Some Updates to the Sidebar

I've made a few changes to the sidebar (the thing on the right with all the links and toys). Since I'm going to China for a few weeks starting next week, I thought it would be appropriate to change the playlist off of the soundtrack of The World Ends With You, despite how awesome it is, and instead put up a playlist of one of my favorite Taiwanese bands, Nan Quan Ma Ma. Please enjoy!

The second update to the sidebar is the addition of an interesting blog I came across while I was doing research on the earthquake in Sichuan, China, called The China Beat. It's writers are mostly from the United States, most of them members of Academia specializing in Chinese studies. I think the blog really presents some of the most educated looks at Chinese media and external media about China, thus doing something that I have always found to be very valuable - presenting an issue from both (or even all) sides of the discussion. There's still bound to be a little bias in the blog, but I've found them to be very objective in terms of presenting information - something that can't be said for many news outlets today. I highly recommend checking it out!

Delicious

I couldn't really think of a good title for this post, but since I'm in the middle of eating the delicious ribs Cherrie made for me yesterday before going back to school, I just titled this post with the first thing that came to my mind!

Cherrie was here at home all of last week, since we had the Memorial Day weekend. She was supposed to leave earlier to go back to school, but since her class lectures are posted online, she stayed a little longer, which was nice, especially since she left behind all this great food for me! Seriously, though, even though we didn't do anything special, it was great having her around all week.

Nick, Chris (Nick's roommate), Joe, and I started playing a bit of Mario Kart Wii online recently. It's crazy fun. Somehow, it's more justifiable to lose to a human than cheap AI. More importantly, though, it's substantially more satisfying to kick everyone's butt! After beating 100cc with all 1st place finishes, I've gotten pretty good at getting very far ahead in Mario Kart - so much so that Chris made it a point to go back to single player mode and practice all week! I'll have to see if he's improved sometime this week.

We've started sparring in my kung fu lessons. Well, actually, it's really only been me and Joe so far. Last week, I had a pretty pathetic showing - I didn't pace myself and I was well worn in just five minutes. Yesterday we had a much better sparring session - it went for close to 45 minutes and I was still fresh by the end of it! I think Joe was pretty much spent - still he did well to keep on going for as long as he did. It's all starting to come back though - prior to these last few weeks it had been close to three years since I last strapped on the gloves!

Well, that's about all for my delicious update.

Nice Choy Lay Fut Demo

Nice compilation of techniques. I like how he slows down for the "bullet time" effect! =)

Cool Choy Lay Fut video compilation

Just came across this blog today. It's a pretty big collection of the Choy Lay Fut videos on YouTube - not all of them, but enough to keep you occupied for a while!

Click the link here: Choileifut's Weblog

Chinese Mosquitoes

Ed is in Taiwan now, doing translation work for one of my aunts who, with her husband, own and operate SOCO Machinery, a machinery manufacturer and market leader in certain industrial machinery. He has been blogging furiously and his skill in blogging has improved. I think it shows best in his latest post, Encountering Immortals. This post is about the elite mosquitoes in Taiwan and China, and probably many other places in Asia as well. I remember them very well, as they have given me many fits in my adventures in the Far East. Much more deadly than the slow, plodding mosquitoes here in America. However, I think Ed describes their killing tactics better than I could, so go check out his description for yourself!

the Escapades ch. 4: Encountering Immortals

Bad Stuff Happening All Over

This has been an interesting week. It was a busy work week, for one, and I've done over 65 practice problems in preparation for my quiz in Financial Management this weekend. Fortunately, I was able to make up for some of my own suffering by playing Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, and The World Ends With You for a few hours. In doing so, I discovered "Tournaments" in Mario Kart Wii. In my last post about Mario Kart Wii, I criticized the game for leaving out the skills-honing Missions Mode from Mario Kart DS. Well, "Tournaments" are basically Mario Kart Wii's equivalent of Missions mode, only better in some ways and worse in, well, one way. Start with the bad news first, it seems like you can only do one Tournament every few weeks, so there isn't any selection to the missions you can try - you can only do one until they post up the next one, at which point you can only do that one. Now the good news - Tournaments are set up by Nintendo themselves on the the Wi-Fi Connection periodically, which means there is potentially an endless number of them, and also means that your performance in the Tournaments are ranked against people around the world! Games are always better when you can prove you're better than the next guy!

On a more serious note, however, some bad stuff really did happen this week. Sometime last weekend, brush fires started popping up all over Brevard County, and several of my co-workers actually had to take time off of work to fight fires in their neighborhoods that were threatening their houses. Some 40 houses actually burned down, and many other structures as well. The worst part is, the fires were started by arsons! Governer Crist hit the nail on the head with the quote, "It's unconscionable that somebody would do this to another man or woman, put them in jeopardy." Fortunately, my neighborhood and house have thus far been okay.

On the other side of the world, two huge natural disasters struck Asia early these past few weeks. One was the cyclone in Myanmar, and then the magnitude 7.9 earthquake near the large city Chengdu, China. I don't know what the exact count is now, but over 150,000 lives were lost, and likely hundreds of thousands more trapped in rubble. Chengdu and Sichuan are also home to the largest population of giant pandas in the world, and it was reported that the status of the Wolong Panda Reserve, which I visited with Eric, Kir-Wei, Colin, and Jelani in my study abroad in 2002, is unknown, although the 60 pandas that lived inside the actual research facility were reported to be okay. The rescue effort in China is huge, as they have deployed over 120,000 soldiers to the region to supply aid and find trapped people in addition to accepting foreign aid for the first time in Chinese history. Unfortunately, the effort in Myanmar is not going as smoothly as the military in Myanmar has not allowed foreign aid to enter.

My thoughts go out to the families of the victims of the local fires in Brevard, the cyclone in Myanmar, and the earthquake in China.

Very nice Wushu Choreography

I was surfing around on Kung Fu Magazine's forum when I came across this video. The user has posted a whole series of these videos, seemingly from the same competition - so there are a lot more where these came from! Even though they're not "real" fights, it still takes incredible amounts of practice and athleticism to pull these off at full speed without any additional equipment like they do in the movies. Enjoy!

Tiny Boxer

This kid is gonna be good...

Hooray for Circuit City!!!

This past week has been pretty laid back for the most part. Save for the ridiculously long and ambiguous homework that I had to do for school, I've been able to live and eat well, especially since Cherrie has been in town all week to cook my meals and clean up a bit around the house!

However, because of the ridiculously long and ambiguous homework I had to do for school, I didn't really get a chance to play that much video games. I was getting a little upset at that fact, especially since my recent discovery of the RPG which all future RPGs will be measured against, The World Ends With You. In fact, I wasn't able to play that game all week until the weekend!

That was all forgiven, however, because today, I happened to chance upon the Circuit City sunday paper ad that indicated that Circuit City, the place where I purchased my Nintendo DS, is offering Buy 1, Get 1 50% off on select games! Now, usually, these deals don't capture my attention that much because usually those "select games" kind of suck. But today, the select games included some very good titles, such as Smash Brothers Brawl, which, as my dedicated readers surely know, I added to my Wii library a few months ago for my birthday.

Fortunately, there were still at least two other titles that grabbed my attention, notably Super Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart Wii!! Anyone who knows me knows that Mario Kart has been my favorite video game series since the very first one came out in the early 90s. I was actually somewhat torn about whether to get the Wii iteration because I already had the very good DS version (which, in my opinion, still has some edges over the Wii version, which I'll get into later). However, for Buy 1, Get 1 50% off, I couldn't pass it up, especially since I had wanted to get Super Mario Galaxy since I got my Wii for Christmas!

Mario Kart Wii brings some awesome elements to the table. Most obviously, is the motion control and the nifty Wii Wheel peripheral, which really adds to the driving experience. It's intuitive, as sensitive as I could want it, and definitely makes the game a challenge. Secondly, the online and Mii integration is very cool. I haven't played online yet, but I look forward to making my Mii feared throughout the world! The way Miis show up in the game as spectators or advertisement posters (like in the shopping mall course) is a nice touch as well. I always knew I would be a good Abercrombie model! And, not to be forgotten, the addition of motorcycles and tricks/stunts also adds a neat new mechanic for seasoned players to try to get even better!

However, some options are missing from my beloved DS version. Most notable is the absence of the Mission mode, which tested and honed your driving skills by asking you to complete several objectives and provided a little more single player depth. Second is the lack of options in battle mode. Previously, battle mode could be played free-for-all or in teams, but now, only teams are available. I haven't tried it yet, but I believe the battle mode is also defaulted now to play more like a timed mode to see how many kills you get, regenerating you after you lose all of your balloons, rather than a last man standing type of game that it always was in the past. I imagine this is to prevent early losers from disconnecting from the game, but there was always a thrill when the two best players were left in a death struggle that will be sorely missed now.

Regardless, with my new The World Ends With You obsession, plus these two new highly acclaimed Wii titles, my gaming backlog is longer than it has ever been. Guess I better start getting that homework done so I can start playing!!

New Music Player!

Gasp! A second post in the same day! That hasn't happen in a while! What awesomeness must have occurred to justify this extra blog attention?

Over the weekend, I tried a new DS game called The World Ends With You. It's an RPG by Square-Enix, the famous RPG makers of acclaimed series like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. The World Ends With You, known as It's A Wonderful World in Japan, is different from those games in a number of ways such as the huge difference in gameplay (a very action intense gameplay compared with the typical turn-based gameplay of most of the other RPGs that have come out of the company). One of the other major differences would have to be setting of the game, which, unlike most other Japanese games which are usually placed in some medieval or "steampunk" imaginary world, sets up in the Shibuya district of modern Tokyo. In turn, the soundtrack for this game is a very awesome mix of hip-hop and urban rock music.

I happened to be looking around for the soundtrack of The World Ends With You on the streaming media site imeem when I discovered that you can actually embed your imeem playlists on your blog. So, in one bold swoop, I've made a big upgrade to the "traditional" sources of music on Grant's Pad, namely "Grant's Music", which just listed a few songs that I happened to remember at the time, and the "Media Player", which has perpetually been linked to Taiwanese radio station 91.7 Hit FM for the last year or maybe even longer. Both of these, as you can see, have been removed from the sidebar, replaced with my imeem playlist, which is currently playing the soundtrack of The World Ends With You.

And so, this post comes full circle, beginning and ending with... You! I mean, The World Ends With You. Check out the playlist, and keep an eye out for updates to the Grant's Pad playlist in the future!

Gerbils, Chi Sao, and the Forbidden Kingdom

We went to my parents house in South Florida this weekend. It had been a while - we hadn't been there basically since the beginning of the year. Only a few changes have occurred - most notably, my sister has only one gerbil left (down from two in January and three at some point last year). I don't think it's her fault though, those gerbils were getting pretty old, probably two years or older! I still remember when Ed brought his gerbil home and gave it to my sister. That gerbil also died even though my sister and my dad took it to the veterinarian to see if they could save it (him? her?). Shortly afterwards, my sister got three new gerbils. This paragraph will serve as my tribute to the ones that have since passed.

One of the main things I did on this particular trip home was pick up some more kung fu tips from Ed. It's quite interesting how much progress Ed has made in his kung fu since his freshman year. Back then, I still dominated our sparring matches, but today, it's a completely different story. We tried sparring a little bit, I thought I did a pretty good job (at least I was not getting hit that often!) up until the point when I jammed the fingers of my left hand blocking one of his kicks. I'm still nursing that injury!

One thing I noticed while sparring Ed was that he had developed a prowess for grabbing and locking, or chin na. I figured this was due to practicing a drill called "chi sao", or sticky hands. I've mentioned chi sao before in one of my posts, most likely the post about Wing Chun kung fu. Essentially, you maintain contact with your partner, rotating your arms in a very relaxed fashion and attempt to land strikes or effect locks on his or her arms. The drill develops sensitivity such that you should be able to feel when your partner tries to attack, allowing you to counter by shifting your body weight or locking the striking hand. After my fingers got hurt, I figured, instead of the contact stuff, it would be worthwhile to try to get some experience in chi sao for myself. Needless to say, I was completely dominated, finding myself twisted and locked up tens of times! Still, I picked up a few of the locks he used and have since taken them back to practice.

At the end of the weekend, my sister came back from her band trip and we went out to see Jackie Chan and Jet Li's The Forbidden Kingdom. It was pretty good - the fighting was par for the course but the plot was a bit of a mess. I don't think it was due to the story itself, but rather due to how the director paced the film. There isn't much sense of time in this movie - it's hard to tell how long in "real time" each scene takes, and I felt that it would have given the story a little better flow if that information were somehow conveyed. Instead, it seems like a bunch of little episodes stuck together. The story is an extension of the Chinese classic Journey to the West, in particular focusing on the Monkey King, Sun Wukong. For that, I give the film kudos since it brings one of the most beloved Chinese stories into mainstream American entertainment. Regardless of the poor flow, I still recommend this film because of the introduction to the Chinese novel, some pretty cute Chinese actresses in Li Bing Bing and the somewhat cross-eyed Liu Yifei, and of course the long awaited fight scenes between Jackie Chan and Jet Li!