"Golden Night", a Poem

So this is a poem I recently wrote. I didn't edit it much at all, and since I'm busy I'm just going to post it like this, with a possible repost of it at a later time.

I'll let you think about what my meanings are here, and soon I'll post a self-analysis of each line and of the poem as a whole.

I actually have a HUGE collection of poems now, but I don't like to blog them a lot, for now.

Enjoy?

Golden Night

Those looming clouds of black Knights,

Whispering of black and white.

When not a wink does my mind see,

And yet, that eye does peer so deep.

When armourless I rest, my soul cannot.

It breaks away to seek the steal I sought.

For through those knightly clouds, the white one beams,

Piercing my lone soul through waking dreams

For I am the blue knight,

But glowing with the reddest light.

And I await that golden knight with steel,

So much so that my blinded eyes can't close and become Blue;

Those shining arms, now ethereal...

A sword with two edges, mastered with time;

I see it and cannot stop seeing--sublime.

For when it's gone I cannot rest

I seek it, the golden light--my golden sword of all the world's might most great--the best.

I beg it from the clouded knight of black,

and in return he turns my vision blue.

But when he dies and golden light shines through

My rusted armour then performs me true;

And even when the darkest knight comes back,

My life your golden velvet light renews.

You slay the moon and bring my vision back,

And my eyes more than those another, see you.

~Yukigami

New World - Wandering in the thick of night

Right now I'm doing my best to quickly learn the Python programming language. I've gotten a lot of advice from friends, and I've been sluggin' away at codecademy.com and some videos I saved from a couple of months I spent before in U of T's CSC108 (when I wasn't learning it for serious reasons).

To be honest, my motivation and interest right now is pretty damn high. I have a lot of reasons why I really need to do this, and time is of the essence! I am really going at it!
To be honest some more, I'm also really scared of it. I am excited by even the mere thought of programming battleship, Tetris, or a text adventure such as Pokemon! However, the more I read up on or get told about all I need to learn to do and about all the things some friends of mine already can and do do - hehe, I said "doo-doo!" - the more I'm kind of just like, "woah, shit!"

Am I going to give up? Not a chance. Am I going to ignore the intimidation and feelings of hopelessness?

Hell yeah~

I've been browsing a lot of programming-related stuff recently, especially some incredibly informative and interesting Youtube videos, and today I took a little peak at my friends (outdated?) blog.

Honestly, I have no clue what he is talking about, and I don't know how many years it would take me to get 1/4 as far as he has. Not to mention, that last post at the top of the page was from four years ago. I quickly saw "SDK" written near the top and almost kid myself that he might be talking about Go, since he plays.


Nope.


But you know what, this is probably something like what it feels for starting Go players. So...

I'm going to go at this the same way I went at Go back when I was improving quickly at Go as a Kyu player who wanted to become a professional player (yeah... well... I REGRET NOTHING!!).

I'll keep making some updates about my progress with programming. Wish me luck! Or at least... wish me greater probability?

For anyone wondering when the heck I'm going to get around to finishing and posting chapters of stories, such as Love Lilycove or one of my Fate AU fanfics... They are coming.


I'll do my best!! I'll become a programmer!!


For now I may wander in the thick of the night,
But I'll run and I'll fearlessly take on this fight,
For the now is my goddess who beams down so bright,
To rid my future of eternal twilight

~Yukigami

More Thoughts On Poetry

Here's another reason, a thought, as to why "popular poetry" can, and perhaps should, seem more appealing than the scholarly "higher" variants.

It makes sense that metre, rhythm, phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, general symbolism and many other literary ploys should infest the every syllable of the "poetry" that we conceive, melodify, and scribble onto our medium before cutting, refining and rearranging until its audiovisual powers of intellectual invocation meet or transcend our original inspiration.

On that note, I should also add that true beautiful poetry as I see it is like a painting; it is up to the artist and the beholder whether or not to hold any bias or preference for subjective beauty as presented either overtly, covertly, or some blend of the two. True masterful poetry pays no homage to complexity, and most assuredly not to specificity. Those two elements do not generally complement, amplify, or enrich poetry in any general sense beyond the niche. True inspirational, evocative poetry is influential and timeless.

Whether yet budding small and meek as I, or bloomed, every writer springs forth in sudden bursts. So too should poetry rush out from its master's keep, from shimmering sunlight beaming down mosaics through the leaves and onto the restful face, the fleeting, sandy waves of opalescent blue on a blinding summer day, the unlikely marriage of street lamps and fall leaves under the bewitching beams of the twilight moon, or the romantic freezing of time as a violet night gently ices the world a cold alabaster.

 

~Yukigami

Summer Teaser

Hello!

There's one more thing I feel like posting today: A teaser for my blog-related summer productivity!


The following more or less sums up my blog-related productivity aims for this much-anticipated summer of 2014:

• Write a whole bunch of chapters of Love Lilycove, and possibly also chapters of another one of my stories (not a fanfic) called Jackie! (the exclamation mark is a part of the title!). The total combined chapters will probably, and hopefully, range from 10-25. I'm sure I can manage a lot more than ten, but no promises!
• Write a vast variety of character biographies, info sheets, and so on. First of all, all of the characters from the stories I'm currently writing (i.e. particularly Love Lilycove's characters, but also a bunch from my many other yet-to-be-written stories) will have all kinds of the aforementioned documents written up for them and posted!
• Exceed 100 poems! This should be an easy summer feat, as I already have around 70 poems completed and stored in my Evernote~ I believe I have only posted 2 poems to Nevermeltice so far. It's because I'm not clear on what the scoop is for literary/conceptual theft, as well as how internet publishing affects future career-related usage. That is, if I post poems and story chapters and things here, does that limit or hinder my ability to get my works published in the future? This is an issue about which I must further inquire...
• Write a bunch of each of the following:
• Story synopses
• Story one-shots
• (Possibly) manga chapters by me with poor drawings for the sake of visual story-boarding
• Some more quotes, at least bringing my total to 10-15
• Several big articles/essays on certain topics I'm enthusiastic enough about to the point that I'd go as far as to work hard on such things outside of school. For example, in addition to a big essay on Fate (Fate Zero especially, but also the Fate universe), I plan to write up something big I brainstormed that takes on some big real-world philosophical matters and life problems, particularly pertaining to school, parenting, careers, career counseling, advice and opinions, philosophy, the education system, grades, social judgement, and additional relevant matters. You'll see!
  
• Go stories and articles/tutorials, one of many examples being my new Joseki Explained series (or more broadly, my "Go Explained" series). I'll be writing at least triple what's needed for the CGA newsletter schedule as far as Go articles/tutorials go. I'll also be posting some other content that should prove helpful for Go players, specifically for students of the game but also for teachers.
• Role-play sessions for Pathfinder, D&D and whatever else will be written up as many stories and posted! Furthermore, my characters and everything about them will be posted. Other information, such as my imagined worlds, races (etc.) will also be posted.
• I'll be posting a lot into the Magic/card game section too, starting with my current decks, my deck plans, my personal taste, and some of my MTG aphorisms.
• In addition to everything else, there will of course be a lot of more random posts, or random tangents. Plus, I'll be sharing all kinds of interesting content from other blogs, especially those of my close friends - and that means even more stories, characters, magic, role-play and more!
• Anime reviews and related will of course also be featured. I will do some writing about Fate, Gundam SEED, Hataraku Maou-sama, and many more.
• And let's not get ahead of ourselves! I still need to write up some autobiographical posts. As all of my passions and a lot of my many personal ideas are being exhaustively poured into the many sections of Nevermeltice, I figure I might as well allow you the chance to get to know me through more than just topical posts in which I rant about, share, or guru things.
• All of the sections of this blog will be activated and fully operational pretty much as soon as the summer begins; as I'm not planning on taking any courses this summer, I'll have a lot of time to write, blog, and Youtube - or should I say, YukiTube - which brings me to my next points;
• My friends Johnny and Allen and I will be having weekly (or maybe even more frequently) short story contests. We''l choose either anime or other stories, scenes, or themes to write about and each be given like 1-3 hours (we haven't decided yet) to speed-write it all in separate writing environments and then return with our stories at a certain time. We'll then rate several aspects of each story and discuss them. I think this will be a lot of fun, and it was Johnny's idea.
• My Youtube Channel, probably to be named "YukiTube", will be fully active as soon as the summer begins! First, I'll finish adding all the music and other videos I've been meaning to fill it up with. I have various playlists with which all my videos will be organized, such as: Go, Fate, Pokemon, Interesting, Education, and so on and so forth. I plan to immediately make at least one Go video - the first video ever of my new and up-and-coming channel - before I get to other tasks.
• I will be practicing not only with Photoshop and Illustrator (I am currently Level 0 in Illustrator and Level 1 in Photoshop), but also with Visual Novel-making software such as Novelty and whatever else I can find that might be better. I have strong intentions to advance myself in terms of VN-making as well as (or especially) programming. Due to some unease about my future, I'll be doing a little more programming than I had originally planned.
• Also, as far as games are concerned, I also plan to download some other game design software and tools and see what else I can do. I'm very interested in the game-design industry. I might even read up on that specifically, as I'd really rather not procrastinate or half-ass an interest of mine that's both potentially career-relevant and about which I have plenty of enthusiasm. 

I have lots of other tasks to do that don't necessarily relate to my blog as well, such as:

-Using Athletic Centre and improving my fitness with a light daily exercise regiment and a certain number of days a week of "intense workouts" (but also exercising near/in home).
-Learning Python (I'm not taking it in school, I can only teach myself, learn from others, and study up on it online. But I really want to develop my skills seriously and turn myself into a prospective computer science professional. I think the more I learn, the more I'll like it and be able to fool around with programming stuff. When that happens, It will be easier for me to devote more and more time to developing those skills. I am, however, planning to take CSC108 next Fall.
-I have some other more specific goals and "to do" tasks, and well, I guess even these things (above) will find their way into the blog :)


So stay tuned!!

Once Summer comes around I'll be pumping out an average of two or more posts per day - and staying true to the original-but-seemingly-forgotten purpose of the blog, I'll be pumping out chapters of Love Lilycove for you to read, critique/comment on, and share! ;)

De wa!

~Yukigami

Nevermelting Love

Nevermeltice

 

**** 

I'll love you and forever pay the price;
Be trapped here in this never-melting ice

And all the shining light our future holds

Can never melt this frozen shell, so cold

Things will get better and better, I said

The lives we led, no longer do we tread

Frozen we stay in that ice forever

And so it shall be; I'll leave you never

Without you, forever my life would end

Forever my heart, all time would rend

For inside my heart be violent weather

And never to our time, could I, time bend

Thus forever I'd frown, as my time ends

I'd fall to the dark; I'd sink to the nether

Mourning the loss, forever, of my dear friend

I love you and I'll say it twice - no, thrice!

We'll continue our flow as our love grows

You'll always be beautiful, falling snow

I'll follow you down, and follow above

Together with you, forever my love

I'm trapped, happily, in Nevermeltice

****

 

~Yukigami

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 

My Favourite Pokemon, Types, and Versions

Hello, hello! Yukigami here again!
こんいちわ！

Firstly, here you go, have a Vulpix!

Isn't it beautiful?

I have this picture as the avatar for one of my online Go accounts on KGS.
This is what I have posted in the KGS user info:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ふしぎで、かっこいい。
かわいくて、美しい。
一番きれいなポケモン。
まぶしくて見えないよ、ロコン。

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

The passage above kind of rhymes.
It is read,

"Fushigi de, kakkoii.
Kawaikute, utsukushii.

Ichiban kirei na Pokemon.

Mabushikute mienai yo, Rokon."


It roughly translates to:

Cool and mysterious.
Adorable, and beautiful.
The number one prettiest Pokemon.
You shine so bright that it's blinding, Vulpix.

But it really sounds better in Japanese, ne?

Now, onto the main pointless point of this post!

Some of Yukigami's favourite Pokemon:

Vulpix, Ninetales, Arcanine
Wartortle, Starmie, Blastoise

Lilligant, Bulbasaur, Ivysaur

Espeon, Gardevoir, Mew

Eevee, Persian, Zangoose

Zorua, Weevile, Absol

Sandshrew, Gliscor

Glaceon, Lapras

Dragonite, Dragonair

Jolteon

Gengar

Scizor

Note: This list is not exhaustive, and gives no hint as to a 'Top X' list.

 Some of Yukigami's favourite types:

This, however, I can divulge with confidence.
In no particular order:

Ice, Water, Normal, and Ghost


I have trouble creating a hierarchy out of these four favourites. Although some of my very favourite Pokemon are fire-type, fire doesn't quite fall into the Top 4.

Reasons why I like these types?

**Ice types are cool and mysterious. Pun both intended and not intended. There aren't many ice types, and ice tends to be on the beautiful side of things. I think snow is beautiful. Snowy Christmas or New Year's Eve nights are very romantic. I have many romantic night-time memories under lightly snowing purple Winter skies - "romantic" also in a fantastic sense.

 Furthermore, I am Yukigami after all ('Yuki'-->雪-->Snow). I was born in the Fall (Does that mean I should be called Akigami? ;p ), and I have always loved that time of year, not excluding Winter. The colour of the dying leaves... In all irony, it is beautiful. Also, I have pretty good Canadian tolerance to the cold. My friends always question my choice of clothing, but all I can say is "it's not cold!" or "I like it though."


**Water types are often beautiful, and when it comes to Pokemon, I am pretty aesthetic.
Several of my top ten favourite Pokemon are water-type, such as Wartortle, Blastoise, and Starmie.

Rather than being beautiful, Blastoise is simple yet cool, especially under the right rendering. I have always really liked him, and he is my starter-of-choice.

Starmie is very aesthetically pleasing and also rather useful competitively. Wartortle has the best of both worlds; He has most of the coolness of Blastoise, and a Weevile-esque badass-ness. He also has some beautiful parts, such as his big, elegant white tail and wing-like ears. His teeth show, he wears a cool "don't take no shit from no one" expression, and even has some cute little moe cheeks. He is one cool second-stager.

Water is something that is just innately beautiful. Remember all the times when you've seen the sun shining along the surface of a body of water, like glittering diamonds. Water is calm and amorphous, and as such, can represent a cool, stoic, and flexible mind and personality. Though this might glorify me too much, it definitely suits me well. Furthermore, and this may sound strange, I love to drink! And I'm not talking about beer. I am always thirsty, like a fish, and require a lot to drink in a day. Water is definitely another Pokemon type that's befitting of me. I usually chose the water-type starter Pokemon in my first game play-throughs, and while Blastoise is my favourite (and one of the strongest, now that he has a great Mega-evolved form), before 6th-gen I always thought Swampert might be the strongest of all starter Pokemon, or one of them. His power definitely goes under some people's radar.

**Normal types, especially the stronger ones, in my opinion tend to be anything but normal. Snorlax, Clefable, Zangoose, Togekiss - these Pokemon really don't have much normalcy to them, do they. Of course, now that Pokemon X and Y are out, two of those Pokemon's normal typing have been replaced by fairy typing. Lots of normal types look really "nice" in my opinion, like "nice and simple", but this part may be a tad subjective. I tend to prefer Pokemon that look more simple, or more beautiful. Another cool thing about normal types is that many of them have high HP, and can learn all kinds of elemental moves. Whether or not they can competitively make good use of those moves, Thunderbolt, Ice Beam, Surf, Flamethrower, Psychic... It's still pretty cool that they can use them at all. Furthermore, let me ask you: what did you imagine the first time you heard of 'normal-type?'? What I first thought was something like "down-to-earth, bland, typical, people, non-elemental, physical..." and so on. But is that really the case with normal types? Well clearly, no, it isn't! So it's not a boring type or anything!

**Ghost-types seem to fit coincidentally (or not so coincidentally?) well into my group of favourite types. Ghost-types are cool, mischievous, dark, mysterious, and often able to use a plethora of elemental moves. The spookiness and mischief of ghost-type Pokemon really appeal to me, perhaps partly because I was always a bit of a clown and a trouble maker years ago as a kid and as a young teenager. I was never a bully, 'gansta', or vandal - rather, I was a class clown, and someone who'd mostly lost his sense of danger for a while, as though having nothing to lose. That's what things were like back then. For some reason or another, if taking on the persona of a Pokemon trainer I would definitely feel a sort of kinship with ghost-type Pokemon. To me, they represent a kind of alternativeness, a kind of rogue-ness, and a kind of difference. Furthermore, I have always loved Halloween!

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Finally, I hereby divulge my opinion on the six generations of the main Pokemon handheld games!

If I control for nostalgia value and the graphical/technical standards of each game's respective time, removing them from the equation, my hierarchy from the best experience and down would go like this:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

2nd Generation (GSC)

3rd Generation (RSE)

6th Generation (XY)

1st Generation (RBY)

4th Generation (DPPt)

5th Generation (BW)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Additional comments:

Black and White had a lot of Pokemon that, frankly, were quite ugly. I just thought, what were they thinking??
Obviously the game had its good points, and like any Pokemon game, I loved it. But it was also way too easy to beat (like XY), and the aesthetic dissatisfaction of the Pokemon messed it up for me. Some of the Pokemon, including some less ugly ones, just have way too many intricate details; it really isn't very nice to look at. Simple is good. Less is more. Kyurem and Genesect are two examples of Pokemon I can't stand looking at, not to mention Genesect is rather hax, too. Then I see everyone using it competitively, and it disappoints me that people don't care about using their real favourites, or that aesthetics mean nothing to them. Numbers don't matter to me, though...

Even if some people claim one of them as one of their "favourites", it simply cannot be that the countless people battling with them all like them as a "favourite" and would favour them even if they weren't very strong. I just don't think strength - aka numbers - should be a legitimate qualifying quality for a favourite Pokemon. If it were, then I could work for Gamefreak and draw a bunch of thorns and spikes sticking out of a piece of crap, give it a name (Shitcicle), and give it awesome stats, and people would flock to it and use it in Showdown and stuff. Then if someone criticizes them on their choice of Pokemon - as I'm sure I'm not the only one annoyed when everyone uses the same boring teams with the same sets - they may claim that it is, in fact, one of their favourites. But would they really do that if the Pokemon is a shit-cicle? At least then, you could laugh at them and it will no longer matter to you.
Don't just battle - battle in style! Use, like, a Persian!

Please keep in mind that this entire blog entry is highly opinionated and biased, and you need not thinking much of it. I'm sure it will clash with many of your opinions. Furthermore, my game generations hierarchy is sketchy even for me. 3rd Generation, for example - it might be my favourite.

As for 4th generation, well, it wasn't quite as memorable to me as some of the other games. I also didn't like that some of the places and their music had a kind of hillbilly/hick thematic. But there were so many awesome things about the game that made up for that. Some of the cities were nice, like Hearthome, and the game had plenty of beauty. Cynthia was a truly awesome champion, and her music, too, was cool. Everything about the final encounter with Cynthia was powerful and awesome. Also, I probably played the 4th generation games more than any other. Even after lots of restarted games and accidental erased game files (my brother, etc.), my last file has close to 400 hours (stupid breeding!!).
Overall, I would say that 4th gen wasn't that far off from those above it on my hierarchy, and I like it a lot more than 5th generation. I loved the ending video/music, too!

What can I say about the 1st generation? Well, I can say that it is a fierce competitor for the top spot on my hierarchy, along with 2nd and 3rd gens.  Gary was a really cool champion. Or Blue, I should say. He probably has the coolest Pokemon Champion battle theme EVER, he looks cool and rival-y, and his Pokemon levels made him a relatively tough champion to beat without Player hax. First generation lacked much of the dimension the other games have to them though, and the game is essentially over after you beat the Elite Four. Even 2nd gen transcended that issue. Actually, 2nd gen transcended it the best out of them all!

6th generation, XY, is a solid game. The sheer amount of added features, fixes, etc. make it an indisputably awesome Pokemon game. One of the awesome things about it is the character customization features, which I've wished for since I was a kid! I was like, "man, I wish I could be one of those 'rocker' characters! gnarly, bro~"

There is just no way to say that Pokemon XY is not a great game. There is also no way it could fall below the middle point on the Pokemon game hierarchy. Two downsides about the game are that, with the change to Experience Share and the continuation of even easier Elite Four members whose Pokemon levels aren't very high and who use only 4 Pokemon (!!), and that the game feels kind of "finished" after defeating the Elite Four, much like the first Pokemon games.

3rd generation was simply awesome. There were lots of different terrains, and the map terrain itself was made beautiful and more dynamic. The game was a huge step up from the first two generations in many respects. Like XY, there were a huge number of added features and small additions. The music was nice, and many of the places - such as Ever Grande City, the sooty area near Lavaridge city with all the Spinda and whatnot, and the underwater terrain - were simple awesome and very memorable. There is just too much to say. Pokemon Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald were amazing Pokemon games and easy take 1st, 2nd or 3rd place.

It's not hard to explain why 2nd generation was my favourite, so I won't even have to say much. I will even put it into point form, for both our sakes:

-Great music (for example, National Park theme at night)

-Large map (even just Johto alone, no?)

-Pummeling infinite Rockets

-New Pokemon types

-A HUGE step up from 1st generation

-Espeon ~ ~ ~ !!! (Also, Lugia is pretty cool for a legendary ;p )

-ANOTHER REGION! Going back to Kanto, and reliving the first generation!!

-The cruise to Kanto!

-Get 16 badges, and then...battle...Red!!! That...was very ultimate.

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~Yukigami