I know I don’t really pay attention to most of the happenings regarding Arashi (gotta admit, I kinda miss AMNOSnet being an Arashi site, otherwise I would have wrote this on the blog section. Anyway, moving on.), but when I got on my Twitter after arriving home from church choir practice, I see this piece of news in the Arashi ON LJ Community.

While a lot of the fans there are utterly shocked at the news, me being an old-timer fan wasn’t at all surprised. This is where I become very tempted to tell the JE fandom world that no matter what odds and ends things may end up, one way or the other from the most trivial to the more serious situation, NEVER mess with JE!

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• Current Location: Home
• Currently Drinking: Kombucha Drink (yum!)
• Currently Reading: Decoding the Lost Symbol by Simon Cox
• Mood: Contemplative

So, for the last few hours (maybe even longer because I get distracted a lot ), I’ve been moseying along TFL to join some fanlistings and fill up my FANDOM section. When I started joining fanlistings of various J-dramas and some J-idols (I haven’t joined them yet, but I did bookmark for the future), I realized one thing. My own fandom designs are not girly enough for anyone to join.

CUTE is still the in thing in the hobbyist fanlisting site designs, at least, in relation to Japanese entertainment. I used to go all-out using old school web standards in the early 2000 but when I got a revelation regarding the Web 2.0 standards as well as producing sites with validated code, my so-called CUTE design style had disappeared. It just got way too long to produce another CUTE design style that would actually conform to today’s web standards, so I went for a more thematic (thematic as in design based on the theme of the fanlisting) rather than producing another CUTE designed fanlisting site.

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• Mood: Hungry

Pretty soon there will be a mini-gallery of sorts to be added here on ADRIATASTIC! I installed JournalPress plugin and NextGen Gallery, where I will be posting a gallery of some of my photography and other stuff I feel like posting.

Though I don’t usually write about site updates in the main blog (I still have yet to search for an asides plugin. I’m not using my Twitter account just to post updates and most of the people who follow me don’t really care about all of that), this is another test entry, primarily involving JournalPress. Once I post this entry up here, it should also be posted in my LJ account as well. In that way, I can get my LJ active more or less without even have to bother copying and pasting posts that are relevant to be posted on LJ.

You see, many of my friends are in LJ (well, many of my close friends that is). Back in the days individually-hosted blogs were the in thing, with their own custom designs and fancy-schmancy blogging/CMS systems. Today, social networking pretty much killed the scene, but as a designer myself, I still got my pride. Designing my own blog designs hosted in my own server is one of the only ways I can improve my web designing skills one way or the other and free blogging services such as LJ and VOX (and yes, I have a VOX account too) are preventing people from visiting individually-hosted blogs like mine. I had to actually copy and paste some of my entries to my LJ just so my friends can actually read it and comment (none of them visits my blog anymore with reasons: too busy, too inconvenient, and it’s not trendy enough, whatever that means…).

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• Currently Drinking: (Sugar-Free) White Cranberry Peach Juice (Ocean Spray On-the-Go)
• Currently Playing: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates
• Mood: Sleepy

As a “consolation” for meatless and abstinence Lenten Fridays, I compensated my two-bit lunch of Healthy Choice Country Vegetable Soup and two slices of Toasted Wheat Bread with Margarine with an afternoon snack. I don’t normally do afternoon snacks at all, not even when I’m at home, however my very strong hunger pangs still got to me. I opted for a snack bag, though I seriously craved my usual Baked Crunchitos that I usually get from work, but there was none to find around the house. I thought of rushing down the groceries to buy a few snack bags but my mom would start nagging at me on how I should save more money than wasting them on snacks (even if they’re healthy and 100% organic, which isn’t something that my mom is in to, unfortunately). Right then, I had to improvise.

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• Currently Drinking: Rooibos Milk Tea
• Currently Playing: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates
• Mood: Content

First Friday of March, third Friday of Lent. Other than breaking from soda and chocolate, I’ve been truly being a temporary flexitarian. All devout Catholics have to anyway during Lent, unless you’re not that devoted and just don’t care. In other words, my Lenten menu will always be generally the same. Fish, veggies, fruits, grains, all that. Meat, meat products, and poultry meat are not allowed on Lenten Fridays.

That reminds me. Are eggs considered to be a meat product? If that was the case, does that mean we can’t eat cheese, we can’t drink milk, we can’t even use butter or margarine in our breads and crackers, or even eat ice cream or drink milk tea? It seems a lot of Catholics have different interpretations of what is allowed and what is not allowed to consume during Lent. My parents used to eat eggs along with the non-meat-based food for Lent, but our current priest stated that eggs are considered meat products. A lot argued about this thing about the egg. On the other hand, it’s not much of a problem with me, since I don’t eat eggs everyday anyway.

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• Mood: Sleepy

(clockwise) Mia Fey, Maya Fey, Phoenix Wright, Miles Edgeworth

I’ve always been a fan of the Ace Attorney games since Day 1. Well, I consider Day 1 as sometime during spring in 2007, starting with the first game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. These followed by Justice for All, Trials and Tribulations, and Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (featuring a new main character/defense attorney, Apollo Justice). If you’re one of those import gaming purists and have never heard of the small hype of a visual novel game taking place in court, it’s the Gyakuten Saiban (Turnabout Trials) series.

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• Currently Drinking: Coconut Chai Tea
• Mood: Tired