Very excited for this Godzilla film directed by Hideaki Anno (Evangelion). Reviews from Japan have been glowing and I can’t wait to listen to the soundtrack by Shiro Sagisu.
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Category: Entertainment
They are really changing things up for Sun and Moon. Ice Ninetails and Sandshrew, trials with Pokemon as the final battle instead of trainers, and lots of multiform Pokemon.
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Stranger Things
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWxyRG_tckY
In a break from my usual posts recommending anime, I have an actual proper television show to talk about. Well, it’s a Netflix show, so who knows if that is technically television (or something superior)… but regardless, you should watch Stranger Things. Stranger Things is a Netflix original show which begins with the mystery of the disappearance of a child in a small town in America in the 80’s, but that mystery quickly becomes a supernatural sci-fi horror mystery. It is an homage to a bunch of stuff from the 80’s and gets inspiration from Stephen King, Dean Koontz, E.T. and more. But apart from a very interesting story and good atmosphere, there is some stellar acting especially from the children. I don’t want to spoil too much, but a great part of the show is showing a bunch of different sets of characters attempting to solve the mystery before their storylines intertwine for a satisfying conclusion.
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British Grenadiers on Loop
It is no secret that I am a fan of the… genre? Category? Whatever it is, the group of anime known colloquially as ‘cute girls doing things’. Recently I realised that I had not discussed one of the greatest shows in this category, which was fortuitous as its movie recently came out. Girls und Panzer is one of the standouts in this burgeoning category of shows, and much of that can be attributed to the fact that the thing that the girls are doing is engaging in friendly tank battles.
Friendly tank battles with realistic live ammunition, where the girls are literally only protected by the fact of plot armour.
To elaborate, in this weird alternate world tank battles using WWII-era and prior tanks has become a martial art practiced solely by females, called sensha-do. The main cast attend a school that is located on an aircraft carrier (along with a small town), and to save their school from being shut down must win the high school sensha-do championship. The studio behind GuP have their priorities straight, as a huge cast of tanks are depicted, from the eponymous Panzer IV to the dependable M4 Sherman to the fearsome Maus. The sound design on these tanks is especially top notch, though I cannot say if it is actually accurate to the tank.
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Not much room left, but I can’t help getting more.
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Thoughts on Metal Gear Solid V
So I’ve now finished Metal Gear Solid V and it was a pretty good game. Not better than The Witcher 3 for me, mainly because MGSV is flawed in its sparseness of story in the first half and a few other quibbles about its open world design. The rest of my thoughts on the game will be after the cut, but as a warning there will be major spoilers after the cut.
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SMASH x anisong
On Saturday, at the Sydney Manga and Anime Show, there was a concert. It was pretty amazing. First though, I’m so happy that I managed to get stuff signed by both GARNiDELiA and (I’m super happy about this) yanaginagi (though it was just a signboard)!
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The Power of a Magic God
Recently I’ve been slowly making my way through my anime backlog, and recently finished Toaru Kagaku no Railgun S (A Certain Scientific Railgun). That prompted me to catch up on the Toaru Majutsu no Index (A Certain Magical Index) light novels, which are on their second “season”, New Testament.
The first “season” of the light novels ended with a really epic arc featuring battles on an immense scale, which you would hope from an arc named the World War 3 arc. It’s why a third season of the anime is on my most wanted list.
But I would love even more an anime adaptation of the Othinus arc in New Testament, because I think it is one of the greatest and most epic arcs in Japanese media I’ve ever read. I’d highly recommend it if you have the time to watch through all of Index, then read from where the anime leaves off and through to New Testament. But given that Index is 23 novels and New Testament is 11 novels at this time (not to mention that Index is licensed now and it will take ages for all the novels to be published), I’ll give a spoiler filled description of why I think the Othinus arc is one of my favourite stories thus far.
Just to be sure, spoilers be ahead.
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Anti-Aliasing
I am not a graphics programmer. I have only passing knowledge of the graphics pipeline and could not code a shader to save my life. But as a gamer I am fascinated by the research behind anti-aliasing techniques, and so it was with great interest I read on Neogaf about the new AA technique being used in Farcry 4, Hybrid Reconstruction Anti-Aliasing, presented at SIGGRAPH 2014. Of particular note is that this technique performs a little better on AMD’s latest graphics architecture, GCN, which is present in both current generation consoles. It suggests that, given the console focused development of most AAA game studios (and game engine studios), the next few years could see more research into graphical techniques optimised or more performant on the GCN architecture, and thus influence the direction of high-end graphics performance on the PC.
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New Monitor
I’ve just installed a second monitor for my PC, the QNIX QX2710 LED Evolution II SE. This 2560×1440 monitor is one of those famous Korean monitors that offer a high-resolution IPS (or more accurately Samsung PLS, which is essentially the same thing) monitor for a relatively cheap price. The downside is that the panels are A- panels, so they’re defective enough to be rejected from a big brand monitor, but those defects are not major. For example, it may have up to 6 dead pixels. Luckily mine has no dead pixels, though it does have backlight bleed.
The other feature of these monitors that attracts PC gamers is that the refresh rate can potentially be overclocked up to 120Hz, with most getting at least 96Hz. This roughly means you can play games at framerates higher than 60 fps with no tearing (up to the refresh rate of the monitor). My monitor can get up to 110Hz without issue, it seems (though my frame-skipping analysis was quite rushed). With Wolfenstein and Bioshock Infinite I can play with V-sync off and get no screen tearing (which was a noticeable problem on my old monitor with V-sync off). The issue is that to achieve those refresh rates with AMD graphics cards you need to use a third-party patch for the AMD graphics drivers, and that patch disables hardware accelerated video and HDCP (necessary if you want to watch Blurays on your PC).
But otherwise it’s a fine monitor for the price I paid for it, $345 including shipping from South Korea (the price has since gone up). I purchased from AccessoriesWhole on eBay, but I hear that Dream-Seller and Greensum are also good sellers to buy from.