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takunomistudio-blog · 8 years ago

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Takunomi Coffee Reveries, Vol. I

Contents

1 - Introduction

2 - Revitalizing the Ancients {Breath of the Wild, Final Fantasy XV}

3 - Coding for Your Own Sake {Coding, Python}

4 - LoFi Hip Hop Radio {Musical Interlude}

5 - Enticing for Computer Science {YouTube, Shōgi}

1 - Introduction

So a break for the better part of March apparently extends to most of April. That's fine. It gives time to reflect, struggle with exams, play some video games, all that good Jazz. In regards to reflection, it became apparent that daily updates was a noble goal, but a bit demanding, and my favorite posts were the Saturday recap posts, so why not try to make irregular but meatier Saturday posts only? As the content above shows, I thought it better if a bunch of good content was gathered for some relaxing perusal, coffee in hand.

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2 - Revitalizing the Ancients

I would be remise not to talk Breath of the Wild. The only problem is, the game pretty much speaks for itself, quality and qualities wise, doesn't it? Yet, since last I posted, I completed Final Fantasy XV, so it's not a bad idea to talk abot how these two ancient giants deal with awakening in today's gaming world.

I wasn't immediately floored by FFXV, but the sort of chill, super-realistic setting of magical pretty-boys and roadtripping in hostile territory quickly won me over. Talking abot it's story is both a laughably sort excercise and a maddingly long one, so I'm going to simply say: It's quite good, and quite incomplete. If you haven't played FFXV, just wait till all the updates and DLC are out, you'll get the full experience.

What FFXV truly was to me, was a fantasy of travelling around a lush green environment and mowing down wildlife and roaming weaponized armor troupes. The open world element, I realized, was simply a part of the mood. I could hardly go wherever I liked, and trying to explore, rarely revealed anything surprising. FFXV was, like so many earlier entried in the series, about it's combat. I'll get to why that's more than ok.

I haven't finished Breath of the Wild yet, but it's not trying to hide where it'll end up, so it doesn't require a lot of confidence to say that I see the bigger picture by now. BotW gets open world design. It gets it like no game before it. Everything is traversable and though there isn't a purpose to going all places, neither does it ever feel like a time waste. The level of detail in both the big picture and the smallest iota, is astounding. To be fair, BotW doesn't play much different from so many other games. Instead, it seems to say "This is how you should do open world", drops a mic and let's you play.

Both FFXV and BotW initially appear to be entering the modern world by seemingly accepting how Western developers design games: Real-time combat, ultra realistic graphics (FFXV) and go-where-ever-you-like, play-how-you-feel-like (BotW). Instead they both end up adhering to their roots in decidedly new ways. The Zelda puzzles, space-comprehension-requiring dungeons, grunting NPCs, tangible environments. It's all there, but in a far greater and smoother scale.

In many ways, it would be easy to call BotW the greater success, but I don't want to seem like I don't appreciate the technology behind FFXV. Consider the first time I entered the wood and monster infested Duscae area. I saw a creature I had a mark for. Me and my bodyguards flung into the fray and started hacking away. As the melee rolled around, we entered the vicinity of nearby monsters who happily obliged and suddenly the brawl was blooming into a war-like scenario. At that moment, a flying tank filled with soldiers came by to have a chat. I realize now, that this is crazy. The number of characters that FFXV supports at one point is mind blowing. No slow-downs, just more and more beasts. BotW on the other hand, nearly cracky my Wii U when I engaged five hulking moblins and a small batch of ice-bats in freezing tree-house. Perhaps BotW could achieve something like FFXV, but it's not the point. To these games, open world means different things. To BotW it's external: Go everywhere, always, whenever. To FFXV it's local: The immediate space is open to the battle system, now, to everyone.

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3 - Coding for Your Own Sake

Why would you want to learn programming? Maybe the idea just appeals to you, or you have some greater goal in mind for the future. Right now, you just don't have a clue what to code.

Here's a way to find a small project: Just recreate another program, in the simplest way possible, and maybe add a tiny spin on it to give yourself a challenge. Cut out visuals, complicated functionality or even user friendliness. Just make it run.

So recently I thought, how about a music player? I'd like to try my hand at Python, that seemed like a pleasant langauge to code in.

Reading around a bit, I discovered that Python is all about importing so-called modules that do a lot of the complicated stuff for you. I simply googled various key words and started copy-pasting something together. I learned stuff about how mp3 files being a bit more complicated than I expected, and so I scaled the project back to simply playing .wav files. Currently doing a course about distributed systems, I thought, maybe I should make it a small radio program? This was bit more complicated, but no more than it all resulted in the following tiny program. Simply start the program with

python3 server.py [name of song].wav

in one terminal window, and start a client in another terminal window with

python3 client.py

and hear the music play. It even works across computers on the same network.

server.py

client.py

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4 - LoFi Hip Hop Radio

Hiphop-like music coupled with looping images from amazingly relaxing anime is apparently a thing, and I see no reason not to endorse it one hundred percent. Below you see Shizuku Tsukishima from Whisper of the Heart feeling as relaxed as I hope you do. The image links to one of those previously mentioned hiphop radios.

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5 - Enticing for Computer Science

The video above is one of toco toco tv's fantastic interviews with interesting and creative Japanese people. Manao Kagawa is a professional Shogi player, and, as far as I can understand, apparently somewhat uncommon, being female.

Besides being a wonderfully relaxing interview, it features a great part in the beginning where Kagawa-san goes to browse the Shirataki Gofukuten kimono shop. It seems that being a Shogi player requires you to wear somewhat formal wear, and the result is that the players looks insanely dashing.

What's even better though, is the mentioning of the Shirataku Ayumi Hai, a yearly Shogi tournament for female players to win beautiful and (I assume) quite expensive kimono.

A quite well-discussed subject, is how the rate of women joining Computer Science and the IT work force in general, is too low. I won't get into politics here, but what is a fact, is that Computer Scientists are in short supply everywhere in the world. At the same time, it seems the education world is mainly drawing from one of two pools of potential students (men). In other words, there is a whole other, quite untapped, pool of with potential students to draw from.

I've seen some really good initiatives to reverse the current trend, but I think the one seen in the video is a wonderfully aesthetic idea. I don't know if it manages to draw in new Shogi players Japan, but having some sort of algorithm competition aimed at high school age (or younger) girl, with very sought-after, classically feminine prizes1, seems like it could draw in a segment that normally has no interest in this branch of science, despite engaging in similar ones (mathematics, medicine, biology).

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Big IT companies sponsor lots of things with huge amounts of money. Winning a Chanel handbag for solving algorithmic problems in high school, seems like quite a carrot. ↩︎

#Breath of the Wild #Final Fantasy XV #Whisper of the Heart #toco toco tv #shogi #python

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