Showing posts with label weather. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weather. Show all posts

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

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Nevermeltice!


So guys,

guess what?

.
.
.
.
.
.

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!).

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

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


Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Dark Christmas?

暗いクリスマス?

この間ひどい嵐があって、木がたくさん倒れました。それだけじゃない、木がパワーラインの上に落ちて、オンタ リオ中にたくさんの家が停電の状態になっちゃいました。僕はトロントに住んでいて、とても不便でした。たった今電気が僕の家に戻ってきて、すごく助かりまし た。数日前から外が少し危なくらしくて、モールも店もほとんど閉まっていて、ぎりぎりのクリスマス買い物をできませんでした。友達のみんなもこの状態だから、クリスマスの後に、パーティをする予定があります。
ああーー冬休み終わっちゃいそう~~

TT__TT



(Owned by weather!!)  x(


Now that I have electricity back, life is okay again.
Actually, it really wasn't that bad. But it was boring, and more than two days - say, a week or more - would have REALLY sucked.


Tonight, I am happy that I was able to prepare some presents for people with help from my mom, though I will have to do a lot of shopping tomorrow, too!
In particular, I was able to prepare something special for someone. It's going to be legen--

Wait for it...





--DIFIC!!


wait...


..something doesn't sound right...

.
.
.
.
.


...

YAYY! ELECTRICALNESS!!!



 (This image was not made by me, nor do I own it)



AND...


NO!


It was not Yukigami's fault for all the freezing of the trees and falling of the trees onto all dem power lines. The ice-coated trees may be beautiful, but Yukigami would not go that far. Well, for the time being Yukki wa HAPPY DESU! ;p



~Yukigami