NIPPON-ICHIGO

October is exciting. It’s my birth month! More awesomely, it’s Halloween month!

How do Japanese kids handle zombies? Let’s find out:

They go all-out, that’s what they do! Samurai Soul! Yeah!

I just had to share this video. It had me grinning and laughing the whole time.

I enjoyed doing my past blog matsuri research for nice independent animations on the internet made by Japanese people. I should keep posting them from time to time. Here’s an adorable one I just saw, which is actually Taiwanese:

Don’t read the comments there if you go to Youtube; though you should never read Youtube comments anyway.

Speaking of animation, I also just saw some pretty neat and elaborate sketch animations for the next Castlevania game. I actually don’t see these kinds of things often, so it’s really cool.

BOOSH!

Download them here.

I’m probably slow in finding this, but this amusing Japanese website meshes Katamari Damacy style with Nintendo Wii’s Mii Parade aesthetic to make a Twitter toy that amuses me perhaps too much!

It makes your Twitter feel special!

I’ve already done this like 8 times.

By the way, I’m on Twitter a lot. If you are, too, you could follow my main account (on which there are many artistic/design ramblings) or the one for this blog (which is similar, but also a feed for posts here).

You should know, I’m on a real Mario kick right now. With the recent release of Super Mario Galaxy 2, not to mention E3 with all the other great returning classic platform heroes, I just want to play video games all day. But such desires of the id are played down and subdued, only to be lived out in my fantasies while I watch video game related media at work.

(Nah, I’m working, honestly… with a little peep here and there.)

So anyway, I got a real kick out of this.

Teppei Okada has the right idea. If I could even remotely play violin, this is exactly what I’d do, too.

While I’m at it, here are a few more Mario videos I’m liking the hell out of. SPOILERS: Mario dies at the end of all these videos. (Why are we all so cruel to him? But I enjoyed long-jumping him into walls in 64, if only to hear that goofy “d’oh, oooof…”)

(more…)

I actually still have a lot of entries planned/in progress for this blog. I just had a sudden decrease in free time due to the acquisition of a new job, but I do have a bit of hefty updating to do (also to the site itself). Expect a few design- and video-related posts in the future. Also, media commentary??

Anyways, I like to see practical things with a creative/cute design spin. I was going through the backlog of Engrish.com Brog posts (because for some reason I had never read them, despite being a big fan of the site since 2000) and saw these adorable Japanese barcode designs.

My favorites are umbrella-related.