Summary:

The episode starts out with Mikuru serving tea to Kyon and some new character yet to be introduced, though he was in the first episode. Then we see Yuki without her glasses, which will be explained later. Kyon’s narration describes being involved in a “world-cramping” event that happened in the previous month, but doesn’t quite explain it. Instead the attention is turned to Haruhi’s idea of entering the club into a baseball tournament to promote the existence of the SOS Brigade. While planning out who else to recruit for their baseball team, Mikuru suggested that she had a friend. Kyon wonders to himself what kind of friend this is. As in from where and “when”. Mikuru settles Kyon’s suspicions by telling him that she’s “from this time”. Trust me, I was a little confused too. After they decided the team, they went to the school baseball team and asked them to let them use the field and their equipment. The team caved in at the sight of Mikuru.

Haruhi at that point was at the batter’s position and started sending baseballs at the club members. Mikuru was too scared to attempt to catch any balls, Kyon tried but couldn’t catch any. Our new character could catch them, but with effort. Yuki just stood motionless and caught baseballs that came directly at her. While Haruhi practiced with the school baseball team, Kyon asks Yuki if she could make it rain on the day of the tournament. She warned that it would have aftereffects on the ecosystem centuries down the road.

At the day of the tournament, we are introduced another character that was in the first episode. This was Mikuru’s friend, Tsuruya. For the last recruit for their team, Kyon brought his 11-year-old sister in. Haruhi was somewhat outraged that Kyon would do that, but then she figured it would be a good handicap for them since they didn’t want to slaughter their opponents too badly.

Their first opponent was a college team favored to win the tournament. The SOS Brigade scored nothing most of the way through while the other team gained a massive lead. After more disappointment, Haruhi appears frustrated and the three club members besides Kyon realize that something bad is about to happen, such as Haruhi destroying the world due to her bad mood. As the new guy explains to Kyon about the situation, there is a sudden flashback of a large humanoid figure. Just for a moment. While they managed to hold off their opponents from winning the game for another inning, the new guy asks Kyon how he and Haruhi managed to get out of the “other world” and suggested that maybe Kyon would do the same thing to get out of their current situation. Kyon refuses. The new guy resorts to asking Yuki to save the day. Yuki is shown moving her mouth really fast, which Mikuru points out as an incantation. Kyon has another flashback where he’s with Yuki in a strange setting where she’s chanting really fast with her mouth and she has glasses on.

The flashback ends and we see Yuki hitting a homerun. Yuki tells Kyon that the bat has been modified with a boost in attribute data. Or quite simply, it now has “homing mode”. After several homeruns, Kyon tells Yuki that that’s enough, worrying that anymore would raise a lot of questions. Since victory has yet to be secured, the next strategy was to make Yuki the catcher and Kyon the pitcher. As Kyon pitched, Yuki would control the ball with her powers preventing the batters from being able to hit the ball. At the last batter, the ball fails to fall into Yuki’s glove and the batter takes off running. Yuki slowly walks to the ball and with just a flick of her wrist, she sends the ball flying at Haruhi at second base where the batter is running towards. The ball’s velocity hits Haruhi’s mit and rips it right off Haruhi’s hand and is stopped by the new guy as he catches the mit that has the baseball. The batter has stopped in his tracks, bewildered by what he just saw and the new guy tags him out while he is still in a state of shock. The game ends, but Kyon talks Haruhi into forfeiting their spot to their opponents claiming they’ve had enough fun for the day. Haruhi agrees.

Review:

Sorry if the summary was a bit long. There were a lot of things that could not be left out. Anyway, when I first saw this episode, I thought I missed an episode because there was a lot of content mentioned in this episode that I didn’t see. And the lack of explanation led me to believe that I was supposed to know what’s going on. I quickly went back to the last episode and checked the preview for the next episode. To my surprise, this was supposed to be episode 4. I thought to myself, what the fuck? As I watched the preview to this episode, Haruhi says it’s episode 7 while Kyon says it’s episode 4. At that point, I realized the episodes were out of order, going according to how Haruhi calls it considering whatever she wants to happen, happens. Therefore in this case, she wants episode 7 to be the next episode, and that is the case.

On the topic of too much content, we have this new guy in the club. Yuki doesn’t have her glasses anymore, which obviously makes no difference to her. Mikuru is in a nurse outfit for some reason. Then there were the flashbacks that Kyon has with some scary looking blob giant and where he’s in another dimension with Yuki. As a final tidbit, just because I’ve seen this whole series already, is where Haruhi suggests tying Mikuru’s hair into a ponytail but throws away her suggestion after looking at Kyon. I can’t spoil it now, but that short moment has a lot of meaning behind it. As well as how Kyon and Haruhi got out of the “other world”. All the viewers are left with are that the two are gonna be involved in some kind of situation. Next episode, according to Haruhi is episode 3, though the airing order would make it Episode 5.

Here’s the end of the Bahamut fight in Advent Children. I found it pretty enjoyable because of how the scene was constructed with the different characters propelling Cloud up to catch up with Bahamut Zero. Then there’s the soundtrack playing in the back called Divinity II. Awesomeness.

Last night I felt like playing around with Photoshop so I just whipped something up really quick to brush up on my techniques. This is what I came up with.

Then with some modification, resizing, and a few extra items, I came up with this:

That’s what it feels like anyway. Usually there’s nothing really special to write about. But that’s not the point of writing a blog. It should just reflect my current thoughts at the moment I’m writing it. So I might as well give it a shot. So what’s on my mind? That would be the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Ever since last Friday, all I saw in front of me was just three days of work and then there’s four days of relaxation. It’s definitely something I need. Though I’m not close to burning out from work, it could potentially happen, so I’m going to really savor these four days. Just tonight, it took about two and a half hours from the moment I got off work to the moment I stepped foot in my house and took off my shoes. That’s really the downside of the Thanksgiving weekend I guess. The freeway was packed tonight. I don’t even want to know what it’s going to be like Wednesday night as more than the usual amount of people are on the road.

Along the lines of work, which takes up an average of 10 hours of my day, compounded with 3 hours of commute to and from, I’m starting to reconsider perhaps cutting down on my work hours. The first month of work, it was 8 hours each day. Then as the days went by, I’ve adopted a more destructive schedule which was an average of 46 hours a week. It definitely brought in the money at the end of the day. But is it worth it? I don’t mind reverting back to eight hours a day, but I’m addicted to the almighty dollar. What can I say? For now, I guess I can wait until the time is right: either by own choice or when I can’t take it anymore.

I think what I need to keep me blogging is a hobby. Although it feels like for some, blogging is their hobby. But I’m an artist at heart. Unfortunately, the conflict is that I don’t have time to work on my art. Why don’t I have time? Because it’s wasted on work. Perhaps maybe I should not work so much, but I need to work a lot to build a comfortable security for myself in case something unfortunate happens. And so I’m left with not enough time in my life to pursue my hobbies, which therefore cuts down the potential for blogs. Endless, vicious cycle! Yarr.

Oh well. I still love my website. It’s revolutionary. But Google has yet to notice. That’s fucked up.

I’m just posting this in case someday my source of information is lost. This is in regards to downloading videos off YouTube.

Step 1:
Go to YouTube video that you want. View the page source.

Step 2:
In the page source, search for “player2″

It’ll look something like:
player2.swf?video_id=(long string of numbers, letters, and symbols)”

Copy all content between = sign and ” mark.

Step 3:
Insert http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id= into URL
Insert copied content after = sign
Hit Enter
That should download the video as Get_Video with no extensions.

Step 4:
Go to downloaded file and rename it to whatever you want to and add .flv to the end as the file extension.

Step 5:
Download an FLV player. Plenty of them out there like VLC Media Player.

And that’s it. I’ve adopted this method for YouTube videos that I want to post on my site because I know how long my site will be around, but I sure as hell don’t know when a particular YouTube video will stay on their database.

Credits go to TIAN @ http://www.tian.cc/ for the tutorial.

Summary:

As the episode starts, Haruhi identifies our narrator as Kyon, which is about time since I’m tired of referring to him as the narrator. Haruhi tells Kyon that she wants to recruit a “mysterious transfer student” to the club. Her definition of a mysterious transfer student would be one who transfers to the school two months into the term. At the club room, Haruhi decides a computer for the room would be nice. So she heads over to the computer club, which is in the same hallway.

Haruhi barges into their club and demands a computer from them. The computer club president refuses, of course. Haruhi then places the president’s hand on Mikuru’s breast and takes a picture. Afterward, she kicks him on top of Mikuru and takes even more pictures. Haruhi tells him that she now has images of him sexually harassing Mikuru. The rest of the club members refute it claiming that they know what really happened. Haruhi fires back saying she’ll say that the whole club was planning on joining up with the president’s actions. If you know what I mean. The computer club president gives in to the extortion and Haruhi manages to take their newest model. Afterward, Haruhi even forces the club to set up the internet for her in the literature club room.

Haruhi then appoints Kyon as the person to set up a club website. While Kyon works on the website during lunch, Yuki who haven’t said anything yet gives Kyon a book and tells him to read it. Later in the day, in the club room, Haruhi comes in with a stack of flyers and tells the club that they will be distributing the flyers in bunny girl costumes. Haruhi puts on one and forces Mikuru to put on the other. Kyon runs out of the room as Haruhi is taking off Mikuru’s uniform. Afterward, Haruhi drags Mikuru outside as Kyon apologizes in his thoughts to Mikuru by not trying to help her get out of the situation. As they attract a large amount of attention out in the open, the faculty stops the two and Haruhi and Mikuru are back in the club room as Haruhi vents her frustrations.

The next day after the club meeting, Yuki asks Kyon if he’s read the book she gave him. Kyon says he hasn’t. Yuki tells him to read it as soon as he gets home. While Kyon flips through the pages, a bookmark falls out of the book. The bookmark had a note, written so neat that it looked typed, that read (translated) “7PM Waiting in the park in front of Kouyou Station”. Kyon runs out of the house and heads towards the location where Yuki is there, still wearing her school uniform. Yuki takes Kyon to her apartment and tells him that she and Haruhi are not ordinary people. She goes on to say she is an interface created by the Data Integration Thought Entity. Or in other words, an alien.

Review:

There were many small tidbits that I could not include in the summary so I’ll include them here in the review. In this episode, Mikuru refers to our narrator as Kyon. Kyon says to himself, “you’re calling me that too”. In technicality, Kyon is a nickname that his sister calls him. His real name is never revealed. The bookmark’s words are handwritten, but looks like print because Yuki is really a computer-like entity. As for the episode itself, most of it felt like any other normal episode with the main plot being the computer club fiasco. When Yuki reveals herself as an alien at the end of the episode, that took me completely by surprise. Before this point I thought I was just watching a comedy with regular people. All of a sudden, there is an alien involved and Haruhi suddenly becomes a mysterious abnormal being.

And if you thought this was a surprise to me, the next episode was even crazier. It left me confused, amused, and a little more wiser. In that order.

Summary:

For this episode, the narrator, currently nameless, talks about how he stopped believing in Santa and various other supernatural beings as he grew up. Though he did wish that such strange things would appear in front of him. On his first day of High School, he ends up sitting in front of a girl who introduces herself to the class as someone who is not interested in regular humans, but instead interested in aliens, time travelers, espers and so forth.

As our narrator, he goes on through the episode describing the likes of this story’s heroine, Haruhi Suzumiya. Some of his lunch buddies talk to him about the strange things that Haruhi has done in middle school and about some of the relationships she’s had, which all have which did not last very long. Our anrrator goes on to describe the strange acts that he noticed Haruhi performs while at school. Such actions such as having different hairstyles for each day of the week and as the days go by, the more ponytails. Another would be Haruhi joining every club in school but quitting them soon after.

The narrator strikes up a number of conversations with Haruhi during homeroom and they end up talking about the clubs at school. Haruhi can’t find the club she wants, while our narrator explains that you can’t do anything about what doesn’t exist. This would lead to Haruhi realizing that if there’s no club, then all she has to do is make one herself. She drags our narrator into helping her do the paperwork for setting up the club while she finds a clubroom. She ends up taking over the Literature Club, which had one lasting member, Yuki Nagato. Haruhi then pulls in a new member named Mikuru who doesn’t even want to join the club until she sees Yuki and says she understands and agrees to join the club.

At that point, Haruhi decides on the name of the club, which is the S.O.S. Brigade. Well, it would make sense in Japanese as it comes out “Sekai wo Oini moriagerutame no Suzumiya haruhi no dan” to make the SOS work, but anyway, it translates into “The save the world by overloading it with fun, Haruhi Suzumiya’s Brigade”. Our hero is left with a giant headache, giving up on even trying to talk sense into Haruhi.

Review:

As I was watching this, there were some interesting scenes going on. It did alright as an intro to some of the main characters and an introduction to what the rest of the series is going to turn out to be. what drives this show really is Haruhi’s personality mixed in with the thoughts of the narrator. And the SOS Brigade is probably going to be something the anime community will remember for a while as well as the “Host Club”.

Here was a spur of the moment sketch I drew that I eventually turned into a spur of the moment Photoshop experiment with coloring.

Here’s what it originally looked like on paper.

Outline:

Inked:

Final:

Oh man, everytime I see this GIF animation, I get a little humor and then some sadness and pity. What do you think?

Here’s an old flash video I found while I was cleaning out my computer. I can’t seem to find a way to convert it to a streaming format. I can’t seem to figure out how to upload videos on youTube. Anyway, this is for the nostalgia of Ragnarok Online; my first MMORPG. It’s a 3+ MB file, so give it some time.

| Ragnarok Battle Online

There have also been continued versions of this called Ragnarok Battle Offline which is a side-scrolling computer game. Go figure eh?