weeeee, it’s alive ^______^

oh well, I’ve been working so damn hard on it. I made myself a deadline – February 28. And I made it just in time! Aaah. I’m tired. I’ve been up till 4:30am, checking the mail form, checking the links, checking the font size with various resolutions. It works all fine, it’s even Netscape-compatible. Yeah, I feel accomplished. I even got nice sitemail ;_; (Just two hours after spamming two MLs and 4 message boards to announce the glorious opening of coup d’�tat!)

I think I won’t be too much online or in front of the screen tomorrow. But then again, I want to make a new layout for yuukitenshiNET and update hydrophilia…

Looks like Yoko Kanno is not responsible for the whole soundtrack of Rahxephon. As far as I can tell only the opening and the ending theme are composed by her ;_; And only the OP is performed by Maaya Sakamoto, the ED is performed by a different female vocalist…
Maaya-chans official site has a short sample of that OP (’Hemisphere’) available for streaming. It sounds lovely *_* The single comes out Feb 21st. I might wait for a new album, though, or the soundtrack, but only if there are more songs from Yoko Kanno on there (which I doubt).

One thing I forgot to mention earlier: Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited away) won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale! (It actually shares the award with Bloody Sunday.) That’s absolutely wonderful, I got all teary-eyed upon hearing the news ^^; Hayao Miyazaki-sensei is one of my heroes and his latest movie winning an award given by the country I grew up in makes me proud and happy. Proud of the German juries taste (^^;) and happy for Miyazaki-sensei.
I wish his earlier films would get as much attention as Spirited away. I showed my little cousins (both girls) an Japanese-dubbed, English-subtitled version of Tonari no Totoro. They didn’t understand the dialogues, of course. I translated some things for them from time to time though, when I thought it was neccessary for understanding the actions. And despite the language-barrier they loved the movie! First I showed them just the first half of it and then they had to leave. The next time they came to visit us, the first thing they said was they wanted to see the end of Totoro so we watched the movie from where we had left off before. The magic works, even if the kids don’t understand the dialogues. It works because of the language of the pictures, because of the magical story. (And may I add, it also works for grown-ups, not just for children.) Now, if only they’d make a German-dubbed version! I know I’d hate it, but little children aren’t that picky when it comes to dubs. It would be so cool to show them Ghibli films in their native language! I know they would love them such a lot more than Disney movies…

It looks like Arisu from Missalina Rei is in a new band… it wouldn’t all matter that much to me if they weren’t called coup d’etat, which is the title of the baroque site I’m working on ;_; I had a few alternative titles in mind, but everything is already that far in progress, I’ve finished the design days and weeks ago, with the title being part of the layout. I don’t want to change the whole damn thing. Besides, coup d’etat wasn’t chosen out of the blue from me, it was all K’s idea! Well, he kept mentioning that whole concept of entertainment and coup d’etat so I though that title would be more than fitting for my little site for them. Bah. That’s just mean.

I’m almost 100% sure I do not want to order the Kagrra single and album from Brand X. Almost. That video is too tempting, though. I gotta be a strong girl. Brand X is evil Brand X is evil. My new mantra. That’s how I start my days. Not.

I think these past six months of not being involved in any part of the German educational system did a great job on improving my overall health. I haven’t had a cold or anything like that. But I noticed I’ve started missing my best friend really badly. There are so many things I want to tell her. Even though I have quite a few people around me who I know I can trust, it’s just not the same. Nothing’s ever been like the friendship we’ve had (and we’ll probably have again, with some time passed). Unfortunately, some of those people I would’ve liked to call friends never seem to keep their promises (not all of them, though. just a few). Those so-called ‘friendships’ are hardly in balance, I seem to give more that I get from them. If anyone asks a favour of me, I gladly do what I can. However, if there’s something I ask of them, even just small things, they promise to help me, but in the end they won’t. They say they keep forgetting about that, that I’ll just have to wait a little longer. At the end of the day it’s just empty promises, though. If I do something for them, I do not expect anything in return. But if I really need some help but the person who promised to help me out keeps forgetting about it… then it doesn’t feel like a good friendship for me, sorry. So please don’t expect me to do you favours over and over again if you can’t do the smallest thing I ask of you.

Kagrra will release an album on May 1st ;_; I love them. One month before my birthday, this is going to be the best present I’ll get for my birthday! And its title is one of my alltime favourite Japanese words: kirameki *_*
I’m contemplating whether to buy this at Brand X because you’ll get a free video if you buy the album with the single that comes out in April… but then again, going through four months of pain for the socend time just because of an online shop’s inability to get my items shipped won’t be worth a 5-minute video, will it? Well, will it???

Only two days left till the 16th… it’s kind of strange when you know that one of your favourite bands will stop activities in just a few hours ;_;

Oh, just discovered something really stupid: I’ve just received an email from the Due’le mailinglist. The sender’s English is not the best but in her sig there’s a quote from the 2nd track of the Replica maxi with some strange Engrish and then there’s this line all in caps (which equals screaming/yelling) that Miyabi needs help with his English o_O How about the one complaining getting English classes first?! Oh well. You can’t make fun of things (even if it’s not to be taken seriously) when you make the same mistake like the person you’re making fun of o_O

I know I shouldn’t complain so much. This is exactly why I don’t watch any news shows anymore because they are simply annoying. And since the only person I can have political discussions with is my mother and I don’t want to bug her with my whining I just don’t watch the news. It makes me a much happier person, really. (Unfortunately, I’m a inconsistent person at heart. I watched the late night news yesterday and coudn’t fall asleep afterwards because I was so pissed off by certain international political developments >_<)

On with some happy news: Mist of Rouge will release a collection of 4 promo videos in April ^-^ Can’t wait to see the guys ‘in motion’ ^^; I’m not sure whether or not I should order the Garden video coming out in March… I think it’ll consist of live footage which I don’t like as much as PVs.

Btw, I dropped the MoR site project, at least for the time being. I’m in the process of making a baroque site, though. I’ve finished the design for it last weekend (in fact it took me just one day to make the design) and I’m tyoing up the content right now. It won’t go online until mid-March, though, because I want to have some lyrics up there when I open it, but my copy of Tokyo Stripper won’t be here till the Kagrra video comes out so I can’t do any romanizations right now ;_;

Asuka manga rant: I think Hyakumantsubu no namida has lost it’s magic for me. It started all too well and fresh and exciting but at the moment the whole story is developing in all too predictable ways. The art isn’t as pretty as a few issues before, too. Kazumi-sensei seems to draw the characters’ arms longer and longer with every new chapter o_O
Yumemiru machi – Disaster City Blues is growing on me, though. It started three issues ago. The first chapter got me quite interested, the second installment was kind of weird because I couldn’t make out the connection to what happened in ch.1 but now, with chapter 3, I’m completely hooked. First I wasn’t too impressed with the mangakas artwork (I didn’t like her previous series that ran in Asuka and Shoujo Teikoku), but for this story it seems to have changed a bit and it looks really good. The story is somewhere between fantasy and cyper-punk, both bizarre and fresh (in the sense of not repeating old plot devices of ‘alternative’ shoujo manga). Very cool.
Asuka 4 is supposed to come with a school calendar including artwork from Akira Onodera… can’t wait to get it. But it’s still more than a week until it’s released in Japan ;_;

Aah I nearly died ;_;

I’ve been on an extended font-downloading spree since Thursday and today I finally installed all 374 new fonts… So far so good, but when I wanted to work with Photoshop I got strange error messages while launching PS and couldn’t get it to start >_< I tried several things, went to several trouble shooting pages and performed all the routines described there but nothing seemed to change a thing because PS wouldn't start ;_; I got nervous... I didn't give up, though (I'm stubborn when it comes to solving problems on my own) and searched with Google (aye, good ol' Google, now what would I do without you?). There I found a message from someone with the same problem I had on an Italian graphic designers' forum. Okay, Italian... well it could have been worse (e.g. Portugese, Russian), I had four years of Latin at school and Italian and Latin are quite similar so fortunately I understood enough of that message without having to search for an Italian online translator.
I had been afraid the problem might have been caused by mass of fonts I have but thank God it wasn’t. In fact, it was one particualr font that I had installed that caused all the crashing and not-launching. I removed and deleted the font and voila, PS works again, just as fine as before.

I went to Kagrra’s official site (haven’t been there for more than a week) and read the latest diary entries of the members (that sounds strange ^^; members… kind of like they didn’t mean anything to me >_< )… anyway, I especially liked the Nao’s entry of how he spent is birthday. (Which was awfully cute.) Izumi and Nao seem really really close… makes me miss my best friend ;_;