Prownie's art #5: Persona 4 cast

Hello there!

Not too long ago, I've finished playing Persona 4 and got the best ending. To be fairly honest the story wasn't as strong as the one from Persona 3, in that game there was a lot more at risk, including a lot more character development. That is not to say that Persona 4's story is bad, I do like how comedic it gets, especially when the characters get into really awkward situations and the the whole recurring theme of finding and accepting the truth.

The game-play is better than Persona 3, since you can actually control your party members, social links actually have some game-play use in battle and the menus are much faster.

Without further ado, here's some art:

From top to bottom; left to right: Yu, Yosuke, Teddie (and human version), Ryotaro, Rise, Adachi, Chie, Yukiko , Kanji, Naoto ,Nanako

Some of the character designs in this game remind me of other characters, for example Yosuke looks like Shaggy from "Scooby Do!", Yukiko looks like Violet Parr from the Incredibles (hence the face-mask), Naoto looks like the protagonist from Persona 3 combined with GoGo Tomago from Big hero 6 and Nanako looks like Boo from Monsters inc. Teddie's human form also has hair like Donald Trump's.


Today is also when Persona 5: Royal was released, which I would love to get but unfortunately I don't own a PS4, so I guess I'll just stick to playing the PS3 version of Persona 5, which by the way has a rubbish frame-rate on RPCS3 (Update 9th November: the newer versions of the emulator play the game with a far better and consistent frame-rate). So far I think Persona 5 is a pretty hard but great game. I'd certainly like to draw some portraits of the characters later on.

That's all from me!

Selfish Effective altruism #4: Why China could be a very important country

Hello there!
Here is a long form post regarding the area of effective altruism, it will be in it's own series called "Selfish Effective altruism" which is full of long-form blog posts regarding effective altruism. This one will be about the great potential and dangers of China.

Preface

Whether you know it or not, China is quite a powerful country which has a largely growing technology industry especially in a city called 'Shenzen'. However it is often facing issues with communism and conflicts with the US which in my opinion, is more or less both of their faults.

I was going to put in agriculture of China, but I had far more to write about regarding their technology - though China's agriculture production is pretty high.

Keep in mind that this is one of my first long-form content blog posts so it will be subject to criticism, and any kind of criticism is welcome. I don't expect you to only use this blog as a source of knowledge for China - though I would be grateful if this blog made you think about China a little more or have you learn something about it as it did with me. I suggest you read relevant studies, blogs, books or videos as well. Most the sources are in the bottom of this post, so please read them.

There is a lot to mention about China and this blog only scratches the surface of China so don't be surprised if I make another post about china. I've also heard that countries like India and Russia also have a large amount of potential; they may get their own posts. Without further ado, time to get started on China.

Technological powerhouse

China is quite powerful in terms of technology thanks to a city named "Shenzen" which is like the silicon valley of china. It is home to the Tianhe-1 which is a super computer which can process about 1000 trillion operations per second, it is also being used to work on 1,400 research projects for research centres and companies every day, which is over double its counterparts in the US.

China is also one of the manufacturer of iPhone parts in the US. In 2017 telecom equipment including mobile phones counted for 25% of total exports to the US and another ~25% was electrical machinery. China's new economy has expanded 2 times as fast as the overall economy throughout the 2010's and created 20 times the number of jobs than other sectors, mainly traditional. China seems to play quite an important role in the US's imports as well as their technology experiencing large amounts of growth.

Though, China was not always like this, since technology wasn't its highest priority. Though, in China's 10th 5 year plan (2001-5) they did increase funding into technology by more than 1.5% of its GDP into it. Only in the late 2000's did they look to develop their open-source technology culture, when Android an open-source operating system, was released.

It was embedded in china's history that it was a country that wanted to avoid dependency on foreign technology without knowing how it was produced. Since Android is open-source, this paved the way for china to make a lot of projects open source. China is the 2nd largest group contributing to open source projects on GitHub. The reason for this heavy involvement was that China wanted to integrate with the rest of the world's tech infrastructure and governments and agencies were willing to make this move. Due to the fact that China has many open source projects, they are increasingly active collaborators, which is pretty great, given the short amount of time this has taken to progress.

There are a variety of industries making their tech open sources like healthcare, transportation, energy etc.Companies like Hauwei, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent have contributed their code around cloud infrastructure and machine learning. Despite this growing movement, it is still pretty weak compared to contributions from the US and Europe.

There are open source projects like Alibaba (Dragonfly) which is a software that distributes files as efficiently as possible  contributed largely by super power Alibaba. Open source in China is even important for their collaborations with other countries like the US, which I will get to much later on.

Shenzhen in all its glory. Credit:Pixabay

There is a city called "Shenzen", which is known as a technological powerhouse as it houses many tech giant as well as having a population of 12 million people. 40 years ago it was just a fishing village which became a breeding ground for fundamental research and development. It is also known as China's 'Silcon valley', it is also the location of China's 4th major science centre where the Chinese government intend to become a global technology and innovation powerhouse.

The Chinese ministry of Science and Technology as well as the National Development and Reform Commission manage the science centres like technology parks and government funded labs. These areas undertake basic research in fields like nuclear reactions, quantum physics and astrophysics. Beijing, Shanghai and Hefei are the science centres in china. We have also established that Shenzen is quite powerful in terms of technology, but the scientific research there is very basic, but in the 13th 5 year plan China plans to have high level talent and offer an open research area in Shenzen, there is expected to be built a large-scale technology infrastructure and national labs, focusing on fields of biological science, cyberspace and materials science - which could possibly contribute to bio security, cyber security and then some.

The rise of the communist regime

It has not been too long since the 70th anniversary of the communist state in china. Although there are plenty of human rights relating to ethnicity, religion, fair trial and workers and increased well being in things like education and jobs. The ruling party has achieved quite a lot like building the word's second economy (over $15 trillion) behind the US. Despite this, the leadership is quite flawed in terms of leading government because , there is not a consideration towards the expression of human rights. 


Xi Jinping (the secretary of the communist state)  suggested the idea of the "Chinese dream", which is more similar to Lenin's vision of communist Russia where all people have access to the shared prosperity of the nation, rather than the 'American dream'. Over the decades people have climbed out of poverty though there has been a large inequality gap. Although post-Mao china did see economic equality, that was only because everyone was poor - very similar to Russia during Stalin's process of collectivization, where it tried to share resources but was inefficient for the people. They say that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, this is what trying to enforce communist ideas is. The Chinese government blame the US and Taiwan for funding the protests in the city, although Hong Kong's SAR government as well as the central government of policymakers are to blame for causing the uproars in the first place.

In July 2019 someone publicly demonstrated to have Xi to resign and implement universal suffrage but this failed and they died when they were in detention. There were also protests by truck drivers, security guards and hotel workers in the 10 days leading to October 1st 2019, over the same thing. Xi Jinping did not do anything to pacify this aggression, which I don't think would be great for someone who wants to accomplish "access to shared prosperity" with their people.

Managing the communist regime is a very difficult task for the leaders, so difficult in fact that they are kept awake at night - especially since there is a lot of hyperbole on their end about China quickly becoming a world power.

Xi's party faced long-term and complex challenges, and the only party that could defeat them is themselves, the ruling party has 89 million members. Xi often refers to the collapse of the Soviet Union which happened when it had 20 million members. Funnily enough the soviet union collapsed short of it's 69th year anniversary which makes china's communist party pretty powerful (as it has over 4x the members).

Xi did an anti-corruption campaign to prevent official corruption, but there is a catch, the government officials are averse to making any decisions and tend to deflect responsibility therefore resulting in poor progress in reform. Soon after, bureaucratic lethargy became a new target in this campaign but it has not produced any notable results.

Conflicts with the US

China has a number of conflicts with the US. An example of this is in trade, where Trump encourages consumers to buy american by making imported goods more expensive by putting $360/£296 billion tariffs on Chinese goods. It doesn't really help that China also puts a tariff of over $100 billion on US goods.

Credit: Pixabay

Donald trump mentioned in his first speech regarding national security strategy that "China and Russia challenge American power, influence and interests attempting to erode american security and prosperity". He also claimed that these two countries were developing advanced weapons that could threaten the US, possibly taking us back to the cold war. Trump said the two countries would be determined to make economies less free and fair, and to control data and information and expand their influence. Although Trump does seem to have a point about the economy of China being unfair, as was established earlier with the Chinese dream and lack of freedom of rights. There were no details about the weapons though.

China's GDP figures have dropped due to the the trade conflict with the US, having lower target economic growth of 6% - 6.5% (whereas 10 years back it would have been ~10%) and it is predicted that in the next 10 years growth would be 5%. Chinese investment in the US fell by 70%, due to Chinese companies not willing to put up with months in a review process with the Comitte of Foreign Investment in the United States, and needing to risk being turned down - the US would not like this either.

Trade between US and China seems to be at stake also as trump criticized Beijing's efforts to militarize areas in the south china seas which can endanger the free flow of trade. They did this by surrounding Navy vessels around a Philippine island, during the time that Trump was too focused on Chinese trade tensions and North Korea's missile and nuclear tests. Probably not the smartest move on Trump or China's end.

Politics aside, China's tension with the US is also quite concerning as it is where Microsoft does more research and development than anywhere outside of the US, with Beijing employing over 200 scientists and involving over 300 visiting scholars and students - it also recruits for roles in machine learning, something that is very important in the development of AI. The trade embargo concerns Microsoft's chief executive Satya Nadella who mentions that “A lot of AI research happens in the open, and the world benefits from knowledge being open,” - perhaps referring to China's tendency to have open-source software. Nadella goes on to mention that this has been true since the scientific revolution and putting barriers on this would worsen the situation.

Though some people oppose the idea of Microsoft researchers collaborating with China's National University of Defence technology, when they were working on AI technologies. They thought that this technology could be used for oppressive means, and could be the communist party in china using america as a way of boosting the communist party's human rights ideas. 

There is also a problem with opportunities for the Chinese researchers to work in the US, as visas are for shorter periods - making the researches unsure of whenever they will complete their projects. As a result they would go to other countries, but there is a catch to that, since the capacity at top universities in other countries for Chinese students is limited. UK and Australian universities are likely to see a greater demand for Chinese students in the not too soon future.

Conclusion

We have looked at China's open source and innovative technology as well as their communism and conflicts with US. I believe that China and the US are both to blame for their conflicts as they keep on imposing tariffs and insulting (for a lack of a better term) each other. Despite this, China is quite important because of a few reasons, one is that its communism is pretty large and almost nothing can stop it, if this goes out of hand you could only imagine what would happen. Secondly their technology industry is a large asset to not only US companies like Microsoft but the open source community since their contributions are pretty high. 

Their science industry is also growing quite rapidly which, with some collaboration with other countries could help solve the world's most pressing problems. However if relations which China go sour, these problems may be a lot harder to solve.

That's all from me!


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Sources

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-sets-2019-gdp-growth-target-at-6-to-65-2019-03-05
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/no-chinas-communist-party-not-running-borrowed-money-89176
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49943037
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48196495
https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-relations-china
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3032542/xi-jinping-biggest-danger-communist-party-itself
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/quite-a-leap-forward-for-the-chinese-communist-party/cid/1710141
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3029874/china-looks-ai-future-subways-adopt-facial-recognition
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3032842/shenzhen-takes-new-role-basic-research-centre-after-earning
https://medium.com/inside-machine-learning/is-open-source-alive-in-china-3f606aafbd3b
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/15/asia-markets-us-china-partial-trade-deal-oil-and-currencies.html
http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/579845
https://www.thepharmaletter.com/article/china-investing-heavily-in-ai-to-boost-pharma-sector-says-analyst
https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/7-chinese-open-source-projects-you-should-know-about
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-china-became-a-hero-in-open-source/
https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/10/article/amazon-opens-internet-of-things-lab-in-shenzhen/
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/18/asia-markets-october-18-china-gdp-brexit-oil-and-currencies.html
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/china/what-can-we-expect-in-china-in-2019
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2124851/donald-trumps-national-strategy-targets-china-russia
https://news.wjct.org/post/communist-china-turns-70-who-shares-its-economic-growth-0

Announcing the release of "Arm strong - Episode 1"

Hello there!

Today is when I release the first episode to my latest game "Arm Strong". It contains 11 new levels, made to be more challenging than the original's. I also added in 2 new block types, one of them being a spring which can bounce the player to greater heights and a platform which the player can jump from beneath it to stand on.

I plan to make 2 more episodes, Episode 2 being released around the 10th December and Episode 3 being released around January/February 2020.

Episode 2 will add one more block type and around 11-14 new levels similar to this one.

Episode 3 will add no new block types, but will use all of the features from Episode 1 and 2 to challenge the player to almost anything the game has to offer. Episode 3 will add 16 or more new levels to the game.

I'm not sure if all of this would go into fruition, because when I had plans for episodes to Batemp II, I quickly realized that I would need to fix some major problems with the game and would take a lot of time. Despite this I think that Arm Strong is far more feasible to make levels for because it does not have as much major problems as Batemp II does.

That being said, I hope you enjoy the new additions that this episode has to offer.
Download it here.

That's all from me.

Othermind Update: Area completion

Hello there!
Despite the fact that I haven't posted about this game in a while, it does not mean that progress is stagnant, rather the contrary!

Preface

A lot of progress has been going on in Othermind/Pipe dreamer II, such as a lot of the game being complete, a lot of work going on in the art department and not to mention a lot of bug-swatting.

Area completion

The maps in Othermind are all in the game now, more or less looking like final designs, although a lot of the placeholder tiles are still present in these worlds. Sadly, I did have to scrap 2 worlds due to the workload of having to make their mini-games, which means more bugs, and polish the area's design to make it not only look as interesting as possible but to also remove any potential exploits that the player could preform to make them stuck on a certain area. Despite the removals of 2 worlds, this game still has more worlds than the original so that's good, but only 3 of them have mini-games.

The worlds

If you want to explore what the game has for yourself, you are free to skip this section. Otherwise I'll talk about what the game has in store

Blue meadow - A lush environment full of blue trees, walking radishes (from the first game originally called "Leems") and ledges where only the leems can walk up.

The City with no name - Based on the one from the first game, which was originally going to have a mini-game but I thought it was quite a bit tedious so I decided to make the area a nice walk around town where you have to go out of your way to throw sales pitches to people in exchange for gems.

Peach sea - Similar to "Aqualove" from the first game where Narlwrus maneuver the waters. This area is far less buggier than it was in the first game since I had trouble with where the player could be dropped off at. The name was inspired from the Pink sea from Yume Nikki.

Mushroom world - Might remind you a bit of Super Mario, there is quite a bit of jumping invovled as the creatures you can posses there can jump to some pretty outstanding heights.

Winter world - A vastly cold world full of ice and Yetis who do not like anyone going near them. The water can freeze the player if they get in but Yetis can walk through there due to their warm fur and thick feet.

These are the worlds that appear in the game, I try to keep the details as minimal as possible because I think the most enjoyment you can get out of them is by playing them yourself.

Art progress

My friend Joe is doing a great job at drawing the animations and the tiles. Though it is quite a bit of effort to co-ordinate him to be on the same page as me, mainly with the more technical side i.e. making something into a tile-set, I tend to get around this by making some edits to his work to suit my vision. I'll show you an example of the tree he drew vs my edits to make it a tile-set:

The things on the side of the right tree aren't bushes, they are to smooth out the appearance of the trees as shown in the screenshot below.

Here is both our efforts in action:

The translucent magenta tiles are collisions.

I'll post a few more screenshots here too:

I probably need to get rid of those polka-dot blocks that I used to call "large mushrooms".

A lonely Yeti with a cold heart in a equally cold world.

Recently I started using Trello (I used this for the development of Bounty Hunter II) again to set tasks for my artist to animate other characters and draw the tiles. It's a pretty efficient way for us to communicate with each other since we can put in attachments (including piskel files) allowing for ease of access with resources.

Conclusion

At this point it is crunch time because I plan Othermind game to be released in the 15th December. This month I plan to work on finalizing most of the art and making the areas reflect their finished forms. In November I would like merely to focus on bug-fixes and polishing the game as well as finishing touches (I still haven't completed the main menu).

In other news I'm also working on a blog post that is most likely going to be longer than most of my posts, it is part of my "effective altruism" series and will be about China and why it is important. The post is set to be released in 27th October so to those interested in China, look forward to that.

Do you need to drop your native language to learn a new one?

Hello there!
It's been a while since I've last made a blog post about Japanese, let alone language learning. Quite a bit has happened since last time, so let me get you up to speed!

The branch to other languages

To set things straight, let me get one thing clear: I'm not quitting learning Japanese, I still learn the language every now and then. But I'm not as serious about it as I was a year ago, that is for a few reasons. One is that I'm learning other languages as well, a few examples include Spanish, French, German and then some. Another reason is because I've got several other things going on in my life, therefore I cannot be willing to focus on learning Japanese as much.

I certainly don't regret trying to learn Japanese, it has given me the needed confidence to pursue learning other languages including one I absolutely despised learning back in school (French).

My method to learning languages has slightly changed since last time. At first I insisted on learning a selected language by consuming any kind of media in the language I was interested in. I tried it out, but I ended up not enjoying this process since it is one thing to understand what is going on in the media you are consuming, and another to learn a new language whilst doing so. After some thought, I decided to abandon this approach and instead I decided to try learning languages from stuff I already knew.

Learning from the stuff you love

I started this approach by replaying one of my favourite SNES games "Terrainigma" (which I first played 4 years ago), in Japanese. The way I try to learn the language is by taking a photo of the dialogue in the screen with my phone through google translate and selecting certain words that I would like to learn. This process is quite tedious, but at least it is more bearable, since I've already played Terranigma, I know about everything that happens in the game from the characters to the plot. I'm also doing this with learning French from an RPG maker game called "Off", which I have also fully played in English.

The experience is not as novel as when first played... well maybe novel in another way, because I'm learning another language through it but you know what I mean. The fact that it isn't novel can give my brain more space to allocate for focusing on learning the words, because knowing the context of what is happening in the game can certainly add to the ease of learning the language. This approach has a wider application than just merely video games. You can do this with a film, television programme or book you enjoy.

You can even do this with leaflets, posters or books and suchlike.

The method

In the last point I explained that I use google translate on my mobile phone to assist me with the learning. I'll explain this in more depth, I select certain words of the sentence and try to memorise the words usually when I'm on a train journey somewhere. I remember doing something like this with French where I had to memorise a bunch of words for an exam, except here it is different: I'm not memorising things for an exam, I am memorising words so I can understand future things I consume in selected language better.

Funnily enough I remember it easier when I do this than any of the times when I had to memorise the vocab for a test back in school. Perhaps it's because the medium gave me a bit of context to remember the information, therefore I can refer to it.

Speaking the target language at this point might be good once in a while (just to get my feet wet), but I usually focus on input. I've tried to talk to a few people who know my select language but it's very difficult because I sound awkward when I speak to them due to my limited knowledge.

I think it's better if I focus on immersing in media and occasionally speaking the language to myself just to see how I am when I speak the language.

Conclusion

Although I'm not as committed to learning languages as much as I was back a year ago, the fire is still well and burning. Instead of studying the language, I try and learn it from consuming what I already enjoy, and through this, I would 'live' the language.

When I have reached my next milestone, I'll be sure to write a post about it.
That's all from me.