Lat Miku

More aptly known as Hipster Miku, this is another figure to add to my stack of Miku figures. To think that at one stage I firmly believed that one figure per character was the way to go. The timing's pretty good since my Tony Miku is in for repairs (turns out that pose is a bit hard on her feet) and I've got a spot on the Miku shelf in my cabinet that this new figure will fit nicely into.

No shots of the box, because I'm lazy like that, but it's just the normal sort of box with photos of the figure all over it.

Flights! and anime

I finally booked my flights for my trip at the end of the year, so it looks like going to C81 is definitely going to be happening! I'm hoping to have enough money saved by December that I can enjoy lots of good food and drink there as well as funds for assorted doujins from Comiket.  My plan so far is to fly into Tokyo on Boxing Day, go to Comiket, stay for New Years, then take the train to Osaka and spend a few more days there, checking out all the nearby places like Kyoto and Nara as well. Exciting stuff - it's a shame I have to get through a couple more months of uni before I can go.

Since the anime season is essentially over, I think I'll comment on a few of the shows I've been watching as well.

Usagi Drop - Just finished this one last night. I hadn't read the manga, although I had been spoiled as to its ending, but the spoilers didn't turn out to be relevant to the anime thankfully. I really liked this show. Rin was positively adorable throughout, and it was heartwarming watching her and Daikichi, especially as he adapts his life to fit Rin in. The art style was great, with everything looking like it was painted rather than drawn, and this was the only show this season that I watched the OP/ED on every episode for.

Steins;Gate - A great show as well. Then again, I don't really see how a show about a mad scientist (IT'S SO COOL!), time travel, and an evil organisation could be bad. For the last episode I went hunting for Dr Pepper - I ended up finding some in an American sweets import store - and put on my lab coat just to get myself in the mood. The VN has apparently been extremely quickly translated, so I'm looking forward to that.

Kaiji 2 - It isn't over yet, but I was amazed last episode when I saw that the bog arc remains unresolved, again. The show is glacially paced and I'm convinced it would be better told in half the episodes. It's still not over, and I don't know whether Kaiji ends up winning or not, but there have been so many contrivances so far that I can't bring myself to be too excited.

Tiger & Bunny - I liked it more in the first half when it was a monster-of-the-week show with interesting characters, and some development shown between episodes. The latter half all just seemed a bit silly for me, with some important story points being led into extensively then resolved very quickly and unexpectedly (sometimes off-screen).

Nichijou - Very hit and miss. Having said that, Yukko was a good character and scenes with her interacting with Mio or Mai were pretty funny. I didn't like the Professor so much. The animation was nice, as expected of KyoAni, and the OPs were great. It just wasn't a very consistent comedy.

The only show I'm watching that will continue into next season is The Idolmaster. I had no expectations for this, but it's been very enjoyable so far. I'm not sure what other shows I'll be watching next season, but I'll probably post about them when I decide.

Anyway it's mid morning and I'm hungry, so I'm going to go make some pancakes. Take it easy!

Busy

I haven't been able to take it easy all week, since I've had to spend most of my free time studying. My inner NEET keeps telling me to just procrastinate, so it's a constant struggle between my notes and the myriad distractions out there to actually get anything done.

After a few days of varying productivity it was Friday, the day of the exam. I had to be up early since, due to the usual administrative incompetence, I had a tute scheduled that morning as well. It was the usual group session, where we run through the various steps of a case and try and sort it out. It was my turn to read out the material for the group as well, which led to an awkward situation. I'd read out the background information when another person commented that I should read more often since I apparently have a good voice, and several others agreed. I appreciated the compliment, but damn I really don't know how to respond in that sort of situation. I sort of laughed it off and kept going, but perhaps I'd have been better off blushing profusely and stammering "s-s-stupid...". My image isn't very tsundere though, so I stuck with laughing nervously.

It could have gone worse

After that finished, I had my exam. They're always stressful because the questions tend to be obscure as fuck rather than being about the important key issues we've been learning. It wasn't organised very well either, with all 400 odd students crammed into the one lecture theatre right next to each other. Cheating would have been extremely easy, except that I don't trust the people next to me to know the answers any more than I do. It went alright though, and it was only a midsemester exam so it wasn't worth many marks either.

With the exam out of the way, my weekend has been going great. Minecraft 1.8 got leaked, so I've been playing a lot of that on a friend's server. The changes are making exploring a lot more fun, specifically the ravines, extended caverns and abandoned mineshafts. It's a shame a lot of the patch's features have been gutted and delayed for a future patch, but I kinda expected it. Minecraft doesn't have a great record for delivering important features on time, so I'll take what I can get.

And of course there was the Starcraft. The show matches before the finals were extremely funny, with Losira (T) vs MC (Z) probably being the highlight. Lots of joking around, good-natured trashtalking, and funny builds with offraces. For the finals themselves, I was very sure MVP was going to win. So sure, in fact, that I decided to bet a small sum of money on it. The odds were well in his favour but I still made about $20 off it, which is a pretty decent return. So yeah, it's been a good weekend.

I was going to take some pictures of Lat Miku but my camera's mysteriously drained its entire battery just sitting there doing nothing. I've got it on to charge, so I should be able to take the pictures in a day or two.

Some new music

Some of those music CDs I ordered have arrived. The rest haven't been posted yet since they're waiting on one of them to be released before shipping. It's a bright sunny Spring day (the weather's wasted no time changing seasons), so apologies in advance for the intense glare on the photos.

tabgraphics works summer 11 (from C80)
So it's not entirely CDs, although the artbook from this is mostly just a beefed up CD booklet with a few extra pages.

Deus Ex and much frustration

So I was really looking forward to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I said a while back that I'd preordered the collector's edition, which came with an artbook, a DVD with various extras on it, and a figure of the main character. I'd paid off the preorder in full, and was eagerly awaiting release.

The night before release, though, I was called up by the EB Games store and informed that they wouldn't have a copy for me. There'd been some allocation error or something, I don't know the specifics but it all seemed pretty bullshit to me. I was in the middle of a DotA game at the time so I just told them we could sort it out tomorrow when I went in to pick it up. The next day I went in and the guy told me much the same thing, that for reasons beyond his control his store hadn't received the requested number of copies. Again, it all sounded like a load of shit to me, but I realised it wasn't his fault personally so I didn't give him too hard a time of it. I did tell him I was extremely annoyed, and asked him what the point of preordering was at all, if not to guarantee a copy of the game come release day. He agreed with me, and said it reflected extremely badly on the company and that he was very sorry about it.

In the end I was given a copy of the augmented edition (like the collector's but without the figure) for the price of the normal game. I still wasn't happy since I could've gotten it even cheaper on the internet, but by that stage I just wanted to go home and play it.

I never asked for this

And then it started pouring down on the way home, so I took my glasses off when I got off the bus and put them in my jacket pocket. Of course, when I got home and went to get changed, I forgot all about this and ended up accidentally standing on them, and now they're quite broken. I hope they're not too expensive to fix. At least I'm short sighted so it doesn't impact my ability to see my computer screens clearly.

It was kinda like this, minus all cuteness.

The day looked up after that though. I thoroughly enjoyed Deus Ex, and have just finished my first playthrough today. I liked the endings. A lot of people on /v/ complained that they don't give you a lot of closure, but I think it was a nice way of reflecting on your choices without messing too much with the canon already established by the first game. If there was one thing about the game that annoyed me, it would be the boss fights. The second one had me stumped for so long, as I was mostly a non-lethal stealth character and I just kept getting demolished in the fight. After trying for over half an hour I gave up and went to bed. The next day I woke up and tried it again, and beat that fight on the first try. Feels unexpected man.

I'd recommend it if you're interested in stealth shooter RPGs. It's a fairly long game, and it has a lot of replay potential.

I'm on holidays for a week now, so naturally I'll get nothing useful done all week. I might go play another few games of DotA, even though it's only going to make me annoyed.

Not taking it easy enough

It's been a busy last couple of weeks. I had some assignments to do that I'd completely put off until the last minute, so I had to spend a few long days getting them done. That's not the half of it though, since I've been busy watching the first reveal of DotA 2 in that German tournament with the insane prize pool.

From leeks to hotdogs

It's been a couple of months since I posted anything about Toyota's Miku campaign, so I figured I'd see what's happened since then. I'd hoped that it'd just die down and fade away, but then came the whole bacon-wrapped hotdog fiasco, and a couple more opportunities to make some more terrible terrible ads:

These two are a bit cringe-worthy, but could be worse. I still think it sounds silly to say "Miku-chan" in an English language ad, but that's not such a big deal. The worst is yet to come:

Yeah, I really have no idea what they were going for in these two. The ads aren't about Toyota any more, since the last three haven't had anything to do with cars, and they certainly aren't about Vocaloid as a music synthesizing program, so the only remaining possibility seems to be to piss off fans and shit on any chance of Vocaloid being taken seriously.

If you don't think the videos themselves are bad enough, take a look at the Youtube comments, where the reactions range from the positive ("MUKI IS TAKINGOVERTHE WORLD!!") to the negative ("Dont do it miku!!! dont fall for the people who nuked your home country!!", "*transforms into Black Rock Shooter* i will go and save miku before she is lost forever!").

There's also been a contest to come up with an American Miku design, to be announced at the J-Pop Summit Festival in San Francisco later this month. Given the bacon-wrapped hotdog theme though, it's clear what they're shooting for in the American market.

At this point maybe they'd be better off going the whole way and changing the song they're using from World is Mine to something more appropriate:

今の私よりもっと太く大きくなって見せるよ

On the bright side, there haven't been any new commercials in a while. I can only hope this trend continues.

I recently ordered a stack of Vocaloid CDs myself, after getting my tax return. I have no idea why the government taxes my welfare payments only to give all the tax back to me at the end of the year anyway, but it makes for a nice windfall. I ordered the new Gumi compilation album that's coming out in a month, as well as 8#Prince's newest CD and some older stuff by 40mp, among others. Hopefully they won't take too long to arrive.

And finally, it's only a week and a half until the Dota 2 championships - it'll be the first look at the game as well as (to my knowledge) the biggest prize pool in video gaming's history. I may do a post about this later, as I consider it a pretty big deal.