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Showing posts from November 23, 2014

Week 8: Light novel

Light novel (ライトノベル raito noberu, also ラノベ ranobe or ライノベ rainobe) is a style of Japanese novel primarily targeting young adults. They are typically around 50,000 words long, are often frequently published, are generally published  in A6 format (105×148mm) and are often illustrated. They are often serialized in magazines such as Faust, Gekkean Dragon Magazine, etc. In recent years, on the basis of such novels have been created manga, anime, movies and acting. There are two main aspects that distinguish light novels from other forms of literature. The most obvious one are the illustrations. Almost every light novel will have an anime style illustration as its cover. Apart from that most of them also contain 5-10 extra illustrations placed within the book, but there are also those that don’t have any. The other aspect is the writing style. Light novels focus mostly on dialogues, which allow the story to progress quickly, keeping the reader interested and reading at a bit fa...

Week 8: What are eSports?

eSports or Electronic Sports are organized tournaments in which contestants compete in teams or against each other in video games. The rivalry between the competitors (players) takes place both in the form of recreation, as well as on gaming tournaments (the phenomenon of pro-gaming). E-sports history is associated with the increasing popularity of online gaming in games like StarCraft, Counter-Strike, Quake, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and League of Legends. Quake's popularity led to the creation in 1997, in the United States, of the Cyberathlete Professional League. There are prestigious tournaments such as the World Cyber Games and the Electronic Sports World Cup, and in Poland - Poznan Game Arena and the Electronic Sports League. Individual computer games of different genres, in which games being played between players, are called disciplines. The most common game genres are MOBA, a real-time strategy, fighting and a first person shooter. Games are played live, an...

Week 8: Kickstarter - are you willing to donate?

Many of you probably already heard about most popular and also controversial crowdfunding platform. Kickstarter launched back in 2009 and was founded by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler. Idea of this site was to help creative people gather funds from public so they can bring their projects to life. Projects introduced by them could be from different categories: art, movies, games, music, tv shows, food joints, technology etc. It also introduced model of pledges, in which backer could pledge a certain amout of money that contains extra bonuses when actual product is finished. Since 2009 kickstarter had many successful campaigns such as: 1.The Pebble - we already talked about smartwatches recently and pebble was one of them. It was first smartwach to ever reach public and untill this day remains best campaign.The Pebble raised $10,266,845 dollars from 68,929 backers on Kickstarter, and surpassed the funding goal by over 10,000%. 2.Double fine adventure ra...

Week 8: Tattoos

Who doesn't know what tattoos are? After all, this kind of body art dates back to ancient times. Many centuries ago people from primitive tribes used to decorate their bodies with various patterns, depending on the region. Nowadays, opinions on the art of tattoo making are divided. Styles and tendencies change all the time. Tattoos were very popular among Polynesian people. Their meaning was symbolic and ritual. Not everybody could afford to have one. To deserve it you had to kill an enemy and cut off his tattooed head. This privilege was reserved mostly for chiefs and warriors. The word "tattoo" comes from the Samoan language in which "tatau" meant correct, workmanlike. The best known are Maori face ornaments called "moko". http://www.vanishingtattoo.com/tattoo_museum/images/maori-moko6.jpg http://www.themaori.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Nusho_Tamoko2.jpg Julius Cesar mentioned Celtic tattoos in his letters and Ahmad ibn Fadl...