An Open Letter to NJ Transit

Dear New Jersey Transit,

You need to get your shit together.

I hate to be so blunt and kind of mean about it, but it's what needs to be said. I'm 22, and I've been commuting from Bradley Beach/Asbury Park to New York Penn Station regularly for school for about a year and a half. I am a regular on the North Jersey Coast Line. I've used your trains for years before this, and will probably be stuck using them for years after I graduate to visit friends and do business. This is not a fact that I'm happy about.

Your mission statement, as taken from your website (and a poster in the Asbury Park train station) reads as follows:

Its mission is to provide safe, reliable, convenient and cost-effective transit service with a skilled team of employees, dedicated to our customers' needs and committed to excellence.

This is almost completely contrary to the experiences I've had using your service. Most of your conductors are incredibly nice, friendly, and willing to help customers as best they can. But your service is not reliable, convenient, or cost-effective. Maybe it was at one point, but it certainly isn't right now.

Let's start with "reliable and convenient". NJTransit, when my train gets stuck for more than half an hour twice in three weeks there is a serious problem. When a train has to be over-crowd itself taking on all of the passengers from another train, causing the passengers already on it to be cursed at and rather roughly shoved around instead of providing both sets of passengers with working trains, you cannot call your service "convenient".

When two weeks later, there is a problem with your tracks and passengers are left to wonder WHERE their train is going to go in order for us to get to our destination, you cannot call yourselves "reliable". Nor can you when I check your website and am SURPRISED that my line doesn't have any alerts on it.

Now let's move on to "cost-effective". This is my least favorite part of your mission statement, because I really really do not like being lied to. Your service has LONG since stopped being cost-effective.

Last year you made some changes to your ticket pricing and schedule. . .




How can increasing ticket price and reducing service possibly be cost-effective to your customers? A round-trip ticket from Bradley Beach or Asbury Park to New York Penn Station had previously been $20. This was affordable. Now? A round trip is $30. That's a $10 increase. That's $10 I'm not spending on comics (supporting my industry), art supplies (my job), or food (basic survival). This would be acceptable if there was an increase in trains, or if there was any kind of noticeable improvement to the services already being offered. But I've already made note of the fact that you have decreased the amount of trains running, and your rail system is full of problems causing delays.

I know the economy is in a bad state, and I know this winter was harsh. But you COULD be making a lot of money and are screwing things up for yourselves by making mass transit expensive, unreliable, and an all-around pain in the ass to use.

Get on the ball. Fix this. And do it soon.

"Tuesday's Anime Sampler" or "Thanks For 1,000 Hits!"

Back home from my two week stay at Downtown Otaku's. It was a great trip and I was glad to hear that he had a nice time and got there and back okay. He bought me a figure of Rukia with Shirayuki, even though I already had it. so now I have one, and a special one from Chile. He also bought me GOALSBOT, which is probably the coolest robot I now own.


The one he got me is red and blue and has a 7 on it's uniform, but I couldn't find a picture of it, and I'm too tired to get up and actually take one. This is why I should not blog right after waking up.

"Rook Takes Queen" has also hit the milestone of 1,000 page views. For a blog that's only been consistently updating for two and a half months (which is the period of time I've been tracking visitors) I think that's a pretty impressive number, and I want to thank you all for coming by here 1,000 times. I hope in the next two and a half months, you'll all come by 1,000 more times.

To celebrate, let's take another look at my ridiculous visitor map.



Spent yesterday with McLovin and Kristin, once again in Kristin's basement watching anime. This is usually the only time I get a chance to watch new things, because on my own I am generally just too busy and impatient to sit and watch series. And I miss out on a lot because of this. But it's been fun sitting around with friends and watching things together and I'd rather see things with friends than alone anyway. While usually we pick one thing to watch and marathon, this time we watched a little bit of several things...

Gurren Lagann: Parallel Works 2


In all honesty ParaWorks 2 deserves it's own post, so I think i'm going to hold off saying too much and write about it in full later. Like most people, "Kittan Zero" is my favorite but I also adored "Kiyal's Magical Time". It was humorous and sweet, and I think I described it as "If Gurren Lagann and Di Gi Charat were the same thing." Over all, I liked Parallel Works 1 better, but 2 had some really great stuff.

Hetalia: Axis Powers


I've always been pretty against Hetalia because portions of the fandom drive me insane. (Sorry guys, but it's true.) But at Otakon, I went to the Voice Actor Q&As for the voices of Vino and Firo from "Baccano!", who happen to be doing Russia and Italy. They did a bit of the voices, and there was so much crazy accents that I thought I'd give the dub a shot just for that.

We watched the four episodes that are up on Funimation's website, and while I'm not suddenly going to throw aside everything else I'm doing to dive into this fandom, I did think it was pretty funny and cute. I have also developed a huge crush on Italy. Italy and Germany are amusing to me, but so far i'm not that into anyone else. We'll have to see where things go as I watch more.

K-On

McLovin once described K-On to me as "If the cast of Lucky Star was in a band." and I have to admit that's pretty spot on. The story isn't quite as scattered and moment-to-moment as Lucky Star, but it's got a lot of the same feel. The characters are very cute, and the show is a little mindless (at least as far as I've watched into it), but I think after watching things that are a little heavier, like "Baccano!" and "Durarara!!" (which are both still hilarious at points, but are not straight comedies), there's nothing wrong with something that's just silly and cute.

I'm loving all of the character interactions in K-On a lot, and their reactions to the world around them. it's a very sweet little series and if you just want to laugh and enjoy something fluffy and silly, I'd recommend it.

I'm still waiting on the last chapter of "The Lucifer & The Biscuit Hammer" before I can blog about that, and Kristin just sent me a link to "Yankee-kun to Megane-chan" for me to start reading, so I'll have those to blog about in the near future. I'm also planning my next cosplay; Marlone from "Atelier Marie". I've got lists of everything I need, and my best friend, Cass, has offered to help me make it. Suri's possibly going to do Kreis so we'll be a matching pair. So I'll have updates on that as things happen too.

Thanks again for coming by guys! It's been great blogging for you all and I hope to bring you more great things to read about in the future!

Rambling about a personal project.

As I've mentioned here and there, I'm a cartoonist by trade. Or getting there are least. I've got one more year at the School of Visual Arts before I'm out in the big bad world, trying to do this for a living. I'm in no way under the impression that this is going to be easy, but it's my only marketable skill, and it's what I love to do.

I'm very lucky in that my family is in full support of my choice in career, and I have a fantastic network of friends helping me along. Not to mention that guy I'm dating, who is far more patient with me than he probably should be. So I've got all of the backing I could ever hope for, and I am so grateful for that.

I'm not sure how often I'll post about my own projects, just since I'm not really sure how much anyone cares. But I figured I would lay all of my cards on the table now so that way later I could make posts about them if I actually ever do them and you'd all be slightly less confused about what I was rambling about.

Since it's the focus of my two week stay in Downtown Otaku's apartment, and it's still pretty nerdy, I guess I'll talk a little about the project I'm currently diving headfirst into.

Originally, "Waiting For Neveah" was part of an alternate-reality segment of another story idea I had, so it has some or the same characters, but I ended up getting so interested in the story that I started working on it separately. It takes place on a much smaller scale than my other idea, so wrapping my head around it has been much easier.



I took the standard idea of people trying to break out of a government or system they didn't like and flipped it. So the basic premise of the story is a small group trying to establish order in an otherwise chaotic world that has fallen apart. This is an idea I posed to Suri when we first started dating and it's always stuck as something we wanted to play with.

At it's core, "Waiting For Neveah" is about priorities, following through, and taking risks with no promise for reward. I'm still fiddling around with exactly



I had written a script for the prolouge in my Junior year for a script writing class I took with Jack Harris (a former writer and editor with DC comics!). Since it's such a straightforward story (going from point A to point B) and I'm already used to drawing all of the important characters it's going to be an easy project to move forward with. I've got thumbnails and pencils started and I'm planning to do it as my portfolio project for my Senior year. Hopefully I'll be able to make the project public next summer when I graduate.

I post a lot of sketches and misc. work over in my sketchblog, Watermelon Bees, so if you're interested in seeing more stuff related to this, or just other artwork of mine, you can head over there and sort through those entries.