Azusa lieks caek. I liek Azusa. I think I like her because she is the most accurate representation of my insecurities that I’ve noticed in a show. I’m constantly unhappy with myself, and with what I do and with things around me. Yet I end up going with the flow anyway, and then end up wondering what I should say to other people about it when they ask.

When I look back, I’ve done the same thing one too many times when someone asks me “wow you have a lot of meetings, what do you actually do at those meetings?”. Its the kind of dissatisfaction with yourself when you’ve enjoyed yourself so much you don’t think you’ve achieved anything.

…and then the person you’re speaking to suddenly tells you they are all on track for the next big event, and its suddenly hard to tell anyone about anything you do.

On a lighter note, I really like Azusa’s Mustang.

Its also really embarrassing when I see Azusa talk to herself, something I tend to do when I’m excited too. It shows me how silly it actually looks and how awkward situations become with it x_x.

I get the feeling their window glass is slightly yellow tinted.

I also hate it when I tend to do all those useless things that I enjoy but want to get rid of because it takes a toll on productivity. But it’s just so much work.

“Can I take it off?”

And I especially hate myself for getting caught up with everything I do, even if that something was a sidetrack from what I intended to do all along.

It gets especially silly when I realize that I’ve been tamed for a while and just realized it.

But in the end, I always realize that I did what I could and enjoyed myself at the same time, which is what really matters, despite worrying about everything while it happened.

That said, I’m a hopeless cake lover too.

Doujin Overload again! This year I was much less of a stalker and more of a seller, and only thanks to a trusty sidekick was I able to run around with a knifecamera and find more gold for myself!

Got in early in the morning to get the booth ready. Doujin Overload is an event by anime fans for anime fans where everyone sells their own artwork/keychains/products that are anime related.

Everyone’s busy setting up too!

This Azusa caught my eye. All of a sudden I want it D=.

And more very nice 1:4 figurines.

There were dolfies too. Not too keen on those though.

Soon the event picket up, and people were starting to flood into the place.

Soon it was time to sell the stock!

But the most important part of the event to me was… the cosplayers!

This year’s cosplaying was much much better than last year.

Especially when you have an awesome Data Sentient Entity Humanoid Interface walking around and keeping the peace.

There was lots of Touhou going on in the cosplay scene this year too, which was the awesomeness. Yukari~

There were so-so ones as well,

There were some very fearsome name-writing lolis too!

And an extraordinary Miku walking around like a princess.

Of course, mixed into the pure win is always the inevitable eyecancer.

There were awesome butlers too! Butlers HAVE to be called Sebastian after all.

Also there was some really really awesome Black Rock Shooter stuff going on from Christchurch! Kudos to these girls who are always ahead of the pack.

There was also a Haruhi, which was admittedly over9000 times better than the last one.

The military sent their regards too!

And one of my favorite Touhou Project characters, Aya!

… along with our 9baka fairy Cirno!

We also have more awesome gothloli gracing our sights.

… and Celty’s selling doujin! O_O.

I saw a Konata too!

But the best part of all was the presence of an awesome twintailer in the vicinity all the time, which was awesome.

We can’t forget our furry friends too!

And making a special cameo appearance is: The Stig.

Finally, on one of my last go arounds in the room, I spotted an awesome dolfie of Maria, which actually looks the part! It may just be the undoing of my no-dolfie policy.

Overall, it was an awesome pedobear-approved event where I had a lot of fun, enjoyed talking to all our extremely friendly cosplayers and met some awesome artists. Kudos to the organizers, Graphic Novel Cafe for making the anime scene look so big. Rest assured we will continue to support the heroes of our local anime community.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you on behalf of Collateral Damage Studios, Ichitakaseto, Tiyoro, Bane, Siua and Kuonn P to all those who bought our artbook! We almost sold out thanks to all of you! We hope to make more awesomeness for you in the future and hope you’ll continue supporting us in the future!

I am currently on what is fast becoming an annual trip to Auckland to attend Doujin Overload. This year instead of TragicComedy, I will be manning the Collateral Damage Studios booth in Doujin Overload. However, the event is tomorrow. Today I just came to Auckland to chill.

Kagami didn’t look too happy with me drawing girls to pass the time. We talked, but only when we were trying to solve the puzzle. Unfortunately even the moderate puzzle was too easy.

Auckland’s airport has a bus service that drives you to the city, because its a very long drive. You buy a ticket here and then board a bus that tries its best to come every 15 minutes. A return ticket is $23 and a one way ticket is $16. So we bought a return because we needed to come back.

Walking down the road to the hotel.

After we settled down, we got up and started looking for places to chill at, and found this small passageway down a street.

At the end of it was a large balcony with an awesome view of the city’s buildings.

This place made me wish I had my wide angle lens with me.

We sat down on a bench nearby and enjoyed the view for a while.

Next we headed down to the glittering city.

The city is busy even at night. Well, it was actually 6 o’clock in the evening.

Me and Kagami found an awesome office lobby

It had really cool vibes.

At the lifts.

There was also a group of people dancing and singing in the city.

Expensive shops

Lots more glittering city

The most prominent feature of Auckland city’s skyline, the skytower.

The Hyatt Hotel, where Doujin Overload will be held. If and of you are going, see you there!

We saw an interesting little walkway down to somewhere, but Kagami was already itching to get home.

So we had a final look at the city over the hill and walked back.

Its been a while since I posted about Christchurch, so I’ll talk about a less exciting but relaxing place to be in called Sumner, because me and the Hiiragi sisters so happened to end up here after getting lost for a while. If you think that you’re tired of a place that has too much to see, come here and relax yourself. Its actually also a beach, so you can dip your legs in the icy water and enjoy yourself in the freezing pacific breeze.

First of all, I’d like to emphasize that this beach is really just beach. Just sand and rocks, and some boats. A lot of people come here though, so its not my favorite beach. Couples enjoy sitting at the rocks while the Antarctic winds chill them. But it does make you feel really relaxed and ponder about how worthwhile modern life is.

Some very cool rocks with mold growing on them.

Kagami enjoys looking into the distance.

Because this beach is really a very large field of wet sand inside a bay bordering the sea, the most interesting things besides the sky here are the rocks. Here we see the formation that was in front of Kagami in the previous photo.

We enjoyed ourselves chatting and making up lame jokes. The air was sitting at single digit temperatures, but it was really refreshing for some reason.

We even saw little roses buried in the sand.

This is actually the north end of the beach. I loathe the south end because its just packed with people and cars. Its essentially an esplanade with a parking lot, beach and just so many people and their dogs.

The south end has a proper carpark, but you can park on the roadside here at the north end…

… and walk down the stairs to the beach.

There’s some colorful vegetation up here too.

Deeper into the bay is an estuary, with a LOT of birds. They aren’t afraid of humans because its illegal to kill them. So I get to come really close to take pictures.

But they also have a sense of “personal space”, so they tend to walk away when either me or Kagami get too close.

About 10 minutes from the end of the beach is Sumner town, which has shops that support the local population.

Cool ad.

There’s also junk just lying outside shops that make them look cute, but serve no functional purpose.

We also noticed a cool little lot where they train young sailor cadets.

They had a cool cannon.

Kagamin reenacting the pose of the French captain at the helm of warships coming to the aid of settlements in the American Revolution.

Further along one can see boats anchored in the shallow bay waters.

There’s a yachting club here. Maybe I should get a boat someday… it looks like fun

Today’s overcast, so there wasn’t really any sun to speak of.

Boats on their keels.

People buy land along the slopes of the mountain facing the beach and build their houses to see the great view of large masses of water from their balconies. I’d really like a place like this too, but its so expensive.

But the kind of living probably makes it all worth it.

It would also be so swell to be able to just come downstairs and ride my boat out for fun with Kagami.

There is a long walkway extending from the end of the beach all the way to the town, so a lot of people from the town jog down to the beach via this walkway.

On overcast days the sky just looks so low.

Interesting bulbous plants. You’d never notice these amongst the bright colors of spring and summer.

There’s also a small playground nearby with interesting courses.

Metal ball is very interesting.

One of the interesting things about this city is on certain days you see a lot of these colorful bins outside every house. The council gives three bins to every house, one red, one green and one yellow for them to separate their unrecyclable rubbish, organic rubbish and recyclables in to the bins respectively. The green one gets collected every week, while the red and yellow get collected on alternate weeks.

There was a cake store too, and with lemon cake.

I couldn’t resist. So me and the sisters chilled out there for a while. It was actually also an art gallery, so we had a chance to see some swell oil paintings that were so realistic they were selling in the thousands.

Soon it was getting dark, because it was winter the sun sets early in the day, so we decided to head home.

Lately I’ve been getting the feeling that anime is trying to portray student councils as a small group of decisionmakers very detached from the rest of the student body and who constantly create their own clique and meet in isolation to discuss the most random things. Could this actually be true about Japanese high schools in general? Is this a satirical work of writers who find no respect in their old schools’ councils? Or are stories written this way just for the sake of comedy?

I’m sure girls will highly anticipate the arrival of special skirts that do not flip in strong wind.

First off, the president is awesome.

Not because she’s a sadist or anything.

And the treasurer is awesome too, because of her sheer size and ability to fly and kick people indirectly.

And there’s the secretary who’s like, not so straight.

This reminded me of marimite.

I wonder if the student council here is appointed via beauty contest too…

3-P means 3 people. You get the joke.

“I like high places, because I can look down on people from there.” Win.

Poor girl can’t get a drink to save her life.

Okay I’ll stop now. This show is just full of lame jokes and punchlines.

Back to talking about my trip to Singapore before last week. That night we went to a nice little restaurant called Ikoi (relaxation) in a Hotel Miramar somewhere on the island.

Its really just a restaurant where you sit down, pay a fixed price and order whatever you want for the rest of the night. And its ALL Japanese food. Obviously, the place gets very full because this kind of payment is extremely worth it.

First of all, we had Chawan Mushi, which was basically egg and meat cooked in a very mysterious way that creates a soft pudding like texture yet salty and with mince at the bottom of the cup.

We had tempura too! This needs no commentary.

Then we had dead fish served on a nice boat. We tried eating the wasabi alone. It actually tasted really good in large amounts.

Kagami seems to like the smell of raw salmon and tuna.

Next was the cold tomato. It was no joke. It really was cold tomato.

Agedashi tofu! They just make the best stuff.

And awesome handrolls.

Kagami does the honours with the soup from the obinmushi.

We also get soup boiled at the table! Its got some awesome veges inside. Moms if you want your kids to eat their veges this is a good one.

More fish! This is fried though, and has LOTS of fish egg in it. Fish eggs just make it taste so awesome.

And then we had even more salmon!

This came out of the soup. Douzo omeshiagare!

And even more cooked salmon.

And yakitori.

And taking pages out of gluttony’s notes, we decided to have some zaru soba as well at the end of it.

Meanwhile, we have Shia from The Bonkurasu Brigade and Ooga from The Banzai Effect watching over the lolis on the other side of the table.

On the next day, it was time to leave… So it was off to the airport with us.

Because the flight was late at night, we sat around…

Climbed the little artifacts around the airport…

Saw some dinosaurs…

And just stood around looking at planes.

Time passes quickly when you’re having fun talking to a loved one so it was soon time to takeoff.

The night we took off, a lunar eclipse occured.

Today I bought a cake for the Hiiragi sisters to celebrate their birthday. We invited some close figmas to join the party too.

First off we went for some rememberance shots.

Kagami was so happy and said its the first time I did it for her and was like “a…about time I got a cake. >_>” Pff. Kagami, its for you AND your sister.

So first of all we decided to light up the cake, and Konata volunteered. But Kagami decided to veto that and said someone but Konata should do it.

So we got our in-house self-proclaimed pyrotechnician Kusakabe to do it for us.

So now that the candles were lit, it was time to make wishes and blow it!

The cake looked awesome in the dark.

… until the paper wrapper started catching fire…

Then the letters started burning spontaneously

Before we knew it things were starting to get out of hand so I blew out the fire instead.

We ended up with a burnt cake.

And so our pyrotechnician fell from grace.

It took a while to clean up the mess caused by the flames and wax.

After that, we went off to complete the ritual by cutting the cake.

And had a great night with a fire to laugh about.

If you want to wish Kagami happy birthday, go to her facebook and wish her!

On Thursday I returned to Singapore in transit back to New Zealand, and took some pictures of what I did there.

This is a picture of Marina Square, which me and a wolf walked past on the way to Marina Bay Sands

Since Marina Bay Sands opened that day, we decided to go up and visit the top.

First we had to walk down a path that led to a lot of construction sites.

And then walk under the immense building.

After we got up, we then started to realize how high the buildings were.

Kagami enjoyed herself. I just had a chance to face my fear of heights.

And they seemed to be constructing a death star of some sort.

Picture of the wolf and I.

Golf course on the other side of the bay

Motorways running over the water.

Around Marina Barrage is also a site of intense construction.

Meanwhile Kagami continued to enjoy the view from the top.

As the sky grew darker, the city became lit as if stars fell out of the sky onto it.

Watching pretty sunset. Everyone nowadays seems to own an SLR and tripod.

A nice view of the very busy port of Singapore.

The golf course is now lit with lights

The financial district is a wonderful sight

View of the Marina Bay area

More views of the city

A stadium being built for the youth olympics.

It started raining after it became dark, so we went back into the hotel buildings

Inside the hotel buidling. You can see where each of the 3 towers rise from the main building

The helix bridge just outside the sands building

View of the marina bay sands hotel from below at night

On the next day, we headed out to a karaoke box. Reimu decided to ride on the wolf’s shoulder

On the way, I saw a colonial style hotel that looked really out of place among the boxes.

There were nice fountains.

Botan becomes interested in Reimu

Kagami and Reimu had mock battles while we were singing in the K-box

They seemed to have learned that from Ip Man

Me and Konata!

We also met the plum, ume and sentinel011 from The Bonkurasu Brigade.

Kagami and me <3

After the Karaoke, we all headed out to dinner

Which involved some very nice dishes. More on this later.

I know very well how they feel. After living for years on end in a cold country like New Zealand, spending time near the equator where the temperature is a constant 30C is capable of driving people to extreme measures to cool themselves down.

I tried swimming wear too. But I didn’t wear a girl’s swimsuit. Only Kagami did. But it only made me want to jump into the pool.

I tried putting my head against the aquarium. It was fairly cool but not as cool as you’d like it to be. Thankfully my aquarium didn’t have a thermostat, so it was always quite cool.

Lying on the table didn’t work however, it heated up to my temperature fairly quickly.

So I decided to be “one with the heat”. Like the saying goes: if you can’t beat them, join them. Didn’t end too well though. I ended up soaking my clothes with sweat.

Next I tried ghost stories, since it sends “shivers up your spine”. It didn’t help though because while I felt shivers, I felt nowhere as cold, and my brother barging into the house didn’t help either. That made me jump and I felt hot again.

So I surrounded myself with big posters of Antarctica and imagined that I was sitting in the snow just like in New Zealand, but the posters stopped the air from flowing and the room just heated up from the sunshine.

So sitting in front of the fan and humming into the blades kept me occupied for a while.

I found some ice in the fridge and ate it to keep cool then. But after that my mouth just went all cold, and I felt hot again. Of course, I didn’t fill a pail up with ice because I didn’t have that much around.

After watching the entire episode, I realized I forgot I had an air conditioner in my room. That’s what happens when you leave home for too long. You forget about even your own room.

After a short night’s sleep we woke up to the fresh smell of K-ON and hotel room to start our day.

Next we headed down into town to find a karaoke place that we were supposed to meet up at.

And then we sang for eight hours.

Kagami had fun too.

Yes that’s basically all we did all day before I jumped on another jet plane to land in Malaysia.

The next morning me and Kagami decided to have a look around our local spaceport apartment. Turns out there’s a nice swimming pool.

And badminton courts! Great places to keep fit.

And a cafe to provide food for those activities.

There’s a little flower garden too! We will have to do a photoshoot here sometime.

And there was a nice playground for Kagami to run around in.

There were also some courts for those more inclined to play with balls.

We decided to hang out at the pool for a bit to cool off in the tropical heat.

But ended up playing in the water.

View of the area from upstairs. Note that the Zentraedi-sized piano was actually built for the purposes of entertaining our giant guests once, but nowadays its form is less functional and more as a source of aesthetic appeal. Our giant friends have also gone to less heavily populated micronian areas to entertain themselves.

View of Kuching City from the tower with Mount Santubong in the background. Legend has it that a fallen titan fell to earth and became the soil that formed that mountain. Hence the face-like shape of the mountain.

After a long hot walk under the sun, we decided to take a break and chill out with nice cold drinks.

It also turned out our stowaway was an impostor all along. HIIRAGI!

And Reimu just drinks too much… even in this hot weather.