Welcome to Rupee Shards, my own little world for whatever I feel like writing about. (Gosh!) For those who don't know me, I'm an administrator of OtakuBoards and a theOtaku chat moderator, and I've been hanging around here since September 2001. I'm an avid gamer and anime fan so most of what you'll see here will relate to one or the other.
Nintendo WFC Friend Codes
Wii Number: 8387-7566-7057-0450
Super Smash Bros. Brawl: 1504-5385-2566 (Des)
Rock Band 2: 4667-9521-5706
Mario Kart Wii: 4124-7294-7708
Animal Crossing: Wild World: 4553-2727-4864 (Desbreko in Kakariko)
My Super Smash Bros. Brawl friend code is: 1504-5385-2566
Add me and leave a comment with yours if you'd like to play online together. I hope to start filling up my friend roster with OtakuBoards and theOtaku peoples soon.
If you haven't checked out the Game Videos link in the introduction, it goes to my YouTube channel where I post video walkthroughs for my favorite games. A lot of them are boss videos, where I show strategies for beating bosses and explain everything in the video description, but my latest project was a full game walkthrough for Super Metroid.
The walkthrough was a lot of fun to make (even if I did go through hell with my PC crashing and burning twice in the process) and I'm really happy with how it turned out so I thought I'd share it again here even though I already posted about it on myOtaku. Unfortunately, embedding playlists doesn't work (consider this a feature request if anyone of importance happens to read this) so I've put up my favorite segment of it and a link to the playlist page. In the video descriptions I wrote up notes to explain the various tips and tricks I use, which are time stamped to match where they're shown in the videos.
In the future I also plan on making posts here whenever I add new videos to my YouTube channel. I'm not sure what my next project will be yet, especially with Super Smash Bros. Brawl releasing tomorrow (it will no doubt devour all of my gaming time for a while to come), but I've been thinking of doing dungeon walkthroughs for a Zelda game next.
Also, if anyone needs help in any of the games I have videos for on my YouTube channel (or any Zelda game for that matter), feel free to post questions either here or there and I'll answer as best I can. I always enjoy helping people out with games.
I watched the first season of Mahoromatic recently and thought I'd write up my thoughts about it. To start, I should mention that I'm not a big fan of maid, robot, or ecchi (i.e. lots of fan-service) themes in anime, which happen to make up nearly the entire show. I've not seen many shows like it so I have little to directly compare it to. However, I like a change of pace from my usual preferences every now and then and Mahoromatic sounded like it would be a fun watch.
The first thing that struck me was just how clichéd the whole thing is. I expected this though—I mean, it is a maid robot show and you really don't need to have seen any of them to know what they're like. There's Mahoro, the cute female lead who applies for a live-in maid position for Suguru Misato, the standard nerdy, glasses-wearing kid living by himself in a large house. And, oh yeah, Mahoro happens to be the most powerful combat android ever created. Having fought for nine years to defend Earth from an alien invasion that's been kept secret from the general population, she now only has one year to remain operational, provided she avoids farther combat. Mahoro does actually have a reason for applying as Suguru's maid, after being allowed to live as a civilian for her remaining year, but even that's terribly clichéd.
No one watches a show like Mahoromatic for the story, though, so it doesn't matter how ridiculous it is. It can safely be tossed out the window and you won't be missing anything.
The reason I did watch Mahoromatic was simply to laugh at and revel in the cuteness of Mahoro's day-to-day life. The series was produced by GAINAX and SHAFT so the visuals are top notch and Mahoro is indeed cute. Her innocent nature and little personality quirks even make her, dare I say it, moe.
Quite ironically, the show frequently contradicts Mahoro's trademark phrase, "I think dirty thoughts are bad!" There aren't many panty shots, which are usually all too common in anime, but there is an abundance of boobies. In fact, in the very first episode Mahoro gets into the bath with Suguru. We all know the excuse—only to wash his back, she says—and we all know it's just that. I personally don't care one way or the other about fan-service but if it puts you off then you shouldn't bother with this show.
In the end, there were no surprises and Mahoromatic turned out to be exactly what I thought it would be. It was shallow, clichéd, mindless, self-indulgent, yet still fun and entertaining. And at the end of the day entertainment is why I watch anime, and it's why I'll be continuing on to the second season.
As you might know, I'm one of the administrators over on OtakuBoards, theOtaku's sister forums site. And, if you were around on OB the past few weeks, you probably noticed the site was pretty inactive. Not a lot of people joining, not a lot posting, not much happening at all.
For a lot of the site's life (that I can remember accurately), theOtaku had a link to OtakuBoards somewhere fairly prominent. I myself found OB through a forums link on theO, way back in 2001. So, being a forum that features anime discussion as one of its main topics, we naturally got a lot of members from theO visitors.
But that changed with theOtaku's last layout revision before Version Vibrant here. The link to OtakuBoards was taken down and activity slowly dropped off. Up until a few days ago OB was at the lowest slump in activity that I had ever seen, and I've been there for over six years and also have access to all the activity statistics in the admin cp. At one point I even commented on Adam's myOtaku page saying that the feature I wanted most for Version Vibrant was another link to OB on theO's front page.
With Version Vibrant live now, I've gotten my wish and OB is once again linked to from theO. Not only that, but OB was the first of the three sites to come back up during the server move, which gets much love from me.
So, how has this affected activity levels on OB? I could tell you but I think this chart from the admin cp stats pages shows it best. (Everyone loves charts.) It shows the number of new members who have registered each day over the past month:
March 3-4 is when the sites went down and OB was the first to come back up. Now, some of this is due to the other two sites not being available for those two days and a link to OB being provided on the holding page. But still, I think it's obvious how much difference that connection with theOtaku makes.
UPDATE:
I updated the chart to include the first two days that Version Vibrant has been live. As I figured, we didn't maintain 100 new members per day but 35 and 34 is still way better than the single digits we were getting before.
