It’s pretty different from other Monkey Majik songs, which lean more on the melodic use of a guitar rather than as background percussion. It’s also a completely English song, which, although being a Japanese band, has lyrics that make a little more sense since the singers in the group are of Canadian origin. I find it has a really nice beat and the flute gives it a different touch of tranquility from the other percussive instruments. But I think what I really like about it is that while it talks about happiness, it still has a lot of minor chords in its verses and only brings out the happy major ones in the chorus, and even then only in parts of the chorus. To me, it makes these happy chords, in contrast, even happier.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Random Quote: You know, I’m sick of following my dreams, man. I’m just going to ask where they’re going and hook up with ‘em later. - Mitch Hedberg

I’m not going to try to make excuses, but I’ll try to make up for my long absence. I’ve been quite busy with university, and I had also debated putting this blog on hiatus (which is what ended up happening), but I’m back. For a little while, at least.

I wanted to do another in-depth post about the last bit of the Friday of Comic-Con and all of Saturday, but then I realized it was just me gloating about how awesome it was and it wasn’t too fun to read or write. So I scrapped that and decided to talk about what I didn’t really like about Comic-Con, which was five times shorter and more interesting in my opinion. (And also to accentuate the negative)

And so, my first Comic-Con was great, but there were plenty of issues:

The line for Hall H. Needless to say, this is nowhere near the hall.

1) TOO MANY FRICKIN PEOPLE
For $35-ish a day and what this convention has to offer, this is a steal. I would totally be fine with paying double the price if half the amount of people were allowed in. I guess with more people, the vendors are more likely to get more paying customers, but still. These lines are INSANE. It’s not even comparable to an airport line or a roller coaster line. And with crazy fans, you could be there hours ahead and still not get in. I swear some of these people camp out there the whole weekend. (Some of them smelled like they did. Twas not cool.)

So… many… awesome… panels… ahhhh.

2) Too many things to do/see
Looking back on what I got to do and who I got to see, it’s a pretty extensive list. But it’s definitely not even a tenth of what was there. After the convention, I went online and hear about so many things I didn’t even know happened while I was at the convention or all these people I missed, simply because I chose to do something else instead or I didn’t even know it was going on. I found this quite heartbreaking for me because, perhaps unlike other fans out there, I like almost all the genres which means I like almost everything and which means I have to choose which one I like more. For example, I wanted to go to the Marvel Games panel which was at the same time as the Cartoon Network Panel which was at the same time as anything in Hall H (dreams come true in Hall H) which was at the same time of various autographs, a few of which I knew of were Tara Platt and Yuri Lowenthal. Basically, imagine there being at least three things you wanted to go to at any given time. For a whole weekend. As awesome as it was, there were so many missed opportunities. And, if by some miracle, some of these things weren’t at the same time, the crazy long lines would haves barred me from getting into most of these panels. It was really sad.

3) It’s better to stay in one place
Kind of related to the previous point, but it’s worth making it its own point. I got a lot more accomplished on Saturday because for one thing, I was there the whole day and didn’t sleep in as much and because I mainly stayed in one room. This meant I got a good seat and saw everything that went on in that room, including the cast of Family Guy, the Cleveland Show, V, Fringe, and the main three from Vampire Diaries. Also, because I was in the room for the previous panel, it meant I could leave the room and come back without having to wait in line again so long as I came back within the hour of the next panel. I did this for the Simpsons panel because I found it pretty boring. (I think it was because they didn’t have any/many people from the voice cast there lol. I have yet to meet a boring voice actor or one who wasn’t naturally hilarious.)

I can’t see anything, Domo! But you are quite cool…

4) So hard to find anything!
I just want to say, for the size of the event, they were as organized as they could be. The lines for getting into rooms was very systematic. There was a good general map. But particularly for autographs… I thought it was madness. Sure, you might know someone who’s on a certain show so they’ll be at a booth affiliated with that show, but you don’t know at what time, because there are even random booths where people randomly sign at random times, and then there’s also the official signing section where only some people sign, and then there’s the idea that you don’t even know if you might get an autograph from someone because you have to RAFFLE for it? That’s just crazy.

(At least the voice actors didn’t have the raffle and a lot of them gave you their autographs for free so that was nice. I also think it was pretty cool that I was able to basically walk up to Vic Mignogna and ask for an autograph and he did it for me. )

Still, I had a great time. I really did. I saw Zachary Levi, Vic Mignogna, Anna Torv, Seth MacFarlane, Billy West, ALL of the MythBusters, and many more. Twas awesome, but of course, we all want more.

Random Quote: Hyperdimension drive? How dare they enter our territory with a navigation system that’s supposed to only exist in theory! – Roboworld leader, Redline

And I haven’t completely disappeared… although I did come close.

The first thing you see when you reach the convention center. Is that an awesome start to your day or what?

My trip to California and Las Vegas was awesome. Insanely awesome. And also quite insane.

Let me try and explain.

As I mentioned before, I was going to Comic-Con for the first time with my sister and brother-in-law. I arrived in the Bay area a week before the convention which included the Distant Worlds concert and mainly ‘prepping’ for Comic-Con (aka catching up on shows. I obviously was (*ahem* AM) not only behind on the anime I follow, but other stuff too). We were too late for to get the 4-day pass and had to settle for Friday and Saturday passes. We thought those two would be the best days anyway, which in many ways was still true, but Thursday was apparently pretty epic… But anyway, we left Thursday night for San Diego and we had already gone through the Comic-Con schedule to see which panels we were planning to go to.

Oooh.

And boy were there a plethora of them to choose from. Eventually, we narrowed it down to our top 3 for the busy time slots, with 2 backups in case we couldn’t get into various events. As I said, this was our first Comic-Con and we had no idea what to expect. We knew there would be tons of people but even if we did know the numbers at that time (which I don’t think we did, but it’s about 125,000), there’s a big difference between imagining a number of people and walking through it.

And needless to say, we were overwhelmed.

This was weird yet cool… yet weird.

After registering and getting our huge (and I mean HUGE) bags, which also broke quite easily, we were psyched and about to get in line for our first panel; the Big Bang Theory in Ballroom 20 (the second largest room holding about 6000 people). As reference, the only other convention the three of us had been to was Fan Expo in Toronto which, compared to Comic-Con, (the motherlode of all cons) was a baby.

We had planned to arrive an hour before the panel, and technically we did, but we weren’t in line an hour before the panel. Having never been in the room before, we also had no way of gauging how far away we were from the room in our line and the volunteers were pretty useless. They told us we might be able to get in, but after about 20 minutes in line and only some movement, we decided it our time would be better used on the exhibit floor. (Later, this decision was confirmed when we got into the room for a later panel and man, we were REALLY far from the room. Like really.)

First cosplay pic of the con. Yay Avatar!

We were still overwhelmed by the giant that is Comic-Con and had completely forgot about our back-up panels at that point in time, which, in hindsight, was my only chance at seeing Nathan Fillion that weekend. I was quite disappointed. Instead, however, I was able to get one of the limited free Fullmetal Alchemist keychains from the Square Enix booth.

Chibi Roy and Ed are quite cute

So my time was not completely wasted. I was able to begin exploring the exhibit floor which was HUGE. It was cool yet so very annoying. There were so many cool things going on, possibly at the same time, and you would never really be able to find out about them. It was all about luck, or I guess in some cases, one’s ability to stalk. Even so, I found it really difficult to find anything and I didn’t have the chance to explore all 5000+ booths. But more on that later.

Awesome merch.

Also, it was around this time I discovered Comic-Con had their own public wi-fi network and so I was able to tweet. Having only an iPod touch, I don’t usually get to do that often so I was quite happy.

At this point, my little group split up as my sister and her husband went to Hall H (the biggest room and where ‘dreams come true’), mainly to see Will Ferrell (and Mark Wahlberg and Eva Mendez) which they later said was hilariously awesome while I… *sigh* … I went to the Vampire Knight panel.

Wrong vampire series. Hilarious banner though.

Before you judge me, let me defend myself.
(Or dig myself a deeper hole…)

This is one of the cases where I do consider VK and Twilight similar in my mind (aside from the obvious similarities of vampires, vampires with abilities, lots of hot vampires, a love triangle, an annoying protagonist, lots of angst and wangst, both have a huge case of fan dumb, the paper version is much better than any other adaptation, wait these are two different series?). I like both of these series. I actually do. But I don’t like to say I do in public because of the fangirls. And because I don’t want to be killed for being a KanamexYuuki fan. (Although I admit ZeroxYuuki is growing on me. Reading fanfics quite easily changes my thoughts on various pairings.) And I just want to say I am Team Edward but I’m also Team Lautner. Meaning book-wise, Edward all the way, but in real life, I’d pick Taylor.

Blah, sidetracked yet again. My main point is that I didn’t really go to this panel for Vampire Knight. I haven’t seen much of the dub but the bits I’ve seen plus just seeing the names of the voice cast tell me this will be pretty horrible. I mainly went because it was my only chance (or I thought it was) to see Vic Mignogna. He’s just too cool. And hilarious.

Perhaps this picture of a cute attempt to make Pikachu a… rock star will distract you from my tangential ramblings.

And… I kind of lied. It’s not so much that I didn’t want to be surrounded by the fangirls but rather because I knew I would turn into one of them. Whether if it’s a side of me I like to keep hidden or just a contagious feeling (“If you can’t beat’em, join’em”), it was there. There were some funny moments that I caught on video but I’m a little too scared to look at them right now because it’s definitely going to hurt my ears, and even more so because I know the loudest voice (also the one closest to the camera) will be mine.

What was perhaps even more annoying was that I was closest to the front than I was at any other panel at Comic-Con but I had the worst view. Partly because I was of to one side and the voice actors were not sitting in the middle of the room and closer to the other side of the room and also because a very tall guy cosplaying Zero was sitting directly in my line of sight.

Stupid tall Zero…

What was perhaps even more annoying was that I heard him (guy cosplaying as Zero) talking to his friend earlier and he seemed like a really nice guy, so I couldn’t hate him outright. He just happened to be in my way and annoyingly tall.

But anyway, the panel was great. I laughed and squealed like crazy. And, as I was waiting to get out of that area, I was able to get Vic’s autograph! There were a few other people’s autographs I could have gotten as well but I only really cared about Vic.

Aww I feel so bad for him because it’s pretty obvious everyone likes Zero and Vic. He’s actually pretty cool.

And this is getting quite long so I’ll stop here for now. (My sidetracking really needs to be cut down. A lot.)
I can see this being at least a 3-parter but I should be able to whip them off pretty quickly… hopefully.

Random Quote: “We won’t be meeting Ashley for a while. The file claims she’s 20. She’s got the body of a 20 year old. The personality of a sixteen year old. The face of a thirteen year old. The voice of a spoiled nine year old.” – Let’s Play Resident Evil 4: Chapter 3

So, the point is, FFXIII now, post later.

So I’m going to Comic-Con (and I can’t even begin to explain how cool that is) but I just can’t stop my pessimism. No, it’s not so much that too many awesome things are going on at once I can’t get to them all (though that is still something of an issue) but rather since I’m only going for Friday and Saturday, there will be some things I will miss. If I had to pick two days to go to, it would still be these two days since they have the most action and awesomeness, but Thursday, late Saturday, and Sunday have some great stuff too.

In particular, there is:
- FUNimation Panel – Which will probably have some Hetalia news. And it’s FUNimation.
- White Collar Panel – A ‘new’ show I got into and it has Matthew Bomer. I need to find him later…
- Video Games Live – It was either going to this or the MythBusters panel, but due to various reasons, we’ve decided to go to the MythBusters panel, which will still be awesome.
- Castle Panel – This is going to be what I regret the most. It’s on Sunday and we are still in the area but we don’t have tickets for this day. Even if we could still get tickets, even I’m not sure if I can convince myself it’s worth it to pay for the whole day when all I want is this one-hour panel. But it has Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic and others from the main cast! And Nathan Fillion is just too cool! I will hopefully see him at other panels but the main focus won’t be Castle. I would love to hear him talk about Castle. But I guess right now my main thing is seeing HIM. And hopefully that will be done.

I am also hoping to find Vic Mignogna without having to go to the Vampire Knight panel, which hopefully is for obvious reasons but if not, it’s because the VK fangirls are as bad or (if possible) worse than the Twilight fangirls. Especially since Vic is Zero, an angsty white haired pretty boy and not part of the OTP but definitely in the fans’ OTP. Although I have to admit, while I will not participate in that fangirl craziness, it is quite fun to watch Vic embarrassed and cringing… Hmm…

Poor Holy Rome… I feel your pain… kind of…

Still, I just want to say, Comic-Con will be a full on double rainbow all the way.
And I’m quite excited for bingo.

And where was I when I first heard this great song? Why, at the Distant Worlds concert in San Francisco!

Oh yes.

This was an amazing concert and a much better ‘real’ start to my trip in California after my flight got delayed a day. And guess who was at the concert?

Nobuo frickin Uematsu.

The genius composer (and God) of basically all Final Fantasy music. They shined a spotlight on him at the beginning of the show and he came back near the end. He didn’t say anything but oh my god I saw Nobuo Uematsu. Awesome.

Here was the setlist:

Opening~Bombing Mission (FINAL FANTASY VII)
Don’t be Afraid (FINAL FANTASY VIII)
Memoro de la Stono~Distant Worlds (FINAL FANTASY XI)
Medley 2002 (FINAL FANTASY I-III)
Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII (FINAL FANTASY VII)
Prima Vista Orchestra (FINAL FANTASY IX)
Kiss Me Goodbye (FINAL FANTASY XII)
Zanarkand (FINAL FANTASY X)
FINAL FANTASY series: Main Theme

The Man with the Machine Gun (FINAL FANTASY VIII)
Theme of Love (FINAL FANTASY IV)
JENOVA (FINAL FANTASY VII)
Ronfaure (FINAL FANTASY XI)
FINAL FANTASY XIII medley
FINAL FANTASY XIV medley
Opera “Maria and Draco” (FINAL FANTASY VI)
Terra’s Theme (FINAL FANTASY VI)

I can’t even begin to say how cool this concert was. Sure, I listen to this music all the time and know most of it by heart and could easily see some minor errors here and there in the performance, but there’s still something about hearing it live and with a large audience that makes the experience that much cooler.

A girl playing FFVII on her PSP during intermission.

I thought there were some interesting song choices… particularly from Final Fantasy VIII. I mean, come on, two battle themes? You can get away with that with FFVII, but FFVIII? There are other cool songs they could have chosen from, even if they didn’t want another slow song like Eyes On Me or Fisherman’s Horizon. What about Balamb Garden, Succession of Witches, Blue Fields or even Liberi Fatali? (Okay maybe not Liberi Fatali since they’d need a choir for that…) That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the two battle themes. They are quite awesome in their own right. But I felt like they could have spread the love a little more.

A cosplay of Tseng and Reno (Yes I did also get a picture with them.)

Also, since this was I guess a more ‘official’ concert as opposed to something like Video Games Live they were able to show offical game footage including FMVs and gameplay, which was a great addition to the music. I was a little confused why there were some bits they didn’t show (For example during the opera in FFVI, they showed everything from the game of that scene BUT the parts when the characters were singing. I guess this was done to put a greater emphasis on the singers, but if you’re going to taunt us with bits, that’s just mean.) But I will admit I’m being quite nitpicky. Even the parts they did show consistently kept a smile on my face.

Having seen the setlist beforehand, I remember thinking that there was no One-Winged Angel. Here they had Jenova and on the second day even Dancing Mad but no OWA. They even mentioned during the concert how they created a poll for what people thought the best battle themes were and they said that these two songs were on top of the list, so that’s why they included them. While the conductor, Arnie Roth, was saying this, I sat there thinking, “How is One-Winged Angel not number 1?” But then I thought, even if it was, like Liberi Fatali, it needed a chorus. But lo and behold, for their one encore song, the conductor said “We’re about to create one of the biggest choruses for our last song.” My heart was racing at insane speeds at this point as we all knew what was coming up. With the lyrics on the screen on top of awesome VII and Advent Children footage, we started singing along to the amazing song. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if it was because I was sitting on the balcony, but I could only hear my sisters next to me and a couple guys behind me really singing. But either way, that was a great way to end the night. We sang One-Winged Angel!

And, instead of a quote, I will end with a song. There were plenty of great ones to choose from, but I decided to go for the nostalgic classic.

]]> http://crystaljazz.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/distant-worlds-together/feed/ 0 twilightshiva Distant Worlds Distant Worlds Distant Worlds Distant Worlds http://crystaljazz.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/hakuouki-shinsengumi-kitan/ http://crystaljazz.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/hakuouki-shinsengumi-kitan/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:09:55 +0000 twilightshiva http://crystaljazz.wordpress.com/?p=937 ]]> I finished the show.
And well… it was very… I can’t even think of the word for it. But it’s something negative, I’ll give you that much.

Before I begin my rant though, I just want to say this show was GORGEOUS. (Even if these screenshots aren’t the greatest in quality.)The scenery porn helped me get through this show. As well as the guys. But I’ll admit I was more a fan of the backgrounds than the guys in blood. Or white hair. (It doesn’t work for everyone… especially when you can compare the white versus their normal hair colour.)

See this one actually isn’t too bad, but still not as good as his brown hair.

And if you didn’t already notice, spoilers ahoy!

Haha you mean THIS?

lol This part was pretty hilarious.

I went into this show thinking it would be something like the manga, but then I realized there was also a game for it as well so that meant there could be numerous endings the animation crew could choose from to use. I also watched the show with the mindset there would be some bishies (which there were) and some harem goodness, which there was but not quite to the level I was expecting. They did make it quite obvious which of the guys she liked, similar to the manga, and how numerous other guys showed some level of affection as well but this wasn’t that central to the story.

But it turned into such a nice moment! Kind of!

Yeah it’s weird how he never explicitly says he wants her as his bride. To create powerful children. Oh wait maybe that’s why. Because that would be CREEPY.

In fact, there were so many random subplots I’m not really sure what the actual story was. Well, I’m slightly exaggerating; the main storyline was the changes and secrets of the Shinsengumi, which included the Rasetsu, Koudou-san, and less related were Kazama and the random subplot with Chizuru’s long-lost (and forgotten) sister brother. How many of these plotlines got wrapped up? How about none? (The random Itou subplot did get wrapped up with his death I guess…) Sure, they might be able to wrap up at least one of them in the sequel, but at the same time, who out there thought this was good enough to deserve a sequel? Why in hell does this get a sequel when I have yet to hear of a sequel for Skip Beat? And don’t tell me it’s the number of fangirls because Skip Beat has a fairly large fanbase! (But apparently this tells me otherwise…)

Anyway, with so many plotlines, I didn’t feel like the show flowed very well. And even thought it looked like there were plenty of things going on, a lot of it still felt filler-ish, which I found even more strange in a 12-episode show. I had felt this early on and so I decided to marathon the second half of the series. It helped slightly, but perhaps made me notice the choppiness a bit more. I kept thinking they would expand on a certain plot a bit more but then they switched to another one. I assumed they would have gone back later but that never happened, or if it did, it was for one sentence of dialogue.

She took the word right out of my mouth.

And don’t even get me started on Chizuru. I feel like she got more useless with each passing episode. She started off fairly strong, with even some sword skills (which never got used) and I was under the impression she wouldn’t be completely stupid and actually be able to help… which she kind of did. But that didn’t make up for the trouble she caused as well, at least half of which was due to her own stupidity. And I still don’t understand how the members of the Shinsengumi can give her death threats numerous times everyday and yet she’s still so nonchalant and doesn’t care at all. How is she not scared? Is she really that stupid? Wait… yes. Yes, she is. What’s even worse is that they constantly tease us about killing her and never actually do! God that would be so satisfying…

Aww come on! It would be so easy! Just do it!

Fine. If you can’t kill her, at least get her out of the way. Do it already!

And why is she still so stupid as to not realize the Rasetsu all go berserk whenever they are near blood? Hence that she should GET OUT OF THEIR WAY WHENEVER SHE IS BLEEDING! WHICH IS QUITE OFTEN! My other question is, I can understand wanting to protect her from being kidnapped, but she can FRICKIN HEAL HERSELF! Why do they keep trying to be human shields for her when she’s the one who can withstand it and live?

And why am I still watching this show? Oh right, it’s pretty. And hot.

Pretty…

The fighting scenes weren’t that great and I didn’t even pay attention to much of the music. The story obviously wasn’t there and I’ve complained plenty about the protagonist. So all this show had going for it was its looks and its pretty awesome voice cast. I can’t say it’s one of the best looking shows I’ve seen either, but it was pretty damn good. Good enough that unfortunately, I may end up watching the second series, if only because of this teaser image.

I see a hint of Sebastian there… or maybe it’s just the haircut.

Speaking of Sebastian, I haven’t watched the first ep of the second season yet but I’ve heard some pretty great reviews. My impressions of that will follow soon, hopefully. But I have to pack first. California-bound!

Random Quote: in a pic!

… unless you’re in a shoujo series. Then it’s okay

– Saito Hajime, Hakuouki

Life has been getting in the way of my blogging recently but since it’s also the end of the season, there are a number of shows wrapping up so I have plenty of stuff coming… that just hasn’t happened yet.

But I want to wish everyone a Happy Canada Day from a couple days ago and a Happy 4th of July today!

And in celebration, here is a clip of the fireworks I saw on Canada Day!
(You can hear my friends are pretty excited )

So yeah… I will have more stuff soon plus I’m going to California next week so there will be some posts about that, particularly about Comic-Con! I’m so excited!

Random Quote: In this world, Hell is where the cooks are British, the policemen are German, the engineers are French, your lover is Swiss, and the bankers are Italians.
- Hetalia Axis Powers (Oh Hetalia…)

So I had started a post for Fullmetal Alchemist but I thought it would be better to post it once the anime is over to do it all together.

Plus, I’m done high school.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

*ahem*
Okay. Back to what this post may or may not have been originally about.

WARNING!
Girl talk is about to ensue.

So a few weeks ago, my sister was telling me how she started experimenting with some simple nail art and she asked me to give her some more ideas that weren’t too complicated. During this search (which inevitably led to a youtube binge) I came across a design called marble nails.

It didn’t look to complicated and more importantly, it didn’t require any artistic skill.

It seemed simple enough, right?

Wrong.

Well, mostly wrong, at least.

For my first attempt at anything relatively artsy nail-wise, it was a success. But other than that, it wasn’t too great. Surprisingly, my best nails were my first and last nails to do, both index fingers. The right pinkie is kind of cool too but doesn’t go with any of the others.

There were a few things I was unprepared for/had difficulties with.

1) How fast I had to act when making the design.
Depending on the nail polish you use and how much you used (I was pretty stingy) affected how much time you had before your design hardened. Still, the longest time I had (off the top of my head) was maybe 30 seconds. Sure, you only have to make a few lines, but I’m also horrible under time constraints (particularly in video games and exams…) so even that was difficult. There were a few times I had to restart because it hardened after I made only a few lines and it was a crappy design. I still ended with a number of crappy ones but believe me, there were uglier ones.

2) How difficult it is to make droplets!
This was surprisingly difficult. It took forever to get certain nail polishes to pick up enough polish to drop into the water and of course, it was never consistent. Not a problem I thought I would have.

3) Consistency.
You’ll notice my right hand is a lot lighter than my left hand. That’s because one has more light pink in its designs as opposed to the other. The cool thing about marble is that no design is exactly the same but at the same time, you can end up with stuff that’s completely different.

4) Air bubbles.
I had no idea this was going to be an issue. What was even weirder was how some nails got bubbles and some didn’t, and I didn’t know what I was doing differently to learn from this mistake. I had taken pictures right after doing the nails and they all looked horrible due to the bubbles. I took more pictures the night after and they looked much better, but you can still see where the air bubbles were. However, since I had no real design in mind, I can get away with saying the random circles were a part of the design.

5) How much time it would take.
Be prepared for a good hour for this. I actually went closer to two since a few of my nail designs were beyond crappy so I redid them. This seems like it just takes practice so I can see how some people could whip this off in less than an hour, also if they did more than one finger at a time. I did a few that were 2 fingers at a time but maybe I didn’t make my design big enough because they weren’t that pretty. Plus doing more than one finger adds more risk to the amount of polish left on your fingers. Whether having music on helped or slowed my progress, I’m not sure. (Especially since I often break out into song and cannot multi-task… okay I guess that answers that question)

6) How much nail polish remover I would have to use.
Of the 5 or so examples I saw online, all of them were onto a fake nail and I knew I would have to be somewhat prepared to remove the polish off my fingers, but it was quite a bit. It also took more time since I had to be careful of what I was removing, which is usually not the case. Only now did I find a video where the girl covered the rest of her finger in scotch tape to avoid this. Why didn’t I think of that…

7) How long they would last.
I’m at roughly the 2-week mark and the thumbs are completely gone except for a dot or two and the other fingers have about half left. According to my sister, this is fairly long but compared to my regular nail polish, it’s quite short.

Also, be prepared to ruin a bowl/dish/whatever you are using. Nail polish is removable but it’s such a pain.

So yeah. That was my first experience with marble nails and I’m strangely optimistic that most of my issues were because it was my first time trying it.

Random Quote: “Go Green. Date your neighbour.”
- Meet Locals dating service ad

I’m just about caught up in the anime (I’m at ep 58) and I finished the manga, which as luck would have it, finished this week. That is definitely the fastest I’ve gone through a series.

And I am speechless.

I would write more right now but… I actually should have been studying for my exams this week (whoops) so I have to do some of that now. But I just want to say that was great. And incredibly happy ending, but great. (But not enough RizaxRoy! Come on!) I was also a little worried when they were halfway through the battle at the second-last chapter but then I realized the last chapter was over 100 pages long so I was relieved. I was afraid it was going to be a rushed ending, but I was pleasantly surprised.

But seriously, I’m going to miss these guys.
Hiromu Arakawa, that was one great series.

“A lesson without pain is meaningless. For you cannot gain something without sacrificing womething else in return. But once you have overcome it and made it your own… you will gain an irreplaceable fullmetal heart.” - Fullmetal Alchemist