Sunday night, some friends and I went to The Comic Strip in El Paso, TX. We went and saw Gabriel Iglesias. He is absolutely hilarious. He did a 30-minute show on Comedy Central once and also has a movie coming out. I bought a DVD from him and had him sign it as well.

Here are a couple of pictures.

This is my friend Josh and I before the show started.

Left to Right: Me, Josh, Gabriel Iglesias, and Diane (Josh's Girlfriend).

He ended up staying on stage for almost two hours because he was having just as good of a time as we were. It was a fun time.

Well, we went on a whitewater rafting trip. Talk about fun, as the picture will tell you. (I'm in the bottom right of the photo.) We went on a Saturday to Taos, NM and then got up early Sunday morning to do the rafting. They provided us lunch and then we came back that night. It is a 6 hour trip one way, so that makes things somewhat difficult.

We were going to do the rougher trip, but 2 recent deaths persuaded the group to downgrade it, so we took a little bit of an easier trip. However, that didn't make it any less enjoyable. I still had a blast and so did our groupmates. We will definately take the harder trip next summer.

Here are a couple of pictures that I have taken lately (and not so lately).

I saw this while traveling down the road around town. This car is covered with stuffed animals.


I saw this while walking down campus a while back. The back of this car is literally being held together by duct tape.


This is a picture while we were traveling down the road towards our rafting trip (more on that later).

So a couple of friends and I were helping my brother and his co-workers move offices. This was the hardest moving job I have ever done. We had to carry solid wood desks (read: extremely heavy) up two flights of stairs, with 180 degree turns in them. They were so narrow that two people could not walk side by side down them without being crammed together. It was a pain. Hopefully I won't have to do that again anytime soon.

What is Crest of the Stars, or it's sequels, Banner of the Stars and Banner of the Stars II? Perfection. Well, that may be pushing it, after all, everything that a human touches is not perfect.

These are anime. Now, I can already see you rolling your eyes. "Not that stuff," you say. Just here me out for a minute. I am not a huge fan of anime. I watch the aforementioned series, and if you can count it as such I also watch Teen Titans. I know, I'm 20. Does it make me immature that I watch these things. I personally don't think so. Why is it that if you watch something that is drawn that it is automatically for children (cartoons)? Of course there are huge exceptions to what I just said (read: South Park) something that is definitely not for kids. I can't even handle it.

Anyways, I got introduced to crest about three years ago. Back then, we had this TV Station called TechTV. Well, I didn't have it, my grandma did. Ok, let me back up. Visits to Grandma's house were almost always boring. There wasn't ever anything for me to do except watch TV. She does have the best cable service around though. She gets 80 or 90 channels, and she doesn't even have digital. She just has the regular service. TechTV, now sadly, swallowed whole by G4, has this show called Anime Unleashed. Since there was nothing better to do I watched it. As soon as the music for Crest of the Stars came on, I was struck. It had a great buildup type sound to it.

The first episode I saw was not the first episode of the series. I started watching it with the 3rd episode. However, that night they were airing a season long marathon so I was in good shape.

Let me tell you a little bit about this show. It follows the story of Jinto and Lafiel. Jinto a human, but Abh in title. And Lafiel, genetically an Abh. The Abh are descended from humans, who decided to genetically alter themselves and live in space. Space is their home, they do after all, call themselves the Kin Of The Stars. The complex relationship between the two is simply amazing. They love each other, but neither one of them will admit it to the other. I think that is one of the reasons why I like it so much.

I have been lonely, romantically, all my life. I attribute it mostly to my extreme shyness and overall chickenness (yes, I know I made that word up) around girls.

Well, enough of that sappy stuff. I like stuff not in the mainstream. I guess Crest of the Stars, although widely popular with the people into this stuff, is not widely popular with the general public. (I mean at the time of this writing it only gets 147,000 hits on Google.) Take for instance PBS. They have a lot of shows on that station that you simply cannot find elsewhere. There are three shows on there that I like a lot. Here are some with their number of hits from Google in Parenthesis, just for popularity reasons. Are You Being Served? (107,000) (Which I was also introduced to at my grandmother's house), Keeping Up Appearances (122,000), and The Red Green Show (16,300) are all great and extremely funny shows. Compare that to a popular show like Law & Order (1,490,000).

Is there anything wrong with watching something that isn't main stream? Definitely not.

Back to Crest of the Stars. Another thing that I like about it is that it is kind of a future type of show. I like Star Trek and other shows of it's nature. I don't know, there is just something enchanting about them. I have all the DVD's so far and All the Manga as well. I wish I could buy the novels but they haven't been translated to English.

Wow, this has become a long and drawn out post, possibly the biggest I have ever posted. All I know is that I love this series, and it would be difficult for me if they didn't continue it. Am I crazy?