2 weeks, 3 papers, freedom! / Memories of Animeskies.

till then, i need to concentrate!!

Recently I did a search for my old anime graphics design website "Animeskies" and ended up on tumblr with tons of pretty pictures like the one above with the hashtag. It was a good decade ago when it was popular (or at least I think it was more so then, or perhaps it was just me who got out of it) to go to graphics sites to get your layouts (found one submission!) blogskins, neopet profile design (called lookups), wallpapers, animation sprites, downloaded calenders, midis, japanese lessons (someone kept a copy of some translations), photoshop tutorials, manga drawing tutorials etc, and such sites even give each other "awards" which are like graphics you can display on your site with an awarded title. 

Like this :P I gave out awards too! Essentially, sites ask you to judge them and you decide the category they receive  X)

Sigh nostalgia. Gone were the heydays! Haha, it was such a teenagish hobby all conjured up with photoshop and dreamweaver and ftps etc. That was around the time when the internet started taking off. I wasn't born into this millenium. u.u

We (I had a team of contributers! Friends, classmates) actually had a good amount of hits too! I had to deal with bandwidth problems and looking for hosts. Started off from angelfire, then to freewebs, then to  Jennifer who hosted us at our last address (animeskies.endlessrain.org) . I actually found an analysis of the website. There were the people back then who frequently comment on tagboards/chatboxes. But I guess now those individual design sites are superseeded by tumblr etc where people post their works directly onto the sharing sites. Oh man, I'm starting to feel old enough for reminscing! The little details from those few years are coming back to me now that I start looking at these things again. Its amazing how much you forget with time. Its only when you look back that you see the things that have changed. My writing 10 years ago was terrible lol. To be fair the graphic designs were very basic too! lol. Teenage hobbies.

Some screenshots of the oldest layouts (yes, it was fashionable to change layouts to version 1.0, 2.0 etc X) )

I don't have a screenshot of the last ever one. :( I could go on forever, but I've been distracted long enough today with 3 days to the exams so... Better get my butt off non-related tabs. :(

Haha, I'll end off with a blinkie from then as seen in the screenshot above! :p Till freedom!

[Cover] Ray of light - FMA 歌ってみた & Utaite culture!

After being a fan of the Fullmetal Alchemist 鋼の錬金術師 series for a while (watched both the original and the brotherhood series), I finally got down to finishing one of the songs which I liked from the anime. Recorded last summer, this is a cover of the ending song "Ray of light" from fullmetal alchemist brotherhood originally sang by Shoko Nakagawa 中川翔子. I chanced upon a video of her talking about the meaning behind the lyrics she wrote which if you're interested. She wrote the lyrics to the song from the point of view of edward to his father who left ed and his brother when they were young just like her own father so she tried to identify her own feelings with edward's. The song means is mostly about conveying the process of growing up, much like a strong ray of light.

I found it a little difficult to record this, I think mainly because the pitch goes lower than I'm comfortable with so I tend to sound flat, but after many tries, this is what I came up with! I hope you like it!

Also found out some terminology today. People who (like me lol.) regularly covers j-pop and anime songs are called 歌い手（うたいて）and the songs that they cover are usually labelled "Song title を歌ってみた" which essentially means "I tried to sing ____". Apparently its a Nico nico douga practice? 面白い。

The discovery of this 歌い手wikipage also uncovered an entire universe of youtube/nico nico douga (NND) cover singers, some of which are more famous and have tracks in compilation albums such as quoted from the wikipage:

• 10 Dai Utattemita Live! BEST (10代うたってみたライブ!BEST) features talented utaite in their teens (10代).
• Ikemen Voice Paradise (イケメンボイスパラダイス) features utaite who are considered ikemen, that is, male utaite whose voices give the impression of being good-looking.
• Kamikyoku wo Utattemita (神曲を歌ってみた) features kamikyoku, or "godly songs", sung by notable utaite.

Amazing isn't it? At the risk of sounding like some fangirls I know of this subculture, some of the male singers of this genre do have very attractive voices, and some of the girls are very professional too! XD Granted alot of it revolves around vocaloid songs that are original productions. Anyway I digress.

Van