Magi: Labyrinth of Magic: Labyrinth of Awesome!

Magi just keeps getting better!

Yeah, that's all I'm here to say.


Here's the current opening video:

And here's the ending! 8D

~Yukigami

Rosario and Manga

Yukigami here~



I came to a pretty obvious conclusion just now while studying for my 6pm Fantasy and Horror midterm.

I should read the Rosario and Vampire manga! Even though I had the conclusions spoiled for me, they sound like what I'd wished for for the story as a continuation of the dissatisfyingly inconclusive anime ending.

Trinity Cross and High Volume

You really need some good, high volume to really experience all the instruments (incl. voice) ~ ! !

From Youtube:
Rosario + Vampire: Ending 2 - Trinity Cross

Full Song: 
Trinity Cross (Full)





だろう？

言っていること分かるだろう～

分かるよなー～

音がちゃんと別々にきこえないと、おもろい経験にならねーだろう～

だって、曲の中に話しているのは人間だけじゃねー。

 

~Yukigami

Log Horizon: Episode 16

I've been following various Anime, one of which being Log Horizon. I'll be posting a lot more about it later, though probably not more than another post or two unless it gets awesome.

This episode focused on the issue of the Goblin army. Having forgotten about certain events from back when this world was just their regular MMORPG game and not their actual lives, the adventurers focused on improving the status quo, gathering information, and upping their levels. They didn't realize they'd been mostly neglecting to think about game events and taking on NPC missions. As a result, the Goblin King was crowned due to no attack on the goblin armies, and all of the goblin clans united, numbering 10,000 visible and likely a whole lot more on the way.

In this episode, they've already begun to pillage towns. The classic trope of the beat up doll/teddy bear lying on the ground after discovering a catastrophe/tragedy was used. An NPC girl one of the characters, Touya, had met before, had this doll, and in this episode it was found when some of the characters made it too late to save the people of a city that had at this point been already razed. Two goblins were fooling around with the little doll, and then Touya realized where it was from, and stormed in at them.

That said, this series really lacks impact.

I watch it because it's relaxing and kind of fun. I find it extremely cute in a way. The story pretends to be a serious Sword Art-esque locked-in-MMORPG anime with serious problems, but it can't help being very lighthearted. The way this anime tries to be epic but never really allows us to expect that anything very emotional, thrilling, or horrible will happen, and something hard to explain about it leads me to find it just very very kawaii. But it's not a moe or sort of obvious kawaii, it's more the tone, the concept, and especially the dialogue that makes it cute. And again, I don't mean the normal kind of cute; I am finding it cute in, well, probably the most condescending kind of way possible, because I have trouble telling whether the author meant ot to be this way, or actually thought he was making something epic. But I like to think that it is this way on purpose, and I find that the anime has a unique, for lack of better word, "cuteness".

Hmmm, yeah, no other way to describe it.


OH! Almost forgot. One of my predictions, which I don't think will happen though, is that the strategist main character, Shiroe, would have the attacking fishman(?) army from before intercept the goblins and have them end up fighting each other and dying off, or at least use this to assist defending against Goblins. I thought this because... They were fighting an endless army of fish, and then suddenly they weren't anymore despite having commented on their huge numbers. What happened to da fishies??

Oh, and...............

I think Rudy, the prettyboy mage, is an NPC!! This is because when Isuzu ("Miss Isuzuu~~") tried to friend list him, it didn't work. And then things got dark and awkward and we didn't see what happened after. In the next episode, everything was normal. But I think he is an NPC :D Interesting little twist. If he isn't then you suck Log Horizon...



This ending theme fits the series pretty well.

~Yukigami

俺のブログはこんなに可愛いわけがない: I-Its not like I wanted to show you this because I...

To add to my last two posts containing very old story writing attempts of mine, I present to you, the reader, something recently posted by my friend at WakeGaNai that was a past attempt of his at writing a Naruto-verse fanfic short story.

Here you go~

俺のブログはこんなに可愛いわけがない: I-Its not like I wanted to show you this because I...: Irrelevant-Kirino or Always-Totally-Relevant-Kirino? と、とにかくちゃんと読みなさいよ。バカ兄貴！ Way back when, I was enamored with the idea of forum-based...

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 

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?

.

.

.

.

.

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. 

.

.

.

OH!

Almost forgot,

GUNDAM!

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

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

Suisei no Gargantia

Hello~

Yukigami です～


So I finally decided to try watching Suisei no Gargantia. It's from a few seasons ago, I guess?

My brother and maybe A.C. or someone had suggested it to me, but I hadn't given it a shot yet. But all I have to say is, it is not a chore to watch this. Although I've seen four episodes so far, I probably shouldn't say absolutely that it will be truly great. But I think it will be quite good. Being from the Fate Zero guy,

Fate Zero:

it's not like my expectations were low or anything,
but this has been a really good and entertaining anime so far. The following is my nutshell review of Suisei no Gargantia so far: (reminder: the picture above is  Fate Zero, not Gargantia)

I'm not too much of a mecha person; I LOVED Gundam SEED/SEED Destiny (both, especially SEED) not because of the mecha element (though I'm not anti-mecha, and some Gundams looked nice), but because of the soundtrack, art, and most importantly, the emotion!
It was a very emotional and dramatic story, and I loved it!

So back to Suisei no Gargantia...

The first few minutes of episode one created the usual kind of mecha atmosphere: if you know what's going on, you are fairly focused on the screen and you are thinking about the people and machines involved and who's dying and who's owning. But since it's the first episode, it's the usual few minutes of @_@

After the first few minutes, things became quite clear despite the continuing space-fighting action but this time, I was mesmerized. Somehow the anime just looks VERY good, and captivated me, much to my surprise. I couldn't take my focus off.

As for the second half of the episode, all I can say is that it got even better. The main character looks good, there's nothing annoying about his character except for the mild possibility at this point that he might be an all-powerful kind of protagonist. But that's only for now, the impression within episode one. The setting moves over to Earth afterwards, an "origin of humans" location apparently unimaginably far away from Ledo's former whereabouts. When Ledo speaks his native tongue, it STRONGLY reminds me of Hataraku Maousama!! Plus the plot of a guy from another world trying to adapt to life in a normal society on normal Earth.
Reminiscent of this! xD :

"Katsu-duum~!"

There isn't too much else I can say about what little I've seen so far, but the ending theme, as posted earlier, sounds nice, and the video is beautiful!

It's still good after four episodes, and I'll be sure to post more thoughts soon. I like the main girl - she is drawn well and acts as a contributor to the show's aesthetics. She reminds me just a little bit of Nausica. Just a little. I like her better though.

This (below) is copied from Wikipedia (but I have omitted a little part at the end of it that was a bit of a spoiler...

A 16-year-old Galactic Alliance ensign. Trained as a soldier since birth, Ledo finds himself shipwrecked on Earth following a failed attempt by the army to destroy the Hideauze's home planet. As he interacts with his new surroundings and gets used to the crew of the Gargantia, Ledo is exposed to some concepts of human society long forgotten by his civilization due to its permanent state of total war against the Hideauze, like entertainment, cooperation and tolerance. Ledo gradually grows attached to his new friends on Gargantia.

Check it out!!

~Yukigami