Love is... Montagues vs Capulets

I just recently finished the anime (Japanese animation) adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. Released early in 2007, I only managed to get to watching it courtesy of a very busy and challenging year and of course, now the advent of the summer holidays. I'm glad i left this series to watch when I had nothing else on. And i have to say, it's THE BEST adaptation of Shakespeare's play I've seen. Every previous adaptation pales in comparison to this anime. While set in a semi-realistic world (with the exceptions a floating city, the existence of pegasi and some strange tree and its respective caretaker) with a real heavy dystopiatic (<-- is this even a word?) theme, the entire story doesn't detract too much from the original work of Shakespeare. Granted, it's still to some extent a tragic love story marred by familial fued (though not your garden variety familial fued)

IN ANY CASE, for all anime lovers out there who doesn't know the existence of this series, I SUGGEST YOU HUNT IT DOWN and watch it ASAP.

In Shakespeare's original work Romeo and Juliet both died by killing themselves which in my opinion, despite the context / circumstance in which they did it, was a really horrendously stupid way for a couple loving each other to die. While in Romeo x Juliet the ending is not dissimilar, it's at least a whole lot better. I've hinted too much about the ending already in my latter sentence so I'll shut up and let all of you watch and find out yourselves.

Personal enjoyment rating: 9/10

Yellow Christmas, Oven New Year, and callouses on my fingers

This post is just to bring readers up to speed on what's happened since i last posted an entry

As per the previous entry, i was waiting for my academic results. I now can say that i have passed and now this year, in 2008 i am finally progressing to the 3rd year of my course, which was meant to happen this time last year.

In any case since then there's been some hot days, notaby Christmas day and New Year's. Both were around the 40 degree (Celsius) mark and no real respite coming until a couple of weeks back when it was in the mid 20's.

I've also recently applied as a transcriber at www.animechords.com, a rather popular site dealing with transcribing, as in, putting chords to anime music. My "application" was picked out of "many with rather questionable ability to communicate effectively and ability to transcribe". I was pretty happy about that. the only downside of this job is that i won't get paid for it, but might just get picture of large cute animal plushies, or so says my "boss". In the process i've gotten to know a little about a guy who lives near the border of western Germany in a little town called Venlo that goes by the name of Jelmer bas Kosters.

I've managed to complete a couple of transcriptions thus far, but have more to do, hence the callouses on my fingers playing guitar for hours on end.