The smell of rain~

I just love the smell of rain~ Don't you think that the smell of rain, especially after it rained on the pavements of a hot day is absolutely exquisite? Today, I found out that there's actually a term for it!

petrichor (PET-ri-kuhr) - the scent of the dry earth or pavement after a rain.

J.K. Rowling new book and latest tweet

As all Potterheads already know, J.K. Rowling has recently announced that she will be releasing a new adult-genre book later this year. To say I'm super excited is such an understatement. I'M BEYOND ECSTATIC!!!

J. K. Rowling actually has a Twitter, though she rarely tweeted. In fact, her last tweet was about pen and paper being her foremost priority therefore she won't be tweeting much. Come to think about it, most of her tweets were about pen and paper being her priority. Anyway, about one day (I think) after news of her new book broke out, she finally tweeted, "As you may have heard, I have a new book out later this year. Very different to Harry, although I've enjoyed writing it every bit as much." (J. K. Rowling's Twitter)

To prove that she's moving on from Harry Potter, her official website, www.jkrowling.com, is "currently being refreshed and redesigned, and will be relaunched later this Spring."

Fans interested for latest update could subscribe for further announcement.

The overwhelming and uncontrollable addiction of non-stop purchasing of books

"The overwhelming and uncontrollable addiction of non-stop purchasing of books" is an extremely rare type of addiction where symptoms include excessive urge of purchasing books at the sight of it, without even finish reading any of the books that the addict had bought in the past. There had been severe symptoms where when anyone tried to stop the addict from purchasing more books, the addict would then start to scream and verbally attacked people that tried to stop them. Fortunately, most of the reported cases showed that it's a mild disorder which could be easily cured under the watchful eyes of selected psychiatrist, therapy, breathing exercises and meditation.

P.S. This post is entirely fictional and by no means were there such disorder exist. Nevertheless, if you really do, or suspected that you might have this disorder, I would wish you good luck in curing your disorder.

Movie Review: The Wedding Diary (结婚那件事)

Another movie review! I've been doing a lot of that these past few weeks. o.O Anyways, today's movie is The Wedding Diary starring Penangite Ah Niu and many other Malaysian, Singaporean and Hong Kong actors and actresses such as Elanne Kwong, Kara Hui (love her!), Zhu Hou Ren, Marcus Chin, Chris Tong, Shaun Chen and Maggie Theng.

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This movie is about Ah Niu's character, Wei Jie (蔡伟杰), and his never-ending budget crisis on planning the best wedding ever for his bride, Elanne Kwong's character, Zhi Xin (芷欣). Wei Jie comes from a poor Hokkien lower class family in Penang whereas his bride is a rich daughter to a wealthy Cantonese Singaporean family. Obviously, these two families would clash at some points. Not only that, Wei Jie and his father's relationship had some strain, so does Zhi Xin and her mother, where Zhi Xin always felt that her mother had been very cold towards her father, Colin Chong. (There had been some jokes on the names of the fathers, really funny XD). So pretty much the entire movie was centered around over-budgeting, social class, pride and relationship, both romantically and familial love. Not only does this movie contained much humourous scenes, but also touching scenes such as the one between Wei Jie and his father. I almost cried on that scene but I tried not to. The girl beside me cried though. The next scene was even more hilarious, when Wei Jie visited his father and saw the blanket draped over the body and he began to cry out anguishly. Immediately, the "body" turned out to be an Indian guy who was pissed off at Wei Jie for making too much noise and disturbing his sleep. Damn that was sooooo funny!!! XD

Overall, this was a nice romantic comedy movie, highly recommended. 8 out of 10!

P.S. Most of the scenes shot in Penang, especially the ones shot in Georgetown, are quite near to my house and my college! It's a wonder why I didn't saw the cast shooting nearby.

Viz Media took down MangaStream's Scanlation

As many avid JUMP series manga fans may have known already, MangaStream recently made an announcement that they will immediately cease scanlating Naruto, Bleach, One Piece and some other prominent shounen series, thanks to Viz Media. For more information, go to this link: VIZ Media Licensed Series Dropped. I find one sentence that really pawned, "So long as their product continues to be slow, awkward and inferior to something a ragtag group of nobodies can churn out in a few hours - fans will continue to look to scanlation groups and aggregators for their weekly fix.". OWNAGE! XD

That sentence had much truth in it. Considering that the Big Three were some of the mangas that were forced to be dropped, and with Viz sluggish translation and release, combined with the power and high demand of the fandom around the entire world, sooner or later someone would start getting the raws and get together with a group of translators and what the you know, a new scanlation group is born.

Viz Media could have made some sort of negotiation with MangaStream, instead of just blindly shutting them down. At the current time, MangaStream scanlation had been pretty decent, not to mention very fast. And, most importantly, they actually deleted the past chapters, leaving only few of the recent chapters to encourage readers to support the mangaka and buy the manga instead. So, in a way, they are kinda helping the manga industry and should be respected for their decision on deleting old chapters of the manga. Unfortunately, Viz could not see any of their effort. Pity. A partnership of some sort would have been very beneficial to both parties. Oh well, I wonder who is going to scanlate the new chapters from now.

List of books that I've recently purchased

I've bought a couple of books the past week after acquiring my RM 200 book vouchers. I am fully aware that the book vouchers were supposed to be used for textbooks and stationery, you know, stuff that are related to your studies. However, my college and most of the lecturers there discouraged the students to buy textbooks (too expensive, besides what would be the use of our library if every students owned textbooks) and I had sufficient amount of pens and other stationery that could last me for a couple of years since in my course, we don't really need to copy much notes. I'm not sure whether my lecturers wanted us to buy files for our assignment (since my semester had just started like, only few days ago and the assignment questions had not been released by the university in U.K.). Even if there is a requirement for files, I would think it may be too late as the vouchers expired on 31st March. I thought of buying a huge stack of papers since we had to print stupid load amount of notes (why can't we just read from our laptops, why else would they sent us the notes) not to mention lotsa assignment coming up soon. My house still had some supply of white papers but the thing is they're not that white anymore (-_-) and all of our assignments are going to be sent to my course's university in U.K. for moderation. So I'm just gonna use my remaining voucher to buy some useful things then.

Anyway, so I've bought some books, using both my own money as well as RM 150 worth of book vouchers, at Popular, Komtar branch. So many people were using their vouchers too, the college and university students.

- 河两岸 by 许友彬

- The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

- To the Moon and Back by Jill Mansell

- Septimus Heap: Darke by Angie Sage

- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

- Girl in the Cellar The Natascha Kampusch Story by Allan Hall and Michael Leidig

- What's New, Pussycat? by Alexandra Potter

I haven't read any of these books yet as I'm still reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. I may paused The Lost Symbol and start any one of these books. There was one book that caught my attention, a Chinese book about this author visiting various bookstores around the world. I assumed it's about her experience and the people she encountered. Really pretty book and expensive too, RM 68. I'm still thinking whether I should buy. I'm also considering buying 那些年，我们一起追的女孩 if it's a Simplified Chinese version. I didn't get to watch the movie with my friends (I had to look after my brother in the morning) but my friends loved it and judging by the public response, it's really good. Another book that caught my interest was Perfect by Ellen Hopkins. Actually, it was the cover that attracted me, it seemed like it's going to be a depressing story. I'm still searching for the book that I'm super interested to read, which was The Boy from Baby House 10 by Alan Philps and John Lahutsky. I've read an article about the boy and his story really intrigued me. With all the depressing incidents that happened, he managed to stay positive and get a happy ending in the end. Sadly, I only get to go to Popular and not Borders nor MPH, which are both too far from my house. Well, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that I would be able to find that book in Popular.

This is what I did when I was super bored in the past...

All of these images had been coloured by me in GIMP.

Movie Review: All's Well, Ends Well 2012 (八星抱喜)

First day of February and another movie review! Whew, time seriously flies. Today I went to watch movie with my friends. We decided to watch a Chinese New Year Cantonese movie called All's Well, Ends Well 2012, starring Donnie Yen, Louis Koo, Kelly Chen, Raymond Wong Pak Min, Sandra Ng, Chapman To, Lynn Hung and Yang Mi.

The movie is about four men that went to this website designed for men to help women in need, free of charge except for a hug. Donnie Yen acted as an 80s singer that continued to believe in pursuing his dream. Apparently, he can't move on from the 80s, since his fashion and hair style are really old-fashioned. He acted opposite Sandra Ng, also a has-been female idol that was really lazy. Due to a bad experience while performing on stage, she basically had let go of her life and live off by relying on her boyfriend that beat her while giving her lotsa cash. These twos relationship are more towards friendship rather than romance.

The second dude is Louis Koo, acting as this over-confident construction worker that spouts (bad) English in each of his sentences. He was chosen to be a model for Kelly Chen's character, an ambitious female photographer. The next couple is Chapman To, a less-attractive romance writer who was delusional of his looks (he thinks he's very handsome and every girl would fall in love with him). His task was to let a naive blind lady, starred by Lynn Hung, to feel love. These two couples are going towards the romance route.

Lastly, Raymond Wong acted as a lawyer whose own daughter hated him. He was to act as a fake father for Yang Mi's character, a rich girl who wanted to secure her late father's fortune. One of the requirements in her late father's will was for her to get married before the age of 25, which was a week later. This relationship would be about fatherly love.

Since this movie is a Chinese New Year movie, there would be much humour and entertainment. And boy, this movie totally had me in a laughing fit from the beginning till the ending credits where they showed the NG clips. And it wasn't only me, everyone in the cinema were laughing non-stop. This goes to show how entertaining this movie was. Instead of being a movie made just to induce laughter out of the audience, the movie has a decent plot that actually make sense and character developments. I would say this movie is a mixture of romance, comedy (for sure), friendship, family love and slice of life.

Overall, an 8 out of 10. =D

Respect the Scanlating Groups and Scanlators. Honestly!

I'm an avid manga and anime fan. I remember the very first manga I read was Zettai Kareshi, also known as Absolute Boyfriend. My friend bought the English version of the entire series and all the girls in class were hooked. And that is the start of my beautiful (ahem) obsession with manga and later, anime.

Anyway, in my country, there wasn't much manga title sold, not to mention English version. Regrettably, I can't read nor understand Japanese. So raw manga are pretty much useless to me. I then began to search sites where I could read manga online. And soon, I began to visit the scanlation group's site and just download from them instead, since my Internet connection could be slow sometimes and it was extremely frustrating just to wait for a page to load finish when I was so absorbed by the story. Now, I hardly visit those manga aggregator sites anymore. The quality of the manga were quite low anyway, and I'm the type of person that goes for quality, as high as possible.

One of the scanlating group sites that I frequently visited was Omari's Sister. I liked most of the mangas that they chose to translate. Some mangas I liked included Akagami no Shirayukihime, Seirei Produce, Orange Chocolate (sadly it had been dropped and as of now, no other groups had taken up this series, I do recommend it though, it's quite interesting) and many more. Do check this site out, they provide direct download links and you don't even have to be a member.

Well, one of their policies (and I'm sure, as well as other scanlating groups) is for people not to upload their scanlated mangas to any manga aggregator sites. Unfortunately, there were a couple of people who were either simply extremely ignorant, blind or just couldn't care less, decided to upload some of the popular mangas to sites like MangaFox. And just recently, MangaFox had released an announcement where they decided to shut down the forum where scanlators could make requests on taking down series they scanlated. Additionally, they also stripped off the moderators power to take down series. All thanks to the lovely owner of MangaFox, NOEZ. Consequently, due to some irresponsible people that decided to ignore Omari's Sister rules, they decided to watermark future releases and not release it in zip or rar format anymore. Instead, they put it as pdf file. Took some time for me to get used to but I managed.

Now, I never really liked MangaFox. Back then, the site that I prefer to read mangas online was OneManga until they decided to shut down. Man, I really miss that site. MangaFox used to be decent, they did heed the scanlators' requests and took down mangas. Unfortunately, now, they just blatantly ignore the scanlators and do whatever the hell they want to do, with the supposedly noble pursuit of ensuring the members to be as satisfied as possible. I can see why the scanlators are angry, especially in the case of Omari's Sister. In their eyes, sites like MangaFox are in fact thieves that stole free resources for the sake of getting profit. The adverts and constant request for donation? Peeps, MangaFox main objective was money yo.

In the rare occasions where I visited manga aggregator sites, I usually went there for the forum (notably MangaFox, though I stopped going there after Omari's Sister posted stuff about them) or to check out mangas then directly go to the scanlators' websites to download the mangas. As long as you supported the scanlators, or even better, the original author of the manga, that would be much much better. If the Japanese manga industries realised just how popular most manga are among the overseas fandom, they should just find reliable translators to translate these mangas into several foreign languages (ESPECIALLY ENGLISH). That way, not only they could stop online piracy, they could also earn much much more.

Lastly, all I have to say is that tt really annoys me how some people completely disregarded the scanlators simple request and pleas. Hell, I would be annoyed if someone took my work and ignored my request no matter how nicely I told them not to. So people, do respect the scanlating groups and scanlators. Without them, you don't even have any mangas to read, well, for those that can't read Japanese that is. These are the people that you should thank to, not the manga aggregator sites, especially MangaFox.