When thinking of the works of award winning director - Hayao Miyazaki you would normally think of his amazing fairy tale type movies like My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away or Howls Moving Castle. They are all similar in the sense that they are set out in a somewhat realistic world with elements of magic and mystery and these become the predominant aspects of the story, which create the unforgettable feeling of a Studio Ghibli Movie. The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ), however differs from the tradition fantasy genre and is based on a true story of a Jiro Horikoshi, an aerospace engineer, who’s dream was to create beautiful planes that would surpass the German designs in both speed and power. Even though the setting is in real life World War I and then World War II Japan, this touching story of a young boys dream, dedication to work, search for perfection, love and despair is one of the best works of Director Miyazaki. It really shows us, just how fragile a human life really is.

Plot:

The movie starts off with Jiro’s life as a Japanese kid (日本の少年), who wants to soar through the skies on a plane, but can’t due to his shortsightedness and glasses. After borrowing a magazine about airplanes and their designers and engineers, our young Jiro starts seeing dreams where he sees a famous Italian engineer - Giovanni Caproni and is able to not only talk to him about the art of building planes, but also walk inside and outside on the wings of the planes designed by this renowned engineer. These dream sequences help Jiro in achieving his dream of being a plane designer and building the most beautiful aircrafts (#utsukushii).

During his older years, he was traveling by train to Tokyo to go to university. During that train ride, a girl and her maid were traveling home to her family, and this girl helped Jiro out by saving his hat, which was blown away by the rising wind. However the train was caught right in the middle of the Great Kanto Earthquake and fires in Tokyo. In this the maid who was helping the girl get home, got severely injured and couldn’t walk home. Jiro helped the girl and her maid to get home safely, but little did he know that years later that he would find the same girl and fall in love.

Every day for lunch Jiro would it Mackerel, not just because he liked the taste, but also because the bone shapes intrigued him. In the skeleton of this fish he saw the skeleton of a wing of a future fighting jet. He kept this concept in his head for a long long time, until he finally got the opportunity to make a plane with this design. After graduating and getting a job in Mitsubishi, our young adult was assigned to help produce working designs for the next generation of planes. Unfortunately they failed horribly and the Japanese army had to borrow the German wisdom in this regard. But that didn’t discourage Jiro as he had a vision and he stayed true to it to the very end.

When going on vacation to a hotel in the mountains there was a beautiful girl standing a top of a hill painting. With the rising wind, fate has brought Jiro together with Naoko, the girl that he helped more than 10 years ago during the earthquake. Not too long after they got engaged and soon after married. But Naoko was sick with Tuberculosis and that was very sad and painful for both of them. But she stayed strong and spent as much time as she could with the love of her life - an aviation engineer.

Overview:

As I mentioned before, this movie is rather different from the other Miyazaki films. The Wind Rises is meant for adults. It has serious themes such as future dreams, career prospects, love, family, health, and the thin balance of your own career versus spending time with your loved ones. It felt, however that this is the movie that Miyazaki wanted to make. His previous works were amazing and inspirational, but they were more oriented towards the people watching. Whereas with The Wind Rises, it felt as if Miyazaki made it because he himself wanted to watch this movie. This movie is more than just a biography of an engineer, its a story of love and dreams.

Soundtrack:

The element of silence and the amazing original sound track played an essential role in portraying the story of Jiro thought his life. When he was interested in Italian airplane design, fun and cheerful music played. When they traveled to Germany, more serious and strong melodies were present. It not only helped enhance the visualization of Jiro’s dreams and fantasies, but also gave contrast to the reality of life in 20th century Japan. And the ending theme which played during the credits was a perfect end to a great movie.

To sum up:

The Wind Rises is a movie worthy of being called a Hayao Miyazaki masterpiece. Of course it is not as grand as Spirited Away or Hauls Moving Castle, but it is still an amazing movie which I would recommend anyone to watch. Not only does it give an insight of the history of Japan and  its people, but also in to the life of a boy and a girl who had to overcome a lot in their life.

The opportunity to witness this movie was given to me and Andrew from the University of Sydney by the biggest and best anime distributor in Australia: Madman Entertainment. Thank you and please bring us more amazing movie screenings in the future!

8.7/10

The 22nd winter Olympic Games have just begun in Sochi Russia! For any country hosting an Olympic Games is a great honor and Russia hasn’t had a chance since the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow. Its been tough on Russia, they had to building all the venues and hotels from scratch, spending an amazing 51 billion dollars on infrastructure, new stadiums and hotels. But they managed to get all of it done on time (almost) and they Olympics have officially begun a few days ago with the amazing opening ceremony, which showcased the history of Russia with beautiful ballet and performances.

But it did not all go according to plan. One of the simplest pieces of the opening ceremony did not quite open up, so to say. Look:

This image is all over the internet, it even became the logo of the #sochiproblems subreddit. Aside from this small blunder, everything else was beautifully executed. It was so worth waking up at 3am to watch.

Well I am mainly rooting for the Russian team as it is their home ground, they need to win! Also the Latvian team and the Japanese team are in my top. Australia though, it would be pretty cool if they won something, but I doubt they will. They did though in 2002, in a very very very interesting manner.

Good luck to all athletes!

Blumenkranz - in german it means a wreath of flowers (ring of flowers) and that is what normal german speakers would think if they heard anyone say this word. Well if anime fas, who are watching the show Kill La Kill hears this word, they will undoubtedly think of the second best track from the OST (Original Sound Track) which bears the same name - Blumenkranz.

The soundtrack plays whenever Satsuki’s mother comes on screen to give a strong and powerful feeling that the main villain of the series deserves. I don’t know what it is with german language that gives it so much strength and power, but more and more Japanese singers seem to be incorporating words or phrases into their songs lately. But of course not only are the lyrics a bit strangely arranged (some people are even saying that they were made using google translate) but the girl who sings it is obviously not German as she can barely pronounce the words properly. To be fair, she did a lot better than Link Horizon with their Guren no Yumiya (Shingeki OP).

If you know even a bit of German, I suggest you look at the lyrics and try reading them while the song is playing to see the difference. Also here is a cover by a German singer, and this sounds so much better. Especially in the “Ja, Ich bin viel stärker, als ich je gedacht hab” part in the middle of the song. The Japanese singer completely swallows the gedacht, like it never existed, making it that much harder to sing for the German Girl.

This year I have officially become an adult (in every country); I turned 21! Every year up until now I got to spend this special day with my 2 most special people - my mommy and my daddy, but this year we did not get the chance to meet up to celebrate it together, but nevertheless I had a great day with my friends - yay!

Part 1 - Madoka

1st of February did not only mark my 21st birthday, but also the first time the third Madoka movie - Rebellion was screened in Australia. The anime clubs of both UTS and UNSW attended this event and we all lined up at the cinema at 12 to pick up our very own signed boards! I got Godoka /so happy. The movie was amazing to say the least, Ruben and Clara have both blogged about it, so you can read up on their impressions. There was also a cosplay competition, which the didn’t announce, but I was ready for it anyway, some people dressed up as madoka characters and I won the grand prize (BluRays of the Madoka series signed by the english VAs) with my Kyuubey cosplay.

Part 2 - Dinner at Casa di Nico

At 6pm we gathered at a nice Italian restaurant in Darling Harbour. I had 20 people join (apologies Ruben and Clara) who came to my party and this one of the memorable days of my 21 year old life. We had pizza, pasta, whine, cocktails, deserts and a lot of gift wrap… Ok let me just say this, who ever though it would be a good idea to wrap my presents in 2 full rolls of wrapping paper, going for about 10 layers is a bloody … GENIUS! It made me crack up and face-table myself twice. Finally after about 5 minutes of unwrapping I got to see my Ghibli BluRays there. Now I have Grave of the Fireflies, PomPoko, Whispers of the Heart, Howls Moving Castle, Arietty and Up form Poppy Hill to add to my collection, totaling in 13 Ghibli BluRays overall out of the 20 Released (1 coming soon). So I a whole lot closer to completing my collection! Also thanks to Seb and Cindy for the Steins;Gate art book - so much Kurisu, I am dying, and the Tyrion Lanisters wit and wisdom book, I will go though them and try to be as witty. Thanks to Cindy for the beautiful orange flowers. Thank you so much to all my friends who came! Lots of hugs, lots of kisses, and lots of fun.

Photos from party:

View album on Imgur

Part 3 - Kenny’s Birthday on the 2nd of February

I want to wish Kenny a happy happy birthday, as she was there celebrating with me the night before her own big picnic-party. It was an awesome day, thanks for organizing and inviting. Also thanks to Dale who went to winter comiket and got me those amazing looking Monogatari doujins of my favorite lolies - Shinobu, 89ji & Ononoki. And the Kyuubey hoodie, I will try my best not to get it dirty as it is pure white! And here are the photos from the Botanic Gardens:

In Autumn of 2013 (March) I set myself a goal. That goal was to buy textbooks, study them thoroughly, take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test and pass it. I am very grateful, that I realized this so early in the year and had more than enough time to prepare for the exam which was on the 1st of December.  And now I got my results back, and guess what - I PASSED!

I had a lot of time to study and I spend countless hours on learning kanji, vocabulary and grammar. And it payed off! The exam was hard, like I don’t usually call exams hard and challenging as they are usually really easy for me even without studying, but this was. I put a lot of effort and I achieved the result I wanted. Usually I am not that excited for my success cause that is just the natural progression of things - I do not fail. But this time I was very very very happy to see my pass, as I know I had to put in a lot of work to achieve it, whereas normally it would just come to me anyway.

26th of January - Australia Day. Its a day of celebration, aussie BBQs and kites! Drawing Circle and the Japanese Australian Students Society (JASS) had a joint event at Centennial Park which was a sort of BBQ / drawing session and kite making workshop. Around 20 people came and overall it was a great joint event, even though it was rather cloudy (with a chance of meatballs).  But that didn’t stop multiple groups of aussies gathering together with their family and friends to celebrate this day together.

For me though, it was a good opportunity to catch up with people who I missed and couldn’t see due to me being constantly busy with work. And so I did. Too bad my lovely girl couldn’t be there with me on this funtastic day, but I got to spend a whole day with her before for our 4 month anniversary. We watched anime, had lunch, went to Kino, and drank some good white wine.

During the event we had sausages, burgers, a huge variety of sauces and drinks! There was also a football-ball which we could play with (and so I did, tried to show off my skills which I picked up while playing бананы with Гера & Гера). It was fun, I didn’t have time to make a kite though as I needed to leave early. Would do again.

Well here are photos which I took (have I ever told you that I don’t like taking photos when its cloudy):


Oh and also my close friend, an photographer with more experience and skill then me with a camera, uploaded his batch of photos. Here is a link to his album:

Currently all schools in Latvia are required to use this online grading system called E-klasse.lv which is run by the company DAEC. When I was still in high school (almost 4 years ago), all the teachers had to put the students marks and grades into both a paper journal and into this online system, but as I have heard from my mother, now they are only using this online system. Of course this has its benefits and makes it easier for both students and their parents to access, but there are also obvious risks as well. Unlike UTS which uses a very complicated and secure system to store all the university students marks, e-klasse is not as big and I highly doubt it is as secure as what my university has to offer. Anyway, that is beside the point, what I want to tell you about is the absurd story that happened to one of our students (former student of Rigas 10th Secondary School) when he tried to improve the user experience when using this online grading tool.

As you can see now, there is a lot of clutter on the main page, advertisements, useless information, buttons and text in 5 different colors, news articles which none reads anyway, etc… What he sought out to do, is no different from what AddBlock has been doing for years now. He wanted to remove all this clutter from the page and only leave the login and password, as that is the only feature which people use. So he wrote a very simple Chrome extension (seriously anyone with basic HTML, CSS and JS knowledge could do it) to remove all the useless

#top_adv_box,
#top_adv_box_r,
#top_sub_nav,
#idx_content,
.open_faq,
.q,
#mn_dbg,
#fake_ph_uname,
#fake_ph_pass,
#slide_wrap,
.todays_names,
#btn_live_demo,
#wall_left,
#wall_right {
  display: none !important;
}

Back in 2011 I wrote a review of Steins;Gate, a series that I really enjoyed watching and gave it a 10 straight away and I even said that it was the best time travel story told in anime. Now, 2 years later, 7 months after the movie came out in cinemas I ordered the Blu-Ray and today we had a screening with the anime clubs of UTS, USyd and UNSW. It was a grand event, around 50 people showed up to watch this awesome movie. Anyway to the review.

Ok I can’t not compare the movie to the series it self. And in all honesty its not as good as the 26 episode series, but that is understandable as it is only 1 hour and a half, whereas the series is around 10 hours. Fuka Ryouiki no Deja vu starts in the Steins;Gate world line where Mayushii is alive and Kurisu was not stabbed to death by her father. Everything seems fine and they are all living a happy life. But then suddenly Okabe starts seeing these delusions of events that have happened in other world lines. They start getting more and more serious up until he completely loses track of the world lines and disappears into the timeline which is 0.00000001 off from the Steins;Gate one. And the only person that still manages to somehow remember Kyoumas existence is his beloved tsundere Kurisu. It’s all up to her to bring him back!

During the series we got to see the evolution of the plot, the character development and the resolution of a complex time travel mystery that was played for us. In the movie though none of this was present, the characters have reached the pinnacle of their development, the story is at its finale as well and the plot twist that needs resolving gets solved in 5 minutes by embedding a strong memory in Okabes head - his first kiss with Kurisu. The movie was made to entertain us, to give us that warm feeling that the lab members are back and they are still as funny as ever. But as far as story or plot goes, there was pretty much nothing new. All the concepts have already been established and they are playing on the fact that all the characters kinda have their memories from other word lines because of Okabe.

It was entertaining to watch and I would definitely recommend it to all the Steins;Gate fans out there. However personally I wished they would have something more thrilling, some new plot points, and twists, with a marvellous resolution at the end. But it was a good movie nevertheless. Also special mentions to the OP and ED, they were both great and I will add them to my music collection.

In the end I decided to give it a 8/10

I have been asked this question multiple times, and would always give a tl;dr version. Now I can finally tell the story in full.

So where did this obscure nickname come from? It all began a long time ago when I just started going to Klass English Language School back home in Riga. It’s wasn’t really me learning English, it was more of practicing it, so that I wouldn’t forget. Anyway, the real reason I got given this nickname is because of a peculiarity in pronouncing my name in English vs Russian. For English speakers, pronouncing my real name (Vadim) isn’t too hard, just a bit awkward as the name is unusual for this part of the world. For Russian speakers however, pronouncing my name naturally, in English, is very hard, as they are used to the Russian pronunciation. So as a result, they end up saying it with Russian pronunciation, and thus messing up the whole sentence due to the changes between Russian and English pronunciations. Thats when I realised that, I needed a solution for this.

One of my sempai’s from the school - Oleg, one day decided that my name is too awkward to pronounce, and made it his goal to find me a more… English nickname. One day he proclaimed that I look like Jamie, talk like Jamie and act like Jamie, so I must be Jamie! That puzzled me greatly, as I had no clue what he was talking about. After a detailed explanation that the Jamie he was referring to is from the Cartoon Network show MegasXLR, I understood where he was going with that. At first I opposed, I didn’t like it, but my fate was sealed. From then on in, I was known as Jamie. That became my nickname which I used in games on my PC.

Somewhere around that time I finally got an internet connection in my house and I started playing games online. I quickly came to realisation that my nickname, Jamie, has been taken pretty much on every website and online game. Once again I found myself with a problem in need of solving.

“What can I do to still keep Jamie, but to make it more unique?” - I thought to myself. Then it hit me! I needed an extension to my nickname. I didn’t want numbers at the end, and none of that randomness. “So where should I look for a good extension to Jamie?” - I kept on thinking.

Around that time I also started watching South Park. In season 3 episode 5, a certain creature named Jakovasaur made its appearance. That’s when it hit me.  Jamie Jakov - JJ. PERFECT! It was unique, it was easy to remember, easy to pronounce (if needed), and allowed me to get JJ. From that point on all my online presence was summed up with this nickname - jamiejakov.

People say they are sometimes embarrassed of the nicknames and later on - emails, which they created for themselves when they were younger, when the internet was just picking up. I am not. I am proud of how it turned out and that I am still using it and will be using it in the foreseeable future.

Remember in August I blogged that I got Porco Rosso? Well today my shipment of two more glorious Blu-Rays have arrived. This time its my second favorite Ghibli movie - Princess Mononoke and The Cat Returns. This was a present to myself for Christmas and New Years, and also for finishing last semester with good grades.

They have been added to my collection and will be re-watched in due time. As mentioned before, if you want to get me a nice present for my birthday (which I might add is coming up soon), you can always order one of the Ghibli Blu-Rays which I don’t have (these 2 + the 5 in the last post is all I got).

З.Ы. This is also my first post of 2014! What a great way to start of my blogging life this year.