It’s November, which means there is one more left till we hit 2020. Usually around this time is also MADKID’s cooling time from their usual activities. When we don’t see them as often and active on SNS, it usually means that the boys are busy cooking up with something fresh and brand new to (possibly) kick off the 20th year of the 21st Century. Before, there’s usually some kind of a huge activity with MADKID by themselves, but as of this moment, their upcoming live schedules are at the usual live festivals with other fellow artists and groups from the underground.
On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that MADKID is completely out of the limelight or out of the public social media. In fact, far from it. The members also have gotten into the artistic and literal mood. What I mean by artistic is that they all became a lot more creative in things that are outside their field of expertise. I personally also got into the artistic and literal mood myself. But please, read on.
SEPT presents “CinderEile”
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Image Sources: SHIN’s Twitter, MADKID Official Twitter, Nana (GeeSLY) Twitter, SEPT PPN Twitter
Earlier today was the opening night of the CinderEile stage musical. As I wrote from the previous entry, the musical will run for five days, with Sunday (11/10 JST) being the last day. Many of SHIN’s friends and colleagues came by to watch the first night, and from the reports on Twitter, the first night was a huge success.
Also, SHIN finally revealed about the character he is portraying in the story from his Monday blog entry and even on Twitter hours before the opening night. I mentioned from the previous entry that he may be portraying Tomoki because his name was listed second on the official cast list. It turns out that SHIN is portraying the main male protagonist of the story, Haruto Tanaka.
You can check out some of their dress rehearsal previews and soundtrack samples by following the SEPT PPN Twitter. It’s really safe to say that SHIN has expanded his artistic repertoire as a performer from dancer to vocalist to stage actor, so let’s all congratulate him on this major accomplishment to his current career.
But SHIN isn’t the only MADKID member who’s now on the artistic and literal mode. The rest of the members aren’t falling behind either.
#WannaBeYouTuberKazuKINGTanabe
Starting last weekend, KAZUKI began uploading and presenting a series of daily short clips under his new Twitter series, #なりきりYouTuberかずきんぐたなべ (#WannaBeYouTuberKazuKINGTanabe). His new series of clips are mostly product reviews of his favorite electronic devices, appliance, clothes, and some other random stuff. Some would be thinking why won’t KAZUKI just open his own YouTube channel rather than just using this Twitter (and sometimes his Instagram/IGTV account).
In his first video, he already explained why. He wants to gain new followers on Twitter. If he couldn’t gain followers for him as an active J-Pop artist, he thought that he could gain more followers in another way. He already declared himself as a “wanna-be YouTuber” for the past few months now because of his new love and talent for creating vlogs and documentary-style videos. In addition to posting short clips, there is also a catch behind it: fans and users who come to watch his videos must like and RT If the video he posted reaches 100 RTs, he will post a new video the next day.
Upcoming TikTok Stars
YUKI opened a TikTok account sometime last week to post random videos, just like any other TikTok user around the world. I’m not a TikTok person but I used to lowkey watch some old musical.ly videos back in the days before it merged into TikTok. I still haven’t downloaded TikTok because I’m trying to conserve some space on my phone, but I might when on my iPad. You can watch some dance covers of his favorite (K-Pop) tracks and a singing/performing a few covers of his favorite (K-Pop) songs live. You can still find his cover recordings on his SoundCloud.
He isn’t the only one who recently opened a TikTok account. MADKID President YOU-TA also opened a new TikTok account himself. Eventually, he will be uploading some TikTok videos himself, but as of now, it’s empty.
So, if you are a fan of TikTok or a TikToker yourself, please do follow them, and keep an eye out when both start uploading their freshest videos for you to watch.
AXCEL STYLE going Artistic and Literal
I know I don’t talk about my art much, mainly because there are a few things that I’m not confident in sharing and that I feel like that I’m lacking as an artist if I don’t create something “artistically pleasing” through the traditional means of pencil, pen, paper, marker, paint, etc. And from that, I have always stuck myself with adult coloring books and some quick sketching.
But, I also realized too that you can make art digitally. Some say before that using digital graphic tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. is considered “cheating in art,” but in fact, it isn’t. You still have the learning curve of knowing how to use these programs, and just like using traditional art tools, it would also take you a lot of time to create digital art. So, thinking about it, graphics software are also tools, and even if some features make things faster, it’s still a tool you’re using to create art.
MADKID’s latest official photos and SHIN and YUKI’s modeling photos for Hysterical Glamour suddenly gave my dormant digital art inspiration spirit the urge to recreate these images into digital art. They can be watercolor style, pencil style, anything. Somehow, my sleeping creative flows just woke up somehow, and currently, alongside my daily code studies, I just couldn’t get enough making digital fan art of the boys.
Before, I shared them on Twitter. I thought about opening a brand-new section within the site to post my current fan art and keep it there. However, I figured that social media would be a lot faster to gain new followers (and friends, hopefully) and plenty of chances to share about MADKID in the (fan) artist community within IG too. After all, MADKID gained a lot of fans thanks to their opening themes for the anime The Rising of the Shield Hero, so why not?
Because of this, I opened a brand-new Instagram account solely dedicated to my digital fan art, AXCEL STYLE Fan Art. I don’t have a lot in there posted, obviously, but I have posted a few of my art there so far. I still have a lot of WIPs and I need to get to them. I do hope you’ll enjoy what I have there, and if you have a request or (maybe?) commission, you can contact me directly and we may work something out.
November is NaNoWriMo Month
If some of you aren’t familiar with NaNoWriMo, I decided to participate in the yearly event. Why? Because in literary art, MADKID’s current official photos made them look like princes and kings that made me decided to write a fantasy detective story with the guys as the main characters, an original protagonist character added to it, and adding more names of MADKID’s IRL friends in the industry and some trainees from the ongoing TV survival show Produce 101 Japan. So far, I only wrote a prologue to show an insight into what the story is about, but since then, I haven’t really progressed yet.
November just started, so I got enough time for me to catch up. It would have been a lot simpler if I wrote a romantic story, but then I quickly lose inspiration when I write love stories. I’ve been writing this fanfic in my head for quite some time now but haven’t really written it down on a word processor. But, it has been a long time for me to write a 50k rough draft novel. The last time I participated and won the challenge was back in 2011-2012.
Am I going to release the fanfic once it’s completed? Definitely. But the question is, will I be able to finish it, and when will I even release it? 😅
That’s all for today’s’ What’s Happening? entry. Nothing much is going on at the moment, but at the same time, there are some things that are happening. I’m hoping that maybe sometime December or January 2020, we’ll hear huge announcements on what’s to come for MADKID and for the Axcels. Maybe even February, during their New Divide one-man live or even after it.
There were a few on Twitter who sent me DMs, asking me if I can write about the activities and such within the MADKID FC. The answer to those messages is that I can only post so much about the FC. I only post the ones that the MADKID Twitter announce in public and it’s always been that way. If MADKID Twitter tweets something like “The FC blog has been updated. Please check it out.” and nothing more after that comes, these are the cases in which I will not post or tweet about. I’m just honoring the terms of use of the FC after all.
But, for any FC news, I only have one. Unlike last year, in which I received my 2018 birthday video during early 2019, my 2019 birthday video was finally posted a few days ago from this writing. So, in short, the FC is right on time.
Till next time, Axcels!