Kaigai Manga Festa 2018

A month ago, I had the chance to visit the Kaigai Manga Festa comic exhibition for the first time. It was collocated with Comitia 126, a famous periodic manga convention held in different cities of Japan throughout the year.

The event took place at Tokyo Big Sight and the entrance fee, which included a catalogue book, was 1000 yen. For some reason, the entrance was free after around 13:00.

One of the main attractions was the live drawing event by Kim Jung Gi (@KimJungGiUS, @kimjunggi_jp). This was actually the second time I watched him drawing live, the first time being at Nakano Broadway. During his performance, Kim usually answers various questions from the audience and the commentators. It must be hard for him to concentrate!. Then, Risa Kageyama translates his words into Japanese.

This time the canvas was a bit hard to see, so the process was projected on a big screen. The way that Kim Jung Gi draws is mind-blowing. It looks like he has the whole composition inside his mind and he can start drawing from anywhere without any reference lines.

This was the final result. Kim is not really that good at drawing cute anime-like girls. His style is closer to the kind of artists that used to publish on the Heavy Metal magazine. I guess that was a character related to the sponsor of the event, the Fun's Project Channel, an excellent website with educational contents for artists and creators. There are more pictures and a video on Kim's Twitter account, make sure you check them out.

Apart from Kim, other notable artists such as Sean Phillips or Duncan Fegredo attended the convention. I also took the opportunity to walk by the booths in Comitia 126 and discover great artists such as:

• @pochi1989
• krenzartwork
• hunwaritoast
• kaitan0908
• dieselzombie
• ue_tateri
• naffy
• JohnHathway
• @taiwan_shurara

I also found interesting some commercial sites with booths in the event such as:

• haikeisouko (manga and anime backgrounds)
• fanza (digital adult manga shop)
• kindle indie mangas (lots of amateur manga for free!).

Finally, I learned about a tool in Blender called "grease pen" that I need to check.

Google Cloud Next in Tokyo 2018

Last month I took a day off from work to attend Google Cloud Next 2018 in Tokyo. Artificial intelligence and cloud computing are two topics that I love, and this event was great to catch up with the latest developments.

The event was divided into two physically separated areas: one for developers and another one for business. I only attended the former. The stages were pleasantly illuminated, and in general, everything was well organized.

There were numerous technical sessions during the event. Thankfully, Google released an Android application that made it easy to reserve a seat and receive notifications in real-time. Talks were videotaped and published a few weeks ago on Google Cloud Japan's Youtube channel (see the sessions playlist). Unfortunately for non-japanese speakers, the videos are all dubbed into Japanese, and there is no option to select the original audio track :(

Apart from the sessions, there was a spacious booth area for attendants to learn about Google Cloud services through demos (e.g., JapanTaxi's demo) and example architectures (e.g., architectures for game backends).

The next day, I attended another event, organized by GCPUG (Google Cloud Platform User Group) Yokohama, that hosted 2 great presentations by Mete Atamel (Dialogflow) and Felipe Hoffa (BigQuery).

Conclusions: Google Cloud Next was exciting, and I learned a lot about cloud architectures and recent developments in machine learning services such as BigQuery ML. Check out other reviews here and here.

Techbookfest 5

This is the second time I attend a Techbookfest (技術書典) event, and I have to say that I loved both of them. Techbookfest events are events with booths where software and hardware fans can sell their own publications.

The events are quite popular. During the first few hours, you can expect a long queue of people ready to buy their favourite publications before they get sold out. The first event I attended was Techbookfest 2 and it was held in Akihabara. I remember having to wait for a couple of hours in the rain. Techbookfest 5 was held in Ikebukuro. There was a long queue as well but at least it was sheltered.

There were many interesting circles (a person or group of persons in charge of a booth) in Techbookfest 5. Personally, I bought a publication related to a 3D modeling software I have been learning for a while called MagicaVoxel. It seems that the author has also published a book on Kindle called 3D dot modelling (3Dドットモデリング) and has its own voxel webpage. I also bought a publication about creating your own cartridges for the old Game Boy by Nicolli. There was also a similar circle specialized on the Game Boy advance (GBA). I also got a publication related to GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) whose author used to convert a ramen picture into a curry rice one. Finally, I bought another publication about modeling and 3D printing a robot that was then imported into ROS.

Conclusions: Techbookfest is a really nice event if you like software or hardware technical stuff. I hope I can participate as a book writer in the future. I was happy to see that many booths offered their publications in digital format, for example through taimen or booth.

Climbing Mt. Ryoukamisan

I recently climbed Ryoukamisan (両神山, yamap, yamareco, yamakei）with some friends. Ryoukamisan is a mountain located in Saitama, near the Chichibu district. It is part of the 100 famous Japanese mountains.

We used the the Hinataooya (日向大谷) route to get to the top of Ryoukamisan and then went back using the Nanatakizawa (七滝沢) route. Here you can download my GPS log. You can also get information about similar trips from here, here and here.

With its 1723m I would say that Ryoukamisan requires a bit of hiking experience. There are quite a few steep areas that will require you to use the chains anchored to nearby rocks. When we arrived at the top everything was cloudy. For that reason, I can't tell you if the views are good or not.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this mountain is its Shinto shrine and its relation with various Shinto deities.