What better way to end this year and decade but with a hodgepodge post consisting of three completely unrelated topics?
Year: 2009
Umineko no Naku Koro ni – Final Thoughts
It’s the end of another anime season, and one of the series that concluded this season is Umineko no Naku Koro ni. It’s a good thing that I gave up on writing organized, paragraph-form reviews, since I have trouble organizing my thoughts for Umineko. I’m not really what to say about Umineko other than that it didn’t suck nor did it impress. Anyways, here is my random list of thoughts about the series.
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Nintendo Wii and Wii Sports – Two Month Impressions
Having not bought a video game console for more than seven years, my family finally caved in and bought a Nintendo Wii two months ago. Originally it was my mother who wanted the Wii because of the good things she heard about it, but as expected I ended up being the one who uses it the most. We only have the console and Wii Sports for now, and here are my impressions after playing for two months.
TJ Online Relaunched
I’m on winter vacation right now, and I don’t plan on going anywhere. Therefore, there’s no better things for me to do but to pay some attention to my oft neglected personal website. Over the last four or five days, I have been busy converting TJ Online from Xoops to WordPress, and the website you now see is the finished product of that effort. Xoops is a nice piece of software, but over the years I’ve discovered that it’s a bit overkill for a personal website. I chose to convert to WordPress because… everyone else is running WordPress. It is the most popular blogging platform out there for a reason, so it seems like a good choice. Converting my site into a blog also will help motivate me to write more… or at least I hope ;) . I’ve also chosen to convert this site because it gets very little visitors, so screwing around with this site won’t really affect my total traffic by much.
Since WordPress didn’t have an automatic import tool for Xoops and that I wanted to keep as much of my old data as possible, I manually moved every article, download, and gallery picture from Xoops to WordPress. By manual, I meant manually copying and pasting posts, uploading photos, and modifying the database via PHPMyAdmin. It’s boring and time consuming work, but I am used to doing this stuff. Compared to moving my data, installing WordPress and plug-ins was pretty easy. I really like the fact that WordPress has integrated a plug-in search into the admin panel. It makes finding and installing plug-ins so convenient. Compared to Xoops, WordPress is simpler. There are definitely some areas where Xoops is stronger, but thus far I have found that WordPress is meeting my needs for this website.
Anyways, this is more or less the completed website. I might add some small things here or there, but the look (modified from the understated but elegant “Piano Black” theme from mono-lab) is here to stay. Since the theme itself is primarily black and shades of gray, I will try to use bright backgrounds to liven up this place, and as a start I’ve employed a photo of some of the fuchsia in my family’s backyard. Anyways, hopefully all the changes will make this site more user friendly and attract more visitors.
Lastly, I hope everyone will have a happy holidays.
Valkyria Chronicles – Final Thoughts
Here is my second end-of-series final-thoughts for the summer 2009 season, and this time it’s for Valkyria Chronicles. Unlike my last final thought post for Umi Monogatari, I’m just going to write this in point form to save time. I think I spend more time ordering up my points and writing up transitions than coming up with the points.
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Umi Monogatari – Final Thoughts
Up until now, I usually write a full review for any anime series that I’ve followed but didn’t blog episodically, but I don’t really have the time these days because of school. It’s hard (and probably fruitless) work covering the series that I’ve already committed to. I should probably be studying instead of writing this, but alas… Anyways, from now on I’m just going to write down random thoughts for these end-of-series “reviews”. So here are my final thoughts on Umi Monogatari, a 12 episode anime based off a line of pachinko machines.
New Camera: Canon Powershot SD890IS
My family recently bought a new point-and-shoot digital camera and I decided to write a little article about it. We decided upon a Canon Powershot SD890IS which met all the requirements my family had within the right price range. This is not a review of the camera since I don’t know enough about photography or camera technologies. Rather, this is just an article for me to show off a brand new gadget and write some initial impressions from the viewpoint on an uneducated consumer, so here goes nothing.
Review: Record of Lodoss War (OVA)
I usually don’t watch oldies, but the Record of Lodoss War OVA was a show that I had been wanting to finish for more than a decade. I probably saw the first one or two episodes of Lodoss back in 1995 when it aired on a Hong Kong TV station, and about a year later I watched that last two episodes after borrowing the video from the library. I must have been impressed or else I wouldn’t have remembered the show for so long, although after watching the video the show slipped off my mind until about two months ago when I discovered the show’s English name by chance. Although I’ve titled this post as a review, it’s more like a list of random thoughts on the show. While I was intrigued by Lodoss 14 years ago, I can’t say I’m too impressed after watching all 13 episodes.
TonyJiang.com: Third Year on the Net
It’s been three years since the inception of the tonyjiang.com domain. In the last year not too much has been happening to my websites as my efforts were focused on work, school, and something else. This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to write about though, so keep on reading for the inside scoop into tonyjiang.com’s third year on the world wide web.
Review: Afro Samurai: Resurrection
Afro Samurai: Resurrection is a sequel movie to Afro Samurai, which was a short, five-episode series made by Gonzo that aired in 2007. The series was notable for its take of the samurai + hip hop style and Hollywood voice talent in the form of Samuel L. Jackson and others. The story didn’t make all that much sense, but it was very well animated and gloriously violent, and that’s probably the main reason why I like the series. Resurrection works along the same lines as the predecessor, but I feel that it wasn’t as good as the series.
