Much credit is due to my economics lecturer, Peter Midmoore.  I honestly believe he's one of the best the school of business has to offer and despite my disinterest in economics, his dry humour does often liven things up during lectures.  At the end of every session, he has a short 5 minute review session comprising of seven or so short true/false questions based on what we'd covered in the lecture.  Noticing that there was both a decline in attendance and in participation with the quiz, he recently started to offer chocolate bars to those who got the questions correct; I myself have been lucky enough to win two bars in recent weeks.

I'm still hitting the gym with Peter every day and I'm feeling great.  We've just increased our workload on most machines and the results are really coming through.  I feel more energetic, healthier, and the buzz after each workout is a real bonus.  Khang's still dead-set on trying to coax me into eating a kebab immediately after a gym session...

For the first time in months, I was genuinely quite impressed with the latest issue of Newtype USA.  Featuring heavily on shows coming up in Easter, I felt I actually did get something from it rather than the usual rehashed information that I've read about online weeks ago.  The bundled DVD also featured an episode of Divergence Eve which I've been wanting to check out for a long time (yes, it is a tits and ass anime), though sadly, I was disappointed at what I was presented with.  Two minutes into the first episode and it had already managed to confuse me with the title, "Mission 2".  The rest of the episode was an odd mix of serious story telling coupled with obtrusive fanservice.  Now, anybody that knows me will know my love for fanservice, but it does have to be in the right context and situation.  With Divergence Eve, it just felt at odds with the rest of itself.  I was actually considering the first DVD (of three) but after this, I'll be spending my money elsewhere.  Thank you, Newtype USA!

My shipment of the complete Planetes manga arrived recently too, kudos to Amazon for getting it to me a week earlier than expected!  The manga seems like it'll be a very rewarding read from an anime fan's perspective; three of the best story arcs from the second half of the anime have already been presented to the reader.  Talk about throwing your aces on to the table early...  The visual style of the manga also changes after the first two chapters which I found really odd; its as if they were originally the artist's rough works which were used to pitch the manga to a publisher.  It didn't look particularly Japanese at all, more akin to the type of black and white comics you'd find in a newspaper.  The latter chapters resemble the anime much more, Hachimaki has black hair (not white), Yuri has white hair and doesn't look permanently stoned, and Fee...  well, Fee looks hotter and we'll leave it at that.

I made a bit of an odd discovery last night regarding the show, Mahou Sensei Negima; it seems it already has two aired versions of the same theme song, "Happy Material".  Mike had mentioned to me a while ago that the early episodes would be re-done from scratch for the eventual DVD release since Ken Akamatsu thought they looked like shit.  I didn't realise that the theme song would also receive a make-over, now featuring different vocalists (the cast of the show), more guitars, and sounding more like ska-punk; time for some skankin' me thinks!

Whilst I was home over the weekend, I decided that I'd try my hand at learning katakana and hiragana.  I now play more Japanese originating console games than ever before and figured it'd prove useful deciphering various menus and option screens.  Katakana is used for English words used in the Japanese language, for example, Christmas (Kurisumasu), pocket (pocketo), and memory card (memori kado).  Hiragana is kind of a halfway house for words of a Japanese origin; if you know the kanji for the word then by all means use it since it reduces the number of necessary characters in a sentence.  However, I believe on the last count there were actually over 36, 000 kanji symbols available for use with Japanese so you can't honestly expect somebody to remember even a fraction of those.  Hiragana allows one to "spell" out a word phonetically as it were, by breaking the word down into its basic syllables you're able to write down the corresponding characters which produce the same sounds.  There are also subscripts and various other additional characters which can change the way something would sound so it can be quite overwhelming for somebody delving in for the first time.  An excellent beginner's guide can be found here, courtesy of ntsc-uk.com

Its a sad day for the Church of PSP, Nintendo have confirmed they'll be releasing the DS in a slew of various colours.  The white and black versions have caught my fancy and I'll be placing an order on play-asia fairly soon.  First, I need to shift my Famicon edition GBA SP before any of this can take place...