weekend

It has been a really busy week. I hadn't do anything much lately. All I did was doing some college stuff and being lazy. I actually don't know what to write in here, so I figured I'd just stop by and drop a line or two.

Well, after the holiday, activities has gone doubled. Besides classes and labworks, I had to do funds raising for the upcoming ITB Fair 2006. I also has to follow this Suzuki Training for Engine Tune-up later in December 2005. And that training is sure time consuming although it is quite fun. Two days of engine theories plus five days of field work will surely be tricky. I mean, some of the training schedules actually take place during classes. So I guess I'd have to skip several classes. Although the Mechanical Engineering department would give permission letter, yet, I'd be missing classes, if you know what I mean.

Despite all of the seemed-to-be on the go days during last week, I actually got through it quite well. But next week's still waiting for me though. Usual classes, two labworks and three presentations that could be issued at anytime next week, a load of assignments, engine tune up training, plus several event-preparations that needed to be done. Aw gee, I like it being busy...but it's just troublesome.

totally fantasyc!

I just watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children earlier and I have to say that, "It was totally cool!"

I don't know what else to say. As one of the Final Fantasy (FF) fan, I'm glad that Squaresoft (or was it Square-Enix?) has paid their debt to FF fans. Why would I say that? Remember FF: Spirits Within? Well, although it was a quite-good movie, it wasn't quite-FF. Oh yes, several part of the movie had something to do with FF but overall I didn't feel the aura of FF inside it. I heard people mentioned it as not-another-sci-fi-movie.

But it was different with the Advent Children. It has FF written all over it! It was obvious actually, since Advent Children was originally a sequel from the a best-seller Playstation game Final Fantasy VII.

Personally, I played the game already but never finished it. But I strongly recommend, that if you really want to enjoy this movie, you have to get through the end of the game to comprehensively understand the story. As for me, I managed to get most of what's inside the movie itself. No big problem experienced.

I don't want to give spoiler (yet), so I'll be brief. The story took place two years after the final battle between our heroes from FF VII (you know the band, don't you?) and Sephiroth (or was it Sepiroth? I forgot how spell it) who wanted to destroy the world. This time, there was a disease running around called Geostigma. Usually it infects children but somehow Cloud, the main character, also had the disease (I don't know, maybe there's more information about his in the game). And then there was this gang of three-men kept on searching for Mother. Cloud was forced to confront his past and his own personality (as always, I presume. But I was surprised that he hadn't recover from his mental problems all those times) and ended up fighting with those gang of Sephiroth-worshippers. I thought them as one since they were all resembled the cool-bad-ass-guy with black outfits and silver-hair color. Enough with the story (spoiler, mayhap?)

Watching Advent Children could be quite nostalgic. There were several scenes from the old game such as the city of Midgard, the church where Cloud lived, the Forgotten Capital, and of course several flash-backs from the game which was not actually there in the game (know what I mean?). Also, you can enjoy several original FF soundtracks by FF-specialist composer Nobuo Uematsu. For example, in the battle between Tifa versus one of the silver-haired guy, the music resembled the battle-scene in the game. Also, after that, you could hear the you-win-the-battle-music which was sooo FF (FF banged gitu loch!) that turned out to be the bad-guy's cellphone ringtone. And lots of other similar stuff as there in the game.

The sucky part of the movie that I managed to observed was hair animation. I don't know they did it on purpose or was it because it was so hard to animate hair. I saw on several scenes, that they didn't put details on hair-animation. For one, when Cloud and Kadaj (the leader of the silver-haired-gang) were riding high-speed motorcylces, their cool-styled hair looked only as if it was hit by a slight wind. I mean, come on, at that speed?! Plus, when it was raining, Cloud's hair was OK, it didn't even look wet. Maybe they put wax on it, who knows! If it was because the difficulty on animating hair movement then it's fine since I do know it's very very hard to animate hair naturally. But if they did it on purpose then it was so uncool...uncool!

The second part of the sucky scene were the fightings. No, most of them were good! It's just that...several fighting-movements were too fast that no man could ever do that (nor man's eyes could ever follow that, for this matter). All I could see was flashes of swords hitting each other. It decreased the appetite of enjoying battle scene a little.

The best part of the movie? The summon (was it Bahamut?) and the scene where you get to see Aerith (and Zack?)! Too bad we could only see a little of her and heard also a little of her lovely voice. But I guess Tifa's cuteness could make it even.

All in all, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is a worth-watching and worth-having movie. Thank God I bought the DVD!

back on track

Hello everyone, I'm back from the holiday. Well, it was quite a good holiday back then. I'd really like to compile some of the stories and pictures from my journal during the holiday. Let me check into it and see if I could do something about it. But I promise you nothing.

Anyway, how's thing going over there? It's not good in here heheheh, since it's another two days before I must go back to classes. Plus a whole bunch of assignments and tests will be waiting for me on the other side. Ah well, let's rock!