February. Why?

Holy... I am so glad this month is gone. I had barely any time to work on my quest, far less for my blog. All the optimism that was in my previous blog post is just gone (don't worry, it'll be back by the bottom of the page). Here's the ironic part though; I'm fairly certain that I just made everything harder for myself causing myself to by my own downfall.

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Well? What happened?

Let's talk about every single thing that was going on for me at this time. During the first half of my month I had a history paper to work on. This was not as easy as I originally thought. Every single day I would come home, do my homework, and then just work on this. This lasted for about two weeks. The reason it took so long was because when I had completed my second draft I went to go talk to my teacher. She gives me some tips on what to improve on. From these small tips I proceed to listen to them, but also redo my entire essay. I'm not even joking I literally opened up an entirely new document and started fresh. Right now I'm sitting here, writing this blog post with that essay long behind me and i'm thinking "Why did I do that to myself?"

While writing this I also had to practice for a piano recital that was coming up. It's not to say that I was slacking off or anything, but I had only gotten the piece recently and I did not feel ready (it's not my teacher's fault there either, I was working on my piano exam before so I couldn't work on anything else). But what ended up happening is that I would try and practice for a bit, but then I would shift my focus towards my history essay. You might be thinking "Well after you handed that in then you would be able to play more piano, right?". Uh... Sort of.

Right after I handed my essay I breathed a sigh of relief before shortly realizing that exams were in three weeks. I decided that to not make myself shrivel up and die I would give myself a break from work; I mean it was still three weeks so I definitely had time. This break period lined up perfectly with a friend visiting from another country, so for about four days I hung out with him and some others. Though, after he left it was back to the grind of schoolwork.

When everything was said and done, when exams were finally finished, when there was no more work to hand in, when nothing was going on after school, when I was finally ready to get back into Japanese... I realized it was March and nothing was done for February and I would have to make up some excuse on why I put up another filler post :).

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Oh. Okay. Well I'll just see myself o-

Wait, WAIT! I feel bad about leaving you guys with nothing again, so I'm going to try to make reading this worth your while (emphasis on TRY). So as I said earlier on I play piano and I have pieces I play in my class and pieces that I work on at home; i'm going to play one that I learn at home for you guys. However, since this is a Japanese blog I'm going to do a piece made in Japan... so... uh... *sigh*... I'm gonna play an anime p- WAIT NO DON'T LEAVE. Look. Alright I know you hate me already, but I swear it sounds decent, and since it's piano there are no vocals. Before though I need to put in two things. Firstly, here is the original song. I'm gonna be honest I don't like this version that much, I prefer it without the lyrics. The second thing is sort of a 'plugin' for a Youtuber? I don't know. Basically I did not put this music together myself, someone online did it and I took his sheets and performed the same piece. The name of the guy is called 'KyleLandry'. This is the song that i'm doing under this on so if you don't want to see my horrible playing, you can see a real piano player here. He doesn't only do Anime things on piano though. Here is his 'Evil Morty' theme, This is his Game of Thrones Medley, and he even does improvisations like this one here (I really recommend this one). If you have a mild interest in piano I think you should check him out.

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Cool.

Hm? You're still here? Wow I thought you would leave. Well since you're still here I guess I have to put what I promised. Here it is. My mediocre piano playing:

(Also the reason I decided to do this for this blog post was because my teacher recommended to me that I should add audio to my blog, even though the comment got deleted (I didn't do it) I didn't brush off the suggestion Ms. Bruski ^^

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Hey, that did not sound half bad I thin-... Huh? Is something wrong?

aaaaAAAAHHHH! This pained me mentally and physically to make. Going in to this I thought "Wow this is going to be so fun! I can't wait!" It ended up being the opposite of fun. It literally took me one hour just to figure out how to record properly. I don't know what idiot created this program for the piano but there is an automatic accompaniment every time you click record, and you might say: "Hey can't you just turn it off?" No. You can't. There is no way to turn it off. "Hey can't you just turn off the volume for the accompaniment?" Yeah, you can. But when you click record it goes back to 100%. "Wait so how did you manage to record it without the accompaniment?" WELL. I went and muted the entire track. "Wait. It was that simple? Are you sure that you're not the idiot?" No. They don't label it. I had to flip through the users manual for fifteen minutes before I found something that related to muting tracks. To mute the accompaniment you would have to go into a specific mode before selecting the track you want to edit; after that you would have to press two buttons at the same time and hold it down. Once again: The person who made this program is an absolute idiot.

After I finally got everything figured out I was dead mentally. I was so frustrated I did not want to do anything else. However, I already had the camera set up and I really didn't feel like taking it out again for another day. So, I started. "Take one", "Take two", "Take three" and on and on. By take seven I was just completely done. My entire body ached every time I would play (yeah this really puts into perspective how fit I am), my hand was hurting from slapping the chair out of frustration so many times, and I was tired because I was going at this for a couple of hours by now. And I know, seven takes may not seem like a long time, but keep in mind each of these takes took around five minutes to complete with around a one minute break in between (delete old footage, set up camera, etc); not only that, but above I state that I already was not motivated to do anything so not being able do what I wanted really pissed me off. I decided to pack up everything and go to sleep.

When I woke up the next day I told myself I would not do that again and actually try to have fun. I gave myself a week break before going at it again and (long story short) it was fun and the end product ended up being something I am eighty percent proud of.

However there are some things I am still not happy with (other than the obvious mistakes I made). Firstly, it does sound pretty bad. Not the song exactly, but how it SOUNDS. The audio is a crappy midi file that doesn't even attempt to sound like a piano and instead produces this ear piercing shrill. If you thought my playing was half decent then PLEASE look at the original; it sounds ten times better. Secondly (and lastly) I wanted to cut off the beginning and the ending parts of the video recording so you would not have to see my setup. But

I'm not a video editor so I had to use the great software called Windows Movie Maker. Every single time I wanted to crop something it would just unsync the audio and at times even cut off parts of it. I would try to move the audio after cropping the video but then a different part would be out of sync. Basically I gave up and because of that you wasted about fifteen seconds of your life looking at some amateur set up, thinking he is good when in reality he isn't.

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If you looked at the song and are interested in the anime that birthed it then I'm gonna talk about it here; if you don't care then you can just skip.

Ah you're interested. You know, as I'm writing this I really wonder if anyone will really stop and read this. Eh I really don't care I just need to tell myself that people are reading it and I'll be fine; I just wanted some place to put down what I think.

Alright. First season: Clannad (or クラナド) and second season: Clannad After Story (クラナドアフターストーリー). So I don't waste your time I'm going to list the genres/things I think you would want when judging if you want to watch something or not. Romance/Slice of life/Drama/Depression. Tons of Depression. If you don't like that sort of thing then once again just skip to the next section. No one was here in the first place you say? Don't remind me; I can dream. Anyway lets continue on with my amateur review. The name doesn't mean anything in Japanese. I actually did some research and it's actually pretty funny how it originally got it's name. The original writer (because it was manga before animation) saw an Irish band called Clannad and thought it meant family in Irish. In reality 'Clann' means family in Irish. The guy literally named his story after a band. You see I can put down this random information that I find humorous because no one else is reading this.

First Season: I'm going to be blunt: the first season is just a stepping stone for the second season. There isn't really that much plot involved. It's just some guy delinquent in his last year of high school that doesn't care about life that much. However during this last year though he meets this one girl which then leads to him befriending four others (I mean technically it's five but I don't count the last one as she is sort of in and out of the series) which I think is completely ridiculous. The story is that it just follows their high school life and, of course, teenage drama. Don't get me wrong it does have it's fair share of depressing parts and sometimes its attempt at humor does work, but generally this season is not why this series is in my top three anime of all time. I doubt I would've watched this if it wasn't constantly recommended to me over and over and over again. I mean their eyes are literally the size of their hands. LOOK AT THAT (below). No, the reason I can rate this so high is because of the second season.

Second Season: HOO BOY. This season. Remember when I was giving my general overview of this and I said "Tons of Depression". Here it is. At first it starts out all nice and adorable like 'Here's our life after high school. Yaaay'. No. Not cute. I am just going to leave it at that because if I keep going I KNOW I will spoil it even more without realizing. I will give you this though; Many people say in the community that "If you don't cry in Clannad then nothing will make you cry," which I think is completely wrong. But you know. People can say what they want. I can say for one that I didn't cry so it means one of two things: I either am extremely manly (lol what a meme) or I don't have a soul (I think we have a winner). Yeah sorry I couldn't give you any more but if someone really did make it this far then I'm afraid I might give a major plot twist away.

Yeah that review was useless.

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Some final notes for this post...

Another month with nothing done. On top of that, this was just a post explaining how 'hard' my life is. Wow I get an education and I play music, "OH THE PAIN". I'm sure that you're getting tired reading these types of posts over and over and over again; I know I'm tired writing them. Let me make a promise to you. My next blog post will be the most productive one out of all of them. Mark my words I will have something interesting to talk about!