Meet the newest member of my figure collection - Tsutsukakushi Tsukiko from the show 変態王子と笑わない猫. She is a cute little girl who wished to lose all of her emotions so that she wouldn’t appear childish to her friends. Even though throughout the series she barely shows any signs of happiness or sadness, we can still see when she is angry or shy. They portray Tsukiko as a cat because the cat god was the one who fulfilled her wish and also because cats are a general symbol of cuteness in Japan, and Tsukiko is too damn cute!

When the show was coming out in April 2013 I immediately knew that it would be popular as it has cute girls and a hentai protagonist who both the girls are in love with. The formula for a successful anime: cute girls + sexy scenes = profit. Thats is what sells in Japan and we can not do anything about it. But hey, I preordered this figure from AmiAmi and it cost me about $40, but I regret nothing! 2 hours of work for this beautiful thing is totally worth it.

Anyway, I have more pictures of her on my:

It has been 16 years since the first Pokemon game came out in Japan in 1996, wow thats a long lifespan for a game! While some might say that the hype has died down over the course of time, other still believe that Pokemon is as popular as ever especially with the release of X&Y last Saturday which brings gamers the 6th generation and into a completely new region: Kalos and around 60 new cute little critters to catch.

---

My Friend got Pokemon X on Saturday and has been playing it ever since. Now at 5 badges and going strong with her Delphox named Homra. I watched my friend Darrell play it when he got it on the day as well. There are graphic improvement, a new story, some new mechanics, but the core mechanics of the game are still there, so a Pokemon-illiterate person like me (cause I have only played though half of first gen) could understand pretty much everything that happened.

These guys are the 3 new starters and as usual, you get to chose one of them to be your friend and trusted companion on your journey around the region. Chespin, Fennekin, & Froakie. I like Fennekin the most, but I think Chespin is the cutest starter (don’t really like his evolutions as much as Fennekins).

TechCrunch wrote a nice article about this new generation of Pokemon, I recommend you read about it if you are interested in this 2 decade old game.

Remember last year when I became the screenings director for the UTS anime club? Well that just happened again! On the 5th of October we had our AGM and elected a new team for 2014. Our beloved president Lexi had to step down as he will be graduating next year, then our amazingly talented and hardworking secretary - Clara ended up leaving our ranks as well, and also our 2 photographers, treasurer and vice have been replaced. I can say thank you for your hard work, and I hope to see you around.

Our new execs (going left to right):

• Grace - Arts Assistant
• Meig - Secretary
• Cindy - Events Coordinator
• Chloe - Arts Director
• Ruben - Webmaster
• Baek - President
• Keo - General Relations
• Vadim - Screenings Director
• Tac - Photo/Videographer
• Ravi - Vice president
• Allan - Treasurer

Lets have an awesome year guys! I will be leaving for my exchange to Japan in April though, kukuku.

Visit the official website to read more about this meeting.

You know there over 180 countries in the world and most of them have their unique language. Have you ever wondered which would would be the hardest to master? Well I know 5 languages: Latvian, Russian, English, German and currently Japanese. Out of those I would have to say Russian is the hardest to learn (its my mother language though). Recently I stumbled upon this article which tries to answer the question of which language is the hardest, and I was very surprised by their top pic. Here is the link so you can read about it yourself.

Learning languages is amazing.

Each of their shows is filled with character development, engaging dialogue, thought provoking themes, deep plot, intelligent humor, symbolism (meanwhile at shaft).

This seasons Monogatari series second season is no exception. If you guys remember Bakemonogatari - Nadeko Snake ark and the ever so famous OP - Renai Circulation, then you will be pleased to hear the in this seasons monogatari Nadeko has her own ark and a new OP to match it!

---

Here is a link to Renai Circulation (RC), and here is the new OP called Mousou Express (ME):

Doki Doki

I would like to compare the two. In RC we can see that Nadeko is all cheerful and looking forward to seeing her beloved Koyomi-oniichan, she is trying hard with her studies and going forward in her life in a skipping pace. In ME its the exact opposite. To be honest Shaft just reused some parts form RC but played them backwards, but it does convey a message. She has regressed, she has fallen into a dark state of boredom a slight depression. She can’t be bothered studying or working hard; “excuses and reasons are just to bothersome, because its fate there is no helping it” - she sings. She just wants everything everything everything everything. Her childish and selfish side has shown itself and that is what this ark is all about (kinda, no spoilers).

З.Ы.: Originally made for the Anime@UTS Music Monday post.

This has been a very expensive week for me, but I can honestly say that it was worth it! GTA V, iPhone 5s and the Bower & Willkins P3 headphones are all mine, and I sure as hell am enjoying all of them. I’ll talk about my purchases in chronological order, so first up I would like to start with one of the best games (and definitely the most anticipated) of the year -

GTA V

The game was set out to come out at exactly 12am on the 17th of September. Naturally I preordered it, but then I also decided to go to the store at like 11:30pm to wait for the midnight release and pick it up straight away to get some gaming time before going to bed. I can say one thing, good thing I came 30 minutes early! I managed to get a spot at the front of the line (8th or 10th) thereby getting the game right away at 12 and heading home. The game cost $89 (which is the normal price for the standard edition of any console game in Australia).

---

When walking out of the store I could see the number of people standing in line to both JBHifi and EBGames stores. Id say around 200 people were there that night. A truly massive game launch for a truly massive game. I am currently on 8 hours of gameplay and 19% passed. Once I clear all the missions and start having fun with this huge open world, I will write up a review of it, so stay tuned.

iPhone 5s

Next up is my story of how I got myself the latest gadget to come from Apple. After selling my iPhone 5 (iChitanda) to my high school IT teacher - Natalia Ivanovna Rodina, when I went back to Latvia in July, I have been left without a smartphone. For 3 months I was walking around with a 5 year old Samsung brick. I am not complaining. I actually did enjoy not being on Twitter and Facebook all the time, but stuff like my japanese dictionary and train timetables were greatly missed.

Anyway, at 4am me, Wilmer and his friend went to the Chatswood Apple store (Wilmer was nice enough to drive us there on his car, yay!). 4:30am we line up in front of the store and wait until they open up at 8am. During that time I managed to finish watching Dick Figures The Movie, and may I saw it was awesome, and a japanese talk-show about hafu (ハーフ) - people, who have 1 japanese parent and one foreigner, and about their life in japan, especially if they don’t know english. 8am I get my new phone, all is good (some minor complications with my credit card, but got that sorted out). $869 for the phone, $79 AppleCare extended warranty, $48 Red leather case, $269 P3 Headphones. So here it is my beauty:

Her name is iShinobu because it has been a tradition of mine to name each iDevice in the name of my favorite anime girls. Here is the list:

• Mac Mini - iKonata ( Lucky Star )
• MacBook Air - iTaiga ( ToraDora )
• iPhone 4 - iKirino ( OreImo )
• iPhone 5 - iChitanda ( Hyouka )
• iPad 3 - iRin ( Usagi Drop )
• iPad mini - iYuri ( Angel Beats )
• AirPort Express - iSaki ( Eden of the East )
• AirPort Express 2  - iTogame ( Katanagatari )
• and now the iPhone 5s, which was given this name because of the ever so cute vampire girl Shinobu Oshino from the Monogatari series.

Watching KVN when suddenly this. Jožin z bažin

В выпуске на открытие дома КВН, команда Станция Спортивная спела песню про грузчиков. Они использовали минусовку этой песни про ёжина с бажина.

Sunday Movie Night is an event I organize at urbanest every week at 8pm. The movie I chose for this week was Happy-Go-Lucky because I came across this term at some point somewhere and thought that it was rather suiting for my own personality, and because apparently there is a movie with the same name and same theme, I chose it for the screening.

The story revolves around Poppy, a 30 year old girl who is living with her flatmate Zoe and working as a primary school teacher. Why is she so special? because her character is “happy go lucky”. She always looks at the bright sight of things, she is always happy and acts silly and jokes around about things most of the time. Poppy is trying to make everyone around her happy by making jokes and smiling, but that doesn’t always work. Still she doesn’t frown, she doesn’t cry she just continues being herself.

---

In the beginning of the movie her bicycle was stolen, and when she sees that instead of getting angry or depressed she is just a bit sad that she couldn’t say goodbye to her good friend (the bike). Sometimes the things she does are a bit overboard, but it hasn’t harmed her so I am guessing it ok, but of course this is a movie and not real life.

I like her; I love her optimism; I love her lifestyle; she is happy; she doesn’t need a reason to be happy, she just is! Of course there needs to be a balance between optimism and realism, but I believe that in her head she knows when to be series and what to take serious, but acts in a somewhat childish (in a good way) manner because she understand that she doesn’t need to push her troubles on others. And this is exactly what I admire in her! This is what I have been longing for. I want to be like that, I want to act like that. I believe that most of the time even now I am like Poppy, and that I am happy with my life.

Here is a trailer of the movie:

I would recommend everyone to watch this interesting movie, as I am sure it will show you what it is to be around a person who is constantly happy and cheerful.

8/10

PS: If I had compare to an anime character, I would say Poppy is a lot like Hajime from this seasons Gatchaman Crowds, like for example in this scene here.

Today I’d like to talk about Trello. Trello is a cloud based organsation and collaboration software which can be used in creating personal plans and schedules as well as work on projects with a team. With an extremely easy to use interface and a vast set of features I say safely say that I will be using Trello in the future a lot!

---

Initially introduced to me by my close friend Ruben during our Digital multimedia class, I wasn’t too impressed and we didn’t end up using it that much. This semester however for our Software Engineering Practice (SEP) class we had to use a project management tool called Jazz Hub (I wrote about how it crashed a few weeks ago). After playing around in Jazz for a good hour the whole team (6 people) decided that its too complicated for our needs and we switched to Trello, which our team leader Ruben proposed.

We haven’t looked back ever since. The interface is slick and easy to use, the software itself is reliable and gets the job done; it even has integration with dropbox and GDrive, which is very convenient for our causes. This is what our task pane looks like right now, we have finished and submitted the first part of our project -  the documentation and are ready to move on to the next stage:

Overall I am very pleased with my experience with this software in the past 4 weeks and since we will need to use a project management tool for the rest of our assignments for SEP, I am relieved that we are using Trello.