I live in Japan and my Japanese is pretty shit, honestly.

But for what it's worth, most of my study is with Anki with subs2srs generated cards.

Some people will tell you that you should learn all the standard kanji first. I think you should not listen to them, because you'd be much better off using that time learning vocabulary. There is an endless amount of vocabulary - if you aren't spending most of your study time learning new words in some way you're probably wasting your time.
Start reading as soon as you can. You can get to a level where you can read simple manga pretty quickly, and there are children's novels with full furigana. Don't torture yourself by reading too far above your level (if you need a dictionary, it's too hard - unless you have automated dictionary lookup like with visual novels).

I made a game. It's called Stuck in a Clock, because I don't have very much creativity at 4am. It kind-of sucks, and it's kind of broken, and I'm not sure why I didn't stop at any point and make it look less awful, but here it is anyway: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=7956

Off to get some sleeps.

I would post progress but there isn't any.

Did you just say fuckit and do alchemy instead...?

Welp, I've got nothing.

10 seconds doesn't do much for me either. Death is useful notsomuch either.
Shame about round 2. I quite liked sacrifice, silence, void, and trust. They're open to wide interpretation, don't imply any particular mechanic, and are evocative. 10 seconds and death is useful seem like they'd lead to lots of games revolving around particular mechanics.

I found that in like 1 second...

Hah - I swear I looked at six different videos for precure games on youtube and all the official ones I saw were playing dressup or look-after-the-baby or other mostly irrelevant and uninspiring gameplay, like

. That one looks more like what I was hoping for.

I asked some Japanese women a few months ago when they thought Japan might get a female prime minister, and their answer was a flat 'never - it's impossible'. When I asked three Japanese ten year old girls what their mother does, they all said 'she's a housewife'. The rest of the developed world has its problems, but Japan could really do with an injection of feminism. Some better role models in media surely couldn't hurt having them realise there's a problem in the first place (because if you grow up and the only dream you end up having is 'I want to be a housewife', you're probably not going to see any need to demand change).
 
On manga - eh. I'm not saying the whole lot is rotten, but browsing through the shoujo section of a bookstore doesn't give much hope. Still, sure, certainly it's better than video games, although at least video games have the cover that there aren't many out there targeted at girls in the first place. Shoujo manga has thousands of titles with honestly disturbing roles for the female protagonist (shounen manga - hell, even 'ecchi' softcore porn shit - has better female role models than most shoujo romance manga).

Not that I really wanted to hijack the thread to talk about Japan - guess it's been on my mind recently though and had to get it out somewhere. There's been a lot of talk in Australian politics about misogyny lately, but in Japan there isn't even any groundwork for that discussion to happen.
And whatever, I guess the point I was really trying to make is that before complaining about the sexism problems of games aimed at men, it would be better to fix the sexism problems with games aimed at women first. Or, well, complain away, but I think the other is more important. And I guess it's an old thing to criticise, but, well, as far as I know nothing much has actually changed.

Last time I fucked up my sleep schedule and was a zombie for the second day. I learnt a lesson - all-nighters are for the second day only (which should have been obvious, seeing there's no advantage to an all-nighter on the first day anyway).

I still have no confidence that I can make a game in 48 hours though. What other people manage to do in that timeframe amazes me, and I'm not sure how they do it.

This might not be on topic, but...

Rather than criticising games aimed at men that empower male characters and disempower female characters, I'd be more interested in seeing criticism/examination of games aimed at women that disempower female characters. I'm probably not the person to do it because I don't actually know anything and maybe there aren't enough games aimed at girls to make a real criticism of anyway, but when I see it, it bothers me.

I was doing a bit of research the other day, wondering how the Pretty Cure games actually play (Pretty Cure being a magical girls anime franchise generally starring ambitious, intelligent female characters who beat up bad guys as well as any super-sentai team and are generally good role models for little girls). The games were about playing dress-up with the characters, and dancing. It was depressing to see, honestly. Other marketed at girls games I've seen end up being about cleaning up your room or babysitting or somesuchshit.

Someone mentioned manga positively before, but like 80% of manga aimed at girls portrays the female lead as a fucking idiot who exists only to impress some boy. These kinds of portrayals of women aimed at girls bothers me more than the same kind of thing aimed at men - and I think they're a lot more likely to actually influence thinking. But then, Japan might be a unique case because gender relations here are 30 years behind the rest of the developed world. It bothers me anyway when little girls tell me that when they grow up they want to be a wife.

Autumn looks great. Looks like quite a bit of variety, and the original shows look promising.

But I guess there'll always be people ready to shout that anime is dead. What do you actually want from it, anyway...?

(actually readable chart: http://anichart.net/fall )

You should continue. Casshern Sins is brilliant.

I gave up halfway. It's incredibly boring. I watched the second video and don't think this is telling me anything that one didn't already, and being lectured by someone sitting on their high horse isn't all that enjoyable anyway even if I largely don't disagree with what she's saying. Constant negativity never endeared anyone to anyone either - maybe I'll try again when we get to video 11.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-07-25/serial-experiments-lain-director-ryutaro-nakamura-passes-away

I think we've seen enough of Danganronpa to basically judge it. Some things that fly in video games just don't in other media (probably because video game writing is generally so shitty that the standard is very, very low). I might keep watching it, but it's pretty bad. Hopefully not worse than Devil Survivor 2 from last season though.

Shingeki no Kyojin's pace continues to be glacial. In manga you can afford to take all the time in the world to give background information or pick up the fucking rock, but in anime it gets a bit painful.

I am quite enjoying Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi.

I'll announce that I'm in here, so there's someone to point and laugh when I don't accomplish anything.

He can't speak or read it, but he can understand it. Say what you will, I've seen him watching without subs before.

I don't want to argue or anything, but, well - what have you seen him watch without subs? There's stuff out there that can be understood quite well without understanding Japanese at all, and elementary Japanese can get you a long way in a lot of genres.

I watched a fairly respectable amount of anime before I started studying anything and didn't pick up anything from it beyond the bleedingly obvious onii-chan, doushiou, kind of stuff. I'm pretty sceptical that someone can get to a useful level without some kind of study. I don't mind being proven wrong if you want to explain further though.

I don't watch that much anime, but I have a friend who does.
Anyone here seen so much anime they can understand Japanese having learned it from the subs?

I really doubt that's possible (speaking as someone who lives in Japan and is studying Japanese fairly seriously). Watching anime is very good listening practice and can be a good source for studying from if you approach it with the right tools ... but actually learning the language just watching with English subs ... nah, I don't believe it. There are just too many words, and the rate at which you pick up words watching with English subs (or raw, for that matter) is negligible unless you have a pretty strong base of knowledge to begin with, and even then it's not even remotely efficient.

The second season of Kaiji is exhausting and annoying - everything is already set in motion and you just watch the plan play out and things happen largely by chance for pretty much all of it, at a snails pace. I wouldn't say 'don't watch it', necessarily, but you could stop watching at the first season  and would probably be left with a better overall impression of the show.

I started watching Sky Girls. Was kind of expecting it to be like Strike Witches but even tackier, but fortunately not so much. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Of course, there's obligatory fanservice, but it's not an arse shoved into focus at every possible opportunity - just some (many?) character-developing scenes that happen to take place in public baths and a boob-joke episode. I can live with that much.

So it's the new season. Anyone excited for anything?

http://haruhichan.com/static/images/charts/deliver.php?c=Summer2013

Of what I've seen the first episode of so far, C3-bu and Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi have the most potential. I'm hoping Gen'ei wo Kakeru Taiyou will be good, but, well ... I kind of doubt it.
And Kingdom is good - nice that they actually have a budget this time rather than relying entirely on that awful CG.