I've been very busy as of late, many things to do and very little time in between trips into the heart of Thailand.

Band Work:

A friend of mine who started his own band sent me 4 tracks of music in MIDI form for clean-up and editing. (He writes sheet music with a freeware MIDI-making pogram and preforms the songs he makes on real guitar). He seems to think that I should write music and manage for the band but I'm not so sure that I'm up for that. The tracks take a while to clean up, I've only managed to complete 1 so far.

Manga:

I have at the very least 100 manga series I keep up with, and it takes a lot of work to keep up with them. Since it takes a while to load on the crappy Thai net connection I open two tabs, each one for a different manga series. While one tab loads a page I readc on the other tab that has an already loaded page. By the time I finish the loaded page, the other tab will have finished loading its page. So I switch over to the new tab after starting the former tab's page loading process, And then I repeat this sequence of events daily until I'm able to finish at least 5 updates.

Music:

I bought around 12 discs of miscellaneous Asian music. Each disc has about 100 to 200 tracks of random music by hundreds of different artists. Sorting through each disc and translating the track names takes me about 2 hours (per disc). I have fully sorted through 2 discs so far, but I found some very good music, As of now my 2 favorite non-anime Asian music artists are Jay Chou (Chinese singer/actor/composer) and Bodyslam (Thai rock band). I also found good single tracks by many obscure artists.

Gaming:

Me and abacus have purchased at least 30 PS2 games by now. And there are so many choices its hard to choose and stick with just one. My personal favorite out of the games we bought is Okami. It is a beautiful game, graphically and gameplay-wise. The game came out a year or two ago, but in the States it's still priced at $30 dollars because its such an awesome game. Abacus got hooked on the Metal Gear Solid series. Though the game is half-cutscene/half-gameplay it seems pretty fun. And there are a number of other awesome games, BLACK, Yakuza, Ar Tonelico, and Ace Combat 5 among them. Its gonna take a LONG time to play through each game.

Airsoft Guns:

After buying over 20 airsoft guns (Most are for personal use, while 2 or 3 will be sold to friends in the States), there was the problem of how me and abacus were gonna get them back to our homes in America. We were definitely NOT going to bring them with us on the plane ride back home. I shudder at the thought of what would happen if they searched our bags and found a small arsenal of pistols, shotguns, and MP5s (Thai Arisoft guns don't have orange tips that American authorities use to identify fake guns). And we couldn't mail them by air because it would cost about 150 American dollars to do that. So we decided to ship them by boat for less than 25 American dollars. The only downside is that the guns won't arrive until after school starts so there will be no chance of having an airsoft tounament with our friends for a long while. T.T

Dealing With abacus:

I never thought that living under the same roof with a "friend" could be so hellish. It was fine at first, and then he started playing the Metal Gear Solid series and Tekken 5 on my Playstation 2 (abacus apparently has never owned a game console and rarely played on any, so I thought I'd be a good friend and show him the joys of console gaming. I shouldn't have done it.). He now trys to attack me at random times using moves he saw in Tekken. He also headlocks me at random times (Luckily, I can escape from this with relative ease, pressing my thumb into his throat seems to hurt him enough to let me go. He then proceeds to roll around in pain on the ground for a couple minutes).Him running around waving the airsoft guns and making gun sounds also annoys the hell out of me. Then there's the biggist problem: I'm an anime/manga otaku, and he doesn't really like anime and manga. Most of my time and money is spent on manga sites and anime memorabilia, and this apparently disgusts him. He periodically tells me how its disgusts him that I spent hundreds of dollars on anime memorabilia and hog the computer to keep up wit my manga. He doesn't understand that its not an addiction, ITS MY LIFE-BLOOD. And besides, I can quit any time I want to, I just don't feel like it. I'm not addicted, WHY WON'T ANYONE BELIEVE ME!?