This page is for all of you who wanted to know where I got the idea for my blog's title and my pseudonym. If you didn't care... well then, feel free to ignore this page.
The overall title for the blog is "Study Abroad Chronicle" mostly as a tribute to Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, an anime/manga series made by CLAMP. Ever since reading Magic Knight Rayearth back in high school, I've been a fan of their work, and it's not like the name doesn't make sense or anything.
My pseudonym, Counterpower, is a little bit harder. Way back in elementary school, I was a Pokemon fan, as pretty much everyone was back when there were only two games rather than several dozen. In my childish innocence, I came up with my own Pokemon that could learn an attack from each of the 15 types. Since it could counter anything, then, I called it Counterpower.
That wasn't the last time I used the name. A little later (still in elementary school) I wrote a page-long story set in a country called Eltel. Since this was before Avatar: The Last Airbender came out, I was not in fact ripping them off with the idea for this country. Although if I tried to talk about and/or use it now, I'm sure someone would accuse me of such, since it was essentially the same "controlling the elements" shtick. And I named the leader of this country Counterpower.
Well, Eltel was mostly ignored by the time I was in high school, but I kept using the name for myself anyway when I needed a pseudonym. I haven't laid claim to all the "Counterpower" usernames, but I take them wherever I can get them.
Although lately, I've also been using "Zankou Hoshizora" or just "Zankou" as well. In 2009, I wrote a story for National Novel Writing Month, giving one of its major characters that longer version. It means roughly "afterglow of the starry sky", and is probably the most ridiculous pseudo-Japanese name that anyone has ever come up with in recorded history.
... Okay, it's not the worst, but I still can't believe I actually did that. Unfortunately, I like the character I wrote in that story too much to stop using the name.
Basically, if you see a Counterpower online somewhere, it might very well be me, and if you see a Zankou in a high score list somewhere (like the DDR machine at the Namco Wonder Tower in Kyoto), that
