By ◆ Juppie on Saturday, August 27, 2011 @ 5:59 PM
I'll start out with a big birthday shout-out to the Vocaloid Lily! There's sure been a lot of Vocaloid birthdays this summer - Gumi, Gakupo, and Miku's is coming up pretty soon.
Not a lot of Vocaloid producers use Lily, which is a shame because I do like her design and voice, but I have read that she's rather difficult to use...Oh well, happy birthday to her, nevertheless, and I hope someday we'll see more songs from her.
On to the main subject: The J-pop Summit Festival in San Francisco's Japantown. I only heard about it recently on Vocaloidism's blog, or else I would have wanted to go the year before last year (probably not last year because I was so freaked out by the homework load in high school that I didn't want to go out of the house for the first few weeks). But at least I had the chance to go this year, so I was really excited about it.
It's really not that big of a festival, not like the size of huge conventions such as Anime Expo down in LA or anything like that. That reminds me, one of my friends did ask if I wanted to go to Sacanime in Sacramento with her...I really want to go, but it is pretty far from here. :\
Mostly I walked around and bought posters at the vendors' tents at the festival, as well as gawking at all the cosplays I saw, which included:
VOCALOIDS
- Many, many Mikus (well, I guess that's to be expected, the most popular Vocaloid ever). Not just her official outfit; there were several different costumes.
- 2 Kaitos
- 1 Meiko
- 2 Lukas
- 2 Gumis (both were of the song Matryoshka)
- 2 Pikos (this really surprised me, I didn't expect a lot of people to know about him)
- At least 3 Rin/Len pairs (a picture of one of the pairs below)
(I do not know either of the cosplayers or the person with them XD)
There were also cosplays of:
- K-On (There were Yui and Mugi wearing the K-On school uniforms, and Mio wearing the outfit from the ending song Listen)
- Macross Frontier (but actually, it was kind of a Vocaloid crossover, since the girl who was being Ranka Lee had a Miku wig on, and the girl who was Sheryl Nome had what looked like a Luka wig)
- Kuroshitsuji (there was a Ciel cosplay, and also a guy with black hair and a butler/waiter type of shirt, I don't know if he was doing Sebastian or not)
And there were a ton of girls dressed up in lolita fashion. I wonder if they got dolled up just for this weekend's festival or if they wear the clothing on a regular basis. o:
I really spent way too much money on buying posters, but I'd say it was worth it. XD I considered buying a t-shirt that said The Socialist on it (because it's featuring the Rin Kagamine song "Socialist Darling") just to try and see if anyone thought I was a communist (well, I did have a classmate last year who insisted he was a communist, so it's quite possible someone would notice and get fired up about it). Also walked around and saw that there were two small malls in Japantown, so I browsed the stores over there and bought a few things. There's two crepe stores there! I definitely have to come back and buy them. And I ought to go check out San Jose's Japantown sometime. I guess I'm just going to make myself even more obsessed with anime and Vocaloids and whatnot, but oh well. It's good to finally have something to look forward during this coming year.
Labels: 2011, cosplay, j-pop summit festival, japan, japanese, japantown, jpop, lily, merchandise, san francisco, vocaloids
By ◆ Juppie on Sunday, March 13, 2011 @ 7:09 PM
I often feel that I am in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some may dispute it, and remind me that I live in the Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the electronic world, not to mention that my neighborhood is one renowned for its school district (and according to my father, who has been to Taiwan, even the people there know that our town is home to excellent schools) and my town is the headquarters of a very famous company. But for me, those are not the things that make a place the place to be.
Only a half-hour's drive away is the city by the bay, the place that Tony Bennett, according to his song's lyrics, left his heart: San Francisco.
Read more »
Labels: beach, california, city, confusion, de young, islands, lost, memories, museum, ocean, pier 39, places, san francisco, seashells, silicon valley, surprise, travel, treasure island, tulips
By ◆ Juppie on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 @ 5:49 PM
In the past, I've always found that having to go the airport, check in your bags, go through security, have your passport checked multiple times, wait for the boarding to start, wait for the plane to take off, get a headache or become uncomfortable from sitting too long on the flight, and be unable to sleep...It was such a hassle. I still wanted to travel, that's for sure. But besides getting to see picturesque bird's-eye views (good photo opportunities!), I thought flying was rather troublesome.
It was especially difficult this time, when I was trying to get home from Barcelona after I had finished cruising. We were supposed to fly to London, and then from London to San Francisco, because there is no direct flight from Barcelona to San Francisco. Apparently air control people in France were on strike, so our flight to London was delayed. (I mean, if there aren't enough people working to make sure the planes don't crash into each other up above, then everything gets backed up) This meant that we would miss the flight from London to SFO. We were told to go to Iberia's ticket sales (Iberia is another airline) so that we could find a way back home. (I believe that Iberia and British Airways are part of some alliance of airlines or something like that.) However, we didn't see Iberia's place right away, so we lined up at the wrong place. Then eventually we left that line to go join the line for Iberia. When we got up there, we were told to go to American Airlines and try to check in our bags and get onto one of their flights instead. However, we were told it was too late and they couldn't accept more passengers. I was very annoyed at the time because I believed that if my parents had listened to me and spent more time searching for Iberia's ticket sales, we might've made it in time to catch a flight home that very day. But after a while my anger dissipated. (I still have to work on anger management.)
The lady who was searching for a flight home for us came up with a solution, although it was a complicated one.
Bsrcelona to Madrid, Spain
Madrid to Miami, Florida
Stay overnight at Miami in a hotel
Miami to San Francisco
I thought we might as well take it since I wanted to see Madrid's airport and Miami's airport. But my mom thought it was too much hassle, and plus we would have to stay in Miami, so my parents asked the lady to find another way to get us back to California. Eventually she discovered something that everyone in my family could accept.
Barcelona to Zurich, Switzerland
Zurich to San Francisco
The only catch is that we would be flying the next day. But we took the opportunity nevertheless and looked for a hotel not far from the airport where we could stay that night.
When the time came to fly home, I was filled with trepidation, thinking that some other catastrophe would befall us and force us to be stranded in Barcelona for a longer time, but we did manage to get on the planes without mishaps. I have decided that I like Swiss International Airlines a lot. They gave us some lovely food, like croissants and milk chocolate, and even ice cream on the long flight from Zurich to SFO. I would have been content to stay on the plane forever. I didn't feel particularly airsick, and it was very enjoyable photographing what we saw (like the snowy mountains in Switzerland - I think those were the Alps). Since we were flying west, it was like going back in time. It was as if night would never fall and the daylight would last forever. I haven't felt so peaceable and content when traveling in a very long time. For the first time, I didn't want to go home.
Labels: airport, anger management, barcelona, daytime, flight, food, happiness, hassle, home, iberia, london, missed, options, photography, san francisco, strike, swiss air, travel, trouble, zurich
By ◆ Juppie on Sunday, September 20, 2009 @ 12:20 PM
A few people asked me what I was going to do during our three-day weekend (at my school, the students have Friday off since it was Staff Learning Day) and I told them about going to see mummies. (Not that I actually saw any, but that's what I had expected to see) There is an exhibit going on at De Young Museum in San Francisco, called Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs. It started in June 27 of this year and ends on March 28 in 2010, so it's a pretty long exhibit. It seems not many people my age are particularly interested in archaeology, though. It's disappointing. According to my mother, the people in the area where I live don't love the arts and history as much as they should. That's why we don't have famous musicians from the area or good ballet troupes and orchestras... So you have to go to San Francisco to find the better museums.
I really would've liked to take some photos, but you're not allowed to take photographs in the exhibit. In fact, everyone pays more money to go to the exhibit, unlike the usual De Young exhibits (if you have membership, you can go in free! But not this time. Members get a discount, though). I suppose the artifacts are quite valuable and fragile. After all, they are from thousands of years ago...And yet some of them still look to be in good shape. I heard there were mummified fetuses that had been found and I thought that sounded really disgusting. And the fact that the brains of a dead person are removed with a hook through a person's nose is kind of disturbing too. Luckily you don't actually have to see that.
I was disappointed that the real King Tut coffin was not at the exhibit, though there was an animation showing the layers of the coffin. It reminds me of those Russian dolls that look like this.
If you remove the coffin layer by layer, you start out with a box, then another box, and another box, and then eventually to the actual person-shaped coffins, which also contain multiple layers, and finally you reach the dead person inside. So that's why I thought of the Russian dolls when I saw the animation.
There was a mummy coffin at the exhibit, though. It just wasn't Tut's. It was bigger than I thought. I would have liked to open it but practically everything is in glass cases.
I read an article about Tut which was free for the taking at the museum. Tut's lineage is a bit of a mystery. It is rumored that he is the son of the previous king, Akhenaten (his real name was Amenhotep but he changed it when he decided to change the religion of Egypt) and one of the king's wives, Kiya. Akhenaten had another, more famous wife called Nefertiti who might've been jealous enough of Kiya to have banished or killed her. Sort of reminds me of the Romans plotting to kill each other before.
By the way, let me explain why I said "kings of the valley"...It's because many of the Egyptian kings were buried in a valley named The Valley of the Kings. (Pretty obvious name, eh?)
Labels: akhenaten, artifacts, brain, coffin, de young, egypt, exhibit, fetus, kiya, mummy, museum, nefertiti, pharaohs, russian dolls, san francisco, tut, tutankhamun, valley of the kings
By ◆ Juppie on Saturday, April 18, 2009 @ 2:04 PM
Usually you probably hear the term "Live, laugh, love" instead of "Fight, love, live." Filoli Website
But that was the phrase popular at this place I visited recently, called Filoli. It's a California estate built in...the 1900's, I think...by a family, the Bourns. They were trying to get away from San Francisco (where they had previously lived) because a great earthquake and fire had ravaged much of the city, so those people with enough $$$ started building homes in the countryside. It took from 1915-1917 to build the house, which was modeled to look like an estate in Ireland, and also like the architecture of England, both of which Mr. Bourn (at least, I think it was him) was inspired by.
Anyhow, back to the phrase. The name Filoli was very puzzling to the Bourns' friends, since they didn't know what it meant. They thought it was an Italian name. (Yeah, right. The Bourns weren't from Italy.) Actually, he just took the first two letters of each part of his motto, which happened to be "Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life." If you ask me, that wasn't very creative, but oh well. At least he didn't just call it Bourn. (Notice a lot of people name their companies and other things after themselves...Like HP, otherwise known as Hewlett-Packard.)
The main reason my family went to Filoli was because of the gardens. They were really something. There were many, many gardens, and so if you come at different times of year (By the way, Filoli is open from mid-February to October) you might be able to see different flowers. When we went, it was tulip season, which delighted me to no end. (I have this strange fascination with tulips...) If you hurry you might be able to get there before all the tulips start to die. Some of them already lost their petals, like the ones at my house (it's really quite sad, but my dad still thinks they look pretty, even dead). They come in various colors like white, light pink, dark pinkish/red, dark purple, light purple, and even yellow with red parts. Too bad the roses haven't bloomed yet. The ones at my house have started to. I suppose that Filoli just follows a different seasonal pattern from my neighborhood.
Keep in mind that Filoli does charge admission. I was unhappy to hear that since I always want to get in free, but of course they need to make money to keep the place running. (My mom says that a museum in Las Vegas closed down since they had no budget. I wonder what kind of stuff they had - slot machines? Elvis Presley portraits?)
Still, it's a nice place. The house where the Bourns (and later the Roths, who moved in later) used to live has 43 rooms and 17 chimneys, according to one of those retired people tour guides (no offense to them, but they look rather...old, since they have white hair and all). I don't know why you would need so many chimneys. There must be a lot of fireplaces in the house or something. I only have one fireplace and we don't even use it. The house has a bunch of old-looking furniture and portraits. It looks kind of like the Hearst Castle, or a more modern looking version of those European palaces. Outside there's a small rectangular pond, and even a swimming pool. (Wow, I guess people liked swimming pools even back then. It was pretty big and clean, but I hear sometimes people fall into the pool, particularly little kids who just run around in circles. Personally I like the pools at Hearst Castle better since they have interesting designs.)
I wouldn't really want to live there, though. Instead, I'd rather live at this house I just saw today. It was an open house (you know, for sale so you can look inside if you're a buyer). It looked like an adobe house, sort of. It was only one story but there were many rooms. The furniture was very beautiful and the master bedroom had a little room connected to it where you can look outside (great view, the Stevens Creek is right there, and maybe you could spy on your neighbors :o). If you wanted you could set up your computer in that room so you would kind of feel like your were outside even though you were inside. Seeing as I am an indoor person, but like to have a view, that would be cool for me.
Labels: backyard, bourns, fight love live, filoli, flowers, garden, house, money, name, open house, phrase, san francisco, swimming pool
