Great Success

Before I started writing this post I went looking through my own blog for a previous piece (I thought) I'd published about how knowledge of another language conveyed Bonus Points to your Google-fu when looking for stuff on the internet. Then I realized I haven't made any such post here, it was an answer I'd submitted on Quora.

A decade ago I watched a trailer for an anime called "Dai-guard: Terrestrial Defense Corp.". I never got around to watching the anime itself, still haven't, but I instantly loved the music in the trailer. Turns out they just used the opening sequence for the trailer, so this song is actually the opening theme song as well.



Well, I'd never been able to find a high quality version of the full song. I could only find either good TV sized ones or crappy quality full length ones. Until now. With my post-uni Japanese experience I tried again today and found it forthwith. And my Japanese is admittedly rudimentary, too.

I'll upload it to YouTube eventually, but for now here's a high quality full length mp3 file of the song I'll share with you. Enjoy the fruits of my labour.

This Is What I've Been Waiting For. Finally!

Well, it's the end of March and therefore all versions of Frozen [2013] will have been released in all their respective countries. More importantly they'll have been released in all 43 languages, which, in turn, means I should finally be able to find high quality versions of "Let It Go" in 42 languages. If you'll recall, the French Canadian release reused the mainland French-sung songs.

デタラメ・マザコン・チェリーボーイ 〜for the movie〜

OH SNAP GUYS

So there's this fictional band called the 金玉ガールズ (Kintama Girls), right? They exist in the world of Detroit Metal City. It's a cool series I highly recommend checking out if you have a sense of humour.

Anyway, the (fictional) band released a single cd and I managed to pick it up a few months ago. But, a terrible, terrible twist of fate befell me. The track titles on the files had become corrupted.

Three tracks. I already knew the name of the first track (title of this post) so that wasn't a problem. The third track was an instrumental version of the first, again no problem. But Track 2. The file name was just a jumble of nonsensical wingding symbols. How the hell do I find its name? This is pretty obscure material to begin with. "Hey internet, what's the name of the second track on a hard-to-find single from this fictional band?"

I filed the quest away for a while but today, I found it. At long last. A website that sells imported cds decided to post the tracklist.

2. クダらねぇ社会

Acceptance of Cuteness

Have you ever seen a Japanese airline plane? Or their elementary school buses?
Check some of their school buses, for your viewing pleasure.

 As a whole, the Japanese have a great appreciation for aesthetic Cuteness that goes far beyond what we have here in the U.S.
Here, Cuteness is a quality that is linked to children and pet animals.
I am excluding the usage of the word 'cute' when applied to attractive females and males here.

According to tradition, at a certain age American boys are supposed to become 'men', symptoms of which include spurning cute stuff as childish and/or 'girly', sprouting facial and chest hair, choppin' down trees, making their own beef jerky and beatin' on their wives.

In conjunction with the increasing popularity of nerdiness/geekdom, Cuteness has gotten a massive boost in mainstream acceptance with such modern wonders as Lolcats, YouTube videos of cats and anthropomorphized pictures of other animals' faces. Seriously, it's done a lot to pave the way for guys to be able to say they find stuff cute. I attribute this to the coupling of Funny with Cute. If a guy just made a bunch of Cute stuff with kitties, I guarantee people would question his sexual orientation, but since it's a joke, it's all good.

A more recent case would be the burst of popularity for the show My Little Pony in a demographic that is most certainly not the target one: teenage to adult males. There are a lot of reasons these 'bronies' claim to like the show but since I haven't done my That looks like shit! Lemme watch it so I can talk about it routine I won't spew hate on something that I admit to knowing nothing about.
At first glance though, I suspect a healthy dose of hipsters-drinking-PBR class irony at play here.

Also, stuff like this makes it funny. Speaking of LOTR:

My rusty Japanese and Yu-Gi-Oh!

Speaking of Yu-Gi-Oh!, I started playing Nightmare Troubadour on my bro's NDS. I noticed that he had a Japanese ROM, probably by mistake since he also has an English one loaded too. In case you're wondering, these are all on a Top Toy flash card. My Japanese is still good enough that I can understand the gist of the lines but my kanji vocabulary is lacking. Playing this game is only sort of helpful for practice though. I think a visual novel would be more intensive on dialogue, hmm?