Jess♥

'tis a great time of life enjoy yourself as much as you can! I'd love to go to college again. well actually I probably will. but it won't be the same as when i was young and carefree. many poeple say college/university was the best years of their life. I won't be so melodramatic to say that as I believe the best time in my life will be when i have children but oh well.

adding abarenbo mama to my watched list great series, really enjoyed it. gonna watch hotaru no hikari next. what are you guys watching? have i missed any series that you have recommended? can you recommend any more?

i'm not sure, I don't know if it could be considered extra mode, just part of what they do, like taking out their weapons or whatever. I mean, i feel like when they increase their guts, it felt like what gaoranger used to do when they 'flashed' their claws.

basically, it's intended to mean "shut-in". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGmKxma_CUQ it's not a nice term in japan, but for westerners it's used to describe committed anime or manga fans.

but i said toku's legend... toku legends does not work with hte logic i gave. but as long as you realise that and are ok with it then no probs. ( or where you referring back to your original title that you said up there? in which case, no probs)

here's something interesting that was passed my way.

very interesting. I had been led to believe that super sentai came about as a result of working with marvel. not only that, but that marvel was ultimately responsible for the concept of super sentai. it is very interesting to see that myth being turned on its head now. what was once believed as fact, is now clearly fiction. super sentai is the end result of a 5 man kamen rider team concept. so durendal, do you have any thoughts about music? names, interesting thoughts... i thought we were settled on the name but i guess we can give more suggestions for ryuu-oh. how about Toku's Legend? phrased in this way, it suggests the alternate definition of 'legend' meaning 'Guide'.

ok, I added videos to my post so you can review. what part of your songs did you have in mind? cool, so you would edit a new montage each time. you wouldn't get tired of such a sequence? my thought was that if we had one, that played in front of each video, it give the whole project a sense of wholeness, but i guess the music would do that and also the concept of the merging images would be the same each time. then again, what about the person who edits that is not yourself, it might be a big ask for them to edit a new one for that series? or do you intend to edit each one?

i'd like to suggest that an OP be kept very short, because a lot of times when i watch these things, I get tired of the op and if my computer loads the vid fast enough, I will skip it. people have short attention span these days. I would recommend maybe 20 seconds. music, I would like to suggest JAM project. it is good positive vibe, and did the theme for rescue fire and i am sure many members here like their music, for example, their rendition of okkusenman. i just went through a couple i have on my computer. suggestion 1 - 'Peaceful One' OP 1:22-1:42 ED 1:42-1:58 suggestion 2 - 'The Everlasting' OP 1:03-1:23 ED 3:52-4:12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzEPC7kGXIo why don't we each pick a couple of tracks and then we could take a choice from them? oh, suggestions for visuals, it needs to be things that people love about super sentai. it needs to really be what we love about it, since we are producing this. personally, I love the characters. the suits and fighting come secondary. although the fighting is the hallmark of the genre, I feel that it is the characters behind the fighting that gives it soul. it's why we care about the fights. personally, I would like to see a montage that fades through each of the characters faces from each of our favourite series. so I would pick hurricanger. and whatever you guys pick, we would show the main characters faces fading into each other. that's my ideal. maybe that could be for the ED. or maybe for the OP, it could show some pivotal fighting scenes, with lots of explosions? or maybe some slow shots of the various senshi in their post-henshin poses? well I have given my favourite idea (faces), so maybe we can compare notes and decide from there?

was goranger super sentai or was it just sentai? i think i remember something about having a robot being necessary to be a super sentai? with regards to the history, I think it could be alluded to but not necessarily spelled out? it depends on what kind of information we are talking about i guess.

personally, I always see the movies as alternate universe, almost fan fiction, because they aren't made by the original producers. but it's not my call. will we keep the script between us while we work on it? that makes sense because then people won't have seen it and will look forward to a release. we can use a 4 way private message. oh did i say shinkenger? how silly of me. I meant to say magiranger. I've seen about 70% of shinkenger. I've seen all of magiranger. not that it ought to change anything now. the ball is rolling nice organisation guys! and impressive knowledge of the series. I have seen this series all the way through and i do not remember specific fights. nice dedication too. I'm looking forward to working on this

yeah he was hella impressive wasn't he! I was suprised at first, I had forgotten he ws around and the first thing i saw and the first thought that came into my head was but then i remembered of course. and about time too. things were getting pretty hairy there. it's impressive to see that his skills are seemingly superior. i have never seen ****** in such an advanced stage, or at least i do not remember it looking that way.

since it seems to be your idea initially, then the choice is yours. for the name, I would like to suggest something to do with japan legend as it can be good publicity for our community and potentially bring us some more members. (although it's not necessary as i think it would be clear that the people working on it are based here.) for series, if you want to choose a sentai, my first recommendation would be either shinkenger or gekiranger as I have seen those all the way through. the others on your list i have only seen partially. if not a sentai, then from that list, i would recommend rescue fire as it is the only one i have seen many episodes of. the other i have not really seen at all. ishinomori was responsible for goranger? wow, that is a surprise. well, somebody mentioned it to me before somewhere and i thought they were mistaken because i had not heard it before. well it does seem that this project might work well alongside Project Toku Wiki. if for example, we do gekiranger for the first review, then the PTW gekiranger page could be the current focus for translation? what would you think of that durendal? and of course it would help out a LOT with making a good informative script. and when the video is released, it will bring more attention to the PTW and all that hard work.

I do have it, but i don't have a dvd drive in my computer so i can't do anything with that anyway. the only series i have on my computer is gokaiger. I am obtaining juurenjaa and timeranger as tvn release them but that doesn't allow us to do anything on the series as a whole. I also think we could do kamen rider as well if you guys wanted to.

sounds like you really know what you're doing! I can't really add anything to this, I'm not really as organised as you are on the footage editing front. I look forward to what you guys come up with and i hope i can give it some good feelings with narration! I'll try and add input where i can, it's not my strong point though. If you wish, you can provide some sample script and I'll do some test recordings. I may not be able to get the right enthusiasm you see, so it's best to check that beforehand.

toku, if you're referring to me, it doesn't really matter about that, since i would be giving my voice to it, I have seen enough super sentai to make up for not seeing some older series with my enthusiasm for more recent series. especially after seeing gokaiger. and of course whoever edits it would need to have the footage. i was actually thinking of you as you do a lot of AMV. also, it wouldn't have to be the same person writing and editing for each series. I know we are badly off topic here. is it worth splitting the topic, are we going to talk about this more?

i'm willing to present if somebody does a script and editing of footage. i'm comfortable talking in front of the camera and i'm familiar with many series.

I agree on the pain thing. especially if you are training for combat. pain is a way to help us to know our limits. artificially numbing pain, invites worse injury and potential long term consequences. I don't believe in pain killers and never take any form of drug. legal or otherwise. well apart from what comes naturally in food and drink such as caffeine. besides that, many martial arts are generally about balance and maintaining a natural equilibrium in your body. taking pain killers does not promote a natural equilibrium, kinda the opposite.

a part was left behind, which must mean that something else has come with you. i mean, you weigh roughly the same, don't you? maybe your mum put a big chunk of her love in you and it pushed a different piece of you out?

I think it's like how i said about making a plan. I think that we make a plan for ourselves before we are born. then it is up to us to follow that plan or not. of course, since it is our plan, following it will make us happy. i guess the problem comes when we forget our plan. at the same time, i think the plan is not absolutely set. it has room for manoeuvre. this stood out to me. what you are basically saying here is that if you strive for anything you are going to be disappointed? it's like you are focusing on the negative? in fact you are suggesting that anything that you strive for will automatically end in failure? of course you said you are pessimistic. that's fine if it serves you, but if you think it is not serving you, I have a phrase that is very important to me. you only fail when you give up. basically, if you try at something and don't succeed, that is not a failure. because you get to try again. you may need to adjust your plan, and change certain criteria, but you can keep trying to reach a goal if it is what you really want. you have only failed when you stop. and if you stop trying for something that you really want, is that doing justice to yourself? personally, for my own use, I would like to change your sentence to something more like " as for short term goals, the more things you set to strive for, the more potential happiness you bring into your life." I say potential happiness, because not every plan will be so easy and we need to choose our battles. but note, it is our own choice. another concept i value highly, we choose what attitude we take towards life. we decide whether to be optimistic or pessimistic. so it is your choice if you continue to be pessimistic. it is not out of your control. your mind is your mind. the thoughts you generate are generated by you. sometimes thoughts seem to come into our minds spontaneously. these are generated by habit. to change a habit, we simply need to take notice of it and catch it when it occurs. I used to bite my nails. I don't now. it is possible to change these things. if you wish to be more optimistic, you can do so. just take notice of when you think pessimistically. you don't need to berate yourself. it's best if you don't because we are all human and make mistakes. if you notice it, all you need to do is point it out to yourself and think about a different version of that thought that you would prefer to have. so for example, if I notice myself looking at a girl and thinking "ugly bitch" I would stop myself and think "i just thought about that person negatively, I wish i could think of her as beautiful, how would i do that?".

or maybe all 3. one thing i like to remind myself is, whatever way we view it, if we look at our spirit, soul, or fate, or the universe, or god, to each of these, time is no obstacle. so in that respect, it has been 'predetermined' by a personal manifestation in order to guide us. luna diviner, I have trouble fully getting what you are saying, but from where i am sitting, it seem like your goal is very far off in the distance and you haven't fully grabbed hold of it yet. maybe you need some interim goals? things that you can comfortably reach out and grab. as your friend said, you are not valuing the joy of living now, and that may be the contradiction. do you watch kamen rider OOO by any chance? that series really covers these issues quite a lot. the main protagonist fights the monsters and is the hero, and he is giving his life away for others to live. the main thing they are focusing on is getting him to find his own desires. things he wants to live for NOW. I also understand this, there was a time a while back that I found myself only wanting for things that were far in the future and not really very motivated for things in the short term. what i did, was i started to make a plan. I placed my long term goal at the bottom of a piece of paper, (actually a text file on my computer) and above that, I put interim goals. things i needed to work on in order to reach that goal. as i worked on fleshing out my ideas for a long term goal and interim goals, I started to formulate even smaller short term goals and things that i need to do. then as i had my plan set out, I decided to add other things into my framework of my plan. I guess the fear of death is an interesting thing if we stretch it's meaning a little.l like you mentioned, going to jail was like dying, or even not living for the moment, is like dying. I can attest to that, when i suffered a bad experience abroad, it really made me question my future. my long term goals involved going abroad and so if i could not go abroad, then essentially my future was destroyed and for all intents and purposes i was dead. this was not physical death but emotional or spiritual death. there is a very different set of feelings. do i fear that? well at the time it filled me with anxiety and fear. it's been a very difficult thing to overcome, but as we grow in strength, the fear diminishes. I was never afraid of physical death because i believed that i would not suffer afterwards. but to 'die' and still be here alive and have to deal with that 'death'... that is really like being in hell. in this sense, I am afraid of 'death'. I'm learning to not be so afraid. learning more about that each day. in fact, since i can actually talk about it here, i would say i have learned a hell of a lot by this stage.

nice work guys, you reminded me of a quote from a wonderful movie called Dogma. I love that movie. anyhow the quote, "it doesn't matter what you have faith in, just that you have faith." we can have faith in a lot of things. one of teh most important is having faith in ourself. faith is an unerring trust. without that, we can't really function. i'm sorry if this causes even a small bit of discommfort, but have you ever questioned if what your eyes show you is true? it turns out, we have faith in our vision to show us what we need to see. that is what faith is. it's not something to use as an excuse for lack of facts. it's a matter of trust. it's our only recourse when we are walking through the dark blindfolded and with earmuffs. we have faith in the one who holds our hand. wow, yeah eether, it is truly a burden to be thoughtful sometimes XD there are times when i would love to be ignorant and stupid and just enjoy life and never have thought of these things, but as you said, I am not so brainwashed and could consider myself 'free' or at least 'more free' than many others. bad stuff in life. yeah i can understand that. here's a funny story. this is my own personal story, I don't want to impress my own thoughts on anyone else, I just want you to understand my own process. when i was a child I wanted to become a choir singer. I had been christened methodist and though I wasn't very much into it, I made that approach towards the church. I signed up and got a robe and went and sang as part of the church choir. now a few things happened. first thing, the second time i went, I started to feel sick. for whatever reason, I alone, overheated and started to feel faint. I had to leve the church and sit in the grounds to recover. next time i went, I locked my new bike up right outside the church door. I locked it to a drainpipe and went inside. i loved that bike, it was pure white and the first bike i ever had. it was bought by my grandpa who i love very much. when i came out of teh church it was gone. it was stolen from outside a church. now... I didn't go to the church any more. i stopped singing in the choir and decided that the church was not for me. now for the punchline. you may see this as a crisis of faith. "God did these things to me" and so on... but actually, I didn';t feel that way. well i may have been sore at the time, but the way i see it is this, I was guided away from the christian church by an unseen force. how else could these things have happened i such a way? pure luck? i don't think so because it seemed so specific. I was guided away from this church by these events. and I beleive that there is something that set those events in motion. they were truly unpleasant events, but I believe that those events set me on a better path. last thing. if you are not a christian, does it mean you are an atheist? no. an atheist is somebody who believes firmly that there is 'no god'. there's a number of different categories that explain methods of thinking about the existence or non existence of a divine single deity or multiple deities etc. but why be so quick to put yourself in a box? you've been in a box for much of your life, only just breaking out of it now. I wouldn't be in such a hurry to get into another box. erutanxiku has a topic about that :- Religious Upbringing for the Next Gen

that is a very challenging post. I hope nobody gets offended by it. I think that as you are coming from your own personal experience then you obviously have relative experience to pose the question as an open question. anyhow, I think that with some people, their religious views are the result of ignorance, or lack of personal experience. I find that as many people grow, they come to understand various things about the world we all live in and these things are not explainable by the cold rule of science. science deals with what we can measure, but it can not deal with the things we feel. I am sure each of us here has unique experiences that have led us to our own individual ideas and beliefs. some of us choose to fit our experiences into a framework that already exists, but sometimes our experiences don't fit into any framework that we have seen. additional, about the scientific method and certain phenomena that can be considered non-scientific, things that cannot be measured, can't be proven, however, in a person's own experience, there are certain phenomena that can be repeated and tested. you can't record these experiences, in the same way you can't record your dreams with a VCR. but you can repeat them and observe them. unfortunately you can't prove this to anyone else because you have no evidence so it's down to each individual to keep their eyes open to experience these things. as a person experiences more, they will formulate their own ideas about life and death.

I don't fear death, I see it as another challenge i will have to deal with. things happen all the time, unchangeable things that you cannot go back. an interesting thing to think about now is, are you already dead? the past life that you know, is only within your memory, you cannot be that person now, so for all intents and purposes, that person that you remember being is gone/dead. the idea of death as being the end of human experience is an interesting one, that doesn't always take into account what our 'experience' actually is. what you are living right now, seeing through those eyes, thinking inside that head of yours. what is that? until we can answer that for sure, then death is not really something we can properly have an answer for. in fact it brings up all sorts of questions. there are members of my family that are now not around me, they are somewhere else. they aren't dead, but i cannot talk to them, or see them etc. now are they alive or dead? actually i don;t know. but it doesn't really make much difference at all does it? I don't know what comes with death. what i do know for sure, is that fear and anxiety and all these emotional issues that we experience, are a product of our body. so upon death, I am pretty confident that whatever happens, I will be free from any fear i may experience. I think it will be one heck of an adventure.

this is interesting, it sounds similar to another thing i said elsewhere. that our big bang was like the ripples on the surface of a pond, caused by a stone being thrown in. the stone is o longer within our reality, but the effects of the stone are what make up the fabric of reality. just something to think about. anyway, some things that seemed to be pretty dominant and i wanted to address. evolution. I have a rather animist view of this, in that evolution has it's own awareness, different from our awareness that could be called spirit or soul. lot's think about insects and similar things, that come along season after season, going through the same cycles and rhythms, just like the rhythms in our own bodies. each time an insect comes out of its cocoon after metamorphosing, it is a step on that journey, a beat in that rhythm, and i feel that there is something that is experiencing these rhythms and waves of life and over time, slowly changing. as for whether this experience has some awareness, I am not certain if we can say, there could be some for of network like our neurons that is perhaps making different decisions like our own thought processes, but on a larger scale and instead of neural communication, it is genetic or something else like chemical transmission etc. in short, I believe that evolution has consciousness , on a scale of understanding that we can't fully fathom. ( in the same way though, I am thinking that these various consciousness are not 'gods' but could be considered so by some peoples, and all are simply part of a greater whole) about time, well our idea of time is basically a straight line going forward and back. i think it's easy to think of this like a train line. all of our trains travel along this track in one direction. at some point each of us will derail and crash (die). the line has a beginning and an end. asking what was before the big bang, is like asking what stops are on the line beyond the terminus. well there aren't any stops because the line doesn't go there. TIME doesn't go before the big bang, but there is something outside of time as we understand it. this is like alternate realities, is like moving off the train line and exploring the countryside. what was before the big bang? well in terms of space time, there is no such thing as before the big bang, but in terms of 'possibility' rather than 'reality', there is many things before the big bang. the only way to see those things is to go off the line. (die) well either that or use a very special tool that we all have, called imagination. that is what many people believe astral travelling is, during dreaming. they believe hat when we dream we can spread wings and travel from the train. this is how i like to think about these concepts at the moment anyway. by no means am I correct. that's half the fun durendal, youngguyver would like your way of thinking there. I remember he was talking about a similar thing a while back. edit: I just read back and caught something else asking about motivation for god to create our universe? have i got that right? well the bible would have it that god created man to worship him. it comes across as very egotistical, but i think this is somehow true but I want to present it in a different fashion, I will quote (or perhaps paraphrase).... I believe it was doctor carl sagan who said "we are the way for the cosmos to know itself".