So it seems as of this year AKB will be allowing former members to participate in their annual “Senbatsu General Election” (aka popularity contest).

Now obviously the first thought in everyone’s heads is “WTF NOOO!! WHY?!”, and on looking at it that does seem to be the sensible thought. However it doesn’t have to be that way, there are ways in which this could work, so lets look at what’s been announced and what this means:

“The members who have the right to stand as a candidate are…
(1) The members in AKB48, SKE48, NMB48, and HKT48 (as of March 31)
(2) Former AKB48 members who transferred to the sister groups in overseas (Takajo Aki, Nakagawa Haruka, Suzuki Mariya, Miyazawa Sae)
(3) OG members who have been the member of AKB groups more than 4 years”

So we basically have current members, current members that are on overseas loans, and former members that had been a member for over 4 years. This means that previous winners that have now graduated (“for example, Maeda Atsuko”) have the ability to participate again. This is somewhat of a drastic change as she would no doubt win again despite not being part of the group.

But then I thought, why would that be a bad thing? If Morning Musume had an election involving all of it’s members every year… Lets say many years ago the likes of Goto Maki, Nono etc. won, then skip ahead a few years to an election for Morning Musume after Sayumi has graduated, say Riho wins….. does that victory carry the same weight as the victories of Nono? Of course not, few people would consider the current crop of Morning Musume remotely close to the same league as previous members. Thus such a senbatsu becomes rapidly flawed, its only purpose to inflate ego’s.

Morning Musume’s “Division 3 winner” & “Premier League winner”

Now imagine a scenario where all members including graduated ones are voted for every year. The flawed victory scenario no longer happens, current members are compared with former members on an equal footing every year. This has many benefits:

• Gives current members something to strive for
• Gives fans a conclusive “who is the most popular member ever”
• Gives former members media coverage (think of it like a pension plan!)

…and perhaps most importantly:

• Gives management (and the entertainment industry as a whole) an indicator of when the group is past its prime or time to retire.
  

Regarding this last point, if we go back to AKB, sure Acchan could come back this year and win it again, but the current members will be pushing her hard, it wouldn’t be an easy victory, this indicates that the current lineup of the group is still popular amongst the public. Now compare this with if Morning Musume were to do the same now; the former members would ease to victory, there would be absolutely no challenge whatsoever. This suggests that the current lineup isn’t popular, and perhaps management should consider gracefully putting the group out to pasture, bringing a fresh new group into the field… it worked for Aki P right (Onyanko Club –> AKB48)? Eventually there will come a tipping point where there are more former members at the top than current members (unless of course Aki P masters the utopian masterpiece of a truly generational millenia long idol unit, whose members popularity are tied to human generations over the course of lifetimes. An idol for life with fans for life.).

That sort of data is surely vital to an idol industry whose sole purpose is popularity, what worth is an idol if she is not idolised? (admittedly that’s an entirely different discussion, but just look at this point from a company profits perspective $$$)

And so we can conclude that having former members take part is good for the fans, good for the group, and good for the industry!

…BUT NO!!!

That is not how it is going to work with this year’s AKB senbatsu. Lets take a look closer at the details:

“Same as the previous years, 64 members will be elected for the 32nd single. Details are as follows.
(1) #1~#16 = 32nd single Senbatsu members
(2) #17-#32 = Under Girls
(3) #33-#48 = Next Girls
(4) #49-#64 = Future Girls

The reception desk period for the candidacy will be from March 31 at 12:00 pm ~ April 7 at 12:00 am. The members who are willing to run as a candidate need to submit a written notice to the election executive committee which is set in each theater.”

There are two major issues there. Elected members will be participating in the singles, and participation requires the candidate to opt-in.

Having former members participate in singles just seems to be a completely crazy idea. If a member has left the group but is still participating in singles then surely they have not left the group? Does that not defeat the purpose of leaving? This also means that current members will have less chance to shine if former members are constantly around. BAD IDEA!!

And regarding candidates to opt-in isn’t really that good either, having popular members potentially not participating invalidates all of the positive aspects of having former members in the election. If they are going to go down this route then all eligible candidates should be on the ballot paper. Of course they can choose to not turn up to any related events, refuse to even speak to AKB management, but they should still be able to be voted for even if they don’t turn up to collect their award! If you are ranking current members against former members you can’t have some previous winners deciding they no longer want to participate just to preserve their winning record. Again doing this invalidates all of the positive aspects of having former members in the election. BAD IDEA!!

So, I’ve rambled for a bit, my general conclusion is that overall this could be a good idea, however the implementation AKB are going with (based only on the details I have seen so far) is in my opinion completely the wrong approach. However I guess it shows Aki P is up for a bit of experimentation, maybe he’ll see how this one goes and then reach the same conclusions as me. Time will tell…

 
tl;dr: Vote Mayuyu!

Having listened to all the entries on glorious YouTube (Official Eurovision Channel Playlist) here’s my favourites this year (predictions and misc stuff to follow at the bottom of this post below the wall of videos):

1 point (ok, so I couldn’t narrow it down entirely, so here’s 4 songs on joint 1 point from me!):

Switzerland – If only because it’s seemingly been spammed everywhere the past month.

Belarus – Ok so it’s obviously awful, but it’s still reasonable! And kudos to whatever those outfits are!

Moldova – Upbeat, happy!

Serbia – Reminds me of something that wouldn’t be out of place in Final Fantasy X, nice orchestra work.

2 points:

Latvia – Vaguely good song, video is naff though.

3 points:

Spain – Powerful and well sung.

4 points:

Norway – Upbeat, would be much better without the misc dubstep buzzing, but still, worthy of 4 points from me!

5 points:

Can’t deny it’s well sung.

6 points:

Romania – Happy, upbeat, joy, and that combination of instruments makes me smile.

7 points:

Malta – Feels like a kinda retro Eurovision song. Malta deserve to do well one year!

8 points:

Sweden – This seems to be the favourite to win. It’s a rather good dance track, but potentially forgettable, 8 points, not 12 from me.

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10 points:

Ireland – Ahh come on, you’ve gotta admit it makes you smile right? (If not then you sir are a miser.)

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12 points:

Cyprus – This almost contains all my requirements for a perfect song; synth, la la la’s… just needed a key change and it would have been perfect! (somehow I think she probably can’t sing it well live though )

As for who I think will win, I reckon it’s probably gotta be Sweden (unless those Russian grannies with that horrid song win, in which case SHAME ON YOU EUROPE!! >_> …but it’s more likely than I’d like to think). UK should have a top 5 finish with Humperdink though, probably won’t win.

Before I finish, I’ve gotta mention a couple of songs that didn’t make it past their national selections. This should have won the Swedish selection lol, the guy is hilarious:

Likewise these Latvian guys were also funny, if only for the trollface medallion (first appears at 2:13) and their taking the piss out of everything and using bits of previous Eurovision songs/lyrics of anything/everything.

As this was an el cheapo trip I flew with EasyJet from the misc airport Stansted in the middle of nowhere, which required getting a coach there late on Friday and sleeping at the airport. -_- Though I do have to say that an airport at 2am with no-one around apart from the odd handful of people sleeping is rather tranquil. Fast forward several hours after throwing away all of the liquids from my bag and re-purchasing them on the other side of security and it was time to board! As far as budget airlines go this was all very streamlined and efficient, window seat and everything, no hassle, leg room quite reasonable etc.

Now the downside (there had to be one right!) was that my flight was landing in Denmark and not Sweden…….. which was of course entirely intended ; Malmö is a 10 minute train journey over a bridge from Copenhagen airport!

(said train journey over a bridge)

Got out at the station in my destination, got some local cash (which turned out to be entirely un-needed as *everywhere* took card), and ventured outside! First impressions; the place is like a clean quaint version of a built up 70′s English town but with all the signs in foreign. Second impression; jesus christ the wind is cold. The weather app on my phone said it was currently 10°C, but it clearly didn’t take into account the freezing wind rolling in from the sea at full force… conveniently my hotel was only a short walk away (via getting a map from the tourist office opposite the station)!

Checked into hotel with ease, informed I had free breakfast awaiting me the next day, bonus! Hotel was really nice too, free tea/coffee 24/7, free wifi, super comfy/warm beds etc. Then went off exploring the town after a short nap:

After a few hours it was almost time for the concert, I thought I’d turn up an hour beforehand rather than queue up all day because it was bloody cold. This turned out to be a good decision as those of us with VIP tickets were let in right after I turned up… so turn up, get passes, walk straight in and straight to the front, no queuing!

The average age of the concert attendee’s everywhere outside of the VIP area seemed somewhat younger than I was expecting (mostly 10 year olds with parents :s ), but oh well, at least where I was there were quite a few people from other countries (I believe I saw German, Finish, Danish, and Icelandic flags there) that weren’t 10 year olds… so I didn’t feel that out of place, lol.

As for the concert itself: FANTASTIC! Probably the best produced/choreographed concert I’ve ever been to (not highest budget mind, just truly well produced… slick, so much attention paid to the dancing on every single beat of every song). I think also the only concert I’ve been to that I could sing all of the lyrics for. :s There was also not much of a proliferation of camera wielding terds, \o/ most people were too busy screaming at him or singing/jumping. \o/ \o/ Lots of the songs seemed to be special extended concert versions too (with room for audience singing… a few thousand people in a crowd singing Manboy acapella is pretty amusing), nice when someone takes care of what they’re doing for a concert rather than just playing an album and singing it. Lets not forget the ending either, he had the water shower thing on stage, lol.

After that I think about 10-20 of us with backstage passes were waiting around backstage because he was gonna come out and meet us (pretty sure half the people with backstage passes weren’t Swedish, lol… lucky he speaks good English!). He’s definitely a funny guy! I did have to ask him about the lyrics to “Backseat”, and suffice to say, yes, they are as rude as they sound (“You’re the pilot girl I’m cruising”, “I’m riding in your backseat” etc.), but apparently no-one else noticed this? He said he was just angry when he wrote it, lol, funny hearing an entire crowd singing it though.

It was a good length concert too, think it started at 19:00 and finished at ~21:30, we didn’t end up leaving until about 22:45.

At this point I had to find somewhere to sample the local beer and night-life, ended up in the local brewery for a couple of hours. But at the prices they charge for beer in Sweden one could hardly drink much (like £7 a pint >_>). Cheaper to get the train to Copenhagen, go out there, and get the train back (I was too lazy to do that).

Next day, all you can eat buffet breakfast, meats, fruit, cereal, toast etc. etc. Very filling! Packed up my stuff, checked out of the hotel and went out to do some tourist stuff. First stop purchase a tin of Surströmming (aka fermented/rotting herring), sadly I didn’t get to taste it as Danish airport security confiscated it as tinned fish is apparently considered liquid.

Anyway, tourist stuff. I went around Malmö Castle/museum, rather interesting if not very castle-like. Apparently the locals dug up plague victims remains and used their bones to make bone china. Also went around the kinda scummy looking “beach” which was freezing and full of goose poo. Then followed that up with eating moose and gravlax at a local restaurant and watching some football on their TV. They do seem to like their patio heaters out there, screw environmentalists!

And with that as the weather was starting to turn, time to head back to Copenhagen airport and home. God knows how I ended up sat next to a bunch of Danish weeaboo’s on the flight back, jeez listening to them was almost as bad as suffering a screaming baby. But oh well, a fun weekend!

https://code.google.com/p/winebrewdb/

It all came about because keeping a record of the homebrew wine I occasionally make somewhat outgrew the spreadsheet it was originally kept in. Cue a search of the internet looking for a proper program that does the same thing, records brews, notes, recipe’s, pictures, has various calculators and info. All I could find at the time was a couple of outdated websites that looked like they were made in the 90′s, a few programs for storing homebrew beer data (doesn’t quite fit the needs of wine brewers… different processes), and a rather large and expensive program for more professional vineyards/winery’s, which was somewhat overkill for my needs (I did later find BrewTrax which is basically what I ended up writing a very simple version of, but more on that later).

So failing to find an appropriate bit of software at the time and definitely needing one, I fired up Eclipse and thought “how hard can it be?”… turns out, not very! If you want to learn programming don’t bother reading anything, just have a project with an end goal and then just start. First problem was obviously “how do I make a window?”, google it, insert result into your program. Next problem; “how do I add some buttons/text to that window?”, again google it, insert result into program. That’s where I was when I had that (lol):

…a very Java looking application with a rough idea of the buttons I wanted and zero functionality. Next problem then; “how do I make the buttons do stuff?”, google again, use result. And so on, how do I store data in a database, how do I retrieve data etc. etc. Just keep furiously googling everything until you have a working program that does all you need! Then once you’re at that point you just have to make it look pretty and fix all the bugs (there will be bugs, there are always bugs), et voilà:

An entire perfectly working (minus 2 cosmetic bugs that I have no idea how to fix) open source program that doesn’t look like poo and does exactly what I need it to without any bloat (even works on linux and mac)! Made as I said above, with no prior knowledge, no books, no tutorials, just a whole lot of googling! All in the space of 3 weeks too, god knows how long it would have taken to get that done in an actual office environment with professional qualified programmers… even simple things like a text change can take weeks in some companies I’ve worked, lol.

As for that BrewTrax thing I mentioned earlier, it pretty much is a far more complex version of what I made. I paid for it because I wanted to check it out, and on paper it sounds great, but in practise it was far more effort to use than I cared for. Not to mention if what seems like half of the application is taken up by menu’s and toolbars then something’s gone horribly wrong. See below (green highlighted bits are the bits of the program that aren’t menu/toolbar):

I could list the other silly design decisions (no search function, only endless “filters” for example), but then it’d just turn into a long winded rant, lol. So back to the original point of my post…

You don’t need to be a programmer to make a program!

Anybody can do it with a bit of googling. Now if only drawing ability could be acquired through a quick google!

Edit: On further playing with BrewTrax it’s not too bad once you change the layout, pick what columns you want, set your filters and then hide the filter box. Still could do with smaller icons/padding though. And it seems there *is* a search function, just not particularly obvious at first, lol. Now if only it had more users so that their live data thing and online recipe’s etc. had more use.

2+ hours of cold queuing on the streets of Brixton, then 2 hours of standing indoors waiting for it to start (while partaking in the odd tipple of sambuca of course).

It started out pretty damn awesome, 4minute, then HyunA thrusting in my face with possibly one of the songs contending for best song of 2011:

…followed by G.NA doing her stuff (shame she didn’t sing this). Then the rest of the concert was screaming fangirls… I think Beast may have been on stage singing too possibly, couldn’t hear them over the screaming though, lol, my ears are still ringing (that may be the closest any of us will ever be to experiencing the sheer pitch and volume of a crowd of fangirls at a Justin Bieber concert).

Pretty good concert, worth £75? Probably (just about). Minus the usual idiots it could have been improved loads by mixing up the songs/setlist instead of having all of 4minute/G.NA’s stuff first then all of Beast’s for the 2nd half …that just meant most of the guys in the audience were left with nothing to look forward to for the 2nd half of the concert.

All we need now is Miss A to come over (even just to Europe would be close enough!!).

• Cats > Dogs
• Tea > Coffee
• Kirino > Kuroneko
• iOS > Android > Blackberry > Windows Phone
• Straight hair > Curly hair
• Windows > Linux > Mac
• Unrolling from the front toilet paper > unrolling from the back
• Nvidia > ATI
• Intel > AMD
• Inami > Poplar
• Skirt > Hotpants
• Milk in after brewing tea > Milk in before brewing tea
• Radio 2 > Radio 1
• Ale > Lager
• 360 > PS3
• Special K > Cornflakes
• PG Tips > Tetley
• Pool > Snooker
• Minori > Taiga

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/id466660403

Clearly internet petitions do work (eventually…), that one I mentioned ages ago was trying to get them to release the full version on CD at the time (site seems to be gone now).

I wonder why they’ve chosen to release it now, a bit late? It doesn’t even look like they’re really promoting it at all, and being digital download only it’s surely not going to have much of an impact sales-wise with Oha Star’s primarily young schoolkid audience. Leads you to one of two conclusions; a) someone wants some extra money (though with the aforementioned lack of promotion and likely non-existent sales, it would seem they clearly don’t want money, lol), or b) someone only just remembered they still had it sitting around and chucked it up on iTunes because it’s better there than it doing nothing but gathering dust.

Either way, all is good with the world, finally a high quality full version instead of a live recording where all you can hear is a bunch of sweaty guys clapping.

BUY IT, BUY IT NOW!!

The last season of anime is possibly one of the best in recent memory, few shows, but what shows there have been included some right gems! Level E with it’s fantastic plot twists, and Hourou Musuko (aka Wandering Son) which is quite possibly one of the best (yet incredibly underrated/outright written off by some people) slice of life shows ever made!

I’m sure you’ll agree that the first thing you notice is the beautiful watercolour artwork, it’s refreshing to have an anime that isn’t afraid to try something different style-wise, and I’d say it’s paid off nicely.

The basic premise of the show is that the main character likes dressing up as a girl and we follow him and his friends interactions with each other. Sadly the majority of viewers simply turned off after the first few minutes because of that plot (clearly their insignificant shallow minds couldn’t cope with anything other than fanservice, fanservice, explosion, fanservice). But frankly the show’s premise is another breath of fresh air, a departure from traditional anime trap fare with a show that portrays the characters and their feelings in a much more realistic manner.

As a slice of life show it does what it says on the tin; we follow Nitori-kun, his friends, family, and all of their ups and downs for a few years of their school life, you do end up becoming attached to all of the characters by the end. However if I were to pick one downpoint I’d say it does at times feel a little too fast paced with the occasional time jump and a lot of characters introduced at once in the beginning,a full 26 episodes for the series would have been much better. >_<

It’s currently available on Crunchyroll for most of the world (with some rather dodgy at times subtitles: namely in the first few episodes consistently getting the various characters school years completely wrong, which made some of the relationships between characters really confusing… his sister and her friends are in the year *above* him, not below, lol). Oh how I hope for a blu-ray release with English subtitles (however we all know it’ll sadly never be released in physical form anywhere outside of Japan)

Any non-shallow minded anime fans that don’t watch anime just to consume copious amounts of shite and fanservice should certainly give it a watch!

I’ll end the post on the best girl in the show……… Anna!