Wednesday 9 September 2015

First fortnight in Japan.



After missing out C88, I finally arrived at Japan. I rented a 21m square apartment in Minowa, a few station away from Akibahara station, top of Iriya and Ueno. The renting price is 60,000 yen per month with water bill included. The bad new is I am sick before I came over, this made everything extra hard at the very beginning, but after getting some very effective medicine from Pharmacist next door, I am almost recovered to perfect condition.

Water/Electricity and Gas connection is actually pretty easy, all I needed to do is call their office and they would provide a call back with English speaking staff. However the hard part is internet, I have applied internet though BBapply.com. it is an easy to use 3rd party agency specialize on connection internet for foreigners. The person who taking charge is called Jimmie, he is very helpful and provides help where ever he can. He checked tconnection my place have and suggest me to use Asahi.net for ISP. However even with all the help I can get, it still took 2 weeks for the internet to be actually connected. Mostly due to slow processing time and the fact I need to wait for my ID and Password to be physically mailed to my mail box. Their customer service staff have no access to any of my connecting information. My neighbor living in 201 tried to apply for internet service as well, however he had no luck due to he doesn't have a foreign credit card. And yes it have to be a credit card not a debit card. they told me they have already send the files to ISP, but it might take more than a week for the connection to be established.

Regards mobile service and mobile net. I purchased a prepaid sim card from So-net at B1 Narita airport, the connection it self is pretty stable but the price is slightly higher than other offering. I was going to switch to Bmobile since I heard lots of good words regards the service from internet, however friend told me their connection is really bad. Later on I found out Asahi.net offers mobile sim too, however their service actually requires a contract and foreign credit card to be recorded. But the pricing is way better than any of the prepaid service. It is ¥1000 per month for 3gb of LTE network, it takes a little bit of time(under a week) again for them to send the sim card and my ID/PW however the connection is stable and generally worth the wait.

For phone calls, I purchased a Japanese number from Skype, so I am able to receive phone calls in case of emergency. As for calling, the first month of Skype credit is free, overall speaking this should save some money.

For furniture and electronic appliance, I purchased all my furniture so far from Nitori. Nitori is like A Japan version of Ikea, except it’s even cheaper. Although most furniture requires some sort of Assembly, the whole process is very simple. They offer free delivery service for any purchase more than 7000 yen. For fridge and washing machine, I have followed my agency’s suggestion of purchasing 2nd hand appliance from removal service. Both the fridge and washing machine is only 2 or 3 years old, both under mint condition. In total I paid 30,800 yen for both appliance plus delivery and installation.

The hardest part is banking, as my friend suggested, I tried to open a bank service in Japan Post bank. Everything went smoothly at the beginning, however I lack of the invoice/salary document to open a debit account. After failing to receive Invoice/Salary paper from my employer since I am a contracted Artist not a full time employee, I decided to go to Japan post again the next day, however with different staff at counter, they turned me down, refused to open a bank account with me since my Japanese language skill isn't good enough. They asked me to go to Ueno office instead, since there's might be English service there. I went to the Ueno office, and they turn me down again. So after some research I found out about Shinsei bank, and I am currently trying that one out.

Also I have purchased a hanko with my initial from a hanko store in Akiba. Although most places takes signature, apparently Bank isn't one of such places, The hanko it self cost me 6000 yen, so I better make sure I take a good use out of it XD.

Hopefully my jobs for this month is coming in soon, time to work hard again.

Finally here's a picture of the 27inch monitor I bought from Akiba, it is a display copy but only cost 11000 yen!


Friday 14 August 2015

Sold out on Comiket!!!

Hurray~ 超弩級艦隊調理バトル ドイツの味! is Sold out on c88.

Thanks Alan and Andy for help minding the table, I failed to apply for visa on time OTL.

And Thanks ACL_myon for translating, the book is not possible without you. XD

... sorry for not printing enough books to sell, I will apply for C89 this year, hopefully I can get a table and reprint the book。

This is my first attempt on Doujin Manga, it's miles away from my comfort zone, and I have learnt a lot of new skills during the production. Overall a great experience, however there's still a lot to learn, I hope stepping into different field will improve my illustration skills overall as well~

Lastly Thanks コミプリ for printing the book, the handling and printing quality is great.

Everybody お疲れ様でした~


Now what should I do for C89 lol

Friday 12 June 2015

Accepted for C88!!!

This is Nyachou again, I am attending summer Comiket in Tokyo 2015 this time under my own circle name Clover Workshop. I will be appearing in the first day of the event, hall east and table number G12b.

This will be the first time attending Comiket on my own and I just finished story board lol, I haven't plan out everything yet. The Visa, the printing, the ticket and accommodation and plus the book it self (;*△*;), with a time spam of less than 2 month to deal with everything plus work (stress stress stress). Well I'm still glad getting in, I will try my best to get that book on the table~

The book will be Kancolle related cooking Doujin manga with bit of service in it O w O.

Here's the circle cut

And circle link https://webcatalog-free.circle.ms/Circle/11923838/

宜しくお願い致します。

Saturday 16 May 2015

Wacom Companion and Cintiq thoughts

Here's a story regards Wacom and their products on my point of view.

So, most people probably already know that I owned a Cintiq Companion since last year after returning my surface pro. Surface pro was a very nice portable computer, it's light, great screen and decent battery life. I would have kept the surface is I'm just after a tablet, however drawing wise Companion is simply a much better tool.




Regards my experience with Cintiq Companion, it was great. I have been used Companion for the past whole year replacing my computer + cintiq 21UX setup. This doesn't mean Companion is perfect, the the battery life is consider poor for a portable device, screen size is rather too small and 8gb ram isn't perfect for processing my image. However it's bearable consider Companion is the only portable device built for drawing on the current market. Let's put it this way, there's no other device on current market that offer similar experience as Companion. I even brought my Companion to the Japan trip to finish one of my unfinished projects. As matter of fact I love my companion but things will change 1 year later.

Now this is what happened to my companion. Early this year the device decided to die out of nowhere. It is the power plug issue that Companion was well known for. I have this issue after 1 month of the purchase, Wacom Australia gave me a replacement and I been using the device til early this year. Knowing the power plug is fragile, I took very good care of it and the device should suffer from no physical damage at all. But no matter how much care I put onto the device, the power plug just decided to die on me.

Thankfully the power plug issue is still covered outside of the original 1 year warranty. Apparently all device made before July 2014 have fragile power plugs and they replaced the material on later designs. After knowing the issue Wacom Australia decided to be very kind to me and send me a new device. However after all this experience with Companion, I decided to sell the device and upgrade for a new one.

I have thought of upgrading to Companion 2, however knowing original Companion was this fragile, I can't help but worry about the durability of companion 2, so unless the review of the device is overwhelmingly positive, it is not an option.

The new Cintiq 27QHD is what really catches my eye right now. It offers 97% Adobe RPG and have a pixel density of 110. Regards pixel density, For normal monitor it might not matter as much, however for a device that usual put right in front of your face, you can't help but noticing the physical pixels on the monitor. Companion having 180 ppi, is perfect, however since the screen size is only 13 inch, I would still have a bit of issue looking at my work. The new companion 2 and Cintiq 27QHD upgraded their display to 2540 x 1440.

Here's the problem I have with Wacom and their design of products. They are never up to date with technology. When companion first released, 4th gen intel cores were already available, it was a major upgrade on battery, this is especially important on tablet device, however Wacom decided to release their Companion anyways with the old 3rd gen core. Cintiq 27QHD, although this device have upgrade to 2540 x 1440, I can't help but ask why don't they just simply go all the way to 4k since this technology is widely available already. They decided to upgrade the resolution on companion 2, but this is pointless since the pixel density on that device is already great, the actual problem is the screen size of the device. I would rather have the device upgrading to 15" screen instead of the resolution upgrade. Overall I have to say Wacom do try to make their product a better experience for customer however what they offer is usually not what we wanted. And though out the years, Wacom's product have suffered from a downgrade of quality, not just the hardware but the software too. Here's a great video from David Watson regards the poor touch function of Wacom device, although to be fair half of that was Adobe's problem. In comparison, my 8 years old 21UX is still functioning to this date.



After all this talk, I still want to have a 27QHD, yes it's not a 4k display, yes there is reports on the buggy remote but what really stop me from buying the device is actually dead simple. The price. I been sitting on my computer, checking Wacom Australia product page daily with my credit card ready, hope to buy the device right away once it is released. And when the product is finally release, the price shock me. It is 4.3k Australian dollar and it does not comes with the stand. The stand is sold separately for 500 dollars, so you are looking roughly around $5000 dollar for a drawing monitor, not to mention it's not even a 4k display. So, a full PC would cost less that 1.5k, An iMAC with 5k display cost less that 3k, A decent 2nd hand car cost less that 5k, why would I spend 5k hard earned money on a drawing monitor. Oh and the stand, are you telling me this 18kg weight somehow worth the same as my smart phone?(I know international postage are expensive but same goes for any electronic device on the market right?)

Final thoughts on the problem, It is sad to see what Wacom have done in the recent years, their product quality went down greatly from the past years but the price is kept going up. What we really need now is another company to join this market, stop this total domination, and hopefully we will be looking at better quality products from Wacom at more reasonable price. However as for now, I would still be a Wacom customer, because regardless all that, we don't have a 2nd choice.

That's all I have to say and....... does anybody want to buy Companion?




Monday 13 April 2015

ヘスティア様

Here's something that become very very popular lately, since I just finished my Dengeki illustration competition submission and still waiting feedback from Art Director, I decided to put in little bit of time to play around with this too.

The biggest question is....what is this string made of?! There's lots of image on the internet and they all seem to be vary in length! O A O Is this some kind of magic in the novel? well there's no way we could find out, but this is indeed a very interesting design.

Also I suffer from this problem lately, when ever I randomly draw glasses onto characters, I having problem of taking them off. I'm not sure if this is a psychological problem or I simply start to develop a glasses fetish....no this can not be, as I do not like glasses character in general. Anyone who know what my problem is please leave a comment and let me know.


For more reading regards the character, you can find it from link below

http://haruhichan.com/wpblog/44080/internet-reacts-to-danmachis-hestia/