Saturday, January 11, 2014

Poem/Blog/Drawing/ENG287/Anime/COLD!!

皆さん、こんばんわ!

今回僕はちょっと耳をかりる、長くにしないけど。

一つは、ポエムを一篇を書いてみせる。
二つは、外ちょうーさむすぎる!
三つ、もっとこの「Nevermeltice」というブログのことを教えておく。
四つ、僕のたった今始まった「The Digital Text」というコースのことも教える。
五つ、僕は絵を書くのがまじで下手すぎるからどうか手伝ってくれ!
そして最後は見ているアニメと好きなアニメの話になるよ。よかったら、読んでコメントを書いておいて下さいよ~

Now I'll be so kind as to reiterate in English. Also, my Japanese is far from perfect, let me just put that out there ne ~ ~


Good evening!

This time (today~) I'm going to borrow your ears (eyes, actually~) but I won't make it too long, don't worry!

Before anything, let me just note that this is being posted over a day after I started it. It warmed up just a little outside. Outside cold is now merely unbearable.
Also, coming up, I will be posting two reviews of anime. One will be a review of episode 1 of Hataraku Maou-sama, another will be a discussion about Amagami SS (and SS+).
:)


So firstly, I will post a poem of mine. Just, because; this blog is partially about writing!


Here it is, a little sample: (yeah, it's short. Anyway, lots more where that game from~)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I sit here in light's way
To sleepless nights myself I do condemn
Of seizing night
Dreaming eyes wide awake
A sunless day-less day
Dreamless I dreamt
Of sunless skies
Like fireflies
To suns a vibrant grey

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Secondly - and I'll get this over with right now while I'm at it -
CHOOOUUU~ SUPAAA~ COLD OUTSIDE!!

Did you know it's like -37 outside in Toronto right now? and like worse than -50 in Winnipeg.
Of course you knew! You heard about it my *post* from before.
Check *this* out, My *friend* sent me this clip to demonstrate how cold it is...

Also this! My mom sent me this.


Third, I will talk more about this blog, just a little. I'll do that down below.
(Moving right along...)


Fourth, I wanna say a thing or two about the class I had tonight. A new course, and my first lecture of 2014.


Fifth, I wanna tell you about how much I fail at drawing. I am really looking for ways to learn to draw manga, and would greatly appreciate either good advice and resources for this pursuit, your own willingness to draw characters/thing for my purposes (ambitious aren't we), or both. Anyway, onegaishimasu!



Lastly, I'll be mentioning a few Anime I'm watching at this moment, as well as a very non-exhaustive list of some of my all-time favourite Anime.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~



So... Shall we begin~?


So about my blog,

Nevermeltice~

I dearly hope that if you all get the reference. You know, that thing... Never-melt ice. That thing in that game, the game with a name starting with "P" and ending... with "okemon."
A major thing about this blog, as you may have realized, is that I will use it to host and share my Pokemon fanfic story, Love Lilycove. But obviously there's more; I talk about Pokemon and other videogames, I talk about anime, and I provide my detailed opinions and personalized summaries on Anime, Pokemon, and more. I will sometimes post things like Poems or character biographies, or just talk about random subjects like Gundam or my daily life events. So I guess you can say, it's a pretty typical blog. But I am striving to make my blog as interesting as possible given its typical topics, and as aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly as possible. But for that, I will need your comments! This also goes for my writing!

I plan to make a new banner or two soon, by the way, allowing me to keep two or more on reserve. This will allow me to change up not only the overall theme, but also the banner length whenever I want (thus also allowing me to adjust widths and things). I'll continue to play around and experiment with various aspects of the blog as I go along, and I'm sure I'll be able to make it better and better little by little, but your comments would be very helpful and greatly appreciated!
Onegaishimasu ne~ Cheers!


While I'm at it, I would just like to throw this out there:
What kind of things do you keep and display in your room?
Personally, I don't have nearly all the things I could wish for, but it's enough to keep me 元気 enough.

I have six posters up. A colorful Eevee evolutions poster, a Japanese Majora's Mask poster, a colorful, pretty, overpopulated Mario Galaxy-looking poster, a Gundam SEED poster, a very large Unlimited Blade Works movie poster, and a poster of a Link of the real world sitting on the stone seating area of a decorative water fountain. The fountain includes a stood-up stone scroll decoration with inscriptions along the lines of "Fountain of the Triforce.

May 16 1845 This fountain was...Golden Goddesses...The Hero" (etc.).

The "Link" boy is wearing a burret-looking green hat, a green sweater with an unidentified pattern in the middle, a brown, cross-strapped school bag adorn with Batman, Zelda and other kinds of pins, an Ipod or something one his lap with earphones on, is holding open a volume of Bleach, drinking a seemingly summer-themed drink from what must be Starbucks, and has next to him three books: A sociology book of some kind, 'The Triforce Wars', and 'Hyrule: Myths and Legends'."

Don't worry, I will take pictures of my posters and post them at the bottom of this entry!

I also have two more posters but nowhere to stick 'em: A fiery/electrical Naruto/Sasuke picture, and a sakura-filled Tsubasa Chronicles poster. Four of all of these, including my gigantic UBW poster, are courtesy of my good friend WakeGaNai~


Onto the next topic,
one of my courses is called The Digital Text.
First of all, the professor is pretty good. He's a young, pretty cool guy with a strong bri'-ish accent and good style. And he seems to really like Hiphop. But anyway, I really wish I could afford his clothes.
 
The first lecture got into talking about what exactly this course is, how it is pretty new and really hot, "hot" as in, a current and somewhat revolutionary topic of research regarding the things we can learn about words, lyrics, novels and pretty much any other similar media - using computers - and I will elaborate. The professor spent some time talking about an apparently quite well-known program called Hiphop word count. You can perform such operations as typing in a word and having the problem display for you stats, such as how often it appears in Hiphop lyrics. You can narrow it down further to artists, cities etc. Instead of starting from text, such as lyrics, and deriving information from it, you can do the reverse. The course is all about how computers can use words to help us learn a lot about anything. The program takes songs and produces "lexical diversity" ratings based on word counts and syllable-per-word counts. Apparently, the shorter the text, the greater the lexical diversity is likely to be. Which makes sense, since you wouldn't want to write something really short that many people are going to read if it isn't brilliant, but on the other hand, if it's long it will be harder to focus in on or less meaningful to consider the less brilliant parts because they make up a smaller percentage of the whole work. Take my poem near the top of this page, for example: while I won't say it's brilliant, it isn't very long, and there probably isn't any major slip up within it. If I had made it much longer, it probably would have had somewhere (or more places) within it lacking "umph!" or being worded less than ideally. From these sort of measures, we can see for example that Hiphop lyrics have decreased on word count over time. Does this mean they're getting dumb'ed down? Not necessarily, but it is something that could be worth someone's hypothesis.

The course is full of interesting things like this - for example, apparently we can use something called optical character recognition (OCR) to search for, work out, and collect all the words from within a text. For this, the professor mentioned Conrad's Heart of Darkness as an example. He gave a purportedly edgy example, remarking that if someone wanted to, they might use OCR on this book and, through such manual human interventions as word usage statistics (and a whole lot more, apparently), we can build a hypothesis suggesting, if the data displays fitting evidence, that Heart of Darkness is a racist book. That was just an example though, and I've never even read the book so please, no comments on that debate here. The course will touch upon other related things such as text formats (Plain Text etc.), copyright, etc. He goes on to talk about a website called Rapgenius.com, where sort of like with Yahoo Answers, users can all contribute explanations for the deeper meanings and correct ways in which to interpret lyrics - but it's not just for rap, he says. The website can be and is used for various forms of textual media. After a user has posted thorough explanations that are voted best by most others, contributing becomes impossible thereafter.
Anyway, this is only the beginning!



Now onto the drawing thing...

I can't draw.
Although I had a bit of talent from drawing when I was a kid, I never continued it. To make things short, I can't draw and I'm looking for someone to help me draw some character designs and stuff. I'll take anything I can get!

My friend from WakeGaNai is having his girlfriend help him out. Check that link there for an example. I need some anime/manga-like images for my stories, such as Love Lilycove! (particularly for Love Lilycove, since it's probably the only story I'll be focusing on for a while.)

Actually, I would like to learn how to draw manga, particularly drawing characters. If I could get good at that, I could probably get away with minimal background-drawing skills, since I'm not drawing a manga (unless of course someone would like to draw a whole manga with me!)
Please help me out, I want to know some great resources for learning to draw manga/anime-like characters!



Lastly, I said I would talk about some of the anime I'm watching:


The anime I've been watching most recently, excluding some that I tried but immediately dropped or put on hold, along with my personal ratings, are:

Shingeki no Kyojin
8.5 - Everyone knows this title, and it is definitely pretty epic with few lulls. The excitement of this anime increases greatly after the first 2-4 episodes. It's a known hit.

Golden Time
8.0 - A new and currently running anime, it has a pretty unique and very realistic feeling. The songs are nice, the art is good, the story is fairly simple but is focused on and carried out very interestingly, to good success. Worth watching for sure.

Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou
8.0 - I finished this and it's not super new, but I'm really hoping for another season. The first episode was absolutely hysterical, and after that, at least one of every two episodes were quite funny, and still most episodes were funny. The episodes were divided off in a consistent and fun way.

Magi
8.0 - This show was really funny and cute and awesome in the first episode, all at once. The music is cool, the setting and tropes are cool and fresh (despite the deserts), and the characters, including non-main characters, are really interesting and good-looking. This show has done a very good job of fully introducing the characters through plot, building up the issues of the story naturally and interestingly while still making them very clear and easy to understand, and packing the first bunch of episodes full of important action while at the same time building up a very big world with potentially, many, many more episodes to come!

Suisei no Gargantia 
7.5 - While the first few minutes felt like a mecha, the next few were captivating and the battle in space was very clear and understandable. The main character is good-looking and interesting, and the first episode ends off in a whole new setting as a very interesting conclusion and a great start to the series. Despite occasional slower or talking-based parts, the story remains interesting with action always somewhere around this corner or the next. Furthermore, the story manages inclusion of a certain amount of romance, and does it well; most watchers will be interested in that quite a bit.


Hajime no Ippo: Rising
7.5 - Ippo returns, continuing to defend his title as the Japanese featherweight champion, but soon faces his most powerful and sinister foe yet. The conclusion of that fight is pretty cool considering what he had to do to win, and this anime is still ongoing. Still with humour, still with lots of punching and liver blows, and still with good old Ippo. I hope Ippo will continue to pull off a 7.5-8.5 rating under my scrutinizing (not really) gaze. Well, there's gotta be a reason why the old manga is STILL going!

Gin no Saji
7.5 - This is a cute and interesting series because you don't really see anime about farming. Gin no Saji has a certain relaxing feeling to it, and for once, we get a main character who is actually probably the main one making us like the show. While it's hard to see this anime as an 8.0, and 7.5 may be a limited time opinion, this show definitely builds its episodes just fine and is pretty funny sometimes. Season 2 has just begun.
 
Log Horizon
7.0 - This show has a lot going for it, but at least one thing really not going for it. Starting with the positive: Some of the music is nice, and the anime as a whole has a VERY cute feeling to it without being overtly cute - in fact, the art style is not even particularly a cute one. It's cute because it tries to me a locked-into-the-game-world MMORPG series that instead has the real world turn into a game for some reason, but keeping its original structure. The downside of this anime is also one of its upsides; although it loses by far to SAO and the like in terms of epic battles, danger, and overall emotion and impact, but the anime despite its occasional darker times has a cute and very warm feeling. It's very relaxing to watch, but without being boring or completely uninteresting. Strangely, even when the dialogue does get long, it's not much of a snooze. Somehow, watching this anime just brings your mood up. That's why it manages at least a 7.0 in my opinion. If it can continue on from here with some very epic events, it can bring it to a 7.5 or so, and avoid falling down to 6.5 or 6.0 in my eyes.

Tokyo Ravens
7.0 - Here are the strong points of this anime: The art is really nice, the songs are nice (especially the ending! So romantic!), and the story looks to have a lot of potential and options. Also, a tragic incident that occurs around the beginning is nicely tied into later developments, allowing the story to multitask with a pretty strong romance factor. While the number of characters to keep track of sometimes gets excessive, and while at times the entire plot and events and inside-story dialogue gets really confusing and unrelatable as though we are supposed to just listen to things now and wait for a while before the story tells us who or what so and so were talking about before, the show also consistently maintains enough drama and eventfulness and tsundere antics and things to probably avoid a 6.5 or 6.0.

Strike the Blood
6.0 - This show is pretty decent, with nice character designs, a cool story behind the main character, and good personalities. While it suffers slightly from the Tokyo Ravens syndrome of showing us people and dialogue and dialogue containing people, all of which we cannot yet relate to due to lack of information. But it does it far less, and overall the events in the city and respective ambitions of everyone are... Uh... Yeah, to be honest, I have no clue. I don't even know what's going on, still. Plus, it's taking too long to explain background stuff. Also, not sure if this is a positive or a negative, but it's turned into a kind of harem as well. Well, at least for once, I can actually somewhat understand that. For once, we have a possibly-harem anime with a male lead who is actually handsome, cool, and even cooler due to his Progenitor-ness (he's like an ultimate vampire guy or something) who basically can't die.



Okay, that's all~~


This post was supposed to be finished some days ago when it was actually really really cold, but I got bogged down with other stuff, including working on the blog as a whole.



Here are the images of the posters in my room. I've also added some other pix, and all of the following were taken with my iPod.














Here's some post-storm beauty:












And then a few random things...








~Yukigami 

Go Club

Hey~ Yukigami です!

I added a new section about Go.

Today I am still in the midst of post-revamp post editing. Not only am I editing all my previous posts to make them work with the new scheme, I'm doing a proper edit of the language and style, which includes toning down the fun-but-all-over-the-place-ness of some of them. Having written some of them pretty quickly or when I was pretty tired, I went a little overboard with bolding/underline/colour/text size/etc.

Well, by the time I even have a substantial number of readers, that stuff will have all been long since edited.
I might not finish today, but probably within a few days. It's not easy posting as much as I'd really like to (which is several posts every single day) while juggling all my courses and everything else in my life, but...
I'm doing my best!!
マジでがんばっている!

While I write this, I happen to be listening to my favourite Sword Art Online OP/ED, which is this:
Yume Sekai (夢世界)
On that note, I should mention that my friend over at WakeGaNai is a big fan of SAO, and like me, happens to be working hard on a fanfic or sorts (AU?). He's writing one based on SAO, whereas mine involves Pokemon.


Now, onto the main point of my post...


My school's Go club meets every Friday, and yesterday evening/night was the first meeting of 2014.
I brought up a lot of deep discussions about Go in order to collect the thoughts and opinions of my peers and use them to help me figure something out a little better. What I'm really interested in is all of the complicated elements involved in Go improvement. As I am a 5-6 Dan player (I teach, if any of you are interested), I am particularly interested in how it works for someone who has already gotten a strong and innate hold of the fundamentals. Two friends in particular joined me over dumplings in this discussion. One friend, a very high-level player who has attained American professional status (the American Go Association has just installed their own sort of professional system). More on the professional systems here.

He believes that it is purely about reading ability, and that style (for lack of a better word to describe the unique taste and tendencies and preferences in the way a person plays) and other internal factors have little to nothing to do with it. He also argued that getting stronger is not about playing stronger players or being taught, but rather, is based on personal study and solving a lot of life and death problems ("Tsumego"). Although the part about tsumego is a thing fully understood, appreciated, and applied by any player who has, largely by that very means, achieved my level or higher, and although it is the same advice that I give to my peers and my Go students and is a form of study I have utilized to the point that I am actually quite confident in my reading when playing against another player of even or lower level, I just cannot agree with that overly simplified answer. Moreover, it's not the kind of answer I was looking for - I was looking for a much deeper discussion. Still, my friends listened to my various proposals and questions and the logic and purpose behind them and did seem to acknowledge the depth of my ideas despite their simple answers. Here are some example subtopics discussed:


  • Go improvement and affect of mental age
  • Ability to reach 7-Dan if already aged 30+ or 35+
  • How a built up style or bundle of built up tendencies and ways of thinking can promote or hinder improvement past a certain level
  • Caps on personal potential
  • Improving past 5/6 Dan: All about reading, or are concepts involved
This pro friend of mine later contradicted himself though; when the subject of playing environment/playing stronger players/being taught was brought up again, he advocated it as a great way to improve this time.
The other friend, a weaker Go player who is really great at music (and extremely enthusiastic about deep intellectual subject matter such as math and philosophy, a really interesting and receptive guy to talk to), was in full agreement with my other friend, and very strongly advocated the use of time and effort over stronger players and teachers. However, I think it's not quite that simple with Go, particularly once you have reached a level where you both know all the fundamentals well (and have lots of Go experience), and have little to no one strong to play with or learn from. Go is extremely complicated and ambiguous, so improving is not as clear-cut as it is with some other sports/hobbies/passions. One of them added, in response to the notion of a "personal potential cap", that there are two kinds of Go players: those whose mind is just not configured in the kind of way that yields them the prerequisites to having the affinity for Go to climb the Dan ranks or even the stronger Kyu ranks, and those who have it and have no limit to their potential and could without a doubt, by virtue of that "type 2" designation, reach professional strength. But my mind thinks about things in a complicated and deep way because I believe that everything about life and the universe is extremely convoluted. To me, it's hard to believe that it could be so black and white. I think there has to be a grey area. Even if the grey area exists only within a short range around the two polar extremes, I believe it must exist at least that much. For example, if two people are both that aforementioned "type 2" with great potential, since everyone's mind is very different and people are not made equally (I strongly believe this, and by this I really just mean that despite the many different kinds of intelligence there are, one person could still very well be "more intelligent", ie have a stronger mind, than another person, or that one person's mind is better at the faculties used for playing Go than another person's). If we assigned a number to the max potential of Person A, calling it "90", then I think even if Person is B fall within that "potentially strong Go player" sort of category, his potential might be 85 or 95 or maybe even 68.

Not to sound either conceited or condescending, but the fact that players as strong as my friend can be so strong and yet see the world through such a simplifying paradigm kind of cheers me up for some reason, because it makes me feel a little more like I should be able to reach that level, if and when I ever have the time and strong interest again to study Go seriously. (actually, it seems most of the people around me see everything a lot more simply. I guess that makes life easier?)

Well, another friend from the club who is about as strong as he is (these guys are among the very best in all of Canada!) approved of teaching me, so I will challenge him to more games from now on, since every time I played him before was really fruitful for me after his post-game (post-Armageddon) review. Because of this, the fact that most of my move criticisms on a game played later that night received his agreement, and other things, I pretty much came to the conclusion last night that the way I am thinking about the situation regarding my future Go improvement is correct. That is, due to my fair 5d+ reading level and vast experience since reaching "5-Dan" level a few years ago, I am probably correct in thinking that minimal study on my own time and merely playing and reviewing with him nearly every Friday (and reviewing a second time when I get home) is actually probably enough to help me make some big improvement. This is precisely the question I'd wanted answered when I begun to involve others in all those deep ideas at dinner. I would be very interested in studying Go improvement and strength from a research standpoint (sociologically, psychologically etc.).

And to support the conclusion I reached last night about my improvement, let me just further add that I improved relatively quickly after I began to play go in 2006, and I never hit any walls I couldn't break past all the way until I reached the relatively high level of 5-Dan. After high school, and after spending time writing, working, and doing what I wanted, I went to S. Korea and joined an international Go training facility by the name of "King's Baduk" in 2009. More on this in another post some time, but basically I returned to Canada as a 5-Dan player. After that, I spent around half a year training myself in Go, as I didn't have the money for lessons. I played lots and lots of games, solved problems, studied pro games, reviewed all of my games in-depth, but after all that time I didn't make any significant improvement. I entered university after that. I mention this anecdote because it supports my assertion that at this time, having much stronger players play and teach me is likely my best means of improving.


By the way, I plan to add over time a great deal of Go content, as well as information and stories about my own Go experiences. Eventually, the Go section will contain as much learning content (in addition to all other kinds of Go content) as would another website that focuses completely on helping site visitors with their Go improvement; while this is a mere blogspot page, I will probably never close it even if I get myself a real mad-from-scratch website going (the more traffic and networking the better, right?).

Stay tuned for all that! I'll also talk a lot more about the Go club, its members, Go in Toronto etc~!


Lastly,
let me just add...


First, snow and ice everywhere, severe power outages, and -37 weather,

and now, horrible downpours of rain flooding the streets and working together with the large, roadside snowbanks to form large and consistently-placed super-puddles!?

On my way home from post-Go club post-dinner late-night Go playing, I blocked off the rain with my hood and continuously and continuously dodged the giant puddles everywhere via the narrow bits of wet, icy sidewalk left on the far edges of the pavement tiles, but just when I was almost home, I activated someone's trap card and got owned. I stepped off the sidewalk to cross the street, onto the sheet of ice coating the first bit of road before me, only to realize I'd become the victim of a dreadful little optical illusion...
The "sheet of ice" turned out to be a giant, shin-deep, freezing cold ocean of a puddle that happened to be very reflective under the street lamp, and somewhat ice-tinted.

Well, good thing it's not really in my personality to get emo about something like that~  :)


~Yukigami

Introduction to Go / 圍棋 Wéiqí / 바둑 Baduk / 囲碁 Igo

Yukigami here~


So reader, do you know what the game called "Go" is?
You can also read about it here at Sensei's Library.

Go is an immensely fascinating, deep, competitive, and mentally cultivating board game that originated in China some ~4,000 years ago. The game embodies the people playing - particularly higher level players who've mastered the basics and become able to play well - and the players' emotions, personalities, and in-game ambitions are manifested - and visible to some - in each of their moves. Although man-made, many have considered Go to be ominously deep, simply flawless, and analogous to life despite having very few rules and being played on nothing but a 19 x 19 grid, by taking turns placing black or white stones on the intersections rather than in between them (so, not on the squares.)

Many players such as myself actually got into Go as a result of having watched the Anime Hikaru no Go!

The game is about surrounding territory (area of the board), and the two players take turns placing one stone at a time on intersections of the board. Go can be played online, too, on servers such as KGS or Tygem.  Each intersection of the board is worth one point, and the player with the most points(territory) by the end wins (unless they win by resignation, of course).

Counting takes place after both players have passed their turns due to inability to find any remaining moves on the board worth any points for them (I will make a video of it sometime). Stones themselves on the board are not worth points, unless they've been captured or the players are using the Chinese counting style (we'll talk about that much later on another occasion).

Each single stone placed on an intersection without any other stones next to it to the north, east, south, or west of it has four "liberties"; the empty intersections north, east, south and west of it, not including diagonal directions, are its "life" - in Mandarin Chinese we would call this "chi". What happens when the last liberty is gone is that the group is immediately taken off the board and added to the prisoners/captures (however you wish to call them) of the unfriendly(capturer's) colour. Captured stones are stored in the lid of an open Go stone bowl/container, or otherwise off the board and away from the bowls of stones, and kept for later.

Every stone on the board is referred to in terms of "groups"; any one or more stones of the same colour are considered all one "group" as long as they are all connected by their liberties - that means that a string or cluster of stones diagonally next to it counts as a separate group. I won't explain the Chinese counting style now since it's complicated to explain and very unnecessary, but the usual style of counting - the Japanese style - is done by having both players pass their turns and agree to score the game, remove all stones recognized on the board as "dead" that were not removed as captures during the game due to having died without ever running out of liberties (there are fundamental rules and concepts for recognizing dead groups).

In other words, stones that end up in a hopeless situation and cannot escape the fate of a death-by-liberty-shortage that the opposing player could manually initiate at any time during the game are, as a rule, considered "dead already", and the player whose territories contain the opposite-coloured dead stones is not required to spend moves to shorten the liberties of the stranded stones until the liberties reach zero. It is a common mistake by weak players to go out of their way to capture all the already-dead groups of the opposing colour needlessly, even though the process of placing stones inside their own territory fills up their own surrounded intersections, thereby losing them one point per move.

After removing all of the dead stones from the board and adding them to the opposing player's captures, neutral spots, or dame ("dah-may" - intersections that lye in between opposite-coloured territories that are impossible to fully encircle and thereby claim as points, due to lack of room) are played either optionally, or to prevent confusion, or to claim more real points if for some reason the players are counting with the reversed-logic Chinese method (which in such case, should definitely all by played on *before* passing the turn). In the west we generally refer to them as "dame" or "neutral points". I would greatly suggest beginners to fill in all the neutral points before scoring in order to make the respective territories very clear.

After pulling captured stones off the board, each player takes all the stones they've captured and places them onto intersections inside any of the territories of corresponding colour. By this logic, the more of a player's stones have been captured, the more points they will lose out on later. One capture becomes equivalent to one surrounded intersection of territory. The difference is that surrounding an intersection gains you one point, whereas capturing a stone causes your opponent to lose one point during scoring. Thus, the two are equivalent.

However, it is usually much, much easier to surround area on the board than to capture many stones; although weak players constantly have their stones captured by others, such is usually not the case in high-level games. Most of the small amount of stone capturing that goes on in high level games is a side effect of or effective sacrifice for the purpose of surrounding territory, invading territory, fighting to make a group fully alive etc.

If, for example, the Black player still has White captures left to fill up White territory with even though he has already reduced all of White's territory to zero with White captured stones, the way to deal with this situation is through the basic logic of points in the game: since gaining a point for oneself or taking away a point from the opponent is equivalent towards winning the game, since winning requires just 0.5 points more than the opponent as its minimum requirement, the player who is unable to use the rest of his captured stones counts them up; if there are still ten more White captures yet unplaced, for example, then Black can instead increase his own territory by ten points, by removing ten of his own Black stones from his territories, thus increasing his total territory by ten while not putting the opponent into negative numbers of territory. Also, players cannot run out of stones; usually a Go set has something like 200+ stones per side, and it's extremely unlikely and pretty near impossible that more would be needed.

Because Black has the significant advantage of playing first (though this is generally only significant for advanced players, so don't even bother blaming a loss on that!), White receives a bonus of 6.5 points called "Komi" (from Japanese) which is added to his or her total score at the end of scoring. Komi is where the ".5" comes from in the score of Go games, a fractional difference received by white in order to prevent tied games. Thus, if Black has 76 points on the board and white has 70 on the board, then if it's an even game (no handicap), White wins because 70 + Komi (6.5) = 76.5, thus White has 0.5 points more than Black.

A Komi of 0.5, which merely causes White to win in case of a draw, is referred to as a 1-stone handicap. In other words, reducing White's Komi to a mere tie-breaker is a measure taken to compensate for a 1-rank difference ("a stone's difference"). Below, I will briefly detail the rating system. For player-player rank differences of more than one, stones are set onto the "star points" of the board (starting with corners, following a certain arrangement for each configuration). Even though black starts off with extra stones on the board, White's Komi is also reduced to 0.5 in all these arrangements.

A handicap of two entails placing a black stone on two corner star points lying diagonally across from each other on he board. Specifically, Black traditionally places them in the corners in the upper right and lower left from his or her point of view.

A 3-stone handicap has a stone on each corner star point except for the one in the upper left, which is used for the 4th handicap stone.

In a 5-stone game, there is a stone placed on the star point in the very center of the board in addition to the four corners.

For 6-stone handicaps, however, the handicap stones are arranged in favour of symmetry by placing a stone in each corner, and a stone on each of the east- and west-side side star points.

7-stone games, like all of the other configurations, maintain symmetry (except for one- and three-stone handicap setups, that is). Compared to a 6-stone game, a 7-stone game also has a stone placed in the center (the star point in the center is called "Tengen").

8-stone games have a handicap stone on all star points other than the central one, and 9-stones games have handicap stones on every single star point.

While Go in terms of rules and objective is very simple, the game is at the same time extremely complex - so much so that even professional players cannot say that they have, or can ever, "master" the game. Thousands of people have dedicated their entire lives to Go, and serious students of the game spend extreme hours on their endless learning. They play lots of games with each other and with stronger players or teachers, replay and study pro games, mentally solve puzzles which require reading many moves and variations far ahead in their heads, and study all about each of many other aspects of the game such as opening development patterns, local corner-of-the-board patterns that get really complicated and intensely numerous ("Joseki"), middlegame ideas, in-game counting and positional judgement, endgame tactics and concepts, and for lack of better translation, effective moves of skillful finesse ("Tesuji" in Japanese). But the list goes on...

Go cultivates various faculties of the mind and draws from them all to contribute towards the most efficient and effective tactics, the deepest and most accurate and logical strategies, and an overall display of logic, reasoning, flexibility, greed control/reasonability, choice making, risk management, self discipline, move reading, and of course multitasking (and more..).

Because the game tests player on this kind of wisdom and discipline and helps them improve upon these aspects of self, and for many other reasons overall, Go is an extremely deep and philosophical game with nothing to be desired in terms of large-scale strategy, small-scale tactics, mental cultivation, challenge (there is no end~), and fun!
(...and taste~  ;p)

Go is an absolutely brilliant game, and it is hard to believe that it was created by humans (in fact, we don't even know by whom!). Although at first, someone learning the elementary. fundamental tactics of Go may not yet have the privilege of seeing the true depth and awesomeness and wonder of Go to its true and unending extent, the more they learn the more they'll see it, the more they'll see how much they're not seeing, and the more they will be amazed.

At the same time though, there is quite a lot of exclusive fun to be had via the process of learning and continually improving at the game, and of being at a level where Go is a complete mystery and a maze yet to become an innate kind of second-nature developed skill. In saying this, I imply that reaching that kind of innate feeling does happen (somewhat, anyway), it's just that despite that new feeling, and despite the ability to play relatively good moves repeatedly over and over in only a few seconds each if we want to, we despite development of this ability lose none of the room for self improvement or challenge in the game that we've ever had. Even though we can quickly play mostly-good moves - or at least decent moves - playing faster does usually reduce the quality of our moves.

Like the expanding universe, the Go world around us and all its challenges expands proportionately with us as we improve - or rather, it expands even faster than does our knowledge of Go.
"True knowledge is knowing that you know nothing."


Go is an assimilated part of me and will never escape me, for once it entered my life, it for a time was as my life itself - and by its own virtues, still is.


~Yukigami

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Changing the Look!

Hello there,

I'm just posting this to say that before finishing multiple entries I mean to publish soon, I am trying to undergo a very major change to the template and overall look and functionality of this blog. I'm trying to make it nicer, easier to look at, more user-friendly, and to have more useful sections and sidebar items.

Stay tuned!

Please comment on any good or bad things about the current (upcoming) blog look, or the old one if you've seen it (blue or ice-themed background, white central text area, framed pictures... )

Ja ne!

~Yukigami

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Nevermeltice!


So guys,

guess what?

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.

It's COLD!!!


Here in Toronto it's -37 for some reason!! Even though in recent years we haven't even gotten a White Christmas!

...

So I was grocery shopping today...

...by foot.


...

...


SO.


COLD!!!


This is coming from a real Canadian, too!

That's it! Time to change the blog background to something less suitable and less COLD!
(::Edit:: Ended up changing it to the "Awesome inc." black theme, but also did a huge deal of reorganizing and advancing!)



So anyway, yeah, I just hope there ain't any Nevermeltice out there!

Guys, please go ahead and comment on the blog - about anything!
How about telling me what you'd like me to blog about? Not that I have a shortage of blog material, but I don't mind whatever relevant topics you might suggest :3 You can be sure though that I have a long list of blog topics all lined up for the next while, and that list is increasing faster than the age of this blog in days (more like hours, almost. Almost~)

By the way, as you can see from recent entries, I am doing a lot of wacky and fun experimenting with how I write my blog (though after my thorough post-revamp editing, which I'm actually doing right now, it might be just a little less out there~).

But...
For the next one or more posts, however, I will be posting in a much more "normal" and neat fashion, with limited use of colour, bolding, and underlining (but no limit on pictures and links!).

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School has just resumed, but I will still be working towards finishing Chapter One of Love Lilycove. I'm positive that once I've completed one chapter, further chapters thereafter will go increasingly quickly.


Thanks for reading~!







~Yukki


Sunday, January 5, 2014

Pokemon: Arcanine

 Yukki here!


I will start with an overview of this "arcane canine", followed by my own review of its overall appeal and XY-aged battling summary.







Arcanine is a fire-type Pokémon introduced in Generation 1. It is known as the Legendary Pokémon.

We know Arcanine from the original Pokemon opening theme,
from Gary/Green's original line-up along with Blastoise and others,




...from the first set of the card game as an uncommon with 100 HP and two fairly heavy attacks,






...and we know him as the original dawg! (aren't you glad I didn't say doge?)
 

He is classified as the "legendary" Pokemon, though he is not "legendary" in terms of rarity, as he evolves by simply using a Fire Stone on a Growlithe.


Here's some more basic Arcanine information:

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Kanto Pokedex #059
Japanese: ウインディ
Types: Fire
Average height: listed as 6'3" (About my height~!)
Average weight: listed as ~342 lbs
Abilities (XY): Intimidate, Flash Fire, Justified


Red
Blue
A POKéMON that has been admired since the past for its beauty. It runs agilely as if on wings.
Yellow A legendary POKéMON in China. Many people are charmed by its grace and beauty while running.
Gold
HeartGold
This legendary Chinese POKEMON is considered magnificent. Many people are enchanted by its grand mane.
Silver
SoulSilver
Its magnificent bark conveys a sense of majesty. Anyone hearing it can’t help but grovel before it.
Crystal An ancient picture scroll shows that people were attracted to its movement as it ran through prairie s.
Ruby
Sapphire
ARCANINE is known for its high speed. It is said to be capable of running over 6,200 miles in a single day and night. The fire that blazes wildly within this POKéMON’s body is its source of power.
Emerald This fleet-footed POKéMON is said to run over 6,200 miles in a single day and night. The fire that blazes wildly within its body is its source of power.
FireRed A POKéMON that is described in Chinese legends. It is said to race at an unbelievable speed.
LeafGreen A POKéMON that has long been admired for its beauty. It runs agilely as if on wings.
Diamond
Pearl
Platinum
Black
White
Its proud and regal appearance has captured the hearts of people since long ago.
Black 2
White 2
The sight of it running over 6,200 miles in a single day and night has captivated many people.


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From Wikipedia:

Arcanine, of the Legendary Pokémon species, is a canine or wolf-like Pokémon, resembling a shisa with traits of a tiger.


 In fact, Arcanine even appears at the very beginning of the Pokemon series on a stone tablet displayed in season 1: episode 2 (from 09:47). Ash points to the tablet, claiming to have seen "a flying Pokemon like that one" that "flew right over the rainbow," pointing to the upper right (blue) section of the display.



Articuno can be seen in the upper right, with Moltres in the upper left, Zapdos in the lower left, and Arcanine standing proud and dignified in the lower right.
Ash is mistaking the featured legendary bird in blue (Articuno) for a Pokemon that's neither of those four (namely Ho-oh), much to the doubt of Professor Oak, who proceeds to ditch Ash for Pizza.
Oops! I meant this...
Ho-oh..

It can be clearly deduced from this that Arcanine was meant to be more than just another stone-evolving non-elite Pokemon. Well, at least to me he is much more than that. You'll understand why after some explaining, but his information and lore are pretty cool too!



Here is an overview of Arcanine's battling stats: 





For those who don't know how to interpret this, I will explain in some detail:



His 90 base HP (health/"hit points") is above average. At lv. 100, he can have 384 HP if he is trained in that way. 384 is quite high actually, for an offensive type. It doesn't match up to Lapras, Vaporeon, Chancey, or anyone like that who specializes in HP, but most Pokemon have less HP than Arcanine. He knows how to take a hit!

His Attack stat is not astronomical or anything, but it is quite high. He can hit very hard, and investing a lot into this Attack stat and relying on it is not a bad way to go. For reference, a ridiculous offensive stat would be something like Mewtwo's maximum Special Attack of 440 (though he is legendary and kind of unfair), and 350 (base 110) is a typical "high stat" number; Jolteon's Special Attack, Espeon's Speed, Vaporeon's Special Attack, and many more all max out at 350 (base 110). Charizard's maximum Special Attack is 348.


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So to start off, 
we can say that Arcanine's HP and Attack are good.

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Arcanine's Defense is poor; it's above average for very offensive Pokemon, and is not below average or anything, but it's not reliable either. The same goes for Special Defense. But with Arcanine's good HP and "not terrible" defenses, he can be trained into a decently wall-y Pokemon.


His Special Attack sits at a respectably high max of 328 - base 100 - and some Pokemon would even fully invest in this and use special attacks. It's not recommended to focus on this for Arcanine, since his Attack is even better, but having great Attack is no reason to ignore his good Special Attack stat, which is just as high as that of a Mew or a Celebi. Thus, Arcanine's move set should be either physical, or both physical and special. 


Lastly, Arcanine's Speed: Maxing at 317, it's not amazing, but it still makes him faster than most Pokemon; Arcanine can still be considered a "fast" Pokemon, though in the current age of Pokemon, his speed should not be relied upon. More on that in my battle review below.


As you can see, Arcanine's stats are solid and respectable; while he isn't hyperbolic enough to be an insane "sweeper" or "wall", his ability to fill either role pretty well without moving to either extreme gives him a certain longevity on the battlefield and versatility as a team member.

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Having detailed a thing or two about his stats above, I will try to keep this as brief as possible now.
I won't get into the whole "appeal" thing much, either. Arcanine is a cool Pokemon, and I've loved him since Pokemon first came out in Red and Blue (Blue w00t!!).


Arcanine's lore and overall appearance put him, I can almost objectively say, into the top tier of cool Pokemon out of all 700'something! (Yes Blastoise... that includes you too. Especially in the picture above <3 )




Battle Review
 
Now, first of all, Arcanine has great versatility due partly to his move pool. Here is a far-from-exhaustive list of some of his best and most useful moves:


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Flamethrower, Fire Blast, Heat Wave (etc.)
Flare Blitz, Flame Charge
Extremespeed
Wild Charge
Close Combat
Crunch
Iron Head
Roar
Bulldoze
Will-o-wisp (A TM I have to mention...)
Body Slam
Morning Sun
Iron Tail
Reversal
Outrage
Dragon Pulse

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So as you can see from this list, he learns all the physical or special fire-type moves he could need, he learns a strong electric attack - a wonderful way to deal with water* and flying types - and he even gets Close Combat, a very powerful fighting-type move he also received starting in the 5th generation, which helps him deal with any rock or normal types, as well as pests like the steel/fire Heatran.

Crunch can help him deal with any psychic or ghost types, but also guys like Latios or Jellicent who try to wall him off.  

Iron Head also help his issue with rock types, but it serves a special purpose now of damaging fairy-type Pokemon. Luckily for Arcanine, he is a fire type and as such, resists fairy-type attacks (for some reason).

Bulldoze isn't super powerful, but it is a ground-type move that can truly help him a great deal.

Morning sun is amazing, as it allows us to create a bulky (defensive) Arcanine who can recover his own HP! 

Plus, he even learns strong dragon-type moves, which could be a strong niche choice - a special attack in Dragon Pulse, and an even stronger (but riskier) physical dragon move in Outrage.



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S
O
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It is clear from this that Arcanine has a lot at his disposal.



Continuing,
His downside is that as a fire type, it's not too hard to wall him off. It's true that he may have prepared the right countermeasures with his move set, but then comes the question - how do we choose 4 moves out of all this? One of Arcanine's weaknesses is none other than his own strength; he has so many good moves and so much coverage, but he can never cover everything at all times. If you choose to make a bulkier, more defensive Arcanine like I do, your choices may then be even less if and after you assign him anything like Will-o-wisp or Morning Sun.


But at least as a fire type, Arcanine is easy to look after. It is clear that he is only weak to water, rock, and ground, and if you know the opposing Pokemon can't use any strong moves of those types, then there's little to worry about aside from sheer power, status ailment, or stat-boosters.


Still, the fact that there is a whole plethora of different Arcanines we can construct gives us the fun, creativity, and uniqueness that I personally always yearned for in games like these.


Personally, I do not invest much in Arcanine's Speed. His Speed never hits any impressive numbers anyway, and he can make up for slowness with defensive bulk. After all, even if you do choose to invest a lot in an offensive stat or two, playing your cards right will lead you with plenty more EV's to spread around onto HP and here and there. Arcanine can compensate for any lack of Speed not just through defensive bulk, but with his awesome and formerly exclusive move, Extremespeed - it's a Quick Attack with double the power that has even higher move order priority.


The last Arcanine set I was trying out was a Special Defense Set with some investment in Attack and HP as well, and a smidge in Defense. By investing a lot in Special Defense, I could treat him as a kind of Special Wall taking advantage of his Intimidate ability to make up for any lack in physical Defense, and then further raise that stat by multiplying it by 50% with Assault Vest. Mind you, this item prevents Arcanine from using any non-attack moves, so this is a purely experimental set.


By having Arcanine act as a slow tank with high offense, he ends up only lacking in the Speed department and fully compensates with Extremespeed (though it's not mandatory. Still, it's good to have at least one Pokemon on your team with a "priority" move. But for that I also have Scizor with Bullet Punch). After attacking second (unless the Pokemon was slower than Arcanine, which is actually still often the case), Arcanine can choose to make a second move in a row by taking priority in the next round with Extremespeed.


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Abilities and my team:

Intimidate can either make Arcanine into a great Defense wall, or balance him out as a Special Defense wall or in general (because Intimidate lowers the opposing Pokemon's Attack stat).

Flash Fire can be used for prediction-switching when they try something like hitting Scizor with fire.

Justified can be useful if Tyranitar or someone tries to lock in Espeon with Pursuit but instead Espeon escapes using Baton Pass and has Arcanine power up from the Dark-type hit.


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~END~






RAFF!  

RAFF RAFF!!


~Yukigami

Gundam Astray and Mini Update

Hey~  
Yukigami 'su!


 First of all, a mini update on things...


Thanks to a friend, got another monitor set up in my room. Doing the whole dual-screens thing (and I'm not talking about my Espeon set. But maybe that too...).
It's nice.
It's like I'm jellin' or something.

That same friend, J Chow of WakeGaNai, got me an Astray Blue Frame model kit - my first Gundam!
 

Also,
I made myself a quick little desktop background, which actually looks pretty okay...






(I actually got rid of the little bit of text in the lower right though, but I'm too lazy to go save that one as png right now.)



Anyway,

I seem to be 100% past whatever sickness I was going through,

So that's good.

I think tonight two things I'll spend some time on are studying for my stats course, and finally making some more progress.



Progress.



Progress?



Progress on what?
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Progress on Love Lilicove!

Chapter One!!
 (and while I'm at it, maybe a better synopsis?)

Yeah, things come up. but this is getting done!!

It shall
                       it shall. 

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.
.


OH!


Almost forgot,




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While I'm not exactly a Gundam connoisseur, my appearance-wise favourite Gundam so far has to be Astray Blue Frame. I just love the colours, and most importantly, the giant sword. In various kinds of fantasy realms, I have always preferred to imagine myself as the guy with the surprising strength and very disproportionately gargantuan sword





~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Oh yeah~

Gargantuan...

Gargantia?


That reminds me

episodes of Suisei no Gargantia are gone from animetake... Getting episodes 9 and on from a friend soon.



Anyway,

here are a few pics from Google:

"Gundam Astray - Blue Frame":










I hope you are enjoying the start of 2014!!


~Yukki