2011-05-28 23:15:00
Alright, I'll admit it: Bamboo Blade turned out a lot better than I initially expected. The second half of the season got a lot better, with some good character development and nice story telling. I still don't have much love for the artwork, but that's alright. Given how few anime there are about kendo, I'm glad that Bamboo Blade is one of them. It's good and I enjoyed it. ^_^
View or add comments (curr. 0)
2011-05-27 09:05:00
Last wednesday tuesday was the seventh anniversary of our marriage. How time flies! Eleven years together, seven years of marriage and two-and-a-half years of a cute kid running around ^_^
Thanks for everything honey! <3
kilala.nl tags: life,
View or add comments (curr. 4)
2011-05-26 07:07:00
When it comes to my kendo equipment t I quickly learnt how to properly care for my uniform, how to fold both the hakama and the gi to retain the pleats and shape. So far though, I've been avoiding one crucial part of equipment maintenance: taking apart and inspecting my shinai. But I finally did it last night ^_^
Menno, as vetted sports climber, will confirm the necessity of regularly inspecting your equipment for defects. If his materials are broken it might cost him his life, by plumetting to the ground. Similarly, if my shinai is messed up, it might take out someone's eye. I mean, it -is- a stick I beat other people around the head with :/
Armed with an excellent free kendo equipment manual (courtesy of the Fukuda Budogu company) I dismantled the shinai into it's components and found everything in order. No splits, no splinters and defects in the tsuru (the yellow string) and the leather parts. Putting it back together I rotated the bamboo slats' order, making the original bottom slat now the left one. The reasoning behind this being that this will ensure even wear an tear on the whole shinai. Getting the tsukagawa (the leather grip) off the handle proved a challenge since it's so tight. However, as suggested by the guidebook, latex gloves quickly solved that problem!
The whole process took me little over an hour. Lessons learnt? That I'll need some practice in retying the tsuru because right now it's not as tight as it could be.
I recently saw a great documentary on the production of shinai (part 1 and part 2 on YouTube). I don't know if it applies to my model, but in general the creation of one is quite a few hours of manual labor. It was great seeing the artisan go through the steps of making a sword, starting with newly dried bamboo branches.
kilala.nl tags: sports, kendo,
View or add comments (curr. 1)
2011-05-25 06:13:00
Had another bout of hyperventilation in the middle of the night. I think it's linked to a short panic attack I had during the evening. I'm feeling anxious about next weekend and the moment Marli mentioned Saturday I felt a surge of adrenaline and fear shoot through me. Ever so quickly, but apparently it was enough...
kilala.nl tags: hyperventilation, anxiety,
View or add comments (curr. 7)
2011-05-23 16:49:00
There aren't many anime that focus on kendo, the most famous one being a series from the early eighties: Musashi no ken (lit. "the sword of Musashi"). Another, much more recent one, from the fall of 2007 is Bamboo Blade. The screenshot above is from the show, ridiculing one of the commonly known aspects of kendo: kendoka and their equipment stink, especially during summer (^_^);.
Bamboo Blade really isn't that good: I'd qualify the art as meh, the story as generic (though it's growing on me after a few episodes) and the animation as crude. But still, it's about kendo, it does a fair job of portraying shiai and it conveys the enthusiasm kendoka have for their sport pretty well!
kilala.nl tags: anime, kendo, japan,
View or add comments (curr. 0)
2011-05-21 17:55:00
Like a few weeks ago, today was a small class in the dojo. Only eight guys in bogu and three newbies in keikogi.
Before warming up with suburi and stretching (no running at all this week, that felt odd!) the whole group focused on studying kata. I'm very grateful for the help of Raoul, a visiting member of our Amstelveen dojo, who provided me with some good insights on kata 1 through 3. After that sensei Ton took us rookies apart for some practice and uchi geiko, while the rest of the group spent the remaining hour sparring.
My fast men and kote are still crappy, like I learnt last week. I did finally understand the mechanics behind the fast men, after seeing a few confusing explanations in class. The idea behind the fast men strike is that the shinai moves in a straight line towards the opponents face, only to jump up for a strike at the last instant. I kept on thinking that this movement was achieved through the wrists, but instead it happens almost automatically by thrusting forward, combined with raising and straightening the right arm. And -then- the wrists come in :)
EDIT:
Now the only thing I need to figure out is why the heck I keep getting these splitting head aches after training. I get back home around 1200 and you can bet dollars to donuts that by 1300 I'll have a head ache that lasts until I go to sleep at night. Menno suggested that it might be a hydration problem, but it even occurs now that I'm downing 1.5 to 2 liters of water in the morning. Personally I'm thinking it might have something to do with the muscles in my neck and how I use them during kendo.
kilala.nl tags: kendo, sports,
View or add comments (curr. 3)
2011-05-18 21:43:00
One could describe Pixiv as Japan's own DeviantArt: a website for artists of all fields to share and to discuss their work. Many amateur mangaka have a profile on Pixiv to showcase their works. One of my favorite artists, whom I discovered a year or two ago, is Nyanpura (ニャンプラー).
The young lady on the left is Nyanpura's regularly recurring character: a chubby, meganekko (girl with glasses) who is both cheeky and geeky (she loves video games). People who know me will understand that those are all qualities I like in a girl ^_^ When it comes to the artwork, I like the sketchy style, combined with the earthy color pallet that Nyanpura often uses.
Sadly, judging by the Pixiv profile, the artist isn't very active anymore.
View or add comments (curr. 0)
2011-05-18 20:37:00
My $DEITY, it took me a few times in trying different fonts. ಠ_ಠ
But finally it works! The look of disapproval is displayed correctly on my Macbook. Stupidly my iPhone's been doing it properly since day one. The instructions I used on Mac OS X:
Make sure that you pick the "computer" level in step 3, because else the font will only work for the admin account.
Of course it's a silly thing to be happy about, but it irked me to no end that I couldn't see many of the emoticons used on a daily basis on the Reddit fora.
kilala.nl tags: geeky, internet, apple,
View or add comments (curr. 4)
2011-05-15 11:56:00
Two years after buying our house in Almere we did our second big investment. The first being the roughly 11k in landscaping, the second being 5.6k in painting. As you can see in the picture above we've finally gotten rid of the awful KLM/Lufthansa blue and the house is now a lovely "carriage" green as the color is called.
All the plastic paneling has been cleaned, all the woodwork has been restored and all the frames have been painted. Also, the paneling on the storage room (on the left of the front door) has been completed replaced. Out went all the rotten wood and in came the Keralit. Keralit is made of recycled plastics and is available in many different "wood" grains and colors. It comes with a ten year warranty and is of course easy to clean.
All of the work was done quickly and perfectly by Sosef Schilderwerken.
Our next two investments planned for the future are an extension on the back of the house (within ten years) and a replacement of window frames with plastic framing (within five years).
kilala.nl tags: house,
View or add comments (curr. 2)
2011-05-15 09:31:00
Recently I've noticed that it really is becoming possible to have marginal conversations with Dana. No more one-liners, but actual back and forth speech. That's a great development! Like this morning:
Me: "Let's go have breakfast. What'd you like on your sandwich?"
Dana: *thinks* "Cheese bread."
Me: "Oh, I'm sorry. We're out of cheese."
Dana: "Cheese out?"
Me: "Yes, sorry. What else would you like?"
Dana: *thinks harder* "Colors bread!"
Me: "Alright! Kleurenhagel it is."
Dana: "Colors bread" :)
kilala.nl tags: baby,
View or add comments (curr. 1)
2011-05-14 17:39:00
After missing four weeks of training in a row (family stuff, spring cleaning, Queen's Day and Anime 2011) I finally got back to the dojo today! Training with Martijn in our yard has been very helpful, but of course there's no substitute for the watchful eye of sensei and training with the other 15 folks in our class.
Despite the fact that the past two weeks I've held back on training, the warmup routines came pretty easily! The usual stretching and suburi, two laps of suri-ashi and three laps of fumikomi-ashi. Usually I'm pooped after the laps of suri-ashi, but not this time. Nice. Either way, starting from next week I'll run to/from the office again on a daily basis and I'll also train at home at least once a week. Back to my old schedule!
Lessons from today:
kilala.nl tags: sports, kendo,
View or add comments (curr. 0)
2011-05-14 17:13:00
There we go! It took me a week, but here's the festival report for Anime 2011.
Photo from here. Dana just took one glance at the picture and remarked: "Dana shirt! Dana party!". Which is completely right because she wore her staff shirt at the big party last weekend ^_^
kilala.nl tags: anime 2011, anime 200x,
View or add comments (curr. 0)
2011-05-11 00:00:00
Recently we have been running into an interesting problem between BoKS 6.5.3 (FoxT Server Control) and Putty.
Situation: End user's password has expired and must be changed upon login.
Symptom: On password change, Putty crashes with the error "Incoming Packet was garbled on decryption. Protocol error packet to long".
Cause: Unknown yet.
Temp solution: Set customer's last password change date to very recently (eg: modbks -l $USER -L 1), then have customer login and change the password manually (eg: passwd).
UPDATE:
Earlier we reported a bug that would make Putty crash when trying to change your password upon login. The rather cryptic message provided by Putty was: "Incoming Packet was garbled on decryption. Protocol error packet to long". Here's an update on that matter.
A number of FoxT customers logged calls about this problem, among others 110216-012399. After investigating, FoxT's reply in this matter is:
BoKS Master: If you already have TFS090625-101616-1 installed on the Master but not TFS081202-134416-3 (i.e. rev 3) you may want to uninstall TFS090625-101616-1 temporarilly and then install TFS081202-134416-3 and TFS090625-101616-1 (in that order).
BoKS Replica: Hotfix 090625-101616 does indeed contain the corrections from 081202-134416 (rev 3). Thus hotfix 090625-101616 is sufficient on the Replicas in this case.
kilala.nl tags: boks, sysadmin,
View or add comments (curr. 0)
2011-05-01 13:29:00
In the good ol' tradition of last year, I've again ripped off Mike's glorious designs and made another convention shirt for Dana.
For my sister's birthday last December I also made her two Japan-inspired shirts, hoping to blackmail her into attending Anime 2011. I think I've failed in my setup, but at least she liked the shirts! One is a sweater with the Kuroneko Yamato (a transport company) logo on the back. The other is a ruby pink t-shirt with a sparkling, hot pink design of Candy Candy which was one my sister's favorite anime when growing up.
EDIT:
Darn! I just thought of a t-shirt design for myself which I should've made: mix the vampire Clara (the cow on Dana's shirt) with the batman logo, to make the Batcow logo. Horns instead of ears, a nose ring, udders and wings to match the shape of Mike's design. Oh well...
I've also just found out that Dana will probably make swift friends with Marko's (long-standing visitor and gopher) brother who cosplays as Agent P (Perry the platypus)! Sure the outfit could use some work, but come one! It's Agent P!
kilala.nl tags: anime 2011, anime 200x, creative,
View or add comments (curr. 5)
All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Thomas Sluyter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.
