Gundams

I have just sent in an order for a 1/100 scale Dynames gundam and one 1/144 scale GN-X a few days ago online. They are much cheaper than when they were sold in Brunei. A 1/144 scale cost me about 30 bucks back then and a 1/100 scale cost me about 70 bucks. That's just a little higher than how much you can get them for in Malaysia. Thankfully the site I ordered it from sells them for about half the price. With luck, I hope they don't turn out to be out of stock like the Avalanche Exia I originally ordered. Aside from that, I am also expecting the new gundam 00 Ps2 game, Gundam Meisters to reach Brunei soon despite it being in japanese. Gundams are the epitome of awesome.


I've been meaning to write in about a bunch of other stuff that I had planned on posting up here but never got around to it due to the many interruptions in my life. For now I'll leave you with some of the dreams that I have written into my dream journal. Yes, I've been keeping a dream journal but that's to see how far i can remember what happens while I'm asleep. Been very absentminded this year for some reason and my inability to focus on one thing has gotten worse. But that also means that I'm getting better at multi-tasking even though I really don't need to get better at that as I can play with my yoyo, read a book and play chess at the same time. I'm one of those people who make others wonder why is it I never crash into things while I read and walk. Funnily enough it actually helps me read faster as when I'm in a hurry I simply scan the pages with my eyes, reading several lines at once in my head and compile them together to understand what's going on. That really helps a lot with my last minute revisions. Having dozens of thoughts running around in my head makes it easy for me to get sidetracked. This is shown by the fact that I was only going to leave you with my dream entries but am now talking about my multitasking capabilities.

Back to my dreams:

03/03/08

It was a bright day. I was at my grandpa’s house and I was climbing the stairs. I took one step up and blinked. When I opened my eyes, I was at a white sandy beach on an island. The island had a lush green forest up on the higher ground. The sky was azure with some clouds and the sea was deep blue like in Australia. It was an extremely beautiful place. There were people around me and I think I knew them but I didn’t talk to them. Actually, it seemed like these people weren’t people I already knew but people that I might know in the future. I couldn’t see their faces though. I walked up to this brown wooden rowboat and moved it into the water. I got in and the boat and it started moving through the water by itself. Not like it suddenly propelled forward but started floating in the right direction. Eventually I reached this halfway point between islands where white stone cubes emerged out of the sea and floated in the air above me forming some kind of arch. Each cube seemed to be made of marble and Aztec-like patterns covered each cube and all of them were at least 5 meters away from each other and weren’t on the same height with adjacent ones. The cube in the center of the arch was the highest of all. After admiring the arch, a blue whale leaped out of the water hiding the arch from my sight the way a dolphin would. When it splashed back into the water, I found myself on a different beach on an island similar to the earlier one. What was different with this island was that there was a huge white monolith with Aztec-like carvings on it the size of a skyscraper. But the way I saw it was different, my body was definitely on that island but I was seeing it from where I was a moment ago. I turned around and I saw that the rowboat was on the beach as well upside down and I was looking at where I saw the island from. The arch of floating cubes was still there and I turned around to find myself in front of white marble steps that led to the monolith. I looked back and saw that the beach behind me and that I was on an intermediate platform between the steps leading to the monolith and steps that led from the beach. I looked back up at the monolith admiring it. It really was a work of art. It seemed ancient and foreign to me. I wanted to take a closer look at it and I started to climb up the steps. I looked down at the steps as I walked up but when I looked up again, I was at my grandpa’s house again back where I was standing before I was at that island. I‘m not even sure if that was an entire dream. If the dream was only me at the islands then this dream must have happened in an instant while I was awake.

05/05/08

It was nighttime. I was sitting inside of a small airplane. It was the type that could on be ridden by a small number of people and had propeller to move it. I looked outside the window and saw that the plane was above this small island with an apartment complex on it that was surrounded by a lake that was surrounded by a brightly lit city. I then found myself standing next to the plane. It seems that we already landed near the waters and there was a speedboat not far from me. I looked into the plane and saw an anxious pilot and my siblings looking down at the floor of the plane. I then saw my parents looking very distressed walking away from me to one of the car park area. It seemed that they wanted to leave quickly for some reason. I looked up and saw that the apartment complex didn’t have a light tuned on in any of its windows. It seemed that no one lived here. I looked to my left and saw that there was light coming out of this room that looked like the entrance into the building. I went in and saw that there was no one at the reception counter. I looked opposite the counter and saw a corridor that lead to the rooms. It split into two corridors at one point. It was dark in the corridor and the only light came from a small white fluorescent bulb that was positioned above this grandfather clock. I looked at the face of the clock and the dreamed ended there.

06/06/08

It was nighttime judging from the entranceway. I was walking along a large red and gold carpet in a hotel. I passed by the reception area and walked up these stairs that lead to the rooms. There were corridors on either sides and I took the one to the left. There were many doors along the walls of the very wide corridor and I kept walking looking for a specific room. After some time I saw an door that was slightly open. I went in. The room was dark but I could see since the TV was open. It was playing an old black and white murder story. There were many things on the floor around the bed but I walked across the room to the open veranda door. I stepped onto the veranda and saw that there were hundreds of verandas similar to the one I was at around me. The scene then shifted to me being on a dirt road in a field of bright green grass. It was bright beautiful day with some clouds up in the sky. There was a mountain in front of me. Its peak seemed to reach high into the sky. I could tell there were stairways along the mountain. I then saw that the path was leading closer to the mountain and would take me under a naturally formed archway around the mountain if I followed the path. The dream ended without me even taking a step forward.

15/08/08

The class complained about the exam question one part (ii) that it was because the exam outline according to the teachers didn’t match the question. Rif did a wall run up and flip onto the roof behind him at sunset. People were impressed and it felt like I’ve seen him do it before. Auzee played around with my backpacks and hid them around. Wandered through a house with many odd sized passages and a bunch of people were partying in one room. Found 1^st backpack among others hidden under a table in a dark but yellow tinted hallway. Found the 2^nd in a kitchen like area that was slightly dark but all bluish white walls. Some light was coming through the windows and they were soft white lights. Carried them back to a parking lot that looked a lot like the stadium’s. It was a cool misty morning at the time. After that found myself inside a mall like area with a green floor in the middle of an area that’s just supposed to be empty and surrounded by walkways. It was noon at this time. Met Wali in the supermarket in an aisle with shelves filled up with sour creams and onion Pringles bragging about how his onion linked other merchandise plan was drawing in money and girls. Oddly enough I didn’t see any money but some girls dressed in red outfits standing around him. Woke up after that.

29/08/08

It was noon. I was looking down on people from the veranda of a fire station. A bunch of people I knew standing below on the streets were calling me to come down. I grabbed hold of the railing and jumped over. I quickly pulled my body closer to the railing before I let go and pulled myself closer to the wall under the veranda by pushing the floor of the veranda. Used my feet and hands to slide down the wall before jumping kicking off at a sufficient height for a good jump. The people I knew didn’t have any recognizable faces but they told me to follow them. I walked with them until one of them walked into this abandoned hangar just down the street and screamed when he went inside. We went in and saw that the guy was twitching and his skin was pale. Not far from him was chupacabra-like creature that had one shrunken and one swollen eye but was wearing glasses and a white shirt. It leapt up high into the hangar until I couldn’t see it. The others told me to go chase it down while they take care of the one who got attacked. I ran back to the fire station and got up on the roof. I jumped off the veranda and onto the roof next to the fire station. Ran across several roofs to the hangar. There was a huge hole along the ledges right under the roof. I walked along the ledges to the hole. I nearly fell down once but there this red and white metal pole protruding out of part of the ledge that I grabbed. After getting back onto the ledge, the pole snapped and I took the metal pole with me into the hole. On the other side of the hole were walkways along the walls. I walked along it for a while before the chupacabra jumped me. I whacked it with the metal pole in my hand and before it could recover from the hit, I thrust the pole into the chupacabra’s chest like a spear and knocked it over the railings. It was still unconscious by the time I got downstairs. Then for some reason the people I knew sprayed it with what I somehow knew was water mixed with onions using a water gun. I then found myself in a hospital where I found that the chupacabra returned back to being a human and he was complaining about the test that he got before turning into a chupacabra. He was saying something about having to prove his proficiency with Sanskrit and Indian before being allowed to pass a citizenship test. I suddenly found myself in a wasteland full of ruins. A man was telling me to get inside his car quickly. I got in and we took off. It was sunset now. Behind us I could see that for some reason dust and stones were flying about in specific regions. This kept happening until I realized that there was a pattern to it. They were giant footprints and we were being chased by something big and invisible. We drove across the wasteland until the car sped off the end of the edge of an archipelago. We landed safely but for some reason, a huge part of the archipelago’s left side was now covered in dust. My guess is that the monster tripped and fell down. We drove further until we went past this rural living area and stopped at a lake. We passed by an oil transport truck before reaching it. The lake was extremely large and beautiful that it may have just been a still ocean surrounded by mountains. I turned around and both the man and his car were gone. I walked back to the rural area and saw a bunch of girls quarreling over something in front of a house. They went in when they saw me in a very orderly and quiet manner. I walked up to the house but instead of entering through the door, I just walked through. There was no one on the other side of the door. But soon a girl was being carried into the room by what I think were her friends who were invisible. The dream ended there.

01/09/08

Dreamt of two people in a game-like ninja mansion. Very many guards on four sided fortress wall that protected the ninja mansion on the island. Outside was a typical dark place in the woods/ remote village. The hero tried to sneak by swimming underwater to the mansion but there were too many guards for him to sneak past by. Many times he disobeyed the laws of physics to shoot a shuriken at a ninja’s head while underwater in FPS mode getting several head shots. Others didn’t seem to care. Eventually a master came by on the outskirts of the town that looked like a yellow tapir nosed person dressed in blue robes. He told the hero how to get in. Hero got in through hidden air vents and met the heroine inside the air vents. They snuck in and out hiding in a hidden room connected to vents until they got enough info. When they decided to take a chance, they dropped from the vents into a part of the mansion where the ceiling was high and the room was white with big green hill in the middle of the room with lots of dragon quest-like monsters around frolicking. I then found myself standing outside London kebab area in the rain at night raining. End of dream.

The ones with the same month and day in their entries were entries that I think happened in those particular months but not on those particular days. That's all for now but I should warn about something as well.

Be prepared. I'm not sure what's going to happen soon but it'll be a major event of some sort. I've been getting this strong feeling that the events happening right now are simply the prelude to something big. Be ready for whatever's coming.

Avril Lavigne could make Mummies laugh

It's been four days since i ate a carbonara dish at Dixy Chicken and I still haven't lost my craving for italian food. Last time I ate some at capers, it took me two weeks to get over it. Hope that it doesn't last as long this time.

Anyway, I recently watched the 3rd Mummy movie. It bored me. I could predict everything that was going to happen before it did and that was not because of my talent with precognition. The movie was just too damn unoriginal. I was hoping they could at least throw in a giant monster fight. Giant monster fights are always good. Though I have to say that I did like Jonathan. The same as he was in the first two movies and still as funny.

Onto the next thing. Do you guys remember that Avril lavigne song, "girlfriend"? I don't think she meant for it to be funny but I Laughed Out Loud the first time I heard it in the car. I found it very amusing for someone to go up to a couple and tell them directly that one of them should be replaced with themself. When I saw the music video, I laughed even more. That song is just so damn obnoxious. To add to my laughter I found a video where someone synced the song to a bunch of scenes from "Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu". Normally I am against such kinds of behaviour but that was too well done a video.

Take a look at it:



That's it for now, hope you enjoyed the video as much as I did.

"Acupressure"

Lately I’ve taken to casually threatening people in humorous but plausible ways. Not that I actually plan to carry them out. It’s just more for entertainment purposes. I wouldn’t mind seeing them carried out though. I do come up with some rather creative threats.

I guess that it’s actually quite effective when I say it with my poker face but I think I’d be able to get a much better effect by smiling. Especially considering the fact that me smiling usually means that someone else is suffering some sort of indignation at the expense of my entertainment.

Aside from making threats, I do have other deterrents to make sure that people won’t bother me. One of them is actually quite easy to do and requires very little energy and focus to do. Colin once told me that it was called “Acupressure”. I’m not even sure if that’s the actual name for it but Microsoft Word doesn’t seem to argue with the spelling so I guess it’s real. That’s why my posts are quite long by the way. I’ve usually got twenty other pages open in Firefox so I have to make these things in advance.

Back to “Acupressure”. Basically it’s like driving a sword through cracks in the shield. It involves me pressing a finger onto several spots on the body with enough pressure to send a sharp intense pain through that part of the body. You’d be surprised at how many cracks there on the human body.

I’ve tested it on myself sometimes to figure out some of the more troublesome spots. Unfortunately, my ability to dull out pain hinders my attempt at figuring out how effective some of these spots are. There’s also the fact that I’m one of those people who feel like they’re being tickled instead of pain when hit in certain parts. Approximately 50% of my cousins are the same way on my mother’s side of the family. Thankfully the ones that I enjoy bothering aren’t in that 50%.

When I do test these areas on people later, they always look like they were slapped hard in the face. In fact I have this new spot I want to test out on people but it doesn’t really cause much pain but this feeling of disorientation for a few seconds. Unfortunately, I would only be able to use this in practice when in close proximity of my target or in a surprise attack. I’m not even sure of the extent of its effectiveness on other people.

“Know yourself before knowing your enemy”. That is basic concept in the art of war. It means you must be aware of your own capabilities and limits before engaging an enemy. This applies to “Acupressure” very well. I actually figured out how to do it just by understanding which parts of my body would be the most effective places to attack. It doesn’t have the effect of paralyzing people like in those Chinese fighting movies but it is quite useful. I can even use it to relieve pain. It’s quite effective for whenever I have constipation. The stomach pains I mean, not the inability to eject waste. I’ve even used it to relieve neck pains for some people but they usually thought I’d only make things worse or was joking until they realized that it did work. I still remember Hafiz Alidi’s reaction when I managed to relieve him of his neck pain a few weeks ago. It was quite funny. Hopefully I’ll remember to send him emails with pictures of food during puasa like I planned.

There is another saying I like is “Only go into battle when victory is certain”. A very reasonable notion but I do have the tendency to disregard that piece of wisdom when I determine that any result would be fine with me. This “Acupressure” technique that I am capable of wouldn’t be very useful in real life combat on its own but it can be quite useful in creating openings. For example, a sharp thrust in a small unprotected area right under the sternum would force my target to exhale sharply allowing me to follow it up with a decisive knockout blow to several areas that would be open for attack. Thank god my yo-yo skills endowed my fingers with the strength to pull it off. It’s probably the same reason why some people think that I use too much strength while I’m typing.

Hopefully I’ll be able to figure out how to induce effects like sleeping or nausea eventually. It’d be very convenient if I actually could put people to sleep with a single touch. God knows that I wish for it every time my youngest brother thinks that what he has to say is so interesting that he won’t stop talking to me even when I tell him that I have no desire to listen to him talk about how Aliens and Rods exist (I don’t care whether or not aliens exist, they’re just one of those things that I’d say “They exist? Oh well” if they were ever proven to be real. As for Rods, I seriously really doubt there exists an organism that can bend space and time but depends on small little wings to move about). That was just a recent topic he’s been talking about and now he’s moved on to something about some game he plays at school. His talkativeness really gets to me and I have no qualms about shooting down stuff like santa claus with the harsh truth to keep him quiet.

That’s it for now. As for that new spot I want to test out, I think Edmond should make for a pretty good test dummy.

Despair Before My Birthday

Yesterday was my eighteenth birthday. Everything proceeded just like the ones in the past few years. The only difference was that it was much quieter than usual. People just wishing me happy birthday and no one singing “Happy Birthday” until it was time to cut the cake. Well… not really, Rif and another friend of mine tried singing it but my guess is that they both stopped because they could tell that I wasn’t in the mood to hear that song. I’ve been acting much quieter than usual yesterday because I honestly wasn’t looking forward to my birthday for some reason.

I’m not exactly sure why though. Even I find it odd that I am unable to enjoy my birthday as much as I usually do. I’ve always looked forward to it every year before this one but I just didn’t feel the least bit excited for today. I even liked the fact that few people actually remembered and that I could just let the day pass by quietly. I suppose maybe it was because I’ve been wondering about the concept of “despair” for the past week or so.

I don’t know whether it should be called a blessing or a curse but having a high IQ can be just as much of a burden as it is of use. Of course personality plays a vital role in that view but I’ll try not to ramble about that in this post. Last time I really took an IQ test online, I got 141 – that’s in the range of “Highly Gifted” since that’s four points short of being a genius. Funny thing about IQ tests, especially timed ones, is that you only have to go through a few times to manipulate so that your score can get as high as 191. I had to make several accounts to that though.

By having this amount of intelligence, I don’t have many problems with mathematics or computers. I do screw up often just because of careless mistakes. The proof lies in my O’level A. Maths results. So basically my logical ability is my strongest field of intelligence while visualization is a second. At least I think it was visualization. I don’t remember the specified ones very well but I do remember that logic was 168 and the second highest was 153 and third was 151. Don’t remember which category was third though.

Since logic is my highest category, it also means my reasoning ability is top notch. Before anyone who knows can think of disagreeing, let me tell you that having high logical ability doesn’t necessarily mean that your common sense will be high as well. Common sense is comprised of three things: Logic, Experience and Etiquette. I would rather have said politics or strategy instead of etiquette but that’s just my point of view while etiquette is easier for others to understand. While it may seem that my statistics in those three are high, average and low in those fields respectively, my knowledge on etiquette is actually quite high. I just choose not to be polite to people because I find it impractical and dull to restrict my opinions around people I know. Unless of course I have to deal with them through some form of business. I find it very hard to socialize with people that have direct influence over my activities. I just can’t shake off this desire to act in a strictly professional manner around them.

I always prioritize practicality over formalities. That means I also hate working on the frontlines of matters and prefer to work in the shadows where no one can see me. Of course people would often think of me as anti-social, manipulative and sometimes evil especially when I start smiling when things go wrong. Unlike most people, I still have the ability to be amused when things go wrong even when it puts me at risk. I guess that means that I prioritize entertainment over practicality. Well except when people are actually depending on me, I rarely get to have fun whenever they do that. As such the number of people who have seen the Death Note films and immediately thought of me when they saw L has exceeded twenty. Those are also the ones who would tell me that in person as well. I was actually amused when seven of them (all of them my cousins) simultaneously pointed at L and shouted my name when they came by while I was watching the L spin-off movie at home. Apparently two of my teachers have told me they did the same thing when they watched the first death note movie years ago.

Anyway back to “despair”. I think I’ve once written that normal people would be quite disturbed at my reasoning on matters like this. I’m actually quite surprised that I didn’t go into depression after picking at this concept. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t done the same thing with “emotions” all those years ago. Although, I did have to write down the more depressing findings on a piece of paper for a couple of days to try to get myself motivated to do things again. And to make sure that I wouldn’t accidentally cause a suicide if someone else read it, I burnt it and flushed the ashes down my toilet. I took me about three days to regain my motivation, it’s actually quite depressing to think about what others would do if they fully understood the contents of that paper.

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about depressing things. I think I started my habit of thinking about these things during my silent times when I was ten I think. That was the same time I bought a book called “Lord of the Dead” by Tom Holland. When I bought it, I honestly thought it was a book about vampires, werewolves and ghosts but it was quite different from I expected despite it actually having vampires in it. I am actually quite thankful that I read that book at an age where I did not understand the horribly disturbing aspects of that book. I went back to it about five years later during one of my idle hours equipped with much more worldly knowledge only to be shocked by the fact that I had finished such a book when I was ten. Two years later, one of my friends borrowed the book from our classroom’s reading corner only to call it one of the most disturbing books she had ever read. I don’t have that book anymore though since I have no idea who took it last or if it had been confiscated while I wasn’t around by our discipline teacher. It doesn’t matter though since the story of that book is now permanently burned into my memories in the form of a movie that can only be seen by me.

Anyway, my latest venture into this part of the way man perceives reality allowed me greater insights into despair. I believe that I even ventured into the deepest region of what despair meant to me and the inevitability of it. I would even go on to say that I’ve seen “Absolute Despair” in my thoughts. I’d rather not explain or lead people as to what that is but if you think it’s something related to death or loneliness, then you must be leading a happy life which could easily be destroyed if you understood what I’ve concluded “Absolute Despair” to be. I’ve had enough time to get used to it though. To illustrate what I mean, I shall use this one scene from d.gray-man to illustrate my point.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. I’d have to agree with that, though now, combined with my proficiency with psychoanalysis, I actually have something I can use break the “core” of most people. I feel that I may have just become a bigger threat towards humanity.

There are many good things about the fact that people can die. Not being able to die while having zero motivation would simply cause stagnation in the civilizations. That and stupidity. I remember watching this movie “Idiocracy” where there's this guy who’s been sleeping in a hibernation pod for 500 years only to find that world is now filled with morons who speak “text messaging” and water has been replaced by an energy drink. After watching it I made a decision. I came up with the top three worlds where I would commit suicide straight away should I find myself there. Here they are:

1. A world populated by morons only.
2. A world populated by men only.
3. A world filled with worm-like creatures.

Despite them being in that order, I seem to have reached the maximum desire to commit suicide in all those conditions so I based the order on the reasons why I would commit suicide or genocide depending on whichever is much more satisfying. Frustration > Displeasure > Disgust. I may be able to overcome my disgust for worms but I believe that I may never be able to overcome the urge to kill myself under the other two conditions.

You can easily imagine why I freely express my distaste towards Kyou Kara Maou to my friends. I honestly can’t see why is it a bunch of self-proclaimed straight guys would like such a series. Unless of course those really are just self-proclamations. Thankfully the fact that Animax will be showing CLAMP’s x x x H o L I c soon cheers me up. Those of you who don’t what that is, please get your mind out of the gutter as it’s a supernatural themed series whose only relation to what triple x’s normally stands for is the appearance of one of the main characters.

On a final note, anyone who knows me shouldn’t worry about me. I have no major symptoms of depression or the urge to start cutting various body parts. Pain only really registers to me when I concentrate on it so I honestly can’t understand why some of the people around find that making small cuts on their body would make them happy. I’d have to say even with my abnormal thought processes, I’m actually a lot more stable, mentally and emotionally, than most of the people I know.

Music: Japanese VS. English

Recently I acquired some character albums from one the anime I like. Honestly I wish Kyoto Animation would hurry up and deliver the second season but at least they’re continuing another one I like in the fall season. Anyway, the character albums for the main cast weren’t anything special but two of the support characters’ albums really stood out. One had a really upbeat and happy melody but I can’t come to like it as much as I could as the character for that album kept reminding me the dangers that one of my friends now poses to all girls under legal age. Hopefully whatever that guy is doing now isn’t something that could destroy his social life or get him sent to jail. Surprisingly though, there are a lot of people like him who mix up the world of anime with the real world and turn into creatures that society no longer recognize as humans. That sort of thing may have been normal centuries ago but now it’s illegal to indulge in those sorts of preferences.

Anyway, the other character album was really good. Go look up the seiyuu, Shiratori Yuri, on google and you may find a link to a song she sang. I actually set the one I liked best as my alarm despite the fact that it is so melodious and soothing that I may actually fall asleep again unlike the effect that my previous alarm had which would probably turn heads if people heard it because it’s almost unheard of for there to be a song that’s a mix of opera and rap (Iwasaki Taku is an amazing composer!). If I ever figure out how to host it on this blog, I’ll set up the songs I like for you to hear if they’re available for online streaming.

Most of you probably don’t get what I’m talking about or who those Japanese I mentioned were. Both of them were Japanese workers in the anime business. Seiyuu is the term for voice actor or voice actress and a composer is someone who comes up with the songs in the anime. The reason I know these things is because I am very big fan of anime. Despite being a citizen of Brunei Darussalam, I have watched and completed over 200 series of anime and read nearly 150 different manga of various genres in the past 6 years of my life(I did read Doraemon and Dragonball when I was younger but it was only in 2003 that I realized that they came from japan). Incidentally, about 35-40 new anime are introduced every thirteen weeks for each season of the year so I’m not even close to having watched 10% of all the anime out there.

This would seem very biased of me, which normally I try to avoid being but I have to say that Japanese music is so much better than English music. English music only occupies almost a fifth of my entire music library while Japanese music takes up 70% percent leaving the remaining ten percent split between instrumental music and game soundtracks( All the games were made in Japan though).

Why is it that I think that way? To set things straight, it’s not because of the language. If it was the language, I probably wouldn’t be enjoying the few Malay songs that I have. In fact, even though I can watch an anime without subtitles and understand everything that’s being said, it’s still too hard to translate the meaning of those songs while listening to them.

The reason I prefer Japanese songs over English songs is because so many of the English artists seem to be copying off each other while the Japanese keep on experimenting with their sounds. For example, if you listen to a song by Bow Wow and another by one of the many rappers out there trying to make names for themselves, you’ll find that their songs sound very similar. However if you take the songs “Evolution” and “Voyage” by Hamasaki Ayumi, you’ll find that despite both songs were made up by the same person, both are done in very different styles and are very good in their own way.

I’ll admit that it is true that Japanese songs have the same problem as well but it happens far less often to them than it happens to the Americans and that there are artists who are still finding ways to bring out good songs. I can name some of them: Akon, Linkin Park, Goo Goo Dolls, Sean Kingston, Black Eyed Peas and One Republic. You can probably tell that these guys are at the top of my list of favourite American performers(Stephen Colbert is at the top while President Bush is 2^nd who is still funny even though his job isn’t actually performing in front of people) despite the fact I haven’t heard any new ones from them lately. I do applaud Linkin Park and Black Eyed Peas( Or to be more specific WILL.I.AM. and Fergie) for having so many different sounds in their albums, they also had some of the more interesting videos. I still can’t understand why critics would slam their albums so badly just because they wanted their songs to go above the norm.

The fact is that a majority of American artists lack creativity in their songs and seem to be filling up their albums that have one or two good ones with a dozen other mediocre ones just to fill in the gaps. I do have to say that they definitely beat the Japanese in terms of music videos which is quite odd for a nation that hold so many superior musicians. They really should think of getting the anime opening directors to direct their videos instead. Look for any video by the “Brilliant Green” on youtube and compare it to say – the anime opening sequence of “Xam’d: Lost Memories”. Love its song by the way.

There’s also the fact that most of them use vulgar concepts and words in their songs which make it hard for me to enjoy them. How is it possible for people to enjoy listening to other people sing about what they should only do in private. Even though I seem to have lost 95% of my ability to feel embarrassment, I can still see how awkward it would be for someone to be blasting such inappropriate songs in a public area. Hell, the juniors at school even seemed to be bothered by the Kingdom Hearts boss music that I was listening to at school while waiting to be picked up and that didn’t have any lyrics in it(Though I only lowered it so that only people in my immediate area would hear it if they really seemed disturbed by it).

The Japanese on the other hand always seem to be trying outdo themselves in their fields, whether it’s in technology or music. Just look at the Nintendo Wii, Xbox360 will NEVER match its sales because it’s the most unique console yet. That’s why I always seem to be finding new Japanese songs that are fresh whether they be sung by singers or composed as background music for an anime. The variety that they have to offer is much wider than any other country I’ve heard(Don’t get me started on Korean songs, almost every single one I hear is a love song about someone missing someone else). Thank god that the same also applies to anime and manga.