Steins;Gate

I find I'm saying the same things over and over again with awesome anime. Brilliant plot, loveable characters, emotional heartstring-pulling, etc. It's the same over and over again. I just don't know what to say anymore. I mean it's a wonderful show and all, but I don't know how to comment on it in an original and non-clichéd way.

Maybe I should start over.

Steins;Gate was extremely good. It had an excellent, well-crafted storyline with streamlined pacing and wonderful plot twists. It kept me on the edge of my seat, it did, and each well-placed cliffhanger (at the end of the episode, where else?) always left me craving for the next one. I salute the writers, for it is difficult to work with a time-travel story (just ask comic book writers) and make it work: to be layered and complex but without the usual confusion inherent in the nature of time-travel.

I liked the characterization. Each character was crafted to be unique and easily identified, and with enough humanity to be endearing. Okabe was hilarious, but it was interesting to see his deconstruction as time (haha) went by. Kurisu... well as female lead she's obviously very attractive, and it was funny to throw in a bit of closet-otaku character. Daru... Boey in ten years. Enough said. Mayushii was drop-dead adorable, but she's more of the sister-type I guess. Suzuha was cute too; I liked her a lot. Feyris was hilarious and adorable and a bit creepy at the same time; I mean, who goes around saying nyan all the time? Moeka was creepy - that's all. Even Mister Braun was hilarious and mindblowing.

I've seen a few time-travel stories in my ti- in my life, and I do believe none of them plays out the Butterfly Effect to its true potential. I mean, changing one decision you made in the past should radically alter the world in completely unimaginable ways, not make a similar world with one significant difference. Though of course, there won't be much of a story to tell after that. Most of the physics in the world works out though (as far as I can tell; I'm not an expert), so that's nice.

I guess you're wondering why the slew of anime recently; I'm finishing up some homework so that the Japan Trip experience won't be so alien to me. Comima, here I come.

Tu-tu-ruu~!
The Edna Man

Do You Believe In Love At First Sight?

Okay so I was thinking about the original "Do You Believe In Love At First Sight?" idea I had some time ago, and I thinking how I really want to make it a short movie, and how one should go about doing it; like where you should film, who should be in it, etc. Then I had this idea: what if random other people were wearing "No" shirts throughout the film? (The original just had the main character wandering around with people as per nomal.) And then: How would you get a few hundred people to wear "No" shirts for the shot? This is what I came up with:

You'll need to find a community with a semi-closed system. In other words, the people in the area should be there almost every day and will likely not travel too far out of the area. A university or school would do nicely. You'd need to print maybe 200 odd shirts and sell them to the people in this area. Hopefully with the college demographic and a plausible story about a charity or a movement, you'd sell all the shirts. Coupled with this sale is the invite to this Facebook event where everybody would wear the "No" shirt for a day. The density of "No"s would depend on your success rate.

Then you'd need to get your girlfriend's best friend to persuade her to wear the only "Yes" shirt you printed beforehand, on the day of the "No" event. (Oh, this should have come first: you need to get a girlfriend.) Then get someone with a video camera and wander around school, getting as much footage as you can while your girlfriend's best friend steers her away from you. Until the climatic end of the day when you finally meet "unexpectedly" in a moment of joy and wonder and romance with an awesome soundtrack playing in the background.

Siiiigh.
The Edna Man

Infinite Stratos

Infinite Stratos was okay. It was basically harem fanservice with awesome mecha fight scenes. That's it in a nutshell.

That said, I did love the fight scenes. It's like the spent 80% of their budget on the fight scenes alone. Some of the bullet sprays looked almost Touhou-ish. I do wish that they had elaborated more about the weapon systems and the Infinite Stratos battlesuit itself. There was so much potential in that, but they had to go waste it on the extremely unpractical combat uniforms and and unlikely international harem fanservice. Sigh.

Infinitely,
The Edna Man

The Birthday Troll

My friends are awesome.

I just got massively trolled by a whole mob of my friends tonight, who all came down for an enormous surprise birthday party: MINE. This was my first ever surprise birthday party, and I completely did not expect it AT ALL. XM was the mastermind, and I have to say he played the con extremely convincingly. And I now realise that today when I told him I was mindgaming him at badminton, he told me "Who's mindgaming whom?" and it was a CLUE and I completely missed it. (Well, I wasn't even looking for it.) I have to say that as a fellow con artist, this elaborate setup was dasterdly brilliant, with perfect misdirection and excellent secrecy. Best lesson of the night: tell as much of the truth as possible. Brilliant.

The dinner was held in Pepperoni's huge function room, and over pizza we played Pictionary all night. It was a hilarious blast, and I'll never forget it.

A big shout-out to everyone who came down: Sheu Zhi, Shaun Ong, Jonas, JX, Kuang, Lou Ee, Jc, Kyle, Levin, Hui Jun, Ernest, Seng Wei, Bryan Ong, Jonny, Darrell, Herrick and Xi Min. Also thanks to Shaun Lee, Zhang, Kwong and Juzzie for the present =D

But greatest thanks of all go to my mom and dad, who apparently first proposed the idea and contacted XM to mastermind it.

Best Twenty-First Ever,
The Edna Man