here goes nothing………….worms are crawling in my stomach. perhaps i’ll just give Eperformax Makati another call tomorrow…and tell them that yes, I’ve decided to take their offer rather than make a complete ass of my self should I take this other job offering.

let me take again this moment to blab about…everything and nothing. I’ve decided to spend my holidays here in San Pablo City. Before I go back to Sahara Desert..I mean Quezon City. I’m on to another job.

Today, I spent most of my time watching again, Hagane no Renkinjutsushi (Full Metal Alchemist)…Yes, you must think I don’t have much of a life…which is partially true, considering I spend  most of my days either reading, writing (may or may not make much sense), drawing (glad I was able to spend time on this one) or watching all sorts of things. For today I took out my Full Metal Alchemist DVD and re-watched it for the 13th…er 14th time…who knows…I started with Episode 36 and ended on 51 (the ending - mine eyes! Mine eyes!) I think I’ll never tire on this one. Beats my Gundam Wing addiction anyday. ^_^ A review:

Full Metal Alchemist

One of the best things to hit the airwaves in any country…

Maybe it’s an unthinking prejudice, but I tend to be a little bit leery of anime series that run past twenty-six to thirty episodes. This is not to say that I shun them - if I did, I would never have discovered the perfection that is Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water - but trends over the past few years have shaped my reactions. Series that run to twenty-six episodes will often tell a complete story with minimal filler (please note, many, many exceptions arise). Thirteen episode series will usually tell their story with very little filler, if any. And then there’s your shonen anime like Naruto or Dragonball which go on forever, telling the same story again and again and again for over a hundred episodes until your sanity checks back in on you and you stop trying to follow them and do something useful with the time that you’ve saved, like building a four-story house with your bare hands, shaping and baking the bricks on your own.

So perhaps it’s fortunate that I had just assumed that Full Metal Alchemist would only run twenty-six eps, because otherwise I might not have climbed aboard one of the best rides that I’ve ever taken. Full Metal Alchemist runs fifty-one episodes (not counting the movie that’s expected to come out in Summer 2005) and while you could probably trim some of that, it needs almost every one of those to tell its story.

FMA tells the story of Edward and Alphonse Elric, brothers and practitioners of the art of Alchemy which is the magical ability to transform one substance into another. The centre-most law of Alchemy is that of Equivalent Exchange which states that to gain something, you must sacrifice something of equivalent value for it. The only thing in Alchemy which is forbidden is the Human Transformation, or rather the attempt to bring the dead back to life. So it transpires that Edward and Alphonse lose their beloved mother one day, which gives them a lofty, if daunting goal: that of returning her to life with their magic. Studying both Alchemy and the chemicals that make up the human body, the two brothers are ready to make their attempt… they have the rituals that they need, and have prepared all the chemicals that make up the human body to satisfy the principle of Equivalent Exchange. Brimming over with enthusiasm, the brothers Elric make their attempt…

And if it had worked, do you think we would have had a series, folks? Naturally, it turns out that their reasoning was specious and the ritual goes horribly, terribly wrong. Edward loses his arm and leg and Alphonse loses his entire body to the ritual and is saved only when Edward affixes the younger boy’s soul to a hulking suit of armour. Flash forward a few years and we join up with the brothers, on their hunt for a way to restore their bodies to normal.

Now given this premise, I would have expected this series to be a fast-paced action anime that built up to a murky but inevitable conclusion that became clearer roughly halfway through the show. I would have laid money on this and I would have been absolutely wrong.

What we get in FMA is a multi-layered, multi-tiered plot that runs from the beginning of the series — before we even really know it’s there — to the very end, when it all culminates in a wonderful, yet unambiguous, conclusion which resolves the various threads that have been running through the show. We’re given a vast and deep cast of characters who exist to be far more than just single players upon the boards seeking out their sliver of limelight before being shuffled off to the wings. We’re presented with a deceptively simple magic system and asked to watch how simple principles can transform into an intricate but elegant system containing many hidden traps and rewards, hinted at in earlier episodes but only revealed towards the end of the show.

I mentioned that the plot was multi-layered? Really, the place where this layering is best centred is in the character dynamics. Every so often you’re introduced to ‘the problem’, only to discover that ‘the problem’ isn’t really the main problem after all. This is not a Final Fantasy style ‘you’re the bad guy… oh wait, no, you’re the bad guy!’ tag-off so much as some rich, deep plotting. Most of the adversaries in this show are seen from the early episodes onwards (with one or two exceptions), and it’s only through the power of hindsight that we realise what they were really up to back then and there. Some adversaries ‘cross the floor’ due to their individual motives, fighting on the side of the brothers as situations change and adapt and the real string pullers reveal their true colours. Other times friends become enemies as events put folks on different sides, forcing them to make hard choices about who and what to fight for.

Further, while our main characters are indeed the brothers Elric, there are very few main characters (pro and antagonist) who don’t receive some special focus all of their own. We witness a panoply of stories that run the gamut from the sad to the beautiful to the tragic; and each one has its place in the tapestry. Many series would be content to simply have a character explain his or her motivation, but Full Metal Alchemist makes sure that the viewer lives that motivation and understands how it’s driving the plot in its own way, small or large.

But characters do not alone drive a show, and this layering also comes out in the mythology about which FMA concerns itself: Alchemy. At first, Alchemy seems to be a deceptively simple magical power that’s meant to be the gimmick by which we set apart our main characters from a legion of other main characters who are off on their own quests across the animated landscape. As time goes on, however, we learn more and more about the hows and the whys of the art. We learn what Chimera are… how Hommonculi are made… what Red Stone is for… the secrets of the Philosopher’s stone… and finally, the reason why Alchemy works at all. It all ties in with the Elrics’ quest and in retrospect it all makes sense from beginning to end. This is really a series that deserves more than one viewing, though I’m going to have to put a second run-through off for a while, given how durned long this series is!

FMA does have its share of action sequences, and these too reflect the depth of the series. Battles are a joy to watch, waxing kinetic and spectacular as the ability to reshape matter is used in a wide variety of manners, wildly transforming the battlefield from one minute to the next. Further, each character has a very distinct style of engaging in both combat and (if applicable) magic. Whereas many shows try to vary the styles of their combatives, but wind up with much the same thing from battle to battle anyway, in FMA there is a real sense that when two people who have not fought before get into melee, the viewer isn’t entirely sure what to expect. Now if only more Fighting shows could get this right…

Very little of this show feels ‘destined’. In many animes you can generally get a sense of what ’should’ happen and often early on. You know how the final confrontation is going to shake down, who’s going to die, who’s going to fall in love with whom, who’s going to learn a valuable lesson about life, and so on. FMA tends to avoid this behaviour and doesn’t limit its resolutions to what’s thematically appropriate, building instead towards more complicated resolutions. During the first ten episodes I made several calls about what would happen at the end of the series because I was sure that I knew where things ‘had’ to go. I was wrong on all counts.

Likewise, it’s impossible to predict who will serve what role in this series. Characters may go from being support to main characters and back again. Some characters are unexpectedly killed, though their deaths are never cheap; if someone dies, they’ve died for a reason. FMA starts off fairly light but morphs into a mature show fairly quickly; this isn’t a series for the kiddies who are expecting relatively safe action and adventure (and thank God for that).

And the ending? Well, I don’t want to say too much about it beyond the fact that it rocks on toast. The whole endgame of the series takes quite a few episodes (eight or ten, in retrospect) though doesn’t feel drawn-out for the time lavished on it. The length of the ending arc lets plots and plans move into place and connect together, taking time to resolve each protagonist and antagonist’s place in the story without short-changing them. Characters who seemed to be one-shots come back in the latter parts of the show to play important roles and help to show how all the story threads interweave.

It’s great.

Lastly, the music in this series is good enough that I’ve invested in several of the sound tracks simply because I had to get copies of ‘Bratja’, ‘Melissa’ and ‘Motherland’, three songs used in the course of the series. Every opening and closing theme used in this series is a worthy addition to the soundtrack (even though I’m partial to the first opening theme used), which is a rare bird these days where anime shows with really great opening songs tend to change them for something less catchy the next season.

I’m not even going to try to find some negative to balance the sheer, white-hot glowing positive review that I’ve written above. I’m sure that there are some weaknesses and negatives that I could find but I’d have to hunt for them and it might distract from my central thesis…

Full Metal Alchemist is one of the best damned things to happen to anime in years. Square/Enix can pat itself on the back for this one. It simply is that good.

The movie had better come out soon, that’s all I can say. The ending gives us closure but also provides a clean way to continue the series. A movie would be the perfect capstone.

Fortunately, FMA is available on DVD and is (as of this writing) being shown on the Cartoon Network, so it’s available to a wide audience. The voice acting in the dubbed version (the one shown on CN) is actually pretty good, though I vastly prefer the original voice actors from the subtitled version of the show. Either way though, check it out. You may be glad that you did.

My Rating: Loved it

(side image-click to enlarge) decided to test my hand in Photoshop. I’ve not used it for around three months so I went ahead and did a test run of sorts. Experienced some difficulty, I forgot some of the techniques I learned a while back.
But the good thing is I haven’t forgotten all of it! (it could be worse if I did). The picture above is the END result - did this one for Scott Ferguson of SWAU. And also I bade farewell to angst (pertaining to my job, since I’ve decided to quit the whole thing, I cannot stand one more day of talking/mingling with that foul creature otherwise known as my supervisor) for a while.

(see very large picture on the left) - my latest portrait art. For those not familiar, this is Senator Padme Amidala from Star Wars AotC.

One more thing, I’ve decided to go NCNS on Monday I’m looking for another job.

Reading: "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte

Just got the copy yesterday. Last book I read was "Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier (still not finished actually - I got to the part when Stobrod already re-appeared and Inman was nearing home, a few pages left).

On to the topic, I should be going home tomorrow. Thank Gott! I mean, after weeks of living in "Brokeback Mountain" (our in term for being broke ^_^).  Also I should be going to work tonight (my shift starts at 7:00 pm to 4:00 am - imagine walking along San Miguel Ave. at 4:00 in the morning, not too scary though), but I won’t, I just had enough of Teleperformance (especially since the "red tape" is so long, that our back salary - Pole and mine’s - got stuck somewhere on someone’s filing cabinet! We still don’t have it despite my efforts!) And most of my salary went to taxes! (jesus h. christ! yeah i’m so aware of that, but it’s still apalling - Gloria Resign! T-T).

Another thing which made me quite fed up with the whole thing is my Supervisor the "T-Rex" (I haven’t decided a more suitable name for the monstrosity - how about "Creature from the Green Floor", we’ll call her that in the mean time). At first I thought she was quite nice (where is my head?) but then the "T-Rex" just reared her ugly head. So I was quite taken aback when she started, "slamming things" in the presence of yours truly. And her apparent vehemence in taking "sup calls" left me dismayed (that’s "your" job man!) This morning I had one such call. And she decided to slam the chair, the clipboard and the headset after the call (bash! bash bash!) I do not think that her behaviour is professional at all (she’s acting more like a little kid, "what! Sup Call??!") And mind you, since I went to production I’ve only got 2 Sup Calls (this one included), not unlike her "friends".

I’m not being really "sensitive" and all, but I’ve been putting up with her for weeks. There’s a big difference between not giving up (being brave) and repeatedly slamming your head against a solid wall, without looking for alternate solutions (being stupid).I’ve just decided to look for another job, again, this time a job where I could put my real talents to good use (got  web design offer recently, plus I’ve got other options such as E-Performax, Ambergray and Info-Nexx). Sometimes, I’ll admit it, I think I made a huge mistake when I left MSC, sure I could take calls (and I’m not bad at it either), but I’m not happy! Such sentiments! But before I "leave" I’ll contact my Product Trainor, the wonderful Ms. Joy de la Cruz, and tell her what has been going on, she’ll probably make a report about it or some such) Many from our batch already quit, because of the abundance of such supervisors. I wonder if the American heads know that (perhaps someone should go around Jeffrey Johnson’s or probably Randy Redden’s office to report, I’m sure they won’t tolerate such behaviour, Supervisors are supposed to help you realize your potential not nip it in the bud, our Learning Lab Supervisors set that example - special mention - Sir Jerome Parel, very competent, very patient and very responsible in taking Sup calls - yey! Big hand for sir Jerome!) I’m sure you, gentle reader, got the point.

I was NCNS for four days, my team mates thought I resigned already (not really, but that would come, one of my team mates already passed a resignation letter)