Akurasu Blog

Happy 2012 Everyone!

So I have this here neglected blog that I want to try to update it a bit more often. And to do that, I’ll need something to talk about.

So how about some New Years Resolutions?

My only really goal for last year was simply to be better at Japanese. Not a very upwards goal but I’m slowly climbing the seemingly infinitely long stairs to fluency. I was pretty good at keeping up with my SRS decks almost each and every day of the year. I did drop RTK since I found my sentence deck far more interesting. (RTK is damn useful, but if it can’t hold your interest, you might as well find a new way to learn.)

Read more…

I recently finished watching Kobato. (Originally this was posted to Facebook, but I felt this deserved a repost to my blog, with some additions such as some fancy pictures.) This is the first CLAMP show I’ve seen in a long while (since Rayearth) that I’ve watch to completion. I’d say I overall enjoyed it. Certainly not a show for everyone, but if you enjoy shoujo & slice of slice anime, this wouldn’t be a bad pick. Read more…

So it seems my blog has been left out to dry. I’m going to work on fixing that, I originally started this blog so I could have a place to post my thoughts and show off some of my work. Probably the reason I stopped posting was due to social networks such as Twitter being so easy to use. However, with Twitter’s 140 character limitation there it is really hard to express myself sometimes. So I’m going to work on posting here a bit more often, I have plenty of things to still talk about.

In the past year or so I’ve done some programming work on an iPhone game called Circuit Swap, check it out, it’s a fairly clever puzzle game. I spent a good amount of effort leading the localization efforts for the game too. I’m not sure if those efforts turned out the best it possibly could but I certainly learned a lot in the process. This might be a topic I’ll expand upon more later.

If anyone remembers back to early March, I took a break from my Japanese studying so I could work on an AMV for Sakura Con 2009. For Sakura Con 2008, I submitted a Kanon AMV, which was okay. This year I was trying to go with a more universal idea and also use anime from various different sources. I actually spent about a week and a half thinking about possible sources for my video. I decided upon doing a Zombie video for the Commercial/Trailer category of the contest, using one of the awesome trailers for House of the Dead: Overkill. Guess what, the Japanese don’t have a lot of apocalyptic style Zombie anime. I did not have a lot of time, so I had to make use of what anime sources I could find and stretch them to work quite a bit. Read more…

I’ve been blogging about some of the notable things that happened to me at Game Developers Conference 2009. I’ve been a little slow due to simple laziness. Let’s see if I can still get through the whole GDC week before my memory degrades. I did take some decent notes for the whole week at least.

Ah, I had a funny little mixup on Tuesday. I was stupid and left my GDC work schedule in my hotel room. I knew today was the first day I had to work. Well, I kept track of when I needed to work and thought I could just use the master schedule to point me where I needed to be. Well, the master schedule had a bit of a typo. It said 30709. Apparently it should of said 300709 which means 3007 & 3009 two combine rooms. I was sent off to the North Hall to check in and North said “you don’t belong here”. And so I headed back to the Conference Associate lounge in West in confusion. Funny enough, 3007 is the room right across from the CA Lounge. Anyway, I got to my session late and I didn’t need to write on the Boo Boo sheet, since I was sent to the wrong location. (Actually, if I had my schedule on me, it wouldn’t of been an issue. So it is partially my fault too.) Read more…

I had a little unplanned marathon of the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya today. An anime about an eccentric girl who decides to start her own club to keep herself from being bored. Thankfully I wasn’t alone, I enjoy company when I watch TV, so having someone willing to watch something with you is always nice. I have had the LE boxes sitting around for quite some time. I just never had a real incentive to open the boxes up and watch them. Read more…

Monday and Tuesday at GDC are Summit and Tutorial days. I wasn’t actually scheduled to work Monday, so I was able to attend the entire Localization Summit. (Actually I missed half of a session after lunch. Either way, I was still able to hit all the sessions.) Thinking back on things, maybe I should of hit a different summit, oh well. The summit wasn’t bad, however it had a big focus on the European and expanding market. Obviously more money can be made, the more regions you release a game in. There was lots of talk about the need for efficient tools and the ability to localize for several different regions at the same time. Lots of companies seemed rather proud about the tools they had set in place, like Sony and Lionhead. I loved hearing about the process they had for everything, however I am a bit more interested in the Asian <-> English localization market, doing something more like the companies: Atlus U.S.A., Inc; Nis America, Inc; GaijinWorks; and 8-4, Ltd. (Sadly the last two don’t have real websites.) So some of this was not as interesting to me as it could of been. Read more…

Hey, I just got back from the Game Developers Conference yesterday. I 100% thought I would have time to blog while I was at GDC but I only managed to send out a handful of tweets. I guess that that is better then nothing. I did however keep a few notes so I would have something to write about when I got back.

So I guess I will be writing about everything about a week late.

Sunday. This was my first flight by myself. I had no problems with security or getting on my plane for my early 06:30 flight. I got to the Moscone West building around 10:00. I just hung around for a bit before I had to go pack bags. I was a bit nervous at introducing myself at first but everyone is so nice, the other Conference Associates volunteers and everyone else. I got a chance to take some photos while everything was being setup. Read more…

Hey everyone, as you should know I’m heading to GDC soon. So I will be trying something new so I can talk about what is going on. I got my hands on a Twitter account and I’ll try to be micro-blogging during the Conference. If you see on the right side here, I got a nice gadget that feeds off my Twitter account. Check it out.

If you don’t know what twitter is, watch this.

Twitter in Plain English

Haha, I’ve been going through my files, and found something I completely forgot about. here is a simple animation assignment I did for my After Effects class. I don’t think I spent more then a day to toss this together, so don’t expect much out of it.

Download: Akurasu_-_Tux_Ani.mp4
(Update, the flash player seems like it might be acting up, if this is the case I’ll try to fix really soon.)

I even have a super mini script I wrote for it.

Penguin Sitting
feet twitch
head rocks

stands up
walks forward off screen

Yeah, the script wasn’t very specific, but it was a simple assignment.

I still think it’s rather cute. For one day of work, what do you think?