It's been a long time since I blogged here. I was busy creating my personal site, replacing the old "Noelle" blog. Anything up on the anime front?

Let's see... I'm going to a party today. It's yet another eyeball for the #Pinoy_Otaku chatters. I haven't tired of them at all, and I really want to see them again--even though it means I'm going to miss Anime@Arki.

Last semester I took a course on The Governments and Politics of Southeast Asia. It was fun, and I got to learn more about the neighbors of the Philippines. Funny thing is when I tried researching about Singaporean political parties, the only search results that came up were for the dominant party--the People's Action Party. The other parties' pages were either down, in an undecipherable language to me, or they hadn't been updated in a while. Worst of all, some of them were using foreign free webspace providers--maybe because they had no financial backing enough to get them their own domain? Enough about politics, though. I'm taking a break from that, since it's supposed to be my summer vacation. (I hate my course)

On to brighter things! Mikka, yes, it is hell to have braces. I should know. My teeth were especially stubborn; that's why I had to wear braces from my first year in high school to my third year in college. I only got them removed last year. Retainers are much easier to bear.

Tin has referred 72 people

Selene has referred 27 people

Andrael has referred 23 people

Kuwami has referred 18 people

Mikka has referred 10 people

Fewer people used "Megumi" or its derivatives (Megumi-sensei, Takani Megumi, Megumi Sagara, The Fox). I didn't mind using an Anglicized version of Megumi-sensei; in fact, I reasoned that since my parents were both medical doctors but I had no intention of becoming one, I could be a doctor by title instead. And so "Doctor Megumi" was born.

The only reason I started using my real name as well as my net nick is because I realized whatever I did on the internet couldn't really be called mine because I was using another name. Besides, I was only known as Doctor Megumi on the KFFDisc, where I had started lurking. Everywhere else I was "Noelle De Guzman".

In the meantime, I'd begun taking on certain characteristics of Megumi without even knowing it. It culminated in January when some people told me I actually laughed like her. It's a case of life imitating fiction; in this case it imitated the fiction I'd built about my personality on the net.

I finally figured out who the bastard was who sent me those lousy flames-cum-emails. Oh no, he didn't admit to it, but his actions on an ML certainly gave his intentions away. This person wanted to keep all the action for that ML and found a convenient way to vent his frustrations about other people not from that ML (let's call it "X-brand ML") getting into cosplaying through my ML (Pinoy Cosplay). He vented these frustrations on me, labeling me a hypocrite for not forwarding a message to X-brand when it was mistakenly sent to Pinoy Cosplay. I explained that it was out of my hands when I checked my mail and that I had made an error in judgment by assuming that the message had also been sent to X-brand (the message was from a person on both MLs). And I thought that was the end of it.

The thing is, now that the news about the cosplay event was released first on Pinoy Cosplay and not on X-brand, someone suddenly starts griping that X-brand will be labeled last year's cosplayers, or has-beens. When I tried allaying his fears about it, saying that X-brand was still the largest _cohesive_ collection of cosplayers, he said X-brand is the only collection of cosplayers. Really now! Just because X-brand was around first and its members have all cosplayed before (unlike Pinoy Cosplay, whose members are almost all new to cosplaying; still, Pinoy Cosplay's existence as a group interested in cosplaying is undeniable, and that makes it a collection of cosplayers) doesn't give it precedence in receiving news about cosplay events. If the news gets to Pinoy Cosplay first, it's all right with me. I'm not the one who provides Pinoy Cosplay with the information; the availability of news to my ML is entirely dependent on those who organize the event. The fact is, they chose to send Pinoy Cosplay the information.

Hope this loads faster for you, lolo-sama. I did love the Hitomi layout, and I was going to use this for the Greymatter blog I was planning. I guess I changed layouts a little early.