Wet camping in Chiba

Last week-end I went camping with 3 other friends. We wanted to go to Yamanashi, but didn't reserve in time so we got a pretty limited camp ground choice and decided to go to Kujukurihama Seaside Dai 2 camping grounds. The place was so so, close to the sea, but the beach there was pretty disgusting.

One of my friend was the same one that came to my last 2 camps, the 2 others were new to camping in Japan, one of them being completely new to camping at all.

Even though the location wasn't the best, we still had a lot of fun. we set our tents in an half circle around the tarp, and the fire being on the other side. this time we actually tough about the wind direction too so we didn't get smoked all day and night haha.

I sold my old tent to one of my friend (the grey one) since when my previous roommate left japan he sold me his bigger tent (yellow/brown one) which is big enough for 2 people.

We spent a lot of the day just cooking food on my newly purchased fire pit/grill. It was delicious and was a lot of fun.

We had so much fun talking and eating that we didn't actually really have time to play any kind of games or watch anime.

Unfortunately, while it was very small rain up to when we went to sleep, the night had a very strong rain. So when we woke up we just packed and left immediately.
There was a lot of bugs on that camping site too.
It was still an overall pretty nice trip, but we'll probably wait till after the summer is over till we go again to avoid the heat, humidity and the bugs.

No full album this time due to problems with getting permission for the pictures.
Some of the pictures in this post were shot by https://twitter.com/anti_friday

Shoji Kawamori Expo

Last Sunday I went to the Shoji Kawamori Expo at the Aamo Gallery, inside Tokyo Dome City. Shoji Kawamori is the designer/producer of the Macross series, he also participated in the designing and/or production of a lot of other works including Vision of Escaflowne, Eureka 7, Genesis of Aquarion and a lot more. He's also the Mech designer of the Armored Core video game series, and participated in a lot of other games too.
Another very interesting thing he did is that he designed the AIBO dog robot that Sony released in 2001.

I am a big Macross fan, and while I'm not in Macross for the robots(not an actual Mech fan) I was still very interested in this expo.

 The Expo was probably one of the best I've seen. It was seriously really cool. There was a lot of stuff, and while I could only take pictures in the first room displaying some big scale items he designed, the whole thing was great.

The Expo had an option to enter the K-40 theater, we had no idea what it was, but we decided to take it, it was 400 yen more than the entry fee of 2000 yen. (audio guides are also available for 800yen more).
The theater thing ended up being pretty cool, it was a dome shaped projection above us (kinda lake a planetarium) with characters from a lot of his series woprking together to battle some evil spatial monsters. It was pretty short, but still great. Might not say it was worth 40 yen, but still ... nice.

After that, the second room had big displays of things he created. Giant Mechs, Cardboard, Punch made of model boxes, all pretty cool.

There was also a wall with a bunch of fighter toys from the past years, I noticed that a toy I had when I was a kid was actually a Valkyrie toy, and not, as I tough, a transformer toy lol.

There was also a display of some figures created for the shows he produced. I think most Macross figures don't actually look good personally, so wasn't interested in this too much.

You could take a picture of yourself shooting missiles.

And there was a cool display demo of one of the fighter's toy doing it's transformation. I tried to take a video, but someone moved in and I couldn't get a good one.

After the display part, we couldn't take pictures anymore but there was a bunch of tunnel like corridors filled with design sheets, notes and storyboard that he created.  It was very nice to see, starting from the first Macross, covering all the entries in the series, and also going over all the rest of his works, including the work on Nissan's car and the SONY AIBO robot dog. There was so many design sheets they went up to the roof in an arc, it was great.

Overall the Expo was great, and it's still going on for a few days, so if you're in Tokyo now you should definitely go see it, it's up until 2019/06/23.

Full album: On Google Photo because I can't find anything else now

As it Happened: Chinese New Year 2015

First post in a new series of post "As it Happened". These post will be posts about old things that happened in japan, and that I didn't talk about on this blog, but that I want to talk about, or at least I want to remember them.

2015/02/17:

My favorite ramen shop in shimokitazawa employed a couple of chinese students, and they decided to make a chinese new year party inside the shop on the day it's closed. I was invited because I was friend with the manager and some of the part timers there. It was my first time really celebrating the chinese new year. All the food was cooked by the students, and I think most of it was by my friend.

As you can see on this picture, there was a lot of food involved. If I remember well, a lot of it was gyoza (I love gyoza so I was very pleased).

The strangest one was a gyoza cooked with cola. I love cola so I was really looking forward to trying it, but if my memory is good, it wasn't actually that good lol.

That's all for this post. Hopefully this new series will get me to actually start posting more frequently again.

Why is it so hard to write here?

I want to tell you about things that happen here, but most importantly I want to post here to remember. When I go back in my blog, I'm filled with the memories that came with the events that each of these post were prompted from. It's really great, so why have I stopped doing it?

Normality? Everything I do now in Japan feels just like normal life, like everyday things that aren't worth talking about. I know they aren't but it's hard to actually get myself to write about it anyway. I have a lot of things I could talk about, but 0 drive to do so, so here I am again making a blog post about making blog posts.... I'll promise again that I'll write more, and I'll break that promise again.

Source of post image: http://mito-nagishiro.tumblr.com/post/170555593750

G+ comments death

I went back and had to import manually all G+ comments to Disqus, that a fucking pain in the ass... so all comment between this post and before the time G+ comments were a thing (don't remember when exactly) are manually imported comment. Some formatting might have been lost, and all tags and avatars have also been lost.

Fuck Google.

Also I'll be moving from blogger at some point in the near future, because I don't trust google to keep blogger alive much longer. 2 year max.

At that time though, importing the comments from disqus to the new blog will be easy, since I can just remap disqus urls,  so no comments will be lost.

While I'm at it, I say this all the time and never do it, but I plan on posting a bit more from now. I'll go for a minimum of 1 post a month, and more if possible. Look forward to it please!

semi-related picture:

G+ Comments

WTF happens to G+ hosted comments for blogger post when G+ closes down? I can't find any info about it...

5 years of drawing!

Once again this year this pôst comes late... 21 days late this time! As of September 6th, I have been drawing for 5 years...

This year has been pretty bad. I personally don't really see any real improvement. I believe I still haven't topped my best drawing from last year. I've been in an Art Block for most of the year and my doujin isn't progressing... I've still applied to comiket anyway, didn't win the lottery this summer, and waiting for the answer for winter, which should come at the start of November if I remember well.

Really I don't have much to say this year, since nothing really moved...

Here's this year in drawing:

As I did the previous years, I did a Poll to ask you which is your favorite illustration among the illustrations I did last year, please vote on it and leave a comment explaining your choice so I can use it to improve!
you can vote on your favorite drawing of the year here.