In yet another breaking development that casts a blinding spotlight on the unrelenting passage of time and my lost teens, Maaya Sakamoto, my favourite singer in all dimensions of space and time, got married at the ripe age of 31 to fellow seiyuu Ken’ichi Suzumura.

Seriously, do you people realize that the 90s was like twenty years ago? It’s fricking insane. Maaya is basically old school now. I don’t even know the names of any voice actors nowadays. Get off my proverbial lawn you damn kids. I am having a quarter-life crisis.

Anyway, I had just returned from a trip to Hong Kong two days ago and spent today finishing up my packing for my imminent house-moving, so I didn’t notice this piece of gigantic news until Kurogane messaged me on Twitter.

There’s a short personal message on Maaya’s official news feed announcing that the wedding took place on 8th August (incidentally a rather auspicious date in some East Asian cultures):

今日はいつも応援してくださっている皆様に、ご報告したいことがありまãã€‚
私、坂本真綾は、８月８日に声優の鈴村健一さんと結婚しました。

今までの自分の人生の中で
好きだと思うことや、嬉しい、心地いいと思うことを優先ãã‚‹è¡Œå‹•ãŒ
いつも未来につながってきました。
だから結婚についても、
私がそうしたいと心から思えるときが自然と来たので
その気持ちに従いました。
鈴村さんは、一緒にいるととても穏やかな気持ちになれる、優しい人でãã€‚
これからも私が私らしく歌い、演じ、そして生きていくために、
心休まるパートナーが側にいてくれること、とても頼もしく思いまãã€‚
皆様にも、あたたかく見守っていただけたら嬉しいでãã€‚

これからもより一層仕事に励んでいきたいと思っておりまãã®ã§ã€
どうぞよろしくお願いいたしまãã€‚

坂本真綾

Today I have an announcement to make to everyone who has long supported me.
I, Maaya Sakamoto, was married to voice actor Ken’ichi Suzumura on August 8.

Throughout my life, prioritizing the things I like and the things that make me happy and feel at ease has always turned out to be the right path to my future.
So when it came to marriage, the feeling that this was the right time came naturally to me and I decided to follow it.
Suzumura-san is a kind person who makes me feel calm when we are together.
I believe that as I continue to sing, perform and be myself in the coming future, it will be great to have a supportive partner by my side.
I would be really glad if everyone would also continue to watch over us.

I hope to strive even harder in my work in the future, so please continue to lend me your support.

Maaya Sakamoto

Interestingly, as noted by Kurogane, Ken’ichi Suzumura voiced Shinn Asuka in Gundam SEED DESTINY, alongside Maaya who voiced Lunamaria Hawke. This is like Nadesico’s Ruri x Akito all over again. Although Nadesico is by now so old in Internet age that I don’t think anyone online knows what I am talking about.

Real-life parallels fiction

Now to be clear, this is not going to be a fanboy rage thing where I desperately struggle in a futile attempt to not have to confront reality because the marriage of my favourite singer somehow symbolizes the lost of a part of my comfort zone for the past decade. But I have to admit that the timing of this almost too perfectly coincides with the start of a new chapter of my life.

Human beings are superstitious creatures like it or not, and it’s not unreasonable to perceive mutual significance in unrelated events as long as we keep it to poetic musings.

I am actually quite happy for Maaya. 31 is kind of old for a woman to get married by Japanese standards and, in typical Japanese fashion, all sorts of social complexities evolve past 30 for a single working woman. Hope she continues to sing.

I guess officially Maaya Sakamoto is now Maaya Suzumura even though she probably keeps her maiden name as her stage name for branding purpose.

So I am moving soon and I have been spending the past week stacking things (mostly books) into boxes. Sifting through all the stuff I have accumulated in the past ten years really takes me back.

It’s been just about 10 years since I first watched Evangelion, which was kind of how everything began. I would link to my old blog post on it, but I wrote it on my old b2/cafelog (WordPress’ predecessor) blog and it’s stuck somewhere in my site database inside an unconverted b2 table. Just as well, since the post was probably shit.

Games and DVDs. An R1 Evangelion box set is buried somewhere underneath

I’m off to Stanford in just about a month or so and the house-moving will actually take place after I leave. The next time I set foot on Singapore, I’ll be walking into an unfamiliar room with all my precious stuff stacked in boxes covered with (at least) one year’s worth of dust. That ought to be fun.

Crap ton of Haruhi stuff

I am still hanging on to the slim hope that one day pristine limited edition Haruhi goods from the series’ golden age will be worth billions of dollars. But I think the chance that I will make a profit on this collection is probably only slightly higher than this guy’s long-shot investment.

Crap ton of Maaya Sakamoto stuff and other CDs

Honestly speaking, I think my Maaya collection can objectively be described as pretty darn sweet, especially considering I do not live in Japan. I basically have all her singles and albums (including her releases from when she was half of the teenage duo Whoops!!), often two copies of each, plus limited edition and all that jazz. I also have a bunch of posters that CD shops in Japan put up to promote her new CD releases, some related DVDs (including the short movie 03+ she starred in) and some concert memorabilia.

Bunch of manga and Japanese books

I am kind of a compulsive hoarder, but mainly in the sense that I like to collect more things. I don’t actually mind throwing away stuff I don’t need. Not shown in the pictures is a rather large mountain of old magazines and books that are destined for a glorious second life as rolls of toilet paper.

Random English books

Mahoro packed in her box

I actually do not own that many figurines in spite of my urge to collect stuff. PVC figures in particular do not preserve well in Singapore’s hot and humid weather unless you keep them in the box, so I had to throw away some over the years. But the few I keep around are pretty awesome. Maybe one day I’ll finally get a proper dust-proof display case for them and save them from the cruel fate of spending eternity in their boxes.

Kan’u Unchou and Tony Taka’s C73 releases

Haruhi Bunny and Tony Taka’s C75 releases

Going through my collection makes me feel old. I can’t believe that it’s already been a decade since Evangelion first raped my mind. A few days ago, I heard people on the radio reminiscing over 90s pop songs, referring to them as “retro”. Moments like that really turn your perspective upside down.

Speaking of Evangelion, check out my sweet new Esc key

I guess house-moving and college in the States are two huge changes waiting right around the corner that will mark an end of an era for me personally. I have no idea what the future will hold, but things are definitely going to be different soon. Part of me is feeling uneasy (and lazy) about the changes ahead, but mostly I am looking forward to California. Hopefully I will retain the essence of who I am, even as I grow into a new environment.

Manga and CDs

But no matter what happens, I’ll definitely still find time to finish the occasional volume of Kimi ga Iru Machi. That damn thing has more twists than a Taiwanese soap opera. I wonder if the San Francisco Kinokuniya is any good. I hope Maaya performs at Anime Expo again some day…

Anyway, I’ll be in Hong Kong from the 4th to the 10th and spend ten days in Scandinavia towards the end of the month. Things are getting kind of busy around here, but I’m sure I’ll be able to find the time to post some photos from the trips, even though I have yet to finish posting all the photos from my last trip in April…

We have won one or two Internets before in our lifetime and now we can finally claim our hitherto figurative prize.

The entire hosted content of the defunct Geocities free hosting service will be released as a 900-gigabyte torrent file by a group called Archive Team. I’m sure we all have fond childhood memories and traumas associated with the pop-ups-with-flashing-cursors monster that was Geocities. Here’s the chance to relive it.

From Techradar.

The entire contents of Geocities is to be released as a torrent – granting people access to a database of websites and content that should be considered a huge part of the internet’s history.

Geocities was shut down with little fanfare by Yahoo back at the tail end of 2009, but the speed with which it cleared out the data shocked many.

However, the self-styled Archive Team has now gathered up that data and has announced that it will release the whole lot as a torrent.

Geocities existed in a simpler time when the Internet had not yet hit major meme status and websites in general were far less polished and sanitized. Awkward HTML tables, Times New Roman, animated GIFs and primitive Javascript message boxes were the state of the art and we hated it all. But we had a great time.

With shiny and smooth Web 2.0 designs still far off and Ajax still just a hero in the Trojan War, surfing on the information superhighway then felt like a second great westward expansion full of exploration and adventure. This unbridled experience that has since evolved into something closer to cable TV. And in that analogy, Geocities was the hive of villains and outcasts that thrived in the lawless frontiers of the West.

The group releasing the torrent explained their intentions in a blog post.

Who will want this? Anyone who feels like browsing among the artifacts of yesterday, who wants some data to play with, who is doing research into history, who wants to get some mileage out of a few weblog postings of crazy glittery animated GIFs and MIDI music. Itâ€s not for everyone. Some people will probably grab a few files out of the thousands of archives in the torrent, unhook and call it a day. Others will want all of it, every last bit, to put onto their $80 1TB hard drive they bought down at the local computer mart.

When you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that Geocities’ archive fits on a consumer-grade hard disk that you can get for under a hundred bucks today. Downloading the Internet has never been more literal.

I can only imagine the vast amount of raw data that future historians will have access to.

Today, our archaeologists can extrapolate so much information about ancient civilizations from a few mud bowls and skeletons.

Tomorrow, there will be a whole new class of historians called web historians who will create massive statistical computer programmes to analyse the significant events and social developments of the past. There will be archaeologists who specialize in ancient digital protocols and hardware manufacturing.

And, I suspect, there still be people waiting for the Year of the Linux on the Desktop. (Except that desktops will have long been replaced by personal computers embedded in our bodies.)

Futurist reveries aside, I suspect the short-term implication of the Geocities torrent is actually copyright. After all, Geocities may be ancient in Internet years, but its entire life span is but a blip in the outrageously-long copyright terms we have today. A torrent of its entire archive probably steps over more imaginary property rights than the entire 4chan image board.

And yet, it’s hard to argue why anyone should care about the potential infringement. It’s painfully clear that the copyright laws we inherited from the Industrial Revolution are severely ill-equipped to deal with the digital world. The fact that advancements in the techniques of information dissemination have always been followed by extensions of copyright terms greatly amuses this writer.

I cannot even being to fathom how we can hope to legally study history in the future, should perpetual copyright terms ever come to pass, as some crazy people with ill-placed good intentions desire. Once we begin to accept that people can own ideas, it’s a straight path down to thoughtcrime hell. There is a cyberpunk dystopia novel somewhere in that.

Geocities, the site that just keeps giving (ad-infested pop-ups). Rest in peace, gentle abomination of our childhood.

P.S. I think I used to have a Pokemon fan site hosted on Geocities back when I was ten (complete with animated GIFs and Comet Cusor). Maybe I’ll try looking for it when the torrent is released…

P.P.S. Here’s an awesome collection of animated “Under Construction” GIFs archived from Geocities sites.

I used to love Pokémon. I owned Red, Blue and Yellow and completed them at least a few dozen times, to the point that I memorized the walkthrough. I tried out Diamond recently on my DS, but despite clearly being a superior game in terms of gameplay diversity and production values, it doesn’t seem quite as interesting any more. I guess it’s the whole growing up thing.

So anyway, Nintendo has created a new line of apparels called Pokémon 151 for people like me. They are targeted at adults who miss the time when there was only 151 Pokémons but don’t want to be caught dead wearing those brightly-coloured Pikachu T-shirts that Nintendo sells.

They have four designs up on the site now: Hypno (Sleeper), Cubone (Karakara), Articuno (Freezer) and Mewtwo. Take a look.

ecchi nano wa ikenai to omoimasu

No? Nuts. Well, here’s something from the other extreme. While surfing Nico Douga two days ago, I chanced upon all six episodes of Golden Boy, that were uploaded under extremely nonsensical titles, and rediscovered the pubescent joys of blatant innuendoes and sexual stereotyping.

Blast from the past

Golden Boy is a short OVA series from the age when veliciraptors roamed, or in other words, the 90s, back when Jurassic Park first came out. It’s the insanely risqué and politically incorrect story of Kintarou Oe, a Toudai student who left school before his graduation in order to travel around the country and “study”.

All Toudai students have Newtype sense

In each episode, his travels take him to new places where he meets beautiful girls and terrorizes them with his lewd behaviour and his hilarious forthrightness. But there’s more to him than he first appears (a pervert acting without thinking on impulse) and the real fun of the show lies in the duality of his personality, which is revealed in the first episode and leaves you coming back for more.

Oh my god! Look at that…ancient CRT monitor. O_O

In a way, he’s like the precursor to Eikichi Onizuka from GTO, except way more racy. Onizuka may love pantsu as much as the next pervert, but he’s got nothing on Kintarou.

There are a total of six episodes of Golden Boy and each one features a different main girl. The formula is roughly the same: Boy meets girl. Boy is perverted. Hilarity ensues. There is little continuity in the story, save for the self-referential final episode.

This is a normal scene for a Japanese software company

At this point, before you go ahead and torrent legitimately purchase this show, it has to be made clear that this series is meant for a mature audience, the fact that I first watched it in middle school notwithstanding.

No, there’s no sex, despite the plot setting that sounds suspiciously like a B-grade porn flick, and indeed not much fappable material at all. What it does have is some nudity and a truckload of adult humour (or low grade humour, it’s the same thing really). This is the kind of animé that they talk about in PTA meetings while brandishing pitchforks and torches.

(That said, the source material of the show, a manga series by the same title, does venture somewhat deeper…)

It’s over 9000!

It’s incredible hard for me to describe why this show is great without spoiling the punchlines, so I’ll just not try. But imagine GTO, except 200% more NSFW.

And while toilet humour (literally) and sexual innuendos are the soup of the day and the series’ raison d’être, some episode endings do provide additional sentimental à la carte, clichéd as some of it may be, for those of you who need to crywank (à la Key fanboys). Either way, it’s excellent guilty pleasure for those who seek it.

What unseen horrors has she just walked into?

Good lord, I believe I just hacked together my own abominable culinary metaphor while simultaneously using an obscene amount of français. I’m a bloody genius.

So. Uh. Yeah. This show is pretty good, but don’t tell anyone that I recommended it! I have a reputation to protect.

Getting it

Interestingly, ADV actually dubbed and released this series before, so you should buy the original. Their license expired some time ago, but apparently Media Blaster picked it up last year, so a re-release is probably not too long off.

That said, not everyone can afford animé when corn prices are so high. If you understand Moonspeak and have an account at Nico Douga: 1 2 3 4 5 6

If not, there’s always That Which Must Not Be Named.

More screencaps

I swear this isn’t porn

No, really…

Why won’t you believe me? :(

C-C-C-Combo breaker (was never funny)

See, there’s nothing suggestive about a woman in tight leather riding a bike

Kimono is nice and prude

Oh fiddlesticks. I give up!

Vrooooom

And so this blog lives to die another day.

Some days ago, I was reading through the MegaTokyo forum and came across a thread on the original Tokimeki Memorial (TokiMemo) being ported to the PSP. (clicky if you don’t know what is it)

“That reminds me… I never did manage to get Kasumi’s end in TokiMemo 2…”

I posted a few replies and forgot about the whole thing.

Hikari-chan~

So there I was today, watching the mythical second episode of the two-part OVA based on the original game. It was crap. The producers obviously didn’t want to show the player’s character onscreen because he represented the player and didn’t have an official character design nor voice-over. So the OVA ends up having the girls taking turns to appear onscreen and pretty much nothing else happens. But I still kept watching.

“That reminds me…again… I never did manage to get Kasumi’s end in TokiMemo 2…”

I tried to forget about the whole thing once again. I finished the OVA and closed the folder.

“Don’t even think about it! My PlayStation is probably buried under a ton of game discs and magazines in some well-hidden corner of the storeroom right now. I will never find it!” I told myself.

Suddenly, my Winamp started to play “Going on!” by Bullet 77. The lead vocal of Bullet 77 was Junko Noda. Hikari Hinomoto, the female lead of TokiMemo 2, was Junko’s debuting role.

It was too much for me to bear. TokiMemo 2 was located just beside me, in a stack of mostly-PC games. I tooked the jewel cases out of their cardboard cover and looked through their contents. All five discs, the manual and even that tiny slip of paper that wraps over the spine of the case were present.

It’s no fancy limited edition, but it’s mine. I made up my mind. I walked to the storeroom and flicked the light switch. The room was full of boxes from when we moved in this year. I had no idea where to start. I started moving the boxes out one by one. I found a huge stack of PC Gamer magazines (which spell “PC GAMER” when you put their spines side by side), my old Tamiya models, a few issues of Newtype USA (which I no longer buy), a huge box of pirated PC and PS1 games and even my Sega Dreamcast. But the PlayStation was nowhere to be seen. I tried plugging in my Dreamcast, but the controller no longer responds and the disc drive failed to read every disc I tried. (I wonder if anyone still repairs these things?) Setting the Dreamcast aside, I once again wandered into the depths of the storeroom.

And there it was. Hidden underneath the bag which contained the Dreamcast was my PlayStation. I jumped for joy. I was so happy I could kiss the PS1 if it weren’t covered with enough dust to choke a grown man.

So anyway, to cut the story short here, I cleaned it thoroughly, plugged it into my TV and placed the first disc of TokiMemo into the top-loading drive. I pushed the power button and prayed, glancing nervously at my deceased Dreamcast. It booted. I watched the opening video. Twice. Ah… memories. The controller’s directional pad wasn’t working, which caused me to panick for a bit until I switched to my backup controller and it worked fine. I don’t like the colour on this one, but at least it works.

Fear my 14″ Sony Trinitron TV!

I checked my saved games. They’re all there. God bless Sony engineering. Although it doesn’t really matter since I intend on restarting the game anyway, it’s nice that I still have access to the extras I unlocked through Hikari’s path.

Hikari-chan~~~

Don’t you just love a story with a happy ending? ;_;

Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure I have the EVS append discs for TokiMemo 2 somewhere on my harddisks…