Tag: english

Internet changes

October 1, 2010
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A couple of years ago in the scene i’ve belonged to online then, it was more or less customary that everyone starts a fansite or a “shrine” for the anime or band they loved. I still see some point in shrines. A shrine is a tiny website with only a few pages, a largely graphic design and minimal textual content devoted to the topic.

But a fansite is large(r), with quite a lot of work put into it, whatever the form of site is. Just writing the content and hunting down some rare images takes ages. I mean it, from experience. But just now i realised that i’ve never been to a fansite with the purpose to check out some info, or just read about details. And that’s the static content the writers (usually) put such insane amounts of work into.

Static content just won’t make people stay there. Once they’ve seen it all, without anything else to do they leave and probably never come back. What makes people stay and/or come back is dynamic content.

Forums, where on the one hand, they can interact with other fans, and on the other, generate unique content. News feeds, which is pretty much the same as writing a thematic blog. And if they still need the info, a cross-linked wiki is surely there in the blue with tons of data (part of which is user-contributed) on the topic. I wonder if other websites (anything beside communities, shrine-types, blogs and wikis, and of course webshops/download portals) would have a chance to survive at all. Like, at all.

Toradora!

September 30, 2010
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I first started watching Toradora! when it started airing, but then it just wasn’t interesting enough to watch. But this spring a girl from the music club said she was watching it, reminding me too. In the summer break, before heading off to my journeys, i managed to watch it all.

It was… Strange. Obviously, after watching loads of anime the final pairings get more or less clear in the very first episode, and with that, for me the anime gets more tense, since it’s a story between a startpoint i’m at and not infinity, but a known (or thought to be known) endpoint. It’s drama, and it’s funny, and it’s highschool. Crazy life, that i’m pretty sure doesn’t exist anywhere but anime (not in Japan for sure) with loads of hilarious but at the same time very touching situations. And we can see bonds forming and disappearing.

It was nice. I didn’t even pay attention to details like graphics or music–the character designs and the story were enough. After i finished it, i felt strangely down, but i guess that’s just natural from a single guy watching a romantic anime.

Also, the Suzumiya fan i am, i just had to use the pic above, from Drunk Weeaboo. Of course there’s no Hare hare yukai dance in Toradora.

Samurai Champloo

September 30, 2010
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I can’t even recall when i finished Samurai Champloo, yet another masterpiece by the creator of Cowboy Bebop, Watanabe Shinichiro. It must’ve been sometime back in the middle of august…

Yet, just as its older brother, Samurai Champloo is great. As Cowboy Bebop mixes blues with space and western, so mixes Samurai Champloo historical Edo period Japan with modern city underworld and hip-hop. As expected, both the graphics and the music of the anime is of insane quality. Fantastic puns and jokes, hilarious situations often burst into amazing fight scenes and/or tear-jerking drama parts.

The story is very well designed too. Through the loosely connected episodes of the heroes’ journey, a story worthy to be compared to a classical full-length novel unveils. In the meanwhile, sometimes strikingly harsh realities and brutal but just philosophies appear. And however matching this description is to Cowboy Bebop, i’m talking about Samurai Champloo, and despite these similarities, while watching it, it doesn’t feel like a “little brother” or successor, but a creation of great value.

Something you really should watch.

Above image from The Futile Podcast

Holy crap

September 29, 2010
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In order to provide the Battle.net Service, Blizzard must be entitled to access, monitor and/or review text chat, including private, or “whisper” chat, in the event of complaints from other users or violations of the law. By clicking the check box below, you agree that Blizzard (or one of Blizzard’s affiliates) has the right to monitor and review personal messages you send or receive on the Battle.net Service, or through any game that is playable through the Battle.net Service, to investigate potential violations of the law, the Battle.net Terms of Use, or the Terms of Use agreement specific to any game playable on the Battle.net Service. Blizzard will not use the information for any reason other than pursuing such violations.

Battle.net account registration, chat agreement

I consent to Blizzard monitoring and/or reviewing my personal messages.

I guess i should just move to China. Not much of a difference anyway, living under a communist regime and playing a game on Battle.net. This is so… scary. Especially after reading Little Brother (Cory Doctorow’s)…

StarCraft 2 + Blizzard rant

September 29, 2010
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Blizzard pissed me off. Badly. It’s one thing that battle.net redirects me to the korean website, even though my account is south-east asian–apparently all japanese are considered to be able to speak korean too. But whatever, i got used to typing sea.battle.net instead of just battle.net.

Actually it was all fine when i got the game (StarCraft 2 we’re talking about here). I completed the campaign, wrote a blogpost about it and since then played against harder and harder AI’s. Not against humans for the sole reason that the people i would want to play with are in another region. And StarCraft 2 is geo-locked, just like World of Warcraft. Meaning you can’t play with people from other regions, and even if you got access to another region, your achievements and scores will be stored only for the region you got them in. Even better is that although SEA apparently got merged into the north american region, technically the two are still separate, just now i can have a NA character too. Great.

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Third night, Okinawa, etc

September 29, 2010
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I thought this night worths a separate post, it was really funny. I was staying at CamCam, where i returned after i finished my sightseeing trip. That was when i realised that my watch stopped sometime during the day, that’s why the sun was setting at two pm.

But of course when i realised that it’s six pm and not three, i suddenly got hungry. I didn’t feel like going to the same cheap place as the day before, so instead i headed for the main street to eat something with agu, the local pork. But after walking for like ten minutes there, and all restaurants were expensive and the advertisers on the street didn’t even try to invite me in, i got pissed and went to a small famiresu i passed on the way earlier.

I sat down to the great surprise of the owner-bartender and ordered the most filling-looking item from the menu (again to his great surprise that i could read the japanese menu). While i was eating friends of his dropped in and started drinking and talking. I didn’t leave (on intention) after finishing my meal, so it wasn’t long until i was part of the conversation too, and even got snacks and drinks (awamori-water 1:1 mix). It’s always astonishing how quickly japanese can get insanely drunk.

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Funny

September 29, 2010
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It’s always funny when people call me Vale when we meet. For the reason, this name started as my online alias. Not as if i minded being called Vale, i made this name, so i like it. It’s just… strange, when i think about it.

Especially when people ask me how it’s supposed to be pronounced, and i have to admit that i don’t know. “Vale” if looked on as an english word is the same as “vale”, synonymous to valley, and from that point of view should be pronounced as such. But on the other hand, if looking at the evolution of this name, it comes from the tolkienianish “valerauko”, and should be pronounced as such.

Actually, originally it wasn’t meant to be pronounced at all. I used it online, and online means typing for most of the time. But of course i was in contact with real life friends online too, so it wasn’t long before some started calling me Vale offline as well. Some said it this way, some said it the other way. The funniest was my short-time university roommate who pronounced it as Wall-E.

Say it however you want, probably i’ll get it.

The hardest part

September 19, 2010
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I’ve started and stopped and restarted and restopped rewriting my blog engine a bunch of times already. Pretty much as soon as i put this one online, i realised it has way too many faults. But i was, to put it simply, lazy to actually finish any other (not as if this one was complete and finished, it has the basicest of basic functionality, and that’s it).

And i can say, every time i develop website code, the hardest part is templating. How to separate content, representation and scripting. I don’t like having unrelated tags and stuff in my raw writings (especially since i got my new keyboard, with which if i use the hungarian layout, it’s a pain in the ass to type < and >) and i don’t like putting php in my template files either.

What remains is either using search-and-replace on a lame formatting language i make up for this purpose, but it usually ends up just as complicated as if i used php. I do know a good solution, and that’s xslt. I would’ve trusted that if Blizzard used user-side XSLT on the StarCraft 2 website (well, the previous one at least) it’s supported enough, and it seems it is on desktop browsers, but not so much on mobiles. And i myself have a phone with a quite picky browser (NetFront), yet intend to use my blog from that. (Though i still have to figure out how would i input hungarian accented characters with a japanese phone…)

The problem is, server-side xslt seems to have performance issues. Although i haven’t tested it (yet), everywhere i read how slow php’s xslt transformations are. And though that would most probably mean a few hundredth of a second, i’d rather check it before writing an implementation. An implementation, which would make my developing life loads easier, by the way.

If you have any data on php xslt speeds i’d really appreciate it.

Okinawa, day two

September 17, 2010
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Not really separated from day one, but since unlike me the world around started a new day, i count it as such as well. I looked for a place to stay as i realised that i seriously needed some sleep. Not much luck. Using my phone’s net i managed to find a relatively cheap place hidden somewhere in the labyrinths of the tiny alleys of Naha, and i was looking at a streetmap at a crossing when a helpful japanese asked if he could help. He could.

I made it to the place, but it was like five in the morning, so of course i couldn’t check in.

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Starbucks Anniversary blend

September 17, 2010
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First impression: “what the heck, is there pipe tobacco in this thing?” Because as i opened the package, beside the (judging by the smell) dark roasted coffee aroma came a sweet scent that i can only associate with pipe tobacco. I like it. The fresh brew doesn’t have any special scent to it, not until you are about to drink it, because then something sweet and bold appears out of nowhere.

And of course, the packaging does not lie when it has “extra bold” written on it. Indeed, it is well roasted, dark and if it wasn’t a drink i’d say crunchy. But it’s also smooth, which would make a really nice, almost poetic confusion there. The point is, it’s a nice coffee. Multi-layered taste and dark boldness, just how i like it.