It was an exciting day for Japanese Manga and Anime and costume play (cosplay) fans in the State when the Hobbycon 2011, the State's arguably biggest alternative hobby convention, kicked off in Suria Sabah, Saturday.
The first day of the two-day event, which ends today (Sunday), saw various Anime-related activities such as singing, dancing and individual cosplay competition performances.
In addition, many booths were set up showcasing various types of Anime and related items and activities such as games, toys, artworks, fortune-telling, comics, wall art, demos and many more. Judging from the first day, an increasingly large number of the cosplayers appear to be of the fairer sex.
"Gurren Lagan" cosplayers Becky as Yoko Littner and Leone as Kamina said they did the costumes themselves and that both their outfits and props cost each of them under RM200.
"We took about a month or two to do our costumes and props and yes, we are big fans of the Anime and Manga," said Becky.
Another Cosplayer was Cassandra whose character was Mortred the Phantom Assassin of DOTA fame. "I spent less than RM150 on my costume which I made by myself from items including a hula hoop, cardboard, paint and paper," she said.
The occasion also saw some rather offbeat characters including a cosplayer named Massy who cosplayed as an "evil" Ronald McDonald character along the lines of the "Joker" of Batman Movies.
"I spent about RM200 on my outfit which was tailored, she said, adding that she thought the theme was unique.
Another cosplayer Jnalee, who was cosplaying as a Repentia Battle Sister character, said she did her outfit which cost less than RM200 from various bits and pieces and also with some help from her friend Nex who was also good in making props.
According to Hobbycon 2011 event organiser Julian Lee, there was a few "firsts" in store for this year's convention as compared to previous years.
"The highlights of this year's event include bringing in a special guest in the form of Japanese 'Seiiyu' (voice actress) from Japan, Aimi Terakawa, who is the voice of 'Suiko' in 'Cardfight!! Vanguard' who will be performing and also having autograph sessions for her fans both on Saturday and today (Sunday).
"Also we are having probably the first in Malaysia an 'All Star' march where cosplayers do a march in for the opening ceremony.
"We are also going to have a anime quiz and rubics cube competition in addition to Earth Realms Mortal Combat PS3 competition, Magic the Gathering competition and Warhammer 40K and Fantasy Demo, Rigzone computer and console demo, Engetsu Character Design game and Japan TCG Card Board Game.
"We also have 12-15 friends from Sarawak coming to support us which is coming from 'Gunpla' - a Gundam Modeling Group who are here to showcase their hobbies.
Julian said members of the public are invited to come over to enjoy themselves at the event which starts at 9.30am till 5.30pm on Sunday.
2011年12月11日星期日
2011年11月24日星期四
Local massage therapist has magic in her fingers
"It started about 10 years ago. My husband Mark owns his own business. He came home stressed and very tight in his neck, shoulders and back. I gave him massages to help relieve his stress,” says Terri LaBell. “Amazingly, giving the massage was a release for me as well. I went into a zone and could relax doing the work. I found it very rewarding.”
For eight years Terri, who lives in Avon, worked on her husband at home. As she put it, “I pretended I was a real massage therapist.” During the day she worked as a purchasing agent for one of the area’s biggest design and automation companies. This was 2006 and she had spent the last 23 years working in a cubicle and decided she needed a change. A drastic change.
Terri spent the next two years attending professional massage school after work at the Onondaga Massage School here in Rochester. In 2008 she shut down her cubicle once and for all and began her new career as a licensed massage therapist.
“It’s so rewarding when people email or text me the next day to tell me they are pain free. It makes up for the 23 years I spent in a cube and it’s a great affirmation that I’ve made the right decision. I’m helping people every day, and that feels great.”
Earlier this year the former owner of Massage on University decided to sell the business when she moved to Vermont. Her hope was to sell the business to someone who would run it with as much care as she had for the past 10 years.
Having spent two years learning the ropes, Terri jumped at the opportunity to own the full-service relaxation center that offers more than a half dozen services from scrubs to facials, waxing, manicures, pedicures and, of course, full-body massage. On Oct. 1 Terri officially became the owner of Massage on University, the same place where she worked for the last two years.
“Human touch is so important. I’ve read studies of monkeys who were deprived of social interaction and touch. Ones that were touched, they thrived. The isolated monkeys did far worse,” Terri says, speaking of the famous Harlow experiments performed by American psychologist Harry Harlow.
“I think humans are the same way. It’s a disservice that massage is not readily covered by health insurance. Pills are prescribed freely but massage is held in a different regard when in all actuality many pain sufferers need therapy once a week but just can’t afford it,” she continues.
For eight years Terri, who lives in Avon, worked on her husband at home. As she put it, “I pretended I was a real massage therapist.” During the day she worked as a purchasing agent for one of the area’s biggest design and automation companies. This was 2006 and she had spent the last 23 years working in a cubicle and decided she needed a change. A drastic change.
Terri spent the next two years attending professional massage school after work at the Onondaga Massage School here in Rochester. In 2008 she shut down her cubicle once and for all and began her new career as a licensed massage therapist.
“It’s so rewarding when people email or text me the next day to tell me they are pain free. It makes up for the 23 years I spent in a cube and it’s a great affirmation that I’ve made the right decision. I’m helping people every day, and that feels great.”
Earlier this year the former owner of Massage on University decided to sell the business when she moved to Vermont. Her hope was to sell the business to someone who would run it with as much care as she had for the past 10 years.
Having spent two years learning the ropes, Terri jumped at the opportunity to own the full-service relaxation center that offers more than a half dozen services from scrubs to facials, waxing, manicures, pedicures and, of course, full-body massage. On Oct. 1 Terri officially became the owner of Massage on University, the same place where she worked for the last two years.
“Human touch is so important. I’ve read studies of monkeys who were deprived of social interaction and touch. Ones that were touched, they thrived. The isolated monkeys did far worse,” Terri says, speaking of the famous Harlow experiments performed by American psychologist Harry Harlow.
“I think humans are the same way. It’s a disservice that massage is not readily covered by health insurance. Pills are prescribed freely but massage is held in a different regard when in all actuality many pain sufferers need therapy once a week but just can’t afford it,” she continues.
2011年10月19日星期三
A genius of the storefront
Thus began a collaboration that has extended from Pixar’s headquarters, completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, all designed by Bohlin and a team of architects from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson led by Karl Backus – and Jobs himself.
“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Bohlin said last week, a few days after Jobs’ death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”
Just as Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.
“No one in commercial architecture has ever channeled a product into architecture for a client the way Peter did for Apple,” said James Timberlake, a founding partner of KieranTimberlake, who is now designing the new American embassy in London. “Most commercial architecture is under-detailed, under-edited and under-budgeted. It’s gross and ugly, and most of it is an eyesore on the American landscape.”
The work of Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple, by contrast, is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced – and expensive. In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product’s presentation and customer experience.
The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple’s cube on Fifth Avenue in New York, its cylinder in the Pudong district of Shanghai or its soaring market hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have become so distinctive that Apple is seeking to patent the glass elements. Bohlin’s firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ gold medal in 2010.
In their years working together, Jobs and Bohlin, who is 74, appeared to have achieved a rare chemistry.
Jobs was “a very public person,” Timberlake observed. “That’s in contrast to Peter. He’s not a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Philip Johnson. He doesn’t sweep into a room and take over. You go to a design meeting, and it’s more like a fireside chat.”
Backus, who lives in California and focuses full time on Apple work, said the team learned early on to approach Jobs with alternatives.
“He liked to be presented with options and would often make very insightful suggestions,” Backus recalled. “We all enjoyed the collaboration.”
The notion of glass as Apple’s signature architectural statement first appeared in the staircase in the company’s New York store in SoHo, housed in a historic building.
“We had a two-story space, which is a great challenge to get people to go up or down,” Bohlin said. “So we thought of glass. Steve loved the glass stairway idea. He got it. You make magic. We made these stairs that were quite ethereal.”
Just as Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure.
“We got James O’Callaghan involved. He’s brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London,” Bohlin said. “Now we’re cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom.”
In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. The fittings are embedded in the glass, “so you get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall.” Bohlin said.
“This is the kind of detail Steve wanted,” he added. “We’ve been driving for this, doing more and more with less and less. This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century. Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It’s an interesting challenge, how to marry the two.”
Apple’s use of glass in retail architecture emerged as a design and branding element at its Fifth Avenue store, which opened in 2006. The site had the initial challenge of luring customers into an underground plaza that had been notoriously inhospitable as a retail destination. The solution was a pristine glass cube and staircase flooded with natural light.
“We came to the conclusion it had to feel inevitable,” Bohlin said. “The adjacent GM Building has a tall, narrow facade, and its best aspect is directly across from the Plaza Hotel. Everything in the area is rectangular. So we thought of a square of light. It looks easy, but it wasn’t.”
Customers started lining up 42 hours before the store opened, and lines have formed ever since, with crowd control often required to prevent overcrowding. The building is now being renovated and expanded. In keeping with Bohlin’s and Jobs’ never-ending quest to achieve more with less, a new cube will feature larger glass panes and fewer visible connecting elements.
Despite its popular and critical success, Bohlin and Apple have not simply repeated the glass cube in other cities. The new Apple store in Shanghai is a glass cylinder using huge seamless panels of curved glass. Like the cube on Fifth Avenue, it leads to a large underground space, but in contrast, the area around it isn’t rectilinear, and the most prominent local landmark, a towering television tower, is located at an oblique angle to the shopping plaza.
“We had the idea of a circle,” Bohlin said. “Steve said, ‘Why isn’t the entire plaza around the entrance a circle?’ I said that was a great idea, but that’s beyond our control. The plaza was already under construction. Somehow he got the developer to agree to redesign and redo it. I don’t know how he did it.”
More recently, Bohlin has used glass to create what he calls “great market halls,” such as the Upper West Side store at 66th Street and Broadway.
“We’re doing a number of those,” he said. “The glazed lid. Can it be detailed any more delicately? I’m not sure. We continue to press that. Steve was a great client in this regard. He would not discourage innovation that was within his vision of what Apple is or he is.”
For someone as fascinated – some would say obsessed – by design and architecture as Jobs, it’s surprising that he lived in a relatively modest Tudor-style house in Palo Alto, Calif., built by a developer, and never lived in a house he helped to design. That might have changed had he lived a while longer. He and Bohlin had been at work for years on plans for a new house when Jobs died.
“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Bohlin said last week, a few days after Jobs’ death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”
Just as Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.
“No one in commercial architecture has ever channeled a product into architecture for a client the way Peter did for Apple,” said James Timberlake, a founding partner of KieranTimberlake, who is now designing the new American embassy in London. “Most commercial architecture is under-detailed, under-edited and under-budgeted. It’s gross and ugly, and most of it is an eyesore on the American landscape.”
The work of Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple, by contrast, is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced – and expensive. In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product’s presentation and customer experience.
The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple’s cube on Fifth Avenue in New York, its cylinder in the Pudong district of Shanghai or its soaring market hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have become so distinctive that Apple is seeking to patent the glass elements. Bohlin’s firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ gold medal in 2010.
In their years working together, Jobs and Bohlin, who is 74, appeared to have achieved a rare chemistry.
Jobs was “a very public person,” Timberlake observed. “That’s in contrast to Peter. He’s not a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Philip Johnson. He doesn’t sweep into a room and take over. You go to a design meeting, and it’s more like a fireside chat.”
Backus, who lives in California and focuses full time on Apple work, said the team learned early on to approach Jobs with alternatives.
“He liked to be presented with options and would often make very insightful suggestions,” Backus recalled. “We all enjoyed the collaboration.”
The notion of glass as Apple’s signature architectural statement first appeared in the staircase in the company’s New York store in SoHo, housed in a historic building.
“We had a two-story space, which is a great challenge to get people to go up or down,” Bohlin said. “So we thought of glass. Steve loved the glass stairway idea. He got it. You make magic. We made these stairs that were quite ethereal.”
Just as Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure.
“We got James O’Callaghan involved. He’s brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London,” Bohlin said. “Now we’re cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom.”
In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. The fittings are embedded in the glass, “so you get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall.” Bohlin said.
“This is the kind of detail Steve wanted,” he added. “We’ve been driving for this, doing more and more with less and less. This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century. Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It’s an interesting challenge, how to marry the two.”
Apple’s use of glass in retail architecture emerged as a design and branding element at its Fifth Avenue store, which opened in 2006. The site had the initial challenge of luring customers into an underground plaza that had been notoriously inhospitable as a retail destination. The solution was a pristine glass cube and staircase flooded with natural light.
“We came to the conclusion it had to feel inevitable,” Bohlin said. “The adjacent GM Building has a tall, narrow facade, and its best aspect is directly across from the Plaza Hotel. Everything in the area is rectangular. So we thought of a square of light. It looks easy, but it wasn’t.”
Customers started lining up 42 hours before the store opened, and lines have formed ever since, with crowd control often required to prevent overcrowding. The building is now being renovated and expanded. In keeping with Bohlin’s and Jobs’ never-ending quest to achieve more with less, a new cube will feature larger glass panes and fewer visible connecting elements.
Despite its popular and critical success, Bohlin and Apple have not simply repeated the glass cube in other cities. The new Apple store in Shanghai is a glass cylinder using huge seamless panels of curved glass. Like the cube on Fifth Avenue, it leads to a large underground space, but in contrast, the area around it isn’t rectilinear, and the most prominent local landmark, a towering television tower, is located at an oblique angle to the shopping plaza.
“We had the idea of a circle,” Bohlin said. “Steve said, ‘Why isn’t the entire plaza around the entrance a circle?’ I said that was a great idea, but that’s beyond our control. The plaza was already under construction. Somehow he got the developer to agree to redesign and redo it. I don’t know how he did it.”
More recently, Bohlin has used glass to create what he calls “great market halls,” such as the Upper West Side store at 66th Street and Broadway.
“We’re doing a number of those,” he said. “The glazed lid. Can it be detailed any more delicately? I’m not sure. We continue to press that. Steve was a great client in this regard. He would not discourage innovation that was within his vision of what Apple is or he is.”
For someone as fascinated – some would say obsessed – by design and architecture as Jobs, it’s surprising that he lived in a relatively modest Tudor-style house in Palo Alto, Calif., built by a developer, and never lived in a house he helped to design. That might have changed had he lived a while longer. He and Bohlin had been at work for years on plans for a new house when Jobs died.
2011年7月18日星期一
Bizarre image of Dour 2011
Who could, after five-star concert of Foals in a day, still shining in the firmament-Dour? Many more bands than we thought. Never before was the musical bar so high that alternative Walloon festival, which is also the highest number of visitors in its history and was received so prone area had expanded. Heavy precipitation, the only spoilsport, but Suede singer Brett Anderson show us how it came to Aberdour deal with it: do not talk about it, and yet you make it rain soaked everything. The persistence of Suede (****) was infectious: more and more people troepten together in the mud for The Last Arena, sang loudly along with the glamorous rock 'Trash' and 'So Young' and imagined themselves one hour long "The Beautiful ones.
Suede had yet been recognized in several other (*****), Pulp Britpop sensation in his grand comeback Dour polite. Jarvis Cocker, frontman as a little too out there, took all his old tricks and tics up to the audience to please: sarcastic humor, John Cleese-like locomotion and of course songs about the darkest sides of love. Obvious highlights: 'Disco 2000' and 'Common People', sketches in which sexual euphoria and melancholy shake hands reached.
Bizarre image of Dour 2011: Keith Caputo, Life of Agony (***), singer who is in his mid-conversion operation from male to female. From the audience when he encountered was a cowboy hat, he even cracked a joke: "Am I a cowboy or cowgirl a?" For many metalheads occurred did not matter, the Moshpit boiled as usual.
But you do not need to play metal out of it scorching, Two Gallants proven and This Will Destroy You (***) (***) each in their own way: first with the wild, sense of doom pervaded folk punk, the second instrumental music with loud guitars and screaming that floated on the occasional sampled movie dialogue. Postrock, therefore, another genre that always strike at Dour. (****) Pioneers Mogwai this year even if the main stage, where they provided the perfect soundtrack to the sunrise over the ancient heaps of Borinage.
Even Ice Cube (**) has played against this background, but games with his audience - "Say ho!" - Are persistent and brag about the west coast he confirmed above the clichés that you know about hip-hop. Sin, because in the neighboring tents were many acts that were heard how adventurous genre that still can be. Poet Saul Williams and Ghost (***) (***) placed both the central word, without losing sight of danceability. The militants, dressed in a yellow robe American Williams became a real nigga with attitude while British Poet Ghost with his dubpoëzie rapper showed a more contemplative.
Also in 13 & God (****) got a stream of words over you, from the mouth of Doseone, the nasaalste most rappers. His exuberant stage behavior contrasted beautifully with the thoughtful, but extremely effective indietronica of German brothers Markus and Michael Acher, also the pair behind The Notwist. Highlights of: at the same time fragile and combative "Armoured Scarves.
For the hip-hop versions of Bibio (****) (****) and Flying Lotus were totally unnecessary words. So let Bibio, dressed in a T-Shirt Thin Lizzy, The Ballroom at the clubbers with Barstools meej a slippery guitar and dance beats softly wavering. Flying Lotus put the Magic Tent eivolle then under high with twisted version of "Idioteque" (Radiohead) and "Paint it Black" (Rolling Stones), after turning in a breakneck, free abstract, jazzy set was played. Both acts illustrated in this way the essence of Dour: adventurous, eclectic and highly danceable.
Suede had yet been recognized in several other (*****), Pulp Britpop sensation in his grand comeback Dour polite. Jarvis Cocker, frontman as a little too out there, took all his old tricks and tics up to the audience to please: sarcastic humor, John Cleese-like locomotion and of course songs about the darkest sides of love. Obvious highlights: 'Disco 2000' and 'Common People', sketches in which sexual euphoria and melancholy shake hands reached.
Bizarre image of Dour 2011: Keith Caputo, Life of Agony (***), singer who is in his mid-conversion operation from male to female. From the audience when he encountered was a cowboy hat, he even cracked a joke: "Am I a cowboy or cowgirl a?" For many metalheads occurred did not matter, the Moshpit boiled as usual.
But you do not need to play metal out of it scorching, Two Gallants proven and This Will Destroy You (***) (***) each in their own way: first with the wild, sense of doom pervaded folk punk, the second instrumental music with loud guitars and screaming that floated on the occasional sampled movie dialogue. Postrock, therefore, another genre that always strike at Dour. (****) Pioneers Mogwai this year even if the main stage, where they provided the perfect soundtrack to the sunrise over the ancient heaps of Borinage.
Even Ice Cube (**) has played against this background, but games with his audience - "Say ho!" - Are persistent and brag about the west coast he confirmed above the clichés that you know about hip-hop. Sin, because in the neighboring tents were many acts that were heard how adventurous genre that still can be. Poet Saul Williams and Ghost (***) (***) placed both the central word, without losing sight of danceability. The militants, dressed in a yellow robe American Williams became a real nigga with attitude while British Poet Ghost with his dubpoëzie rapper showed a more contemplative.
Also in 13 & God (****) got a stream of words over you, from the mouth of Doseone, the nasaalste most rappers. His exuberant stage behavior contrasted beautifully with the thoughtful, but extremely effective indietronica of German brothers Markus and Michael Acher, also the pair behind The Notwist. Highlights of: at the same time fragile and combative "Armoured Scarves.
For the hip-hop versions of Bibio (****) (****) and Flying Lotus were totally unnecessary words. So let Bibio, dressed in a T-Shirt Thin Lizzy, The Ballroom at the clubbers with Barstools meej a slippery guitar and dance beats softly wavering. Flying Lotus put the Magic Tent eivolle then under high with twisted version of "Idioteque" (Radiohead) and "Paint it Black" (Rolling Stones), after turning in a breakneck, free abstract, jazzy set was played. Both acts illustrated in this way the essence of Dour: adventurous, eclectic and highly danceable.
2011年5月29日星期日
Cater to Core Gamers
Aunt Suzy loves Wii Bowling and Uncle Karl loves Wii Boxing, but where are the games for you, a person that enjoys more than causal fare? Nintendo definitely overlooked your existence with the Wii, but the rumor mill is churning out reports that the Big N is courting companies to develop more mature content on the system. The prospect of seeing Grand Theft Auto V in the same section as a Wii 2 Super Mario Bros. game would be the best of both worlds. And to further cater to us, the Wii 2/Project Cafe needs…
A Robust Online Component
The two best things that can be said about the Wii was that 1) Virtual Console proved unparalleled access to retro games and 2) it never took a hard hit, unlike PSN. Other than that, Nintendo’s online presence is a joke, Friend Codes and all. Nintendo needs to look at Xbox Live, which is the current gold standard, and try to emulate its success. There’s no shame in imitating, here.
This E3, Nintendo has an opportunity to win me (and millions of gamers) over. I hope that the House That Mario Built succeeds as I hate to think that a company that helped transformed me into a gamer in the mid-’80s is nothing more than a video game relic.
A Robust Online Component
The two best things that can be said about the Wii was that 1) Virtual Console proved unparalleled access to retro games and 2) it never took a hard hit, unlike PSN. Other than that, Nintendo’s online presence is a joke, Friend Codes and all. Nintendo needs to look at Xbox Live, which is the current gold standard, and try to emulate its success. There’s no shame in imitating, here.
This E3, Nintendo has an opportunity to win me (and millions of gamers) over. I hope that the House That Mario Built succeeds as I hate to think that a company that helped transformed me into a gamer in the mid-’80s is nothing more than a video game relic.
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