I’ve temporarily disabled the commenting function in the gallery. This is because I haven’t had time to implement an anti-spam solution yet (I’m going to use Akismet like I do in the blog). I’ve started getting some spam and I won’t have Internet access for a few days, so it’s disabled for now.

Though this is not really big news, I’ve started using Jerome’s keywords plugin which gives me these nice tag clouds that I use in the about page and in sidebar on the main page. I’ve modified the plugin a little, but nothing significant. Thanks to Jerome for a great plugin.

I started listening to Mai Kudo about a week ago. I had never heard of her before that. Apparently she performed under the name Ruppina before her recent album Maiself (which I should be getting any day now). I managed to download some Ruppina songs the other day and listened to them in my MP3-player today as I was walking into town to vote (election in Sweden). Her voice is so nice and the songs are very good and easy listening. I’m glad to have found a new (new for me) artist that I like. I think I’m going to get her Ruppina BEST album, which is pretty cheap for a Japanese CD+DVD album.

I’ll update this post with more info later. I’m so tired right now

Click the picture. She’s very pretty. I’m going to update my gallery script to give bigger thumbnails in the blog… tomorrow.. .zzzzzzz

update: I think I’ll put one or two MP3s here to show how Ruppina sounds. I’ll have to pick some favourites first. I’ve been in meetings all day, so I haven’t had time to listen to all the songs yet

update: now it’s time for bed again, but I haven’t forgotten. Here are some Ruppina songs:

• Free will (9MB)
• violet flow (9MB)
• crescent (9MB)
• Proudly (8MB)

I’ve been following the Ultimate Fighter TV series since the start. I like to watch MMA (Pride and UFC) and the series has been good and entertaining. The fourth season is about fighters who have already fought in the UFC doing their comback by competing in the series. The coaches are (at the beginning of the season) Randy Couture and George St. Pierre.

I was really looking forward to seeing St. Pierre as a coach on the series, but in this season they are hardly showing the coaches or the training at all! Instead they’re showing clips from the fighters’ previous fights, which is interesting, but watching the coaches and the training process is 100x more interesting. I’m so bored with this season. It’s so much worse than the previous seasons, that were all good.

The fights in season 4 are very good, but that’s only a few minutes of the episode. I was definitely expecting more from this season. They tried something new and, in my opinion, it didn’t work.

OK, first off I’d like to say that I never thought I’d post an “X copies Y” topic. And the title is perhaps a little sharper than I intended (I just wanted something short and snappy ).

I just watched Maki Goto’s Glass no Pumps PV and the second it started I thought of BoA’s My Name PV which came out a couple of years ago. It absolutely must have been shot in the same location. Look at the chandelier. The caps here are a bit small, but it looks exactly the same. Both videos also alternates between the dance and the artist by a mirror wall.

The songs are completely different and BoA’s dancing is far superior (and BoA is way cooler ). I just thought it was interesting that they were shot in the same place. Now, as you can see I like BoA more than Maki, but I like Maki too, so this is not a hate-post.

[…] there’s more! »

Mai Kudo (工藤舞) or just Mai (舞) is a Japanese singer that I hadn’t heard of until only a few days ago when she was introduced to me by ChrisKay over at AHN. I’ve listened to her songs the past two days at work and they’re pretty good. A thing about Mai that sort of grabs your attention, whether you like it or not, is that she doesn’t wear clothes in the traditional sense in her PVs or on her album cover for that matter. Anyways, I downloaded her PVs the other day (from jpopsuki) and just quickly converted two of them to PSP compatible H.264/AVC video for the people (including myself) who’d like to have Mai on their PSP. So you can take a look for yourself.

Princess Candy PV (4′03″ 17MB)

(download)

Eyes PV (4′40″ 18MB)

(download)

To play the videos on your PSP, unzip the files preserving the directory structure and put them in the corresponding folder on your memory stick (MP_ROOT\120ANV01). The mp4 file is the video and the THM file is the thumbnail image (the same as the ones above). When you’ve put the files in the correct folder on your memory stick you should be able to see the videos in the video menu.

If you want to play the videos on your PC you need a recent version of Quicktime or you need to have a h.264/AVC codec installed. Unzip the files and open the mp4 file with Quicktime.

Enjoy!

PS. Please feel free to leave comments

As I’ve written previously, the DVD box of the movie Daisy that I bought contains both the Director’s cut (international version) and theatrical (Korean) version of the movie. I started out watching the Director’s cut which I loved. A few days ago I watched the theatrical version and I must say that I’ve never seen such big difference between the regular and director’s cut versions of a movie before. Usually the director’s cut just contains a few scenes that were cut out of the theatrical version, but not this time.

Both versions of Daisy contain scenes that don’t exist in the other version. The director’s cut version is longer, but the most important difference is the order in which things take place in the movie, or rather, the order in which they are revealed to the viewer. The theatrical version has a more linear storytelling and reveals things sooner than the director’s cut. In the director’s cut (this must be a record in the number of times “director’s cut” appear in a single post ~ I’m a little tired) the characters are introduced more or less one at the time and lets the viewer wait a while before revealing the whole story.

I liked the director’s cut version most. It’s more surprising since it doesn’t reveal things so quickly, so you don’t know what to expect to the same extent as in the theatrical version. I recommend that you watch the director’s cut (also called International version).

Daisy pictures in the gallery

Daisy official site

I’ve added a J-Pop section to the gallery and so far some recent Ayumi Hamasaki and BoA pics have been added. There are some old pics too. The new ones are for the larger part from posts over at AHN.

The recent pics are from Ayu’s D-Snap/D-Dock CMs and from BoA’s Levi’s ads.

[…] there’s more! »