Anime Street in Asagaya, Nakano shoping and Maid Cafe!

So a new "Anime Street" apparently opened recently (I don't know when exactly) in Asagaya (2 station from Nakano).
I went to visit it today, it was .... soso, but then again, it was Tuesday, and apparently a bunch of shop are closed on Tuesday.... one of the shop dealers told use it's really nice during the week-end because there's event and stuff.

The street itself is really small and a little far from the station, nut it was really easy to find due to indications

While it was a small street, there was still some interesting things there.
A couple of Cafe

We didn't eat in any of them, but the cafe with the Sphere theme had some range Murata stuff, so I went in to buy it.

Close to it was a mini museum of the Atelier Series, it looked really nice, and I bough an art book there.

And while it was closed there seem to be a nice shot of Mad House studio

There was also a (closed) cosplay shop

Since the street was pretty small, we got there kinda fast, so we moved to Nakano after that. Did a lot of shopping, then went to kuroneko cafe close to nakano broadway.
Kuroneko Cafe (I think their website is one of the less inviting website I've ever seen) is a Maid Cafe with Nekomimi wearing maids! It's the first time I went there, though I've seen it often (they also have cafe inside nakano broadway itself). I really liked it, maybe because our maid, Saori, was so cute and nice. The formula was quite different from the other cafe I've been to, the price was 1000 yen per 30 minute, with free drinks.
Since I don't drink alcohol, it's quite expensive, but it also means the Maid is there to speak to you as much as possible, so that you drink less, exactly the opposite of other maid cafe where they want you to drink more.
I'm definitely gonna go back to this Maid cafe.... and I hope I can see Saori again!

We finished our day by stopping in Shinjuku for a quick trip to Anime, when I spend more money again.
Here's my loot of the day!

Theme song of the movie

Dengeki Daioh, bough to see what the special gift was

special gift...

is a kind of plastic sheet.... I'll use it as a poster

Atelia Escha&Logy Art Book

Old Range Murata stuff (book is from 2004)

from a lottery, second worst prize, is still pretty neat, this is an illustration book

2 mini-Ika-chan

You can see all the pictures from today here: (Google+ / Picasa)

Wonder Festival Summer 2014

Today was Wonder festival's summer edition. I went alone this time (last year I went with a friend who cosplayed)

I streamed the first 1h30 minutes,(until my phone battery died) and you can see it here:

I took a lot of pictures in the first part of the event, until my Camera broke.... I don't exactly know what's strong with it, the lense seems wobby now, and the focus seems to be stuck, I'll have to get it fixed before comiket....
You can see my full gallery here (Google+ version / Picasa version)

I'll go over my favourite figures from the show here, most of it from the artisan halls. One thing you should know is almost all of the figures you see at Wonder Festival are resin kits that you have to assemble and paint by yourself, so even if the figures look awesome, your end result might not be as good (the opposite it also true, sometimes the kit seems good, but the artist may not be a good painter so their result might be bad while yours could be better).
I've never painted one, but my previous tries with D&D characters were pretty bad... so I'm a little scared, so I didn't buy many kits, and I stayed away from any expensive ones.... I bought a couple cheap ones to try, so if I can do it fine, maybe I'll buy getter ones next time.

I'll start with the corporate booths, since I went over there quickly and there's really only two fig that really got my attention:
1- Misaka Mikoto, Maid Bikini 65cm version (that's huge)

This figure was made to celebrate ToAru Majutus no Index's 10th anniversary, Dengeki is releasing this 1/2.5 scale figure made by Griffon Enterprise and TEAM GENESIS. It goes for 400$ though, so even if I love it, I probably won't be getting her.

2 - Unicron Head

Nothing much to say about it, except that it look pretty nice, and bring back terrifying memories.This villain was pretty scary I mean.... if could eat your planet.... what the hell can you do against that? Unless you're lucky and he tries to scare you instead of eating your planet, and they revealing a bunch of weakness that wouldn't have happened if he just ate the damn planet....

Most notable Kits:
1- Neptune

This is the only kit that, even if it was expensive, I would probably have bough anyway.... if it wouldn't have been sold out. I'm not a big fan of Neptune, but this figure is so cute, and nice, and the pose looks so cool. I can't even explain what makes it look so great for me, but it was my top figure at this summer's Wonder Festival

2- Flandre

That twisted crazy look just looks so great.

3 - These 2 Miku (I think)

The colors look amazing, especially on the pink one. The background are also a really nice addition, The sakuras on the first one and the start on the second one make these 2 figures something I could just look at for hours.

4- Asuka with LED

This figure was spinning around on the display, and it looked really good. I took shots from other angles too, but due to the focus on my camera dieing, they are all out of focus.

5- Those cute witches

Of course you'd have to have seen the show to understand why these cute witches are so awesome. The bottom one represent the many ways to kill a witch, as displayed in Witch Craft Works's ending: http://youtu.be/j-3Fgrn7Rls
The top one I think was from an insert between 2 parts of an episode, I'm not sure, I don't remember, but it got pretty popular and a gif was made out of it

That's it for my top figures. I also went to the cosplay area, but since my camera broke, I don't really have any really awesome cosplay pictures, you call see all my cosplay pictures here: (Google+ / Picasa)

Even if I don't think I can build them well, I bought a kit that was cheap, nice and looked easy (looked...) to try, I hope it's gonna turn out well

And I got myself a super awesome umbrella!

That's all for my Wonder Festival post, hope you enjoyed it!

Ramune ChocoWafer

Found this today .... had to try it.... it taste horrible!
Didn't try the gum yet.... I'm scared now :P

Diversity bullshit (please read before complaining about the title)

This will be a really different piece from what you can usually read on my blog, so if you're not interested in this topic, please just ignore it.
Picture not really related:

Recently a lot of press has been going around about gender inequality, in life and in hiring. Google and yahoo both released "diversity reports" showing that they hire a lot more man than women, and a lot more white or Asian than any other ethnicity.

And nothing is wrong with the world.

Feminist will make you believe that a 50% ratio is a must, but that's bullshit. A company, should aim to recruit the best people they can, the fact that they are literally forced to recruit women over man because of that 50% belief is completely unfair to hard working people.

I'll give a couple examples to indicate how this works in real life, but I'll start with a "imaginary perfectly balanced world" example.
In this world, there'S as many girls as man interested in the tech sector, and they all are as skilled as each others
So when a company announce that it wants to hire 100 new employe, 300 person apply. Of these 300 persons, 25 man are extremely skilled, 25 women are extremely skilled, 50 man are skilled, 50 women are skilled, and the rest sucks.
This perfect world company (not so perfect since 150 person sucked) will then hire 50 extremely skilled person, and 50 skilled person, choosing the top 25 in both gender.
Thats how equality, and actually normal hiring process would work (if everyone's skill was perfectly equal, and could really be splitted that easily)

Now in a normal world, there's a lot of different variables, first instead of 3 levels of skills, we'll use 10, (10 being the best), and the male/female ration applying will often be REALLY different, here's an example in the normal world:
hiring 100 of 300:
skill lvl 10: 10m, 5f
skill lvl 9:   25m, 10f
skill lvl 8:   30m, 10f
skill lvl 7:   40m, 15f
skill lvl 6:   10m, 2f
skill lvl 5:  50m, 8f
skill level <5: 70m, 15f
Note that in a real situation, the female/male ratio could even be lower, my example has a ratio of ~22% but my Computer science classes had about 10% of female student.

With the Equality goal, this company would have to hire: 15 lvl 10, 35 lvl 9, 25 lvl 8, 15 lvl 7, 2 lvl 6 and 8 lvl 5.
But what a company should really do, to get the most skilled employe should be to get: 15 lvl 10, 35 lvl 9, 40 lvl 8 and 10 lvl 7.

In this "we must absolutely meet equality" world, a bunch of mans that are more skilled than women would not get a job, and a bunch of unskilled women would get one, and this is bullshit.

In real life though, there's more than 10 level of skills, and the difference between people can be greater, Highly skilled women exist in IT, I've just never met one (I've talked to some on the internet, but never talked to one in a company or at school).

People should be hired on Talent (and attitude) alone, and not on their gender or race
That is the true equality. Fuck these percentages.

In the end this post didn't have any comment about racial diversity, but in Canada (Quebec), in IT I didn't notice any bias.... but the number were really low, because there's really not that many minority groups in Quebec city. Montreal must be a whole different story though, but I never worked there, so I can't really comment on it. In Japan, I could have been a victim of racial bias, but I was lucky enough to not have to try to get in a normal company, and got hired in a company that actually loves foreigner, so once again, I can't comment on this.

I'm all about equality, but those who call themselves feminist always seem to forget that equality doesn't mean equal number, it means equal chances.

Pepsi Energy Cola

I didn't know this existed, and I don't know if it exist outside Japan, please let me know if it does.
So it's an energy drink, made by Pepsi, having the name Pepsi, so I could not not buy it, being the Pepsi master....
Well the liquid has the right color as you can see on this picture:

looks like pepsi

But the taste is completly wrong.... well it doesn'T taste bad, but it really doesn'T even come close to tasting like... a cola. It taste like.... water with an samll fruity after taste.
And I'm still tired so it's not really effective!