Sidonia no Kishi

I've always said it and I'll say it again - don't you hate it when good things end? Although I suppose strictly speaking this isn't an end but simply that I must wait for the next chapter to be released, but I must say it turned out better than I thought it would. When I first started reading 'Sidonia no kishi', which I think just means 'knights of sidonia', I was unsure whether it would be good but it seems to have solved the issues I had with it.

[Benisuzume]

At first it was quite hard to follow what was going on, and this is coming from a person who has read manga for years and years and hasn't really had trouble following manga before. Also it did take me a little while to get used to the drawing style, the faces are very simple but the artist is lacking nothing in skill and puts plenty of detail into other aspects of the art, but I suppose it always takes a little while to adjust to the different art of each manga. 

But as with most stories the author tends to iron out all of the creases so to speak and the plot picks up speed and it actually turned out to be quite interesting! The story also got much easier to follow and everything made more and more sense as things were explained. 

[SPOILER ALERT]

I liked it when they explained where he came from, how he is a clone of the old ace pilot and how they changed his genes to make him immortal - although I'm not sure exactly what the author means by this, does it mean he won't die of old age? I know his wounds heal abnormally fast but he must still be able to die if he is chopped in half? I'm interested to know if there are any other quirks to his genetic manipulation! 

[Nagate Tanikaze & Izana Shinatose]

I also find the addition of whole scale genetic modification of the human race pretty cool! How there are those sisters who seem to have grown up in 5 years and have improved physical abilities since they were jumping from roof to roof? or maybe that just has to do with the different gravity? Also how they made so many people immortal and of course how they can change people to be able to photosynthesize which is pretty smart because they only need to eat once a week!

The Aliens are pretty mysterious and have crazy  powers. I think the name of the pilot who got cloned by the aliens (guana) is named Benisuzume and the author gives some of idea of what she is and what she is capable of but is also quite mysterious which makes me quite intrigued! The Chimeria Tsugumi is also really cool and thinking of how the author will use her in the plot is really interesting too!

All in all I think it gets much better after the first 10 or so chapters and recommend it as a great read!

Because I Can

I have been having headaches for quite a while now. They are one of the things that you don't appreciate not having until you have them, and then once they leave they can be forgotten and you don't appreciate not having them once again. But I suppose that is the same for a lot of things, people don't think about how other people are suffering, or they don't understand and so they don't really sympathise. Well I can say that I now sympathise with those people who have chronic head aches.

Well anyway, I've been learning Japanese recently and it is so cool! Not even my headaches can blunt my passion for the Japanese language. The reason I am undertaking said study is because I'm going over there at the end of the year and also because I love Japan! I say this but of course I've never been over there so I can't say that in full honesty but I can say that I love anime, manga and all the little cultural things I've learnt about Japan.

[http://www.humanjapanese.com/home.html]

I'm finding the language really interesting, the characters that I'm learning called hiragana remind me of codes I used to use when I was a kid so it's kind of fun in a secret way. Of course there are all these differences like Japanese don't have certain sounds in their alphabet and they pronounce things differently but that just makes it more interesting! I'm using a cool app on my Ipad that my brother Tobin told me about - it's called Human Japanese and I was using the Lite version but that only goes up to chapter 9 and I'm just about there so I'll have to purchase it soon but I will do so happily since it has been really good so far!

My hair is also getting longer and I've had to put it in a pony tale more on the top of my head because it isn't long enough to start at the back - people keep saying I look like a samurai and that's cool with me because I love all things Japanese.

Well that's all for my very spontaneous blog post. Until next time!

Escaping the Bad

I have been having periods of love and depression concerning LoL since I last posted. It just so happens that I am in a good mood about it at the moment. You see yesterday morning I solo queued ranked and was doing well until a team mate decided he had better things to do than actually be at his keyboard so he went away from his keyboard and consequently we lost the game. It is quite frustrating when this seems to happen on a regular basis.

After that mornings loss I felt a little dispirited about playing at a bronze league level especially after reading a post about being stuck in bronze on reign of gaming. I began to fear that in all my games my team mates would be so bad that I would have no chance of winning consistently anymore, but then I played a game with Ashley last night.

In that game I got to play thresh which is pretty rare nowadays because he is banned almost every game I play, and regardless of a few mistakes on my part and Ashley's we still won by quite a large margin. This may have just been because of thresh being too OP or our jungles being quite good, but I think I realized something.

I realised that I made quite a few mistakes and the thought occurred to me that maybe I do deserve to be playing in bronze and if I actually do deserve that then how I can improve my game play enough to change that? It is amazing the difference it makes to how I see it when my bronze team mates make mistakes - I now feel like I can't complain because I too make those same mistakes occasionally and until I raise my game then I shouldn't be worried about my team mates losing my games for me, I should focus first on making sure I am doing everything possible to win my games for myself. 

On that note Ashley told me about LoL lectures (examples above) which I can't believe actually exist but they do. I only started watching the first one this morning but he outlined the differences between the leagues, and when he was talking about all the places where bronze players fail, well lets just say I felt very bronze at the time. I can now work on strengthening my own play now that I am aware of my own weaknesses.

And so the journey continues on the path to higher heights.

MOBA Revival

So I've had a change of mind about LOL, previously I was mourning because of my massive losing streak and I was even having second thoughts about continuing playing. You have to understand that the game I most played when I was growing up was Neverwinter nights, that was the game that I continually thought about during most of my waking hours. The game itself is based off Dungeons and Dragons rules so you have many different classes that you can choose to piece together, different skills, abilities and feats.

The complexity of thought that can be compacted into single character is immense, I would spend hours planning to character build only to see a flaw and have to plan it again until I had gotten the right balance and I would make many different character builds and then out of all the finished character builds I made I would pick some to play. Plus for every server there are different types of classes that are more dominant so I would make different characters for different servers. To sum it all up - the game was one giant puzzle.

That is why I would usually never get into MOBA's, I mean you have to do some thinking about your champion before you play but the decisions you make about your build while you play must be quick, it isn't so much a puzzle that you ponder for hours as it is a very fluid environment that is constantly changing. You must adapt as the game moves forward, react to ambushes and plan your own and to top it all off once you finish the game you have to start all over again with no substantial increase in power (which goes against my MMO mindset).

Now I realize I have changed a lot in my gaming desires, I no longer want to immerse myself in a game, spending hours building up a single character. I now want a game that requires less time and requires more skill and intelligence which I believe LOL is. So this morning Ashley (my younger brother) asked to play with me again and I complied not really being that interested and in our first game one of our players was AFK and the whole game turned out to be a total mess, but I realized something important.

I had been taking them way too seriously, games are for having fun and I had been playing very seriously which equated to playing passive and not taking any chances, which is not good if you plan to have fun and neither is it good if you want to be a great player I believe. So with my new mindset I set into our second game and even though we lost overall I had a great time!

During the game Ashley and myself playing duo bot dominated our lane and mid was doing well too but sadly top wasn't doing so well and our team didn't really do much to help our singed against their nasus either so nasus ended up getting massive damage on his siphoning strike and won the game for the enemy. Even so the way I played that game, taking risks and not being so serious left me feeling much happier.

The third and last game I played this night was also duo bot Ash/Zyra with Ashley and we won at last! It was a bit embarrassing because we were a bit too highly ranked for them I think and ended up creaming them.

And so my journey in League of Legends continues!

My Father on His Day

Happy Father's Day Father! Well I was thinking about whether to make a card for my Dad but since I just randomly started this blog I figured I'd do a blog post about him instead! My dad is a pretty cool guy, and I'm only saying this because it's Father's day otherwise his head would grow so big he wouldn't be able to fit inside doors anymore, but once in a while he deserves a bit of praise.

My Dad's name is Arie, which is more of a nickname as his real Indonesian name is Indrarso (I think that is how you spell it) which I think is pretty damn cool. He was born in Indonesia but came over to Australia to get married when he was 27 and he didn't even speak English so the first few years were pretty hard on him, but my dad is a pretty tough guy so he was OK. My dad has always been a very selfless man, he talks about how having children changed him and has always let me and Tobin know how much he loves us. It makes me think about whether I will change the same way when I have children, but back to my dad.

I mainly only got to see him on the weekends when I was growing up and those were the happiest memories of my childhood, and until I got to live with him full time at the age of 15 I didn't really have the role model I needed. It's amazing how I changed in the years since I started living with my dad because before that I was quite the problem child. For my Dads patience and understanding I am eternally grateful.

I will always remember a conversation we had on the phone, I was across the other side of the country at the time, which was a major turning point in my life. It was for an English assignment - we had to write something about someone we really admired I think. I chose my Dad and so I called him up and we had a very long chat. He talked about his job which is actually very interesting because of the personal traits required to work like my dad works.

My dad is an IT help Supervisor (he has a different title that is long and convoluted and makes much less sense so I won't use that), and he talked about how he helps people. The main thing he said was that you have to think about the other person, when they are screaming at you, you have to wonder - why? You have to see where they are coming from and be patient. My dad is the man that his workers ask for help when there is someone really upset. My dad never claims to be amazingly clever, I think the main thing that is amazing about my dad is that he understands them and makes them trust that he is going to try to help them - and I think that is what they need the most.

Whenever I try to explain what he told me it never really comes out right, but it made me feel very humbled.

I love you Dad! I will never forget all the things you have done for me!

Happy Fathers day!

Getting Stomped in League of Legends

So I've been playing league of legends recently after being an MMORPG gamer for so many years and I'm having mixed feelings about it at the moment. You see I just recently got Ranked and I won 5 out of my 10 qualifiers mostly because I played 4/10 of those games as Thresh and he is so OP but now that I'm in ranked and i practically never get to play him my ability probably doesn't matched up to my ranking. I got into Silver V and while I seem to do OK most of the time I'm still getting used to draft pick so sometimes i get a really bad champion match up and it all goes to hell.

It's actually been pretty depressing because I've only had one more win after getting ranked which was pretty epic and enjoyable but thinking about all the games I lose now is rather depressing. I just played a game this morning and our mid didn't connect until like 10 minutes into the game or maybe longer? I can't recall. Anyway we were doing OK for 4 vs. 5 but we just couldn't keep it up. We made an admirable effort at least.

Another game I played the other day was even more Depressing because I picked adc (which is the attack damage carry for those who don't play) and the enemy chose my pick - Ezreal and since I don't have many adc champions I had to go with Tristana whom I have never played a game with before and it was a nightmare. I did ask to switch with someone but... my team mates were rather unresponsive to my pleas. 

All this has led me to think about Star Craft II. The good things about that game is that I can play 1 vs 1 and don't have to rely on team mates (I've always been more of a solo gamer), but if I want to play with one of my brothers I can always do 2 vs 2 with them. I think I prefer RTS (real time strategy) to MMO's just because I don't have the time to play and play and play anymore - MOBA are included with RTS in the short play time too which is another reason I started playing again. Also I feel the skill involved is so much more, like the multitasking involved in playing SC2 is immense and there is so much depth to the game and so many different ways to play! There is only one thing wrong with SC2.

My Girlfriend, Kim, Doesn't like me playing it because I get so focused I can't hear anything else and consequently ignore her. The concentration I pour into that game is crazy and I always get a rush! I never used to like playing it that much because I thought it was too stressful but lately I'm starting to wonder if I would like it, as long as I can calm down enough while playing. 

Ah well, we shall just have to wait and see what happens in my Gaming life.