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Animazement 2010 Update: So Laid Back

Last year the Animazement convention relocated from their usual semi-suburban locale to downtown Raleigh. Downtown Raleigh is sort of an unfamiliar place where my conceptions are built upon hearsay and news. And news is rarely good.

But the biggest worry I had was that it wouldn’t be the laid-back retreat type of con that AZ always was. It turned out that it was probably unnecessary. I had a very relaxed time at the city and enjoyed the city’s attempt at downtown revitalization. It’s not surrounded by nature, but at least it’s got sidewalks and places to walk to. It’s still got the same relaxing magic in the water and in the youthful crowd.

Well, as relaxed as it can be at an anime convention anyways.

I’m just writing to keep some notes. Like how the king gives us an excuse to see a song and dance.

We ate well. Probably too well. And uh, Khan. Ustream on Android also gave us slices of Momoi’s escapades in San Jose (time sensitive). Good stuff.

Cons, Lots of Cons

As America heads into “con season” 2010, there’s a lot on my mind. In years past cons are these huge things that I attended one, two or three times a year. This summer, things are lining up like:

Animazement: Memorial Day Weekend – The guest list is actually just as epic as rival Fanime this year, except I think the oldfags would like one and newfags would like the other. (I wonder which con would Fanime-bound Momoi choose.) Still, Keiko Han knows how to draw a crowd of her peers. Noriko Hidaka will probably keep me entertained for a while. Kappei is a ton of fun, too. And I have no handle as to how to approach Koichi Tsunoda. I mean, I have as much contact with his work as the average neophyte, which is Mazinger Z and lol Transformer the Movie (as in that 80s cartoon)? What is he doing nowadays?

The road trip should be a fun exercise of figuring out AT&T’s 3G coverage down the East Coast. I have oodles of hours to do research, lol.

There is also Anime North on the same weekend. They’re kind of having a thin year unless you’re into pro wrestling…

AnimeNext: June 18-20 – I dislike guessing trends with just a couple data points, but if we were to guess how well the con scene is doing by the estimated cost of guests they manage to solicit (which is a matter of many different factors in of itself), the con scene is doing well! At any rate, AnimeNext is the consolation prize for not being able to hit up the Momoi event in Las Vegas as AnimeNext takes place in my figurative back yard as opposed to the other side of the continent… Damn, I want to go to that thing. Someone want to buy me some round-trip tickets lol?

[That Momoi thing is so...soft power invasion. Built on the blood and sweat of hardcore Momoists. Also, I cry tears of shame when I realize part of the draw of the thing was my curiosity to see how this potentially mixed crowd worship the self-proclaimed Akiba Queen. Will they do it American style at all? Or will they be limp like a con concert (not likely)? Or will it be like a Japanese show? So exciting! Also, I wish there would be other anison and dempa acts from Japan with solo US shows.]

AnimeNext’s got Kenji  Kamiyama, so that should be a very good treat. I’ll try to load up on some questions, this guys seems to know something. I’m neither ways about Stereopony but maybe I should buy that Darker than Black single… It’s a big boost for a con I never really bothered to go until last year.

Anime Expo: July 4th Weekend – This con was a notable investment for me, and the decision to go basically solidified my line up for the rest of the year. Only if I can take sick days to go to cons, lol. The guest list is well publicized so I won’t bother to repeat, and you know May’n and Mamegu has to be on my mind. The big questions are:

1. Will con drama rears its ugly head? Beyond slipshod con operations? Inexperience really hurts at a con this size, if all those who quit were replaced by newbies.
2. Who’s the mystery guest?
3. How many hardcore AKB48 fans will be there to clog up everything?

My plans are not set in stone yet, but my expectations are accordingly low. If I can get away with a good concert or two and a set of autographs, will be satisfied. And if MELL/I’ve Sounds hawk the same kind of goods this year (maybe the USB thing will have a different message LOL). And maybe eat a decent meal once a day.

At least it has been amusing to follow Yu Asakawa on her English-language twitter account. Also, need to pick up Reighborhood at some point. I’m too wimp for his doujinshi.

Otakon: July 30-August 1 – Same o’ deal, but I will write it up in detail later. It’s likely that this year will be thin on  Japanese guests, although the two music acts they’ve announced are both pretty good. “Good” in the mainstream sense I suppose, but it does not get my wota energies flowing. It’s likely Otakon will score one one more guests that will really grab my attention, so I’m waiting on that.

Normally I would name drop the NYAF in here, but that has been consolidated with the NYCC in October, so that is well out of the summer con circuit (although I expect to be like a summer con). It’s a shoo-in anyways.

Until 2009, I’ve hit up no more than 5 cons per year. I’ll  hit that by number by Otakon this year, so looks like I will be pushing that envelope just a tad. Probably not the best thing to do…

Kaguya Table and Talking to Myself

Kaguya Table is a home-brewed flash game in the lines of Progress Quest (and others) in that it is a meaningless stats-building game. Where they are different are of these:

1. Kaguya Table is actually a game with interactive components crucial to the “goal” of the game

2. It has Kaguya.

For most, the second bullet point per se is more than enough to check it out, at Walfas.

So what is Kaguya Table?

Well, to be specific, Kaguya Table: The Expansion. I’ve previously linked to a Walfas flash animation because it was adorable, and some probably can say the same about the original Kaguya Table flash.

Basically, Kaguya Table is this game where there is no real goal; Kaguya will flip over a table several times every second. Each time she does so, a damage counter goes up, and a corresponding Experience counter also go up (linearly correlated with damage dealt). After your total experience hits the level-up requirement, that much experience is removed from your total experience pool and you level up.

Below the blinking numeric counters are a bunch of stats. Once you’ve hit a level, you’ll get some skill points in which you can assign them to the corresponding stats. Mouse-over the + sign to see description of these statistics below.

There are some other things you can find out more about if you mouse-over them, or read about them in the comments at the linked post above.

Wait, so why are you talking about this game? Looks really boring to me.

Yeah it is really boring. But it tickles my database animal instincts. I mean as an ex-WoW type who read EJ regularly, it’s just an instinct that I’ve honed from an early age. Before there was even video games I would disassemble electronics and piss off my folks for breaking things out of curiosity. (They got smart and bought me a children encyclopedia set to keep me occupied for some time.) You probably didn’t want to give me a screwdriver unsupervised when I was 6.

I suppose a function of video game is to provide that framework for curious kids to explore, to tinker, to help kids gain an intuitive feel for differential equations and integrals and how to eyeball them in real life. Kaguya Table is a very bare-bones way to do that, but at the same time it is also transparent enough that the lesson about learning how to game is obvious.

It isn’t obvious that people will end up writing massive excel spreadsheets to calculate DPS for WoW, but that was easy to see how once you’ve gave it a bit of thought. For Kaguya Table, it was something I begin doing almost immediately.

I don’t know how many kids and college folks read my blog, but if you ever want to be a scientist, the most precious “brain” skill you need to acquire as an undergrad is learn how to model. It’s important to learn about our existing rubrics of our world, albeit in chemistry, biology, physics, whatever. That classical education is also a head trick to teach you how to think–or how to model the real world. That is the bridge to communicate reality in the language we laymen call math. Naturally in some science disciplines, this skill is highly sought after and trained for (physics and math, ‘natch).

I think I want to say that Kaguya Table is extremely boring, because it’s like, science. But not really. Nerds love it.

So what is the point of the game?

It’s open ended in the sense that people are still trying to tame all the mechanisms and how they interplay with each other. The goal of a game is to beat it, of course, and in the sandbox scenario that translates to mastering every little thing that you could do. In a game simple enough as Kaguya Table, that means maxing out all the stats, I guess.

From reading the game notes, the creator also had that in mind as a part of the challenge. As in, it’ll be darn hard.

So what do you do to master it?

That would be giving away the fun part of the game, but as any Starcraft aficionado can tell you, the true resources are time and attention. Actually, anyone playing MMORPGs can tell you the same, too. (Except nowadays RMT/freemium type games are really taking off and money is now also a precious resource. But whatever.)

So I think a reasonable goal is to get to 100 Mastery levels at the shortest amount of time, and with the most amount of ease. There is an unintended difficulty when you hit Enlightenment, which causes some clients to choke hardcore. Here your CPU speed and RAM will make your gameplay experience drastically different than someone who is using a much faster system.

Wait, I thought this is a stupid flash game, wait, applet even?

Yeah, it is. But for some reason when it tries to convert a big number (something like 1e10 or bigger easily) into levels (which increments by 250 every level), the system chokes. I mean we’re talking about only an order of magnitude of maybe 1 to 500 million on average. The last enlightenment I did timed out three times (which is a very small number) over about 267,000 cycles. And I run on an Intel i5 750 with 4GB of RAM. Maybe I can tweak some registry value to alleviate this. At any rate, the code for this is a bottleneck, and it’s probably the reason why Steve Jobs chooses to whine on Flash being crap rather than using some other excuse.

Is this a joke? Am I being trolled?

I don’t know, maybe.

Well, is it fun?

I think the fun lies in discovering the game and coming up with the way to solve it yourself. Figuring out the point distribution between the stats, figuring out when to hit mastery and when to hit enlightenment, all that. So talking too much about the game probably makes it less fun. Or rather, doing a GameFAQ style sort of information exchange is no fun here. Talking among friends to figure it out, however, is a lot of fun.

I see what you did there.

Meta and Non-Meta Interaction over Blogs

I just want to highlight a few things, let’s lay them about and hit them one by one:

• The Anime Blog Tournament
• The differences in relational styles between blogs, bloggers, and their audience
• The point to the thing
• Overview of this blog for new visitors
• An invitation to game

More »

Black String Theory and a Pun: Thoughts on Tatami Galaxy

Please read Red String Theory from 2DT for some background.

Spring is the season for obsession. Otaku in heat? Akashi-san? Easy peasy Maaya fascination is perhaps what is expected. (To that extent, Nino-san only makes the matter worse.) I think the idea of connecting the red string of fate with Superstring Theory (as known in science fiction) is cute and a good pun. And what is it with otaku and puns? We love them so… Too bad this is an English pun only, right?

But as far as inspiration goes, what makes Tatami Galaxy actually worthwhile as a story is the black string of fate, the frenemy, the antagonist to every protagonist, the rival, and most importantly, the source of conflict. If Akashi is the princess in the castle, Ozu is the dragon. And I’m here to watch a dragon fight. Or float up from a river with a guy sporting a large chin, on its back.

More accurately, if the main character is Yoko, then Ozu is the monkey sword scabbard. It’s quite clear the story is not really about Akashi, or the main character’s want of her, but his struggle with himself.

Both Ozu and Akashi are manifestations, from a literary perspective, of the main character’s desires to achieve some internal balance. It seems no coincidence that Akashi is a no-nonsense, straight-faced and caring person, where as Ozu is spontaneous, reads the flow, and fits within the main character’s style of living so well. He always befriends Ozu, despite his own low estimate of Ozu. I believe both of them reflect a part of what makes up the main character; one is what he desires to be, the other is what he really is but can’t stand to recognize.

I’d further say the dragon is really a part of himself, but only if the proper thing to do is to rescue the princess. I hope they deconstruct this along that line of thought.

But in some ways it is fascinating to see Maaya Sakamoto play yet another countercultural female whose charms hinge more on the exotic than the mundane. Although in some ways Akashi is also quite the normal girl. All is well, whatever floats your pickles. Right, Jougasaki?

Man, that wall of boobs is like, a Qwaser training exercise or what.

To me, each iteration of Tatami Galaxy is pretty much like every episode of Trapeze, minus the interlocking plot elements that are revealed over time. To call it a story about parallel galaxies where picking a flier out of a parade of faceless recruiters misses this guy’s point. They could very well tell the same story using one single time line. For those of us who are already a step ahead, we can step back and enjoy the wonderful Yuasa magic, but until that black string gets fleshed out some, this anime is on neutral gear.

In other words, even if Tatami Galaxy is a story about alternative futures so far, it is thematically a straight line. No need for a Superstrings explanation!

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