Well as the title of this post says welcome back to another minor of The Next Web!

I took a break from programming for about 1 year to learn a lot about video and video editing in the minor Crossmedia. And now i’m back to try and combinate Video and programming to create awesome video based websites. Anyway I will probably rant about that at a later time.

For now I started this blog again to post some updates about school.

Project:
My current project is for ABMedia a company thatmakes video’s for the dutch stocks. We as projectgroup will make a video player with new functions to make there work of uploading and editing easier.
I can’t tell much more about this since we don’t know anything more about this yet. We still need to talk with our employer (Tomorrow) and see what is actually need.

Personal:
Beside school I’m helping to set up a “Japanese Culture Convention” in Groningen called BAGGER which will be held on 14 Februari (Vaentine) We have a lot of events planned and I will post more information about this the upcoming days.

I will try to keep this blog updated on the project and my personal life so come back ocne a while to see the updates

It’s been a while since I last posted something here so I thought I should make a little update.

Abunai 2008 was a lot of fun and well besides cosplay we played a lot of werewolfs a fun game which i might bescribe further on a later post. For this post I just have a little tutorial for all those who played with me to find the online version.

The only thing you need is a webbrouwser and some time (to play).

Step 1: goto the website mibbit

you will find the above picture somewhere on the website and if you click on server (see arrow) the Server address part will become visible.

Step 2: Filling in the information

Fill in the above named information, for nickname you can choose your own nickname of course.
When you are done then click the “Go” button.

Step 3: We will now find ourselves in the following place

This will be your work screen now all you have to do is wait for somebody to start a game, once the game is started you need to type !join to actually join the game. (Picture has been cropped)

That should cover the basics, as for gamelay I still need to figure it out myself, good luck and hope to see you all there

Greetings, Mark “Acrido”

I just noticed I never really explained what Cosplay is so I decided to wrote a post explaining what Cosplay is. But before I explain that I should explain what Anime and Manga is. So I will write this post in 3/4 parts. In part 1 I will explain what Anime is, those who already know can go ahead and skip it, then I will explain what Manga is. After those 2 parts I will explain what Cosplay is. After that I will write a little bit about what my future Cosplays will be and which events I will be attending. (So those who already know what Anime/Manga and Cosplay is only the last part may be interesting for you).

What is Anime:

So what exactly is anime? Anime is basicly is an abbreviation of the English word “animation”. So Anime is the Japanese Animations movies. The best example for those who are unfamiliar with anime are the series: DragonBallZ, Pokemon, Digimon. Those series are however aimed at a younger age audience in my opinion though. Anime has a wide range of different genres which are aimed at different ages and styles. Action, Adventure, Comedy, Magic, Sci-Fi, Drama and so on.

If you want to know more in dept about anime then I recommend reading this page on Wiki it explains everything about anime.

What is Manga:

Maybe I should have explained about manga before I explained Anime since manga is mostly made before an anime. To keep it simple manga is the term used for the stripbooks in Japan. Mostly anime’s are made after a manga with the manga as example. Wiki this page explains most about manga.

So I guess there is little to explain further about this.

What is Cosplay:

So now we finally arrived at the term Cosplay, by reading some of my posts you could have already guessed a little about cosplay but yeah. Cosplay is basically changing into your favorite Anime/Manga or Game (Made in Japan. Examples: Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Tekken) Character. This means wearing the clothes they wear, doing your hair like they have it and if your really fanatic then also wear color lenses. Most cosplayers also act like there cosplayer acts or how they would have to act according to fans. It might look strange to people outside of this community but I must say we cosplayers take pride in our community. We welcome everybody in without looking at gender/age/background/or looks. And we might act crazy or lazy or weird on conventions but we are people just like everybody else in normal life.

I could write about this a lot more but I won’t since it’s already been told a thousand times, instead I will just post some links that might be handy.

First is the Wiki In this wiki there will be explained what cosplay actually is and a little more information then I wrote.
Then we have:
http://www.cosplay.com/ A website where people from all over the world post there pictures from there costumes.
http://www.aniway.nl/forum/index.php A website where people from the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg) Gather and post about everything from the Japanese culture, manga, anime, music from Azia, games, events, cosplay. The members also organize a lot of events each year to gather and do something like going to a concert from a Japanese artist, gather for a cosplay meeting or other random events.
http://www.animecon.nl/ One of the 2 biggest conventions in The Netherlands for Cosplay, Manga, Anime, Music and so on.
http://www.abunaicon.nl/ The other big convention in The Netherlands.

Well that was it for now but like promised I will post a little information about my future in this community.
What will I attend and what will I be cosplaying:

What will I attend:
- AnimeCon From Fryday 2 through Sunday 4 May 2008.
- Abunai somewhere in October 2008 no date has been set as of yet.
I will attend some more events but I don’t know about those as of yet so.

Cosplays that i will be making for this year (or at least plan to make): (Yeah I know some pictures are crappy)

- Dancer Nobody (Kingdom Hearts 2)

- Hirum (Eye Shield 21)

- Jubei (GeBackers)

- Morinodzuka Takashi (Ouran High school Host Club)

Like some of you might know the first half year has ended and I came out with 49 Points. Considering I need 60 points a year I did very well.

For the next half year I plan to do the Minor Crossmedia.
This will mostly be video production but Crossmedia itself means much more…
Let’s hope for the best.

Saturday 26 January It was finally time to go to the Efteling for the Efteling Cosplay meeting that has been set up by members from the Aniway forum.

Me and my little brother woke up at 6 in the morning to get ready for the trip towards The Efteling. We packed a lot of stuff and at 7:15 we finaly left from our house to pick up two girls near us who also wanted to go. At 7:50 we arrived at Deinum a little village near Leeuwarden to pick up the girls and move on towards The Efteling. It was a long long trip but we managed to drive there without getting lost so that was worth the 3 hour trip… as said it took a total of 3 hours so we arrived at 10:15 in the morning.

As soon as we drove into the entrance we saw cosplayers walking towards the entrance and people just standing there already having fun waiting for the rest. We got out packed everything we needed into my backpack and joined the waiting group. It was awesome since as soon as we came walking up we got hugged all over XD

Well the people who where organizing the event asked us to get in line and pay for the tickets so they could actually go get the tickets. It took a long time but at around 12:00 we finally entered the park. First we had a little speech from Ferdie who was the lead organizer for this event and then we split up in 3 groups since we turned out to be with 105 Cosplayers.

But before we all actually entered the park we first did a big group picture:

Well after this point it’s kinda hard to write about it all, we just had so much fun with the groups, awesome people and a lot of randomness.

We had a great time with all, thanks to all those in our group and to the organization for this wonderful day and I already miss everybody. Hope they soon have another event

Greeting Mark

*Edit* Picture albums and movies have been uploaded by some people so here some links.

Foto’s:
Foto Album 1
Foto Album 2
Foto Album 3
Foto Album 4
Foto Album 5
Foto Album 6
Foto Album 7
Lone Picture 1
Lone Picture 2
Foto Album 8

Movies:
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=dtwVLJPDsbI
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=fBinxtpqqNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pox_7RP8h10
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=QKqyiKkdTy0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMxJfy_Ej0I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih0kZG4sd5g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4t9aqijRG4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYrL5A-siFU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N7nHy_8zZc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYm-GK3jVzo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6rFDKDBQDU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r04pBjOKjvU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te2T9d8gCwM

Well it’s been a long time since my last post which I kinda regret. I personally spend to much time on amusement when I was home and to less time to just log in and post a blog. For the next Minor I will work on this by posting more information and make at least 1 post a week.

Well to update the process up until now.

Our project “Mediagenda” has come to an end is is currently running online on a private server, in the near future our client will set the website on his web space. I haven’t talked much about this project which a have run the past 22 weeks so I will just tell you what the site is about.

Mediagenda is a website which allows you to follow your idol, currently it will be an Dutch only product with Dutch idols. But to make it simple to understand:

If your totally crazy about The Red Hot Chili Peppers and you would add this band to your profile on our website then you would get sms/e-mail msgs when this band is on TV/Radio/Internet or in Newspapers and other Magazines. This allows you to never miss your favorite band/Idol again.

Of course we had some extra stuff we needed to take care off but what I said above is the main objective. We finished past Friday and our Client was very happy with.

I did the presentation of our website on Wednesday 16 January 2008 and even our class and teachers where a little impressed with our site and it’s functions.

Today we will go on an Assessment which should give us another 20 school credits if it goes as we want. That said together with the 24/25/27 points our group members already have should set us up for this first half year.

Once the website is online on the new server and into testing mode I will post the link and I will try to get another test version online to show in my portfolio (which I’m still working on.)

Well thats it for todays update,

Talk to you all later

Last Friday we had an open day at school (NHL), there used to be some of us second year students talking to all the people who are interested in our education (Communication Multimedia and Design). But since nobody showed up except me I had to do a lot of talking. I didn’t mind though since there where 2 of our teachers also doing the same story and it was a fun day overall with some first year students and other people I knew walking around and having fun.

One of the other students (Ruben Swieringa) did make a mindmap for our minor which can be found here Mindmap

One of our teachers Martin Kuipers gave a collage about Media and how it changed us over the past few hundred years.
It was a quit intresting story which made us see that somehow we always make mistakes before we use media as it is supposed to. Also showed how fast people learn and evolve compared to 100 years ago.

I’ll try to get the slides of his presentation so that It’s a bit easier to understand.
It was interesting to follow non the less, and it triggered my intrests in concepting some more.

Like promised here the follow up on my last entrée,

Abunai Friday 5 October,

Me and my little brother left for Abunai at 10 in the morning driving all the way to Enschede.

We arrived at around 1 on the grounds and people already recognized us when we got out of our car, we walked to the entrance of the event and asked where the camping was since we couldn’t find it on first try. After receiving directions we got onto the camp spot and found Belgium friends that we got to know trough the forum (they where also in costumes). We set up our tent and went back to the entrance of Abunai to get our tickets and food tickets. Before we stepped into the line we got attacked by 2 cosplaying girls who both clinged onto us and that was the start of 1 awesome day.

We saw so many cosplayers and the atmosphere was so cool, everybody got along and took pictures of each other and everybody was having fun.

The main event of the day was the cosplay fashion show in which cosplayers could show off there ow so amazing cosplays, the best cosplayers on the convention where showing off there skills and time-consuming outfits. The dealer room was another main attraction and there was a huge line constantly in front of the 2 dealer rooms. I bought some cool stuff which I will post some pictures of tomorrow.

The day ended with the disco in which I, my little brother and a lot of our new friends where dancing as crazy as we could.

Abunai Saturday 6 October,

Saturday was probably the best day (in my opinion) we got up early and showered and got back into out costumes. This day a lot of other people where cosplaying characters from the game that we had cosplays off.

We where hanging out a lot with our Belgium friends and the main event of the day should have been the Cosplay Act competition. But since this competition already had a delay of at least 1 hour and since the first 2 acts we saw where not really that good we left to go back outside and enjoy ourselves with jokes and other random stuff. When night came we had 2 girls joining us back into our tent because they didn’t really have any (good) place to stay at, and since it was cold outside we made ourselves comfortable and got warm by just laying close to each other in the tent.

Abunai Sunday 7 October,

Sunday the last day of fun and enjoying… the same morning routine came back as Saturday the only difference is that we took longer to get up since it was so nice and warm laying in the tent, my brother went outside for a little and said that our tent was even steaming

There where a lot of new good cosplays and we enjoyed ourselves again just talking with others and jumping around. The main events of this day where the Anime Music Video competition and the Para Para Dance Event, and of course the ending ceremony. I only went to the ending ceremony and I hope I will see more on next years event. The ending of Abunai came near and a lot of people where sad about this… since we just had 3 awesome days nobody really wanted to leave. We exchanged our e-mails with a lot of people so that we could keep in contact with each other. And that is basicly how Abunai ended, the next day a lot of pictures where posted and a lot of people wanted to go back or wanted the event to last a week or longer.. but we will be back on next years Abunai and besides that we will attend a whole lot of new Anime Conventions.

A little ago (5 October till 7 October) I went to Abunai 2007,
Abunai is an japanese culture event which is hold in Enschede The Netherlands.

I will post a review about the complete event tomorrow since there is so much to say about it but to just name it in 1 word: Awesome!

I never had so much fun on events before and it clearly showed, the second me and my little brother arrived we got hugged by people we didn’t even know and since we also came in costume they exactly knew which characters we where supposed to be. (I will post a few pictures in my full review). We saw amazing people and made a lot of new friends there.

Well tomorrow as promised will follow this post up with a full review on what I have seen and done and I will top it off with some pictures from the event.