To now we get to an idea that is kinda cool. Kamen Rider Rising started as an idea I had one night while watching Venture Bros. I had started watching Kamen Rider Kabuto (yeah, I know, it sucked balls at the end!) and had this silly idea of “What would Kamen Rider be like if the hero was a monarch butterfly?” After having this strange.. and lame dream about it I was almost scared of the idea… but then I though… “What if the Rider was trapped in a dream world?” Well.. the Monarch thing was silly and current concept does not contain a Monarched themed Rider… more like a Knight in armor (not themed after any particular bug).

So, why the name “Rising”? It comes from the phrase “off to a raising start.” Ironically enough, the hero is trapped in his dream (in a comma no less) and cannot escape.

Plot. Our hero is a aspiring manga artist (comic book artist) who has a thing for the old comics. Unable to dream, he imagines his dreams threw the works of the comic books he creates. One day while working on an idea for a new comic book, he starts hearing people whispering rumors about terrible nightmares overcoming people, and even some people not waking up! This all seems like nothing more than chit chat gossip until our hero has his first dream of his entire life that night! It is a terrible nightmare where a giant monster slices off his arms and ruins his ability to draw! He wakes up, just before the monster smashes him.

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Yeah, I know this is a real rare treat: TheXev is writing a blog. I wonder if people even remember what I do around here. I know I don't remember what I do around here... ~_~

Message gets all the flames for taking time, but I haven't done any work on Men At Work! 2 in over a year... why doesn't 4chan flame me? :/ foowy. Guess it goes to show how much demand there is for that. I guess I need to get my confidence back to get my butt in gear. Then today, while sitting at a Pizza Hut down the street and reading the internet news off my phone I read a story (I'll be damned if i can find a "real HTTP" link to it now) about a Japanese blogger who recently won an award for best beginning writer (or something.. its a very prestigious award).

The thing about the article wasn't that she got this award via blogging, or even the staggering information that there are more Japanese blogs then English ones (37% vs 36%), and that most Japanese blogs are personal, rather then contain news. No, the thing that got me is that she was able to show others her creative abilities by blogging. I don't like to talk about my personal life, and I only ever thought of blogs as either being personal or about news...

Getting back to the subject at hand, my year long funk, I think part of it is related to not being able to vent my creative abilities. In all truth, my goals in life are to making a living of writing (and writing video games, like RPGs), yet I haven't been able to actually bring myself to muse over any of these silly side ideas. So......

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For the past 5 months or so since I moved to Florida, I’ve worked for 7-11, the famous gas station chain know for its Slurppy’s and Go Go Taquitos. When I started working for 7-11, it was a pretty decent job compared to all that wonderful foam factory work I used to do. I enjoyed dealing with customers because most where tourist from out of town, most enjoying a wonderful vacation with their families.

Then shit it the fan at the end of January. Opm and I had a third roommate (whom I will refer to as ‘Bob’), and it was pretty common for him to spend a week or two at a time at his mom’s house. I come home from work and opm informs me that the cops came to the apartment looking for Bob. Opm then calls Bob’s workplace (where opm used to work before he wrecked his Dodge Stratus) and asked the boss what was going on. Bob haden’t been to work in 3 days, and apparently he was ‘wanted for questioning’ in regards to a pedophilia charge. Well, being sans one roommate, opm and I were in trouble with the rent money. So I moved in with Piner (of Florida Drift fame), and opm moved back to Pittsburgh with to live with his mom. All of the moving was done rather on the whim and extremely quickly. Along with this move, I transferred to another 7-11 store.

Now, this store wasn’t in the tourist area’s south of Disney or anything the like, it was in the middle of Kissimmee near St. Cloud, in a working class neighbor hood. My first night working at this new store was complete chaos. I carded so many angry people because I’d never seen them before in my life, and I was completely driven up the wall by how much business this tiny store (it was physically smaller then my last store) got. And I knew the Friday was slower then normal because of the rain that day!

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Well, this event happened last Saturday, but I’ve been to busy with my new job to really sit down and write anything about it. Talk about a fun as hell day. I must have driven 9 different brand new Mazda’s, most where the ’06 MX-5, but I got to drive the new 06’ RX-8, and I also drove the ’06 Mazda3. Man, how many times do you actually get to push so many awesome cars in a day, like, seriously push them? For anyone who hasn’t heard anything about this event, click here to go to the official site.

Talk about a fun day. Keo and opm (aka my roommates) and I started the day around 8:30am (this is unheard of for us, since all of us live second shift lives). We drove out to the Orange Country Convention Center and didn’t really know what to expect. We had all signed up ahead of time, so all we had to do was sign a release form, and watch a video on how to handle ourselves out on the track. With that, we were lead into a large room in a nice air conditioned tent, were we would see 4 nifty Gran Turismo 4 kiosk with deluxe racing seats and GT4 steering wheels. Keo and I gave it a shot, but were disappointed to find out the machines weren’t lanned. So much for having any fun there. With the last 5 mins of our lives wasted, we checked out the torn down RX-8 that was in the room. It was setup on two displays, one with the frame, suspension, and motor, and the other just the body. Talk about interesting, I wonder how often you get to see that sort of thing in such a clean format?

Well, it was about 9:45, so we decided to exit the nice air conditioned tent and proceed to the events! The event is divided into 4 challenges: the Performance Challenge, the Matched Time Gymkhana, the School of Zoom, and the Jinba Ittai Experience. The first event we decided on was the one with the shortest line (and we mean it was short at that time), the Jinba Ittai Experience. The core part of this challenge was to drive around an MX-5 on a course, with a bowl containing 3 golf balls. The idea was to beat the target time and still have all of the golf balls in the bowl. Talk about the “Takumi Challenge.” This is where my first problem of the day occurred.

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So, I made it to Florida.

What a trip. I eventually decided to bring down my S12, and my friend opm made a good argument to do it: “I know a guy who can fix up your front end really cheap…” With this in mind, I was all set to come down by myself and probably have a two day trip, when low and behold my mother decides she wants to come down and look for a job. While I agree, it’s a great idea for her to look for work elsewhere then in crappy PA, she drove me nuts on the way down. I swear my mother was born with the sheer purpose in life but to only moan and groan and complain about every god damn little thing you can imagine: “Michael, I’m cold. Michael, I’m to hot. Michael, I gotta pee.”

So now I gotta play taxi for her for the next week or so she may be down here. If she gets a job, great, she can get another car and go to work and stay wherever. After all the god damn complaining she’s done, none of my new roommates want her around, and I don’t blame them. My mom can’t be made happy, it’s not a possible task. And the worst part is, I cannot get her to shut up, even when we are out in public. She’ll say the most god damn irritating comments, and then giggle at them as if they were witty. She honestly enjoys making a fool out of herself, then wonders why in the hell she can’t keep any friends. I can’t stand her.

So now that I’m down here, I’m just guna chill for a few days and get the feel for my new environment. Today opm and I went with his buddy and played football. I didn’t play though, cause the last tragic time I tried throwing a football in 2002 (oddly enough right after I first brought my current computer online and was installing Windows 2000) was a complete disaster, and I vowed never to repeat such a retarded looking toss ever again. After the football game in 90+ degree weather, we went to the pool at the same place, and swam for about an hour, then just shot the shit with opm’s buddy for another two hours afterwards. I didn’t mind it one bit, and I got to get to learn a bit more about opm’s High School days, and have some good laughs.

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Okay, so all I want to do is move to Florida, right? The job market in my area stinks and I’m sick of only working jobs that will pay no more then $6.50, with tons of forced overtime and hard labor. It’s time for me to get the hell out of here and it looks like a friend will put me up in Florida for awhile.

First this hurricane comes threw and devastates Louisiana and all of the surrounding areas. This has raised the gas prices in my area from $2.50 to $2.70 in a little less then two days time. I waited in a long line for $2.55 gas at a new Circle K (they just bought out Dairy Mart apparently) while the other stations in that town were priced at $2.65. We’ve got it pretty good in this area of Pennsylvania though, while there are parts of the country with gas at $3.00, or even $5.00 in area’s of Florida.

So, after putting up with getting my car fixed up enough so it will survive the trip to Florida, it has become very unrealistic to even think about brining my car down there. My insurance rates haven’t been all that bad, but putting gas into it is such a costly expenditure now. I get the feeling if I do bring the car with me to Florida, that I’d end up putting all my money into gas, instead of saving money into improving the car to do some off-the-street racing with it (this is a 85’ Nissan 200SX Turbo S12 for anyone who might actually care).

On top of all of this, I am a bit worried about being able to participate at Revolve and MirrorMoon over the coming months. With Tsukihime entering the insertion stage, and Melty Blood just about ready to get a surge in the translation department because of all the free translators, I feel like I’ll hold the Melty Blood project back from where it otherwise could be and I’ll miss out on the Tsukihime project I seem to have become a less and less part of as MirrorMoon gained more and more support. I already feel pretty lousy for my lack of participation with the Tsukihime project since chendo took over, so I really want to spend a lot of time on the insertion process. However there is the little issue of this move to FL.

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