TheLeong.com

So I’ve been looking at and playing with Flickr lately, and it seems to be a really awesome system for storing, looking at, commenting on, and sharing photos. I’m considering using it as the photo system for this site, in part because it will be easier, in part because then more people can see it, in part because then you’ll be able to comment on individual pictures, and primarily because the way I do it now, editing HTML code, is a huge pain in the butt.

I think I’ll be able to make my Pictures pages look pretty close to what I have now, with Flickr providing the strip of images on the column of thumbnails. I could even be nice and copy the descriptions into a second column so it will look almost identical to the current setup. The big difference will be, when you click on a thumbnail, instead of opening a window with the larger image, you will be taken to a Flickr page. What do you guys think of this (all 1 of you reading this)? Does anyone think I should keep doing it the way I do it, or should I go with the fad and use Flickr? I’ll probably do a Flickr-based pictures page sometime this week. You guys can tell me what you think then.

Oh ya, if you’re on Flickr, my user ID is SkullCorp. Add me as a friend if you have a Flickr account.

Ah, Namja Town. Quite possibly one of the happiest places in Japan, and for sure one of the tastiest. For those who don’t know what it is, pretty much this place is the Golden Saucer from Final Fantasy VII, only instead of fighting in the Stadium, you eat gyoza (pot stickers). Tons of different variaties of delicious gyoza. There is also Ice Cream City, and a Cream Puff Town, and rides, etc. It’s like a food amusement park. Amazing indeed.

Going along with my recent abundance of free time (ahem), I’ve started exploring Mixi quite a bit. It’s like a Japanese Facebook or MySpace. The groups/communities on there are really kind of cool, because they’re more like mini message boards. Going along with the whole “community” title, you also have event calendars and other things in each group that you can use to communicate with the other members. Of course I joined the Namja Town group, and saw an event posting earlier today for private event at Namja Town, on Sunday at 4PM. Japan time-wise, this is already going on as I type this. At the Sokkuri Sweets Museum, they have a 3.5 LITER GIANT PURIN! Holy crap. Japanese purin is pretty much the exact same as flan, but 3.5 liters of it?? Absolutely amazing. Apparently they’ve done this in the past before, but I don’t think it’s available all the time (these pictures are from past events). It costs about 6000 yen (about $60 USD), and you’re supposed to split it with at least 6 people, so you’ll pay less than 10 bucks to stuff yourself with pudding. Who’s up for the challenge?

Special thanks to Air-Wind-san, who let me use his pictures.


Links:
Namja Town official site
Mixi site (if you know Japanese)

This post won’t be as long as my E3 one, but it will probably still be pretty long. Also note that I spent over an hour writing this, but then Firefox decided to crash on me (does that even happen?) so I lost the whole thing. This second version will either be better and more concise, since I’ve already done it once, or worse because I am tired and lazy. We all got together this past weekend for the second A-Team reunion. It was an awesome time; better even than Halloween I think. Bryan lives in Chicago, Ari was able to shuffle his flight back to LA from school, and Seth Brian and Nick had interviews at AEON on Thursday. So everything kind of worked out and we got to all meet up and be awesome.

I drove up on Wednesday afternoon with Nick and Brian. Arrived later than planned (as Ari predicted), and we played Cube for the night. Good times. The next day, Ari and I went to go meet up at Brian’s hotel downtown, where he and Nick stayed so they could be close to AEON. Seth and Mikey got in early that morning from their Amtrak ride. Me, Ari and Mikey went to lunch with Bryan while the other 3 got ready for their interviews. We got some Giordano’s Chicago pizza, and there was a typhoon so Bryan had to take a 2 hour lunch break. Oops! Anyways, after that me Ari and Mikey went to explore downtown Chicago a bit, since we had an afternoon to kill. We first stopped at the giant bean, which is massive and shiny, as you can see in our reflections here. After that, we went to some tourist information building to get out of the rain, and some overenthusiastic guide there was telling us about some of the buildings and stuff downtown. According to him, almost everything we asked us about “incidentally, is the largest ___ in the world,” which I didn’t really believe but it was funny anyway. Eventually decided to go back to the AEON building to meet up with the other guys, but this turned into a 2 or 3 hour walk around all of Chicago, since we kept getting lost. We passed about 30 each of Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, and McDonalds as well. Eventually, met up with everyone, and went to Shin Jung for yakiniku paradise. Good (no, amazing) as always. Mikey re-established Chicken County, which was later invaded by calbi town, haha. I ate so much there that I was pretty much “drunk on meat” and was tired as heck. As soon as we got back, after parking about 15 minutes away (residential parking in Chicago sucks, more info later), I passed out for the night.

Friday was a pretty lazy day. Ate at this Mexican place near Bryan’s, where the cook looked like Horatio Sanz and had some mysterious stains all over his apron. It was a good burrito though. Drove downtown to pick up Brian and get everyone’s stuff out of the hotel, which took a long time since traffic and our directions were pretty bad. After that mini-adventure, we went to the Tower Records on Clark for an autograph session with some of the Play! Symphony people. Watched Angela Aki perform her theme song for Final Fantasy XII, and got her signature along with Nobuo Uematsu’s (the guy that composes all the FF music). Arnie Roth, the conductor for the symphony, was also there, but I didn’t know it was him since he wasn’t really signing stuff, and I just thought he was a translator. I don’t think I’m the only one who made this mistake. Mikey had Uematsu sign his DS, and I heard Uematsu say “もったいないですな,” which means “what a waste/shame,” trying to imply that he wasn’t worthy of signing the DS (a way of humbling himself). It was cool to hear him say that. Also Angela Aki happens to be the daughter of the president of AEON, so that’s a kind of cool connection.

The next day was pretty much our nerdiest day. We woke up and got breakfast at this place near Bryan’s, some diner, then on the way back went to an old arcade that was kind of dark and outdated, but still cool because they had some decent games including Time Crisis 2, which is always fun in the arcades. Went back to Bryan’s and did our routine of playing Gamecube and watching MXC on Tivo while taking turns showering and using the bathroom, which with 7 people usually took about 2 hours. We drove out to Mitsuwa, the Japanese shopping center, to do some grocery shopping and for dinner. Had miso ramen for the first time in almost a year; it was great. There were a lot of nerds and otaku at Mitsuwa, as predicted, including this chick in a green shirt that we couldn’t tell if she was pregnant or just fat. Either way she was butt. I got a picture on my cell phone, which became the “Yuji scary face” trick picture for the rest of the trip. After Mitsuwa, we went to the Rosemont Theatre to see the Play! Symphony, which was kind of a last minute plan but definitely worth it. It was an orchestra performing video game music from Final Fantasy, Mario, Zelda, and a lot of other sweet games. It was a really good performance, with the only negative being the idiots in the audience, almost all otaku and other social ingrates who don’t know how to act in public let alone in a symphony hall. I mean, it’s video game music, but still you have to have some respect for the performers. People would yell things out, laugh, and etc at inappropriate moments. I felt bad for the conductor and orchestra. Koji Kondo (wiki article here), the guy behind video game music such as the Mario theme everyone knows and Donkey Kong, etc did a solo piano performance of the New Super Mario Bros theme, which was awesome. He was rocking out on the piano, and idiots in the audience were laughing and stuff. I really wanted to go kick some people in the face, but I just sat back and enjoyed the music. I could have done without the PC game music (the nerds loved it though), but overall a great concert, no matter how nerdy.

Sunday we woke up and did our normal routine of taking turns showering and getting cleaned up and playing Cube while waiting for people . We headed out to see X-Men 3, which was pretty good. A little cheesy at times, but for a comic book movie it was good. Worth watching for sure. I won’t spoil anything, but definitely stick around after the credits for the secret scene if you go see it. Arclight (I think that’s who it was) had the worst haircut ever; short and greased up but with a thick curly-Q on the front. Me and Seth kept cracking up everytime she showed up. At least I think it was a chick; couldn’t really tell. After the movie, we went to get some more Chicago pizza, then walked around Northwestern campus. It’s a lot different from IU, but still pretty nice. We saw a sign for a Bunkasai, but it was already closing up. Walked around for a few hours, including around their lake, where we saw some old guy on a tandem bicyle playing old showtunes or something on a book box. Come on! Went back to Bryan’s to hang out and reminisce about the old days in Japan, going through the old stories, making fun of the scabes, and watching the Spider-Man video. Good times. After Bryan shotgunned 3 beers, it was time to go out and get some late night food. Mikey was in top form, kicking stuff, running off, tachi shonben-ing, etc. We passed on the McDonalds walk-up widow line and went to IHOP, which was close but just so happened to be in the gay district, meaning that the clientele at 2AM there was very interesting to say the least. I didn’t know that anyone actually rocked the leather pants and leather vest with no shirt, but I saw it there. Brian, who was wearing a Parks Department shirt or something, got hit on by some old guy, which was hilarious because the conversation went as follows.

Guy: So, do you work at the parks department?
Bryan: Not anymore.
Guy: Oh, so you used to?
Bryan: No.

That was hilarious. I don’t know if Bryan was even coherent enough to know what he was saying, but it was genius. After that, the old guy went back to his table and high-fived the guy he was sitting with.

The next day, Monday, was Memorial Day, so Shin Jung was closed. Bryan found another yakiniku buffet place, but they wanted to charge dinner prices, so we all decided against it because we were all very poor by now. Grilled burgers and hot dogs at Bryan’s place, which was good times. A fine wrap up to the A-Team Reunion. Oh but the adventures don’t stop there. The previous night, I had parked next to Wrigley Field, which is a few blocks from Bryan’s apartment. The sign said no parking on game days, and I figured there wouldn’t be a game the next day, and there were other cars on the street at like 11 when I got there. After the BBQ, I’m walking down the street and see all the commotion and crowds at Wrigley. Yeah. There was a game alright. I got that sinking feeling in my stomach as I got to the street, and I knew what was coming. My car, along with any other cars that might have been there, were gone; towed. Bryan gave us a ride to the impound that afternoon and after waiting in line for a long time, I finally got things straighted out. Since the car is registered to my parents, I couldn’t pay with credit card and had to go get cash. There were some girls there that were having the same type of problems, so we all went together to get cash at an ATM a few blocks away. On the way, we passed by a mini-gang of like 9 15 year olds, one of whom was carrying half a bottle of brandy or something (hobo brand, I’m sure). Not soon after we passed them, they threw a bottle of OJ and booze at us! It didn’t really get or splash us that bad, but it was kind of funny. I’m not sure if it was because they heard me mention the brandy to Bryan, because I was Chinese, because everyone else I was with was white, or because there was Cubs and Cardinals and college clothing among the group, but whatever. Wasn’t worth trying to do or say anything.

After waiting in lines for another 30 minutes or so and paying my hefty $160 fee, I got my car back and we were home free. I wasn’t that upset, since it was pretty much my fault for parking there, but you still have to complain when stuff like that happens. I figure it’s just karma for the 0 tickets I’ve gotten at IU, even when I part in ridiculous spots like the fire lane at the Union. Apparently there was a curse on all of us, because Ari’s flight got delayed to the next day for weather related problems (there was line of 100 planes waiting to leave O’Hare), and Mikey and Seth’s train was delayed at least a few hours. Chicago just didn’t want us to leave. Got back home to Bloomington a little after 1AM.

It was a great weekend overall, got to see everyone and live up the good times from Japan. I think most if not all of us will be back in Japan to work this coming fall, so the next reunion just might be at Y’s, where we will reclaim the holy ground. 夜露死苦！　機械犬！　ワンワン！

I feel like I should give E3 a proper blog entry, before I start writing about summer up to now (where my life pretty much consists of sleeping, watching TV, and playing video games). I’ll also be putting up some photo galleries soon, but for now I’ll get artistic and add some pictures to this entry because otherwise it will be 20 pages of solid text. Note that this entry is waaaaay too long to be read, so I broke it up by day. I would recommend reading it one part at a time. I wish I would have written it in 3 separate parts.

We arrived in LA on Tuesday, in the early evening. We stayed with Pat’s aunt and uncle, who lived in Orange County. The first thing we did after getting unpacked and playing his little cousin in Mario Kart was go out and try to find some kind of subsistence. Of course, there are many treasures available in Los Angeles that you can’t get in Bloomington, so I was determined to go to one of those. Enter Jack in the Box, home of the best $1 menu ever. We ordered a bunch of food through the drive through and ate in the parking lot, since the dining room was already closed and we were starving. We came back and tried figuring out how the heck we were going to get to the Los Angeles Convention Center, and ended up deciding on the train system. However, the train station was about 20 miles away, and Pat’s aunt would have to drive us there before going to work. This equated to a 5AM wake up call on Wednesday morning, to ensure we would get to E3 in time to pick up our press badges, and then get “early media access” to the show floor from 9-11AM, before they opened the doors to the general attendees. Note that while E3 is a trade show, there were all kinds of fanboys, nerds, and other riff-raff there anyway. While many of them probably do work in industry, I get the impression that a lot of people, like us, found a way to get in without really being part of the industry.

After riding the train for 40 minutes to Pico station and getting our media badges, we listened to a speech for press (actually pretty interesting), then picked up our free breakfasts in fancy white cardboard lunch boxes. Bagels, yogurt, assorted fruit, and some kind of pastry. Not bad. We ate and then went to the show floor. Although before actually entering the show, there were a lot of big booths and setups outside and in the corridors, the actual show floor was beyond belief. We started in West Hall, which was the smaller of the 2 main ones, and it was still massive. This hall had the PS3 booth and the Nintendo/Wii booth, which were obviously big draws. I played a Gundam game on PS3, which looked amazing but played kind of bad, which doesn’t surprise me for a Gundam game. I gave up hope on playing Wii, since the line had already wrapped all the way around the booth, and this was during early media access. According to newspapers and other articles throughout the week, Wii had the longest lines, sometimes making people wait 4 hours to get into the area to see and play the Wii. I’ll talk more about it later, since I actually did get to play it. Although the Wii area was way too crowded, I did get to play the DS Lite, which is really awesome and lot more compact than the original. Also awesome was the New Super Mario Bros for it, which was a lot like the original style Mario games on NES, only with superb graphics and also some new features. I opened a ? block, and a mushroom came out. Only it wasn’t a regular sized mushroom, it was GIANT (taller than Super Mario). So I touched it, and Mario gets super size! In this giant mode, you can pretty much just run through everything and crush it, and even knock over the pipes and other barriers. Pretty cool concept. That and Brain Age really make me want to buy a DS, although I know I shouldn’t.

After exploring West Hall for about an hour, we went over the South Hall, which was bigger I think. By this time, we were already starting to amass some schwag, such as Playstation neck lanyards, phone straps, free magazines and players guides, etc. Also started taking pictures with the booth girls, which is way nerdy but still fun. Brian wasn’t feeling so great (we suspect minor food poisoning from either Jack in the Box or from the BBQ lunch we had at E3 outside), but other than that things were going pretty well. In the first day of the show, we got to pretty much at least skim everything in West and South Halls (the two main ones), and it was everything you would imagine it to be. After the show was pretty much done for the day, we started looking for the free shuttle to the Intellivision party (it was free, what the heck), which turned into an adventure in itself. Spent at least 30 minutes looking for the actual shuttle, maybe another 30 waiting for it once we found the girls who were leading people to it (actually on our shuttle, it was just the 4 of us, 1 guy who worked for it, and the 3 booth/advertising girls). Once getting on the bus, it was about 45 minutes of riding on the bus and making small talk until we actually got to the party. Apparently it was farther away than we thought, plus the traffic didn’t help. But it was a free party, we were there for a few hours, played video games, ate and drank, and then took shuttle, train, and car back home. We were beat, being awake from approximately 5AM to 1AM. First day of E3 a success!

The second day was a lot more forgiving in the morning. We slept in until around like 10AM, then made our way to the Convention Center. On the way there, while riding the train, there was some idiot kid on a cell phone pretty much being a pain in the butt, and talking to the police department. Apparently he had gotten into a car accident and he didn’t like how it was handled, so he thought he would try to be a badass and complain. Yeah pal, good way to get the cops to pay attention and want to help you. Anyway, he’s the type of guy who talks on his cell phone and looks at people around him, trying to get some kind of sympathy or something to think “man this guy is right, I can’t believe he has to deal with all this trouble,” then goes ahead and tries to start conversation. I was smart enough to avoid this, and pulled an Ari by acting like I was asleep. This left Brian, Kyle, and Pat to try and talk to him, or at least humor him. Brian especially was doing it well, saying stuff like “oh man, you’re right.” Hahaha. Anyway, after that whole fiasco, the idiot got off the train at Pico with us, but luckily went the other direction. We started off in Kentia Hall, which was the last of the three halls with E3 show stuff. Pretty much, this is the oddball hall, with all kinds of smaller developers, foreign developers (that no one cares about), and PC stuff. The only thing in Kentia that was good was the RedOctane/Guitar Hero booth.

We moved back up to South Hall, and watched the Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer in it’s entirety. Absolutely amazing; I love Metal Gear. We visited the Bandai-Namco booth, which had PacMan and The Prince from Katamari Damacy there. I think PacMan was a midget, because he was really short. Regardless, the main point here was that Kyle was taking a picture with PacMan, and then got hit in the nuts! He thinks he was maybe leaning too hard on him or something, but he got punched in the balls by PacMan, then had The Prince come over and give him an “X” sign with his hands. We thought we’d have to throw down and beat up these 2 mascots to save Kyle. Luckily, it didn’t come down to that. Back in West Hall, Paris Hilton was apparently there to talk about some stupid game she has coming out. And by that, I mean they put her name on a rip-off of Bejeweled and tried to sell it. Not only did she create a huge fire hazard in the
hall because of all the people trying to see her, but apparently she didn’t even know the name of the game she was promoting (Pat’s aunt heard that on the news that night). Anyway, we didn’t get to see her, but Pat got a shot of the side of her head with a video camera. Speaking of celebrities, Adam West was there signing autographs at the Family Guy booth. They weren’t even photos of himself, they were black and white headshots of the animated Mayor from Family Guy, who Adam West does the voice for. Weird. Anyway, he is waaaaaay older than you would imagine, and really is as insane as the character on Family Guy. I guess he lost it all with age. But we were able to get him to do an IUSTV promo, so that was cool.

After that, we were bored and went to the G4TechTV area, where they were doing live broadcasts all week, covering E3. We saw Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb (who is really hot), and I think we might have been in the background for a few seconds when they were coming back from some commercial breaks. But that was not the best part at all. There was a heavyset guy in a blue T-shirt in the audience area that we were in that Kyle (I think) pointed out and said “Donkey Lips.” You know, from Nickelodeon’s Salute Your Shorts back when we were kids? Pat scoped out his name badge, and it said Michael Bower. For some reason, I knew this bit of trivia, and knew it was really the guy who played Donkey Lips! I asked him if that was him, he said yes, I said awesome, and we talked for a bit. We interviewed him and got a promo for IUSTV even. He’s a pretty cool guy, no longer a celebrity really, but pretty down to earth. We even got his business cards, and cell phone number although we never called him.

After that, we went back into the show and played around for a bit more. Played some PS3, Pat played some new karaoke game called SingStar, which was actually kind of cool looking, and we headed back around 5 or 6PM. Ate tacos at some Mexican restaurant near Pat’s uncle’s, and it was delicious (some kind of green salsa that was really good). That was about it for the day. I would make this entry longer, but I am lazy and this post is already way too long. I still have another day to write about even!

Last day of E3! We got there around 11AM, and went straight for the Nintendo booth. Kyle and I were determined to see the Wii before we left. Unfortunately, the line to get in was not any shorter than before, and we didn’t want to kill 4 hours waiting in line. I did some talking to the PR guys, and told them that as press (haha), we needed to get in sooner. It took a few times of going up, talking, waiting a half hour for the guy to try to ask his boss, but finally we were able to get in. They only let 2 of us in, so Kyle and I went in while Brian and Pat went to check out the Lucas Arts art gallery. Before we go into detail about the Wii paradise, I also need to mention that I saw Shigeru Miyamoto in person at the Nintendo booth area when I was trying to schmooze the guy at the desk. He was talking to some crazy old Japanese guy in multicolored leopard print clothing, and I overheard one of the Nintendo guys saying that he was a high up on Pokemon or something. Weird. We also got to see Steven Spielberg (were within 3 feet of him), when he was going to and coming out of his meeting with Miyamoto. Who knows what they met about, but at least I can say I saw Miyamoto in person.

We got VIP (I guess) access to the Wii booth. At the very least, we didn’t have to wait in line, the guy took us straight in. Apparently everyone who was waiting for 4 hours in line didn’t do so in vain; the area inside was amazing. First, you walk in and there is a rotating stage with people playing Wii games, like Metroid and some orchestra conducting game. Around that stage, the walls were lined with flat panel TVs (I need to clarify: EVERY TV in the Nintendo booth was flat panel LCD) playing the trailer for Smash Brothers Brawl, which is going to be absolutely amazing. New characters include Wario, Zero Suit Samus, Metaknight, Kid Icarus, and even Solid Snake! Oh man. The area inside was packed, and there were lines inside to actually play the games. First though, there was a nice display case with the actual hardware. The system itself is a lot smaller than you would think; it’s nice and compact and just looks futuristic. The controllers, which everyone was freaked out about when they were first unveiled months ago, are actually a lot more versatile than you would think. There are a few different “configurations,” with a remote control, a device with a control stick, a more standard controller (like a SNES one with analog sticks), and even a thing to turn the remote control into a Zapper. Awesome.

I got to watch all sorts of games, including the Wii Sports tennis and baseball, Legend of Zelda (probably the best looking game at E3), Metroid, and some shitty ports of Dragonball Z and One Piece games. I played Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, and Super Mario Galaxy. Both were totally sweet, and I really want to buy a Wii now. Wario Ware was cool because it showed all the different ways you can use the Wii remote control (which is wireless). It’s super light, and it a lot more accurate than you would think. It puts the Eye Toy on PS2 to shame about a million times over. Mario Galaxy took a little bit of getting used to, because you’re using “Nunchaku Style,” which is the remote control connected to the control stick device, but the game was really fun and fairly easy to play. I really think Nintendo has a chance at becoming number 1 again in the video game industry. I thought before that maybe the Wii would just be a stupid gimmick, and that people wouldn’t want to have to move and stuff to play games. Just a few minutes playing with the system, and I have nothing but positive things to say about this little system. It’s fun to play. The games are fun, of course, but actually using the controller and stuff was fun too. Add that to the cheap pricetag – under $200 maybe – and when compared to PS3 and the X-Box 360 (which I don’t think has a chance in the long run, and especially in Japan), and Nintendo is probably feeling pretty good about themsevles.

OK I’m way too tired to write anymore. That was about it anyway. After playing the Wii, we headed back to run through South Hall again, then met up with Brian and Pat and headed out back home. We had some extra time that night, so we had In and Out Buger for dinner, then went to the beach/pier area of town. Met up with Mike Savitt of IUSTV Rate Your Plate fame, hung out with Pat’s Uncle Randy, and called it a night. Got a few hours of sleep, packed, and went back to Indiana. And now I leave you with a random collage of E3 pictures.

To make up for the length of my last post, here is a picture from an expedition tonight to Wal-Mart. Here you see Nick with a wild specimen of the WORST MULLET IN HISTORY. Why would anyone, redneck or not, ever even consider doing this to their child?

I don’t usually just steal stuff from other blogs, but I really think I should share this with everyone. I found it on the Screenhead blog just a few minutes ago. Here’s the direct link to the entry that I got this from. I think they got the poster originally from here.

Anyway, it’s a sweet Arrested Development poster in Star Wars fashion. Click on the thumb below to get the full sized HUGE one. Who’s going to be the first one to print it out on the plotter?

Note: Full-sized image removed at request of the artist.