First Impressions: Photo Kano

I wrote a guest post over at Finally Anime! describing my first impressions on Photo Kano. To read the whole post, click on the bunny peace picture, please.

Photo Kano is adapted from a PSP dating sim and therefore we expected it to boast many characteristics of such a game. The male protagonist may be almost the most ordinary high school student to ever walk the Earth, but he has at least one distinguishable trait – he keeps picking up hobbies and dropping them, which is more than frowned upon in Japan. You should choose a club and stick to it until you graduate, right?

When our main character, Kazuya Maeda, receives his father’s old digital camera (from the company Canan, paraphrasing Canon) at the beginning of the first episode, photography becomes his new hobby. Thus he spends the whole first day of school snapping pictures between classes, smiling at a girl here, taking a photo of a friend there. Little does he know a fellow student is watching his every step. Leaping out of the bushes, the president of the Photography club appears and Maeda-kun is doomed.

Finally Anime! is a group blog (current authors include Nuuance, Onery and Moonlitasteria), focused on games and anime. I will be doing some other posts for the site in near future, so stay tuned!

First Impressions: Red Data Girl

The first episode of Red Data Girl just aired last week, but for some reason three episodes already pre-aired for premium users on Niconico in 398p a while back. I can’t say I understand the reasoning behind this marketing move, though maybe it is to encourage people to get premium accounts… That aside, let’s look at the anime itself.

The main heroine, Izumiko Suzuhara, has lived at Tamakura shrine, supposedly one of the Kumano shrines, her whole life. Apart from that Izumiko has an another special thing about her – the unfortunate ability to destroy every electrical device she touches. At 15 she is to enroll in Hōjō High School in Tokyo (although she would rather go to the local high school with her friends) with her guardian’s son and childhood friend Miyuki.

Nakagin Capsule Tower

Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo is a beautiful example of modular architecture by a well-known architect Kisho Kurokawa. Simple, compact cuboids clustered around two concrete needles must have looked straight out of a science fiction story when they were built. Completed in 1972, the structure is rather old for a building and its age (and poor to none maintenance) has been becoming obvious in the past years. Not to mention worries have been expressed as to potentially harmful levels of asbestos, well-known for its numerous positive properties in the building industry and later discovered to cause serious damage to humans’ internal organs, especially lungs, upon inhalation.

Both of the towers – one has 11 floors, the other 13.

The departing Google Reader and its alternatives

On Wednesday Google announced they will be discontinuing Google Reader, their RSS feed aggregator, on July 1st, 2013 after eight years of service. Even though the usage has declined according to the company, the ripples spurred by this stone are the size of a tsunami. Every news site ran the article, every tech site looked at the reasons behind the termination, every productivity blog compared and contrasted its alternatives and all those posts were followed by hundreds of comments.

Why? What are the official reasons given? It seems to be the diminishing user base and the fact that the organization wants to concentrate on fewer products. (You can read the full announcement on the official Google Reader blog.) As always there are several different reason making rounds among the Reader’s dejected users, the most prominent of which is the fact that it probably wasn’t bringing enough, if any, money into Google.

Will Google offer a replacement service? I don’t have the answer to this question. However I do recall that when adding a new feed to Google Reader I was often asked whether I would like it to be added to my favorite RSS aggregator or the Google+ homepage. That leads me to believe that users may be asked to migrate there. I am most definitely not the only one to think so and just like so many of the like-minded I don’t want to.

Reflecting on the tsunami (and an another reason I’ll list shortly) you can see there are a lot of people who use the service daily, whether it is for their work, studies or entertainment. Google Reader offers a statistics page (located under Trends in the left hand column), screenshots of which have flooded the comment sections – among other information you can find the number of items you have read in the past 30 days there. The numbers were nearing 3000 items in the shots I’ve seen, which means close to 100 read posts/day. If you follow me on twitter (@dorrykun) you might already know that I read about 55 news items per day using Google Reader.

NonNonBa by Shigeru Mizuki

Among Christmas presents I received this year was NonNonBa from my father. I had never heard of it before, but my dad has good taste.

NonNonBa is a manga about a little boy growing up in 1920′s Japan, going to school, playing war with the neighborhood boys and sneaking around poking his nose into adults’ matters and what-not. Nevertheless his day-to-day adventures are there only to complete the picture, at the center of which are his imaginative depictions of and stories about all sorts of Japanese yōkai. An old woman (called Nonnonba) in the village inspires him with tales of these traditional monsters, just like an elderly neighbor used to entertain the author, when he was a little child with an overabundance of ideas.

Chekhov’s gun

I was reading the third episodical review of Sasami-san@Ganbaranai over at the glorio blog, when its author, Aquagaze, pointed out something straight out of a literary theory textbook. As my eyes flew about the article dripping with discontent, it kept pulling them and my attention to itself.

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.

A term originally used by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in his correspondence and discourse with other famous men of the era means that if you as an author, introduce an object onto the scene it should come to it being used.

Exam Rant #5 (Final)

That’s it. I’m free from school until February 18th.

I had two last exams on Wednesday. They didn’t go that well, meaning I failed them both. It made me sad. It also added two more subjects to the already long list of ‘subjects to repeat.’

Most of what I’ll be taking next semester are subjects I already had this semester and didn’t pass. At my university you have two tries/semesters to pass a class, so I have to pass all those classes I’m repeating.

Anyway, no more ‘exam rants’ for you at least until mid-May. ‘Tis time for some REAL posts.

Exam Rant #4

Fourth week has gone by and I’m still here.

Wednesday: I wanted to take a Mathematics exam (8-10AM), but in the end didn’t feel confident enough to bother getting out of bed. Wait a second, haven’t we heard that somewhere recently? Oh right, the same thing happened last week. In the end I did get up and went to take Structural Mechanics. The exam started at 10AM. First a five-minute “easy” problem, that I’ve never gotten right. I guess my studying paid off, since this time I managed to get it right! On the other hand, it is always an easy problem; why I’ve only solved it correctly of my fourth try is a mystery. Anyway, that was just the first hurdle. The exam then continued for 2.5 more hours of problem-solving… Results at 3PM. I know that at some schools the students wait weeks for their results, but it’s still such a long time. The suspense! The prayers for the examiners to find enough points in your messy calculations!

Anyways, I got my results at about 3:45PM and was pleasantly surprised to find I actually had over 60%. I admit it’s not that great, but I passed and consequently am advancing to the next semester~

Friday: I attempted studying for Soil Mechanics on Thursday and took the 4-question exam on Friday afternoon. It was one of those tests where you look at the questions and think to yourself “Oh, yeah. I know some of these words.” I didn’t stand a chance.

Well then, that leaves me six subjects to finish off within the next week, which is impossible. I’ll take Mathematics and maybe Soil Mechanics on Wednesday. I can’t finish History and Loading and Reliability anymore. If I hand in all my Economics and Building Structures papers, I can take the exams on Wednesday and Thursday respectively. Not that I could manage three exams in one day… ぜつぼうした!

Exam Rant #3

Week 3 out of 5 just ended and the score is 6/13. Well, it actually ended on Friday, but I’ve been a little busy studying.

Wednesday: I wanted to take Mathematics (8AM-10AM) and Structural Mechanics (10AM-1PM) exams. I really need to pass the latter, so I only took that. And failed it… Next tries at those same times this Wednesday.

Thursday: I took a Physics exam. Due to certain rules my university employs, I would be kicked out of school, if I didn’t pass it (same goes for Structural Mechanics above). Dare you reckon what happened? I aced it. Out of 38 possible questions I drew one I was pretty sure of – conservation of momentum and its application for objects of variable mass (Mescerski equation) – and the second – strain tensor and pressure in fluid statics – I knew half of. The examiner praised my example of a lawnmower as the object of variable mass in the first question as she only told us about spaceships and cisterns. All in all, I was ecstatic.

Friday: Obviously Open Day doesn’t prevent our Soil Mechanics examiner from announcing an exam. Unfortunately after passing Physics, I fell asleep at 4PM on Thursday and therefore slept through the time in which I wanted to study my 50 pages of notes. Next try is this Friday again.

In the end this past week has been a yet another failure. I was studying Structural Mechanics over the weekend and therefore haven’t finished neither Economics nor Building Structures work…

Exam Rant #2

Let week 2 of 5 review commence!

It is exam season alright~