Anime Weekend Atlanta 2014
So, it's been a while... a long while, since AWA 2014 but I need to post up them pics sometime. They're mainly cosplay pics, and there aren't too many.
https://caelk.shutterfly.com/pictures/1278
At first I thought I'd post them up with the pics of the Japan trip that I took after it, but dang... I took way too many pictures, and have to go through thousands of them. I'm not finishing that any time soon, so I'm just gonna up the AWA pics on their own.
It was a pretty good con, and we got some good guests, even if they were more old school than anything. I got autographs from Tooru Furuya (Amuro Ray, from the original Mobile Suit Gundam) and Yuuko Minaguchi (Sailor Saturn, from the original Sailor Moon). Junichi Suwabe... we kinda missed, but he hasn't voiced too many roles that I like, so it's all good.
It surprised me more that AWA staff finally prepped a concert hall for the musical guests. Before, there was a real big space for the dealer's room, and all the concerts were in some back room with hardly any seating and speakers from the 90's. This time it was different - a section that they used for the dealer's room was instead converted into a pretty huge concert hall, and the speakers... were real, concert-grade speakers! We had a real concert hall, fit for real musical guests! That's never been a thing before, and up until now, all the performers had to make do with a side show room in the back. But no more!
The musical act I saw was the MIQ concert, which was headed up by her and some other performers she was mentoring. It was unfortunately at the same time as the Idolm@ster panel, and well... concert or panel? Sorry guys, I chose the concert. It was a decent enough concert, and I saw I wasn't the only Im@s fan to skip the panel when I saw the guys in the Im@s happi dancing with their glow sticks at the front of the standing area. Homemade Kazoku also made an appearance, but since I'd already seen them and their music isn't my style, I gave 'em a pass for some panels.
There were some really good panels about Japanese mythology and ghost stories by a person going by Miss Fortune. She was a pretty good storyteller to go with the stuff she was talking about. There were other panels we attended too: some were hit, like the Japanese TRPG panel, and others were... shall we say, not headed by entertaining personalities.
It was a good weekend though, and I got a few people asking to take pictures of me. If you saw a Little Mac limping around (and yes, that was a martial arts injury), that was me!
Crack, crack, crack the egg into the bowl...
I should be looking at my pics from AWA 2014 and the trip to Japan I made last October, but there are a lot of pictures to go through. I should stop taking as many as I do.
Instead, I'll show you all what I've made recently. Koufuku Graffiti ended last night, and I thought I'd make one of my favorite dishes to see it off.
Okonomiyaki, Kansai style. I thought about doing Hiroshima style for a sec, but then there's a lot of juggling you need to do and I don't have many cooking utensils, much less a hot plate. So I opted to do the variation that's easiest when you only use one pan.
I pulled the recipe off the internet, but if I were to do it again, I'd modify it to something close to this.
Batter
10 tbsp flour
2 tsp baking powder
160 ml dashi
3 jumbo eggs
Makes around two portions.
Other stuff
Any vegetables or meats you want
Okonomiyaki sauce
Mayonnaise
Mix the flour, baking powder, and dashi until the batter is smooth. Add the eggs, mix until smooth. Add the meats and vegetables and mix.
Cook over medium-high heat for around 5 or 6 minutes. Flip and cook the other side until done. Adjust heat and/or keep flipping depending on how fast the batter's cooking.
Serve on a plate, and squeeze okonomiyaki sauce and mayonnaise on top.
When I made this last night, I used leafy vegetable of choice, corn, mushroom, green onion, bean sprouts, and cod. There's not too much to it - okonomiyaki is just batter fried with stuff mixed in, and the batter you can get with only flour, egg, and water. All the other ingredients to the batter just add flavor to it, and aren't strictly needed if you're cheap or don't have everything on hand.
There's also some recipes that add grated nagaimo out there, but I don't have a grater so I went without. Most recipes I've seen say to add it if you have it, though.
Ironically, I thought watching Koufuku Graffiti would cause me to go to the Japanese restaurants near me more, but it actually made me want to make some of my favorites myself... which means I'm not as likely to go to them anymore.
Now, fight your rival!
Ya know, I've known about this for a while, but maybe it's time to share.
It's called Idol Sorter, and just like the name goes, it pits idols against your sense of moe and sorts them based on how much they make that sense tingle. It's basically the Touhou Sorter redux - it'll give you two idols at a time, and you choose which one you like more (or if they're tied).
My Cinderella Girls ranking went like this. Idols who are main characters in the anime, I'll underline 'em.
1. Shimamura Uzuki, Himekawa Yuki
3. Tada Riina
4. Saionji Kotoka
5. Matsuyama Kumiko
6. Fujiwara Hajime, Sagisawa Fumika
8. Anastasia, Hori Yuuko, Kobayakawa Sae, Mimura Kanako, Shibuya Rin, Takamori Aiko, Umeki Otoha
15. Honda Mio, Kamiya Nao, Kohinata Miho, Ogata Chieri
19. Abe Nana, Kawashima Mizuki, Harada Miyo, Hyoudou Rena, Igarashi Kyouko, Imai Kana, Kamijou Haruna, Kurokawa Chiaki
27. Takagaki Kaede, Araki Hina, Doumyouji Karin, Hayasaka Mirei, Mizuno Midori, Nakano Yuka, Ninomiya Asuka, Ooishi Izumi, Saitou Youko, Sakakibara Satomi, Shiina Noriko, Shiragiku Hotaru, Suzumiya Seika, Wakiyama Tamami, Yanase Miyuki
42. Mifune Miyu, Mizumoto Yukari, Mochizuki Hijiri, Momoi Azuki, Tachibana Arisu, Yusa Kozue, Mizuki Seira, Nishijima Kai, Saejima Kiyomi
51. Muramatsu Sakura
52. Akagi Miria, Kanzaki Ranko, Maekawa Miku, Nitta Minami, Egami Tsubaki, Eve Santaclaus, Fukuyama Mai, Furusawa Yoriko, Hamaguchi Ayame, Ichihara Nina, Ichinose Shiki, Kate, Kirino Aya, Kita Hinako, Layla
67. Matoba Risa, Matsunaga Ryou, Ryuuzaki Kaoru, Sena Shiori, Takafuji Kako, Yagami Makino, Yaguchi Miu
74. Sakurai Momoka, Yao Fueifuei
76. Sasaki Chie, Takamine Noa, Tsuchiya Ako, Hoshi Shouko, Jougasaki Rika, Shirasaka Koume, Totoki Airi, Aihara Yukino, Akanishi Erika, Anzai Miyako, Asano Fuuka, Asari Nanami, Clarice, Hamakawa Ayuna, Hayami Kanade, Ikebukuro Akiha, Kitami Yuzu, Kurihara Nene, Makihara Shiho, Manabe Itsuki
96. Aino Nagisa, Katagiri Sanae, Kimura Natsuki, Kudou Shinobu, Mochida Arisa, Murakami Tomoe, Okazaki Yasuha, Okuyama Saori, Sajou Yukimi, Sakuma Mayu
106. Namiki Meiko, Narumiya Yume, Natalia, Futaba Anzu, Hino Akane, Houjou Karen, Jougasaki Mika, Koshimizu Sachiko, Moroboshi Kirari, Aiba Yumi, Ayase Honoka, Etou Misaki, Fujii Tomo, Fujimoto Rina, Hattori Touko, Hiiragi Shino, Ijuuin Megumi, Imura Setsuna, Kiba Manami, Kishibe Ayaka, Kitagawa Mahiro, Komatsu Ibuki, Komuro Chinami, Koseki Reina, Kusakabe Wakaba
131. Koga Koharu, Matsumoto Sarina, Matsuo Chizuru, Miyoshi Sana, Nanjou Hikaru, Niwa Hitomi, Nonomura Sora, Oohara Michiru, Oonishi Yuriko, Ootsuki Yui, Sawada Marina, Senzaki Ema, Shinohara Rei, Shiomi Shuuko, Shutou Aoi, Souma Natsumi, Sugisaka Umi, Takahashi Reiko, Tougou Ai, Tsukimiya Miyabi, Wakabayashi Tomoka, Wakui Rumi, Yamato Aki, Yokoyama Chika, Yuuki Haru
156. Oonuma Kurumi, Seki Hiromi
158. Morikubo Nono, Mukai Takumi, Munakata Atsumi, Nagatomi Hasumi
162. Aikawa Chinatsu, Ariura Kanna, Cathy Graham, Ebihara Naho, Helen, Manaka Misato, Mary Cochran, Matsubara Saya, Miyamoto Frederica, Nishikawa Honami, Oikawa Shizuku, Oota Yuu, Satou Shin, Ueda Suzuho, Ujiie Mutsumi, Yoshioka Saki, Zaizen Tokiko
179. Nanba Emi, Yanagi Kiyora
Gourmet Graffiti
Oooooh, man. Today's special. I made some really good Japanese curry today - the best I've ever made. Mind you, I'm not that great a cook, but this stuff still tasted great to me.
Normally when I make curry, I use those curry cubes you get at grocers and stuff. I still used them this time, but I decided to try something else.
See, when I've made curry before, I've usually browned the meat and some of the vegetables in a small bit of oil, then add water and stew the rest before plopping the curry cubes in. But then I thought about it today... every time I've made Japanese curry, the meat has been a little tough, maybe a little dry, without any flavor other than beef. It stands out - there's curry sauce all around and the beef is in the bowl, but it's like it's a coincidence that both just happen to be in my mouth at the same time.
So this time, I thought I'd marinate my beef before stewing it, and my curry came out really good. Thing is, when I browned the beef, I dumped it and all the marinade into the wok, and the beef started bleeding marinade and beef blood all over, which was there when I added the water to stew everything. All that flavor was around in the water when I dropped the curry cubes, and it all mixed and made some really great stuff.
... Then I sat down with my curry, a bottle of my favorite root beer, and watched some Koufuku Graffiti, the anime about food and cooking. Exquisite.
I'm just eyeballing it, but I used a 60/40 mix of soy sauce and cooking rice wine, with a bunch of minced garlic in oil. Let that sit for around 20 minutes, and make the curry like the back of the box tells you to. My curry has beef, potato, button mushrooms, onions, bell pepper, and carrots.
Happy Valentine's Day to me
While I'm talking about figures, I went and picked up my newest figure yesterday: Kazuki Ferrari from Galilei Donna! It's a 1:8 scale figure by Griffon Enterprises, sculpted by TEAM GENESIS (all caps). This was more of an impulse buy, right after I watched the anime, which happened to be right after I ordered a bunch of other stuff from Amazon Japan, and I actually bought the last one from Hobby Link Japan. When I checked the page for her right after I paid, I noticed her figure went from in stock to discontinued.
You might recognize her pose right from the promo art that's been going around. Moving back in time, let's start out with the box.
Geez, I'm horrible at taking pictures, but then there's so much glossy wrap inside, it's hard to get good lighting in there. It's another big box, but it sure looks great. Moving on...
Kazuki stands up on the staircase here, and her right foot attaches to the staircase. That's the only spot that roots her to the ground, and it feels a little... I dunno. The figure is stable if you leave it alone, yeah, but shakes and wobbles a bit if you move or turn it around. I mean, Rin and Uzuki both do this a bit (and they both stand on one leg), but Kazuki seems perched more precariously on her stand than those two.
There are four pieces to this figure: Kazuki, Kazuki's bag, the staircase, and a clear peg. The clear peg is there to hold up the end of the staircase that Kazuki isn't standing on, and it slots into the stand itself and up into the bottom of the second stair. The other side of the staircase has some support, so it attaches right into the base. The staircase and each of its stairs also tend to be a little wobbly if you handle 'em a bit, and I think it would have been better if there were a support peg or two for the top stair as well. Or maybe the right side of the staircase could have the support beam under it. Or maybe all of this. I kinda get that we're supposed to be looking a cross section of the stairs, but I'd still like it to be more stable.
The bag has to be slid by the strap up through her arm to fit. You'll have to do a little jostling around to get it to stay - the strap is made to fit between the folds of her clothes, but you'll have to rotate the bag so that you can slip one part of it through the folds, then rotate it back to place the bag as it's supposed to sit on her shoulder.
If you look at the picture there, see how the bag strap splits on her shoulder, but joins when it gets to the middle of the strap? I fit in the single strap (the part that rests on her shoulder) in between her sleeve, then rotated the strap to get the middle part where it's supposed to sit.
The coloring on the eyes is nice, and the expression is pretty good too. She doesn't have any buttons on her undershirt, but honestly? Sometimes they weren't drawn in the anime. ^_^;
And here's how it looks like from behind.
I do enjoy the figure, I just feel I gotta be really careful with it. I wouldn't think of putting this on anything other than a display case or something, since it tends to wobble pretty easily.
The Honda Rush
I never wrote about this, but I got the Mio Honda figure last... October when she came out. It's a really nice figure, and just like Uzuki and Rin before her, it's based on her New Generations card.
There's not too much in the way of gimmicks. She attaches to the box on her right hand, and while her knees don't attach to the box, they sit in a rounded plastic thing that supports them.
There's a good amount of detail in the figure, and I was a very happy fan when she got to me. Unfortunately, I don't have any good spots where I can take really good pictures and my camera zoom isn't as good as I'd like, but them's the pictures.
Now that I got the whole set, I got a bunch of huge figure boxes that I don't know where to put, and I think I might have to rearrange the stuff on my shelf for a second shelf of figures. But here's the New Generations crew when they're off the shelf and in front of my monitor.
They want to eat a nut of Laerma
I keep thinking my next post will be about AWA 2014 or my Japan trip, but I'm way too lazy to go through my pictures. But I feel like posting something now.
Very rarely, I'll decide to pick up a really old game and play it. One time it was Summon Night, which was an okay game. This time, I'm playing Persona... as in, the old 1996 Playstation version of Persona 1. Dang, this game is old, and it shows. To be honest, I keep hearing good things about the game, but I'm betting most of those reviews I saw were made when the game first came out, or a few years afterwards.
See, I'm not sure this game aged too well. Playing it now, I'm not sure I can say it's a good game. I'm a little under halfway through the Sebec quest... I think... and I'll say it has a few interesting mechanics. Overall though? There are a lot of design decisions that in today's day and age, are simply quite bad. In fact, some of them are quite bad in any day and age.
I can imagine it when it first came out, though. "Oh, these characters shout battle cries! That's awesome!" Or, "Lookit me summon this big dude and... maybe do something cool if this spell doesn't suck!" And, "Oooooh, a 3D overworld! 3D dungeons! And 3D movies! With voice acting!" And I can see why they did this - the game was released in the early days of the Playstation, when 3D became reality and everyone was wondering how to make games with 3D graphics. So, sticking a few 3D movies in with some voice acting would be cool, and making the world map into a 3D stage would be impressive. And eventually someone would reach way back into the first forays into 3D dungeons (like Phantasy Star), and make the players navigate tile dungeons in first-person. And none of that is bad.
But this is just aesthetics. It's just how it looks. When you get past that and into the gameplay, there are some interesting things in the game, but ultimately it's dragged down by how much the game drags on - about 40% through the game, I've racked up around 30 hours, but that's only because the game eats up that much time. With what I've done (about 5 dungeons), any game now I should have passed anywhere from 16 to 20 hours worth of gameplay.
And the reason why is just because the game wants you to fight a lot, and the game wants you to use your Persona a lot. See, every character has two levels: their character level, and their persona level. The latter of these goes up faster when you use persona, and your persona level determines the highest level persona you can equip.
But that's not all: each individual Persona has a rank, which always starts at 1 when they're created. When they're at rank 1, they have one skill and some basic stats. They'll gain more skills and get stronger stats when their rank increases, but you can only do that how? That's right - by using that Persona. So even when you have regular attacks that are a lot quicker than sitting through a Persona summon, the game encourages you to use and abuse your Persona. You even recover SP at the start of every battle. The game hammers this into you - it's okay to use your Persona, in fact you should use it every turn you get.
The problem is that summoning a Persona, and watching it cast its spell or whack your enemies takes a bit of time - maybe about 6 to 8 seconds for the faster attacks. You have five characters in your party. Enemy attacks take just as long, if not longer. Add all that up, and by the time one combat turn has passed, it's been a whole minute, and you're still not done fighting. You get into a battle, and it takes a few minutes for the thing to play out... and then when you finally make it back to the dungeon, you'll remember that the encounter rate is ridiculously high and your step count can be, like... one. A single step. It's got so bad that I've been browsing the internet while the fight plays out, or playing Cinderella Girls or something.
Let me get to the real cardinal sin though: characters gain experience only when they take their turn. Not when you decide what the guy's going to do, but when they actually cast that spell, or use that item, or whatever... that's when they get experience. They'll get more or less experience depending on what they do, and I'm not even sure how the game doles the stuff out other than by how much damage you do, or how many targets you hit at once. What does this mean?
Characters with better Persona skills will get more experience than characters who say, only have single target skills. Characters that are slower will take less turns, and thus they'll lag behind the faster characters in level ups.
Is this fair? No... it's not. I don't even know why they thought this was a good idea, but your slow, hulking tank is going to miss out on some Exp. just because everyone else gets one more turn than him. If he's better at soaking hits than dishing out damage, he's also going to miss out on Exp. because you get more by making quality hits, rather than eating quality hits and turning them into nothing.
I mean, the extra Playstation muscle power doesn't have anything to do with this - it's just bad gameplay, and it fights what the game does well. There's a portion of this game that's just brilliant, with all the talking you can do with your enemies, and the spell card fusion... but at the end of the day, the fact that it takes like, an hour just to walk from one end of the city to the other (due to all the fights along the way) makes it so you don't want to deal with this stuff if you can possibly help it.
And then there's the battle formations that make it so that you can't target just anything you want. If there's any melee attack you want to do, and some Persona have them, both you and the enemy you want to beat up have to be on certain points of the grid. If you're on the left part of the grid, and they're on the right... well, too bad, you can't hit him unless you burn an entire turn moving.
Add this to the fact that the game isn't very well written. I realize I'm saying this without speaking Japanese natively, but the scenes aren't very engaging, and the dialogue is a little generic. Interesting things might happen, but well... real people might talk the way these characters talk like, but very often real people aren't as interesting as fictional characters can be.
Maybe I should have gotten the portable remake of this instead, but for some reason, I feel obligated to sit through the game as it was first made, to see the real beginnings of the Persona series. Eventually, I'll skip these first releases and go straight to the remakes, but for now...
... Sometimes I wonder why I'm like this. I'm only doing the Sebec quest though. Not going to touch the Ice Queen quest at all... so my party is:
Cael - The protagonist, me, who wants to get away from Emperor cards and into World or Moon cards.
Maki - The healer, because she has to be in the party.
Mark - Because he's forced in the party.
Nanjou - Don't like him, but guess what? He's also a forced include.
Eri - The only free choice I have, and the character I like most.
