were lucky enough to have been made into one like Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Fushigi Yugi, Ceres: Celestial Legend, Cardcaptor Sakura, and the list goes on.

I think a lot of the animes made around the 90’s like the ones I have mentioned above have been good adaptations of their original source material. It is to be expected that an anime that’s based off of the manga will be somewhat faithful to the series, but then veer off and become a slightly different version of its original. Most of these changes are not bad at all. It just makes the anime kind of like its own story separate from the manga. The same happens when books are made into films. They are just going to be completely different from the other despite every intention of being faithful to the original. Things have to get cut out or they add things to the film based on what looks better on the screen. Some things translate better in a book than in film and vice versa.

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Merry Early Christmas to me? Pre-Black Friday sales are a good and bad thing

Thanksgiving is a few days away for those of us who celebrate it. Sometimes we wouldn’t even know it’s Thanksgiving thanks to all the stores, media, and Internet skipping over the acknowledgment of Thanksgiving and going straight to the other holiday…Christmas.

With the economy still in bad shape a lot of retail and online stores are getting pretty desperate to capture our attention and wallets. Before the stores would wait until the actual Black Friday to bring out their best deals to offer. Nowadays, this year in particular, the deals are being rolled out earlier. A lot of places have called their deals, “Pre-Black Friday sales,” “Countdown to Black Friday,” or any other variation of that. A number of places like Amazon and Newegg.com have already started their sales since the start of November.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for the best deals out there to get a jump start on my holiday shopping for friends and loved ones. Only, I actually failed to really shop for friends and loved ones. What ended up happening was I see video game, DVD, or clothing sales advertised, against my own better judgment I browse through what was on sale, find something I like, and I buy for me.

It’s horrible. Considering I’m also on a budget, what goes from a well-intentioned shopping/browsing trip ends up becoming the all about me shopping trip and seeing my own desires for the stuff on my own personal wish list quenched.

Amazon has been the worst when it comes to their recent video games sale for Pre-Black Friday. I’m not one to buy a game as soon as it comes out. I tend to wait it out until it becomes on sale or someone gives me the game I want as a present. The temptation to buy is hard to resist. A lot of the sales I have encountered have been very good. I probably wouldn’t have whipped out the credit card if it wasn’t.

These early sales have been good because I end up buying what I want for less than what I would have paid for it had I bought it at regular retail value. The downside is I get no shopping done for anybody else. It has been quite a dilemma this year.

Pre-Black Friday and Black Friday sales tend to be good for electronics and DVDs. These tend to be the most expensive and popular items to buy. You just can’t pass up a good deal when you see one. The one sale I would have liked to see more of would be manga. I suppose places like Amazon can’t bring down the prices of the books more than they already have. I find Amazon to be one of the cheaper places to buy manga compared to a lot of local bookstores. Then again, a huge markdown on select manga volumes would be ideal for the manga lover. If they did an all anime/manga sale I’m sure it would be a hit. We fans get to buy the merchandise for cheap and the stores make a huge profit. This is something Amazon or any store should consider.

Has anyone else had the problem of buying for themselves instead of for others around the holiday season? Did you come into a store thinking you were going to buy for this particular person only to leave the store with a jacket, book, game, or DVD for yourself? It’s definitely happening to me more this year than all the previous ones. Must have better self-control.

I am a one console kind of…oh wait

I wasn’t always a gamer. I have friends who have been gaming since coming out of the womb if that is even possible. My friends are hardcore gamers and they can talk about classic games from the good ‘ol days when we were growing up. Their eyes take on that far away look, you know that look they get when they have gone somewhere else and it takes some time to bring them back, as they reminisce about their first time playing Pac-Man or Mario with an overflow of childhood nostalgia.

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Manga & Comic Fans: What are you currently reading?

This was something I spent most of today thinking about, “What else is good to read aside from what I already know and like?” Then I decided I wanted to throw this question out there in the blogosphere, “What are you currently reading?”

Not everyone is a manga fan and not everyone is a comic book fan. Or maybe you are one of those people who like both! Either way, I want to know what you are reading. You can be reading a little of everything or one series only. Doesn’t matter. What does matter is what series or standalone story in manga or comics are you currently loving right now? What about it made you want to read it in the first place?

This is more of a discussion entry today. In general, I want to know what other people’s interests are. I definitely love reading comics aside from the usual manga stuff. I just don’t collect comics enough. If you are a non-manga fan, but love comics from Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, etc. then drop me a line in the comments section. Like my page on Facebook and tell me there. If you are on Twitter, tweet me your responses @simpleekgrl. Whatever your social media of choice, I want to hear from YOU!

To answer my own question, I’m reading a little of everything. The series that does stick with me at the moment would have to be Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle by CLAMP. Why did I pick up this series? I was drawn to the artwork, and Reservoir Chronicle had Syaoran and Sakura of Cardcaptor Sakura as the main characters. Hell, it’s a whole new story with a lot of recognizable characters from other CLAMP works thrown into this alternate universe story.

I never had a chance to read CLAMP’s other catalog of work beyond CCS and Tsubasa, but I did like how they decided to incorporate the characters they created from previous works to make a whole new story.

And there you have it! Please answer the question and let’s get a discussion going.

Smart tips for manga collectors looking for affordable ways to feed the habit

Last night I read a very useful article written on Manga Bookshelf about how to buy manga on the cheap. Writer C.J. Thomas lists his top tips and personal guide for manga collectors to continue their mountaintop collections without draining your wallet.

Some of these tips I already knew about and others were worth knowing about. My own personal go to places for manga shopping and bargains have always been Amazon or my local comic shops. I’m especially glad to be living in NYC because we have some really great comic book stores like Midtown Comics, Forbidden Planet, and Jim Hanley’s Universe. We even have Japanese bookstores like Kinokuniya and Bookoff, which sells both the Japanese and English translated mangas. You can almost always find a good deal at these places I’ve been to.

The only tip that doesn’t work for me that C.J. Thomas listed is going to the library and borrowing manga. My local libraries do carry some manga titles, but not much. The collection isn’t very big or impressive in my experience. If you do find the series you want to test out at the library, I usually find that the first volume is missing most of the time (and it isn’t because it was taken out already). Manga doesn’t seem to be very library friendly to me. At least in comic shops and bookstores, the collection is HUGE. I’m more likely to buy the manga after reading what it’s about and skimming through it at the store. I have yet to regret my selections after I paid for it.

As I said in my own previous entry, manga is an expensive hobby to have. But it is possible to fuel the hobby by being a smart shopper and bargain hunter to get more bang out of your buck.

Manga Review: Sailor Moon Vol. 1, Kodansha vs. Tokyopop

As promised, I am writing my review on Sailor Moon Vol. 1. I meant to get this out last Friday, but the review went longer than I expected. This review is more of a comparison of the English translated manga done as a re-release by Kodansha Comics and the first English translated release done by Tokyopop.

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