Dacelo's Imaginary Journal

Anyway, a week ago there was this very, very damn hot day. I couldn’t sleep at all and I got bored, so I started fantacising about my idea of a perfect girlfriend. After failing to materialise a solid image of her in my head despite my best effort (they have a tendancy to warp into some other random stuff, like, an angel with lightsabre and energy shield >.>) I decided to get back to the drawing board, literally, to see if i could pen out (or rather, mouse out) something nice. I didn’t really had a plan, kind of just work on parts as I go and tried putting in all the stuff that I like into it, which mainly includes slightly axe crazy smile, some kind of weapon for whacking, tsundere twin tail, marshmellow heaven and some grade A zettai ryouiki thrown in. The result, was something that has a slight resemblence to my elementalist Aerie in Guild Wars. Though my 10 year old half witted half brother assured me that what i drew looked much hotter, which was surprising since he always give me the disgusted look when I watch ecchi anime (perhaps the hormones are starting to hit his brain prematurely, hmmm). Anyway, after agonising on whether to bother with coloring or not, I decided to just leave it as a concept for now and maybe work on her abit more when my drawing skills get better.

I guess I could try to draw more concept characters as my inspiration would allow (preferably NOT in the form of another sleepless night due to heat, must…channel…cold…from…spirit…) so I could have an inventory of characters to work with when I have enough skills to draw an actual manga. In the mean time, I will content myself with more ecchi anime, one of which has angels with lightsabre and energy shield

Completely off topic, but apparently according to wikipedia, ‘coup’ in French means ‘blow’ XD take from that what you will…

Anyway, one of my long time friend from high school, who according to (my self-made) legend, is made of about 100 tons of steel and badassness, asked me why I started drawing manga of all things at now of all time, when most people in my age would have tried it already during high school, sucked at it, and got into playing poker instead. Well, the truth is, after floundering about mindlessly through my pathetic excuse of a life, I have finally figured out what I want to be and how I want to live my life. Instead of aspiring for greatness, which I impressively failed at, I will instead aspire for the mundane, the boring, the (to some) despicable, but that which would ultimately be what I want to be, what I’m proud to be, and what I’m happy to be….

A genuine Chinese otaku.

Now you might say, wait a minute, AREN’T YOU ALREADY ONE YOU TARD? To which I would humbly reply, nay, not even close, because EVEN CHINESE OTAKU HAVE STANDARDS. Or at least that is how I see it (nods head to himself). So with that thought in mind, along with the lamentation of GUILD WARS 2 IS NOT HERE YET ZOMGWTFBBQ and alot of coke, I imagined for myself a real life RPG game, which I called C.O.U.P. for lack of a better name, and the ultimate goal of this game is to collect all the necessary skills and level it up in order to achieve the status of Absolute Supreme Sino-Otakuism (not a real word by a long shot lol), or ASS-O for short. There is no limit to where and how I acquire and train the necessary skills, and since I’m lazy as fuck I’m probably not gonna pressure myself with a time limit

So the skill list for the game are as followed, I might add more if I can think of more relavant ones. The skills will break into 2 trees:

The Chinese Tree

Skill Name: Chinese Language
Skill Description: This is a no brainer. You can’t negotiate prices with chinese shop owners without this skill, which is a very chinese thing to do.
Skill Levels:
–Nil – “me sorry me no chinese XD”
–Basic – chinglish the other way around.
–Advance – can listen, read, write, and speak well.
–Expert – can either speak more than one dialects fluently or can write poetry.
Requirement for ASS-O: Expert, there’s a reason why its called chinese otaku and not the other way around.
Current progress: Expert, this is kind of like my starting skill lol.

Skill Name: Chinese Lore
Skill Description: You need this to identify chinese items…if you are playing D&D. You need some understanding of the culture and custom so you don’t offend every chinese you meet or you’ll end up looking like a pincushion for chopsticks. Also, older chinese will like you more if you know chinese history well and they’ll give you freebies during chinese new year if they like you.
Skill Levels:
–Nil – the chopstick impaled on you is proportional to the number of chinese people you have met.
–Basic – you know enough to not offending everyone.
–Advance – understand most of the historical and culture references
–Expert – you get freebies from oldies.
Requirement for ASS-O: Expert, freebies are cool.
Current progress: Expert, another starting skill lol.

Skill Name: Chinese Cooking
Skill Description: Especially, fried rice, the quintessential chinese dish that everyone loves, except maybe the chinese themselves. If you can’t cook fried rice you won’t be considered as a chinese, IT’S THAT SERIOUS.
Skill Levels:
–Nil – lethal chef, as in, everyone that eats your food dies.
–Basic – the foreigner can’t tell the difference between your fried rice and the takeaway’s fried rice, YES THAT IS A BASIC REQUIREMENT.
–Advance – “my fried rice bring all the girls to the yard, and their like, it’s better than yours, damn right it’s better than yours…”
–Expert – Iron Chef Chinese
Requirement for ASS-O: Advanced at least, cooking is love~
Current progress: I’d like to think it’s advance, but I need some girls for testing >.> (not happening, apparently, so assumed basic for now)

Skill Name: Martial Arts
Skill Description: Every chinese knows kung fu, right?
Skill Levels:
–Nil – punching bag
–Basic – simple self defence
–Advance – I know kung fu
–Expert – one man army (or shaolin monk)
Requirement for ASS-O: Advance at least, this skill is also useful as a party trick.
Current progress: Basic, from army training XD

Skill Name: Piracy
Skill Description: Every chinese does this, young and old without exception, hell, I was considered ‘unchinese’ by my cousins when I bought legit games in EB.
Skill Levels:
–Nil – I pay for all my shits
–Basic – I dl mp3s
–Advance – I dl everything else too
–Expert – my torrent folder takes up most of my hardisks and then some
Requirement for ASS-O: Expert, most people are on this level anyway lol
Current level: I’ll give you three guesses but you’ll only need one >.>

Skill Name: Farming
Skill Description: No, not the type where you grow stuff first and then kill them. Chinese has gained some notoriety in the MMORPG community for being a bunch of zombified farming machines. Since video gaming and indeed, online gaming is a big part of being an otaku, it becomes obvious that this is a necessary skill to have.
Skill Levels:
–Nil – play the game normally
–Basic – occationally farm for fun
–Advance – you know every farming spot, every farming build, and has every character and every item set for farming, and you farm everything that moves, even players.
–Expert – you can do the same farm for up to 72 hours without sleeping
Requirement for ASS-O: Expert, there’s farming, and then there’s zombie chinese farming.
Current level: Expert, only tried it once though lol.

Otaku Tree this is where things get hard lol

Skill Name: Japanese Language
Skill Description: I believe the best way to enjoy anime and manga is if you can understand the language without the subtitles. (nods)
Skill Levels:
–Nil – “watashi nihongo wagarimasen~~”
–Basic – simple conversations
–Advance – can read, write, listen and speak well
–Expert – mastered the use of different speaking and writing styles and dialects
Requirement for ASS-O: At least Advanced is needed to understand everything in anime and manga
Current level: Nil, should probably take a course or something lol.

Skill Name: Japanese Lore
Skill Description: Same reason as chinese lore, except japanese tend to use katanas if you piss them off. Also many anime and manga reference heavily on japanese culture and history so understanding them will make you better appreciate them.
Skill Levels:
–Nil – chopping block for katana
–Basic – you know enough to not offending everyone.
–Advance – you get most of the famous historical and cultural reference in manga/anime
–Expert – you get all the historical and cultural references in manga/anime
Requirement for ASS-O: Advance at least, obviously
Current progress: probably only slightly better than nil, lol

Skill Name: Japanses Cooking
Skill Description: Signature dishes including various styles of sushi, onigiri and bento. Also the precision bladework that is necessary for making thin sashimi slices.
Skill Levels:
–Nil – lethal chef, just by looking at the food you’ve made would induce blindness and amnesia.
–Basic – can make basic sushi.
–Advance – can make a full course meal.
–Expert – Iron Chef Japanese.
Requirement for ASS-O: Advanced at least, I happen to like eating j-food.
Current progress: Basic, still in the process of fine tuning the rice and the various wrapping style.

Skill Name: Manga Drawing
Skill Description: An essential skill for any otaku IMO. The reason why I started drawing manga.
Skill Levels:
–Nil – can only draw stick figures
–Basic – can draw decent sketches with reference
–Advance – can draw well without references and create original characters.
–Expert – amateur mangaka
Requirement for ASS-O: Advanced at least, its every otaku’s dream to creat their perfect 2D gf with their own drawing pen, no?
Current progress: Basic, just practicing sketching at this point to build basic drawing abilities.

Skill Name: Collection
Skill Description: you can’t be an otaku without a decent stash of anime DVDs and manga books, that is the whole point of it. Usually this includes related merchandise as well, but I don’t have the money for that yet so that’ll have to wait. As far as anime and manga goes, those can be partially solved by one of the skill in the chinese tree, if you know what I’m talking about.
Skill Levels:
–Nil – I watch live streams
–Basic – I dl full res episodes and stash them
–Advance – all your hard drives belong to them (because you redl the dvd/bd version)
–Expert – I have a closet full of this shit.
Requirement for ASS-O: Expert eventually, this requires financial backing so gonna have to wait till I get a job.
Current progress: Basic, I only started getting into this like a year ago lol.

*snaps back to reality*
Shit, it’s so late already, wtf am I doing lol.

Several weeks ago, in a moment of perhaps pure madness, I decided to further embrace my inner otaku and started learning how to draw manga. For someone like me, who has absolutely no artistic talent or motivation whatsoever, these kind of things are pretty much doomed to fail before it even begins, just like my other otakuism projects like learning the japanese tongue. Indeed, after some initial research and taking advice from my manga drawing mentor, who I refer to as ‘Number 2″, to start sketching everyday objects to develop basic techniques, I’ve gotten as far as reaching for my sketchbook, stare at it blankly for a few seconds, put it away, and then proceed to start wallowing on my own sense of self pity.

Fast forward to two days ago. Having completely forgotten the existence of my sketchbook at this point, I was procrastinating studying for the final exam and was treating myself various distractions on my PC like usual. One of my housemate’s niece, who messages me on MSN once in a blue moon and knew I’m a otaku, asked me to find her a working copy of a certain paint tool for drawing manga, which basically is a Japanese rendition of MS paint. Being the not-so-good/bordering evil samaritan that I am, I proceeded to tease her into begging mode while I browse torrent sites for it. After an incredibly short search, the program was resting on my desktop, and it seem to be functional for all intents and purposes. After a lite discussion with my moral compass, I decided that I wasn’t evil enough, so I declared to the poor girl that I will be playing around with it for awhile just for the sake of teasing her. Surprisingly, she was happy enough that I managed to find it and asked me to draw her something nice while she goes to take a shower. Realising that my teasing attempt has backfired horribly, and that my pride as an villain as well as an otaku is at stake, I decided to put up something at least half decent so I won’t look like a complete moron. And it was then, with drawing arrows in the mini-map in Guild Wars the only drawing practice that I had for the last 15 years, and armed only with my mouse and my lamentation as a complete failure in everything I want to do, I finally found the courage to land my mouse pointer onto the virtual canvas, and drew my very first line for a manga character. 20 minutes later, I was done and I emailed the software as well as my drawing to the girl, dazed.

She asked me whether I had practiced before, to which I replied never it’s my first time. And then she told me that I ruined her motivation to draw for the rest of the day. It was then that I finally smiled for the first time in many days; realising that I ruined somebody else other than my mother’s day for a change, and the world began to make sense again.

Last night, while talking to my otaku cousin who live in Hong Kong, I found out that one of his favourite manga character is Izumi Konata from Lucky Star. Intrigued, since I too are very fond of that particular character, and the fact that the art style of Luckly Star doesn’t have too many complex lines, I decided on a whim to see how far I could push my limited mouse drawing skill. After 5 hours of painstaking drawing and coloring while blasting anime music into my headphone in the dead of night, It was done. I collapsed onto my bed…dead.

Which brings us to the present, where I at last updated my blog after many moons, with actual content no less. Is the world going to end? Probably not, since I still haven’t touched my sketchbook…

I remembered…

…a doe eyed little boy in the hot summer city of Sydney, as he first set his noobie sight on a dark blue box in the video game section of an electronic store. On the front cover  of the box was a face, a rugged face of alien origin, whose seeming glowing eyes glared right back at the little boy, with such electrifying intensity. Intrigued, the little boy raised his hand and pointed at the box, and he proclaimed quietly, ‘That shall be my birthday present this year.” His father, secretly overjoyed that his son didn’t inherit his mother’s window shopping gene, nodded in approval.

…fast forward 10 years, a cold and wet winter evening in the city streets of Sydney…

It was 5pm, the streets were buzzing with people making their way back to the warmth of their homes after a long day at work. Many were huddling with with their friends or lovers, complaining that the nonstop rain is cold and annoying. The street lights glows lazily, as the reflection of the wet surface is doing most of their work for them. The peak hour traffic is slower than usual, but everyone is desperate to get home, no one wanted to stay on the cold, damp city streets.

In the mist of the home bound crowd, A young man is running, but in the opposite direction of the crowd. And unlike most of the crowd he didn’t seem to have an umbrella or a rain coat. He didn’t seem to notice that it was raining, that he is so completely soaked, or the crowd walking away from the city, or the red light at the pedestrian crossing. There was desperation on his face, as he made the final dash into that same electronic store.

Minutes later, he exited the store, crestfallen, yet undeterred. There was still a small flicker of hope in his eyes. “There is another store I know in Bankstown.” he whispered, and with that thought in mind, he once again surge into cold winter rain, dashing towards the train station.

5 minutes before the store closes, he burst into the front door, soaked, exhausted and heavily breathing. The store clerk was surprised by this odd customer, as the street outside was empty and quiet, save for sound of the constant raindrop. “Are you OK, sir?” he asked.

The young man catches his breath, and ignoring the clerk’s question, he spoke quietly. “Do you have anymore copies of Starcraft II?”

The store clerk chuckled, as if he understood the situation now. “Well you are in luck sir, we have one last copy left. This thing is selling fast.”

There was happiness in the young man’s eyes, the store clerk knew what to do now, he went down to the game locker, and fished out a small, dark blue box, with a silver Terran eagle crest on the front cover. The young man smiled, “I’ll take it.” he said quietly.

Later that night, after a hot shower and dinner, the young man retreated into his bedroom, after proclaiming to his mother that he will be working on a school assignment for the night, he promptly locked the door. As he settle down on his PC, there was a look of nervousness on him, as he loaded a dark blue DVD into the DVD ROM, and puts his headset on.

An hour passed, the young man is in awe, he briefly closed his eyes, trying to absorb what he has just experienced. the glowing stare he saw 10 years ago flashed before him, so vividly that he had to open his eyes again. The young man smiled.

“My semester is screwed.” he muttered to himself, quietly as always.