Japan trip - the rest of it

Comiket was hardly the only thing I did while I was in Japan. I won't go into the details of all the 'normal' touristy stuff I did, but there was certainly a lot to see. A few places I went seem particularly relevant though, so I hope you find this somewhat interesting.

Japan trip - C81

I have returned from my travels. Actually I've been home for a few days now, but I came down with a rather nasty cold in the process and haven't felt up for much. Although it's a bit late by now, I have a bit to say about how it all went.

Christmas blogging

I'm surprised how busy the end of the year has been for me. I've been out of the state for a few days over last weekend, and I've just had the chance to get home, unpack my things, and then repack them all before heading back to my parents' place for Christmas. I'm heading straight on from my parents' place to Japan after Christmas, so I had a fair bit of planning to do (not exactly my strong suit), and I'm still worried I've forgotten something essential.

In the meantime, I'm just taking it easy for a couple of days. The internet here is all sorts of terrible, and any websites that aren't entirely text-based are just a chore to visit, so I'm glad I'm not sticking around for too long. I seriously wonder how I would live my life if I was deprived of an internet connection for any length of time. Maybe I'd actually start on my backlog. Maybe.

I'd put a picture of a cute girl wearing a santa hat here

but the internet's too slow, so just imagine her.

Whinging aside, I quite like Christmas with my family. I think the main reason for this is that I have no relatives in this country aside from my immediate family. I really don't like the sound of a big Christmas with an extended family. We don't do anything really special, just the standard fare - a big meal with lots of prawns and some other seafood/salads on the side, and then probably a long nap in the afternoon. Lazy Christmases are the best Christmases. "Christmases" can be substituted for pretty much anything and that sentence will still hold true.


I'm still doing some last minute planning for my trip, but I'm not doing too much. Despite the impression you might have gotten from my last post, I'm not really one to plan most things in any depth. Comiket, sure, I've got my list nailed down pretty tight, but my time in Japan apart from that is mostly just going to happen as it happens. I'm not sure if I'll be blogging at all while I'm over there, but if the hostels I'm staying at have any decent wireless I'll probably make a post or two in some downtime. Otherwise I won't be making any posts for a while. So it'll be just like usual.


So, I hope you all have a good Christmas and New Years, whether you're spending them with your family, friends, or waifu. And as always, take it easy.

C81 guide

EDIT: the catalogue has been on the internet for a few days now. I'm not going to link it, but if you're having trouble finding it I'd suggest you google "CCC81 torrent".

Comiket 81 is less than a month away!  People with a lot more experience than I have written proper guides to Comiket, but I decided to write a brief one with a bit of info, mostly to jog my own memory before I go to C81 myself at the end of the month. I’ve only been to one Comiket before (C79) so I'm far from an expert, but there is some information I’d like to have known before I went last time that might be useful to others.

The basics:

Dates: 29-31 December
Times: 10am-4pm each day (corporate booths close at 5pm for the first two days)

Comiket is a three-day event happening twice a year. The upcoming Comiket (C81) is happening on the last three days of the year like all winter Comikets. Different days have different focuses, which can roughly be generalised as:

Day 1: Yaoi, shounen, other manga-related works. Also things based on video games.

Day 2: Touhou (doujin, music, games). Some misc anime stuff, gundam, more yaoi.

Day 3: Porn and lots of it. Also doujinsoft, Vocaloid, works based on VNs and anime. 

(This is a generalisation, see here [jp] for a comprehensive breakdown.)

This refers to the doujin circles, as each circle is only there for one of the three days; there are also company booths in a separate area which are open all three days and sell the same thing each day, or at least until they sell out.

Entry is free, but it’s very crowded. As in, VERY crowded. In fact, it redefined the word 'crowd' for me to the extent that I've found nothing to be truly 'crowded' since. This means it can be hard to get where you want to, and that you’ll have to wait in queues for anything remotely popular. If there are specific items that you're after, you can’t just rock up on the day and expect to get anywhere.

Doors open at 10am, but people start arriving from 5am (or even the previous night) to line up. Lining up is worth it if you’re after popular items, as it gives you the chance to get one or two things before the queues for circles get really big. Lining up from early morning gets you in at around 10:30am, while if you arrive at 10am you won’t get in until after 11am. If you arrive at or after noon there won’t be any queue to get in.

Each day ends at 4pm, so you’ve got a very limited window of time to work in. Considering you’ll be doing well to get in before 11am, and most things will be sold out by 3pm, and that queues can be huge, you really need to economise on your time usage.

AutoRename - keeping anime ordered.

OCD related.

I can get a little bit obsessive about keeping things ordered. I must have spent a fair bit of time making sure all my music is tagged correctly, for example, and I have fairly elaborate tagging and sorting systems for images that I save. Anime is no exception, and I feel the need to rename every file I download to something that looks a bit more ordered. Since that takes a fair bit of effort, especially when I download a whole series at a time, I made a small program to rename the files for me so I could spend less time being autistic and more time watching my chinese girl cartoons.

The topic of organising anime has come up a few times on /a/, and I get the impression that there are other people who might find this sort of thing useful. I'm a bit hesitant to post it though, since it was only really designed for personal use and has had no testing or anything like that. On top of that, I'm a complete amateur whose only instruction on programming has been from high school Visual Basic classes back in the day.

Nevertheless, I tidied it up a bit and uploaded it to Mediafire. It's called AutoRename (a program to auto rename anime that's called AutoRename, lol originality) and it requires Windows and the .NET Framework 3.5, which you'll already have if you run Windows 7. The idea is that you drag anime (or other video files) onto the window, it suggests new names for them, and then you hit the "Rename All" button if you're happy with the suggestions, or you can fiddle with the options to make the suggested name more suited to your taste. You can also add it to the Explorer right-click menu for mkv, avi and mp4 files if you want.

If you have any feedback please comment or email me, even if just to say that it crashes on opening.

Games everywhere

It can get boring when you're on holidays or otherwise haven't got a lot to do, but I've managed to bounce from distraction to distraction without much downtime in the middle. As I mentioned last post, I'm still working my way through Genius of Sappheiros although that's been put on the backburner this last week since Skyrim was released. I didn't care much for Oblivion, or at least my interest waned pretty quickly after closing the millionth Oblivion gate in a row, but I've been loving Skyrim so far. I've been rolling with the most generic character build ever (1h+shield warrior) but it's still been fun, although I feel way too overpowered. Seriously, dragons are a minor annoyance, and are more of a chore than a challenge. I'm considering bumping the difficulty up but from what I hear that only changes HP, which could just drag things out. Either way, if you're interested in playing, I'd suggest you try a mage or a rogue character to get the most out of it.

But my plans to keep questing in Skyrim have been thrown into jeopardy since I just received a Dota 2 invite. A guy I met on WC3 Dota and still keep in contact with got an invite with two extra keys, and was generous enough to throw one my way. It's still downloading, but it's about to finish and I can't wait to try it out.

I really can't see me doing anything much else for the next few days.

Rising up from the ashes

A few weeks ago I abruptly decided to forgo all non-productive internet usage so I could focus on my upcoming finals. I didn't manage to stick to this perfectly, but I did completely avoid blogs for that time.  Now, though, my uni year is finally over, and I can spend as much time as I want on internet stuff without feeling guilty about it. This happy state of affairs will continue until early January, so I've got quite a decent holiday ahead of me.

But it's not like I managed to do nothing but study for the last few weeks. I've been playing a bit of The Genius of Sappheiros, a Touhou doujin game released a couple of Comikets ago. It's recently gotten an English translation, and I just downloaded it and started playing a few days ago. It's pretty fun so far, though I'm still in the early stages.

The burning hells are populated mostly by giant feet.

The game's a dungeon crawler with turn-based combat when you run into an enemy group. You can also sneak by them but then you miss out on their delicious experience. The boss fights can be pretty tricky but dying isn't really a big deal. You lose any items you'd picked up from your current run of the dungeon, but you keep all the experience you gained.

The storyline has all the subtlety and complexity that you'd expect from a Touhou game: A strange mist is making Youkai sick and Reimu is going to find out who, by beating up everyone in Gensokyo until someone admits to it.

The sprite art is great, as is the music (as expected of a Touhou game). I'd recommend it if you've got some time that you need to get rid of.


Another time-waster that I've recently taken to is the live broadcasts on Nico Nico Douga. I can't even explain why I like these, but there's something cathartic about listening to Japanese girls doing stuff. In some ways it's the "cute girls doing cute things" idea taken further. A lot of them do imitations of anime characters (the K-On girls are especially common), some of them sing with varying degrees of skill, and some just talk about their day. It sounds all sorts of stupid just typing this out, but it can be great to have on in the background when trying to do other things.

Notably, I haven't been able to waste any time on Dota 2 because I still don't have a bloody beta key. It's a bit frustrating to see some people I know get keys just because they begged constantly until someone gave them one. I refuse to do that, but I'd still love to play, especially now that I'm on holidays. Valve claim they'll be sending out new waves pretty frequently now though, so with a bit of luck I'll be in before too long.

And now I'm going to go and catch up with anime from this season. There's a surprising number of shows that I'm really enjoying, and have me actively looking forward to the next episode, so it seems like a pretty good season so far.