So recently I've tried squeezing in some anime between my work sessions. I haven't watched much for quite a long time. In fact I haven't watched anything seasonal for a while. Which I suppose is okay, because not many good shows have come out this year (and no, I'm not into Type-Moon). So I don't feel I've missed out on much. On the topic of Type-Moon, let's talk about Canaan.

I finished watching Canaan a few days ago. It was an okay show. Canaan is just really, really average, and after having watched it I realized how much P. A. Works had improved as a studio during the past several years. For me, Canaan resembles a less well-executed, less exciting version of Black Lagoon. Most of the action scenes were pretty hilarious (Canaan is just that good at dodging bullets), and only a show like Jormungand is arguably worse when it comes to animating unrealistic gunfights, even by anime standards. The show was literally a trainwreck. The story is okay, but I felt that the pacing is a bit too slow and for someone with a short attention-span like me, it was hard for me to keep myself engaged. 

Well, there are pluses, I suppose. For one, I like the character designs. Canaan looks pretty sexy. She's a cold-blooded killer but she also has that tiny dose of humanity which makes her a bit more likeable. Every other character, however, are completely 2-dimensional, which is to be expected since Canaan is largely a story-driven show (except that the story isn't very good). Secondly, Canaan also did an unexpectedly good job portraying Shanghai. I've been to Shanghai a few times and let me tell you, the run-down districts look almost identical to how Canaan portrayed it. The interiors of the trains and taxis looks very much like their real-life counterparts. So I applaud their attention to detail.

An actual Chinese market looks almost exactly like this. Minus the tits.

Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken (or Danna ga Nani for short, although to be serious I have no idea what its abbreviation is) is one of the more interesting shows I've watched in a while. Well, it's not really a show because it, for the most part, doesn't have a continuous storyline. Every episode is like a comedy sketch that lasts a few minutes long. It's about the life of a good-for-nothing otaku husband with an office-lady wife, and the stuff that happens in their daily lives. The husband doesn't like to work so he stays home all day, while the wife is in a dead-end office job and gets drunk on a regular basis. What's surprising, I guess, is that they somehow made a comedy out of this.

Shows that talk about otaku typically fall into two categories. You have the Lucky Star/Oreimo category that makes comedy out of it (and is typically filled with references to the culture itself) or you have shows that looks at its 'dark side' via satire (NHK and Genshiken instantly comes to mind). Danna ga Nani starts out sort of between the two categories. After a few episodes, however, the tone changes, and it turns into more of a sketch about what you'd actually expect in the daily lives of a young couple. It's mundane, it's somewhat repetitive, and it can be pretty cute at times.

I suppose that if otaku do get married, they'd most likely stop thinking about their waifu and worry about raising kids very, very quickly. The last anime I watched that was solely about post-marriage life is Otono Joshi no Anime Time, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Japan really needs make more shows like these. Which is unfortunate, because the minds of the anime fanbase, by and large, are stuck in high school. Not many people will enjoy an anime about divorce when most fans are either single, or spend their Christmas taking a picture of their favourite anime girl looking at a cake in front of the monitor.

I've been revisiting some of the old shows I've watched. A few days before I watched an episode of Aria the Natural, and it touched my heartstrings in the same way it did three years ago. I'm also trying to finish off Tamako Market, but really, I don't think any KyoAni shows post-Nichijou is worth watching. The only show I'm watching that I found interesting is Gunslinger Girl. I'm only three episodes in and I already think it might be one of the best shows I'm ever going to watch. Somehow they managed to combine little girls with blood and gore and ended up with something that's actually tasteful, unlike Elfen Lied (which honestly was terrible). It also has an amazing soundtrack. I can't wait to watch all of it when I have time.

It seems that 2015 has quietly arrived while I'm typing this up. So yea, happy New Years everyone.

So I've been pretty tired lately. Tried playing games, but video games just tires me out nowadays. Every time I play I either feel stressed or nauseous, and I don't really know why. Maybe it's a sort of mild motion sickness, I think. That feeling goes away when I start working, though. It feels nice to work, to read, and to do all that stuff. Anything but video games...

Been working on a new project. It's not really a book, I guess. It's just an exercise where I get to try out new techniques and improve my Photoshop skills. However a lot of the elements were borrowed from some of the artbooks I own. The images below are just drafts of the real thing, so there's definitely a lot to improve on.

So as you can see, nothing too special. I really wanted to do effects that are a bit more complicated, but composition and colour are probably more important than making them look flashy. As I've said before, looking at the work of professionals really makes me want to get better. I think what made my work process a lot harder than expected, is just how much it takes to tear down what obviously looks terrible and remake things from scratch. That, and the lack of ideas. At the beginning it was hard to think of what to actually put into the project. Maybe I'm just not that much of a LL fan.

2015 will be here soon. Honestly, I'm pretty scared. I'm scared that I'll be one year older soon and that I won't amount to anything, that I would waste my days idle. The feeling of working, and working, and finally working yourself to exhaustion is the best feeling I've ever experienced. If there's really a New Year's Resolution I'd want to follow, it'd be that I can work myself to exhaustion everyday. Work is the only thing that brings me satisfaction nowadays.

I also realized I uploaded two of the pictures as transparent PNGs. I'm so retarded. Also, tomorrow morning I'm most probably going into Auckland city. Oh how much I look forward to going outside...

Whelp, here it is! Merry Christmas everyone. The files are pretty huge, actually. It'd take forever to upload it here. Here are the thumbnails for the album.

And...here's the link! Enjoy. Off to playing Shogun 2.

Woah...I'm so tired...

I've been trying to learn Photoshop lately. To be precise, since yesterday. It was a really, really challenging task, to say the least, especially considering that I'm the kind of guy who's never used anything outside of Word and MSPaint. The reason why I'm trying to learn Photoshop is because I want to make a few projects and make myself slightly more employable since everyone's asking for 'advanced computer skills' nowadays. Okay, scratch the last part. I just feel like making some cool stuff, you know? And things turned out okay, I suppose.

Back when I was in high school, I applied for both what I'm doing now, and Architecture school. Needless to say I spent a lot of time on drawing and designing and all that stuff. I'd work when I get back from school at 3.30pm and keep working till 1 in the morning, watch a few episodes of Toradora then go to bed. That was how devoted I was. Then for some reason, I decided to go with what I'm doing now instead. From organizing space to organizing people, it seems. Anyway, toying with Photoshop felt very nostalgic. The exhausting feeling I'm getting now reminds me of my high school days, when I'd just draw houses and floor plans nonstop. It's a good feeling.

So yea, as you can see, that's one of the first things I ever did in Photoshop. I couldn't even figure out the layers out, let alone knowing how to put down colours and all that jazz. Why can't it just be like MSPaint, you know? So it was kind of an achievement (as silly it was) to have made my first reaction image. Wow, I am so cool. Please respond.

For Christmas this year, I wanted to make a friend of mine something special. I promised him to send him a Christmas card. As you can see, it's almost the 24th of December here in New Zealand, and I haven't sent out anything. I'm so incredibly lazy, it's hopeless. But I decided I was going to make him something a bit more special, without paying a cent of postage. I made him an artbook.

Well of course, I won't show you the whole thing. It's not Christmas yet, you know (or, uh, Kurisu-masu, if you catch my drift?! Ha!). But yea, that's what I did for the past two days or so. The fanbook is a total of 18 pages. Unfortunately I absolutely suck drawing anything anime related, so I didn't draw any of the pictures. It's kind of hard to do it on Kurisu. My friend really likes Kurisu and probably knows her really well. I think my unfamiliarity with her character probably has something to do with the fact that I haven't actually read or watched Steins; Gate. So I had to rely on a lot of second-hand information. Sorry!

Making this project was a pretty confusing process. Imagine a guy walking into a workshop. He doesn't know how to use any of the tools, he doesn't know what he's making, and he's not really that smart. And he has two days to make something. That's me using Photoshop in a nutshell. I had make up designs on the spot then Google the technique of making it happen. Then I would get distracted by a picture of Ruka for 5 minutes before going back to work. Then I would accidentally delete something and then Ctrl-save then have to make everything again. All of this, while listening to K-pop at full-volume for several hours straight. Tracking down the artist names to give them credit took a lot of time and patience. It was very tedious and reminded me of putting citations on my research papers.

I actually seriously considered printing it out in hardcover just for myself. Then I realized that it's just 18 pages and it wouldn't make a very good coffee table book, which I guess is the sort of aesthetic I'm aiming for. Honestly, after flipping through the finished product, I'm not very satisfied at all. Here I see a lettering that should've been corrected. There I see that the spacing is too big or I applied a bit too much Gaussian filter. I have a few artbooks at home and when I compare them with what I've done, I think there's still so much room for improvement. It's like a huge mountain in front of you to see the work of pros and to compare it with your own. It makes for good motivation, you know! Photoshop is really amazing. There's only one thing limiting you, and that's your idea. And the thing about this sort of creative design is that most people don't have good ideas.

Well, that's about all the things I've been doing recently. I guess I'll put the imgur album link to the full version of the book when it's Christmas Day. I think looks okay, but yea. If only I could draw. If I'm doing another fanbook for my next project, it's probably going to be really cutesy. I want to experiment with a really elaborate, over-the-top style (this one is pretty simple in terms of design). So expect a lot of cute girls and flowers and candies the next time I post something Photoshop related.

Also, this song is amazing.

So as we all know, GvG came out a few days ago. I wasn't actually too keen on the new expansion when some of its cards were first revealed, because some of them seemed a bit too random for my liking. Overall, however, GvG is a very good set. People have already started making new mech decks, although I haven't seen any murloc shamans just yet. Besides Unstable Portal, the RNG around most of the other cards is the sort of RNG that spices up the game, but are largely controllable. For example, Handlock players have already figured out that Recombobulator is basically a 2 mana 3/2 Ancestral Healing for Mountain Giants. Unstable Portal is the only RNG card that, I think, is really unbalanced. At its worst, it replaces itself with a 1-drop, and there is a pretty decent chance that the random legendary you pull will win you the game outright. The problem is that all minion-based Mage decks will have to run this card because it's just that good, even though what makes it good is pure RNG.

The changes to Soulfire, Flare and Auctioneer are okay. The Auctioneer nerf is completely on point because of the new spare parts. But putting Flare at 2 mana is not a good nerf. Flare is only overpowered in the Hunter versus Freeze Mage matchup. Tempo Mage is not particularly reliant on secrets (and they also have Counterspell), Pallys never run Secrets and Hunter vs Hunter is more about board control than anything else. I've had my Freezing + Snake Trap blown up by a Flare and still win because my Undertaker got out of control. In my view, Flare should stay at 1 mana, but not draw any cards if it destroys a Secret. Flare has pretty much become unplayable in Hunter, much like Starving Buzzard. And making cards totally redundant is not a good thing - cards like Buzzard and Flare should stay as 'niche' cards, instead of being unplayable.

The 1 mana change on Soulfire might seem small, but it's going to affect Warlock deck building a lot. I think it's more of a Zoo nerf than a Handlock nerf because Zoo needs Soulfire more than the Handlock. Darkbomb has become an excellent replacement for Soulfire in Handlock, which I think is a pretty bad card (in my opinion) in Zoo because of its cost. Clearly, some changes will have to be made, and as a keen Zoo player I've decided to update my list for the new meta. I haven't laddered too much with this deck, so things will change a lot in the near future.

The GvG cards include 2x Clockwork Gnome, 1 Annoy-o-Tron, and 1 Enhance-o-Mechano. What's perhaps most surprising is the complete absence of Soulfire and Dark Iron Dwarf. Let's start with Soulfire.

Soulfire serves two purposes in Zoo. It provides extra reach when you are going for lethal, and it gives you valuable tempo in the early game. In the Zoo mirror, for example, Soulfire is almost always a must keep in the mulligan because you can coin out your 1 drops then Soulfire their 1 drop for free. Part of what makes the 'old' Zoo so powerful is that it plays exactly to your mana curve, while having constant access to 4 damage whenever you need it. 1 mana is very costly for Zoo in the early game. 1 Soulfire is justifiable to provide extra reach, but I don't like 2.

Now, the mechs. Clockwork Gnome has largely replaced Leper Gnome in Zoo lists because it provides actual value while buffing your Undertaker. The spare parts it generates are almost always useful, and at worst they provide discard fodder for Doomguard. Enhance-o-Mechano is an one-off that, I think, will replace Dark Iron Dwarf in Zoo lists. Its Battlecry is pretty insane. The buffs it gives to your small minions gives them a lot of value. Yes, sometimes you do get Divine Shield on your Nerubian Egg, but you also might get Windfury on your Doomguard. It's definitely a win-more card, and in general fits well into the Zoo game plan.

Annoy-o-Tron is purely a tech choice. It serves the same function as Voidwalker, and it's amazing with Abusive Sergeant. The problem is that its stats are very mediocre otherwise, and is a very weak drop on an empty board. It's the sort of card you'd play when you are already ahead, and you want to protect your Flame Imps from getting traded. So I think a 1-off is just right.

Everything else about the list is pretty standard, a tried-and-true Zoo list not too different from what everyone else plays. Some cards that might be considered for an updated Zoo list include Spider Tank (a solid 3 drop), Piloted Shredder (good 4 drop with Deathrattle effect), Jeeves (refills your hand, Zoo runs out steam surprisingly quickly), Anima Golem and Fel Reaver. The last two deserves special mention, because there are times when I play Zoo and I feel I have trouble closing the game out, especially when I don't topdeck into Doomguard. A 8/8 left unanswered will win the game very, very quickly, and its effect is hardly detrimental to Zoo because you will rarely feel bad over burning Flame Imps.

Honestly, I don't think the meta will change too much from what it was like before. People are still adjusting, after all. Despite getting Vol'jin and Shrinkmeister, I think Priest is sort of overrated post-GvG. Control Warrior and Handlock are still very good at what they do, while Hunter arguably benefited the least from the new GvG cards (the only legendary I got from 15 packs was the Hunter one, which I think is almost useless). Zoo is still okay, I suppose. What I'm really looking forward to are the new mech decks, especially midrange Mage decks that run Secrets, mechs and especially Snowchugger. They look pretty legit.

So a few days ago, I went drinking with a high school friend. I hadn't met him for quite a while, actually. In fact, the last time I went drinking with him was before Seattle, so I wanted to have a talk with him. It's funny because every time I go drinking with him (and just him, strangely enough), I get pretty emotional afterwards. I would throw a tantrum, get all nostalgic all of a sudden and in general say a bunch of things I usually wouldn't say. And then I'd forget about most of it. All I could remember from that night was that I goofed off for most of the night. We listened to that awful Anaconda song by Nicki Minaj with my high school friend, and discussed how she's poisoning music, etc. It was pretty stupid. Then on the way home, I thought about my time in America, and how idyllic my lifestyle was over there. It made me very nostalgic.

My days were very quiet when I was at Berkeley. A normal day would be split between lectures, gaming, a bit of socializing here and there, and food. I can still picture myself, even today, walking across that campus with a pair of sandals after a lecture, heading to the local Internet cafe to play some Dota (I must've spent like 500 dollars there in the space of 5 months...what a terrible waste). Then afterwards, when night settles, I'd head back to my apartment, remembering to pick up some takeaway (or a big slice of pizza), along the way. I'd work on my assignments, talking to my floor mates about how their day went, what interesting things happened on campus, and why the floor's toilet was blocked. Just things like that. And by 1 am, I'd be asleep, waiting for next day's lecture. At Berkeley, my days were quiet, but I had plenty of time to read and do what I want.

But at Berkeley, I didn't have any close friends. I was friendly with my floor mates, and I had a few acquaintances I talk to from time to time. But a lot of the time, I was alone, and that occasionally made me a bit homesick. I had a few online friends, though, and they made my time there just a bit more interesting, a bit less lonely. We would have conversations till early morning, even on that one night I was locked out of my own room and we streamed anime together to kill time. When I didn't go online for two days, I would see that my message box was filled with their words, asking how I was doing. And we talked just about everything and anything. They had a pretty big impact on me in those months away from home, actually. They helped me through some tough times, especially because of how my personality is, and that I don't talk about these things face to face, with anyone. Not even my parents. But when I listened in on their ridiculous Skype calls, I somehow felt a bit at ease. It was almost as if they were in front of me for the whole time.

About a week ago, I watched a really good movie, called Liberal Arts. The movie, in a lot of ways, resembles a little private fantasy of mine, that deep inside I've always had the impulse of studying at a small liberal arts college, reading literature, history and all that underneath a tree in the middle of autumn. Studying not for a degree, not for employment, not for the sake of anything except for the sake of learning new things, discovering new ways of experiencing life. To some extent, my life in Berkeley was exactly like that. I'd read a bunch of books unrelated to what I study, go to those antique local bookshops, and stroll the campus after an intense reading session. Everything felt like an extremely sweet, idyllic fantasy. Kind like alcohol, really. It leaves you intoxicated and when you wake up from that dream, you feel much worse than before.

I had been drinking for the past couple days. Two bottles per day, in fact, although in my defence the drinks were actually really, really nice, and if they hadn't been so expensive I definitely would've bought more. Every time I drink, I get into a minor stupor but fall way short of intoxication, so at times I'd just slump there and feel sentimental and nostalgic. I think I should stop this before it's too late. There's an old Chinese saying that goes: "Using wine to quench misery only invites more misery", and I feel that most of this misery is really just a product of my misdoings.

-

On second thought, that really wasn't a very good translation. The original Chinese saying goes:

借酒消愁愁更愁

Interpreted literally, it means "Borrowing wine to pour onto your anxiety makes anxiety worse". Okay, so that sounded a lot like Google Translate, but you get what I mean. 愁 is particularly hard to translate because it doesn't exactly mean misery, or anxiety, or depression. It's a mix between melancholy, sadness, worry, and anxiety, although anxiety probably comes closest to its main connotation. The word is actually made up of two other words, with 秋 on top and 心 at the bottom - the former means autumn, the latter means heart. So perhaps we can put it this way: 愁 is the emotion your heart experiences during autumn. So poetic!

Today, my Love Live merch arrived. It was a pretty good day! It took about three weeks for the package to arrive, which isn't that bad considering it's SAL unregistered. So yea, I guess I'll talk a bit about what I bought, and post a few photos.

First, the mini wall scroll. Despite what the photo looks like, the print quality is actually really good, and the colours are quite saturated (my room has bad lighting). It definitely looks much better than your average bootleg wall scroll, although at 1000 yen it's actually quite expensive for its prize. It's called a mini wall scroll for a reason, you know! But seriously, it's actually really really small. It's about the size and width of an average keyboard. So it might look much better if you hang up a whole row of them because it won't look good just by itself. Honestly, I wouldn't have bought this if CDJapan didn't tell me that any purchase beyond 5k yen gets me some bonus shopping points. Such is life.

All right, now let's get on to the important stuff: the two CDs. I bought two solo albums by Honoka Kousaka (or Emi Nitta, depending on which dimension you live in) from Love Live. The first is called ほんのり穂乃果色 , which I guess is best translated as 'The Color of Honoka' or something like that. CDJapan classifies it as a character song album, although in reality it's mostly solo versions of well-known songs by μ's. There are only three tracks that are original to this album: two character songs and a track called ～Date with 穂乃果～, where you listen to the voice of Honoka set to a gentle background BGM as she goes on a date with you, eat picnic with you, and says a bunch of sugois, ureshiis and desus so you can pretend you went out with your waifu.

So by this point, anyone can figure out that this album is designed specifically for the most devoted Honoka fans. Or to put it more bluntly: squeezing out the last drop of milk from the Honoka cash cow. The two character songs are quite bland, and putting a 'Honoka Mix' at the end of every Love Live song doesn't make them any 'better', since μ's honestly sounds much better as a group. Not to mention that Honoka, in my opinion, doesn't have the most exciting voice of the group. As a leader, she hits most of the midrange notes quite well, but her voice isn't exactly dynamic. My overall impression is that you have to be really, really, really into Honoka to like this album, because most of it is just recycled material with one girl singing.

The second album, titled 'orange cheers!' is basically the same as the previous. Except that this time, there are no original songs, since every track is just a Honoka version of the season 2 songs. As much as I like Honoka, I really think her voice fits much, much better in a group. 愛してるばんざーい! , for example, is Maki's signature song and only Maki can do it justice. Which is not to say that Honoka's version isn't good -- it just isn't very exciting. Even Kotori might do a better job of it, since her voice is very cutesy and stands very well just by itself. 

Like what I said previously, there's really no reason to buy those albums unless you absolutely love Honoka. Personally, I found Honoka's personality and enthusiasm far more attractive than her voice. Which I suppose is enough to justify those purchases, but I suppose that Honoka fans should really look to spend the money on something like a figure instead. If there are plans in the future to release more solo albums/character songs, they should really produce more original material instead of remixing the same old songs over and over. Then again, knowing how fanatic the Love Live fanbase is, I'm pretty sure the otaku in Japan will buy just about anything with LL stamped on it.

I probably going to order one more batch of stuff from Japan before Christmas rolls around. Probably a figure, but I'm not really sure since I'm not really interested in any particular merch at the moment. Let's see how things go.

So I received my finals results just a few days ago. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by how things turned out, even though (like always) I could've done better. I had been pretty lazy this semester, aka my last semester in my 3-year Bachelor's programme. Maybe it's because I had instant access to my computer, while in America I had to walk 20 minutes to the nearest internet cafe for a game of Dota. I really don't know. But overall things had gone okay, I suppose. GPA-wise, I landed myself something like a 3.75 (by American standards) to round off my degree, which is slightly better than an A- average. Here in New Zealand, they hand out quite a few A+ grades (apparently that means 'exceptional work' or something) when in America the A+ is extremely rare. So my grades might actually be a bit inflated.

There are times when I ask myself why I care so much about my GPA. Why I labour so much over something that's only worth 5 percent, when I would turn up to a lecture even if it meant losing out on going to a concert, etc. To an extent, the GPA is just like an arbitrary number, like your salary, or your MMR. Those numbers are important to an extent (a C gets you a degree, 60,000 gets you a comfortable life, 4K MMR puts you in the top 1%, and so forth), but after a while, it becomes a matter of chasing after those numbers for the sake of it. I just want to do as well as I can in my work, just to see how far I can go, in the same way some people just want to earn as much as possible. My dad once told me that earning money is addictive. If you earned a six-digit sum in one year, you are not going to stop on the next. I think the same kind of applies to GPA as well.

Well, things didn't go quite as planned, but at least I could breathe a sigh of relief. I was very stressed before and during the busy exams/essay deadline season, and I was very very afraid of doing badly. More specifically, it was about an economics paper I took. I took this paper because I did pretty well in a political economy course and I wanted to see what economics 'really' looked like. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake. Since most of the work I did were in the areas of political science/sociology, the way economics presented its methodology and explanation for social behaviour was completely different to what I'd been exposed to in my education so far. And so I struggled quite a bit early in the semester. I always joked that the only thing I learnt was that I could now draw a supply curve and remember that it actually slopes up, not down.

Still, I don't regret it at all. I think that part of the challenge of being a student is learning to look at things from radically different perspectives. Every discipline, when faced with a common problem, produces its own explanations. So in international relations, for example, we might look for theories such as institutionalism in order to explain why nation-states behave in certain ways, why China treats Senkaku Island so seriously even though it lacks strategic value, etc. A sociologist might look towards class and identity to explain why xenophobia is such a prevalent issue in China-Japan relations. And an economist might pull out game theory to explain security dilemmas in East Asia. The last one is particularly interesting because I think game theory has a lot of explanatory value. It has a lot of utility in analysing decision-making and why people do things, without resorting every time to history ("X happened because previous events in history culminated in X'). 

The real problem that makes students like me reluctant to look at those varying approaches, is that different disciplines in the university tend to ignore each other. So the sociology student doesn't really think about how economics might explain their course material even better, while economics student might treats sociology as all gibberish (meanwhile, the computer science guy treats them as  idiots who wasted three years on an useless piece of paper). When I was in America, I asked one of my instructors about how important my major is to my future development. He said that you should never let what you learn in university dictate how you think. You just need to be really smart. I think he's really quite right. If there's one thing I really learnt at university, it's that you should just read and learn whatever is necessary to explain what is at hand.

___

A professor from my one of my courses sent me an e-mail the other day. It turns out she actually remembered me from our office hours earlier in the semester, when I told her that I had plans for finishing off my Bachelor's degree with Honours. Basically, she wanted me to keep studying because apparently I'm such a good student and etcetera and that the additional degree will make my qualifications look a bit more competitive on the job market. An additional year at university sounds okay, I suppose, but what I really want is to start working, even if it means starting off with an average entry-level job and working from the ground up. Anyway, it seems I'll be staying at the university for one more year, and I'm already thinking about what I'm going to write for my dissertation. A lot of big organizations like to see writing samples, so to write my dissertation on where I most likely would work sounds like a pretty good idea.

Well, I guess the paper I wrote for her class was pretty good. I'm actually very proud of it, because it was a conscious attempt to make my language as precise and technical as possible (to make the 'science' in 'social science' pop out, so to speak), and for once things actually went as planned. I wrote my paper on comparative environmental policies between China and New Zealand, and ask whether a participatory democratic system lends to more effective governance over the environment. Writing the paper was a very challenging experience. It's always hard to settle on the right variables to test out your hypothesis in a social science paper, because you have to balance generalization with explanatory power. It is always important to simplify and exaggerate, making sure that you quantify the most important variables that shapes the phenomena you are trying to explain, be precise about your definitions, and not to mix up 'believe', 'prove' and 'argue'.

What I've realized is that precision and clarity is the most important thing when it comes to writing any paper, and to keep an argument as streamlined and clear as possible is necessary in keeping a social science paper respectable (and living up to the 'science' in its name). On this topic: something I've thought about for quite a while is whether social sciences, given enough time, will explain social phenomena in the same way as the natural sciences explain the natural world. Or whether the two are so fundamentally different that it would be a mistake for social science to see itself as a purely empirical endeavour. I had been thinking about this when I was writing my research paper, and wondering why all the source material I studied used prose nearly identical to that of a scientific report. And I don't have an answer, just yet, although fortunately I don't have a deadline to figure out an answer for that problem.

For the past few days, I've spent a lot of my time watching Chinese Dota streams. Since I live in New Zealand, the streams do lag from time to time, but overall the experience had been an interesting departure from what you'd expect from Twitch. So in this post, I'll talk a bit about Dota 2 streaming in China, and a bit about the Chinese Dota scene in general.

Douyu is basically a Twitch knock-off...with 10 times the viewers

In the West, Twitch has almost established a monopoly over the streaming market. No other streaming site comes close to matching its popularity. In China, things are a bit more complicated. Several streaming sites, all of which are modelled after Twitch, compete for China's gigantic market. Right now, China's 'Big Four' streaming sites are Douyu, Huomao, Zhanqi and Huya. Douyu is arguably the most popular out of the four, although after a series of recent contract signings Huya may have come up on top.

BurNing's digital apparel Taobao store

China's Dota streamers have several ways of generating income. First, there's the money they get from signing contracts with the streaming sites. Well-known players, such as ZSMJ and longdd, can receive several million Yuan in advance, which makes streaming a very lucrative career. Players like YYF (part of the iG team that won TI2) have made more money streaming Dota post-retirement than during their professional careers. Back in Dota 1 days, professional Dota players were paid with tiny salaries. In 2011, a mere sum of 60k Yuan was enough to convince BurNing to quit EHOME and join DK. It only took three years for professional Dota players, like BurNing, to become millionaires.

On Twitch, streamers generate revenue mainly through signing up Twitch partnerships and playing ads. China's Dota streams also have ads, except they are advertisements of the streamers' Taobao shops. Taobao is essentially a Chinese version of Ebay, selling everything from snacks, gaming mice to clothing. Opening Taobao shops have become a popular way for retired Chinese Dota players to make a living off their fanbase, so it's no surprise their ads lead straight to their own stores. Besides that, however, you won't see ads for the new WoW expansion during a Chinese stream. Third-party advertisements are kept to a minimum.

Besides advance payments and Taobao shops, stream sites have also set up reward systems that pays bonuses for streamers according to their popularity. Douyu, for example, has a feature where you can gift a type of currency called 'Yuwan' to players of your choosing (Douyu or 斗鱼 literally means 'Fish Fighting', hence Yuwan or 鱼丸 means 'Fishball'). Player popularity is assessed according to the amount of 'Yuwan' they have, and bonuses are paid out accordingly. This system is somewhat similar to the donation boxes of Twitch streamers, except that money is administered centrally by the streaming sites themselves.

Ferrari's Douyu stream, with the 'Yuwan' spam on the right

In terms of raw numbers, China's streaming audience is enormous. On Twitch, popular streamers like Singsing may attract somewhere around 20 to 25k people. Slightly less popular streamers, like Merlini, may receive around 7k to 8k. In China, streamers such as YYF receive up to 400k viewers. Ferrari's viewership averages around 200k. Even the less popular streamers from tier 2 teams can consistently attract 10 to 15k viewers. Obviously, viewer count is as polarized in China as it is on Twitch. The vast majority of viewers are concentrated in a tiny group of famous Dota players, many of whom have already retired (with Zhou, longdd and xiao8 being the most popular). Even if you have 6k mmr, your stream is unlikely to attract more than a few hundred viewers...

Unless you are attractive. Like Twitch, China also has its share of female streamers. Like their Twitch counterpart, they are usually young, attractive and have facecams bigger than the actual gameplay. Unlike Twitch's female streamers, China's streaming sites actively encourage female streamers to dress up, cosplay and market themselves to China's male gamers. Huya, for example, has a section devoted exclusively for the female streamers. China's most famous female Dota 2 streamer is probably 冷冷 (or ''Cold Cold'), who also provided Chinese commentary for the annual TI tournaments. Unsurprisingly, she also has her share of drama in the Chinese Dota 2 community, but that's a story for another time.

In stark contrast to viewership numbers, China's stream chat is surprisingly well-behaved. Twitch chat is, of course, well-known for its spam and memes (can you imagine the state of Singsing's chat with 400k viewers?). Twitch chat is also thoroughly unproductive, unless it's on subscriber mode. To be sure, China's stream chat also features its share of memes, but the chat is mostly quite productive. Even on a stream as populated as YYF's, you can still see discussions over item builds, in-game decision-making, and of course a lot of flaming. Whereas on Twitch, you'd expect a wall of Kappa, BibleThump and lots of copypasta. Copypasta, by and large, don't exist in China. While personally this makes for a better experience, Chinese streams are admittedly less funnier without the emotes and the spam. But that's up to personal preference.

Some concluding thoughts

What makes streaming Dota so lucrative has to do with competition between streaming sites, and the huge fanbases popular streamers have behind their backs. Obviously, streaming sites are operating at a loss when they pay out millions of dollars to streamers who can jump to another site if a more lucrative contract is offered. With increasing competition from LoL and other cheap MOBA knock-offs, Dota may lose popularity and with that, Dota 2 streams will become less lucrative. And with more and more pro players entering the market, there'd be increasing competition not just between stream sites but also between players. Chances are that the insane rate of growth that we are seeing now will die out very, very quickly, and the most money will, like always, go to the least number of people.

For the last week or so, I've worked pretty hard. From Monday to Wednesday I've hardly had any sleep, and my working hours went something like ten hours per day. Still, it felt really nice to be working because despite all the stress, I felt I've contributed something. Besides tutoring English on the side, I'm doing my bit helping out the family business. We received so many orders last week, and the workload was absolutely crazy. My parents and I worked really hard to get those orders moving, and I think we did a good job. The running joke is that this is the start of the new Rockefeller enterprise, and that I might take over the family business one day. Well, we are not earning nearly as much as them. But we are catching up!

I'm probably going to spend the rest of this summer on those two jobs, and then spent the next few months volunteering overseas before returning to Auckland, possibly finishing off my Bachelor's degree. In the United States, the Bachelor's degree lasts for four years. In New Zealand, a Bachelor's degree only lasts three years, and they give you an option to do an extra year which they refer to as an Honours degree. Which is basically an extended year of undergraduate study, except that you get to write a dissertation on a topic of your interest. I've always enjoyed reading and doing research, so I'm sure I'll pull through with good grades. I'm not too sure whether I want to actually go back to school, though, since I do have some loans to pay off and I don't like debt. 

Dota has been fairly interesting lately. Both the PA arcana and Oracle came out a few days ago. The former caused an influx of PA pickers, as expected. There are also quite a few Oracle pickers, and I think Oracle is lining up to be a really good support if he's properly used. In general, my pub games lately have been pretty decent. I play on Australia, which isn't exactly the server with the most skilful players, but people have in general been nice. Maybe it's to do with the PA arcana and how the prospect of getting free sets is making people cooperate more than before. I really am not sure. But I definitely hope this lucky streak continues. For the first time in a really long time, I feel that I'm enjoying this game again. Hopefully I don't jinx it.

What really got me excited were the hero effigies. In fact, if it hadn't been the effigies, I wouldn't have gotten back into the game. Valve is just really good at manipulating my feelings, it seems. It took a long time for Pygmalion to finish his sculpture, in the same way that it took me an hour finishing character creation on Dark Souls. But alas, they are done. So pretty.

Queen of Pain is an underpowered hero right now. A few years back, Queen of Pain was the midlaner to go for, and she was featured prominently in TI2. As newer heroes like Ember Spirit and Slark came out, Queen of Pain's skillset became less and less powerful. Queen of Pain belongs in the same category of heroes as Windrunner -- good by standards back in the days, increasingly outclassed by newer heroes that fulfil largely the same function but are better at it. 

Queen of Pain's recent buffs hasn't done too much to improve her pub winrate or making her more relevant in the competitive scene. Decreasing the cooldown on Shadow Strike is useful, but Shadow Strike is primarily used as a harassing tool in the laning stage. The casting animation for Shadow Strike is so slow that you'd almost never want to do it in the middle of a teamfight. The thing is, Shadow Strike is just a very mediocre spell when you compare it to, let's say, Ember's bolas or Storm's Lightning Vortex. It loses a lot of its utility after the first 10 minutes.

Still, I think she has potential in certain lineups. Faceless Void is very popular right now, and there is no other midlaner that combos as well with Chronosphere as Queen of Pain. The key to succeeding with her right now, I think, is to pair her up with big CCs like Ravage and Chrono, and keep on picking teamfights where she can cleanup and snowball those kills into an item advantage. It's kind of counter-intuitive to revolve a strategy around an underpowered hero, but that's just how things are. Unfortunately, her room for error is very low, because Blink itself has a very low margin of error. When I watch my replays on Queen of Pain, for example, I always think that if I had blinked just a bit to the side, my Scream/Wave could've hit two more people. If I'd been a bit more careful with my positioning, I could've dodged a stun and threw out a few more nukes. If my mechanics had been a bit more polished, I could've landed a few more right clicks. Even though I've played so much of this hero, there's always room to improve. 

Sonic Wave just got buffed with a slightly bigger AoE.

The circle indicates the casting range of Sonic Wave. 

Notice how the line intersects with her effigy on the right.

Unfortunately, neither the spell's animation, nor the range indicator, shows the spell's actual AoE.

The actual range of Sonic Wave is about twice that of the casting range. 

It has a MASSIVE AoE, which I feel is underused by Queen of Pain players right now, myself included.

So the trick to landing a good ult is to click in the general direction of the enemy, between yourself and the casting range limits.

Since unit targeting has been removed, do not ever click on the enemy hero. 

For the past few days, I've been really hooked on Valkyria Chronicles. It's actually the first game in a really, really long time that I actually, genuinely enjoyed playing. Which is really surprising, considering I didn't even know it was coming out on Steam. Well, I'm not that huge of a JRPG fan to begin with, so I guess my ignorance is excusable for now. The number of Japanese games with cutesy anime faces (barring OELVNS) are, by the way, increasing rather quickly on Steam. Trails in the Sky came out not so long ago, and Valkyria Chronicles certainly won't be the last on the list. Which is quite nice, I guess. Also I don't own a console, so this mini-review will solely be on the PC version.

A lot of people on Steam have been comparing Valkyria Chronicles to XCOM. I haven't actually played XCOM, so my closest comparison would be something like Company of Heroes. I imagine that if a Japanese game developer got his hands on Company of Heroes in a fantasy setting, he'd make something like Valkyria Chronicles. It's a mix of third-person combat, strategy, visual novel style storytelling, and cute girls, one of whom ends up being your wife. Basically, the game is right up my alley. And I liked just about every aspect of it.

Unlike most of things I'm into, the presence of cute girls isn't the only thing good about this game. The art style is, I think, the real selling point. The plot seems to be loosely based around Germany's invasion of Belgium in '40. But the character design is more of a mix between medieval fashion and World War II weaponry, which is quite charming in its on way. Edelweiss, for example, looks rather similar to a King Tiger (when you upgrade it fully) while the enemy tanks resembled the early war French designs. Unless you are a history nerd you probably won't notice much of this. Or unless you are a Girls und Panzer fan.

In Valkyria Chronicles you get to hand-pick your own squad.

My one shouldn't really be called a squad. It's more like a Chloe harem.

My first foray into HR. Everyone have their key competencies and employee relations.

Unfortunately I'm a terrible manager and I pick people exclusively on their gender and looks. So sexist!

The combat system is really well made. As a turn-based game, the combat actually feels moderately realistic, and even though it's a third person shooter the game doesn't feel too awkward. Of course, Valkyria Chronicles is hardly a realistic combat simulator. Strategy is what makes the game tick, and they did a good job not making the tank, Edelweiss, from becoming overly overpowered. In fact, some of the missions required multiple playthroughs because the AI was just that competent! Or maybe because I'm just that incompetent of a leader. Probably the latter.

Valkyria Chronicle unfolds, quite literally, like chapters in a book. So there's a lot stories, a lot of dialogue and even some skippable side chapters (although no one actually skips them, r-right?), which gave the game's setting a lot of extra depth and richness. The quality of writing is comparable to that of an above-average VN. Of course, it's nothing like A Farewell to Arms, but the drama did make the story a bit more 3-dimensional. Valkyria Chronicles tells both side of the story with a human touch, so that you can actually sympathize even with the Empire's soldiers.

I'm pretty sure that Darcsens are supposed to stand for the WWII Jews.

Valkyria Chronicles is actually a lot darker than it might seem.

I really enjoy watching little girls with twin tails running with a rifle.

It sounds perverted, but you have to try it out to feel it for yourself.

That's about it, really. I usually like to criticize and nitpick things when I run out of things to say, but this time, I don't have any criticisms at all. Valkyria Chronicles is just that good of a game. Well, I guess you could have more cute girls carrying rifles and driving tanks, I suppose, although that might make the game kind of creepy. In any case, the reception Valkyria Chronicles has received should tell Sega that JRPGs do have a big market in the West. So we might see more JRPGs being ported over and translated and put on Steam. Which is really nice.

Not too much has happened recently. I've meant to put my time to more productive uses lately, but besides doing some reading, not much has been done. I've been preparing for my exams all this time and honestly, it's been pretty hectic. It gets worse when you realize that the exam is only in a few days time and you are woefully unprepared for it, which means that your sleep schedule is going to get wrecked and your end up procrastinating a lot. If there's one thing I really, really got out of university, it's the fact that my sleep schedule is nothing like that of a normal person. Most people's day starts from 9 and ends at 5. Mine starts at 1 in the afternoon.

I've been playing a bit of Dota and Hearthstone lately, but neither feel all that close to me anymore. Dota, in particular, has become a game that I enjoy watching far more than playing, because I find the game really really stressful. The same goes with Hearthstone, too. Maybe it's a case of ladder anxiety, but I find it so much more comforting watching other people screw up than actually playing the game. I probably am not the only person with this mentality. The reason why Twitch is so successful is precisely because people like watching others play games for them. The division between labour and leisure is increasingly frail in today's world. When you realize that you are generating capital by watching others play games for you, you know that this world is kind of messed up.

The last anime I watched is Love Live S2, which actually ended up being pretty good, and very touching. If I had to find one anime that sums up today's anime industry, it'd be LL. They basically combined two things that obsessive otaku in Japan loves: idols, and high school slice-of-life aka fictional utopian hug-boxes. Add cute girls to the mix, and you have a show that sells on par with Madoka and Bakemonogatari. It's a pretty standard formula, really, but very well executed, and extremely well marketed. 

LL reminded me of K-ON, a lot. The scene where the girls declared they'd disband when the 3rd years graduate, was reminiscent of HTT breaking down in tears in their band room after their last performance. And I'm not going to lie: both scenes hit me like a truck. LL's execution was a bit less polished than K-ON's, and it didn't do as good of a job combining the slice-of-life elements with the music, and sometimes the drama was cringe-worthy. But very powerful nonetheless. So powerful that it makes you want to throw money at a bunch of girls who don't really exist.

So this is the cover of the character song I just bought.

I really like Honoka's face. It looks mildly autistic, which is kind of cute, I guess.

So I ended up eating up this capitalist marketing scheme and bought some LL merchandise in the end, in the vain hopes that the more money I burn the more real the girls will become. Well, a guy should be allowed to dream! Anyways, I bought two CDs (Honoka's character songs) and a Honoka wall scroll, which will take up the remaining stretch of my bedroom wall that isn't covered with cute girls already. It's only about 70 dollars of value in total, which isn't very much I guess, since my consumerist spending has really died down this year compared to the last. I'll write a review on those merchandise when they arrive.

Besides that, not too much has happened. It's quite amazing how much stuff I can type out when I'm in front of the computer when just a minute ago, I thought my life was so boring my post would end with a single paragraph. But I suppose I was wrong. I'm going to see a movie tomorrow, so I'm going to take some pictures of the mythical 'outside world' while I'm at it. Auckland is a really beautiful city, you know? Hopefully we'd have a nice weather tomorrow.

I've also started a Honoka folder. Soon it will be full of Honoka pictures. Here are some of the ones I really like. Yea I know you can get them elsewhere, but who doesn't like cute girls?

And last, but not least...