try and try again.

cute.monster.kills@gmail.com — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:33:02 GMT

I have an interview in 3 hours for a full time graduate job, and I should be getting ready, but I can't help but need to write something down.

My coworker's friend's ex boyfriend just killed himself last weekend.

Every death is tragic, especially when someone took his own life. This inevitably reminds me of the 3 deaths that happened to my classmates in high school. Two died of accidents, and one died of murder.

And then I just thought, how fragile life is.

I'm sure all of us have had moments in our lives when we just want to give up and think that life is nothing but an endless challenge and that we are tired of living. There are just so much pain, rejection and bad things just seem to happen one after another and we feel like no one cares and no one understands.

I think about the trifles that tied me down for the past 2 months, too much school work, no money, no prospect of future, rejection from job applications, relationship problems and so on. But really, nothing is the end of the world, and these things should never be the end of someone's life. Everyday we breathe, we are trying to live. But with every try, we will get rejections and it's part of life. But no one really fails. To fail is to give up, if you give up then life will no longer exist. But meaning to life only exists if you live, try and try again. Life will always have a meaning as long as you are living. So don't give up because you think life has no meaning. It's a cliche to say that life is short, but life is short. The inevitable truth is, no one will really remember us when we die. 10 years later, 20 years later, or 50 years later. So why be afraid to embrace life? Why would we be afraid to go after something, or someone that we really want? Rejection is not scary, it is through rejection that we find our own path.

Don't be discouraged. Try and try again.

guan says, remember to stay in school kids

cute.monster.kills@gmail.com — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:19:24 GMT

I think this is the first time I've gotten annoyed at work, -_-

Maybe the annoyance from the weekend was carried into the week, but I just have to rant.

Today while calling a customer regarding their appointment, she was very bitchy and angry at the fact that she didn't know that she was switching companies. I accept the fact that our sales do not like to mention switching companies to customers, and will say anything to get them to sign the contracts. However, what I don't understand is, on the contract, it states CLEARLY that they are in fact signing up with a different company. HOW FUCKING RETARDED MUST YOU BE to sign a contract and not read that one BOLDED line stating the important information. Furthermore, how FUCKING RETARDED do you think you sound to me when you get pissed off and claiming that you have no idea what-so-ever when there are only 3 lines of information and what you claimed you didn't know was BOLDED IN YOUR FACE?

HELLO, retarded mid-aged working white lady, I can reasonably assume that you have an education that taught you how to read. We are not "sneaky" (quoting her) for giving you a contract and letting you read it yourself. You are RETARDED for not reading it and SIGN it with your information.

I seriously don't understand these people's excuses. If you feel like you can't understand what the sales person is pitching to you, DON'T SIGN THE CONTRACT. If you feel like you've been cheated, how about READING THE CONTRACT BEFORE SIGNING IT. It's not like we are giving you a 500 pages contract, it's merely a page with 4 point forms. It takes under 1 minute to read 4 sentences.

I know it's my job to deal with these stupid people, but sometimes I really feel like hanging up the phone, drive to where they live, and bitch slap their retarded brainz.

summer of joyful social studies brings tears to my eyes

cute.monster.kills@gmail.com — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:59:10 GMT

Not a moment passes without each one of us experiencing, on every level of reality, the contradiction between oppression and freedom; without each one of us being caught up and weirdly twisted by two antagonistic perspectives simultaneously.

- Raoul Vaneigem

cute.monster.kills@gmail.com — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:37:11 GMT

For the request of hasunoutena, ^^ I typed up the Yoshihiro Togashi interview from the American Monthly Shonen Jump, you can get a basic knowledge of him.

Yoshihiro Togashi, the mangaka of the popular, famous and classic manga Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter x Hunter, also some other very cool manga such as Level E (though I personally can't fully understand that manga and hence put no interest in it). He is one the most famous, sucessful, popular mangaka in Japan, and he is one of my favourite mangaka. His sense of imagination is different, out-of-this-world, he doesn't fall in typical pattern, giving you all those typical shonen crap, he tells you the importance of friendship, love, family bonds without giving you all those sassy goosebumps crap such as YuGiOh.

=D you gotta love him, if you don't know what I'm talking about... Either buy an issue of the American Shonen Jump or go to www.toriyamaworld.com and find the scanlation of Hunter x Hunter and start reading!

-_- I feel like I'm doing a commercial... yeah, guess my choise of advertisment for future is pretty suitable....

This interview appeared in the very first year of the monthly American Shonen Jump, in which Togashi's YuYuHakusho was serialized. Feel free to link to this interview.

At this very moment, in a disorganized studio full of books, reference material, video games and toys, Yoshihiro Togashi is drawing manga. Originally working in the big-eyed, big-mouthed, screentoned art style of the 1980s, on Yu Yu Hakusho he gradually developed into one of the manga’s most distinctive artists. The screentone was replaced by an attractive minimalism. The faces and figures became beautifully detailed (when he wanted that effect) or cartoony, sketchy and jumping with action (when he wanted that effect). His current hit Hunter x Hunter has sold over 20 million copies so far, but a good manga artist never stops learning, and Togashi gets more incredible every day.

Togashi debuted as a manga artist after winning one of the Japanese Weekly Shonen Jump’s new-talent contests. A fan of the occult and horror movies, Togashi put these elements into his early manga and specifically YuYu Hakusho (which has, at times, shocking violence inspired by horror films). In YYH, thinking up bad guys was his favourite work. “unfortunately, the really evil ones can’t be published, so I have to censor myself.” The names of the characters were something he whipped up on the spot, on the level of skimming through the dictionary and putting together out kanji characters he likes. “Yusuke is pretty much a pun, and Kuwabara is a combination of the names of two pro baseball players. Hiei and Kurama are also just names that popped into my head.” In a Togashi manga, the serious and the crazy are just two sides of the sam coin.

Togashi has a self-effacing attiude and a wicked sense of humor, particularly about manga (in a sense of joke definitions of manga terms, he defined “manga that develops healthy well-balanced children as “would you read it?”). but at the same time, his works often express the importance of family relationships and human ties (without being sappy), and few mainstrwam manga artists are more thoughtful. Shonen Jump had the opportutnity to ask the ever-busy Togashi a few questions.

SJ: shonen jump
T: Togashi Yoshihiro

Young Yoshihiro:

SJ: What were you like when you were younger (say, in middle school and high school)?
T: when I was in middle school, I was a bright and optimistic kid, and when I was in high school, I was a dark and pessimistic young man.

SJ: how old were you when you first started drawing? What sort of things did you draw?
T: I started drawing around the 1st to 2nd year of elementary school. I was already drawing manga at that time.

SJ: can you tell us about some of your artistic influences?
T: I was introduced to H.R. Giger’s work through the movie Alien, and was greatly influenced by him.

SJ: how did you become a professional manga artist?
T: I submitted a piece to a Weekly Shonen Jump contest, and was contacted by one fo the editors.

Hoobies & Interests:

SJ: what are your hobbies? What do you do in your spare time?
T: Bowling, which I consider exercise. I spend my spare time with my family.

SJ: I have heard that you are a fan of horror movies. Which onese are your favourite, whether from Japan, America or other countries?
T: Among Japanese movies, Joyu-rei (Ghost Actress, 1996). Among foreign movies, Dawn of the Dead (1978).

SJ: I have heard that you are a fan of video games. What kinds of games do you like? Are you playing any video games right now?
T: I like board-type video games. Right now, I am playing Culdcept (a Japanese strategic multiplayer card-battle board game with magic and monsters)

SJ: if you had to rate your interest in these three genres – sci-fic, fantasy and horror – how would you rate them in order of preference? In your own work, do you think of these as separate genres or all part of the same thing?
T: it changes from moment to moment, but right now, 1) fantasy 2) sci-fic 3)horror. But I don’t really put meaning into any of these classifications.

SJ: do you read a lot of fiction (books, not manga)?
T: I don’t know how I would compare to other people, but I do read quite a few novels. Mysteries, sci-fic, non fiction, etc.

SJ: what parts of the world have you visited? What are some of your favourite places, and why?
T: Turkey, Egypt, Spain, among other places. I enjoy seeing landscapes that I can’t see in Japan.

SJ: what kind of drawing materials do you use today on Hunter x Hunter, compared to the past with Yu Yu Hakusho?
T: it basically hasn’t changed: drafting ink and Kabura pens (a large-nibbed pen “Kabura=tyrnip which produces relatively even lines). However, which HxH, I started using th eMac for some of the colouring.

SJ: have you ever considered doing a non-shonen mana? Something for older readers, such as a seinen (young man) manga, for instance?
T: I have. I’d like to challenge myself to anything at least once.

SJ: you hare excellent at drawing realistic portraits of people. Do you ever draw from life, or base your characters on actual people?
T: almost all of it is from my imagination, but I also often take the images of actual people and embellish them in my own way.

SJ: you have a great talent for drawing monsters and weird creatures, from scary ones in YuYu Hakusho and Level E, to whimsical ones in Hunter x Hunter. How do you do it?
T: Actually, I kind of draw them on a whim, without thinking too deeply about it.

SJ: in fighting manga, it’s necessary to come up with mangy visual effects for showing motion and power. How do you do it?
T: no matter what, I try to make it easy for th ereader to understand what’s happening.

YuYu Hakusho:

SJ: YYH changes a lot after Yusuke comes back to life. Can you tell us why you decided to turn the series into a fighting manga?
T: I had already planned to do so from the beginning. The rest was just figuring out the timing.

SJ: when you first introduced Hiei and Kurama in Volume 3, did you plan for them to become major characters?
T: I intended Kurama to be a major character from the very beginning, but I wasn’t sure about Hiei at first.

SJ: who is your favourite villain in the series, and why?
T: The Togruo brothers, because they are fundamentally unrestrained.

SJ: who is your favourite female character in the series, and why?
T: Shizuru (Kuwabara’s sister), because she keep her cool.

SJ: some fans have debated this, so… how do the Reikai (spirited world), Ningenkai (human world), and Makai (demon world) in YYH relate to one another? Is the Makai “Hell”, or some place else entirely?
T: as far as it goes, I’ve interpreted them as being on parallel planes of existence. Places that it would be difficult to travel to with current scientific technology.. .something like that. It’s much easier to go there as a ghost, without material body, so most people end up going there when they die. Heaven and hell are ultimately just a tiny portion of the Reikai and Makai which people accidentally wandered into, saw and came back to tell about. You can think about it as being just one face of a die. But anyways, the explanation is that it all exists somewhere in reality.

Back to Real Life:

SJ: recently, you had a son. Do you feel that becoming a father has changed your work, or will change your work, particularly relating to the “young boy looking for his father” theme in Hunter x Hunter?
T: I feel that it will be a great influence on me from this point on.

SJ: in closing, what advice would you give to fans who are interested in becoming artists themselves?
T: 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, think of everything in your life in terms of manga. Then it will be easy to become a manga artist.

Cute.Monster.Kills

try and try again.

guan says, remember to stay in school kids

summer of joyful social studies brings tears to my eyes