I write and stuff

 RaW Hero is a work done by a man who is mentally insane. I guess that's already obvious because this is the same author that made Prison School, but this series is on a whole other level. Just from the first chapter alone, you can tell that this is a series that you can not take seriously and also in the same vein can not expect to be any semblance of "quality." All this series wants to do is to be weird, to be unpredictable, and it covers this up by calling itself a gag manga. And honestly, it is pretty funny. I actually laughed a couple times reading it. I think that this is a manga in the same vein of something like Golden Boy, although I think that this is just way funnier. To enjoy this manga, you can't expect anything out of it. You read this to laugh a little bit and to see all the ecchi shit that happens. I don't know if I can recommend this manga to any normal member of society, but I do think that if you enjoy something like JoJos or Golden Boy or Priso...

  A story about two bisexuals that just have sex pretty much anywhere. I first read it looking for some spice, thinking that one of the girls was a girlish looking dude, but turns out the manga was just about lesbians. It's not that bad, each chapter is around 10 pages and the entire series can be finished really fast. The two girls are pretty much in love, although they both have boyfriend(s), so I kind of doubt both of their moralities. It's not that bad a read, but it isn't anything to write home about. I read it to enjoy the little wholesome exchanges and the lewdness, all while trying to ignore the lowkey cheating and other weirdness. All in all, a pretty 5/10 series, I wouldn't give this series a high score but I also think it has merit.

 I love manga. Some of the best stories I've ever read have been from manga, and I highly recommend at least reading some manga series to anyone who hasn't read manga before. This post is to hopefully serve as a guide to anyone who wants to get into manga, and also provide a lot of recommendations. Before I start, I want to first also list off some pros that manga has over other mediums, such as film or novels, which also serve to explain why I love this medium so much. First off, its a lot easier to enter the flow state while reading manga. In my experience, it always takes a few pages before I can become fully absorbed into a manga, and with manga you can also stop at any time, unlike something like a movie where you have to pay attention for around two hours straight. Manga as an industry is also not afraid of new ideas, and this results in both a lot of creative premises/storytelling and a very wide range of genres within manga. There will be a manga out there for anyone to...

 Contradictorily, this was probably my most busy quarter yet. The very first week of the spring quarter I went to a jam in SLO, where I was one of nine collegiate invites for a special collegiate eight to smoke category. I, along with two other bboys from UCSD, stayed with the SLO bboys who organized the SLO jam, and that trip was just so fun. I was able to be driven up by bboys from San Diego that I'd only seen in videos before, and I also did much better than I expected. I didn't win or anything, but I technically got third place because I ended with the third most amount of rounds won. I also made the decision to fly back up to Norcal and enter the Floorgangz Anniversary jam with Josh and Enzo, which was actually super fun. I spent a decent amount of money on this, but I saw a lot of people I knew and I think it was also definitely a highlight of the quarter for me. Besides that, the CAT gathering was also during this quarter. I wasn't as involved with this, but I still ...

 Quarter Summary: Once again, I have severely slacked off and so my recollection of this quarter may not be the best. Honestly, a lot of it kinda blurs together with spring quarter in my mind. Events that happened this quarter include going to Vibe Dance Competition (very fun), performing at a dance exhibition with LVO, MCIA, and URMO, going to a random track meet with Alan and Brian (would be more fun if I weren't injured), parents and brother visiting and taking me to San Diego, and the SoCal boys (Wei and Darren) visiting. Coming into the quarter, I got a new laptop and a new speaker! I also decided to start decorating my room a lot more, and I got a few posters throughout the quarter, in addition to making my little manga hall of fame. Physically, my ankle was still hurt for a lot of the quarter, but this quarter I was really able to heal up and I was even able to start tricking and I played IM volleyball for Tomo as well. Overall, it was a pretty eventful quarter, to be honest...

I didn't do that well this quarter. I'm not really sure what happened, but I just had like no motivation. Perhaps I'm burnt out, perhaps I just don't care, but I never felt as though I was in the best mental state this quarter. That isn't to say that I was feeling terrible all the time, but I just felt incredibly neutral. I definitely could've tried harder in things, but I didn't and that doesn't actually bother me that much for some reason. Perhaps I'm burnt out or something, but I feel as though I would still feel this way even if I wasn't working on school and stuff. Extracurricular wise, I joined the tricking team, and I started contacting random breakdance clubs in socal, because I wanted to organize something for next year. BBA is having a lot more members this year which is nice, but I still feel like the overall level could be way higher. Socially, this quarter was pretty much a hard reset. I stopped being friends with Jennifer very early...

 This is a one shot collection with a bunch of mini stories. I personally did not actually like a lot of them, as a lot of them were just kind of weird and made me uncomfortable. The first one is about a female teacher and a male high school student who lives next door. I didn't like this one. 1/10 The second one is about a girl who's in love with this one ex of hers, who then starts to cheat on his current gf with him. I strongly disliked this one. 1/10 The third one is about this girl who's in an extremely abusive relationship with her boyfriend, while she meets a new guy. Surprisingly wholesome. 6/10 A 36 year old dude is lonely so he posts online to make friends, and he meets up with a girl who says she's 28 but is actually 18. They fall in love. Hated this one. 1/10. Some dude's friend is selling this girl as a prostitute. The dude decides to take care of the girl and stop letting her get taken advantage of by the dude's shitty friend. Also surprisingly who...

 I don't get what it is with manga authors and using Alice in their titles. Anyways though, Alice in Hell is a manga about this fucked up kid who is a genius sniper in a post-apocalyptic world. He saves this woman who just so happens to be a leader of a commune, and so she takes him to the commune to live. This manga is far from perfect, but I have to give it props because this is a manga that felt complete all the way through. Sometimes, some manga can have an issue where you can tell that the author had to inorganically change their story because of external factors (health, time issues, reader criticism, etc.). In other words, the author had a vision for the manga, and he completed it. However, that doesn't mean that the manga is particularly good. I think the author really wanted to just portray a really fucked up post apocalyptic world where things just constantly go wrong. And things go wrong a lot. Large conflicts escalate from small incidents, and the author does a good...

 This manga is a close second to the most degenerate thing I've ever read, with the first being Golden  Boy. In short, this story is just about this dude named Terumi who ends up needing to seduce 14 girls in order to complete some kind of research study done by his aunt, who is a hot college professor. Some of these girls include his own family, people more than twice his age, and even a few underage girls. There's a lot of weird and honestly pretty fucked up stuff happens in this series, but it's actually pretty self aware about it. But I'm going to set aside the premise of the story, and talk about what this manga is really about. This manga is actually just a way for the author to complete 14 relatively short romance arcs in one manga. With 14 being such a high number, almost every romance trope is covered, which means that this manga can serve as a sort of one manga dose of any love story that you desire. So, in other words, this manga is a story about almost every...

 I didn't actually love that many albums this year. Yes, it was a great year for music, especially for hip hop, with a large amount of releases. But, there actually wasn't that large an amount of albums that I truly loved this year, at least not enough to even make a top 10. Of course, I liked more than 10 albums, but I didn't think that I liked them enough to actually include them in my top 10 favorite albums list of this year. Instead, I have gathered 7 albums, along with 5 honorary mentions, and also 1 EP.  Also, the order doesn't really matter here, even if I did try to somewhat order them. My thoughts on these albums change literally like everyday and according to my mood. 1. Dawn FM. This album released in the beginning of the year and it made me a Weeknd fan. I did not like Blinding Lights that much, but this album just clicked for me. Maybe it was the overall concept of the album, which was actually mostly coherent, or it was the nice transitions and song order ...

 I wish I could've enjoyed this manga. But, the truth is that it just simply is not that good. I read this because I loved two of Kaori Ozaki's other works: The God's Lie and The Golden Sheep. Those series, while short, were good enough for me to want to read whatever else Ozaki published. There is so much potential in this manga, but I guess Ozaki's writing skills just weren't good enough at this point in her career, as the execution is just short of terrible. I loved the premise of this manga, where there is a mysterious immortal man who eventually has to take care of a teenage girl. I thought that their dynamic would develop into some kind of wholesome father daughter relationship. As the series went on and more characters were introduced, I also thought that this would develop into a more philosophical series where there doesn't seem to be a good answer to the challenges presented. I thought that the important characters would go through their own character ...

 I gave this series a 6. It's kind of close to a 7, but it's mostly leaning towards a 6. It's pretty good and worth a read, but far from perfect. I loved the worldbuilding in this series. I'd say that that is the biggest strength of this series is the wonderful world that you are put in. The author obviously had a ton of ideas for his world, as there are random little lore drops at the end of most volumes that I greatly enjoyed. However, the actual story and content of the manga leaves a little bit to be desired. I ended up not caring for some characters because there were just so many, and also some of them just weren't flushed out. There is also just too much random sex. There are just scenes where there is sex for no reason and I honestly don't get it. Also, the fairy powers aren't actually ever super explained well, so there's that. If you want to read a solid dark fantasy series, then this is definitely worth your time. There are better ones out the...

 Golden Boy is the worst manga I've ever read. While I wouldn't really want to recommend it in general, I think that reading at least some part of this could still be entertaining because of just how weird it is. And this manga is very, very weird. I personally did not love the anime, so I started reading the manga with no prior information hoping that it would get better. Instead, the manga only gets worse the more you read it. It reached a point where I was physically cringing during almost every chapter, and I had to take multiple breaks from reading because it was just too much. I think Golden Boy works best if you just show out of context screenshots to people. Some insane (and I mean insane as in I seriously think the author has some kind of mental illness) things happen in the manga, and those things are pretty funny if you just take them out of context. Over the course of the series, however, I found that the antics of the manga just got tiring. At some point in the man...

 This manga was confusing because I don't know shit about religion, however I feel like it would be confusing to even religious people because its about Gnosticsm, which isn't that popular a religion nowadays anyways (if it's even still around). There were explanations that I did appreciate, including explanations about some girl named Luns that's some kind of religious figure? The story is basically about how this girl Luna who is causing a war between Catholics and Gnostics, who are also a part of the Nitobe group. I have to be honest, I am writing this review months later, and this story was not good enough to be memorable in the first place. I'm really just going off notes I had written before. This story is very Japanese, by which I mean that there some interesting views of the west. For example, there are some slightly racist depictions of black people. Also, for some reason Ursula De Guin (the author of the Earthsea books, which by the way I haven't met a...

 I've done it again. I've went down another music related rabbit hole. It started when I was skipping through some Youtube video titled "English Pop Songs Turned Into K-Pop (ft. WAY Too Many SM Songs)," and I heard this song called "Still Believe in Love" by some girl named Jennie Hyun. Apparently, this had been turned into the song ""How Great Is Your Love?" by SNSD (which is another name for Girls Generation, apparently). I thought the song was super good, so I tried to find it on Youtube, but I could only find other peoples reuploads of the song, not the original anywhere. I thought that was weird, so I searched up Jennie Hyun, where I found this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/pxpcr/girls_generation_singer_jenny_hyun_goes_on/ Basically, this singer by the name of Jenny Hyun went onto a racist rant on her twitter account, where she said some pretty bad things about black people following some comments that Floyd Mayweat...

 One day (July 4, 2022), I was scrolling through Instagram, when I saw some bboy clip with a song called "Omegah Red - Books of War (Instrumental)." And I liked this song so I tried to find out. Turns out that this song is fan made, with some dude just taking RZA and Mf Doom verses from random songs and then combining them over a beat. For the actual Books of War song, the MF doom verses are from a song called "it ain't nuttin,'" and the RZA versus are taken from "the night the earth cried" by the gravediggas. Heres a link to the fan album: https://youtu.be/DQHBUK_BURE From the description, it looks like the guy who posted this album is the real Omegah Red, who's just using a different name. However, with some more searching online, it turns out that perhaps the beat was also made by some dude named Rob Viktum, on a song named 4/17/1975, from the album Progress 2. I got this from a YouTube comment from this video: https://youtu.be/7uhYYnf7kUw T...

 As of today, I've hit Gold 1 in Valorant, which has been my goal for the past two years or so (it's off by just a few months). It's an amazing high, and I just feel great, but on some level I wonder if it was all worth it. I think it's similar to wearing braces. In the moment, you hate them, and you hate the sores in your mouth and all the other inconveniences that they bring, but you sort of forget about them and as time passes on, you are glad that you did it, because on some level you've forgotten all of the suffering that you had to go through to get to the end result. And playing Valorant these past two years hasn't exactly been all good. There have been countless nights where I've just stayed up, saying "can't end on a loss," only to end up in some of the worst mental states I've ever been in. And those were some truly terrible mental states. But, with these extreme lows, there have also been extreme highs, which just make Valorant a...

 On Growing Up (Or, the Present) On the eve of my twentieth birthday, I arrived into SFO at almost 7am, having spent 2 months in Taiwan. In another 5 hours, I was picked up by my friend, and in about another two hours I was sitting in my other friend's apartment in San Francisco that he rented out, with four other roommates, in order to work over the summer. Pretty crazy. At this moment, I knew I was old enough to be grown up. I mean, I sort of got this feeling when I first went to college. I moved out for the first time. But, on some level, it still felt like college was still another stepping stone before I hit the real world. This was different. I felt like these people were just that much closer to being in the real world than I was.  It's fitting that this happened on my 20th birthday, because I'm not a teen anymore. I was already an adult, and some people move out and start working and start a family and go clubbing, but I feel like I don't really meet those peopl...

 Nausicaa is a masterpiece. and it might just better than anything else Miyazaki has ever created, Studio Ghibli movies included. Most people finding this manga will have already watched the movie, as I have, so lets just get the differences between the manga and the movie out of the way first: Firstly, the movie is actually the adaptation of the manga, and not the other way around. Furthermore, compared to the movie, the manga encompasses a longer, more complete story, and frankly it is just a higher quality in general. I admit I am biased because I enjoy reading much more than I enjoy watching, but I believe a lot is gained from consuming Nausicaa in the manga medium. The movie is cool, sure, but the manga contains far greater depth that any movie could ever hope to achieve. The movie only encompasses the first two volumes of the manga, and it also has a completely separate ending. When I talk about the "depth" that the manga has compared to the movie, I mean that because M...

 I totally forgot to post a UCI Survival Guide after winter quarter, so I'll just do my best to recap both of those quarters in this post. Winter The first 5 weeks of winter quarter was actually online, due to a surge in COVID cases after winter break. I actually went back during the fourth week, however, because my ochem lab got the green light from the school to start early. I personally didn't really want to go back, not only because it meant I got to hang out with my high school friends more, but also because at this point I was a bit tired of my messy roommates and perpetually dirty apartment. This quarter, I was still pretty involved in club volleyball and BBA, but I started to drift away from TAO a bit. This was my hardest quarter academically at UCI so far, and I started to just not have the time to hang out with people. I also didn't really study with other people because I realized that sometimes I work the best alone in silence. Classes Taken (Winter) CBE 40B - M...