Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Now here's a topic of interest I first encountered while reading this article:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/03/murder-or-an-accident-the-brain-.html?rss=1

Article aside (I don't have too much comment on it), the whole concept of TMS sounds really intriguing. You can temporarily disable/turn off a part of a person's brain? According to the wikipedia article it seems that if done with precaution it won't really do any harm, but still...! I guess it could be something like a technology-version of hypnosis.

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation

EFZ Patch for Windows7/Vista

http://efz.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=efz&thread=644&page=1

Haven't tried it out yet, but at least people are saying it works.

\o/!!!!!!!!!!

Bungaku Shojo OVAs

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-03-25/bunka-shoujo-gets-3-all-new-anime-dvd-episodes

There must be some irony in me posting news about stuff I won't be able to watch until like a year from now. :(

Mardock Scramble

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-03-25/mardock-scramble-anime-to-be-3-films-starting-in-fall

I don't know who this girl in the poster is but she looks AWESOMELY MOE. :V

Scientists become the Subjects

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100324/full/464482a.html?s=news_rss

Also:

""This could never happen in biology, where the most intense disputes are about publishing, and reputations are established by your publications," says Knorr Cetina, who has also studied the lab life of molecular biologists."

DAMN YOU BIOLOGY, DAMN YOU

=====

For those who can't read (property of Nature etc etc.):

"I am here to watch you." So began anthropologist Arpita Roy when introducing herself in 2007 to a roomful of particle physicists. At the time, those scientists were racing to finish work on the world's biggest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

The LHC carries the hopes of generations of physicists, who have designed it to reach energies never before achieved in a collider and — possibly — to produce a zoo of particles new to science. But the LHC is also a huge human experiment, bringing together an unprecedented number of scientists. So in recent years, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers have been visiting CERN to see just how these densely packed physicists collide, ricochet and sometimes explode.

"The LHC allows a unique sociological study of how an experiment develops in real time: how scientists form opinions, make technical decisions and circulate knowledge in such a big project," says Arianna Borrelli, a particle physicist and philosopher of physics at the University of Wuppertal in Germany.

Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's research director, is acutely aware of the importance of cohesive collaboration. "This is an incredible social experiment," he says, noting that roughly 10,000 physicists around the world are taking part in the LHC experiments and 2,250 of them are employed at CERN. Just reflecting on the size of the collaboration he co-manages makes Bertolucci's head ache. "Imagine the organization needed when 3,000 people all want to know in advance if they can go home for Christmas," he says.

Managers at CERN have endured a series of headaches since the LHC powered up in September 2008. A little more than a week after the collider came online, a faulty electrical coupling caused an explosion that brought the project to a halt for 14 months. That setback demoralized the scientists at CERN, particularly the graduate students, who worried about the fate of their degrees, says Roy. A graduate student herself, from the University of California, Berkeley, Roy has been camped out at CERN on and off for three years to observe the "language, taboos and rituals of this exotic community".

The collider restarted in November 2009 and should gather two years of data before it shuts down for a year of scheduled upgrades in 2012. Next month, the LHC is expected to achieve record energies of 7 teraelectronvolts. The collider will reach such an extreme by accelerating two beams of protons to nearly the speed of light and then sending them in opposite directions around a 27-kilometre underground track. The beams cross each other at four spots along the ring, and it is here that the real science happens, within giant detectors surrounding each collision zone. The two biggest particle detectors, A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, are the size of apartment buildings and each boasts a team of nearly 3,000 people.

Population explosion

Each generation of collider has brought a jump in the size of the experimental collaborations (see graph, below), a trend that provides ample opportunities for researchers interested in human interactions. Karin Knorr Cetina, a sociologist at the University of Constance in Germany, is one of the few social scientists to have witnessed this growth directly over multiple generations. She has been studying CERN's collaborations for almost 30 years.

When Knorr Cetina first arrived, physicists there were working on a smaller collider and their detector teams were less than one-tenth the size of today's. "In those days 100 people in a team was considered huge," she says. Knorr Cetina says she was met with friendly bemusement by particle physicists, who were helpful, but thought of a sociologist "as a poor cousin of real scientists".

That attitude continues today, says Roy. "What can you say? Physicists are professionally contemptuous," she says.

Social scientists say they earn the trust of the physicists at CERN by immersing themselves in the culture, just as they would with any other population. Knorr Cetina used this approach to unravel the politics of peacekeeping among the thousands of scientists at the lab.

When she first started, she says, "I expected the same lines of command we know from other complex organizations — industry or government". But she didn't find that hierarchy at CERN. Although there are spokespeople who hold positions of authority in the collaboration, there is no top-down decision-making because there are so many highly specialized teams working on different parts of the detector. Knorr Cetina says that at CERN, "the industrial model cannot work. One human simply cannot make technical decisions on such a large scale.

CERN's unconventional structure stems in part from its history and philosophy. The lab was established on the Swiss–Franco border in 1954 to unite a Europe that had been fractured by war. "It's a place for global collaboration, where science exists beyond the politics of nationality," says Bertolucci. But within the lab, the idealism runs into the tensions of conducting actual research. "The paradox is that science is not democratic; we don't determine who is right by a vote or the majority decision."

“It's a cognitive bubble that you can't escape — that you don't want to escape.”

If not an industry or a democracy, what is the structure? Knorr Cetina says that CERN functions as a commune, where particle physicists gladly leave their homes and give up their individuality to work for the greater whole. The communal lifestyle is encouraged by the fact that the laboratory stands on its own international territory. "Even the Swiss police cannot come in and grab us," says Bertolucci. It has its own restaurants, post office, bank and other facilities. "You can live forever within CERN, without ever needing to visit nearby Geneva," says Knorr Cetina. "It's a cognitive bubble that you can't escape — that you don't want to escape."

Bertolucci says that this immersion is essential to CERN's success as a global enterprise. "People coming here from around the world don't feel like they are visiting someone else's country, they feel they are coming home."

"The laboratory does feel like a commune with so many people coming from around the world to work towards a collective goal," says Kevin Black, a postdoc with the ATLAS collaboration.

Sacrificing identity

Around the CERN campus, the atmosphere is welcoming, and its two restaurants live up to their reputation for offering some of the best food of any physics canteen in the world. But it takes more than comfort and the promise of discovering new particles to persuade thousands of physicists to join the commune. Knorr Cetina points to the organizational structure of the collaborations as a factor that leads physicists to sacrifice their identity to the LHC.

As a window into that structure, she describes the evolution of the LHC's largest experimental collaboration, the ATLAS team, which she has studied since its formation in the late 1980s from the remnants of older groups at CERN. ATLAS will be looking for, among other things, the elusive Higgs particle, hypothesized to give other elementary particles their mass.

During the 'birth stage' of the ATLAS collaboration, LHC management had to choose between various proposals for detector designs offered by rival groups at different universities and institutes. It might seem that the most obvious and efficient strategy would be for a committee of experts to a make a decision about which technology to use. However, the ATLAS group did not take that path, says Knorr Cetina.

Instead, the birth stage was a laborious process in which competing groups were repeatedly sent back to retest their designs, until they all agreed on a single plan. In this way, they avoided alienating groups and losing the manpower needed to build the detector. "It's an interesting strategy to get groups to accept losing out, yet remain committed to the collaboration," says Knorr Cetina.

This prolonged process inevitably delayed construction. Physicists at the lab laugh that there are still brochures at CERN that advertise "the start-up of the LHC coming in 2000" — a deadline that was missed by almost a decade. Such delays were no doubt frustrating for physicists but, at least in some cases, they were the necessary cost of keeping the collaboration together, says Knorr Cetina.

Albert de Roeck, deputy spokesman for the CMS experiment, notes other practical reasons behind the strategy. "Spokespersons are considered to be the 'bosses' of the experiment, but we actually have no means of enforcing tyrannical decisions," he says. In industry, if people don't agree with you and refuse to carry out their tasks, they can be fired, but the same is not true in the LHC collaborations, he says. "On our experiments, physicists are often employed by universities, not by us."

John Krige, a historian at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who studied the collaboration structure at CERN before the formation of ATLAS, agrees that there is no simple top-down decision-making at the laboratory. However, he notes that the word "commune" implies that there is little rivalry between the members of the collaboration. By contrast, he says, the collaboration thrives on healthy "organized competition" between subgroups working to build different components for the detector quickly and effectively.

Now that the collider is running, there are other policies within the collaborations that reinforce the communal over the individual, essentially divorcing physicists from ownership of their research, says Knorr Cetina. All papers containing experimental results must list the name of every member of the thousands-strong collaborations alphabetically by country, giving little hint of the real originators of the work.

"This could never happen in biology, where the most intense disputes are about publishing, and reputations are established by your publications," says Knorr Cetina, who has also studied the lab life of molecular biologists.

"So much of the narrative of science is about the genius of the individual — even the Nobel can only be shared by three people," says Maria Ong, a sociologist at TERC, an education research collaborative in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The LHC is an amazing anti-example of that."

Who can review?

Collective authorship opens up questions about the construction of knowledge in particle physics, says Peter Galison, a historian at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In February, the CMS collaboration published its first paper based on an analysis of LHC data that showed that a larger than expected number of exotic particles, known as mesons, were produced during the first collisions (CMS Collaboration J. High Energy Phys. doi:10.1007/JHEP02(2010)041; 2010). The paper includes 15 pages of author names, totalling between 2,200 and 2,300 people (the collaboration leaders are unsure of the exact number). "Can it be said that any one person truly understands all the knowledge that it contains?" says Galison. And who, he asks, can externally review the papers produced? "You reach a stage where the only people qualified to truly review the work are within the collaboration," Galison says.

“The only people qualified to truly review the work are within the collaboration.”

De Roeck says that the size of particle-physics collaborations does inevitably affect peer review. The CMS paper went through months of rigorous checks and revisions during its internal review process; by contrast, it passed through external peer review by the Journal of High Energy Physics in just four days. "External peer review for publication in journals is becoming less important because it is far less stringent than our internal peer-review process," he says.

Although the collaboration's strength comes from stressing the communal good, recent developments may strain the system. A rising number of particle physicists are turning to the individualistic pursuit of blogging. Although most posts are not controversial, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, has had to deal with cases in which physicists broke ranks and leaked information before their collaborations were ready to release it. James Gillies, CERN spokesman, says that the European laboratory has no desire to censor blogs, but it does provide strict guidelines about when it is appropriate to discuss results.

Even with these guidelines in place, the blogging phenomenon at CERN — and its possible tension with official lines of communication — is something that will be closely followed by Borrelli as part of a team of more than 20 historians, philosophers and sociologists — "a huge collaboration in the humanities," Borrelli jokes — that will begin investigating the LHC this year, with funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

"This will be a real-time study of how knowledge circulates in such a big project," says Borrelli. She is particularly interested in the immediacy of publication in the physics community via the online repository arXiv.org, where a hundred or so non-peer-reviewed high-energy physics preprints are deposited every day and are openly accessible. "How do physicists select papers and orient themselves given this onslaught of information?" she asks.

Social scientists are looking beyond the professional lives of the scientists to assess how the collective collaborations affect the physicists on a personal level. Knorr Cetina says that many particle physicists are plagued by nightmares in which their actions cause the project to fail. "These are the nightmares of those who perceive themselves as a link in a chain, not as an individual," she says.

Abnormal stress

Knorr Cetina argues that the anxiety displayed by particle physicists is heightened beyond the usual career stress because they strongly identify with the detector (K. Knorr Cetina Interdiscipl. Sci. Rev. 32, 361–375; 2007). "This is an object that they built with their hands, but they describe it as a friend," says Knorr Cetina. When reporting their nightmares, physicists described being shaken by the imagined loss of the detector as though it was the death of a beloved family member — something not routinely seen in other experimental scientists.

De Roeck agrees that physicists at the LHC are under extreme pressure. Each experiment is made up of subgroups who oversee different components of the experiment and no subgroup wants to be the weakest link that lets thousands of other people down. But he cautions against making too much of the relationship between experimenter and detector. "I wouldn't go so far as to say that physicists have some psychological problem where they start mistaking the detector for a friend and talking to it," he says with a laugh.

Ultimately, it is the ever-growing detectors that are to blame for the increasing size of collaborations in particle physics. The invention of the bubble chamber for tracking the path of particles in the 1950s required groups of 10 physicists — at the time thought to be a large collaboration.

Physicists are already making plans for the next generation of particle accelerators. But these may provide little new territory for social scientists to explore. "There won't be another step up in collaboration size to 25,000 physicists," says Galison. "We're hitting the limits of people in high-energy physics."

MariMite Live Action

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-03-24/maria-sama-ga-miteru-novels-have-live-action-film-listed

Live-Action Catholic school lesbians? :V

Niconico Medley

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm10111236

K-ON!!!!

AIR!!!

MIKU'S CHAIN GIRL!!!

KAGUYA'S THEME!!!

BAKEMONOGATARI!!!

...but dude WTF, still no GUMI? щ(ﾟДﾟщ)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Metal Gear Solid

No, I don't play this game, but:

http://kotaku.com/5500329/metal-gear-solid-peace-walker-goes-unexpectedly-pop

What?!? This is like, it's like, as if some famous pop singer voiced an official theme for an operating system mascot in some big name corporation!!!

...wait a minute...:V

I still won't be getting this, the character doesn't pass my moe standards for a few reasons I won't really explain here, but it was still pretty "...wat"

Hmm... Probably not

http://kotaku.com/5499389/why-youre-going-to-buy-super-street-fighter-iv

I just find it ironic that everything they say here was pretty much done on IaMP already. :V

FFXIII Ethnicities

Nothing really useful here, just:

-Lightning and Serah both look very Asian. Too bad The voice actors make them sound American and not Asian... even FOB would be cool, I think
-Snow is definitely an American Caucasian . In the Japanese version they just make him sound like a Yakuza.
-Vanille and Fang (as someone told me) are supposed to be Australian. After telling me this I can see the resemblance now. I can't really see any other method of classifying them, just that they certainly don't look Asian.
-Hope looks reasonably Asian. Or maybe, a second generation Asian born in America.
-Sezh is obviously a Black American (or Black anything, really).

Mosquito Vaccines

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/03/researchers-turn-mosquitoes-into.html?rss=1

"A group of Japanese researchers..."

Another "Oh Japan" moment.

Followed appropriately with "Why are you so cool".

FFXIII self reference

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=40DCB3F0E36B6F59

So I can sort of watch the japanese parts at the same time. :V

EDIT: RANDOM UNRELATED

Watching the Odin taming battle reminded me how much I was "OMG WTF" when I finally got him, considering I only had FIVE SECONDS LEFT on the damn doom counter. D:!!!!

EDIT2: RANDOM UNRELATED TWO

"Ojii-san, Ganbatte!!"

Oh man, I love the Sazh-Vanille duo. :V

Homework Copying

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/homework-copying-0318.html

Well I have to say a lot of people do these kinds of "this is obvious" research (like Kotaku reporting that games lowers people's academics records) but I'm pretty surprised MIT did something like that. Their study is pretty interesting though, like:

"It found that the copying of problems that require algebraic responses correlated with two letter grades’ worse performance on problems demanding similar responses on a final exam (but found that copying did not adversely affect grades on conceptual questions)."

SO IN OTHER WORDS, its okay to copy your homework if you're going to be BSing most of the time, it seems. :V

Some habit there. Well, everything else in the article seems pretty obvious. But MIT is a school too so I think it wants to know these kinds of things.

Meme-stealing

:V yes totally from her.

As you can see it seems this can apply to a variety of topics so I'm just going to cover the two most popular fads for japanese fanboy otakus right now. I was also going to do KEY or KyoAni but I don't think I really know them THAT well. Except for twisted conceptions of them beating up each other from a particular game I play.

btw "LOVE" is such a rediculously strong word. I'd rather prefer "like" so interpret "love" as "like", I don't truly have romantic feelings towards any of them.

Except GUMI.

VOCALOID
1. The first character I first fell in love with: Hatsune Miku. Well, anyone who has ANY exposure to VOCALOID and likes it, would probably say that, I'm pretty sure. V:
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now: Megpoid GUMI. WHO KNEW a character with such poor design sounds so awesome?!?
3. The character everyone else loves that I don't: Meiko, I'm not quite sure why people like her (aside from her image), her voice is pretty bad since its the first VOCALOID.
Actually, I don't quite get the appeal of miki, either.
4. The character I love that everyone else hates: Kaai Yuki? More like everyone ignores her...
5. The character I used to love but don't any longer: Kagamine Rin... kind of like the opposite of GUMI, when she first came out I thought she was cute, but then I think I didn't like her shorts or something. Meltdown was good, but I don't really like too much other stuff besides Meltdown.
6. The character I would shag anytime: That's a terrible terminology.
...
GUMI
7. The character I'd want to be like: Kiyoteru!! Teacher Vocaloid ahoy!!
8. The character I'd slap: Kaito. And maybe every fangirl that hounds after him.
9. A pairing that I love: GUMI + anyone... :V Probably GuMiKu the most just because GUMI gets more popularity that way. :V Oh! And Gakupo + GUMI have cute pics on Pixiv.
10. A pairing that I despise: Hmm... I don't think I hate anyone in particular... I just don't really care about anyone else besides GUMI. :P
11. Favorite character: WELL GEE I DON'T KNOW, WHAT DO YOU THINK, MY AUDIENCE?
12. My five favorite characters: GUMI, Kaai Yuki, Hatsune Miku, Kiyoteru, Hiyori (UTAU, terribly unpopular though)
13. My five least favorite characters: Meiko, miki, TaoLuka, that tsundere version of Miku, That weird transgender character they made... wtf who is s/he
14. Which character I am most like: Kiyoteru maybe? But not as mature, I guess. :x
15. My deep, dark fandom secret: It wouldn't be a secret if I told you? (Actually I just can't think of one right now.)

Touhou
1. The first character I first fell in love with: Alice Margatroid, I saw her on the plooshmer wiki icon and thought she was cute. :V
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now: Reisen. I blame Scarlet Weather Rhapsody for making her a loli.
3. The character everyone else loves that I don't: Utsuho. I dunno people, she seems pretty stupid being a bird-brain, so what if she has a nuke on her right arm, that just makes it all the more scary...
4. The character I love that everyone else hates: Satori and her sister seems pretty unpopular. However I might be wrong since I saw some people fanboying over her recently. :V
5. The character I used to love but don't any longer: Hong Meiling... she really never did anything wrong, just... more characters came in...
6. The character I would shag anytime: INTERPRETED NOW AS VISUALLY, THE CUTEST: Hina the curse Yokai. GUMI and her Gumiracle has nothing to do with it. Well, maybe.
7. The character I'd want to be like: Satori, she has freakin' mind-reading powers!!!
8. The character I'd slap: Marisa? Stop picking on Alice! D:
9. A pairing that I love: Haven't really seen enough pairings... Sakuya + Hong Meilin seem the funniest though.
10. A pairing that I despise: Hmm... Maybe Marisa + Reimu just because it seems soooooo cliche...
11. Favorite character: Probably Kaguya Houraisan.
12. My five favorite characters: Kaguya Houraisan, Alice Margatroid, Reisen U Inaba, Satori Komeji, Shanghai.
13. My five least favorite characters: Utsuho, that jealousy Yokai on stage 2 of SA, Nazrin that rat thing from UFO, Eirin (too old, I think), Kanako
14. Which character I am most like: Sometimes like Alice, sometimes like Marisa.
Like MegaMari!!
15. My deep, dark fandom secret: I suck at these danmaku games.

EDIT: SO APPARENTLY SHE WAS SUPPOSED TO ASSIGN ME THE FANDOMS but I only have 2, so she'll assign the last one. She says those two were ones that she'd pick anyway.

And so that's how it goes so if moar people want to do this tell me and I will torture you with fandom questions.

Leeches and Reproduction

http://today.caltech.edu/today/story-display-blurb?story_id=43023

ITS NO LONGER JUST A JAPANESE-ADULT-FANTASY THING

...ok that might have been stretching it just a bit.

Japanese Vanille

This is turning into a twitter rather than an actual blog.

Actually its always kind of been like that... :V

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ChYEcZVBaU

Maybe I am biased from all the anime I watched, but for whatever reason I think the Japanese Vanille is much more natural. Also, more onee-chan like than I anticipated. I blame the shota.

Regardless, Japanese or English, I like Vanille's "I actually know more than you guys think but I'll just pretend I'm ditzy and stupid" attitude throughout the game right now :D

Also appreciating Sezh's "OH SHI----" moments. Man if I can control who I play throughout the games those two would be the only two characters I'd ever need.

EDIT: ACTUALLY I'D ALSO PREFER A SERAH THANK YOU VERY MUCH--

I heard there was rumor of a FFXIII-2, as cheesey as it sounds. (I think at best it should be downloadable content, and free at that please :V) IF THERE IS THEY BETTER MAKE SERAH A PLAYABLE CHAR THOUGH D:

Final Fantasy XIII First Impressions

By First Impressions I really mean first impressions (like after 1-2 hours of playing). DUDE I'M NOT HARDCORE GAMER THAT GOES FOR 20 HOURS WITHOUT FOOD OR SLEEP :(

1.) WHAT DID THEY DO TO VANILLE'S VOICE. WHAT DID THEY DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?!?!? I haven't heard the Japanese version but :( She sounds like an old voice actor doing someone young. Or at least relatively old. Why can't they have legit 14 year olds voicing her???
2.) Snow is a "I WANNA BE A HERO" moron that seems like some combination of PJBW and PMA.
3.) Emo Shota is Emo.
4.) Other characters so far are satisfactory. I think the voice matchup with Sezh is pretty good probably because they modelled him after a foriegner, and I like his sense of personality. Also, Imoto's eyes are big. BUT YOU CAN'T PLAY HER!! Or so I've heard. щ(ﾟДﾟщ)!!!!
5.) So the gameplay seems to use time (chaining attacks) as the domain instead of space(choosing between different characters to do different attacks). I can't comment too much about the battle system yet since I haven't gotten access to all the options, but I sure hope they actually let me choose who I can control later on...
6.) Someone told me that the gameplay is like a "tunnel" or something where you just head for one direction, rather than having a world map or something where you can optionally choose where to go. Certainly I suppose for right now it seems that way, where its just basically Dungeon crawling without much to do except to collect the occasional item or save in the occasional save spot. I think again this is to promote the whole "time" domain rather than "space" domain, in that things progress linearly rather than being spread out and having options to do whatever you want and to complete them whenever you want. I think this is especially the case since all your stores are also your save spot, so you technically never need to go into a city. Like, ever.
However, its still very early in the game and maybe they do have something akin to a world map, and cities to go to. We'll have to see.
7.) You'd think by now that they could make the characters not run in such a funny and physics-defying way.
8.) WHAT DID THEY DO TO VANILLE'S VOICE?!?!?!?!? щ(ﾟДﾟщ)~!!!!!!!

Madobe Nanami Shiori

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwUoRzeeLsA

...Yea.


Nanami-Shiori. SHE'LL FREEZE YOUR CPU.


*gets shot for making incredibly lame joke*

"Oshiete Ageru" vs "World is Mine"

This had to be posted somewhere.

"Oshiete Ageru" is the second song on supercell's "Sayanora Memories" single.

"World is Mine" is a really popular Miku song (one of the first songs where I was actually really impressed by Miku's singing).

I was initially ranting to someone (well more like, the first person I could get my hands on) on how Oshiete Ageru was about 90% "World is Mine" recycled, which I thought was disappointing. Consequently, I can hear a bit more difference now that I play the two songs back to back, main difference being that Oshiete Ageru is more in the minor scale (or at least the minor feel), while World is Mine has more majority major scales.

...Still, I find the songs REALLY similar. Well, I think Ryo can do that since its all his music anyway. :V

Gosick

It's LOLI CONAN

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-03-15/gosick-mystery-novels-have-anime-in-the-works

...yea, that was random.

LOL-Lots of Laugh (Miku song)

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8033594

Posting this here because even though its not that great, it's still pretty, and I want to save it for future reference.

Unfortunately, I thought that the limit for favorite at Niconico was 100 videos per folder and that you can have up to 25 folders or something. Apparently, it's 100 videos total (and 25 folders total I believe)... D:!!!!

I have to clean out my favorites list. :(

Our Dog Coco Part 2

Desktop Wallpaper

I won't go spamming all the desktop wallpapers I use every time I change my wallpaper, but I just thought this was appropriate.

In case you didn't know the name of this blog, I named it "The Mysterious Box", which is a screenname I go under. I also call myself Enigmatic Cube. Consequently, the account to this desktop is named Cube.

Now we know what's in the mysterious box!

Courtesy of pixiv. :V

Stress and Romance

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/03/stressed-men-fancy-someone-diffe.html?rss=1

Oh research, why do we even bother confirming this? :V

Algorithms and Memory Reading

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/03/pardon-your-thoughts-are-showing.html?rss=1

this is EPIC RESEARCH TOTALLY WHAT I WANT TO DO

Kind of.

But epic nevertheless.

Fighting Game Players, and Why Lag Sucks

I have this strange obsession with categorizing things and each thing having its own special trait. Consequently I have both observed and discussed how different players in (doujin) fighting game communities interact with each other, so I thought I'd just write up some of my ideas on it. Inevitably, someone in the world has written up the same thing that I am going to write up right now, but oh well. This is just how I see and classify people. :V

Consequently, not everyone just falls ideally into one type. Many people have some or all of the traits that I'm going to mention soon. However, nearly every player has a trait that stands out the most, and thus placing them in a specific category that I am going to mention.

And because I like to use dramatic names, I will have a class for each type of player with the prefix "the" in front of it. And the name will be in bold.

The Trainer: A class blatantly taken from Pokemon. These types of players are probably the most common types of players you'll see in a fighting game community and is the standard "average joe" type player you probably expect to play if you're playing someone you don't know yet. Everyone pretty much starts off as a trainer. These people, very generally, want to play to improve their skills and to enjoy the game. They have some preference for winning (which is why they want to improve their skills) and they do feel disappointment for losing, but in the end they believe whatever they learned and how they can improve their game next time is most important. Their playstyle can be considered "normal", in that they use typical moves with some tactical tricks. They don't try to do something outrageous, but neither do they spam one move over and over again. They want to play to improve their game. They are usually more than happy to talk about the match afterwards, and some will admit their mistakes freely (others might be a little more embarassed by it, but overall not too affected).

The Sadist: A person who either likes to beat people up, or to annoy them. The type that likes to beat people up are typically pretty high level players, yet derive pleasure out of beating those that are lower than them, preferably significantly lower level than them. They don't care if the match was "fun" or not, nor do they care how they do it, they just want to win. If its a perfect all the more fun for them. However, another type of sadist (could possibly be in another category, but I thought it was similar enough) doesn't even care if they want to win, seemingly; it appears that these types of players just want to do something over and over again and see if it works. Even if it doesn't, they do, say, one attack over and over again. Of course, these types of players typically get on a lot of people's nerves, and no one wants to ever play them. These types of players are also the ones that will typically be spamming "Let's play " in chatrooms, and after a few rounds of games (either they leave and get bored, or the opponent leaves out of frustration) does not engage in any aftertalk, and a few minutes later start spamming "Let's play " over again. In general, these types of people discourage other players from playing the most.

The Troll: Possibly another kind of sadist, but kind of deserves a group of its own. These types of people almost never play the type of game they talk about, yet always trash talk it as if they played the game for their entire life and was tortured by it. They enjoy criticizing the game's weakest points and choose to ignore any good parts about it. The fact is its fine if a person dislikes a game, but these types will usually immediately reply "don't play that game" or something similar as soon as someone begins mentioning its name. Additionally, its possible to play trolls that may not dismiss the game, but enjoy criticizing players instead. These are especially types that will be like "this game is a mashing game" and "You're mashing" without providing any helpful criticism at all. Again these types of players are ones many people do not enjoy playing.

The Pyrotechnic: These people like flashy things. Level 3 supers, long combos, Fatal Attacks. If they get the chance, they want to execute things. They still enjoy winning, but sometimes if they get off that level 3 super it doesn't matter to them afterwards if they win or lose, they just feel that they won a moral victory. Generally Pyrotechnics develop after they have a pretty good handle of the game, so they're often fairly high levelled. These types of people are generally fun to play with, even if they are high level and you're not, because what they do typically is just so pretty to watch. Consequently, these types of players amuse the spectators the most as well, and do well in bringing people into the game that they play. For the record, nearly all Japanese players are Pyrotechnics.

The Theorist: A type of player that, possibly surprisingly, does not really like to play other people (at least on the extreme side). A true hardcore theorist lives in the practice mode realm and frame dataset pages, trying to test and perfect a specific string of commands. Their favorite thing to do is make combo videos. The theorist has the same obsession with perfection as, say a mathematician, and believe from their dataset that this is, theoretically, possible, so they should try and execute it. A theorist may or may not like watching other replay videos; on one hand, they can learn of different combination techniques that they didn't think of before, but on the other, they may take pride in discovering a specific string for themself, and want to show people off as being original for having thought that up.

The Experimentalist: An offshoot of the theorist is the experimentalist. These people also like to come up with theories on what works and what doesn't work, but they want to apply it to actual matches. It could be said that if the theorist is a mathematician, the experimentalist is an engineer. They like to use what could work, and then try it out in battle. If it works, great; if it needs tweeking, so what? And if it doesn't work, oh well, it was tried. Experimentalists are typically known to do sometimes crazy things in matches that are not always the most efficient way of doing things. They can also sometimes be seen as pyrotechnics, but generally they're not trying to impress anyone but themselves. In fact, sometimes an experimentalist may seem boring, possibly because he is trying to do one move over and over again just to confirm if it works (or doesn't work). Experimentalists generally are the first to discover if a particular technique is rather effective for a character, though. In fact, experiments are avid admirers of "accidents" where they discover something new which they didn't expect to happen or they accidentally do a move that turns out to be really effective. Theorists, on the other hand, would more likely be turned off by accidents, and rather look at the frame data to come up with these discoveries. For the record, I'm probably best classified as an experimentalist, which is why this section is so huge.

Why Lag Sucks.

Lag sucks because it brings down everyone on that list except for Sadists. In lag, Trainers cannot improve their skill because they are not sure if something they do works only in lag, or something they can't do is because of lag. Trolls hate everything so lag really just gives them another excuse to hate. Pyrotechnics dislike lag because it becomes more difficult for them to execute that level 3 move of fatality attack at the right time, thereby reducing their flashiness. Theorists do not enjoy battling in the first place, and would hate it even more if the moves they are trying to do are failing because of lag. Experimentalists are similar in that respect. Even accidents are usually no longer positive, and typically means you're a sitting duck while the other person beats on you.
Only Sadists benefit from lag. They can do one annoying move over and over again and possibly win from that. Since they only enjoy beating people up or being annoying, this is considered their playing field. This reason, along with anonymity, might be why it seems like there are so many more sadists on the internet than anywhere else.

Mangaka Idols

http://kotaku.com/5489757/chinas-cutest-comic-book-artist/gallery/

From one of the comments on this topic:

"Why do Asians age slower? I mean, I have Asian friends who are in their 20s and they look like they're still in high school!"

*appears to be a victim of this*

On another note, if a good amount of asian people appear decently younger than they actually are, I suppose the Japanese Legislature about the "no H of underage children" isn't going to do too much since we all look pretty young anyway! It will probably only take out those that look obviously like 5 year olds or something.

:V I hope I can be a high school student forever!

Japanese Schoolgirls

http://kotaku.com/5490957/my-wife-and-japanese-schoolgirls

So a game site blogger writes a novel about Japanese Schoolgirls.

...


DIVERSITY? MAYBE?

...or maybe just, "what?" :V

Our Dog Coco

Bungaku Shojo- First Volume

...To Be Released on my birthday.

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Girl-Suicidal-Mizuki-Nomura/dp/0316076902/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268167575&sr=8-1


OMG

I FEEL FATED

GUESS WHAT I WANT FOR MY BIRTHDAY THIS YEAR

Solicitors

EDIT: Spelling error. щ(ﾟДﾟщ).

EFZ Combos 3

Yuu Asakawa

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-03-04/anime-expo-to-host-voice-actress-yuu-asakawa

LUKA-SAN AT AX

Not exactly GUMI, but a vocaloid nonetheless!!

But because its not Megumi I'm not going out of my way just to buy Vocaloid Luka version and hope to get it signed by her. >.>

EFZ Combos 2

Follow up useless blabble with a useless comic.


BTW Minagi has THE BEST Instant Cancel poses in the entire game. Who can do better than a sideways BANZAI "\o/" or an aerial "o shi my skirt--"

Lots of stuff on Society these days

Some recent person at Kotaku posted something (http://kotaku.com/5484581/japan-its-not-funny-anymore) about Japan's culture/environment/something and how it bothers him or her. While reading the blog one could tell it's really just a rage-rant by a very typical foreigner living in Japan, although for whatever reason I found it kind of amusing to read. There are some points I disagree with (although I found his anime rant really entertaining, its pretty interesting of him to make that his first point and shortest point since he probably knows a lot of people will disagree with him on that point, yet also wants to emphasize that anime isn't the important part of his rant). There are also points which I would understand his frustrations. But I think what shines out in his rant, and what is seen in a lot of aspects, is how much society is influencing an otherwise independent individual.

Of course this isn't a new topic at all. Books are always being written on this kind of theme. But I still think its interesting to wonder about, when the individuals stop making up society, and society starts making up the individual. What I think is most significant, and probably most problematic, is that most of the time individuals don't seem to know they're being affected. In a blatant example, communism is the concept of society overtaking the individual, yet (at least in the past) people are so hateful towards communism that they begin to have a collective, societal mind against the concept of communism as well. Which is communism against communism! Well, probably not quite the most accurate way to term it, but I think the image is there. "Communism is a bad thing where government/society tells you what your position is and what you should do. So, you should think Communism is a bad thing! Or else you will be labeled as a Communist and be slandered!"

I think I used a particularly outdated example but I feel that the irony was worth looking into. Consequently I also don't think I haven't been completely immune to society's influence. Well, its not only impossible to be immune, but its a necessity to be brought up with society and have some of its thoughts instilled into one's minds. The whole "genetics vs. environment" is pretty much based on this issue. Yet again, there seems to be some limit where society just seems to be controlling its individuals too much, everyone wants to think the same way, and when people don't think the same way they all want to either exile them or force them to think the same way. This phenomenon is probably stronger in some places than in others. I can probably be pretty thankful that my environment isn't strongly like that, so that I can still have some liberties without people forcing me (too much) into doing this or that.

Its also worth noting that some people may just integrate and play along with society much more easily than others. Perhaps this ranter couldn't quite accept, or integrate, into the environment around him so that's what made him frustrated. And yet there's also the thought of not wanting to be integrated into that kind of environment (which is probably what he is thinking) that is also stopping him, and also making him so critical. Japan, I think, is not really the one to blame, although he just happens to live in it, people just happen to idolize it, so it just happens to be a hot topic he can write about (even though kotaku is a gaming news site, and the topic of hating Japan is not really that related). I think its just the mindlessness he hates, the "oh everyone is doing it so lets all do it" which is prevalent not only in Japan but anywhere you go in the world. A lot of people want people to start thinking for themselves. To stop blindly listening to what other people say. Yet also not to just blindly ignore what other people say either. I think they want people to make judgements on their own, and come to their conclusions because of that.

Yet, the only people who agree with these kinds of people, are the people who already think like that. And in a way that's a societal group in itself, promoting that kind of thought with others. It's just a constant paradox circle, that keeps going and is ending up nowhere. Just like this rant. I really have no idea what I was talking about. Something about society, I think. :V

Your Community tells you what you can do

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/editorial/2010-03-02/7

General summary for those who don't know: A guy with loli H got his materials found out by a mailman (or something), and is now getting procescuted by society around him because of it. This is commentary from his attorney.

While it seems quite intimidating that the opinions of your community around you can convict an otherwise completely innocent person, I think there is some vague basis behind this. Something along the lines of thinking that a community that believes this kind of material is bad, will let everyone know that it is bad so such an action will never come to light. At least I think that's the moral thought behind people who may think something shouldn't be allowed when there is otherwise no other hard, concrete evidence to indicate a crime.

And yet, even though we want to procescute people for reading/viewing crime-like activities, crime still exists in America? One would say we should be focusing on the prosecution of actual criminals rather than wasting time on hikikomoris that have nothing else to do but than to buy H, but I imagine that in itself is a lot harder to do. Still, it really seems paradoxial sometimes. Japan is being pressured to stop a lot of their games, while America is seemingly putting a lot of effort into this rather than an actual improvement of the crime system (unjustified, I may be wrong in this, this is just what my opinions are from what I've seen). Although on an equal effort it does seem like the anime/online community that we have ARE trying to push some effort in the opposite direction to prevent "the other side" from making everything they believe is morally wrong into an actual crime.

Fat Rats skewing results

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100302/full/464019a.html?s=news_rss

Long story short, since mice and rats have constantly supply to food and are confined to a small cage, they are getting fat and this is throwing off the results of some studies.

Although, I think these rats make excellent models of a typical American, so I don't think we should throw away all those results just yet!

EFZ Combos