LOL at Shinjiro's tweet after their Aomori performance.

Shinjiro, if you carry on with the ｢アップル」 thing, no one is ever going to believe that you don't like doing it. Wahahaha.

Look what I found today while we were out for lunch at Vivocity!

The bookmark of my dreams!!!

Yes, it does sound rather nerdy - who on Earth has "dream bookmarks"?? Well, Gerri does. :D

If you can't tell what it is just from the picture, it's basically a large rubber-band-ish thing, with a little hand pointing out the exact line where you stopped reading. It's not too tight, so it won't damage book covers and pages by warping, bending or folding them. And its size should be suitable for most QP-sized books. That means Quality Paperback; books that usually around 20 by 13 cm. That's the term that I know it by, but sometimes these sizes are also called "B-format paperbacks".

And Gerri has always wanted to make a bookmark with a sort of slider thingy, which would slide up and down the vertical page marker, so that you'd remember which line you stopped at on the page.

I've thought of making something like that since I was about 9 or 10? But I didn't know how to make sure that it wouldn't be too bulky or anything. And now there's this!

Oh, I am so ridiculously happy. :D

Only thing is that it's $12.90 each (slight ouch); otherwise, I'd have been tempted to get two instead of one; one for my travel reading book, and one for my bedside reading.

Just in case anyone who's reading this is interested, this nifty little thing is by Fred & Friends; click to get to their website! They've got an online catalogue full of tons of other nifty things! :D

Random little game on the AAA@DW community, which can be found here.

It's basically a sentence, split into four different parts, in four .gif format pictures that cycle through different phrases. Hit the "Esc" key to stop the gifs from changing, and voila, you have your random sentence.

And I got:

Strangely, no one else on the comm who's replied to the post seems to have gotten the "Shh. Don't speak" one for the last picture. Haha.

Sooo... AAA's newest single was released this Wednesday.

CDJapan tells me that my orders of the single (yes, multiple; I succumbed and ordered both Type A and Type B because of the different extras that come with each. m(_ _)m) and their 6th Anniversary concert DVD, which was also released on Wednesday, were shipped on Monday.

Yay!!

But... knowing that it'll probably take about a week before I get it... I'm now trying to avoid all the videos that're popping up from all the people who've already got their hands on their copies.

ARGH. Am trying very very hard to not spoil it for myself, since the last time this happened was with the Buzz Communication Tour DVD and I watched almost the whole thing on YouTube before it was even released because someone was so nice as to record it off the WOWOW channel when they played it and I kept going back and rewatching even after I ordered it and... and... well, you get the idea. I spoiled my Buzz Comm DVD. As in, I spoilt the whole... anticipation and waiting to actually receive it to see its beautiful contents.

Although I have since rewatched it a few times and am very happy that I own it, anyway. :D

Okay. So... yes, will um... persist. Do not click on all those YouTube videos, Gerri.

But I shall just post the pretty preview of the main single's PV here. Because pretty people are pretty. o(^v^)o

I just realised that this was my 300th tweet, which was posted yesterday.

"Rainy morning. Don't wanna get out of bed..." is what it says. XD


EDIT (21st May 2012):

Well, an anonymous person left a comment (the same comment posted on three different posts, really) to say that the grammar in this tweet is wrong:

DERU SHITA KUNAI IS WRONG GRAMMAR.

Make sure you do not displayed wrong grammar on the web. It is a disgrace.

Do not boast about being top in class when your grammar is below standard. Which Japanese school are you attending?

you should remove your picture and message from your blog. dont disgrace yourself with poor grammar


Since it's an anonymous comment, I can't reply to it directly. So in case that person decides to actually follow up and see if I do anything about their comment, I've decided to just reply here.

Well, it was a mistake. *shrugs* It happens when you're learning stuff, doesn't it?

I don't think it's a disgrace, actually. Because everybody has to learn somehow, so if anyone wants to laugh at my mistake, I'm fine with it. I was barely through Intermediate-2 classes at the time of this post, so there was still lots more to learn. :)

Also, if you would like to know what school I'm attending, I will tell you, but first, let me say this: do not judge the school by its students. There are plenty of classes with lots of other students, and I don't think I'm any kind of shining example of their academic excellence. Every school has good students and bad students; the teachers can only do the best that they can.

Me "boasting" about being top in class? Well, I scored the highest on a test; who wouldn't be happy about that? But this was a mark of just 76/100, in a class of nine students, myself included. 76% is average, to me. And nine students is really, really few people; any kind of scoring among so few people is not a benchmark for anything. If I could score full marks or something for the JLPT, then that would be something that I'd properly boast about.

I attended Bunka Language Private School (in Singapore, if you're not from here). Their pace is rather fast; not everyone can catch up. I consider myself lucky that I'm one of the few who was able to keep up, and as we went on to higher levels, juggling work, revision, homework and other things I do in my free time, I just barely managed to stay on top of things.

But my classes are over for now; I haven't started Pre-Advanced classes yet, and as of our final test in Intermediate-4, I was placed third in class. I could've scored about 10+ marks more if I'd memorised all the keigo forms, and actually placed first again, but hindsight is 20/20, and it's already over anyway. At least I still had an acceptable mark of 73%.

Thank you, anonymous, for your concern about me being disgraced by my poor grammar, but it's really quite all right. We all need to live and learn from embarrassing mistakes. :)

Good (rainy) morning to you too. Hope everyone had a nice long weekend. :)
And hope that those who celebrated the occasion had a good Hari Raya too. :)

I spent most of yesterday reading... and editing and tweaking subtitles for dramas that I'd downloaded. :p I know we're not supposed to edit people's subtitles, but sometimes I can't stand the English phrasing.... ><

I don't make huge overhauls of the entire subtitle file or anything, I just correct spelling or grammatical errors here and there... and if I can actually tell that something doesn't sound right, then I change that line. I think I prefer softsubs for that reason (Softsubs are when the subtitle files are separate from the video file. They can be edited, but you need a subtitle editor to do so.). But I suppose hardsubs (when the subtitles are encoded into the video file) are less troublesome.

And for once in a long while, it was sunny! Was actually kind of hot; I wouldn't have minded cloudy rainy weather for a nice public holiday. :p

I think it's been a long time since I last posted Twitter stuff. Somewhere in the middle of the day yesterday, I was amused by this:

momo09301126 (a Japanese fan):
Shin-chan in "Daiji na Koto" is so cool that it makes me cry. Haha.
("Daiji na Koto" was AAA's 27th single. She's probably referring to the PV for the single.)
Shinjiro:
Haha! Thank you.
Naoya:
He's always so cool that I get nosebleeds.
Shinjiro:
Haha!! Don't lie~!
Naoya:
 Our prince's aura is so dazzling that you have to wear sunglasses when you talk to him.
(So is that supposed to be Naoya's excuse for wearing sunglasses all the time...?)

Naoya-Shinjiro interaction on Twitter never fails to amuse me. And there was this too, from back in August, which I didn't post (but which I saved because it was so cute XD):

Shinjiro:
(Is it) Tomorrow? Today? I have to be awake in about three hours, but I haven't even slept yet! Haha, oh well.
(This was posted at about 2am, Japan time.)
Shinjiro (a few hours later):
I only slept for about 2 hours, but I'm not sleepy at all! Haha, I'm so energetic, me. XD
Naoya:
And now you're just totally knocked out in the car.
Suzuki Ami:
Aww, he's so cuuute.
Naoya:
That's our prince for you.
Shinjiro:
Don't tell everyone!!!

Morning events on weekends suck. Nobody wants to wake up early on a weekend.... -_-

But! Seeing this made my day all better! Well, marginally. (Fangirling up ahead, but I bet you've already guessed that by now, haven't you?)

Everyone's in autumn-y, winter-ish colours. It makes me wanna curl up somewhere and sleep. Haha.

And Misako looks so pretty!! I love Nishi's jacket. I want a jacket like that. Looks so cool. Nishi and Misako look so pretty that they even distracted me from my normal main focus for a while. LOL.

Whoever dressed them this time, thank you so much; at least now everyone looks fantastic in this picture, and Shinjiro looks so OMG-damn-HOT. XD
(Somehow, I think that if he were wearing eyeliner, he'd look friggin' gorgeous. But that would probably clash with the soft, natural look that everyone else is sporting. Haha.) 

But putting him in skinny jeans probably makes it terribly obvious how thin he is. Which is scary enough already. Can you eat more please. Nishi as well. I think their BMI is the lowest in the whole band; it's like... what, 17 or lower? 0_0

Hidaka's jacket is interesting. The design on it makes it look like knitwear, but... Okay, I actually can't tell from the photo whether or not it's actually knitwear. Haha. But it looks really interesting.

I like that you can see Hidaka's hand on Shinjiro's shoulder as well. Posed shots are nice and all, but I like it when there's interaction (no matter how small) between the members.

Random morning musings: My dream house would be half library, half studio, and all artistic clutter / organised chaos. :)

I want a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves made of dark wood, full of books that are arranged by alphabetical order of authors' names. It needs to have a comfy couch with poofy cushions and a fluffy throw and maybe a rug that I can dig my toes into when I feel like it. :)

And a desk. A desk with one of those old-school reading lamp with a green glass cover and a short pull-chain, and a swivelly roller chair that reclines when I lean backwards to contemplate the sky ceiling. XD

And recently, I've got around to thinking that maybe I'd like the other half to be a studio/ working space, where I can have a workstation for writing and a work area for making notebooks and other things and knick-knacks that I'd like to experiment at making but have never done because I don't have a space suitable for it.

Yeah. "Head up in the clouds" is a good way to start a weekday morning at work.

Thanks to a sudden burst of inspiration (and madness - ne, Shuta-muse? :) ), "Zero" has grown by another three pages and is now 33 pages long.

I still have no idea where it's going. My stories do that; they lead *me* around by the nose even when I'm the one writing them.

For anyone who's curious, "Zero" was inspired by the AAA PV for the song of the same name; when I first saw the PV, my brain wondered, "But what were they doing there?" and ran away with the idea. If you watch the PV, you'll understand what I mean.



And this was from the "split-personality" single too; "MUSIC!!" was the main single, but "ZERO" was the B-side. So you had one video that was full of colour and open spaces and "yay!", while the other one was all about lockdown, grey colours and insanity.

Arrived home at about midnight after having dinner with Weiquan, Jeslin, Wai Xin and Weiquan's parents at Pietrasanta.

We had four different kinds of wines tonight, and Wai Xin considers that "not a lot" of wine. I gave him the "what the hell?" expression when he said that. Then I considered that he's probably had more than ten varieties at some point in time, so yeah, four might not be a lot. But four is a lot for normal people, 'kay, 酒鬼? :p

Decided to try getting started on my Japanese homework while I'm still wide awake after my shower and waiting for my hair to dry.

But got sidetracked when I switched on lappie and opened up my browser and Twitter and saw that Shinjiro tweeted that he'd blogged. Well, Sunday, so let's go pop over to the official bloggie.

If it weren't for the little funny emoticons that he usually uses to title his blogposts, I would've thought it was Hidaka or Nishi blogging for a minute. Suddenly so many pictures.

On second thought, no self-taken, camwhore-ish pictures, so maybe not Nishi. XD (Because Nishi's posts are full of camwhore-ism. Were you ignored as a child or something?? Lol.) Guess it kinda looked like a Hidaka post for a moment.

Was kind of a long post (which is also unusual for Shin-chan), so I had plenty to read. I think I'm getting faster. But long strings of particles that don't seem to make sense slow me down. For example, I *think* I sorta get the feeling what it means, but I don't really understand what "なのに" is supposed to mean. *scratches head*

It makes it worse sometimes when Shin-chan mixes his native Kansai-ben in with the hyoujungo and my Rikaichan gets confused because it groups the characters weirdly and I can't understand it.

(Side note: "寝れへん" just sounds weird. I can't imagine how anyone would say it.)

This post is just full of randomness, have you realised? All righty, I'm off to bed now. Haha. :D