30 days challenges: food

Someone showed me that TED video about 30days challenges and since lately my life's been kinda boring, I decided to try it. Now I'm in japan, and I should do something that makes me "taste" japan, so I decided my first challenge will be, try 1 new Japanese food per day, for the next 30 days.
So I'll be posting food pictures! lol!

Day 1: Taiyaki

A pretty simple dessert, Anko (red bean paste) surounded by  pancake or waffle batter, forming a fish. And it's delicious!

Little Witch Academia

Sorry I haven't been posting anything lately, I'm writing a nice post, but it's not completed yet, so while you're all waiting I've decided to write about something happening right now.

Little Witch Academia is an Anime short created for the project Anime Mirai, founded by the Japanese government for the training of your animators. It's a marvel of animation, and the story is really interesting.
You can watch the official youtube version here:



So after watching this for the first time I though to myself: "OHHHH I really wish this wasn't just a one shot, and they would make more of this"
Apparently I wasn't alone thinking this, and the studio (TRIGGER) listened to us, and started a Kickstarter to fund a second episode.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1311401276/little-witch-academia-2

The kickstarter was fully funded in under 4 or 5 hours, and at the time of this writing, the team is working on creating stretch goals.
I'm personally hoping for a full length movie. Or a series.

Keep checking this page and back this up!

Raitaisai 10 report (late!)

It's been more than a week since Reitaisai, but here's my report. So far from all the events I've been I think it's the second biggest after Comiket. It's a little bigger than Wonder festival... I think, but they are very close in size.
For those who don't know what Reitaisai is, it's a Touhou Project only event. It's like the Comiket, but with works that are inspired from Touhou only.

I went to this event with 2 friends from work. 1 of them just like events, but doesn't really know Touhou, but he decided to tag along anyway.
We got there about an hour before the opening time, so we had to wait in line. It was a really huge line, while not quite as huge as the Comiket one.

The line actually started moving about 15 minutes after the official start time. Our first target was the Demo of Touhou 14, and ZUN's table. As expected, this line was very long. I'm kinda sad they separated TH13.5 and TH14 line, so if you wanted both, you needed to line up twice. This made me give up on Th13.5.

TH14 line

TH13.5 line on the left, TH14 line on the right

While lining up for Th14, we got to see some pretty nice Itasha. I specially liked the Remilia convertible. You can see them all in this album here: Reitaisai10Itasha, but here are my favorite ones.

I'm definitely making one when I buy my next car.

After getting the new Touhou game, we went to all the circles I wanted to visit/buy from. My loot was pretty nice this time.

I got to speak with IRON CHINO quite a bit again. He told me he's gonna have another Live this summer, can't wait!
After buying everything we needed, we went to take some pictures of the cosplay space, you can see all the pics here:Reitaisai10Cosplay but here are my favourites:

My favourite was this Marisa, she's really nice

I still didn't finish listening to all my Reitaisai purchases (I actually have some left from M3 too) but so far I can tell you that at least these two album stands out from the lot:
http://www.iosysos.com/cd/armdenpa/


http://e-ns.net/discography/ens0024.html

Q&A answers! (Finally)

So I didn't get that many questions yet, but here are the ones I got:

From the G+ post about my Q&A:

Stefano Ceci

9 Apr 2013

Hello! I am also a programmer. What is the career of a programmer in japan?

 

From the Comment thread of the Original post:

Nate River said...

Is it more stressful to work in Japan than it was back here in Quebec ?

Is being a gaijin difficult ?

Have you found a club or a group of Otaku ?

April 14, 2013 at 12:22 PM

 What is the career of a programmer in japan?

To tell the truth, it's not so different than elsewhere. I guess it's different in every company, but where I work, mostly everyone I need to comunicate with, understand english enough that the language isnt a problem. The biggest problem in that sense is, when facing complex (or just plainly badly written) code, if there's any comment, they are in japanese, which doesn'T help so much. Where I work now, I have to bring my own computer, there is no computer for the employee in the office, everyone is expected to have his own laptop. Some terms you'Re used to use may change, I forgot the exemple that hapened to me, but They told me to use, a term for a POST field, which was a really poor choice of term, but apparently "it's what everyone use in Japan".
The programming languages used stay the same, I've done PHP and Java since I got here.
Working with strings can be really complicated if they were not given to you prior.  I often just put placeholders and placeholder names for string thtb I can't write and don't have any idea what they do, then just replace them all when I get them.
If you want more specific nformations of certain points that I have forgotten, please ask again in a comment.

Is it more stressful to work in Japan than it was back here in Quebec ?

It was at first, I was really nervous, because I didn't know about how they judge people in japan on their performances, so I really wanted to look awesome. It made me nervous, but I've learned a lot since then.  First I learned that this company if really different from most company, and it's people are really nice, and understanding. They also offer me a great freedom, I can pretty much work whenever I want, as long as I finish my projects on time of course. Second: apparently, firing someone in Japan is really hard, and a really bad thing to do. So most employee never get fired, even if they do a sucky job. (it also has the reverse effect that, if you're looking for work past a certain age, it's almost impossible to find anything).
So I stopped being nervous about it. It's a pretty nice working condition, and doing my best is more than enough.

Is being a gaijin difficult ?

Yes. Especially if your japanese isnt good enough to have real discussion with other people. It feels lonely. Some people clearly avoid sitting next to gaijin in train. But it's not really that bad. Japanese people are usually nice people, and there's also a lot of people ready to help you. I was lucky to get a couple good friends from work, and they also help me a lot, which makes it a lot easier.
Though If I didn't have google maps and google in general, it would be a lot worse.

Have you found a club or a group of Otaku ?

I haven't found a club of otaku, but a lot of people who work with me are Otaku. I got a couple of friends in them, and every week i get to know more of them. I went to Reitaisai with 2 of them last week-end. I often go out to karaoke with them too.

That's all for this edition of answers, if you have more questions, of if I didn't answer your question correctly. please write a new question in the comments!

Google I/O 2013 review

By now, I guess everything has been said, because I took my sweet fucking time before writing this post, so I'll just go over what I loved, and what I hated, really fast.

The bad:

• Google+ new design
• Nothing new about Glass

The good:

• Google+ new design
• Auto-enhance
• Hangouts
• New Maps
• Beta testing and staged rollout for developers
• Galaxy S4 with stock Android
• Larry Page

Google+ new design

You may have noticed I placed it in both good and bad, that'S because the default layout is really bad, but you can change it. If you go into settings, you can check the "Change the presentation of some pages to work better with screen readers and other accessibility tools." under Acessibility, and it will change all the layout back to single column. Also one of the bad things about the new layouts is; they removed auto-refresh, so I modified a script I found to make auto-refresh again, you can find it here: (you'll need greasemonkey for it to work).
Once these 2 problems are gone, I actually like the result. (Also +Cory Schmunsler  from G+ is working on a CSS to make the column bigger which will make it even better).

Auto-enhance

Auto-enhance is a cool new features for picture in G+, it's an "auto-fix" button for pictures, but it actually does a fucking impressive job. Most of the time, the result is pretty nice, and if you don't like it, it's 1 clink to reverse it to the Original.
I found it to best work with pics that havent been tampered with before (obviously).
Strangely it can actually do a pretty nice job on Anime pics!

Hangouts

The new Google Talk. It's overall pretty nice, and slick. The guys from #+Anime decided to move to a Hangout, and it's pretty awesome so far. It still needs improvement though, especially on the mobile.

New Maps

Not really much to say about it. It just looks good. But the 3d building is not available in japan.

Beta testing and staged rollout for developers

This is pretty awesome for developers. They can now release they apps for beta, to only certain people (like a circle) and they can also gradually release new versions.

 Galaxy S4 with stock Android

I don't like the S4, it's too big. But, the news of a Stock android S4 is a good news for what it represents. It's a first non-nexus device to get it, and if it can be the first of many, that would be awesome. I hate modified androids that take forever to update. I'd love to be able to chose any phone, and have always the lates OS, without having to install CyanogenMode. HTC One with Stock android would be nice, but it's not happening. However that does open the door to a lot of other devices in the futur.

Larry Page 

Finally, Larry Page. Why Larry Page? Because I was really impressed by his speech that closed the keynote, and by the way he handled (and actually did) the open Q&A at the end of the Keynote. This guy gained a lot of respect from me. We have similar views on a lot of matters and it actually makes me feel safer toward google after hearing the CEO speak like that.

That's all folks!

HARDCORE TANO*C Live!

I was expecting to write this closer to the last post, but I got sick and didn't feel like writing anything.
Saturday May 4th was my birthday, and while I forgot to go to a Maid Café this year, I went to the HARDCORE TANO*C Live event in Shibuya.
It was my first time attending this kind of event (Electronic music show/rave/whatever). But I was pleased with it. The show lasted 7 or 8 hours, and at the end I was exhausted. The music was great, but "dancing", mouving and bouncing like this for 7 hours really took all my energy. It really felt great though!

For those who don't know who HARDCORE TANO*C is, it's a collective of DJ's from Japan. Most of them do arrange of anime/game songs, but HARDCORE TANO*C is for their Original stuff. You can see a list of their crew here. Some of their most well know DJs are RED ALiCE, DJ Genki, DJ Noriken, t+pazolite, P*Light and USAO. To give you an idea of wat kind of music this is, you can listen to the "Anthem"of their tour



The show in Shibuya was held inside Shibuya WOMB. Apparently, it's one of the most famous Night Club around the world. The place seemed pretty normal to me, but it was great for what it had to do.

The Started at 13:30, and was opened by DJ Genki.

Dj Genki was pretty nice, it was a good warmup for the crowd.  Then came aran:

You can see what each Dj's intro looked like in that video above.
After aran came a trio of DJ, DJ Myosuke vs Massive New Krew.

Sorry, because my phone battery was depleting fast I didn't take that much video, but I do have some cool samples coming.
After them was kenta-vez:

I actually got to record a nice little sample during kenta-vez performance, it was really energetic, and gives a good idea of the mood and ambience there. Also the sound is pretty good for something recorded through a cellphone!

After that came Minamotoya (Couldn't get a good picture of his intro), who did one of my favourite songs from HARDCORE TANO*C albums, Blue sky!

After him came Hommar ju

Then came DJ Shimamura who did a nice cover of Irony, the Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai opening song

They also did some live rapping which was pretty nice, unfortunately it took me by surprise so i only got like the last part

Then came USAO. I really like USAO, but somehow, i really didn'T like his performance at this event, he only did Dubstep. :(

from that point on, my cellphone was almost dead so I only took pictures disconnected from the internet.
After Usao came Noizenecio

After that Came DJ Noriken, and DJ Noriken took his sweet time to start, it was long, he was playing with his settings, and the crowd teased him. It was pretty funny, but it was also really worth it. Noriken was cearly thr highlight of the night. His performance was so electric, it was pure Awesomeness.

After that came a guest, Kors k, it was a pretty nice performance.

And finally came RED ALiCE, finally? Yes finally, because P*Light and t+pazolite we're not present at the event. Which was a huge let down, because they are both awesome, especially P*Light, who is clearly one of my favorite DJ all around. Also, RED ALiCE was also a letdown, his performance was short, and didn't include any of his best works.

Finally the whole crew came to the stage to say goodbye and plug their new CDs.

They did a live version of the TANO*C TOUR 2013 the Anthem with the singer actually singing live, but my phone was completly dead then, so I couldn't even take a picture of it.

Overall the show was great, and the experience was awesome. I was pretty much completly drained after the show but it was worth it!

I'm sorry this post came later than expected, in part because I was sick, and also because it took me like 2 days to write ><.

My next post will probably be about Google I/O coming tonight, and the next one after this should be the answer to the Q&A.

Thanks for watching!

M3 2013

Once again I'm pushing back my answering of question to this post: Q&A Hoping to get more questions.

Now, about 2 weeks ago (April 29) was this year's M3.
For those who don't know what M3 is, it's like a mini-Comiket, for music only. A big event with a lot of Doujin Music circles selling their works. You can see my last year's post here: M3 and akiba day 1.

So last year we got there a little late, and didn't really know how things worked. This year I got to do the line-up prior to the event, and got in pretty early.

The lineup is clearly not as impressive as Comiket, but there was still a lot of people.
During the first hour of the event, I quickly went to all the circles I knew, and wanted their new albums. The only circle with a really long line was Asriel.
After that, a friend from work arrived around noon, and we walked around, discovering new circles for the rest of the event. I got to speak with a couple of people, especially a lot with Miko again! Speaking with Miko always makes me happy! She's so cute <3 p="">I also went to a circle I discovered last year while walking around, called Kanata Labo (last year they were dorami diego kanata but now they made a bigger circle and the former is a part of the new one). I remembered them mostly because the cute girls told us "WE LOVE YOU" before we left last year, lol. They were still as genki this year as last one! While IRON ATTACK! was present at the event, Chino was not.
Here's a picture of what it looks inside (this is one half of one of the 3 rooms)

In one of the room, there was live performances, so we got to watch TAM play the violin:

Finally, we returned home after eating dinner in Shunjuku. This is my loot from M3 this year:

Kinda small, but didn't have time to walk around the full room, and unfortunately, I think a lot of circles are saving their new releases for Reitaisai at the end of the month.

That's all for today. Expect a new post very soon, because there are two things I wanted to talk about today, but I decided to split it in 2 posts!