The other day I mentioned Luis’s “Tokyo Interiors” prints on display in Shinjuku, and now the Electric Objects pieces are all available — looks like the device to run them is sold out at the moment though.
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Month: April 2017
Earlier today I got to talking about the films of Hirokazu Koreeda with a friend at work, and it’s only after looking him up that I realized he had directed Maboroshi, which not only was his first feature film, but also one of the first proper Japanese films I remember watching at a theater — this would have been back in 1996-98, while I was student in Montreal. That movie marked me quite a bit, but I hadn’t watched any of his other films, so tonight I decided to watch Our Little Sister, which I absolutely loved. Sure, it doesn’t hurt that it stars beautiful girls as the sisters, but I thought the story was quite touching, and the performances were really outstanding. Think I’m going to need to start making my way through Koreeda’s filmography.
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Sunday Morning Cartoon Cavalcade Vol. 3
This weekend’s cartoon cavalcade was off to a bad start when I realized there was no new Samurai Jack this week. So instead I started with the first proper episode of the new Tangled series. I still mostly like this for the art style they’re using, but it makes for a pretty fun series so far. I then watched 3 Mickey Mouse shorts, all very good as usual, especially “Panda-monium.” Then it was time for some more Ren & Stimpy, and oh man, I had completely forgotten about Log — “it’s better than bad, it’s good.” To cap things off this week, I watched the new episode of Rick & Morty that was released yesterday. I’ve watched a few episodes from the first season, and I liked them fine, but for some reason I’m not super drawn to the show. Same goes for this new episode — I liked it fine, there are a bunch of great laughs, but I’m not particularly excited about watching more.
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Ukiyo-e Manner Posters
There have been a lot of great posters promoting good manners in Tokyo transit over the years, and the latest series from Seibu Railways inspired by ukiyo-e is, well, quite inspired. See the rest of them in this Spoon & Tamago post.
This video produced for the promotion of an app to manage the exchange of business cards (called Eight) is pretty mesmerizing to watch. Via Tokyo Soup.
The latest episode of Toco Toco TV is definitely the weirdest one I’ve watched yet, featuring game creator Yoko Taro (Drakengard, Nier). It’s a fantastic episode, and fits Taro’s personality perfectly — from the strange scenes at home (pictured) to him typing nonsense on a computer at the studio (“I can’t see the cursor,” over and over again). I’d also love to visit that pinball place in Osaka. Anne has outdone herself on this one, and I can’t wait for the next episode, which will focus on Editmode, the company behind The King of Games clothing line.
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Inori – Prayer
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of AyaBambi, and so not only am I happy to see them in this video, but this is just an amazing example of projection mapping, to a degree I’ve never seen before. It was done using a new kind of projector called the DynaFlash *1, developed at Tokyo University’s Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory. The video itself was produced by TOKYO and WOW.
I was suddenly in the mood to check out Powerless, a sitcom set in the DC Comics universe that debuted earlier this year. I liked it so much, I ended up binging all 6 episodes that have aired so far. The cast is terrific — and I really quite like Vanessa Hudgens’s super genki character — and it’s really pretty funny. Glad I checked it out, and looking forward to more episodes.
Shortly after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, there was a story that came out about a non-Japanese programmer appearing in the game’s credits, Corey Bunnell (pictured), who it was later discovered had a long time ago written in a forum about his dream of working for Nintendo — read this Kotaku piece. I find this to be such an inspiring story, and it reminded me of how lucky I find myself to have been able to also follow a dream of working in games, and making it happen.
Yesterday (March 31) marked exactly 2 years since we left Tokyo, heading to Canada to spend time with my parents in my hometown, with still no job in sight (or any idea of what city I would end up in). It was a scary move to make, but I had faith that I could make something happen eventually. Just over a month later we were moving to Montreal, and on May 11 I started work at Eidos Montreal as a Production Coordinator for the Shinra Technologies team there (under the Square Enix umbrella). Two years later, and I’ve continued my games journey by moving to Ubisoft and experiencing the launch of a new franchise for the company (For Honor), and now I get to work with yet another terrific team of people as part of the studio’s “Game Operations Online” team.
Without wanting to sound too cheesy, if you have a dream of doing something, sometimes you just gotta have faith that you can make it happen if you try hard enough (and being surrounded by awesome people who can support you in different ways doesn’t hurt either). I decided to do this at a point in my life (i.e. age) when most people are content to simply continue to coast on the path they’re already on. I still have other goals I’d like to achieve, but I can say that what I did was well worth all the effort — and yes, all the stress too.
I was in the mood to start watching another old anime series, and remembering how much I enjoyed watching Future Boy Conan last year, I dug up another old Hayao Miyazaki series in the form of Sherlock Hound (or Meitantei Holmes). Miyazaki only wrote/directed the first 6 episodes before moving on (because of issues with the Doyle estate that halted production for a while), but I’m looking forward to going through all 26 episodes. I just watched the first episode this morning, and it’s deliciously Miyazaki in style and tone.