Atelier Shiori

Akira on Older Girls

June 1, 2012 by chikorita157

In a post written by Akira about his interesting take on older girls, I kind of feel the same way. Although I prefer girls around my age, older ones tend to be more mature or sweet personalities. Also in some cases, people may look up to them as their role model. Azusa from The Idolmaster (pictured above) is probably a good example as she has a sweet personality and really good looks. Also, she’s voiced by Chiaki Takanashi, whom had other older sister type characters. For this reason, many of her fellow idols, especially Chihaya looks up to her. Takane also gets the same treatment, although she is a few years younger than Azusa.

Another good example is Sanae Furukawa in Clannad. Although she is a mom in her 30s or 40s, most view her as Nagisa’s older sister. She has a mature personality and knows how to cook anything except bread.

I think the main reason most anime focus on younger girls because the moe factor. Still, we shouldn’t overlook their uniqueness.

Update (June 2, 2012, 9:22 PM EDT): Apparently received a not so received response regarding my tastes for older anime girls is meh… Well don’t look at me, I only watched about 80 titles to date… but there are probably others I possibly overlooked. But then again, there isn’t a wrong or right answer.

Update #2 (9:29 PM EDT): Damn, how did I forget about Kotori… maybe because she doesn’t get a full on screen appearance in the game like the other characters. Even so, it’s sad we don’t know much about her, except being the secretary. I would like to see a bit more of her.

Update #3 (9:33 PM, 10:34PM): Come to think of it, Ohana’s grandmother, Sui from Hanasaku Iroha would probably fit the description better. Yeah she is 68 years old, but definitely mature and authoritative (you can probably see this with the slapping and strictness). Ritsuko also works as well since she is 19, pretty strict and likes being a producer more than an idol.

But excuse my accused trollage… it’s unintentional.

Thoughts on Comments: Of course what Akira did is somewhat similar to what Author from “Ani-nouto” as he does not allow comments on blogs. Since most people use social networks or Tumblr, these mediums can give a more interactive experience as the comments come directly from the person. However, keeping interactions to these mediums could alienate a few who don’t want to use these, but still want to comment (most namely people who want to remain anonymous or don’t want to make an account). It’s a double-edged sword, which is why I keep comments on… But hey, do what works best.

Apache2 and PHP5-FPM on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

May 6, 2012 by chikorita157

Ever since my move to a VPS, one of the drawbacks is that mod_php uses a lot of memory since Apache has to load the PHP stuff every time a page loads. This can be solved by switching to PHP5-FPM and Fast CGI, which gives the performance of Mod_PHP without the high memory usage.

What is PHP5-FPM? It’s a separate process on FastCGI and separately from the web server. It’s commonly used with Nginx, but I decided against using that server since it would cause a configuration nightmare, especially since my .htaccess files only works with Apache.
…

Summing up the JC Staff & Little Busters rage

April 11, 2012 by chikorita157

JC Staff vs disgruntled fans… surely, the posts in the blogosphere summarize this rage as pointless, overreacting and overblown

@chikorita157 It is a symptom of the attitude of entitlement enveloping the Internet community.

— drmchsr0 (@drmchsr0) April 12, 2012

Nothing more to say than that… of course, check out the take I have made (which is on my blog) along with Akira’s, Reckoner’s (Behind the Nihon Review) and Guardian Enzo.

Thoughts on Aniblog Tourney II Matchings

April 3, 2012 by chikorita157

The second AniBlog Tourney is finally here to bring the greatest e-drama and competitive spirit to the Aniblogosphere. Compared to the last one, there are now 128 participants and separated into four sections. Since the match ups are here, I may as well give a brief thoughts about my potential opponents.

Beginning Rounds
Draggle’s Anime Blog – It’s a fairly popular episodic blog which I’m familiar with, but don’t subscribe to. I feel confident that I can win this round based on the blog’s overall content consisting mostly of episodic and review posts. However, I shouldn’t get ahead myself until the tournament starts.

Anime/Otaku – It’s a fairly old Anime blog focusing primarily on editorial content and analysis. Given that I win the first round, this one might become a challenge.

Semifinals

Anime Princess – Our last competitor in the last tournament. Given that she succeeds in her matchup and I come up with come kind of miracle, I think competition will get rough and the likely hood of succeeding is kind of low since she makes creative posts and writes good reviews.

Analog Housou – Again, this blog mostly consists of reviews and various editorials… another tough blog to beat.

But yeah, given the predictions, I hope that I don’t end up losing in the first round like I did last time since I worked harder to improve my blog and experiment with new things in the past year. As they say, this is not a popularity contest. You should base your decisions on the content and to a lesser extent, the overall presentation. With that, I wish everyone luck and I will start critiquing blogs when the tournament begins on April 15th.

iM@S Oregon Trail

March 23, 2012 by chikorita157

I must be really bored to do this, but someone at Project iM@S did one, but didn’t survive. This brought a good idea since I happen to have the retro copy of it on one of my old Macintosh computers and this was the result…

Yeah, I killed off the whole Project Jupiter and Kuroi. Take that for bullying Chihaya, but that was too harsh and I purposely killed them off. For that, I did a serious run and I was successful.

Also did a Ryuuguu Komachi run and got a higher score, despite Ami had a broken leg at the end with the fact that it took longer to get there.

The original game is too easy. Need to play Oregon Trail II, which is a lot harder and see how it goes next time.

Yukiho Story Mode – Results

March 17, 2012 by chikorita157

Finally done my first play through of Idolmaster SP and managed to get a B on the first try. It’s a whole lot better than the C I got in Idolmaster 2 with my first unit back in January. The big difference is that it took less time to complete her story. Still, the hardest part is mastering the lessons. I need to eventually get a good every time before playing as Iori or my tension levels will drop like crazy.

Will get Missing Moon probably after Spring semester is over… but should be enough money left over for Pokemon Black/White 2.

P.S.: I find it amusing that Yukiho is completely infatuated with Takane… Should add her to the unit when I do her arc in the other game.

Idolmaster 2 Let’s Play Status

March 12, 2012 by chikorita157

_Volumes_External_HD_5_Idolmaster_Game_Videos_The_Idolmaster_2_Let_s_Play_-_Episode_1_Part_I.prproj-20120312-192817 — First part of the video completed, but nowhere to upload it.

Done the first part of the recording today… It will come in two parts, but don’t expect much commentary on the Lessons/Promotions since my Japanese still needs work.

So far, the song list is this:

Ready
Relations

The rest will be…

七彩ボタン
Do-Dai
Change!!!! (Yes, it’s quite obvious what I’m getting at)…

Still figuring out a place to upload it (I don’t want to upload it on Youtube, they might take it down despite being fair use for review purposes), but I’m releasing one part each week. For now, I’ll be recording up to Week 28 so I can catch up with the episodes (the recordings can get very long with the promotions and stuff). The second half will be recorded after Spring Semester is over and hopefully, I can obtain an HD PVR afterwards. This should give me some leeway in obtaining the Japanese PSN cards and an HD PVR for better production quality.

It finally came!

March 8, 2012 by chikorita157

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[singlepic id=47 w=320 h=240 float=]

After waiting about a month and a few weeks, I finally got Wandering Star in the mail. I’ll probably start playing it this weekend, but I need to borrow my sister’s PSP to play it.

As for Missing Moon, I’ll eventually get it somehow… but I need to save some money for Pokemon Black/White 2 in Japanese since I want to play that too. As for who I will produce, maybe the Twins first since they’re easy to handle, although I kind of like Iori now since I like tsundere characters.

Idiotic Comments from Phil Fish

March 7, 2012 by chikorita157

While surfing the Internet, I came across this article where the Fes creator, Phil Fish say that Japanese Games are (censored) horrible without giving any good reason. Not only I got enraged by his uncalled comments, but it ruins his credibility since what he said is unprofessional and also, he is in no position to say it considering that he took 5 years to make a 2D game that probably doesn’t deserve the awards it’s getting.

I do admit that Japanese Games have some problems like not localizing their games (eg Namco with their constant refusal to localize Idolmaster) and that Final Fantasy XIII is pretty mediocre, most of their games are rather good compared to what gets made in the West. I feel that western games are horrible because they play with the obsessions of violence, rehash of FPS games, poor quality mobile games that is filled with ripoff micro transactions, bad movie licensed games, ripoff DLCs over good gameplay and the list goes on. Needless to say, I feel that western gaming is going into a big rut, but that is my opinion. However, this doesn’t rule out all Western games since there are actually good ones out there such as Portal, Half-Life series, etc, but not that many.

I also like to point out that Japanese Games are made for the Japanese audience… so beggars can’t be choosers I suppose. Also, the fact that Sturgeon’s Law applies to everything, no matter where the game is made.

So in short, Phil Fish doesn’t know what he is talking about. He better off keeping his mouth shut and stop making Indie look bad.