Anyways, as I said. I’ve not done much lately. We had one school festival in school, where you could buy some food or snacks students made and sold, take part in events etcetra. I didn’t work as crew this time, I just chilled around trying to be social. It was pretty fun. You can see some low-res photos from there and if you know Japanese, read a little about it, on my school’s blog. This post and the one below.

About the title of the post… I’ve started gyming! Since I’m overweight and pretty weak, I decided that I must do something for reals! Can’t go around thinking taking an hour walk every day will solve this… So, I’ve now signed up for several months at the gym, and gyms in Japan are pretty expensive, I’ll pay 8000 JPY (700 SEK today) a month to use the gym unlimited. That itself is also a motivation for me to go there, because I just can’t waste all that money and not go there??!?!?! right?!?!? :D I’m really pumped! I’ve already noticed some results when it comes to blood pressure and strength! :)

And the other part of the title… I’ve started photographing again! This time I’ll also try to make more quality pictures with more thought to the pictures and more advanced post-editing now that I have a good computer and not a stupid netbook – a netbook won’t work super good for editing pictures on a pro:ish level. :P

I have created a 500px account where I will gather the pictures I’m the happiest with. I have already posted some pictures and there are more coming! Remakes of old pictures, and as we speak two new pictures (the two in the bottom; Intersections and Mirroring).

Check out my photography! http://500px.com/Meroigo
Don’t be too hard on me, I’m still quite the beginner I’d say! x)

Haha, what have I done… Starting with photography again like this… I don’t have much spare time now as it is! xD I also have homework I have to get started with….. I must come up with a story, storyboard, concept, PowerPoint, model some 3D models etc for a CG movie project I’m gonna work with for some months… These things must be done by the 28th…. My mind has just been empty and I can’t come up with anything good or makeable!! >_<

ÄH, DET LÖSER SIG as we use to say in Swedish!

Click on the pictures for high resolution!

I have made a list from the artists I enjoyed the least, to the artists I enjoyed the most!

9. Yuki
Some kind of cute j-pop girl… Compare her to the rest of this stage’s lineup (rock, metal, screaming etc) and you’ll be like “WTF”. She is so out of place… She was the one performing before the band I had been waiting 8+ years to see live. I just wanted her and her stupid sugary j-pop off the stage. :(

8. Zebrahead
I don’t remember much more than that these dudes seemed to provoke the audience to be violent, making me not being able to enjoy the show because I was fighting for my life while also dehydrated and dizzy (near 40°C and right in the sunlight), hahaha. I was very close to the stage up to (Neon Trees, Mona) and during this performance and the violence ultimately made the security guards take me out of there. I also dropped my compact camera during this performance. Fail. I heard there occurred serious injuries in that area later, so I’m glad I didn’t stay there.

7. Mona
They did such a boring show. ’nuff said.

6. Red Hot Chili Peppers
They were supposed to be the big awesome final act everybody had waited for, and for many I guess they were. Yeah, sure, I waited for them somewhat too, but to be honest I was waiting more for X Japan during the whole day (that played before RHCP). RHCP didn’t even play any of my favorite songs… This performance was also 30 min longer than all the rest, which made it even worse because I just wanted to go home, hahaha. Haha, this is so controversial! But I’m just writing down how I felt!

5. Panic! at the Disco
If I had been closer to the stage I guess I’d enjoyed them even more so that they’d come to at least the 2nd position! But anyways, I liked them, and they were OK!

4. Maximum the Hormone
So much energy from the band and fun audience made this performance really enjoyable!!

3. Hollywood Undead
Good show, good music, fun to be in front of the scene with everybody all energetic! One of the dudes from the band even crowd surfed on top of me, haha! :D

2. Neon Trees
First band of the day, second most enjoyable! Maybe because I had the most energy to use at this point, and got a spot right in front of the stage, but also because they do great music, and an awesome show!! Just because you’re the opening act of nine bands doesn’t mean you’re worst of them!!! :D

1. X Japan
Of course.
At first I was a bit sorry for not having a front-row spot for this performance, but that was all forgotten when they started the show. I had been waiting for so long, over 8 years, to at last being able to see them live. It was one of my dreams in life that came true. I am so grateful that they decided to re-unite and give me and many other newer fans this opportunity. I LOVE X JAPAN.
The show was so awesome… I sang along in every song… Yoshiki even made the whole crowd being quiet for a moment to think about the victims of 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
I uploaded a video of parts of the show on Facebook (everyone logged in can view it (also, don’t friend request me if I don’t know you, sorry!)). I GOT X’d!!!

And that was Summer Sonic for this year… I don’t know if I’ll go there more times. I was so exhausted on all kinds of levels after this day. I now know that it’ll probably be much more enjoyable overall to just go to a live performance of ONE band I really really like, instead of a festival with mostly bands I barely care about. It was a bit hardcore to have seven bands play before the one I went there to see. It drained much of my energy. But X Japan made it all worth it. :) See ya!

Click on the picture for high resolution!

My first longer project in Maya. It’s the first character I’ve made from reference pictures. Before this I’ve mostly just played around with the tools… I spent most time with the head which was the most fun part. This model was part of the summer homework (everyone in the class got the same character to model). I am really sick of it so i refuse to improve it, even though I know I could! I don’t have time, I must continue with other homework before school starts on September 1st (around 60 hours worth of homework left according to calculations when writing this, haha)!!

First week or two of my summer vacation I screwed up my sleeping schedule, doing nothing during the days and I felt like such a no-life. So I returned to school. Haha. But I have a lot of summer homework, and I’m changing my major in school from Game Graphics & Character design to: CG (Computer Graphics) Creator. A lot of 3D creating and stuff, you know. So, during the days I sit in school practicing manipulating a computer program called Autodesk Maya. I haven’t created something worth showing off here just yet, but be patient. Stuff will show up here sooner or later! :)

Also, in the middle of the night, I got the great idea of taking my bicycle and going downtown to some bar to watch the the ladies world soccer final. Of course I rooted for Japan! And wow, the feeling in that bar… and when Japan actually won… The joy I felt together with the other people in the bar when they won… Except for one American guy hahahaha… He seemed a bit disappointed in me for not rooting on America, because I’m white, as him and his fellow team. But yeah, I will CERTAINLY go to a bar again when Japan plays some kind of important match in something!!

In eight months before I moved to Japan, I lost 30kg by eating 1500kcal/day and walking 1h/day. That was that. But after one year in Japan I realized that 10kg had come back to me like creepy ninja (lol Japanese reference…)! Of course it was because I became less strict with my diet and yeah then that’s what’s gonna happen. Lucky I didn’t get all 30kg back!! :D

I decided yesterday that I will try out the LCHF diet – no – lifestyle. It stands for Low Carbs High Fat and it’s pretty much about that. You try not to eat too much carbohydrates (5% or lower seems to be OK though), and try to eat much fat. Because yeah, it’s the carbohydrates that is the culprit in obesity, not the fat itself. You can google on this stuff so that’s all I’ve gotta say about that now! I will report my upcoming results of this later.

On August 13th I’m going to Summer Sonic! A music festival here in Japan. I’ve probably mentioned this earlier but yeah, I’m hyped. I’m gonna see X Japan and Red Hot Chili Peppers LIVE!!! Two of my favorite bands!!!! WOW!!!! But there will be many other nice artists there too. Too bad I won’t go the 14th when YUI is playing, I really like her… Anyways, if there are certain artists on the 13th that you really recommend me seeing, please tell me in the comments or somewhere else! I’m not that super-into music so most of the ones on that page are unknown to me!

So yeah, that’s the main themes of my summer vacation this year. Studying in school, changing my eating habits and experiencing awesome music at a music festival… :D

If I look it at the bright side, that’s a cool personal touch!!! :D ……. :(

I don’t think the Apple Care covers this, haha. :D

If I find it bothersome using it with this cracked screen I can always use my other iPod Touch which has the same amount of storage, but is from the previous generation, so no awesome high-resolution display or cameras… I got the newer one for free when I bought a computer at the Apple Store, that’s why I have two iPod Touches. Was gonna sell the older one but never came around to do it… :P

I am so happy! Burger King is opening a restaurant in Osaka (PDF press release in Japanese)! It’s the first one in Kansai (where Kyoto, Nara, Osaka etc are located). It may seem ridiculous, but I love hamburgers and I have been so jealous for almost two years since I came to Japan, of the people in Tokyo having several Burger King restaurants. I would eat there multiple times during my visits in Tokyo, to get that Burger King taste.

By the way, McDonald’s tastes much better in Japan than in any other country I have been to. …Burger King also seemed to taste better in Tokyo than in Sweden or Australia… Australia’s Burger King! What a joke!!! It’s not even called “Burger King” to begin with, it’s called “Hungry Jacks“! O_O If I remember correctly, it was cheaper there than at McDonald’s and that felt a bit weird, since it’s usually a bit more expensive at Burger King… But I can understand why. It wasn’t tasting good at all, even McDonald’s tasted better. Such a disappointment… Maybe they weren’t allowed to use the “Burger King” name because it wasn’t tasty enough and could weaken the trademark…? ;P

Two other hamburger restaurant chains in Japan I have experience of are Mos Burger and First Kitchen. Mos Burger tastes nice, but their hamburgers are pretty special and I want more of the American taste when I eat hamburgers so it feels a bit like an own category and I don’t go there very often. Also, about First Kitchen, I stopped going there a long time ago, it’s just disgusting. Worst food ever… You know, Japanese people often use to shorten names in a particular manner, for example, “Pocket Monsters” becomes “Pokemon” and “Toukyou Daigaku” becomes “Toudai”. How could you shorten “Faasuto Kicchin” (First Kitchen)? “Fakkin” (Fuckin’). Haha. (Of course it’s only done by some people sometimes as a joke, people knows what it means).

I have always chosen Burger King over McDonald’s. <3

My current character course is focusing more on the characters you design with the power of your own drawing ability with your hands and brain, and then digitalize it in 3D or Photoshop or something, while the CG course focuses mostly on just the 3D creating process with the computer. While the 3D part of the character course make you able to create low-polygon game graphics, the CG course is more focused on making high-polygon models and animations for movies (Avatar, Toy Story etc), anime, or pre-rendered video sequences in games etc. Actually, it seems easier to get a job with the CG course since it makes you being able to go to all kinds of different workplaces as long as they can make use of your hopefully awesome 3D skills, while the character course is almost exclusively for game related work.

Also, compared to most of the people in my character class, I’m not as talented or have that burning desire with the drawing-aspect of the whole thing. Clicking here and there with software on a computer hours in a row seems to fit me better than drawing stuff on paper with all the hassle that comes with that… Yet another reason I should change, I guess… …but if I change I must work very hard on my summer break that start in some days, to learn much of the stuff I have missed since wasn’t in that course…

Speaking of the future. Lately I’ve been catching up with Futurama by watching the released episodes of season 6. I have found almost every episode completely awesome! :D Such a good show… After 6 seasons Planet Express still manages to deliver… I haven’t seen all episodes of The Simpsons (I don’t want to), but I have seen a lot in the past, but judging from what I’ve seen, Futurama is the obvious winner. I’m so glad they revived it! :)

Future… Future… I’m going to Summer Sonic 2011 in Osaka in the future! :D August 13th (Saturday) this summer to be exact. It’s a music festival with a lot of famous band coming to play (check the list out here)! I’m going there mainly for Red Hot Chili Peppers and my favorite band of all times; X Japan. It was only a distant unrealistic dream that I would one day see them live. When I started listening to them, and a long while after that, they were still split apart and with one of the band members dead, having made a last live namned “The Last Live”, having recorded a song named “The Last Song”, it didn’t seem realistic anywhere that they would make a comback. But they did! …!!! …!!! …!!! …!!! I’m so hyped. Wow. Check out Rusty Nail from The Last Live for some awesome X Japan!

Now I’m going to talk about something not related to my future, but maybe yours! In the future, you should be watching Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai (“Ano Hana” for short). I already mentioned it in a past post, but it’s so awesome that I wanted to mentioned it again. I have watched all the episodes since that previous post so now I’m 100% sure you should be watching this in the future. It’s one of the best anime I have watched in a very long time, no kidding. But I do hope I will be getting even better anime in the future! :D

Today’s post got pretty long… I wonder how posts in the future will look like… Will they be even longer? And fly in the sky among the iClouds?

An assignment in school was to draw two or more hands in one drawing in 3 hours. I was 1,5 hours late (that’s right, I’m not a morning person) so yeah, this was done in 90 minutes and explains why the second hand to the right has most of the flaws (I had to add that extra hand to pass the assignment, but couldn’t work on it as much as it was intended to…).

I like my beautiful hands. I should become a hand model.

Go to deviantART submission

I felt an earthquake today for the first time since I moved to Japan in the fall of 2009. That’s how rare earthquakes are in the area where I live. Yeah, there have been feelable earthquakes in Kyoto/Osaka when I’ve lived here, but I’ve always managed to sleep through them, or being on the move so I didn’t really feel them (like in the case of the March earthquake).

Weirdly enough, my first earthquake experience was in Sweden (!). One morning in 2008 there was an earthquake in the southern part of Sweden. A completely harmless one that you could feel. I had just been up all night in front of the computer chatting with people, played games and so on. So I decide to go to sleep and I lie down in my bed. When I’m between the state of sleeping and being awake, everything starts to shake. The springs in my bed made the feeling even more weird. It was one of the weirdest feeling ever. Me, almost sleeping, thought of bombs, airplane crashes etc, but it took a while before I could think about an earthquake! When I woke up for reals I started considering an earthquake, and was fascinated by it, like everyone else. Earthquake…?! In Sweden?! I later read that these kinds of earthquakes are really rare and strike Sweden maybe once every 100 years or so.

Anyways, today’s earthquake lasted quite some time, 30-60 seconds, I don’t know. It felt really long. It wasn’t strong enough in Osaka to make stuff fall on the ground or make it hard to move or so, just so that I could feel it and see my roof lamp swing back and forth.

During the shaking I felt a bit nervous. What if there was a really big and dangerous earthquake somewhere right now with people dying? When will it stop? …and such things was what was going through my head.

I looked it up on the Internet and it was an Magnitude 5.4 earthquake at the epicenter (that’s pretty strong shaking, and probably scared people, made it hard to move, and threw stuff on the ground).

What I felt today and even stronger shaking has been a common part of the everyday life for the people living in east Japan since March. I feel so much for all the lives lost surrounding the catastrophes that hit Japan then… I can’t do much over here in Osaka except hoping for the best for Japan and all the people still alive, save some electricity and always put some of my exchange I get in stores in the disaster donation box you can see in almost every store since that day in March…

From this moment and onward, I demand all natural disasters to cease their occurring. Thank you very much. …if it only were so easy. :(