After coloring Ichigo and Rukia, I thought, “Hmm…I wonder if I can write Chinese Calligraphy with my Bamboo…?” So I tried with my Chinese name:
Sure feels weird, and doesn’t look like it was written with Chinese ink, but here it is…digital Chinese calligraphy! 
I felt extra lazy today…originally today was supposed to be spent cleaning the apartment, but instead I spent a lot of time just moping around, doing laundry, napping, whining about having to clean the apartment etc more than actually cleaning the apartment.
But after dinner I had the mood to do some drawing/coloring, so I decided to color the sketch of Ichigo and Rukia that I drew last week. And here’s the end result:
There’s something about Rukia’s eyes that I just couldn’t get right. 
I tried and tried, made modifications again and again, and still I felt like something is amiss. I just can’t put my finger on what’s wrong, but anyhow, this was the best I could do with this drawing today. 
Anyone who has talked to me in the past couple of months probably knows that I’m hopelessly addicted to manga lately, especially to Tite Kubo’s Bleach.
The thing that attracts me to Bleach, besides the awesome sword fights, is Tite Kubo’s drawing style. I’m really really impressed by how he is able to portray emotions on his characters’ faces and body gestures/poses. He apparently also likes fashion, because he drew a lot of his characters in different types of clothes (that don’t appear in the actual manga) that he “designed” himself.
Some examples (taken from the Bleach art book, All Color But The Black):
Since I enjoyed looking at his drawings so much, I decided to draw based on one of his drawings. Here’s my attempt using my Wacom Bamboo and Corel Painter Essentials 4:
Looking at the two drawings side-by-side, they look very different, but I’m pretty happy with it, LOL! When I have more time and the mood for it, I want to color my sketch. Will update when that happens!
Hopefully I won’t end up jinxing myself by celebrating this on my blog. On Sept 22, I finally got back my gmail account thanks to someone on the gmail team. I know security is strict and there’s reason why they make it super hard for people to “claim” that they own an account, but the process I went through since losing my account on Sept 1 had been ridiculous.
But anyhow, I’m thankful that I got my account back. One of the first things I did was to back up my emails using an email client so that if the account ever decides to take a walk again, at least I would still have all my old emails with me. Even though I have my account back now, I know I will never trust gmail 100% ever again.
The thing I find ironic about the Final Destination movies is, well, it’s never final. When will movie producers learn that they shouldn’t take a good movie and make a freaking series out of it? First they did it with Jurassic Park, then the Matrix, Indiana Jones, Saw…the list goes on.
When I saw the first Final Destination movie, I thought it was the most awesome thriller ever. At the time there weren’t as many sick gore movies as there are now…it was the pre-Saw, pre-Hostel era, so it wasn’t often you get to see people’s head abruptly chopped off half way through a conversation. Then the second and third FD movies came out and they were bleh.
So when I learned that a fourth one came out, it was the last thing on my mind to go see it. But it had a selling point. Seeing people killed in 3D? Even Beng wanted to see it!
Rest in pieces
I’ve never seen an actual movie in 3D…not counting the ones in Disneyland and Universal Studios. I actually didn’t have high expectation regarding the picture quality because I always had this preconception about 3D images being rather blur and grainy, I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s the lousy 3D glasses provided at theme parks.
Anyway, Final Destination 3D actually was pretty entertaining! I lost count of the times I flinched when random sharp things like wooden sticks, concrete pieces, and nails burst from the screen and appeared to be flying towards me. 3D-experience-wise, it was great, and added a whole new dimension (duh) to a horror movie.
The storyline was pretty expected…every FD movie follows a template, so no surprises there. It sure made me really miss the first Final Destination movie though. In the first one, there were so many elements going on at the same time that you can never be sure how the character is going to die (the kettle? the knife? the train??) until he/she finally died. Final Destination 3D, however, was more to the point. Everything that happened simply contributed to a single cause of death. It was, how should I say it…well, boring in that sense.
But I have to say, watching something like this in 3D was an interesting experience.
As some of my friends know, on a typical day I’m logged onto Plurk during pretty much all of my waking hours. One of the things I love about Plurk is how much you can customize the look of your profile page. Today, after using other people’s themes for a while now, I finally sat down and made my own!
Of course I don’t know enough CSS to do everything from scratch, so I took my existing theme as a starting point and referred to multiple other Plurk themes for syntax information. Beng also helped me by using Firebug on his machine to look up which CSS block I need to add to customize specific sections of the profile page.
Renji Plurk theme
After a few hours (time flies when you’re having fun!), I’m finally proudly using my Renji plurk theme! I don’t own any of these images, I just put them together to make up the overall look of the theme. The main Renji image in the timeline section is from one of the Bleach Beat Collection CD covers, which happens to be one of my favorite images of Renji.
For those who are interested, here’s the link to install this theme: http://www.plurk.com/installDesign/56-8b873d121b
In the process of doing this, I also found out that I apparently have Adobe Photoshop Elements installed on my macbook… I’ve never really used Photoshop much, so it was pretty interesting learning to use Elements today too!
Next, I might tackle a couple other Bleach-related Plurk themes, and maybe make a Detective Conan one later on. We’ll see how long this holds my interest!
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
I did it! I pre-ordered the Lost Symbol, the new book by Dan Brown. It will arrive (hopefully, anyway) on September 15th, the day it’s released! I can’t wait!!!
On this special date, I went to see the movie called 9. Produced by Tim Burton with the main character voiced by Elijah Wood, I couldn’t say no.
[Possible spoilers ahead, please stop here if you wish to watch the movie yourself!]
The movie is about a world after a big war between humans and machines. 9 (Elijah Wood) accidentally awakens a machine with what looks like a single red eye and extremely destructive power, and for the rest of the movie, 9 has to find a way to stop the machine. He learns of the truth of the key to salvation that lies in a small device, which he needs to get to before they are all killed. In the meantime, the machine makes more machines, most of which look like mechanical spiders or snakes.
Sounds familiar? Throughout the movie I kept getting this feeling of deja vu. Then it clicked. This is The Matrix meets Lord of The Rings. Of course I could be biased by the fact that Elijah Wood’s voicing the main character, but it totally fits. The single red eye, the one small object that’s the key to salvation – Lord of The Rings. Humans create machine, machine revolts against humans and destroys everything in the process – The Matrix.
Even so, I really liked this movie. It was heartwarming and touching, especially the ending. It was kind of sad that 9’s friends didn’t get resurrected like I thought they would, but it was beautiful. The animation was very nicely done. I’m so impressed by the amount of expression and warmth the animators managed to convey through 9 burlap sacks. Every little nod, twitch, eye movement, smile, all genuine and touches the heart. Hats off to the animators!
This weekend was Labor Day weekend, which I spent in San Diego. Beaches, zoo…etc, it was a great vacation, and it was extremely hot. It was so sunny that just now I noticed that I came home with an unexpected souvenier:
The opposite of tattoos!
Here’s the pair of gladiator sandals that I wore the entire weekend:
My gladiator sandals
I guess in a way it’s cool??
Today started like just any other day. I woke up when my alarm rang, then I reached for my iPhone to check my emails. First thing I see is a dialog that said “Cannot Get Mail – The user name or password for ‘xxx@gmail.com’ is incorrect”. At the time I shrugged it off as some internet connection error, maybe something that will be corrected by itself later on.
Then after lunch today, I went on gmail.com and logged into my account like usual. Again, I was told that my password was incorrect. I was slightly taken aback now. I thought, maybe I accidentally typed something wrong. So I tried again. And again. That’s when the nightmare began.
After trying the password retrieval process, I was told, in horror, by the Google accounts help page, that my user name is not associated with any gmail account. Excuse me?? I then checked huinee.blogspot.com, my old blog. I was confronted by:
Sorry, the blog at huinee.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.
What??? At that point I was starting to feel panicky. I submitted multiple support requests on the Google help page, each time they replied that I didn’t provide enough information to prove that I own my account.
Long story short, today, I realized that I was too dependent on the internet. My virtual existence, gone just like that. I felt like my entire life was wiped off the face of earth. Remember those sci-fi movies (like Arnold’s Total Recall), in which the characters find their identities removed from the system and it’s like they never existed? I felt just like that. I had trusted my web mail provider so much that I used it to store important information, and had relied on it to store email addresses of my friends and family. I realized that I couldn’t even remember my parents’ complete email address off the top of my head, I had been that dependent on gmail.
Today, I realized that I had gotten a true wake-up call.
Self-proclaimed shopaholic who owns more shoes than she should, enough clothes to go without laundry for more than a month, and is a big fan of the anime/manga Bleach.
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