Hi LJ! Long time, no see. I figured I'd share this here, since it's pretty much the bulk of what I accomplished this week. It started as a quick experiment in video editing, which I've never really done before, but I managed to achieve pretty much what I was going for (in spite of Windows Movie Maker's best efforts) and learned a lot in the process.

Warning: Major spoilers for X-Men: First Class, and Matchbox 20 cheese.

Erik/Charles -- Be My Savior from Greenapple2004 on Vimeo.

So I've been dicking around on Tumblr a lot lately, as I indulge in a variety of fandoms simultaneously, and I stumbled across this today, and figured there were people here who would appreciate it.

Oh, Avatar... I'd forgotten how incredibly awesome you are... Toph's the best.

What a bunch of geeks!! I love it! Them talking about themselves is Ivy League Pricelessness, too.



Sing it, gentlemen!

Clip 2:

Apparently South Korea is watching the new BBC Sherlock series through the EXTRA BL-colored glasses. :-) You really have to see these trailers to believe them.



Genius!




I wonder what the Merlin trailers were like?!

Anyway, I was going to post these to Facebook, but I've recently friended a whole bunch of my conservative relatives (plus some of their children, which is the part that concerns me slightly more), so I'm a little hesitant. I'll probably still do it, since my LJ and Facebook don't totally overlap, but I figured at least I could share it here first.

I dug out some old issues of Takuhai/Manga Magazine today (gawd, remember those?) while brainstorming some copy, and was shocked to discover that the first one is from Summer 2005. It seemed like I'd been at the company forever when that came out, but in fact, it was less than a year. Crazy!

I've thought this before, but it's really stunning how a huge portion of what I consider to be central to my experience at TP ("The good ol' days") was in a very, VERY compressed time span. Basically, the first year and a half, maybe two years. Wonderful things continued to happen after that, don't get me wrong (and there were some really, really hard times in those first years too), and I continued to meet awesome people, go cool places, hopefully continued to improve my skills as an editor, and at the end of the day, got paid to read comics, but yeah. A whole heck of a lot happened super fast back then.

Anyway, I'm heading to Tokyo for New Year's (and my very first Comiket!!), and I'm hoping the trip, which promises to be a blissful respite in what has otherwise been a kind of insane year, will provide a solid reboot for 2011.

Good riddance to this stupid stasis!

(Only Kate-senpai will get that title...)

Anyway, I've been totally obsessed with Kuragehime (aka. Princess Jellyfish) lately, and so I was super amused to discover that Kuranosuke apparently goes to my old study-abroad alma mater, Waseda University. :-)

Waseda has a very distinctive bell tower that I spotted right away, but it gets confirmed later in the manga when the cast ends up helping out a Waseda theatrical group. I really want a Waseda Exciters t-shirt now...

Anyway, if you've been wanting more animated romantic comedy about super-nerds and the cross-dressers and 30-year-old virgins who love them:



Clara! (tequila!)

My next door neighbor from when I was growing up passed away last week. He had a profound influence on my life, personally, and indirectly the lives of everyone who ever loved Sesame Street. There were so many wonderful experiences I had as a child because he lived next door, and I always was very much aware of how lucky I was to know someone so smart and kind and idealistic, and who cared so much about making the world a better place. I can only hope to live up to the example that he set. I couldn't have asked for a more wonderful friend and neighbor, and I'm glad I got the chance to tell him so when I was home in August.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/09/education-scholar-gerald-lesser-84/

Can anyone tell me why iTunes spontaneously decides that I have no media files every other time I open it? It's not irreparable, but it's kind of a pain to have to drag everything back in there all the time (and it sucks that I keep losing my playlists).

On a whim, I plugged that last post into the meme:






Great. :-)

Posting the meme the other day was a real reminder how I've abandoned my LJ. I had to go back almost two years to find a post that actually had enough content to copy and paste. It's not that I don't still read LJ, since I do, pretty much every day. But between one thing and another, it's been occasionally tough to find the energy to write anything of real significance, or really anything at all. But I'd like to start doing so again, so here goes!

I got my new passport in the mail today. (It's super patriotic, with lots of quotes and flags and photos of national landmarks and stuff.) This was significant to me for a few reasons--one, my previous passport photo was done right after I graduated high school (literally--I think I was wearing the same outfit that I am wearing in the photos from my graduation party), which was officially ten years ago now. (yikes) I had short hair in my photo, and a big goofy smile. Now I have long hair, and a (hopefully) slightly wiser smile. I'm 10 years older and 20 pounds heavier (I knew I had to get the photo updated, because the immigration staff had to keep looking at me, then back at the photo, then at me, then back at the photo on my last trip), and not someplace I ever expected to be, but all in all, I'm pretty happy with how that decade went. For every thing that went badly, or was an unhappy surprise, there have been many more things that brought me joy, or gave me new opportunities, often from unexpected corners. Certainly, I met all you LJ folks within the last 10 years, and it's been a real pleasure, believe me! :-)

That old passport saw me through six trips to Japan, one to Korea (I should post pictures from that sometime), one to Cuba, Greece and Italy. Where will I travel in the next 10 years? It looked like France was going to be the first stamp on the new passport, but that's on hold at the moment, so Japan or Ireland is the next likely candidate. Fingers crossed!

We're more than halfway through 2010 (how'd that happen?), but hopefully it's not too late to wish everyone a happy next-ten-years. :-)