Tag: animu

New Father Brogging, #006

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the most important things that I’ve learned as a first-time dad is that whenever you feel like you’re getting a grasp of raising a baby, behaviors will inevitably change and then you’re back into a position of knowing nothing all over again, and feeling helpless when your baby is reduced to crying and finding great difficulty at what may be causing your child distress.

When my baby is crying, it could be a variety of things that could be causing it; might be hunger, even if it might be improbably because she ate a full feed just 80 minutes ago, but a growth spurt could be in play, meaning she’ll want to eat pretty much every single hour.  Maybe it’s indigestion, to which there are only a few things that can actually bring her relief, like pressing her up against the warm body of a parent, or medicinally with gripe water or newborn anti-gas drops.  Maybe she needs to be burped more.  Maybe she’s cranky because she needs to take a nap.  Lately, she’s become cognizant to the discomfort of having a soiled diaper, something that hadn’t been the case in the first five weeks.  And sometimes, she just wants to be held by mom or dad.

The point is, there have been numerous times where I feel like I’ve identified a behavioral pattern, only to rely upon the knowledge of yesterday for today’s problems, and find out that everything has changed all over again, and then I’m left feeling dumbfounded and useless that I can’t figure out how to bring comfort to my own child.

I never once discounted the difficulty of parenting, for the first time much less, but as I expected it would be, parenting is not easy.  This does not deter me in the least bit, but I am just confirming that it’s about as difficult, and occasionally frustrating as I imagined it would be.  There’s nothing like changing a diaper, only for the kid to rip a wet fart and soil it seconds after being put on, only for an after shock to hit two minutes later, and make me throw my hands up at the frustrating of changing three diapers in the span of 120 seconds.

Ultimately I wouldn’t change a thing, and I’ll change a trillion diapers if I have to in order to raise my little girl right, but damn can I at least say there are times when I just have to say, what the fuck man?

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Hi praise for Hi Score Girl

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I really wanted to say that it was surreal to be binging on an anime again, as if it were the year 2000, but that wouldn’t be that accurate.  Within the last year alone, I watched stuff like the last two seasons of Initial D, and I watched through Kakegurui on Netflix, so I have in fact watched some anime beyond 2000.  Regardless, over the last week, I binged through an anime series, and as if I were 16 years old again, I’m looking forward to when Netflix gets the reigns to the rest of it.

I’m going to assume it’s either Castlevania (which I guess would have classified as anime) or all the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episodes I’d been watching over the last few months that prompted Hi Score Girl to populate in my recommendations on Netflix, but I guess I have to admit that Netflix does kind of know me, because the preview got my attention enough to where I’d fast track and actually watch it, as opposed to putting it into my list and then never actually watching it until like a year later.

And I absolutely loved it.  Without question, Hi Score Girl is a love letter to old school video games and video game culture, and all too often, I felt rushed back to my own childhood watching the daily gaming mania and obsession with video games of Haruo Yaguchi.  I was super into Street Fighter II, and I poured hours upon hours into the game, and at differing points of my life, thought I was the best player in the world, until I went to the arcade and occasionally got my ass handed to me by players better than I was.  I can’t say I was as maniacal about improvement and wanting to be the best, but I’m still attuned enough to gaming culture to completely understand and relate to some degree.

Intertwined through all the gaming nostalgia is a sweet and fairly innocent love story between children growing up, and the trials and tribulations that come with different classes in school and society, the expectations of a family name, and the innate need and want to simply live our own lives.

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Initial D, fin

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not a lot of people know this, but Initial D is one of my all-time favorite anime out there.  Easily in my top ten, quite possibly in my top five.  I’ll be the first to say that it’s far from high quality in terms of plot, progression or quality of animation, but when the day is over, there isn’t any other anime that I’ve revisited the status of availability over the span of 18 years, to make sure that I’m caught up to all the episodes.

That’s longer than my interest in Ranma 1/2, Rurouni Kenshin, Kare Kano, Kodomo no Omocha or Neon Genesis Evangelion, all other series that I could say would be up in my top ten.  Not many of them had nearly the longevity of Initial D, much less a variety of movies, OVA and live-action adaptations made for them, in spite of them probably being considered bigger traditional classics.

I recently finished watching the series after I discovered that the Fifth and the Final Stage seasons were available; after the cheesy way that the Fourth Stage had concluded, I was eager to see if the series could get back some of the gearhead excitement that defined the series as a whole.

To no real surprise, the last two seasons were by no means blockbusters, as the series in general is nothing really complex – dudes who love driving cars and racing, racing against other dudes who love driving cars and racing.  The only things that really change are the competitors to the Project D team, and occasionally the course does too.  At first blush, it’s hard to imagine the types of cars that are losing to a Toyota Corolla AE86 or an RX-7 FD3S, but the show surprisingly takes the initiative to explain and justify the mechanics to how such can happen.

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Photos: MomoCon 2015, Saturday

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As is seemingly the norm when it comes to weekend conventions these days, more impressive costumes tend to emerge on the Saturday, and such was the case at MomoCon this year as well.

Again, I didn’t take nearly as many pictures as I know I’m capable of taking, but the fact of the matter is that frankly, there weren’t as many things I wanted to take pictures of as opposed to things I did. Perhaps I’m overly picky, or maybe my head wasn’t quite in the game this weekend, but these are all the pictures that I took on Saturday.

I went back to a more versatile 17-70 kit lens on this day, and ultimately, I feel that the results of some of the portrait shots are better. Ultimately, there’s still a galaxy-sized chasm room for improvement, but for what it’s worth, the space to operate in the GWCC and lots of natural lighting make it a preferable place for a novice like me to want to take pictures.

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Photos: MomoCon 2015, Friday

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Without further ado, here are pictures I took from the Friday of this year’s MomoCon.

There aren’t a tremendous amount of pictures in general, because I’m a picky picture taker that gives favoritism towards friends, fandoms and nostalgia, and I have a tendency to pass over things I’ve seen before, unless I’m that enamored by them that much.

This particular day, I was using a wide-angle lens which is great at taking pictures at close range while still being able to get a wide expanse of view, but I’m an amateur that never practices, so the focusing on it was questionable sometimes.

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When did Dragon Ball become so popular again?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There’s a tiny part of me that fears that inquiries like this will become more and more frequent throughout the rest of my life, which is going to make me come to the realization that it’s not so much the world behaving erratically, but that I’m clearly becoming old.

But seriously, chalk this up like my once inquisition of the rising popularity of Deadpool, but I have to ask, why is it that Dragon Ball has evidently become so popular again?

It really does kind of baffle me.  At least Deadpool’s rise in popularity can be somewhat chalked up to a talented writer really giving him a chance to shine, and fans responding extremely positively in regards to said re-development of his character.

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