Clannad and Clannad After Story

Never have I ever seen anything quite as beautiful as Clannad. It’s based off a visual novel of the same name by Key and very loyally follows the content within it. Much like many anime that are out there the main characters are mostly students in high school. The central theme of the story I would say would be growing up. Over the time it took for me to watch it I grew to love every single one of the characters. Unlike many anime that I’ve seen this one’s characters are dynamic and grow with the events that happen within the show. Along with the story and the characters the soundtrack fits the show perfectly. Even the extra content created is beautiful and creates their own sense of closure within themselves.

I grew to love Tomoya Okazaki, the protagonist of the entire series and a slacker. He has a strong habit of cutting class and ignoring lectures because he would rather waste his time than learn. Throughout the school he is known as a delinquent and he very regularly pulls pranks and jokes on his friends and fellow students. Tomoya meets Nagisa Furuwaka on one of his walks. She is the main heroine of the story and is a repeat senior at her school because she spent a lot of her time sick her first senior year. She has poor self-esteem and self-confidence, but things change when Tomoya begins speaking to her (and he speaks his mind quite bluntly at times). He helps her achieve her dream of reviving the drama club and all throughout they make many new friends. You also get to meet dozens of other colorful characters that all have great importance to the series. Tomoya helps Fuko Ibiki, a shy girl that at first is very timid around him as well as stubborn, get all the people in the school to go to her big sister’s wedding. He helps Kotomi Ichinose, a quiet genius that is at first awkward at socializing, learn how to socialize and deal with old scars. Each of these characters and many more grow and find a way into your heart. Tomoya grows from his childhood into manhood quite well through the whole series, and many of the other characters follow similarly.

The series explores friendship, family, and love very thoroughly. Each of the characters have their share of loss as well as gain. All of the grow in their own way. There are fights. There is romance. The humor is fantastic, not many shows have got me laughing as heartily as Clannad. There were times where I would be excited over the cuteness of several of the characters. There were also times were I would cry at the beautiful, the happy, and the sad. It is very stimulating in every aspect of the word, but it is not overwhelming. The series is most definitely emotional, but not in a way the leaves you exhausted and depressed, and more in a way that leaves you satisfied and happy.

If anyone were to ask me what my favorite anime was I would say “Clannad hands down” and then recommend it highly. I have never felt this good after finishing any other anime series.

Avengers: The Movie

You all probably know about the latest Marvel movie and many of you may have already seen it, but for those of you that have yet to watch it or have reservations about it: I have one thing to say. “Watch it.”

I remember several of my friends discussing how they might end up being disappointed by the Avengers movie because of all the build up to them. I remember a few of them even saying they won’t watch the movie because of that. It might be true that if you have all these expectations built up when you see something that’s supposed to be epic it doesn’t seem that way, but I believe the Avengers meets all expectations.

It nicely puts all of the Avengers together. Ironman. The Hulk. Captain America. Thor. Hawkeye. The Black Widow. It puts them together by a single enemy showing up and stealing a valuable item from S.H.I.E.L.D. : the Tesseract, a powerful Asgardian device with infinite self-sufficient energy. Every individual member of the Avengers gets brought in to perform various tasks that suit them best. Thor is a bit of a different story because he shows up to kick the enemy’s rear end back to Asgard for trial and joins up only to get the whereabouts of the Tesseract to take it back home.

Each character having already been developed by their own movies show their true colors very well. I find that the previous development of the characters worked very well to Marvel/Disney’s advantage, because then they were able to get right to the meat of the movie’s story and develop the relationships between each of the characters and all of that without needing to develop the characters themselves.

Overall the action is great, the characters are great, the story is at the very least put together well, and the delivery is as expected: epic. 9/10

Listia

Well, here my review on Listia as promised. My curious nature brought me to this site via an ad on Facebook saying get free Magic cards, and because I have an eBay store that sells Magic cards I thought that free stuff sounds pretty good, especially if it has some value to it and I can resell it on eBay. I will say that things worked out pretty well.

Listia is an online auction site, but instead of paying with money you pay with credits and some of the things on there are pretty darn good. You can spend money to buy credits, but it’s ridiculously expensive and silly to do so unless you are absolutely certain that you’ll get your money back via product value. Alright, I wasn’t completely telling the truth when I said you don’t pay money, some auctions require you pay shipping with real dollars, but other than that there really isn’t much else you need money for in this site.

Much like eBay, every type of product you can think of goes up here. Collectibles? Yep. Computer parts? Yep. Cameras? Yep. Even books and clothing and a dozen other categories of stuff with… subcategories! Not only that, but you can get the stuff for pretty much free. Free is good, right?

If you want to add credits to your account you can do quite a few things. One is spend money to buy them there credits. Another is list your own stuff that you don’t want to have anymore and in a few days after somebody wins the auction your credits will come to you. You can also complete surveys and offers of the free kind and the paid kind and get a varying amount of credits per choice. There are also little goals here and there that can give you 10-15 credits if you complete them. Also inviting a friend that then completes an auction gives you 500 credits and them 100 plus the starting amount when they join.

I’ll tell you now that this site is in fact very legit and definitely not a scam. It’s also a fantastic way to get rid of all of your extra junk that you don’t need that somebody else might want.

Cashback

What would you do if you were able to stop time? Ben uses his time stopping for his artistic talent. Wait. That’s not the main point of this beautiful drama. Directed and written by Sean Ellis, Cashback is an excellent story about a young man who just experienced a terrible break-up and has developed insomnia because of it. In order to kill time he gets a night shift job in a grocery store and to pass the time there he develops this ability to stop time and observe the naked beauty of the women who shop there and draw every single one of them.

Ben Willis is a college art student with extraordinary talent, and with an artistic fascination with the female body. His break up hit him so hard that he could not sleep, after he gets the job at the grocery store he begins to interact with the wide spectrum of characters that he has to work with. He has a womanizing and overly competitive manager. A trickster pair of best friends that pass their time by doing some of the craziest stuff. And a few others, but most importantly, he meets Sharon Pintey the only female co-worker who he begins to develop a crush on, but cannot figure out how to let her know.

Every so often you get flashbacks to Ben’s previous crushes and the reasons as to why he has his fascination with the beauty of the female form. The story of the movie is very well put together and while it does indeed have its predictable moments these moments are forgiven by the creative license taken with the movie. The humor throughout the movie is often a little over the top, but so are most of the supporting characters.

Yes, this movie does in fact have nudity, but that is not the entirety of what the movie revolves around.

This still isn’t one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, but it is very well put together and I’ll give it a 8/10.

Cashback

Alpha and Omega

I was bored one night and decided that I wanted to watch the movie Alpha and Omega that was released in 2010 and directed by Anthony Bell and Ben Gluck. I will say that I enjoyed it, but some parts of it weren’t to my taste. In fact I kind of wonder who they were trying to target for an audience with some of the material they put in it. In their previews they presented it as a “Family” film, but as I watched it I had this feeling that something was off about that. This movie isn’t on my top anything list, but it also isn’t anywhere on the worst lists either, if anything it was in the middle of the road.

Now, just about every movie can have this said, but the plot and story of the movie was very predictable. The main point of the film was breaking tradition, as the two main characters were an Alpha, the leaders of the pack, and an Omega, the lower caste among wolves, and they spend the entire movie in love with each other which is taboo in their society. The humor was clever at some points and disappointing at others. The character development was OK, by the end of the movie I did have a sort of connection with the main characters and even some of the minor ones.

Now the major point as the why I felt off about the audience. There are several jokes in there that are tasteless and sexual in nature and executed poorly, and I’m not even sure who they were trying to get to laugh with them. I suppose teenagers in that awkward stage and a little after would find it funny. Maybe college students, I know a few guys that might find some humor in tasteless sexual jokes.

Voice acting was OK, some of the characters I liked better than others. There were definitely points within the film that could have been improved and even some that could have been removed.

Overall, I will give this movie a 6/10 as it isn’t the worst movie I’ve seen, but was nowhere near one of the best.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings starts off after the first Witcher game ends. The player also gets to play again in the shoes of Geralt of Rivia, this time he starts out under the hire of King Foltest of Temeria. While CD Project maintained their works with keeping the decision making up to the player as far as how to story progresses with the choice/consequence style of gameplay and the world has stayed the same, that’s as far as the similarities go if you compare The Witcher 2 to its predecessor.

CD Project did a total revamp of gameplay and mechanics and even graphics got an overhaul. The inventory system became much more fluid and gave much more space to work with than the annoying limited space that was available in the first Witcher’s inventory system. Controls got much smoother and instead of clicking on the enemy to attack it with timed combos, the combat system got more intelligent. The graphics moved from being OK for its time to pretty fantastic for its time as the world became more colorful and detailed than before.

The leveling system gives you three different paths to follow: Swordsmanship, Alchemy, and Signs. Each path has its own branches and bonuses that come with its branches. Swordsmanship means you’re not afraid to come out swinging and are often a fearsome opponent in close quarters combat. With Alchemy it means you are a patient hunter that prepares traps for the various monsters you have to deal with throughout the game. Signs gives you the power of magic to play with and the more you train with it the more powerful your Signs become.

The storyline follows a prologue and three acts with defining moments in each act that could change the outcome of the entire game. Much like with BioWare’s Mass Effect series you may import the save file from your previous games into the new one’s and continue your Geralt’s story, I did not do this because somehow by some amazing occurrence my first play through of the Witcher 1 I played cannon exactly.

The Witcher 2 is very replayable as there are multiple endings you may have with several variations based on choices made earlier in the game.

Some issues people may have with the game are the fact that CD Project changed the gameplay style enough that getting used to the different controls from the first Witcher is a little awkard. Another problem I noticed people had was that when it cam to drinking potions, you could not do it on the fly, but the only argument I have against that statement, and it’s weak, is if you’ve seen the videos for the Witcher you see Geralt drinking his potions before he enters combat because a Witcher is always prepared with everything he needs for combat before it happens.

Overall, I highly recommend the Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings to any person who finds great enjoyment in dark fantasy worlds, role playing, fantasy-style combat, or just a plain good story.

The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings Enhanced Edition

RockMelt: A Browser

I just made the transfer from using Google’s Chrome to RockMelt, a web browser somewhat like Chrome, but with it’s own changes. RockMelt allows you to connect your Facebook account to your browser in a simple interface where your notifications are in the upper left hand corner and you have a chat bar on the right side of the browser allowing you to chat with your Facebook friends much like Facebook. It also has an app bar on the left side where you can add some of your favorite websites to it and check out the news with those sites without actually visiting the site. You also gain the option to go into “quiet mode” where you log off of Facebook and the chat bar hides, the button for that is in the upper right corner of the browser.

The browser runs very smoothly, and aside from the additions noted this browser works very much like Chrome. Now, I like Chrome, but I find RockMelt to be even better because of the new features. I say that if you like Chrome, then you’ll like RockMelt better, if not just as much. If you try it please post your thoughts and enjoy.

EDIT: There is one bad thing that I’ve noticed… sometimes the social networking device breaks and doesn’t display you as online. I haven’t figured out why it happens and it makes it difficult for communicating with other people.

Traffic Swarm

I’ve done several searches on which sites were the best to advertise on that actively said “free advertisement here” and of all of them Traffic Swarm has been the best one I’ve tried yet. Because of Traffic Swarm, my blog’s views have increased from 15-20 views a day to 40-70 views, and it’s getting higher. I’m even getting repeat visitors, which is fantastic, but enough about me, this is a post about Traffic Swarm.

After you make a free account with them you get a few rules like: no more than 10 advertisements unless you decide to purchase our premium plan. You have to earn credits to get views to your link, and the more credits you have the more likely someone’s going to visit your site through the advertisement. How do you earn credits? The easiest way is to buy them using PayPal or a credit/debit card. The free way requires time and a little bit of work. The free way is you must surf the ads that are already present in Traffic Swarm to get 1-5 credits per view with a maximum of 250 clicks per day. At 100, 200, and 250 you get a bonus 10-1000 credits randomly decided. Also on occasion for using them a lot you get 50 credits randomly. This means that you’re guaranteed 280 credits a day, which means at least 280 views to your ad and 280 chances to have someone click on it. Easily in one day I’ve gotten 2000 credits. The most you could get for credits is 4235 which is quite a lot for a small blog.

If anything, Traffic Swarm is a fantastic start for advertising for bloggers. You may have to wait 20 seconds between clicks on ads, but you’re also increasing views on your website. You can also pick the continental area that you want to advertise to, you can pick everywhere, or just North America or Europe. You can even focus to regions.

Premium users get 5000 monthly credits, bonus credits per click, free web hosting, unlimited ads, unlimited website submits, unlimited feature articles, and even paid referrals.

Overall, if you have the time and need advertising and you have a small blog I recommend Traffic Swarm, and even if you’re trying to get just a little bit more traffic to your already busy site and have the ability to cover the expense or time requirement for Traffic Swarm then go for it.

30 Sleep Challenge

Remember that 30 sleep challenge hosted by GOOD that I posted about a few weeks back? They said that they’d send emails with tips on how to go about this challenge, and I have yet to receive an email. I must say that this is quite disappointing, because sleep is very hard for me to come across, and if there’s no guidelines for this challenge how am I to improve my sleep schedule? I read the comments on the challenge post and one of them said that they used to send the daily email for challenges, but they’ve changed their system. This new one doesn’t work.

GOOD is a great website, but I can’t help but feel a bit cheated here. I know I didn’t pay anything, but I went into this challenge expecting goals to be presented as come with many of the other challenges that are out there. I don’t know enough about sleep to improve my schedule, and I’m an insomniac therefor it is more difficult for me to sleep. I would have been nice to receive at least a single email with a list of what to do with some tips for the entirety of the challenge. I’m sorry GOOD, but I am disappoint.

MySurvey.com

I figured it is about time I do a formal review on this paid survey site. I’ve now spent about a month working with it and finally have come up with an assessment of this site. MySurvey is a decent paid survey that you can earn some money with if you take the time to use it and don’t speed through each survey, although you get chances at a larger reward if you do speed through, I’ll explain in full detail later in this post.

Signing up is very easy, you give them your email, make a password, and then attach a PayPal account to it. There’s also a little bit more information, but not much. They try to find surveys that fit your profile after you do a survey to give them the information required to find surveys for you. Many of the surveys they give to you afterwards are opinion based anyways.

The interface for answering surveys fits a few similar styles, some of them appear more modern than others. The style of the survey depends on who has posted it. After meeting an estimated time while taking the survey you will get “paid” in reward points upon completion. You always will get entered into a monthly raffle for every survey you complete. This monthly raffle gives you a chance to get 10000 reward points (10 people win this each month), or 50000 reward points (only one person wins this each month). There is also a $4000 sweepstakes that happens every 3 months, this has special rules that can be found at this link.

Every 1000 points is worth $10 and they do add up provided you take the estimated time to answer the survey and don’t speed through, otherwise you only get the chance to win the 10000 points every month. Here are the rules for the monthly sweepstakes. Reward points also can be turned in for various non-cash rewards from gift cards/certificates to bags and wallets to other various products. However, be careful with the non-cash rewards because I read some reviews saying that the wrong stuff was sent to them and the company that owns MySurvey would not give a refund. Anyone with an account with less than 1000 reward points is considered having an account with no value.

Overall this is a decent site to make some pocket change and possibly win some product of some sort. Even get gift certificates/cards. I recommend MySurvey if only because you can make some money from it or get a small gift card to a family member who goes to wherever the card is for.  I give MySurvey a 4/10 on profitability, but a 10/10 for pocket change and 10/10 for free gifts for family. They are also absolutely legitimate and less of a pain than any of the other survey sites I’ve tried.