1е сентября - международный день знаний, день, когда дети в первый раз идут в первый класс, день, когда ученики всех остальных классов вспоминают что каникулы кончились и что, блин… надо опять учиться.
Я хочу поздравить все моих друзей, кто еще в школе и моих одноклассников в универе (правда наш семестр уже начался месяц назад). В Австралии 1е сентября это не особенный день, но для меня - русского парня из Латвии, этот день всегда был и останется необычным.
Happy birthday to my favorite virtual idol Hatsune Miku! You were born exactly 6 years ago, but for all of us you will forever be 16 years old ^_^ You can also read the congratulations from my friends Ruben and Clara on their blogs.
On a side note, there has been news recently of the new english voice bank for Miku in Vocaloid V3. Its sounds rather good, still feels a bit weird to hear Miku speak english though.
To learn more about it you can go to the Vocaliod Wiki, or listen to a song on YouTube.
1 year ago my close friends Cindy and Sashin organized an event to see the cherry blossoms in Auburn (and I blogged about it). It was amazing, even though we were a bit late and most of the flowers have already finished blooming and had fallen, but we had lots of fun nevertheless. Well this year was even better!
Tac picked me and Saya up from my place and drove us all the way to the gardens (thanks again man, really appreciate it!). We were the first ones there, so we got us a pretty good spot but with a very dirty BBQ. Since we are poor students we decided to clean it with water and tissues… That didn’t go to well. But we somehow managed to get it cleaner and started cooking sausages. We had lots of food, and when I say lots, I mean lots, look at the pictures if you don’t believe me (flickr link below). This year we managed to see some very beautiful trees and flowers and my good friend Seb took some cool pictures of the animals which were there as well (he even managed to get a good shot of the peacock).
This year I didn’t manage to get a group photo (I hope someone else did), but I have this:
Overall it was an amazing day. Thanks everyone for coming, I won’t be in Australia for the 2014 picnic, but I hope you guys have a blast!
Here are some pics:
This is so overdue! I should have finished The Last Of Us before going back home to Latvia, but at that time I was only about 60% into the game. So now, 15 hours of gameplay later, I am done! And I can clearly say that this title deserves to be called the best game of 2013 (we shall see what happens when Watch Dogs and GTAV come out). I will try to keep this review as spoiler free as possible, but at the same time I would like to cover all the parts of the game and at least mention the characters that played a vital role in the story.
If I had to describe this game in one sentence, I would say: “Imagine if Uncharted and Half Life 2 had a baby”. Seriously, one of the zones in The Last of Us felt so much like Revenholm in HL2 and other parts of the game felt like Uncharted. The concept is that at one point a virus has started going around and once a human is infected he becomes a mindless zombie who can only kill healthy people, or infect them by biting them. You have our main character Joel who survives the initial wave of infection and is living in a quarantine zone. He is tasked to take this girl Ellie (our second main character) half way across the country. Why? Because she is infected, and has been for the past 3 weeks, but is still sane, she is still normal and healthy. We have a cure! But we need professional doctors to extract it from her, and they are somewhere far far away.
If you have seen I am Legend you can somehow imagine what is is to live in a world which is overrun by zombified infected. The main goal of this game is not to provide amazingly revolutionary mechanics or features which have not been used in any other game before. No, The Last of Us was made for the story. Same as with the Uncharted series Naughty Dog wants to tell us a story in the format of a game. And it worked marvelously. The amount of detail that was put in the characters and the acting was superb, the landscapes were very well drawn and the music was perfect to the situation.
Without spoiling too much I just want to say that the only thing that I didn’t like about this game was the ending, I expected it to have a similar ending to the Uncharted games, but it wasn’t. I don’t know if it is my WoW experience that is making me say this, but at the end of some content there should be an end boss… And he should be harder then the most of the monsters in the game so far. A last boss is meant to test all the skills that we have acquired during this long journey. Of course as I said before, the main point of The Last of Us is the plot, so I kinda understand why the ending turned out the way it did, but I wish it was a bit different.
To summ up, so far it is the best game of the year, it has received amazing rating from almost all game review websites and critiques, and I would recommend everyone to play it as soon as possible.
9.9/10
One of the most famous parts of the japanese culture are the japanese gangsters or as they are called in the land of nippon: Yakuza (ヤクザ). Takeshi Kitano directed the film Outrage and its sequel Outrage Beyond, which portray the life of members of a large organized crime syndicate - Sanno-kai led by Grand Yakuza leader Sekiuchi. Takeshi Kitano not only directed both movies he also stared in both as one of the main characters - Otomo, boss of the Otomo clan. Since I have already started describing the plot, let me just say that this movie does not have one set main character, however the story revolves around the main Sanno-kai and the three small clans under the Chairmans (Grand Yakuza leaders) control - the Murase clan, the Ikemoto clan, and the Otomo clan.
This film does an amazing job of showing the viewers the terror of the yakuza. The story is based on these key aspects of the yakuza culture: gang wars, police corruption, the fight for power, betrayal of your brothers, and protecting ones honor. Outrage is not one of those action packed hollywood movies where cars explode because someone shot a bullet from 100 meters and hit the gas tank, or where the main character saves a whole building of people and then jumps of the 20th floor without a scratch. No both these movies are as close to reality as you can get. Everything shown in the movies is realistic and believable. While watching it with my japanese girlfriend she said that watching Outrage is scarier for her then watching a Hollywood horror movie, because of how realistic it is.
I haven’t seen many yakuza films, but the ones I have are definitely less believable, but some are more entertaining. I strongly believe that Outrage is not meant to entertain the audience with crazy stunts and breathtaking action, it is meant to show the viewers the inside works of the japanese Yakuza.
The plot and the characters are what make Outrage a top class movie. The acting, of course, was at the highest possible level, and personally I enjoyed watching it more because it is in Japanese and I was able to understand what they were saying without reading the subtitles most of the time. The filming techniques used are rather unique to me and I am guessing most of the western audience, as we are used to constantly on our toes, thrilled at the action. The pacing also felt a bit slow, but it does work well with the general story telling. The one thing that I think needs to be changed is the music. The soundtrack was mediocre at best, there were no memorable tunes and no outstanding pieces, after hearing which I would remember this great movie. That being said, when there was music playing in the background it was very fitting to the situation, improving the enjoyment of the viewers.
Overall I am very satisfied with both Outrage and Outrage Beyond and I think Takeshi Kitano did a very good job in both acting and directing.
8/10
Also, without spoiling too much I just want to add that you shouldn’t mess with a yakuza, because you will lose more than just a pinky.
So this week for out SEP (Software Engineering Practice) class we had to use this online software called Jazz. But since we have 150 students trying to register and access it at the same time, it crashed. So we are just sitting here and waiting for it to go back online to try and do our lab work… The second it goes back up, everyone tries to access it again aaaaand its down again.
Lets hope this gets fixed for next week when we need to use this for our assignment.
So it seems that Thomas the Tank Engine is in Sydney Central station. My good friend Clara, blogged about it and she even had a video of the opening theme. Since we didn’t really have this show on TV when I was a kid, or maybe we did I just haven’t seen it, I can’t relate that well to my friends who are nostalgic about this. I do however know the story and premise.
So why make this post? Well, after listening to the OP again, it reminded me of a certain YouTube video. If you have seen the anime Steins;Gate then you would know that in ep 16 or so (maybe earlier, I don’t really remember) Mayushii and Okabe are in the subway at Akiba and then …
CAUTION
SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
CONTINUE ONLY IF YOU HAVE SEEN THE ANIME
You have all probably heard of Dr. Who at some point or another, cause the show has been going for half a decade! This year in November the show is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Well since its Geek Week, Google Maps introduced an interesting easter egg into Google Maps. You can look inside the Tardis with street view!
(If you don’t know what the TARDIS is, come on.)
TechCrunch wrote up an article about it, with detailed instruction on how to get in. So head over there and see how the Tardis looks from the inside.
SMASH! - the Sydney Manga and Anime SHow is a convention happening every year in Sydney, and its goal is to celebrate the culture of Anime, Manga, Video games, and Cosplay. Saturday, August 10th 2013 at 9am the Sydney Exhibition Center Darling Harbour opened its doors for over 7000 pop culture fans from around Australia and even overseas. Aside from big companies like Madman and KingsComics smaller circles and clubs were given stalls to sell their own merchandise; Anime@UTS was no exception. We had badges, post cards, phone charms, even panda hats.
It was an amazing experience! So many people, so many good cosplays, so many things to buy, so little time! (Though, this time I didn’t buy anything). There were special guests from Japan as well, not only the main ones listed on the site, but also 2 very special people: 8#Prince and kz. These guys make Vocaloid music, and they are not just some nobodies, these guys are famous, and I mean super famous, look at their profiles on Vocoloid wiki and see the songs they made. After SMASH there was a Vocaloid night party where they were preforming, WOW that was epic! Thats the type of club I want to go to to have fun. What killed me though during that was when kz played Irony and Reunion, I just started jumping up and down like crazy and shouting out the lyrics, as these are my favorite ClariS songs. All the feels!
Overall the day was amazing, I cosplayed Accelerator from Index, my friends and follow club members also cos/crosplayed (pics down bellow), I got to see some stunning costumes and just had an overall fun experience being at a convention. Most of my good friends were actually volunteering this year, helping out either at the information desk or at Vocaloid night or just helping out everywhere they could. Ruben wrote up his thoughts on his first time working at SMASH!
NHK news made a small article about it, so if you can read japanese here is a link.
View album on Imgur 
Last week I was contacted by a marketing research organization on behalf of Commonwealth Bank in regards to their iOS mobile banking app. Basically its a focus group where they showed up slides of the new software and asked us questions about how we feel when seeing these new features. It sounded like an interesting thing to do on a Thursday evening, especially cause they gave me $80!
At first we were shown slides of a notification screen and an email that will be posted/sent out to all customers using their current iOS app to notify them of the amazing new update. I was a bit skeptical at that point, because they really don’t need to do that, since iOS7 will have automatic updates enabled by default.
But then everything changed when the fire nation attacked, they showed us a prototype of the new app. Woah, it looked nice. All my worries that it wont fit the new iOS7 interface and general feel were gone. It was perfect, the developers have done a great job, the buttons matched the iOS7 buttons, the home screen had a blur, same as most parts of iOS7. The new features looked good, and they have updated the old features, like doing a quick transfer between your own accounts is much faster and easier.
Its is a very welcome update, and I can see that they are on the right track, hopefully they can release it in the first days of iOS7, cause a lot of people were a bit pissed off when it took Commonwealth 2 months to update the NetBank app for iPhone 5.
I would love to write up more about it, but I can not disclose any more information about the new features or serious improvements. We will just have to wait and see when it comes out.