Catching up.

It’s been a while.

Madison remains a pretty classy place, and summer here was a pretty excellent experience. That’s one of the nice things about the Midwest – as miserable as the winters tend to be, the summers often manage to make up for it. Once particularly nice thing was that the days of incredible humidity that characterize summer in southeast Michigan don’t seem to be a factor here. I’m not sure if that’s a regional difference or if I just got lucky this time around. Ask me again in a year, I suppose!

Work remains a significant portion of my life and time (not always by choice!) but, unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to talk about…well, any of it really. NDAs are common in all technical fields but, in m brief experience at least, people don’t usually want to know about the gritty details of HVAC assembly code or telephone directory systems. Game development, on the other hand, is one of those things that people like to ask about and, when confronted with NDA talk, tend to get even more curious. People that probably haven’t played a game other than Rock Band in decades, mind you! I recently had a sixty or seventy year old lady start interrogating me at a local deli.

True story.

In an attempt to get ahead on some matters of student-related debt I’ve started doing freelance web development work in addition to my day job at Human Head. How long I can sustain this is an open question but contract work is one of those areas in which you can pull down relatively big scores punctuated by long periods of complacency. If that’s your <em>only</em> source of income it’s a problem; if it’s supplementary, the ability to turn it on and off is a wonderful bonus. The project should start up officially early next week, and in celebration of this I’ve updated my web resumé and added a (very small) portfolio containing selections of sites I’ve designed over the years. If you care to take a look, it’s right here.

Oh, and for those of you wondering: yes, I’m still a fatass.

Pre-update preparation.

This is just a brief update to let everyone know that I’m officially moved in and have completed my first week of work at Human Head. There’s a bit to talk about, of course: stuff regarding the new apartment, the trials of my first week in a new city, details regarding my first week and how that went, etc. I’m still not quite decompressed enough to say much, though, so I’m going to hold off on making a real post until the end of the weekend.

Sufficient to say, so far, that things are going about as well as can be expected. The apartment is satisfactory and everyone at Human Head has been friendly and helpful, thus far, so I’m pretty happy with that. I haven’t had much of a chance to explore Madison for multiple reasons, not least of which has been the ridiculous weather this week: sub-zero temperatures pretty much every day. Things are supposed to warm up after today, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to do more of that in the near future.

Further updates to come over the weekend, for those of you still interested.

Words cannot describe…

…how excited I am that Rez is coming to Live! Arcade. And not just Rez, though that would almost be enough on it’s own, but a revamped Rez in glorious High Definition and Dolby 5.1 surround sound.

It’s like someone looked into my heart and made manifest my deepest desires.

Rez is more than just a game. In fact, taken solely in the context of videogames in general, you could even say that Rez isn’t particularly remarkable; at the core it’s a rail shooter whose combat is relatively shallow. But this is the view of someone who hasn’t actually experienced Rez. I used the word “experienced” rather than “played” deliberately — Rez is about the synergy between action and sensation, about the way its gameplay integrates seamlessly with complex, morphing visual and aural aesthetics. It’s one of the few games that is just as much fun to watch as it is to play.

The “HD Revolution” that the 360 and PS3 were supposed to bring to gaming is yet to materialize, in my eyes, primarily because it just isn’t necessary. Gear of War looks great, and there’s no denying that the increased graphical capabilities add to the impact of the aesthetic, but it’s a far cry from an argument for the necessity of HD. Rez, a game that depends on its artistic visuals, music and sounds for its brilliance, will be the truest test of HD gaming.

I’m pretty excited.

Blue on black.

This past weekend was a pretty good one. At the behest of Pat I went down to the Detroit River Days festival, and as a bonus I got to hang out with Keith and Marvin. Getting to see Marvin was a particular treat since he’s been away in Iraq not once but twice and, as such, I haven’t really spoken to him in more than a year.

Anyway, we went down primarily for the (free!) Kenny Wayne Shepherd concert down by the newly renovated riverfront and boy, was that worth it. I’ll come clean: prior to Friday I hadn’t really heard much of Kenny’s music, but after that concert I think it’s fair to say that I’m hooked. Good blues guitar music is always hard to dislike, but there’s something about their stuff in particular that was really fun. I can’t really comment on the set list since I wasn’t familiar with 90% of what they played, but I can say that even after getting started late they stuck around for almost two hours. Even if it hadn’t been free, I’d say we got our money’s worth.

I didn’t spend much time with the rest of the festival, but what I saw seemed nice enough. I do want to get back downtown to take a walk along the new riverfront one of these days, though.

Afterwards we stopped by Greektown Casino to see if Marvin and Keith (the other one) had managed to lose all their money yet. It was my first time at that particular casino and, I must say, I wasn’t particularly impressed. When I picture casinos in my head I typically envision grand, glitzy, relentlessly kitschy venues of Vegas or Reno…instead, Greektown was a pretty drab affair. Cramped, poorly organized and a bit rough around the edges. I suppose it was probably nicer when they first built it a couple of years ago, but with the kind of money casinos pull in I just assumed they’d work a little harder on appearances.

Besides that, I spend most of Saturday attending various family graduation parties and a couple of hours on Sunday visiting with Rob, whom I haven’t seen in a year or so. I also wrote up an interview about being a college student and working in the indie game scene. I’m not sure what, exactly, they’re going to use it for, but it was at the behest of someone working at MTU. I’ll let you know if I hear anything back.

I’ve knocked out several books over the past couple of weeks so I’ll be writing more book reviews similar to the one I did for No Logo a week ago. Hopefully they’ll be interesting (or at least useful) to you and can help me get back into the swing of regular updates.

Our star burns.

I managed to completely torch the back of my neck and the tops of my forearms yesterday. You would think that after twenty-four odd years of living on this planet I might finally understand that the sun’s rays can be harmful. In my defense, I didn’t expect to spend quite as much time out in the open as I did.

The reason I got so much sun? I spent around two hours walking up and down the middle of Ten Mile and Meadowbrook with a coffee can, collecting donations for a local Iraqi war veteran named Cas. He’s a young guy, naturally, and he was on the receiving end of shrapnel damage to his face that’s left him blind in both eyes. I didn’t actually know him prior to the fundraiser, but simply heard about it while I was getting my hair cut on Monday. It turns out that, like me, he’d been going to Phyl’s Barber Shop since he was very young, and so when Phyllis heard about his injury she decided to help raise money for his rehabilitation.

In a lot of ways, Phyl’s is quite a strange place to find in the suburbs. Surrounded as we are by virtually every major chain and franchise in America, locally owned and connected business like hers are pretty rare. Witnessing the way her employees, customers and the other small businesses nearby all came together to help Cas was like seeing the America we’ve all heard about but never really seen. That probably sounds melodramatic, but I honestly felt proud to donate my time and to see so many others doing the same: the barbers working an eight hour day for free (the shop is normally closed on Wednesdays); the spouses and kids of the barbers making signs, cooking food and cleaning up; even customers and neighbors doing whatever we could to make the event a success.

More than just the sense of charity, I found meaning in the nature of the event itself – raising money for a soldier wounded in Iraq. It reminded me that no matter how we feel about the war itself, the people who are fighting it are real and deserving of our respect and support. I may disagree with the president and hate the way the Iraq occupation has been handled, but that doesn’t mean I can’t (or don’t) want to do everything I can to make the lives of the common soldier a little bit easier.

Contrary to what divisive pundits may want us to believe, you can love the soldier but hate the war.

Stand by.

I was going to post on a couple of things today (Game Jam postmortem among them) but none of that seems particularly important just now. Check back late tomorrow.

Buried in bits.

With the exception of this weekend it’s been a fairly boring and mundane week or so. And the “exciting” things that happened over the weekend relate exclusively to developments in my project which, even if I could talk about it now, would probably bore the hell out of you.

But then, what else is new?

I’ve been whiling away my idle hours playing Warcraft 3 with Darth and a few guys from campus. Though it might seem a bit strange to suddenly get involved in a four year old game, the RTS genre has been woefully under served in the last couple of years. I got a lot of enjoyment out of Rise of Nations, to be sure, but that sort of game takes too long to play. With so many meetings and classes strung throughout the day I just don’t find myself with consecutive hours to play games very often. Which is actually why I finally quit (or, to be precise, went on indefinite leave from) Final Fantasy XI. Although I still got a certain satisfaction out of the game – and I would very much like to see the changes they make to white mage – I just can’t justify devoting entire evenings to it anymore. If I ever could, really, but that’s a totally different topic of discussion.

As lame as this may sound, a significant portion of my days are now spent answering, reading and writing e-mails. I have become, almost completely involuntarily, a manager. Don’t get me wrong, when I took on this project I knew that I was going to be the team leader and I had at least some idea of the kind of work I would be expected to perform. On the other hand, I don’t think I was prepared for the sheer volume of e-mail. Over a period of four days (Friday through Monday) I managed to accumulate ninety-two e-mails…ninety-two!

This absurdity quickly sent me crashing up against the university’s storage quotas. I’d been flirting within a few megabytes of their limit for almost a year now, but deluge annihilated what little buffer I had. To remedy this I spent most of this morning going through my e-mails all the way back to late 2005 and deleting around twenty megabytes. After lunch I’ll probably start archiving and compressing a lot of the older stuff that I can’t get rid of yet (mostly HGD correspondence) to move it off of the university servers.

Coming up on the next post: more exciting e-mail stories? Maybe!

A triumphant return.

Wow, you’re still coming here? Now that’s what I call perseverance. Or, perhaps, simply an inevitable consequence of the internet…it’s pretty easy to click a bookmark during your lunch break. If you’re technologically inclined, you might even have subscribed via RSS, in which case you probably didn’t even remember until you saw the little notification!

I like the RSS possibility the best simply because it make me feel important. I mean, how many people can say they’ve got subscribers? You know, aside from everyone who’s every published a LiveJournal. Or has a profile on Facebook. Or…nevermind.

Anyway.

The site is back after a two month hiatus which – given my previous track record – it’s possible you didn’t actually recognize as such. It’s actually been very difficult for me to maintain this sort of web presence lately, primarily because my life hasn’t been very notable. I was doing essentially the same thing at any given point in a year as I had been doing at that same time in the previous year, a situation that does not make for interesting weblog content. When even I found myself being bored by the entries I tried to write, I decided it might be time for an extended leave of absence.

Circumstances change, though, as they are wont to do, and I’m happy to say that things are finally looking to be…dynamic…enough to get me to type once in a while. That’s not a guarantee that things will be exciting, per se, but I’ll at least try to have things to talk about from time to time. I’m involved in a major (relatively speaking) game development project that seems like it might have a shot at going somewhere, I’m finally a few months from getting the hell out of college, and from this point forward things look to be a bit more entertaining.

As for the site itself, obviously (or maybe not, depending on when you last came by) there’s a new visual aesthetic. It’s a pretty radical change from the previous one, so I’ll understand if it doesn’t immediately appeal to my entire audience. The vast majority of it works just fine, although I’ve no doubt that various browser bugs (I’m looking at you IE6!) will be exposed in the coming weeks, but the functionality has all been tested. Feel free to try out the new Live Search function in the sidebar, which will update dynamically (though not exactly quickly) as you type, or the AJAX-based archives. In a shocking reversal of the expected, the photo gallery actually works! It even has a fair number of (older) photos!

There are a few more things I’ll be adding and touching up over the next few days, some of which are predicated upon third parties getting them done. If warranted, I’ll make brief announcement when they’re ready.

It’s good to be back, and here’s hoping that I’ll be able to maintain a healthier level of commitment in the coming year.

The hipster instinct.

Everyone keeps talking about this Web 2.0 bullshit as though it’s the greatest new way to make money on the internet. When I look around, though, it seems like there’s a much simpler business model that must be making someone money, because everyone with a screen printer is doing it. The steps go something like this:

1. Think up some “clever” phrases or puns. If you’re lazy, rip off the latest “cult” movie, like Napolean Dynamite or Snakes on a Plane.
2. Put them on a t-shirt.
3. Make a website using lean, thin lines and solid colors.
4. Liberally apply photos of cute “geeky” girls wearing said shirts.
5. Profit?

Honestly, I didn’t realize there was such a massive market for t-shirts. I mean, I know that I myself have been guilty of buying shirts with videogame-related icons and phrases, but practically all of my purchases were made over two years or so.

This (naturally) leads to the theory that humans have a genetic critical period, occurring somewhere in their late teens or early twenties, during which we are compelled to buy t-shirts with words on them. I assume that the entire internet shirt market is supported by humans entering this brief period of their lives.

This post is about mice (not the ones with fur).

I need a new mouse. Not “need” in the usual sense our generation uses it (i.e. “want”) but in the sense that mine doesn’t actually work anymore.

My current (broken) mouse is the original Intellimouse 3.0 from Microsoft. Say what you will about their software, but Microsoft made by far the best mouse ever release with their 3.0 model. The size is perfect for your hand, curved and sloped a just enough to let your wrist tilt comfortably. It’s lightweight, incredibly precise (or it was for the time at 3,000 samples per second) and has all of its buttons placed in perfect positions. Oh, and the scroll wheel is heaven.

The breaking of my mouse has actually been a slow process. The scroll wheel has been acting up for a long time, but recently it finally got so bad as to be unusable. I attempted to take the mouse apart to see if I could fix it, but it turns out that the tiny screws holding the casing together are either a) very cheap or b) affixed with voodoo magic. I managed to completely strip the heads on both of the lower screws, effectively ending all attempts at repair.

For a time I was heartbroken, since the 3.0 mouse has been discontinued for several years (replaced by a vastly inferior model). Lest you think I’m the only one who feels so attached to this particular model, new in-package Intellimouse 3.0 mice were selling for as much at $120US on eBay!

However, my morale soared when, while searching through various sites reading on Logitech mice that might possibly be a replacement, I found out that Microsoft is re-leasing the old 3.0! Not only that, they added a thinner cord, slicker feet and a new rubberized housing to replace the (admittedly) cheap plastic one on the original. What’s more, they stuck in a 9,000 sample sensor…for reference, that’s more precise than even the $100+ “gamer” models from Logitech and Razer! All for just $40, which is actually less than what I paid for mine back in the day.

It’s possible that I’ll hold out until their “premium” Habu mouse is released. $70 is a lot of money for a mouse, but then that’s only a bit more than I originally paid for this one. If the reviews give it a major advantage over the 3.0 I’ll pick it up.

Brain crack.

How many of you watch The Show? More importantly, how many of you are familiar with Ze Frank’s concept of brain crack? I’d like to add one small detail to his take on the issue: the feeling you get when you see “your idea” implemented by someone else is far worse than the feeling you get if you try it yourself and fail.

Even since I became interested in game design I have, at various times, come up with lots of different concepts for games and things related to games. Naturally, not one of them has ever actually seen the light of day, except perhaps in idle conversations with friends. I have all the same reasons most people do…not enough time, not enough experience, not enough money, etc. The ideas sit around in my head, a source of comfort and encouragement in the quiet hours just before you fall asleep when your brain has nothing to do but take stock of your life and accomplishments.

Of course, none of these ideas have ever been revolutionary, and over time most of them get incorporated into a game. Hell, Battlefield 2 almost single-handedly utilized every facet of a game concept I’d come up with a few years prior. Most of the time, though, it’s less like being swallowed by a whale and more like being torn apart by ravenous piranha…little bits of the ideas are taken here and there until virtually nothing original remains.

Why am I bringing all this up? For the first time since I joined Husky Game Development a year ago I find myself in the position to take one of my ideas and do something with it. Though my current project has been shaped by everyone on the team, the concept and major gameplay details are all things I’ve been babying in my head for years.

It’s a situation that is as terrifying as it is exhilarating. There’s nothing quite like seeing something you envisioned for so long start to take shape before your eyes, but at the same time the risks and pitfalls are so many and varied as to be almost paralyzing. You’ve got to cede a certain amount of control…unlike the world of dreams I do not directly command all aspects of the process. New tweaks cannot simply be incorporated on a whim. The will of the team as a whole must be embraced so that everyone can feel like a part of the final product.

Even more frightening is the very real possibility that this game will suck. How hard will it be to see something I’ve put my heart and soul into casually dismissed by gamers because it’s no fun to play? What happens when, inevitably, triage will have to be performed and features either cut or drastically altered to make our deadlines? What if the game I always wanted to make becomes the game I was forced by circumstances to push out?

Having no experience in game design and no real reason to believe I have any kind of gift for it was easy to ignore when I had all that brain crack kicking around inside. I could console myself that, if I was only given the chance, all these amazing ideas would be fun and engaging and popular.

The possibility that they aren’t is probably the most frightening thing I’ve ever had to think about.

Stop it.

It is 12:15am on Thursday. As of five minutes ago, I can now hear the sound of water being whipped against my window. This marks the twelfth consecutive day of rain.

That is all.

A form of mental hibernation.

The beginning of the fall semester is nearly upon me…thankfully, barring a complete and total mental breakdown (which I’m not ruling out, just using as a metric) I should be out of here at the end of the school year. Exciting, I suppose, or at least it would be if I wasn’t already a year overdue for this graduation thing.

I continue to excel in all aspects of life.

This also means that fall itself is here. Yes, I know it’s still August but when you live at roughly the same latitude as polar bears autumn tends to arrive a bit earlier than most of you are used to. I don’t see this as a distressing or even disappointing development; you see, I’m rather fond of fall, a fact I think I’ve mentioned a few times before. I like summer, and Houghton summers are definitely something to behold, but nothing beats autumn in the Upper Peninsula.

It’s not just the beautiful leaves either…though they’re wonderful to look at (and a great excuse to go on pointless drives with friends) they really don’t stay on the branches all that long. No, I most look forward to the weather – that brisk chill with just the right kind of breeze, especially at night. The sort of weather that’s not actually cold but cool enough that you can wear a second layer, be it a hoodie or a jacket. For reasons I’ve never quite understood, this kind of weather puts me in the mood to do things.

The problem, of course, it that winter often arrives hot (or cold – I kill me!) on the heals of fall, at which point whatever motivation I’ve stored up has to last me through the lean months. In years past I’ve not been a diligent little rodent and my supply has dwindled to dangerous levels very quickly. We’ll see if I can do a better job of collecting this time around.

In totally unrelated news: ten reasons why you should never accept (or buy) diamonds. Nothing you didn’t already know, probably, but it never hurts to be reminded.

Secret shame.

I have something of a love-hate relationship with physical bookstores. On the one hand, the mere thought of a large edifice devoted almost entirely to literature is delicious – one might even say dangerous – to me. I enjoy just walking through places like Borders to see if anything catches my eye. My finances are not such that I can usually buy these books, but they do usually get added to my list.

On the other hand, entering a bookstore means that you have to deal with the people inside it. For the most part the employees and shoppers are content to mind their own damn business, but every once in a while I get a cashier who feels compelled to comment on my purchases.

This is a problem because I have what I consider to be two guilty pleasures when it comes to reading: Love Hina and Star Wars trade paperbacks. The former isn’t a problem because I finished reading that series a long time ago (though the shame has never quite dissipated). The discomfort of the latter is largely internal – after all, an erudite sci-fi fan such as me shouldn’t stray into the realm of tawdry space fantasies.

Commentary on these legitimately embarrassing purchases is usually met with a kind of sheepish smile and a “we all have our stuff” shrug. Occasionally, however, a cashier will take exception to something from outside these genres.

On this occasion I was buying the new Penny Arcade book. It features a title and cover art that are completely non-sensical – over the top comedy that requires you to be familiar with the comic’s sense of humor. Of course, my elderly cashier new none of this but decided to stare at the cover, laugh condescendingly and ask me why the hell I was buying a book of this nature. I told her it was an illustrated history of erotic cartoons, and did so with a sardonic smile. Although, given the context, it probably just came off as creepy.

She proceeded to complete our transaction without another word.

Aloe be my angel.

There’s nothing better than being totally exhausted but unable to go to bed because you’ve cooked your skin to a nice even shade of red. It was worth it, though, because there aren’t that many things in life better than Tiger baseball on a gorgeous summer Sunday. Our seats were much crappier than the section I’m used to (150 or 151) but that was a necessary compromise for the size of the group. Always fun to hang out with old friends you haven’t seen in a while (some as long as three or four years) while meeting some potential new ones.

Toasted skin-cells aside, I’m also tired because I was up until five-thirty in the morning or so taking my brother to the emergency room.

Let me back up slightly. My brother has been working at Monkey Wrench Racing all summer and was kind enough to lend his facilities and expertise to making some routine repairs to my crappy car. Yesterday he spent twenty minutes or so welding my new muffler in place…without a face shield.

I think you can see where this is going.

Anyway, when I got home from Kim’s place (after Pat refused, as usual, to go to Denny’s) around three in the morning I found my brother in the bathroom looking a little worse for the wear and thinking that, perhaps, it might be a good idea to head to the hospital. A few minutes (and several moving violations) later we knew what we already suspected: flash blinding from the afternoon welding. Turns out you can actually burn the layers of skin that protect your cornea – who knew?

In his defense, the “close your eyes and turn your head slightly” welding technique probably works just fine when you’re welding on a workbench or something like that. Indeed, his boss does it all the time. However, when doing that underneath a car the UV light all gets reflected right back into your face. Lesson learned, intense pain endured, Vicodin proscribed.

Fun times.

Norm Doesn’t Post. Therefore, Peter Cetera Lyrics:

If you leave me now, you’ll take away the biggest part of me
Ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, no, baby please don’t go
And if you leave me now, you’ll take away the very heart of me
Ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, no, baby please don’t go
A love like ours is love that’s hard to find
How could we let it slip away?

We’ve come to far to leave it all behind
How could we end it all this way?
When tomorrow comes and we’ll both regret things we said today

A love like ours is love that’s hard to find
How could we let it slip away?

We’ve come to far to leave it all behind
How could we end it all this way?
When tomorrow comes and we’ll both regret things we said today

If you leave me now, you’ll take away the biggest part of me
Ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, no, baby, please don’t go

This is my first Google-Space I-Blog InterWeb America

So uh, Darth made a joke complaining about his student loans. Lawyers don’t have the right. Of course, they might if they feel their imaginary debt justifies the gouging of society later in life… But I guess as long as someone is getting rich off of rich people I’m down. (Plus, some of ‘em put criminals in jail.) Now I’m thinking that pretty much as long as a person is not part of a union they are OK by me. Today’s hatred of unions is brought to you by stories I’ve heard from Ford workers and teachers that can’t be fired because of tenure (this link is just the first reference I found when I Googled my anger).

Now from unions we go to Walmart and from there we go to immigrants and the guy in Philadelphia that had a sign quoting Roosevelt saying “This is America. Please speak English.” or something to the effect. (The train of thought is not necessarily connected but if all the cars keep moving there will be a point where this all blows up in fiery mayhem or “good tv”.) Even though his restaurant never refused service because of a language barrier (he realizes everyone can point) this guy was on my television – just because he put a sign in his window that asked people to speak the national language. I flick people off who drive Hummers every once in a while, and I can’t get no tube-time. Anyway, he was featured on Good Morning America and got to speak his mind on how allowing people to not learn English is a crutch preventing them from achieving great things. I thought, “Damn right.” Then on Drew and Mike I heard their interview with the blind guy that climbed Everest. I thought, yeah, disabled people are way more likely to do amazing things (Forest Gump, DareDevil, the South- Alabama is still allowed to exist, which is amazing.) Of course, giving Juan some crutches after he hopped a fence is like giving him the free, bloated, and inefficient health care that many people are up in arms about, so the only thing I can think of is to change the national language to French and have everyone enjoy the glorious handicap and we can save money on crutches and soap. And as the railroad cars finally slam into the station, Tigers win.

Whining: Just One Of The Services I Offer

I currently reside at my parents’ place in Novi and will continue to do so until sometime in the middle of next week. Actually, that’s not true – I will be there until I manage to see a Tiger’s game with Pat and Matt. I say this as if planning your life around the schedule of a sports team is a perfectly healthy (and entirely normal) thing to do.

Not that that’s the only reason I came down here, of course. Hanging out with “the crew” has been refreshing and, in a lot of ways, exactly what I needed. Not doing anything specific, but just relaxing with longtime friends in that certain way that you never quite seem to be able to replicate with new ones. If you don’t understand what I mean, there, don’t feel bad; I’m not really sure I do either.

One of the most difficult things to deal with, lately, has been trying to define exactly where I am in the course of my life. That’s not so say that a literal description is necessary, or even desired, but the more I think about it the clearer it becomes that a lot of my recent angst stems from a need to figure out just what the hell I am right now.

I don’t feel like an adult, at least not really, since I don’t have a “real job” and I’m still in college. Neither do I feel like a student, though, given that I’m twenty-three and giving new meaning to the term super-senior. Even social labels like gamer or nerd, terms I once identified quite strongly with, don’t seem to fit anymore. At the risk of mining clichés, it feels like I drifting in some sort of existential purgatory.

Obviously the best way to deal with this sort of thing is to buckle down, bust my ass to finish school properly and move on to whatever it is that turns out to be next. Unfortunately, the feelings of motivation want me to finish right now, which is something that simply cannot happen. The vagaries of university scheduling mean that to finish strong I’ll need to string things out for another entire school year…not a happy thought, exactly, and one that mediates against my sense of urgency.

I suppose the most important part – step one, if you will – is to stop my fucking whining and get on with it.

Gonna Party Like It’s 6.6.06

Has anyone else heard about this? I guess it makes sense, but I can’t shake the feeling that the whole thing is a little bit paradoxical. I mean, the only reasons 666 has any significance at all are religious…so are religious people the ones throwing the party? *

I’ve spent the last several days working through the apartment, cleaning it up and organizing. Not so much because it was unusually filthy but because it seems to have had a calming influence on my life. In some ways it feels like it’s helped me focus on rebuilding things one step at a time by removing convenient excuses.

I suppose I should step back for a moment and explain that last. Everyone knows that I am a procrastinator – this is not news. However, the specific way in which I procrastinate is, I think, somewhat unique. Rather than ignoring the things I have to do I instead set a series of goals or tasks that I feel I need to accomplish before I can attempt the one I’m avoiding. Inevitably these motivational caltrops are either completely unrealistic or so inconsequential that motivating myself do them is impossible. In either case, the result is successful self-perpetuating apathy.

As you probably guessed the “goals” this time around involved getting this place in order. Initially it was about the painting, moving and organization of my room but as that neared completion I naturally extended it to the rest of the apartment so as to avoid starting in on the rest of the (arguably most important) work.

The upside of conquering the ladder tasks is twofold: one, I obviously lose the convenient excuses. Two, and most useful, I get things done that needed to be done anyway. If I can manage to continue this type of thinking it’s possible that I might actually use the rest of my summer in a way that gets things done.

Crazy, I know.

* I know they’re not. I just felt like commenting on the hilarity of secular-minded people co-opting a religious symbol for a party. I mean, either it means something or it doesn’t.

Hahaha, I hijacked Norm’s computer.

Hello avid readers. This is Tim. You may not know me, but I am an individual originating from the wonderful (slightly wet at the moment, but still wonderful) state of California. I have hijaked Norm’s computer, and am holding it hostage until one of the following conditions are met:
1. He tells me to give it back.
2. I get bored.

While I am sure that this is a bit of a twist from your Normal reading here (pun intended), I’m sure you’re all so desperate for him to write something, anything, that you will accept it with only minimal complaint. While I most certainly don’t claim to write posts up to his par, the fact that I’m writing anything at all makes the question somewhat academic. Alas, I fear that we will all come to regret the fact that he doesn’t seem to have spell checking built in to this posting… uhh… thingy.

Anyway, I guess I got around to that being bored thing. I’m not much of a writer. So on that note, I must bid you all farewell. Have a wonderful day.

I Didn’t Spell-Check This

If any of you remember I was supposed to go to the Game Developers Conference this week, and go I have (grammer alert!). Got in an hour ago or so after the third-longest day of traveling I’ve had thus far in my life, the first two being the original trip into Japan and the incredibly ludicrous I ran out of money in Hokkaido fiasco a few months later. Been awake since 6am eastern and it is now a little after midnight pacific. Oh, and I went to bed at 2am the night before because I am awesome like that.

Anyway, I’m here and I’m pretty exhausted. The hotel is a decent place (nothing four-star, I’m po’) but it’s quite far from the convention center. I knew this going in, of course, but I went with it because it was cheap and it seems to be within a mile or so of the end of the Mountainview transit line. I plan to test said line out when I get a chance to see just how long it takes to get to the convention center from here but I don’t expect it to be a particularly arduous ordeal.

Actually, one small concern did just occur to me…I think the last train leaves the convention center station just before midnight. That’s not a problem for the convention itself but I have been invited to a Garage Games party on one of the nights. Looks like more cab fair…blah.

Play It Off Like I’m Awesome

Still in Houghton, still going to MTU, still not caring one way or another about my degree or things associated with it. Still have another year left.

I’m not bitter, though.

Spring break is rapidly – one might even say finally – approaching. I’m very much looking forward to the week despite the fact that I have a considerable amount of work to accomplish over its course. As I will be missing a week of classes for the Game Developers Conference I’ve decided that it would be in my best interest to stay here and try to get as far ahead as possible. Given my tendency towards apathy it would probably be more accurate to describe the time as “catching up” rather than “getting ahead” but the former seems so much more pleasantly delusional.

Though I will remain under soul-crushing deadlines I believe the break will actually end up being rather relaxing. This is primarily because I’ll be working at my own pace according to a schedule of my choosing, a failing on my part that is becoming increasingly aggravating as time goes on. For some reason the very idea that my time might be arranged and allotted according to the whims and desires of someone other than myself causes a mental block that, when left unchecked, eventually destroys me and everything nearby. This will probably be an even greater problem when I finally get around to finishing school.

It’s nice to have stuff to look forward to.

We All Need A Life

I’ll be heading to Grand Rapids tomorrow (technically today, I suppose) afternoon for the purpose of visiting Pat’s bachelor hovel. Visiting probably isn’t the correct term for it, actually – something closer to inspecting might prove more accurate. Inspecting what, you ask? Why I’ll be checking for rafters from which he might hang himself to end his miserable woman-less life. If I find any I’ll be sure to line the corners with sharp metal that would slice a would-be noose, and if they prove to be non-load bearing I will happing cut them down.

That’s what friends are for, right?

My vehicle is currently in the clutches of the evil that is a Saturn dealer. You might think that this would entail effort on my part to make sure that they are doing the proper work and not simply charging me for playing poker. This is because you have never dealt with these sorts of people before. After a two week charade where I tried to be a good, conscientious customer and they pretended to give a shit I fell back on plan B: throw money at them until I have something that drives without exploding.

If you don’t count the massive credit card debt plan B is ticking along quite nicely.

To Those Who Are About To Rock…

For those of you who aren’t already aware: Guitar Heroes is a spectacular game. If you are familiar with games like Amplitude and Taiko Drum Master you are already halfway to imagining Guitar Heroes – simply add a significant amount of rocking to the already proven formula.

Possibly the best part about GH is that the rocking is only partially supplied by the game itself. Indeed, a significant portion of pure rock power comes from somewhere deep within your soul, that primal area of the human psyche that leads all of us to air guitar when we think no one is watching. Of course, the primary difference between GH and standard air guitar is the party aspect – it’s a game best played in the company of a bunch of friends. It’s also best when mixed with a liberal supply of creative rock moves – jumping, head banging and even (gasp!) hip-thrusting are not only encouraged but actively required. It is not something one has the power to control.

Given the prodigious amount of entertainment I have been able to derive from the entire (once derided) rhythm-action genre I can only imagine how wondrous it will be when some brave soul finally decides to bring all the disparate interpretations together into The One Game. A game to rule all games, where multiple linked consoles, perhaps via the Intertron, allow entire imaginary garage bands to live out their rock fantasies. Can you imagine? Karaoke Revolution for your singer; Guitar Hero for your bassist and lead; some variation on Taiko Drum Master for your percussion needs; a re-imagined Amplitude providing real-time synthing and scratching all while a handful of DDR faithful provide your show with some much-needed eye candy.

Isn’t technology grand?

Boredom Is The Best Motivator

It would seem I’m going to cheat a bit. I have a loose tradition of coming up with New Year’s resolutions, something that probably seems a bit too trite for someone as cynical as I can be. The truth is I’m very bad at making needed alterations to my lifestyle on the fly, so to speak. Although I am usually pretty good at identifying faults that need to be corrected, I lack the internal motivation to actually do anything about them.

However, when confronted with a convenient demarcation in my life it becomes considerably easier to “schedule” important changes. Arbitrary though the Gregorian calendar system may be the change in years seems to be enough for me.

I suppose I should go back to the cheating bit before I finish. Though I have no intention to tell you of my various resolutions in general, I will mention the one that concerns this site: I will make the effort to put something worthwhile here in a reasonably periodic format. I’m not going to make proclamations regarding the actual frequency, content or anything more specific simply because I don’t want this to be construed as a promise of some kind. I simply figure that as long as I continue to pay for web hosting and take up valuable internet real-estate (hah!) I should do something with it. By posting today I am technically violating my policy of enacting such resolutions upon the first of the year. In my defense, I am very bored.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled browsing.

A Brief Update

I yet live, but I am currently residing at my parents’ house in Novi. As such internet access is limited – in fact, it was non-existant until I finished repairing the family computer. For those of you keeping track this is sort of a ritual for me…I’m not sure I can remember the last time I came here for a break and didn’t have to fix their system.

This post is mostly to demonstrate that my shiny new notebook does, in fact, work, and that the Novi Public Library’s WiFi connection is shockingly strong and fast. More on the specifics of my wonderful toy in the future.

Slowly But Surely

Sorry for the lag from the last post to this one but I think you’ll all agree that, for me, this can still be considered regular posting. At this point I don’t start to feel the least bit bad until it’s been more than a month.

Regardless, I do have a decent excuse: I’ve been spending the majority of my time writing Java code for my game design enterprise group. Shockingly enough it’s actually been…fun, almost. After weeks of hand-wringing because no one in the group seemed to understand the complexity and time required to implement a full game engine I stopped waiting for help and did it myself. I ended up completely changing the system we were going to use and so far I’m quite happy with the results – you can walk around, clip against objects, and interact with NPC objects. All the classes and interfaces are there, now it’s up to the rest of the group to actually do something with it.

Also, I know that Soul Calibur 3 came out almost three weeks ago and that I have yet to do a write-up on it. Rest assured that I will (probably tomorrow). It’s been a rough couple of weeks but I feel like I’m starting to finally ease around a corner. Perhaps I’ll tell you about it sometime.

Until then, I’ll just keep talking about nothing.

All Right, Fine

It was my intention to hold off on posting until such time as Pat has fulfilled his contractual obligations to me. Unfortunately for all of us he hasn’t gotten around to doing it yet and I am very bored at the moment. If the universe is just and fair (which it isn’t) some of your ire will turn towards him.

The thing with Pat is, of course, an excuse. As usual I’ve had nothing interesting, entertaining, important or even particularly intelligible to say for weeks, but if comments are something to judge by vapid banter is better than silence. I’m not sure why this would be.

Anyway, this will signal a return to regular posts that will almost certainly be entirely devoid of anything entertaining. That’s not to say there won’t be the occasional gleam of relevancy in this infinite sea of pointlessness, but I can assure you that such glimpses are likely to be both fleeting and wholly unsatisfying.

You’ve got to aim high.

It’s Like 90 In Computer Years

I really want to upgrade my computer.

It’s an irrational desire and I know it, but nonetheless it is a powerful urge that is difficult to resist. The system as it is was essentially constructed three years ago, with only a minor re-tooling about a year and a half ago to get rid of a gimpy motherboard that was constantly causing device conflicts. I suppose I could argue that it’s about time but, really, I don’t do enough PC gaming anymore to easily justify the expenditure.

What makes it worse is that there is no way to spread out the cost of an upgrade – because various technologies have come and gone in the intervening years I’ve now got to replace the video card, motherboard and CPU all at once. Any one of them alone would probably be affordable and would make a significant difference, but of course that is not possible. The only upgrade I can make without initiating a chain reaction is my hard drive, the component least likely to offer any real net performance gains.

On the other hand, my hard drives are also my biggest concern at this time. Three years is a long time in the world of PC hardware, and hard drives aren’t exactly renowned for their longevity. Especially not when running in a raid array. The two I have now have served faithfully, but I have recently noticed that they seem to be louder during normal operation than I remember, which is often the first warning sign with aging disks.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about it, but that’s not so bad since I’ve been largely disconnected from the hardware scene for nearly two years now. If anyone has informed and intelligent suggestions as to what parts and manufacturers are currently held in high regard I would be grateful.

Connection Re-Established

I yet live, although the site itself very nearly didn’t thanks to my chronic apathy and procrastination. Yes, it was down over the weekend (along with my e-mail, which I finally received yesterday) and Monday, not through any fault of my host but because I didn’t bother to renew my contract with them. On the plus side, this did result in me picking up an extra three free months with my new lease because they suspected that I might be leaving. Once again, my bullheaded stupidity results in a windfall that will convince me to keep being dumb for the foreseeable future.

Anyway, classes continue to attempt to kill me but so far they have not succeeded – with the possible exception of Algorithms. Not because I can’t handle the class but more because I simply haven’t; there is just too much to take care of right now and there isn’t enough time to do so. I will be dropping it for the second time, which gives me great pain but will probably save my semester in the long run.

As for what affect this may have on my graduation plans is as yet unclear. My final degree audit is scheduled for tomorrow and I’ll know for sure then. If everything goes according to a best-case scenario I will be out of here at the end of the spring semester. If not I will need to stick around to take a class or two for the summer. In fact, even if I theoretically can fit everything into the spring it might not be a great idea – eighteen credits of senior-level courses is generally not an excellent idea.

In any case I’m back and considerably more mentally balanced than I was a week ago, no thanks to life which continues to throw curve balls at my head.

I have become an excellent ducker, though.

You Wouldn’t Like Me If You Met Me

I finally finished fixing my e-mail today. Actually, that’s a lie – it’s been fixed for about a week and a half now, but I’ve been using the lie of omission to give me an excuse to stay cut off from the rest of the world for a little while longer. But then, you had probably already guessed as much.

Why have I been in a self-imposed exile for the last few weeks? Many reasons, possibly too many to count, and most of which I’ll not be detailing here at any point in the foreseeable future. There’s no need to take that statement at anything other than face value, and it’s sufficient for the purposes of this post to say that this semester will be…difficult. I’m not normally one to stress out, and I think that my lack of familiarity with such feelings is part of the problem. Between worrying over obligations and nearly a week of sleepless nights (in addition to an actual all-nighter Thursday) I managed to acquire a voracious demon virus that only served to deepen my troubles. I’m mostly over it now, but the after-affects still linger in the form of headaches and coughing.

In any case, I’m making a tenuous return to communication on a trial basis. I’m afraid that I have little to say that’s likely to be of any interest whatsoever, so you’ll understand if posting continues to be light. I suppose I might as well detail the events of PAX, as I said I would, although it is now far enough removed (both chronologically and intellectually) that I don’t have much enthusiasm for it. I guess we’ll see.

A Brief Update

I’ll try to write something a bit more substantial later tonight, but for now I’ll clear up some e-mail confusion: I can see your e-mails, I just can’t reply to them. There’s something wrong with the outgoing SMTP server, and neither Outlook nor any of Powweb’s webmail clients (or my own for that matter) are able to send. No, I don’t know why, and no I don’t have any idea when it will be fixed. I’ve contacted my host and they’re looking into it.

So, for the last time: if you e-mailed me in the last month or so I did get it, and I did read it. I’ll try to get back to you whenever I get things fixed. That is all.

Me + Karma =

This is going to be a short post – I could actually spend seven or eight paragraphs ranting and raving like a half-mad lunatic about the many things that have gone less than perfectly in the last thirty-six hours or so but I don’t have time. Mostly because of the previously mentioned things that went wrong. Go figure.

Anyway, I’m back up in Houghton for all of about twelve hours while I borrow my parents’ van to move my larger things into the apartment. I’ll be heading back downstate in an hour or so in order to pack a few things and sleep before heading to Metro with Bryan to catch our flight to Seattle.

Just to clarify, we’re not eloping or anything despite the fact that Bryan is a sexy slab of man-meat. We are, in fact, going to attend the Penny Arcade Expo for the second consecutive year. This would be awesome in and of itself, but it is actually transformed into a scintillating jewel of wonder by the fact that the one Tim will also be in attendance.

Con report, general updates and (possibly) bitter rants about karma and my probable destinations in life to follow after I get back. Oh, and about all those e-mails I’ve been ignoring: I’ll reply to those as well. I read them, but I just haven’t been able to summon the time or energy to craft intelligent responses yet.

Coming To Theaters This Fall

A few things have happened in the month or so since I last posted, as you might expect. For starters, my car exploded. If you’re thinking to yourself that this is the type of thing you expect me to mention, allow me to introduce you to the darkest depths of my apathy and laziness. Feel free to make yourself at home.

Anyway, for those of you interested in the gritty details, one of my engine’s pushrods decided that the general vicinity of Mt. Pleasant was an excellent place to fire out through the bottom of the engine block. It was a rather spectacular display of billowing black smoke and engine pieces, one that I’d have been more enthusiastic about witnessing if it hadn’t been coming from my vehicle. As it were, I was less angry about the state of my car than I was about the fact that I was stuck in Mt. Pleasant, which is a crappy town if there ever was one.

Even worse, Bryan and I were supposed to be in downtown Detroit that night for the Dear Friends Final Fantasy concert I’ve mentioned a few times before. For those of you not familiar with Michigan geography, Mt. Pleasant is approximately two and a half hours away from Detroit when you have a working mode of transport, and it was about four-thirty in the afternoon when this occurred. The concert started at eight. Not the best of situations to be in.

However, Bryan and I, being the outstanding men we are, were not daunted by the task before us. In a series of events too awesome and action-packed to fully chronicle here we made a desperate dash across the state. Aided by not one but two thrilling car chases, several gun battles with state troopers and more than a few torrid romances with local women we managed to make it to the Maxx Fischer in time to miss only the first two songs. We had to blow the building up afterwards but, in the end, I’m fairly certain it was worth it.

Around The Horn

I’ve written a few times on the strange nature of this site. When I started it back in 2003 I had a virulent hatred of weblogs and especially Live Journal, and thus I tried to do things that were a little bit different than normal. Over time the content here has drifted around but the trend has clearly been towards consolidation; that is, this fourth incarnation has much less “content” than the others, focusing essentially on the posts themselves.

The fact that the others sections of previous versions were, for the most part, empty is really beside the point. What’s important to note is gradual shift towards a more typical weblog presentation, and it’s not something I’m usually comfortable with when I bother to think about it. I’ve always though of online journals as inherently narcissistic – people write mundane entries about their daily lives as though random strangers on the internet are likely to care. In my mind, weblogs have always been closely associated with crappy goth poetry and generic teenage angst.

I’m going to link you to a post by Jeff that, in turn, quotes a fairly significant passage from yet another post made by a mutual friend. His [Zen's] point elicits a kind of “no duh” moment from me, one of those things that was probably obvious to everyone but me.

It’s not that weblogs aren’t manifestations of ego; they are, and always will be. What’s important to remember is what they are in addition to that: mouthpieces for communication; windows into the lives of people we care about; and, perhaps, a unique perspective on aspects of someone’s personality that aren’t normally expressed. I guess it’s something to think about and, in any case, it did serve to make me a bit less self-conscious about having one of these things. Not much, of course – I don’t want any of you to believe that I’m abandoning my misanthropic ways.

No Tree Can Stop Me

It has been said that learning is one of life’s great pleasures, and believe it or not I don’t disagree. Despite my deeply-rooted hatred for formal education, I don’t dislike knowledge, I just dislike the bullshit I’m expected to put up with in institutions that largely just pretend to teach you things. That said, I learned two important new things this past weekend that I will share with you in the hopes you too can lead a better life:

1. Never second-guess your old man more than twice in the same afternoon; you’ll just look stupid.
2. Everyone should endeavor to rip down a tree with their own muscle power at least once a year.

Sunday afternoon I helped my father and brothers cut down a few of the twenty or so dead trees in my parents’ backyard. Trees being the tall and heavy things they are, dropping them in a spot that won’t result in serious property damage is a bit of a trick. Twice I predicted disaster and twice the trees landed almost exactly where my dad had claimed they were going. To be fair, history was somewhat on my side: at one time in the past my dad did manage to put a tree directly on top of our garage. In hindsight, that even was such a dead-on bull’s-eye that I guess it probably isn’t fair to call it an error – he must have been aiming for me (I was near the garage at the time).

Anyway, the third tree was slightly more stubborn. Since there was another dead tree within a few feet, their branches got tangled and the thing refused to go down. Not unprepared for this contingency, my brothers and I had strung climbing ropes about 2/3 the way up earlier on. Between the three of us we proceeded to pull down the mighty beast with nothing but our manly, bulging muscles and testosterone-laden bloodstreams.

Nature is nice – in fact I rather like it – but sometimes it’s much more fun to dominate it than live with it.

My Time Is Valuable

The title of the previous post obviously implies a continuation, however life being what it is that didn’t get around to happening. I’ll probably write another segment later in the week, although at this point the events to be chronicled are long in the past and many of the scars have healed. I suppose we’ll see.

In other news, what is it about the last weekend of July that makes everyone and their step-sister want to schedule events on it? Is there some special property – like, say, the aligning of Neptune with Venus while Saturn rises in Aquarius – that somehow makes it instinctively attractive to primitive parts of the human psyche? Whatever the reason, that particular weekend has become overloaded and I’m now in a bit of a situation.

The Monster Game, of which I’ve often spoken glowingly, falls on that weekend as it always has. Having attended it for the last three consecutive years I’ve grown a certain intangible fondness for the event, and the thought of missing it entirely is a bit difficult to swallow. Of course, the reason for missing it is equally compelling: Dustin’s (in)famous guys’ weekend up at his cabin has been scheduled for the same set of days. Although I could certainly be called a geek, dork or nerd with nary and argument to the contrary, I still find solace in the occasional foray into the outside world. In other words, the dual attractions of water-sports and barbeque with friends are not ones I’m mentally prepared to resist.

To add to the dilemma, the Dear Friends Final Fantasy concert also falls on the weekend in question, although this is not as big a deal as the other two. Given that both days of Monster Game finish by three and that we’re usually out of the cabin by about the same time on Sunday, the eight o’clock start time for the concert on Sunday shouldn’t be difficult to make; the trip from cabin to Novi is around three hours, which leaves two to dress appropriately and get down to the DSO in Detroit.

In any case, fun appears to be on the to-do list regardless of which events I choose to attend. Oh, and by the way: I believe there were a few others who were interested in attending the previously mentioned concert; if you haven’t heard from me in a while and are still interested, send me an e-mail saying as much. I can’t remember everyone who wanted to go and I’d like to make sure we procure enough tickets.

A Break In The Silence

It is very difficult to work when you are never given the tools you actually need to do the task to which you’ve been assigned. This might seem like an obvious statement, but for those of you not yet working in the Real World™ take heed: corporate intelligence does not recognize this.

The problem is compounded by the fact that I actually rather like my new boss and would very much prefer to be getting things accomplished in a timely fashion. However, given that my tools are still in transit from who knows where (probably Dell, I know they can get stuff faster than this) I have been forced to use a rotational borrowing schedule. Essentially, every morning I have to wander around like a forsaken orphan trying to find unused stuff I can then steal and use until someone realizes it and takes it back, at which point the cycle begins anew. As you might imagine, this is not conducive to actually getting anything useful done.

On the positive end of the spectrum I am now able to acquire occasional internet access on my main machine. This has several consequences: first, it means I can actually play FFXI again, which believe it or not I’ve actually come to miss a bit; second, I can start making a few of my planned updates and changes to the website. Hopefully these will be useful changes, although I prefer to reserve judgment on that for a bit.

Tune in later today for either jubilation or commiseration regarding my Japanese final tonight.

Natural Sauna

I would be perfectly happy if we could fast-forward to fall weather right now. Alternatively, this state could stop being a bitch by lowering the temperature for a few days. Ninety-plus degrees may not seem like much to some of you in the southwest, but let me assure you that our situations are not the same. Ninety degrees plus humidity is enough to kill a weaker man.

Let’s just jump to September now. I much prefer the sort of weather that’s just cool enough to wear a jacket or second layer, preferably with a light breeze. If I wanted heat and humidity I would move to Florida and forget how to vote.

Looser In Khaki

I wore my scout uniform today for about the first time in three years, although “wore” might be too strong a word. It’s not clear to me how, exactly, this thing ever actually fit on me correctly; I can only assume that I was quite the strangely proportioned teenager. The shirt felt like wearing a tent; the pants fit very well; the belt was far too small; and the sash was way too long. The various patches and insignia are also woefully out of date, but I think I can be forgiven for that when you consider how rarely I use it.

In some ways it was actually kinda fun to be back in uniform again. I got to see several people I haven’t seen since the last time I donned the khaki shirt as well as remember how proud I was when I got my own Eagle award. It also made me feel a bit guilty, as I haven’t been around to do much helping lately. Granted, I am a busy person and my school is hundreds of miles away, but I also know that I haven’t made any sort of heroic effort to get involved. Given how many volunteers the troop has had (that is, non-scouts) that were a big part of my own scouting career it only seems fair that I should make a better effort.

Maybe I’ll buy myself a new uniform set and head up to help out with their summer camp at the end of the month. That is, I will if I can swing a day off or two and manage to dig up funds with which to purchase the gear. For as much as those shirts cost they ought to be woven from the finest silk.

Good Thing I’m Broke

So, my debit card number was stolen in some fashion. I would be more angry if I actually had any money – as it is I’m mostly just amused imagining how annoyed the thieves must have been when they realized their folly. The means by which they acquired my number are unclear since I am very careful about the sorts of things most people are stupid about when making online transactions. I generally stick with highly reputable sites and am far too savvy to be duped by e-mail phishing scams; for that matter, my spam filters are so good that I only rarely get them to begin with. My best guess is that I must have been one of those several thousand sets of personal information stolen in the last few high-profile electronic break-ins.

In any case they managed to spend six hundred dollars last Sunday. I caught it almost immediately since I make a point to review my accounts via net banking every other day and by Monday afternoon the card was closed and an investigation opened. To my complete amazement the shady gambling site that allowed the transactions actually responded to e-mails and by the end of Friday I’d signed a form swearing upon penalty of federal incarceration that I had not, in fact, made those purchases. All around not too bad an experience, although Bank One seems to have a better policy in these situations than Standard Federal so I’ll probably be making a change in the near future.

Just goes to show that even the most vigilant of us are probably more vulnerable to this sort of thing than we’d like to think.

My Towel Is White

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an intersteller hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that he might accidentally have “lost.” What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towle is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence, a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

As you may have guessed I got around to seeing the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie tonight, and I’m not really sure what I think. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t under whelmed, but at the same time I had been steeling myself for absolute crap and, in that regard, I was pleasantly surprised.

The problems are easy to recognize: lack of funding and lack of…well, funding. It’s obvious that they had a dreadfully tiny effects budget, but to be honest that didn’t bug me in the least. I’m rather sick of all the CGed crap the movie industry feeds us now, and at this point I’d rather have well-done animatronics any day of the week. Heck, in a comedy like this they even add a certain charming atmosphere to the whole spectacle. So, the real problem isn’t effects (as some have suggested) but length – I didn’t clock it, but the movie started at 7:15 and we were back in my apartment by 9:15. Considering that the start time includes previews and we sat through the credits to see any extra bits (there is one) you’re looking at not much more than an hour and a half, certainly less than two hours. Given how much ground they tried to cover (the entire first book) it’s no wonder everything feels rushed and poorly explained. I know I found myself laughing at references to things in the book that I’m certain no one else in the audience got, which makes me think my opinion is probably slanted.

I’d say that if you’ve read the book it’s a good ride because you’ll not only get the main vein of jokes but also enjoy all the in-jokes that only fans of the book are going to get. I think it’s too bad that so many of them had to be in-jokes, but I guess it works out in the end.

Home Is Where You Know The Street Names

Well, here I am, day one of what we might officially call Spring Break, and yet I remain in Houghton working on projects. And playing videogames, but I figure you assume that anyway.

Interestingly enough I came to a realization over the weekend: I’ve lived in Houghton for nearly 3 (non-consecutive) years now and I really don’t know much about it. It’s an easily explained phenomenon, once I sat and thought on it for a few minutes. My first two years were spent in the dorms, and on a small campus like MTU’s that means you’re virtually half a block from every building you might need to visit (especially freshman year, when most of your classes meet in the same lecture hall). I had no real reason to wander around the city itself since the dorms take care of most of your immediate needs, and I was poor enough that the two-dollar movies at the student union were generally more attractive than a regular theater. Additionally, Houghton’s terrible winters discourage much outdoor venturing unless you’ve got a good reason, and exploring a Podunk town (editor’s note: apparently Podunk is a proper noun, because MS Word really wants me to capitalize it) was not nearly good enough for me.

I’ve also just realized that this is the first time I’ve been in Houghton with no class responsibilities, barring the standard weekends. For every other break I’ve either gone somewhere else or headed down to my parents’ place for the duration…a fact that strikes me as rather odd. Odd that one could live somewhere this long and not only know virtually nothing about it, but also never spend even a few days off there.

Now, don’t get confused and think that I actually like this city all of the sudden – it’s still a dust speck on the ass of the Earth, but I think I’ll at least wander around this week (assuming it warms a bit) and see what I can find. I owe that much to Houghton, I guess.

A Little Bit Angry

This country has gone fucking insane and I’m not going to put up with it anymore. The absolute baseness of most Americans has reached epic proportions, and the absurd fear-propaganda being spewed from every media outlet isn’t helping. It seems that basic civil liberties are no longer the concern of the average idiot citizen, and we’re all just giddy at the prospect of invasive government censorship.

Take, for example, the high school student who wrote a fictional story about zombies. In his story, an un-named high school is overrun by – you guessed it – zombies! His grandparents, being the fine upstanding patriots that they are, immediately turned the story over to police upon discovering it in their grandson’s notebook. After all, it contained descriptions of a school somewhere, and schools are government property and therefore any depiction of violence against them is a crime.

I’ll spare you the buildup and just cut to the chase: he’s in jail, arrested on felony terrorism charges. In fact, a judge raised his bond from one to five thousand dollars in a courageous attempt to keep a dangerous criminal off our streets. Rejoice!

Next up we have, naturally, the new and improved revenue machine that is the FCC. Not content with the eight million dollars in fines they levied this year (which is, by the way, up from forty-eight thousand a year ago) it would love nothing better than to conquer the pay services; that is, cable and satellite television and radio. After all, it’s not enough to protect our citizens from the smut broadcast over public airwaves – if people are paying for Cinemax it’s only because the powerful media has compelled them to, not because they want to watch soft-core porn at two in the morning.

Finally (not really finally, because I could list stuff all day, but it’s the last in this lineup), the American Citizensâ„¢ in Florida made the brave decision to omit a picture of a female student from the yearbook because she was – gasp! – wearing a tuxedo. I’m not going to go any further into this one because, really, what else is there to say? Instead I’ll just hit you with what is probably the best quote I’ve read in a while: “When uniformity is compromised, then authority no longer holds.”

Inspiring, isn’t it? I’m sure the founding fathers would be proud.

Arbitrary Detrius

I guess I’m just going to throw together some random data to post tonight since it’s been a week since anything went up here. Honestly, I would update more often if I had anything interesting to say, but quite frankly I don’t.

Spring break is rapidly approaching; I’ve only got to make it through this current week. Unfortunately, I don’t know how much relaxing will actually be done. Rather than heading downstate, as I usually would, I’ve decided that I need to stay here and get some work done on my two computer science team projects. Oh, and probably also finish reading Collapse so that I can start writing the formal book review for it. If anyone is interested in that sort of thing I’ll probably toss it up somewhere on the site when it’s done.

For my regular media intake (because Lost is, unfortunately, starting to lose its luster) I was finally talked into watching the first eight episodes of Air. It’s not bad, I guess, but it just seems too weird, and that’s coming from a guy who counts Haibane and Lain among his favorite series. Air seems like it’s just weird for the sake of it – the plot doesn’t feel well connected or thought out, and things just sort of happen with no discernable reasoning or cause. I’ll probably watch the rest of it anyway, since it’s only thirteen episodes long, but I don’t see it entering into the annals as a favorite.

I’ve also started listening to The Notwist and Mouse on Mars recently. Before I left Japan George the wise sage dumped a moderately substantial collection of offbeat music onto my hard drive, one that I still haven’t adequately explored. Both these bands came out of those tracks, and I must say that the man has impeccable taste…assuming you leave out that one Osaka Bondage track, that shit was just strange.

Oh, and before I forget, sum41 sucks.

My School Has Too Much Money

MTU isn’t a very large school, and thus the campus itself is not terribly large either. In fact, almost all of the buildings are found along a single, half-mile long drag along the only major road in town (US-41). Despite its small stature, the campus still manages to house its share of secrets and oddities, the most recent of which occurs in the new computer science building completed last semester.

Inside the new building there is a tall, circular room whose purpose and functionality have never been made clear. Indeed, the room remains empty (aside from a few construction debris) and it doesn’t seem that anyone is in a hurry to do something useful with it. The oddness doesn’t stem solely from the fact that the room is unused. Heck, it isn’t even predominately about that.

What, exactly, would lead someone to design a room that looks like that? It looks to me like something out of a crappy movie about shady government organizations that work outside the law, like the control center in 24 or something. Are we going to be tracking the movements of extra-terrestrials? Perhaps we’re subcontracting with Homeland Security to create a new crack team of cyber-security hackers or something.

Really, though, we’re all just wondering why the school felt it was necessary to spend our tuition on a fancy room that doesn’t do anything.

Additional Functionality

I can’t remember if I mentioned Pat’s videos before this. If I haven’t, consider yourself notified, and make absolutely certain that you download this little gem with all haste. Having screened it several times for private audiences here in Houghton I have been lead to believe that it is, quite possibly, one of the funniest clips ever dropped onto the Internet. Of course, most of these screenings were done over Winter Carnival break and, thus, the viewers were often a bit inebriated, but I don’t feel this detracts from the conclusion.

Speaking of Winter Carnival, it was actually this past weekend, and its loving four-day embrace was responsible for yesterday’s rambling post. Not being a much of a drinker (by much I obviously mean not at all) Winter Carnival doesn’t get me all that excited, really. At least not any more than I typical break does. That doesn’t mean it isn’t still fun, and good times were had viewing snow sculptures (more on those later) and just generally hanging out. Live music was listened to, late-night DDR was played, old friends were present, and it was good.

As for the snow sculptures…well, let’s just say they weren’t quite up to the standards of previous years. This is by no fault of the organizations that did the work, mind you, but instead the fickle nature of mother Earth. After weeks of terrible wind and sub-zero temperatures (about which I bitched incessantly) Michigan decided to do one of those “gotcha” moments and warm up past forty degrees for nearly a week and a half. While I had practically begged for such an event to occur I hadn’t wanted it during the week leading up to Carnival. Sufficient to say, a lot of damage was done to the sculptures, so much so that several of the grander ones actually collapsed dangerously onto campus walkways.

Oh, by the way, I finally got around to getting the archives section up and running. I finally gave up on getting Wordpress to do what I wanted as it was and wrote my own custom function. Don’t let that sentence trick you into thinking that the resulting page is in any way elaborate. Instead, let its austere nature speak to just how crappy Wordpress’ built-in archiving functionality is.

Who Needs Sleep?

I’ve decided to pull an all-nighter tonight, but not for any of the reasons college students typically pull a stupid stunt like this. I don’t have any major exams or projects due tomorrow; in fact, I don’t have anything due specifically tomorrow. Instead, the goal of this particular exercise is to get my absurd sleeping schedule back in order.

Keeping myself awake during the day and asleep at night is an almost constant battle against inevitability. For reasons that aren’t clear to me I have always been a poor sleeper, in general, and even worse when it comes to actually waking up (once I finally do fall asleep). Classes and work act as regulating influences and are, by and large, the only reason I’m not on a thirty-six hour rotating schedule, but their effectiveness is mediated by the fact that I usually have weekends off. Once you remove the all the “must dos” from my life all that’s left is a man utterly incapable of making himself go to sleep at a reasonable hour, which leads him to wake up later the next day and begins a vicious feedback loop. The saving grace of all this is the fact that there are only two days per weekend, meaning Monday responsibilities can slam the brakes before serious damage is done.

In a system such as this, the real danger comes from vacation time. Those wonderful days of consecutive bliss are wolves among the flock of lambs that metaphorically represent my psyche, ravaging through them in a grim parody of nature’s fury. By the time the break is over I’m getting into bed around six am and rolling up around, say, two in the afternoon if I’m feeling plucky.

The end result is a painful decision: I can attempt to go to bed around midnight, like normal people, only to lie awake and bored for six or seven hours until my alarm goes of. Alternatively, I can give up and try to do something productive (or at least entertaining) during those hours, the goal being that by midnight the next day I’ll be so exhausted that falling asleep at the proper hour should be a relatively trivial endeavor.

Heck, I might even pass out less than an hour after hitting the pillow. Imagine that!

A Single Slip Of Paper

To call it “victory” would be at best premature and at worst delusional, but to ignore the importance of today would be equally so. At long last, the Iraqi people have taken the first steps toward determining their own destiny.

There are a lot of cynical things said about Iraq, and I’m hardly innocent when it comes to that. I’ve been critical of the war from the beginning, especially when it became clear that much of what we had been told was wrong. In the face of all the scandals, the terror attacks, the mounting casualties and the international pressure it’s easy to forget that, right wrong or otherwise, an evil tyrant was deposed and millions of people were given a chance at freedom.

I don’t know what the future holds, and I’m not as ready as some to declare that Iraq will be the example that topples dictatorships across the Middle East, but I can say this: when I read entries like this, I can’t help but feel optimistic. Congratulations, Iraq, and may your chosen executive lead with the honor, compassion and love for freedom that you’ve always deserved.

This Title Is Not Relevent To The Content

For anyone who wasn’t already aware, Katamari Damacy has one of the better soundtracks I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to. Listen to this, and then feel free to commence grooving as soon as you feel able.

This semester’s classes are finally starting to come into focus, and the outlook is difficult. In hindsight, scheduling two team-based projects for one semester was probably a bad idea. Either one of them alone would be easy, and probably enjoyable, but the two together are bad news. I’ve managed to hold my own thus far, though, and the User Interface Design project has actually turned into an undergraduate research project, which should prove to be interesting. For those so inclined, it looks like we’re going to be using the Unreal Tournament 2004 engine to create a test bed for experiments involving Fitts’ Law. My not-so-secret additional reason for this is to become familiar with UnrealScript and the DLL organization that underlies the engine, something that will hopefully make me more attractive to potential employers in the game industry.

Speaking of which, I’m hoping to be able to attend the International Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Through an act of benevolent serendipity the conference falls on the exact week of my spring break, and it would seem a shame to waste such an opportunity. Of course, whether or not I actually get to go has less to do with ambition and more to do with the size of my paycheck at the end of this month. Oh, and my tax return, too.

On one final, completely unrelated note, this video is quite hilarious, in a manner that makes me somewhat jealous. I mean, not only has this guy been to all sorts of places I’ve only dreamed of visiting, he has also danced for cameras at said locations. Can there be any higher aspiration for human existence? I submit that there cannot.

Back In The Game

In a strange reversal of normality I woke up this Monday morning feeling more or less refreshed and, even stranger, with what can only be described as a cautiously optimistic outlook on the day.

I would attribute it to the weather, although how I knew about the change in the dark, windowless cavern that contains my sleeping apparatus I’ll never know. The last several weeks have seen Michigan winter at its most terrifying, a prospect I haven’t had to deal with in quite some time. Between Sendai’s comparatively mild winter and the fact that both my freshman and sophomore years saw (again comparatively) mild Houghton winters, I haven’t really felt the full force until now. Plunging sub-zero temperatures combined with heavy, almost constant snow and thirty mile-per-hour winds do not a pleasant – indeed, even a habitable – environment make.

It seems like I’ve talked an awful lot about the weather lately, something I might previously have attributed to a lack of anything useful or intelligent to say. However, it’s become apparent to me that my mood is tied in some ineffable way to the weather around me. As evidence, I submit my steadily declining mood bordering on mild depression last week, which was really the tail end of a decline that’s been happening since the worst of the weather hit last weekend. The fact that I rolled my ankle severely only twenty minutes into Friday’s racquetball game was, really, just the crowning achievement in a crappy two weeks.

Anyway, the climate today is vastly improved, and the reports seem to indicate that it will get even a little bit nicer as the week progresses. Hopefully this means that my attitude will also improve and lead to, among other things, the first week of regular posting this site has seen in months. I guess we’ll just have to see.

I Didn’t Mean No Harm, George

Having a three day weekend is always nice, even if your school didn’t actually sanction such an occurrence. MTU, like most other schools, wants to at least appear like they give a crap about Martin Luther King Jr. day, and thus has deemed fit to cancel all classes that start after three o’clock in the afternoon. Apparently, nothing worthwhile or important happens on campus after three, a nugget of information that will no doubt come in handy when scheduling for classes in the future. In any case, I only have one class on Mondays anyway and the professor saw fit to cancel it, a gift I appreciate even more given nature’s continued attempts to smother the city of Houghton.

The continued attempts to blanket this city in nature’s loving embrace of snow are reminiscent of Lenny inadvertently breaking the necks of rabbits while stroking them.

In other news, it looks like this year’s NextFest will be in the Midwest, or more specifically, Chicago. I’ve been wanting to take a trip out there this coming summer anyway, and it looks like this would be as good an excuse as any.

One By One, The Penguins Steal My Sanity

It’s cold here. Living where I do that’s the sort of statement I could probably make at any point between November and April without fear of inaccuracy. Humans are, of course, amazingly adaptive by nature, and thus the term “cold” begins to take a new meaning over time. After all, I imagine that, when asked, an Eskimo’s definition of cold would be rather different from that of a Zulu warrior. It is, then, in that frame of reference that I shall make my statement again:

It is very cold here.

Whether by fate or misfortune my time in Sendai seems to have coddled me. I no longer remember what winter is really like, at least in Houghton, and thus irony has seen fit to punish me with one of the worst winters in the last few decades. It has been around negative thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit (adjusted for wind-chill) since Friday, and it wasn’t a whole lot warmer before that. Contrary to what our modern, touchy-feely education system might have you believe, humans learn best through negative re-enforcement – I have learned my lesson, and never again shall I take a temperate climate for granted.

Given the borderline deadly temperatures outside I’ve seen fit to avoid leaving my apartment for anything other than bare essentials, a short list that pairs milk with racquetball in a most bizzare and inexplicable combination.

The People Have Spoken

I would apologize for missing so many posts but doing so would be pretty pointless, so I won’t. The fact is that I have been very busy over break. And lazy. Busy and lazy, a combination sure to destroy relationships and anger mobs of web denizens the world over.

The break itself isn’t actually over as I’m still filling out my last day of work for the week, however since everyone around me is busy freaking out over the latest screw up I’m left with little to do for once. Not that they haven’t asked me , of course – let me assure you that they have, alternating between loud and insistent or plaintive and whiny depending on the particular person doing the asking. I mean, if they wanted to send me to Germany or somewhere else cool like that I might be willing to skip the first few days of class, but they want me to go to Ohio. Again.

It’s not so much that Ohio is a terrible place, at least as mid-western states go, but that the city of Columbus particularly is. Unlike most major cities (which, in retrospect, I suppose Columbus is not) there is no lead up to the city. No suburbs, not even a slowly increasing density of cows. It’s just a few hundred miles of corn suddenly and somewhat alarmingly interrupted by a raised highway that must have been built to look like medieval city walls. This particular highway circles the city, as is often the case with major population centers, and only the lack of a moat and drawbridge retract from the motif.

Of course, once you get inside it’s just a boring collection of moderately tall buildings that quickly give way to dilapidated housing projects that seem to consist of nothing more than concrete porches from which angry looking youth can glare at you with impunity. I would normally glare back, but in the pecking order of visual perches a plastic Saturn automobile ranks far below even a crumbling pile of concrete.

Thus, Columbus is not somewhere I have a burning need to return to, and so my ability to resist repeated attempts to make me go there is greatly bolstered. I mean, these people have a small field containing dozens of sculptures of giant ears of corn. That’s just not right.

I Probably Won’t Sleep Tonight

Yes, the time on this post is correct – well, not entire so, since I still haven’t rectified the time zone issue – but the actual numbers are, in fact, an accurate representation. Finals are over, thankfully, and the last few tangled bits of projects that I needed to complete have been, well, completed. The end result is that my sleep schedule has been absolutely destroyed. In fact, I’d say calling it a schedule at all treads dangerously close to the realm of hyperbole, but I’ve got to call it something.

I’ve spent most of the past two days playing FFXI almost non-stop, not only because I rather enjoy the game but because I know that I probably won’t get to play it for the next three weeks. The internet connection at my parents’ house is not anywhere near the caliber demanded by competent white mages, and I think I’d feel kinda bad if massive lag caused my party to chew dirt. Darth, Pat and Bryan have joined as of late, and with the exception of Bryan all seem to be more or less enjoying themselves. It’s difficult to say for certain if they’ll continue beyond the free trial period, but then I wouldn’t be a very good pusher if I didn’t do my best to make sure they do.

In an attempt to get content on here more regularly I’m going to remove some of the restrictions I’ve long imposed upon myself when posting here. I don’t always have well thought out, interesting things to say, and when I don’t I usually restrain myself from saying anything at all. I’ll most likely start posting shorter, more mundane things here on a regular basis, things that may or may not interest you at all but that will serve as interesting side notes for me to look back on some time down the road. Hopefully you’ll forgive me for indulging a bit, but frankly I haven’t had anything important to say in months.

The End Is Nigh

Finals are fast approaching, an event that sends most college students into a state bordering on absolute terror, composed of equal parts anxiety and fear. I myself tend to view finals as merely one last obstacle between myself and not having to take exams for a month. Of course, I’m crippled by the inability to get worked up about anything related to academics and thus this should be of no real surprise to anyone. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a bit of extra work involved, but then that statement is made on a relative scale.

Standing between me and another wonderful few weeks working for an entirely different slave master are a few final projects this week and the obvious exams the following one. MTU lets out a week later than most other universities I know of, something that doesn’t really bother me much (if at all). Going back down state a week early just means another week of work, a hypothetical week that would almost certainly contain an abundance of inescapable Christmas music and the holiday angst of my family, two things I can do without. My mother insists – although she would certainly make false claims to the contrary – on having absolutely everyone she can possibly imagine over to her house on holidays. The results take the form of a simple equation: as proximity to a major holiday increases your proximity to her should decrease with all speed, assuming you realized this quickly enough and still have legs with which to leave on.

My semester will officially end next week Wednesday, with all of my exams taken care of by then. Thankfully none of them are at seven in the morning and none of the days contain more than two exams, both situations I have faced in previous semesters. In many ways Wednesday with be cathartic, the final culmination of a terrible academic effort combined with a general apathy towards most other aspects of life.

Most importantly, if all goes according to plan it will serve as further proof that people do not, in fact, get what they deserve.

Back Again

This time I swear it’s not my fault. It seems that my host had some serious server outages again this past week and a half or so. Interestingly enough it wasn’t even my server that was down (as evidenced by the fact that you could still see this page) but whichever one was down apparently mucked up things enough that they froze their dynamic content and FTP servers until sometime yesterday.

Not that it really cost me much. They’re going to refund all of November, so no money is lost, and to be honest between preparing for finals and doing my regular projects I haven’t had time to do anything particularly interesting. This semester hasn’t been the greatest but it’s nearly over. More importantly, I have a job for break (Siemens again) and next semester looks like it’s going to be a lot better.

I’ll try to come up with something more interesting to say later on today (which can also be read as early tomorrow morning).

Birthday Is One Word

First things first, a big happy birthday to Haesung! I’m terrible at remembering things like names, birthdays, and…well, anything really, but those are the ones that tend to get me into trouble. Haesung’s is easy, though, because 11:24 just so happens to be the time of the shinkansen I took to Tokyo on the day I left Japan. For some reason little things like that tend to stick in my mind, which is probably why I can still remember the parking lot my family parked in at Metro Airport when we went to Disney world ten years ago or so (5B North).

There really aren’t any other things to say, making my first line a terrible, filthy lie. I guess I could mention that my parents have an incredibly crappy internet connection, but since I’ve spent most of my break at Siemens anyway the use of corporate broadband largely makes up for it.

Except that I can’t view any sites that have the word “game” in them. Including this one now, probably.

Urban Archipelago

In a somewhat ironic twist I seem to have become more political after the presidential election than I was during and before it. I could spend an entire post idly questioning why that is (and who knows, I might later) but for now I’ll just get on with the point.

I was browsing through Metafilter – a site that has become slightly more readable now that the election is over, although it’s clearly going to take them some time to settle down – when I came across a link to Urban Archipelago. The site’s purpose is to establish a new identity for the Democratic Party in the wake of the failed election bid this year, and despite its needlessly harsh rhetoric I think their concept brings up some interesting questions.

People on both sides love to talk about how deeply divided this country is, politically speaking, but one thing they never bother to investigate is why. Not the general why, since I think it’s fairly common knowledge that cities tend to vote Democrat while the rural areas go Republican, but the specifics of why. The description of the “urban lifestyle” presented by Urban Archipelago, on the other hand, suddenly makes a lot of things clearer.

The cities and countryside have been at odds almost since humans first started collecting into tiny villages, so this debate is hardly new. What’s interesting to me are some of the points on things like welfare and health care. Although I was peripherally aware of it, I never really thought about the dependency of rural areas on state and federal funding for survival (that’s not entirely true – I actually had a conversation with one of my roommates about it recently). When you factor in the wildly disproportionate amount of taxes the urban population centers pay the Republican tendency to be against such measures suddenly looks a lot like biting the hand that feeds you.

Of course, beyond the truth or falsity of Urban Archipelago’s assertions there is another matter: is this the sort of divisive politics we want to encourage? In some ways it’s unfair to level that accusation at the Democrats. After all, no matter how you feel about the Republican’s stance you can’t deny that a lot of their recent success has come from preaching directly to their core demographics. Although I’ve yet to see a Republican treatise that advocates the level of abject antagonism that Urban Archipelago does, you could perhaps argue that it’s only fair for the Democrats to use the same tactics.

I don’t know the right answer, but I can say that a truly unified America seems less possible with each passing day. Whether or not that’s a bad thing I leave up to more intelligent people than I.

I Wonder How Much This Option Costs

People like to accuse modern movies of taking computer-generated images and graphics too far, making noise about how they detract from the overall quality. I, however, am here to assure you that they have not gone too far, indeed they have gone just far enough.

I don’t think there’s anything else that needs to be said.

I Thought We Already Settled This

First, if you haven’t already, go read this article and then come back again. Done? Good.

The creationism vs. evolution debate has existed pretty much since Darwin created the theory more than a century ago. In the distant past the debate was excusable, perhaps even acceptable; after all, Darwinian evolution was a brand-new theory that went against a thousand years of religious teachings. Even as late as the famous Scopes trial the battle was at least bearable. If nothing else, humans as a herd animal have proven difficult to convince of anything. To continue to hold this debate today, however, is a sign that something is seriously wrong.

Perhaps my biggest problem with the entire “debate” is the relative cluelessness of those on the side of creationism, which I refuse to call by its adopted name of “intelligent design.” It’s one thing to debate foreign policy and politics with a relative ignorance of history. You could reasonably argue that these matters have a healthy dose of opinion and personal belief built in. Science, on the other hand, is not a question of beliefs. Science does not care if you think gravity is caused by microscopic gnomes – unless you can provide some evidence of it your beliefs are of no merit at all.

I was shocked to learn that people like George Gilder are behind the intelligent design movement, and to be perfectly honest it makes a lot of the previously incomprehensible things the American wireless companies have done clearer. It’s tough to competently rear an industry when you can’t even be bothered to consider the most rudimentary facts when forming sweeping opinions on the origin of life.

Creationists will make all sorts of arguments against evolution, and to someone who’s never read anything on the subject they are understandably compelling. A favorite example creationists use to undermine evolution is the eye. The argument goes something like: “how could something complex as an eye evolve? There’s no advantage to having half an eye, after all.” At which point they’ll get a slightly triumphant (one might even say condescending) smile that comes from the smug satisfaction of putting an upstart atheist pig in his place. What they fail to realize, mostly because they refuse to investigate the facts, is that their prized example has already been explained. Marine animals have been found (a species of octopus, actually) that have what can be best described as half an eye. It includes the basic optic cavity, rods and cones, and nerves required for sight. What it lacks is a lens to focus the light properly, resulting in what is probably a blurry and only marginally useful sensing device, comparatively speaking. And yet it exists.

So, this is my request to anyone out there who considers themselves a creationist or those who simply aren’t sure what to believe: read The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. If you can read that and still tell me that evolutionary theory is bunk…well, actually, there’s no reason to bother with that contingency. Because you can’t. What American needs more than anything right now is a population that is comfortable with careful reasoning and intelligent discussion, and so long as we continue to allow baseless beliefs to rule our schools we will never have it.

Worse Than Hunting Snipes

I return after yet another unannounced sabbatical, but by now anyone who still visits must be used to such occurrences. The last few weeks have been pretty tough, what with multiple exams and projects being due in rapid succession but I’m almost through it. A C++ project due Wednesday (and another next week Friday) along with a probably exam in Programming Languages should be all that stands between myself and a week down state for Thanksgiving break. Of course, over said break I’ll be working as many hours as humanly possible at Siemens VDO (the same place I worked over the summer) for what will hopefully be a dollar more an hour. Although I spoke poorly of the job over the course of the summer, hindsight has turned my outlook slightly more positive. It seems that Quality Assurance is one way to break into the gaming industry and two (hopefully) summers plus breaks of experience in this area will look much better on a resume than I have initially thought it might.

Speaking of jobs, I’ve finally found a few offers here in Houghton and they’re far more desirable than the Subway position I initially coveted. It seems as though two departments here at MTU are looking for a webmaster to redesign and manage their respective web presences, something I would be only too happy to do for money. The latest (still unfinished, I know) redesign of this site prepared me well for the new direction web design is heading and I’d love to apply it in a more professional sense.

Between homework and exams I don’t really do much anymore besides play Final Fantasy XI, a situation that shoulders much of the blame for my vastly reduced internet footprint. I’ll try to be better about it in the near term. No, really, I mean it this time. Hey, where are you going?

I Don’t Even Know What Limey Means

I didn’t expect quite the responses I got to Wednesday’s post so I think I’ll take a moment to clarify, briefly, what I meant. I’m not saying that being cynical is bad, and in fact I’m not even saying that I don’t want to be cynical anymore. You can be cynical without being condescending, I think, which is what I was trying to get at. I made the post in response to a few bad reactions from a handful of people over the last few weeks, thinking perhaps this was a complaint shared by most who knew me. I guess not, but I think it’d still be better if I changed it.

Anyway.

Did anyone else notice this? I guess I have something of a question for my non-American readers and friends: what do you think about that? I’m not really asking what you think about Bush (or Kerry, for that matter) but what you think about one country’s media trying desperately to influence the elections of another nation. It doesn’t shock me that Americans reacted badly to the intrusion:

Dear wonderful, loving friends from abroad,
We Ohioans are an ornery sort and don’t take meddling well, even if it comes from people we admire and with their sincere goodwill. We are a fairly closed community overall. In my town of Springfield, I feel that there are some that consider people from the nearby cities of Columbus or Dayton, as “foreigners”- let alone someone from outside our country.

I imagine that the citizens of most other countries would feel the same way, but then, I don’t know for sure, which is why I’ve asked. For that matter, are there any Americans out there (Kerry supporters I’d imagine) who feel that the Guardian was in line with that campaign? I’d be interested to hear your reasons if there are.

Public Apology #2

Okay, now that I’ve gotten the political pontificating out of my system we can move on to what I was originally going to talk about yesterday. Without going into any sort of long and boring introspection I’d like to apologize to everyone I’ve ever known. That probably seems like an overdramatic thing to do but bear with me for a moment and I’m sure you’ll see why.

Throughout much of my life I’ve been a cynical bastard. One of the unfortunately side-effects of this fact has been my tendency to condescend to pretty much anyone I’ve ever spoken to. It was, at some point in the distant past and for reasons that baffle me now, a personality trait I was actually proud of. I won’t even attempt to explain that line of reasoning – I offer it only for historical perspective.

Anyway, this is one of my many undesirable traits I’ve been working to curb in the last few years of my life. It’s also probably the one I’ve had the least success with, as pretty much anyone I’ve spoken to recently can surely attest. Since I haven’t had much luck on my own I thought that, perhaps, putting it out in a public setting will force me to be more conscious of it. Thus, this post is a combination blanket apology and directive to call me on this any time you catch me doing it. I do this for two reasons: one, there’s far too many of you to apologize to individually (although I’ll surely try while this post is still fresh in my memory) and two, if I have several dozen people actively telling me to shut my mouth it’ll help to defeat the habit.

Think of it like one of those experiments where you shock the rat for going down the wrong fork in a maze.

Child’s Play 2004

I had something else to talk about today but I decided I’d better explain the new banner first. The other stuff can wait until tomorrow.

Anyway, as you may have noticed the pretty autumn leaves have been replaced with a banner that links to Child’s Play, a charity set up buy the guys who do Penny Arcade. You can read the story of how it started here, but if you want the quick version it was done as a response to yet another article comparing gamers to serial killers. Last year’s drive was a runaway success; far beyond what anyone had thought would happen. This year they’ve expanded the drive to include five different Children’s Hospitals around the country in addition to streamlining the whole donation process, thanks largely to the help of Amazon.

It’s always a good idea to remember just how fortunate most of us are in our lives, and even though it’s practically cliché to give to charity near Christmas that doesn’t make it any less worthy. Give it a click and donate a few toys and videogames to sick kids who deserve it.

Stalin For President

The week from hell is nearly at an end, thankfully, with only my Programming Languages exam remaining at seven tonight. There’s also a C++ project due on Wednesday but I can’t even begin to imagine how that might be difficult to finish. After all, when the majority of your class blames their tenuous grasp of variable scoping on the professor’s poor English you can’t expect inspired assignments.

Unfortunately, the election from hell is far from over and shows no sign of getting more interesting or relevant to, well, anything. I am so sick of mindless rhetoric from both sides – and there really are only two this time around – of the argument. It’s one thing to force me to listen to poorly constructed drivel spouted from those who only cast aside the veil of ignorance for three months every four years. This is just something you have to put up with in America. It’s another thing entirely, however, to have to listen to a group of people whose only uniting characteristic is their insatiable hatred for Bush.

Don’t get me wrong, I harbor no love for Bush – I disagree with him on almost every point relevant to his re-election. The difference is that my dislike for him does not blind me to the (in most cases) equally reprehensible characteristics of his primary opponent. The very concept that my disagreement with Bush creates some sort of vacuous moral pedestal upon which I must stand united with a disgusting character like Kerry has been enough to drive me away from the entire spectacle. For them, it’s not enough that I dislike Bush; in addition to that I must vote for the only candidate who is likely to beat him because it is my duty to remove him from office regardless of the caliber of man I replace him with. What does it say about the average American when Kerry supporters find it agreeable to rally around a cry of “anyone but Bush.” Anyone, eh? I’ll have to poke around the less fortunate areas of the world to see if I can’t scare up a few genocidal dictators to offer as an alternative. After all, anyone would be better, ne?

This isn’t a call to arms so much as a call in opposition to the ludicrous one offered by those who support Kerry: please vote your conscience this November. Don’t pick the one you hate the least, don’t pick one who “isn’t the other guy,” don’t pick the one you feel you have to. Vote for someone you honestly believe in, even if it means writing him or her in, or don’t vote at all. There’s something inherently wrong with someone who won’t vote for a candidate they believe in, but there’s nothing wrong with someone who refuses to cast a ballot in support of a lesser evil.

There’s No Place Like Home

Yeah, I know, four days in a row. Don’t get used to it.

Anyway, I think I’ve mentioned at least two other instances of what I can only refer to as “Sendai flashbacks.” They’re pretty mundane when you think about it, and don’t have anything particularly emotional attached to them. For some reason, today’s was different.

For starters it was a little more unusual than the rest: I saw a guy my age walk out of Subway and climb onto a moped. Now, those of you who live in major cities like New York might not find that so odd since you see those things once in a while. Those of you in crazy European nations probably see them daily. Rest assured, however, that in Michigan such a sight is quite rare indeed, and in a place like Houghton it’s practically unheard of. I mean, a tiny moped is all but useless for fully half of the year up here.

Regardless, as I watched him get on and motor away I felt a sudden, deep tug of what I can only describe as homesickness. That doesn’t really make sense since I spent only slightly more than six months in Sendai but it’s the only way I can think of that adequately verbalizes the feeling. It’s not like I’ve never thought about how it might be fun to go back to Japan sometime, but this was first time I can remember feeling that going back would be like going home. Perhaps it was more startling because, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way about Novi.

I think a lot of it has to do with the contrast between a city and a suburb. Almost by necessity, suburbs are devoid of that back-alley feel you get from a city. There aren’t nooks and crannies to discover, there are no small out of the way restaurants to sample or shortcuts home. You don’t have densely packed downtown centers filled with so many stores and cafes that, even six months down the road, you can hang out with the author of a major webcomic and discover a ramen shop you didn’t know about.

As is the case with most seniors I have been thinking, lately, of what I’m going to do when I finish the extended high school experience we call college. A lot of my musings center on what sort of job I want, of course, but almost as much time is spent wondering where I want that job to be. I’ve thought a lot about the west coast, Seattle particularly (who in the software industry doesn’t?) as well as spots in Texas and even Montreal.

I guess maybe this is just Sendai’s subtle way of annoucing itself as a contender.

A Good Exam Is No Exam

I was supposed to have the dreaded Algorithms exam this morning, but imagine my surprise when I came to class and was told that it was now postponed until next week Monday. I guess I should be grateful for the extra time, but really I just wanted to get it over with so that I can decide if there’s any real reason to continue putting long hours into this class. Hours that I could be spending studying for my Programming Languages exam, which is also on Monday.

In site related news, the about section has been newly updated with what should become a regular tradition here. Rather than write my own introduction I had my buddy George try his hand at it. The cams should also be done shorty – mostly I’m just waiting for our new content providers to provide URIs.

Update: the cams section has been updated with (almost) all new content! Feel free to browse about, and rest assured that even more attention whores will be coming soon.

It’s Probably About Time

After months of procrastination and apathy the final edition of the version three template is live! The switch to a new backend powered by Wordpress has also been simultaneously completed. The backend switch was the main reason behind the long delays involved in this project, and the switch itself is far from final as there are several things about WP that I don’t like. However, for the near future things should stay pretty much as you see them now.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the actual version three update itself is done – far from it. The new template has only been applied to the main weblog page (the one you get by default) and not to any of the other sections. The archives are there, but they consist of the old system’s contents and won’t reflect new posts (including this one). I’ll get around to fixing that soon. The other sections will also start getting the template update as well as new content over the next few weeks, so stay tuned if that sort of thing sounds interesting to you.

Even this main template still has some quirks that I’ll be working to resolve. I haven’t implemented the style controls listed at the top right near the header and that will probably wait until the rest of the site is finished.

Anyway, I hope you all like it – feel free to give comments and feedback as you see fit.

Technical Difficulties

Depending on whether or not anyone actually still visits this site on a regular basis, you may have noticed that it was not, as you say, present yesterday and today. There were some fairly major server issues that my wonderful host has finally resolved and things should be smooth from here on out. Thankfully no data was lost, although it might have been for the better if it had – the directory structure is in pretty bad shape and could really use a cleanup.

My e-mail went down long before the site, although I didn’t actually notice right away. Thus, if you e-mailed me anytime between Monday and now I probably didn’t get it and almost certainly did not reply. E-mail is now back online as well, so you may once again send me messages full of vitrol or praise as you deem fit.

Bees And Birthday Wishes

I’m pretty terrible when it comes to remembering things, especially once a year events like birthdays. However, I would like to assure you that I did not, in fact, forget Rob’s birthday despite my post being a day after. While I remembered his birthday, I forgot to make a post about it – I intended to, but what can I say? I suck. So, a day late but no less sincere, happy birthday to Rob.

The other thing I meant to talk about was I Love Bees, the Halo-based interactive online game I mentioned a few months ago. I was going to recommend that now would be a good time to go ahead and catch up, as lot’s of information is available and can be pretty easily read/listened through in a few hours. As you might have guessed from my use of the past tense, however, I’m going to refrain from doing so.

Not because it isn’t good; it’s really, really good. And fun. The problem lies in the content of yesterday’s update – it’s not suitable for all audiences. I’m not sure how much different the feeling will be for someone who hasn’t played this game for months, developing what attachment you can to fictional characters, but I know what it did to me and I can’t say it was enjoyable.

Let me back up a minute and elaborate. For the past few weeks the plot and backstory of the game have been playing itself out largely though unlocked audio files, which I won’t link here for the same reasons I already covered. The files follow the stories of a handful of individuals, stories that initially seem totally unrelated to the larger context of the game. As time has gone by, the files have gotten closer and closer to the main thread of the game until, today, they took a fairly interesting (if not disturbing) turn.

I won’t cover it any further, I just felt like I should follow through on my intention to mention the game despite my misgivings. If you find yourself intrigued and would like more info, feel free to e-mail me and I’ll give you more links and files than you know what to do with. If enough people are interested I’ll probably put some stuff into that forum I created in a more ambitious time.

Hype Control

Just figured I’d do my part to control the flood of hype that will no doubt start coming soon: it seems Half-Life 2 scored a ninety-six percent in the new issue of PC Gamer. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is the same magazine that gave Doom III a ninety-four percent and called it “a masterpiece of the art form.” The article that accompanied the review was like a love letter to the developers, practically the caliber you see in internet forums! OMG IMHO DM3 is teh awesome!!11@@!

Don’t get excited by this – if you even still read reviews, wait until someone like Gamespot reviews it (FYI, Gamespot gave Doom III an 8.5). I lost all respect for PC Gamer after the Doom review – it’s clear that they’re in the pockets of the publishers, especially since EGM strongly hinted that they had passed up the exclusive “for a major release” because they weren’t willing to rig the review scores. At least someone out there has a sense of journalistic integrity.

Dance Karnov, Dance For Justice!

Sorry about the lack of content lately. It’s really a combination of factors, most of which involve Real Life(TM) doing all sorts of nasty things to my schedule. I don’t even have that many credits this semester, certainly far less than I’ve had in the past, which doesn’t seem particularly fair. Or maybe it is, if you look at it from the perspective of punishment for attempted slacking.

It also seems that Houghton has decided, as it often does, that the time has come for everyone and everything to be frozen. It does this without warning, usually after several eighty-degree ninety-percent humidity days in a row. I went out the door this morning and realized that I could see my breath, at which point I went back inside and put on a jacket. Because I was wearing short sleeves. Because it was warm just a few days ago. Eh.

Oh, since I’ve got nothing further to add (I did at one point, I think, but I’m still recovering from my eight-AM class and cognition is not high on my list of priorities) I’ll direct your attention to Dance Dance Karnov, a phenomenon that will no doubt sweep the world within weeks.

The Final Few Miles

Some of you may remember that, sometime back, I started working on a re-design of the site. Well, I’ve finally put the final beta version of the new design up for your perusal. It’s not finished – there are a few quirks I need to work out in Firefox and, most importantly, the character encoding is wrong. If anyone knows of a utility that can convert iso-8859 to utf-8 I would be greatly in your debt.

Anyway, feel free to take a look around and post your responses. The comment system over there works, too, although it’s not linked to this one. I’m in the process of switching over to Wordpress, a rather painful process but one I think will probably be worth it in the long run. Go ahead and post your comments there, if you like, so that you can get a feel for the new commenting system and decide whether or not it meets your approval.

Without further addo, here’s the new site: www.plaristocrates.com/wp/

Juniors Should Understand Pointers Too

There’s a fine line between being a smartass and being a jerk. The former has some honor, mostly because it often takes a little bit of creativity to be a smartass, while the latter requires no effort at all. Likewise, it’s one thing to correct an instructor on a matter of fact. Heck, I’d even say it’s your duty to call bullshit in such situations. On the other hand, if you pick on minor details in the lecture that, really, are completely outside the scope of the discussion just to make the instructor look like a moron you’re just a standard jerk. I’ll even go so far as to say that you’re not a particularly bright one. Quit blaming your own lack of understanding on the instructors handwriting – if you really knew jack about programming in C++ the fact that a period doesn’t quite line up with the bottom of the line shouldn’t confuse you. The intention is obvious, and the fact that you can’t see it is a personal problem.

Outside of class, and outside the former topic as well, Yuta and I have been considering heading down to Sheboygan for an SC2 tournament in October. This sort of boondoggle is in no way justifiable but then, such reasoning has never stopped me before. More information as events warrant.

My Love Letter To Firefox

I don’t know how many of you still use Internet Explorer, I’m hoping not very many, but I’m sure there’s a least a handful out there. If this sounds like you allow me to direct your attention to the latest release of Firefox, the browser from the guys who brought you Mozilla. I wanted to wait until I’d spent a few days with it before I recommended it to anyone else and, I’m happy to say, the wait was unnecessary – this browser rocks.

It’s not easy to get excited about web browsers anymore since, for the most part, all anyone really wants it to do is display web pages. That’s it. At least, that’s what you probably think you want if you’ve never used Firefox. The latest revisions come with a pre-installed plugin that supports multiple search engines, and when I say search engines I’m not just talking about Yahoo! and Google. The tiny, un-obtrusive utility can search Amazon, Ebay, Dictionary.com and the Wikipedia in addition to Google. This covers essentially every search utility I ever use, with the possible exception of the Internet Movie Archive, a service which I very occasionally use.

I won’t bother to go over the stuff that should be expected in any modern browser except to list them quickly: tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, a download manager, RSS content feeds and style-sheet switching are all there and easy to use. The major bonus, for me, is the speed of Firefox – at long last there’s a browser that can compete with IE when it comes to sheer speed in both opening a window and rendering a webpage. My biggest complaint with Mozilla (and the early versions of Firefox) was how slow they ran, but this issue seems to have been completely resolved.

In any case, if you haven’t given an alternate browser a shot since the days of Netscape I strongly urge you to give the latest version of Firefox a shot. Heck, it even provides a help section devoted entirely to former users of IE! After all, I’m not the only one to fall in love with this browser; one million downloads in five days says more than anything I could post here.

Football!

So, after breaking the longest road losing streak in NFL history the Lions have gone on to win again for their first 2-0 start in four years. I’ve been a big Lions fan for years, watching them through both the good times and (mostly) bad, something that tends to surprise most people who meet me. I may not be your typical sports fan archetype but I do hold all the various Detroit sports teams in high regard, though none so highly as my prized Lions.

The biggest bonus, for me, is the fact that I’m actually getting to see this year’s successes. Last year’s season was obscured by my trip to Japan and the previous two years fell victim to Houghton’s proximity to Green Bay; as a result, the dorms only got Packer’s games. Now that I live in an off-campus apartment it seems that I’ll be able to watch all the games, a prospect that finally answers a difficult question: what exactly does one do on a Sunday afternoon?

Heck, the games even serve to motivate me once in a while. It’s amazing how much better a Sunday feels when your favorite sports team wins a game.

Sendai of Michigan

It’s been raining pretty much all morning here, and despite the fact that Houghton is a great many thousand miles from Japan I actually considered riding my bike with an umbrella. Of course, after a few moments I came to my senses and realized that I was never very good at that, even six months ago.

Speaking of Japan, it’s almost uncanny how much parts of Houghton feel like Sendai when it’s raining. The city (or two cities, really) are in a valley with large hills – not quite mountains – rising on either side and a river running down the middle. Walking down the street shielding myself from the rain with an umbrella I bought at Daeie, looking up at the fog-obscured hills, it felt like a brief moment of deja-vu.

To add to the mystique, a pair of squirrels crossed the road in opposite directions as I was coming back from morning classes. This in and of itself is not unusual; the strange part was that one squirrel was snow white and the other coal black, no joke. They crossed going opposite directions almost simultaneously, and though I am certainly not a believer in such things I can see how one might take it as a sign of something. Probably something bad, knowing as I do my general luck with such things, but a sign all the same.

In an unrelated note, in case anyone was unsure: REZ is fantastic. I played it through again a few days ago while showing it to one of my roommates and realized I’d forgotten how beautiful the fifth and final area is. Play it, now. That’s an order.

This Post Includes Math

No, I’m not dead, thanks for asking though. Circumstances have kept me way busier than I expected, although you’re not to take that without a dash of salt. After all, when I wasn’t trying to catch up with my classes I’ve been totally absorbed by Final Fantasy XI, which I’ll probably talk about some other time (maybe once I get the gaming section back up).

The real problem is, or at least will be very soon, my Algorithms class. I am not a huge fan of advanced mathematics, but even things like Calculus and Linear Algebra have a certain attraction in that you can get an answer. Though the problem may be long an involved, the answer itself is usually short and can quickly be verified as correct or incorrect by consulting the back of the textbook.

As you may have guessed, this is not the case in Algorithms. This class focuses solely on the theoretical areas of math, including set notation, probability, and most importantly proofs. None of these are things I care about, which is normally not a big deal. The bigger deal is that this is a very difficult I care nothing about, which compounds the problem immensely. It’s a real chore to work hard at a class you hate; it’s an even harder thing to work hard in a class you hate that you know you can’t do better than pass.

It’s not that the math is beyond my capabilities, it’s just that I never bothered to train myself in this particular kind. To get to the level I need to be just to understand the notation has taken days – I have not yet begun to actually learn how to analyze these proofs. The task is so immense as to squash all real ambition, but the fact is I have no choice but to take the class. Having finally decided to ditch Computer Engineering in favor of Computer Science (pending one or two small details I still need to investigate) this class becomes required rather than elective.

The final blow is dealt by the fact that I have no use for this information I’ll garner from this class. The study of algorithms is mainly for those engaging in the frontiers of theoretical computer science. Those who, like me, are interested in the application of such things won’t be spending time proving the validity of sorting methods – we’ll simply implement ones already created by those who have the time to do so. I have no desire to enter this field, which was why I became a computer engineer in the first place, but my anathema to hardware (read: anything involving circuits and differential equations) is so strong that I don’t see any other options.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling, the technical details that will be boring to anyone who isn’t in my field (and maybe those people too). I should be back to a regular update schedule again for the foreseeable future – thanks for your patience.

PAX Report: Day Three

By Saturday night we were all suffering from varying amounts of jet-lag, although Bryan (the first one to leave the con) continued to deny it. Thus, Sunday morning was a bit later than I’d have preferred but it didn’t matter since we still made what was arguably the most important panel of the weekend: How to break into the game industry. The guest speakers covered a lot of different areas and managed to show me a few avenues I hadn’t previously considered. I’ve always assumed that programming was the best way to go, but after hearing Porkfry give his testimony the testing department doesn’t seem like such a bad idea either. The guests did confirm, however, the one thing that gives me pause in my quest to join the game industry: insane hours. All of them mentioned the sixty to eighty hour weeks they were expected to work so often it was basically standard.

The Halo 2 demonstration was the next event of note and, like the concert on Saturday it filled up long before we had a chance to get in. It was both hilarious and slightly pathetic to see a few guys walking around with signs offering money for someone’s spot in line. The demo itself was the same one the showed at E3, although actually seeing people playing it live was a lot cooler than watching the videos. I’m still not a believer, but I’m fairly sure I’ll end up getting it anyway.

For those of you who don’t know, Bryan and Pat are phenomenal Call of Duty players. With that in mind it was only natural that we sign up for the five on five CoD tournament. I filled in the third slot, but to fill the other two we managed to grab two guys who had never played the game until an hour before! Even with this handicap we kicked ass (or should I say, Pat and Bryan kicked ass) and our momentum was enough to slide us into third place. In fact, we very nearly reached the final round – we only lost our previous fight by three points after leading most of the game. I got a twelve month subscription to Xbox Live out of the deal, something I’ve been wanting but couldn’t justify paying for.

The night wound down pretty quickly after that, largely because the console room was closed early because of theft problems (some ass-clowns stole four consoles). I ended up waiting in line for the DDR Extreme machine and getting into a conversation with a girl named Brandii. As luck would have it, it turned out she had recently graduated from one of the California universities (sorry, they all sound alike to a Midwesterner) with a CS degree and had already landed a job at Monolith as a mission designer for The Matrix Online! She also had met both Warren Spector (of Deus Ex fame) and Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims et al) and discussed the finer points of game design with them. After learning that I was also interested in game design she hooked me up with several great networking resources including the GDC (Game Developers Conference), which she said I could attend as a student for a vastly reduced price. I ended up with a business card and a request that I contact her when I was ready to start working so that she could help me out. That alone made the entire trip worthwhile; the rest was almost icing on the cake.

PAX Report: Day Two

Probably the most difficult thing I had to do all weekend was convince Bryan to be up early enough to make the nine AM opening of the con. Of course, this didn’t actually happen, but as it turns out no one cared because the line to get in was wrapped all the way around the block in both freaking directions; it was unreal. Rather than wait in line we went and got breakfast at the hotel until things calmed down, at which point we still had to wait another half hour or so before getting inside.

It’s kind of hard to describe the nature of the con – unless you’ve been to one before there isn’t a lot to compare it with. The Meydenbauer center is a very classy place, arguably too classy to host a massive nerd gathering (it even had escalators!) but it really lent a feeling of credibility to the entire event. There was a theater where the various panel discussions and concerts were held, a theater that was far too small for the number of people attending, and a basement (really just the ground floor) that housed various tabletop games. In addition, the fourth floor housed a console gaming room with thirty or so televisions which three consoles each, two PC gaming rooms (one BYO and one provided by Lanwerx) and the exhibitor room. Ubisoft and Microsoft were the too biggest presences in the exhibitor area, although NC Soft, Gameskins and Sweetkitty were also major contributors. Brady Games was there, too, giving out free SC2 strategy guides; I grabbed one because they had a pullout poster inside.

We attended a pair of panels, the first being the “State of the Industry” address and the second covering the game development process. Representatives from Microsoft, Nintendo and other major game studios were present and, on the whole, the discussions were very useful in highlighting good and bad aspects of the gaming industry. It certainly made me rethink some of my plans, although that’s something I’ll cover in more detail later.

The Soul Calibur 2 tournament was absolutely insane. The registration was supposed to be limited to 128 people, but by the time the initial pools were finished well over 400 people had been called. Of course, many of these ended up being no-shows but the final count was still in the vicinity of 300 contestants. I ended up in a decent pool although I lost in the final round to a Nightmare player I probably could have beaten had I been at the top of my game. As it was, I got screwed by the Talim vs. Nightmare throw glitch, where a straight on throw (not a side or back one) from Talim will miss Nightmare for no reason at all about 30% of the time. It happened three times, all of which resulted in major damage against me and one of which would have ended the match had I connected. Ah well, I’m still fairly happy with my performance, and big props go to Pat who also got to the last round of his pool.

The biggest disappointment of the night was the concert. Not because the concert was bad – on the contrary, it was fabulous – but because there was only room for about 500 of the 2000 plus con attendees. I lost track of time and we ended up returning from dinner only a half-hour before the concert was scheduled to start, and by that point all 500 seats had been filled. Bryan and I were incredibly disappointed, but they did use the convention center’s internal television system to pipe the concert into the main areas where we were able to watch it anyway. It wasn’t the same as being there, but even still seeing the Final Fantasy piano pieces and The Minibosses live was totally sweet.

By the way, my plan is to cover the second day of the convention in much the same manner as the first two, and then I’ll follow it up with a “wrap-up” report where I’ll highlight the best parts and give general impressions of the con itself. Stay tuned.

PAX Report: Day One

I am not, as most people would attest, the most organized person in the world. In spite of this I ended up doing most of the prep work for out little jaunt to Seattle this weekend that managed to affirm that I can at least effective utilize the internet when planning trips.

Anyway.

Flying to Seattle itself was pretty uneventful, which really is a rather surprising thing to hear myself say. I wasn’t much of a traveler before I left for Japan, but having been there for half a year and done traveling within that time frame was a lot like swinging with a weighted bat; comparatively speaking, crossing the country is nothing.

The only concern I had involved our transit from the airport to our hotel, which was not actually in Seattle but in Bellevue. As it turns out – and as I was already peripherally aware – Seattle bills itself as a progressive, environmentally conscious city and has a pretty nice bus system as a result. Two dollars was enough to get us to the Bellevue transit center, less than two blocks from the convention center which was itself a block from our hotel. Needless to say, things couldn’t have gone more swimmingly if I’d arranged them myself, which with the exception of the hotel I certainly didn’t.

Since we’d be spending the next two days at the convention itself we decided to hit up downtown Seattle, ostensibly to find food and do a little exploring. On the bus trip there Bryan ended up sitting next to one of the more remarkable people I’ve met in my life. Her name I can’t recall accurately enough to risk typing, but she was of Indian descent and had moved to Seattle relatively recently. I turns out she had grown up in Michigan (not more than ten miles from us, no less) which meant we already had plenty to discuss, but to top it off she’d also spent a year in Japan as a student! Friendly to a fault and concerned that we would get lost she decided to play tour guide and led us around, pointing out various spots of interest and good locations for bars, parks and hangouts. She eventually led us to a bar and grill staffed almost exclusively by homosexuals, I might have thought she’d done to try and shake a bunch of Midwestern stiffs had we not already proven that our collective effort to find humor in everything made us impervious to such a banal attempt.

Speaking of gay people, which I wasn’t really doing but bear with me for a moment, the best way to get yourself a free upgrade from a single room with one big bed to a single room with two is to make offhanded remarks about loving your friend a lot tonight. Just in case you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

We ended up parting ways after the restaurant but the encounter made it clear to me, now more so than ever, that the best part about traveling is meeting people like that.

Northern Exposure

Despite the fact that moving always sucks my spirits are buoyed by the wonderful broadband internet connection I am currently posting from. Yes, I’ve finally returned to Houghton, land of trees and snow and not much else. Classes won’t start until Wednesday, or should I say, classes won’t start for me until then because I’ll be in Seattle for the Penny Arcade Expo.

As an aside, something in the office building next door must be throwing out some nasty electromagnetic interference…my monitor is quite wavy right now.

Anyway, once PAX is over and I’ve kicked the collective asses of my first week of classes I’ll probably get around to finishing the site updates I’ve been promising for so long. The redesign has been somewhat painful, and I’m considering creating a “developer’s diary” in the forums so that other web enthusiasts can benefit from my wisdom. Or at least learn from my mistakes, which is really the same thing.

Suicide Club

This post is going to be, by and large, barely coherent rambling on my part. I was going to ask you to forgive me but I decided that simply warning you first was probably the better solution.

Anyway.

I guess I’ll just start with the basics: while browsing shelves at Blockbuster a few days ago I picked up, on a whim, a Japanese horror film called Suicide Club (Suicide Circle), or 自殺サークル in Japanese. It listed an International Film Festival award among its credentials, a club to which such greats as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero can claim membership. Figuring that, at least, watching it would give me a chance to see how much Japanese I remember I took it home.

Let me preface this next part by making it clear what “horror” actually means. When most people think of horror movies they’re actually thinking of “slasher” movies – things like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the Thirteenth, House of the Dead, etc. True horror, both western and eastern, relies much more on psychological fear and a general feeling of creepiness than it does blood and guts. Eastern and western horror differ slightly in both their use of suspense (more in western, slightly less in eastern) and the use of supernatural forces (eastern horror tends towards spirits and ghosts, whereas western tends more towards more “realistic” causes). Both are wonderful, and some movies and games (such as The Ring or Silent Hill) manage to combine both to form something greater than the sum of its parts.

Okay, at some point I need to talk about the movie itself. From a cinematography perspective Suicide Club does something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before: change its style dramatically to suit the situation. In any other movie this would result in a terrible sense of discontinuity, but Suicide Club is definitely not any other movie. Many scenes are shot in something approaching sepia tones, but they never feel jarring – the soft-focus camera effects that have been the staple of the horror genre for years are also used without feeling clichéd.

And the sound design! One of the central tenants of Suicide Club is a manufactured, pre-adolescent music group called Dessert (or Dessart or Dessret or Desert, depending on the director’s whim) whose lyrics perfectly embody the saccharine, dangerously catchy melodies that make J-Pop either angel or devil, depending on your tastes. The grotesque opening sequence involving the simultaneous suicide of fifty-four schoolgirls in a Shinjuku JR station is set to a bouncy tune that doesn’t belong within a thousand feet of such a scene, a juxtaposition that too few directors use properly.

Suicide Club is incredibly difficult to dissect; it includes a dozen conflicting impressions and threads that don’t seem to be easily reconcilable. Indeed, the film feels contradictory in its central message: is it asking you to kill yourself, or is it asking you not to? Is it asking at all? The plot includes both overt and discrete commentary on Japanese society and, by extension, many westernized societies in general. The Japanese heard tendencies and media saturation are drawn to sickening conclusions that, while they certainly stretch the limitations of the word, remain eerily plausible.

The film includes themes from many diverse sources ranging from classic anime like Akira to social commentary from Fast Food Nation. The concept of marketing from cradle to grave is thrown into stark contrast in Suicide Club and is, I think, really the central thrust of the message.

I’m sorry if very little of that makes sense – Suicide Club is a movie you really have to see to even begin to understand what I’m trying to say. I absolutely have to purchase it because there’s simply no way I got even half of what the movie has to offer in my first viewing. This is a movie that’s going to deprive me of sleep for weeks as I ponder in mysteries.

Oh Yeah…

I’m getting ready to re-launch this site with the new design and content (target is the middle of September) and I need a few new faces. I’m specifically looking for anyone interested in writing for the gaming section of the site. I’m not looking for people to just post little news tidbits or even write reviews (in the standard sense) but for people interested in doing short articles like you might find on Game Girl Advance. If you think this sounds like you, feel free to e-mail me and let me know.

Maybe If They Competed Naked Again

Is it just me or do the Olympics feel somehow less interesting than they once did? I seem to remember being a kid and watching pretty much every televised event as long as my parents allowed me to stay up, but this year I was only barely cognizant that they’d begun at all. Between NBC’s mediocre coverage (would someone please kill those commentators?) and my usual apathy the Olympics just don’t have the pulling power they once did.

Speaking of unmet expectations, apparently my buddy Paul thinks that all the best scenes were cut from AvP to make the PG-13 rating they imposed less than three weeks before the deadline (it was originally going to be R). Fine, I’ll give you that, Paul, but somehow I don’t think getting to see a little blood was going to make your movie any better.

Three Hundred Percent Awful

I can’t take credit for that title since it was Pat who actually shouted it out towards the end of Aliens vs. Predator tonight. If any of you are currently considering paying theater prices to see this movie: don’t.

There really isn’t a single damn redeeming thing about it aside from, possibly, the last fight with the queen alien. Even then, I only liked it because the queen alien was well rendered but it wasn’t anything you haven’t seen if you ever saw Jurassic Park. I didn’t even go into it with abnormal expectations…all I wanted was a popcorn movie with lots of awesome predator and alien fighting, but with pretty much every character in the movie (predators and humans) dead within the first half hour there really wasn’t much left to do in the remaining forty-five minutes.

I’ll give you some advice, Paul Anderson – don’t quit your day job. And while you’re at it, go play some AvP at a LAN party sometime…it’s way more fun than your crappy movie.

The Schedule

I know I said I would talk about Hero, but then anyone who’s been reading this site for a while should know that no promises I make here are ever kept. Besides, I realized halfway through writing the Hero post that there really wasn’t a way for me to talk about it without totally spoiling the plot. Instead, I will just wait until the movie is out, see it again, and then make the post (if I still feel the same way) in the forums where those who wish to participate can and those who don’t can safely ignore.

On a positive note, my summer work commitment will be ending this very Friday, and you probably can’t imagine how titillating that is. Following the end of my internment will be what has been referred to as the “guys’ weekend” at Dustin’s place up north, which should include dozens of other people and prove a fitting end of work celebration. After that I can look forward to two weeks of no work, although during that time I have to finish work on my final project for my C++ class. Given the number of times I wrote entire programs on the day (night, really) they were due last year I think I’ll have plenty of time to finish FFX-2 and Beyond Good and Evil as well as The Age of Spiritual Machines. After that there’s a week of packing and driving a load (I have a Saturn so this is quite an adventure) of stuff up to the apartment in Houghton that will serve as a precursor to the big summer finale, PAX in Seattle. Attending this event will actually result in my missing the first day of classes, but this seems like a small price to pay for the prospect of a weekend of geeky goodness with Pat and Bryan.

Thus, busy I will continue to be, although this is the kind of busy I can actually enjoy. Once I get settled into my new apartment (read: get my net connection up) I’ll finally get around to finished the version three update that I started several months ago. No, really, this time I mean it.

Smarter Than Harry Knowles

I’ve been on somewhat of a movie viewing streak lately, having seen The Village, Anchorman and I, Robot in consecutive weeks. I will also be seeing The Manchurian Candidate tonight, and event that will pretty much round out the summer movie circuit for me with one notable exception: Hero.

I’ll come back to Hero in a moment, but first I feel the need to bitch and moan for a bit. The Village was a very good movie (although not quite as good as some reviewers made it out to be) that felt reminiscent of classic horror writers like H.P Lovecraft while maintaining Shyamalan’s own artistic style. As any horror fan knows, though, to truly appreciate (and be entertained by) these works you have to give yourself fully to the universe in which it takes place. You can’t really analyze or critique until afterwards, when many of your quibbles will have been resolved by the clever plot twists that are the hallmark of all good horror stories. Unfortunately, an American movie theater on opening night is possibly the worst place to achieve this state of mind. Inevitably, every asshole in your area will be there armed with all the annoyances one can find in a group setting: they will ruffle bags, answer phones, talk loudly, laugh at inappropriate times (usually because they don’t understand what’s going on) and just be a general bane on humanity. My advice to any of you who have not yet seen The Village: wait, either until it comes out on DVD or until everyone else has already seen it. So long as you can avoid spoilers you’ll be doing yourself a favor.

That was longer than I expected, so I think I’ll just talk a bit about The Village and save the Hero commentary for tomorrow. Shyamalan’s newest effort still isn’t as good as The Sixth Sense, but then to expect that is pure folly; Shyamalan has the somewhat dubious honor of having made his best movie the first time out. Let me clear one thing up right away, though: The Village is not what the previews would lead you to expect, if you’ve actually seen them (which I hadn’t). The pacing is slow and deliberate with the ingenious twists we’ve come to expect, but it adds to that a wonderful use of color. Although far from the first person to use red in this manner, it nonetheless feels perfect in a horror setting and it’s not the only color he uses anyway. The acting is spot on and the dialogue, while it feels awkward at first, works well for reasons I can’t really expand upon without potential spoilers. Do yourself a favor and see this movie; you won’t be disappointed.

Kinda Creepy, Actually

Has anyone else been following this? It’s obviously some sort of marketing blitz, and whoever came up with it has my full, unabashed respect. What am I talking about? Without spoiling any of the fun investigation you can do, I’ll just give you what you need to get started:

In the Halo 2 trailer that has been showing in some movie theaters there’s a URL referenced at the very end – it morphs into this one: www.ilovebees.com. When you go there it’ll bee immediately obvious what I’m talking about…have fun trying to figure it out! I’ll keep you posted if I come up with anything cool.

The Love Of The Game

As awesome as the Monster Game always is, there’s no getting by the fact that you pay for it with your entire body. Yesterday my legs felt like they were encased in clay and my left knee absolutely refused to bear my weight any longer (I hyper-extended it on Saturday) – were it not for the saving grace of IB Profen I would probably not have been a terribly useful slab of human.

Of course, in addition to such standard athletic-related injuries paintball has its own special brand of pain known as welts. See, getting hit with a paintball isn’t usually enough to leave any noticeable marks unless it hits bare skin, although my legs seem determined to prove me wrong on this. My first three or four hits were all neck shots, the neck being one of the few places that pretty much every paintball player leaves exposed…sufficient to say two of them drew a little blood and left me something to remember the weekend by.

All of this begs the question: do only masochists play paintball? Although Keith is a well-documented fan of pain, the rest of my group has no particular love for it or desire to experience it. For that matter, why is it that humans play sports at all? After all, pretty much any sport that you play hard leaves you exhausted and sore the next day; even Pavlov’s dogs did a better job of linking cause and effect.

Either way, the question is purely academic because I will, undoubtedly, compete in the Tippman Challenge this coming September and will, inevitably, end up in a similar post-game situation. Stupid? Possibly. Fun? Oh hell yes.

For Your Perusal

You may remember when, almost two months ago, I mentioned that I planned to participate in a writing contest. Well, the deadline is nearly here (July 26th, actually) and I finally decided to write something. The contest calls for a pair of two hundred word reviews, a task that’s actually much harder than it sounds. I was, at first, quite annoyed by the restriction, but I’ve come to realize that it plays two important roles for the contest judges. First (and probably foremost) it keeps them from having to read through hundreds of three-page crapfests written by 1337 hax0rs with no concept of grammar or spelling. Second, it simulates the sort of environment magazine writers have to deal with. On the net we’re able to write however we want, unrestricted by the realities of cost and deadline, but in the print world these things are major constraints. If someone can manage to write a decent review that conveys the important parts in only two hundred words the judges can probably assume they’ve got someone with actual talent on their hands.

Whether or not mine get included in this lofty category I leave for you to decide. Comments, criticisms and critiques are encouraged; you can put them in the comments section of this post, in the forum thread I’ve created or by e-mail if you prefer.

The Monster Cometh

It’s almost that time again! That’s right folks, the one time a year when I and my gamer-geek posse venture outdoors for nearly twenty-four hours of physical activity. Yes, the 2004 Michigan Monster Game is here, and you all know what that means: welts.

Don’t worry; it’ll make more sense in a minute.

For those of you not familiar, the Monster Game is a two-day event that happens annually on the last weekend of July. More specifically, we will be playing paintball for those two days. If there is anyone out there who doesn’t know what paintball is (and that’s a possibility seeing as how this site now has an international audience and paintball is illegal in many countries) keep reading because I’m going to give you a synopsis.

Paintball is actually a pretty simple game. You have some basic equipment: your paintball “gun” (which is now referred to as a “marker” to remove the negative connotation the other word carries), a mask, and of course some paintballs. There are many kinds of paintball markers but all of them are powered by compressed gas, either CO2 or Nitrogen. They fire paintballs (duh) which are spheres about 1.5cm in diameter that feel like plastic (but are actually some sort of biodegradable sugar-based material) and are filled with (surprise!) water-soluble paint. The markers launch the paintballs at somewhere between two and three hundred feet per second depending on the rules of the field at which you’re playing. The mask is, well, a mask. The basic idea of the game is to shoot people on the other team with your paintballs while avoiding the same fate yourself. Once you’re hit, you’re out for some amount of time that depends on the type of game being played. Types of games include capture the flag, elimination, or (in this case) a big-game format of several four-hour rounds spread over two days where you score points for every minute your team holds particular objectives.

The game is absolutely addictive. In fact, the only reason we don’t play it regularly is because of the absurdly high cost of doing so. A case of paintballs has two thousands rounds and costs anywhere from forty to seventy dollars – in a big game like this one it won’t be surprising if I shoot through two of them. Add to that the registration fee (sixty dollars), gas to get there both days, food and liquids (it’s usually hot so we go through a lot of water and Gatorade) and equipment maintenance and you start to understand the monetary strain involved.

I’ll probably post a little more on this later in the week as well as some photos of the group going and the equipment we use if people are interested.

Six Times Nine Equals Forty-Two

Have you ever been really excited to start something that, by the end, you hoped you’d never actually finish? Aside from the obvious sexual connection that people like Zen have already made, that is. For me it’s The Salmon of Doubt, a book I started a few weeks ago with something close to giddy excitement that has slowly slid into a sort of morose contemplation. It’s not that the book is in anyway bad or disappointing; it is, in fact, the best look into the psyche of Douglas Adams that I’ve ever seen. Instead, it’s the knowledge that upon completion of this book I’ll have read everything that has ever been written by that man.

Not that this is necessarily a new precedent for me. I have read virtually everything ever written by William Gibson and feel no remorse in doing so. The key difference, of course, is that while William is alive and still quite capable of adding to his body of work Douglas is, of course, not. Having read all of Gibson’s books is a kind of accomplishment, something that I can say with pride and know that whenever it is he decides to release his next book I’ll get any arcane references to previous works he might make.

Just as finishing Adams’ works is different that do the same for Gibson’s it’s also different than finishing, say, the complete works of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare was undoubtedly a great writer, he has been dead for nearly four hundred years and, perhaps more importantly, he lived a full life (although not really by today’s standards; he was fifty-two when he died). That is, Bill wrote probably most of what he had in him to write and did so in such a very distant time that imagining what it would be like was he still alive seems like a pointless exercise.

This is not so with Adams. He was still heavily involved in creative efforts, and with the Internet and biotechnology poised to turn so much of what we take for granted on its head it pains me to imagine all the wonderful things he might have come up with. In a world that, more and more with each passing day, seems anything but funny it would have been nice to have a guy who could do more than just make mindless pop-culture references that pass for humor. I’ll probably finish his last book this weekend, and in doing so will close the final chapter on one of the most amazing and talented writers this smallish blue-green planet orbiting a small unremarkable yellow sun on the western edge of the less fashionable arm of the Milky Way may ever know. It may be several years too late, but so long, Doug, and thanks.

Shut Up Caboose

So far I’m totally disgusted with my summer reading progress this year. Normally, I make it a personal goal to average at least a book a month in general and certainly during the summer, but so far I seem to be falling well short. Consider: it is not the middle of July and I have only read Cryptonomicon and The Future of Freedom. For those of you who do not count math as one of your better subjects, that’s about half a book a month. To be fair, I suppose, Cryptonomicon is really like two books in one, but if I start allowing myself to argue semantics it sorta defeats the purpose.

Anyway, there are still three books on my list in addition to The Salmon of Doubt (which I’m about halfway through), all of which are in social- and life-science genres. If you have the inclination and opportunity, I would recommend you pick up The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene or The Age of Spiritual Machines. All three still remain on my list and once I’ve finished them (whenever that happens) it’s always fun to have someone to discuss them with.

In case the whole reading thing just doesn’t seem like it’s something you would do, episode 38 of Red vs. Blue is finally up. It’s the last one of season two, so those of you who were waiting for such an event (Tim,Pontus) no longer have any excuse not to get them. Besides, you know, finishing your lab projects and finals.

Dear Squaresoft

Recently I have spent a lot of time playing one of your games: Final Fantasy X-2. It is a fun game, and I’ve enjoyed it despite the fact that if I were lactose intolerant the cheese would have sent me into a coma long ago. I like the subtly different mechanics; I like the return to the world map and being able to roam about. I like all of these things.

What I hate with a deep, abiding passion is the stupid shit you make me to do see your “perfect” ending. It’s not enough for you that I spend fifty-plus hours trekking through the same damn locations I already explored in FFX whilst trying to find a wife for some loser, is it? No, I’ve also got to talk to a monkey. Probably more than one monkey, actually, in an entire room full of them. The rest of them don’t say anything or steal my gil, but there’s a few elite monkeys that really, really need to be investigated so that I can tally an additional 0.2% onto my completion total and get your damn perfect ending.

This may be new to you, but there are other companies that make games whose names don’t start with Final Fantasy and end with some absurdly high number. I would very much like to play their games too…I do not want to beat yours with a 99% completion and then have to go through it again to get the last few percent I missed just so I can see the way the game was always intended to end anyway. Yes, it was very nice of you to allow people like me to keep all the levels and items we gained on our second go, but that means you knew this shit was going to happen and you did it anyway! If I were British I would say bullocks to you, but since I’m an American I’ll just call it bullshit like it is.

In closing, Square, I wish disease and pestilence upon everyone in your organization. Except for Uematsu-sensei…he can come live with me.

Moving Targets

It seems that the Louisville leg of the tournament circuit has been moved up from Sunday to Saturday, a move that makes sense since Sunday is actually July Fourth. Unfortunately, this new date creates serious logistical barriers that may prevent my attendance. They will certainly prevent the attendance of Pat and Bryan, the two guys who were going to accompany me down and make a road trip out of it (Pat was also going to be in the tourney). Work schedules make this new date impossible, though, and I must say I’m not entirely thrilled at the prospect of making yet another long drive by myself, especially since Louisville isn’t that far from Atlanta and there will undoubtedly be much better players than I in attendance. As it is, the only way I’d be able to go at all is if I cut out of work very early on Friday (like, say, one o’clock), something that might be possible since they made me work thirteen hours yesterday. I thought I left shit like that on the other side of the Pacific.

In other news, it’s looking more and more likely that I’ll be attending the Penny Arcade Expo at the end of August. Not only will it be the first real “geek con” type event that I’ll have attended (E3 continues to elude me) but they’re actually going to have panels with big players in the gaming industry talking about how best to break in and get a job there. This would be invaluable information for someone like me, and I’m not the only one who thinks so as Pat has also expressed interest in attending. The icing on the cake: they’re holding an SC2 tournament as well. Will wonders never cease?

This Way Lies Madness

Apparently, despite years of trying to coach myself out of this habit, I am still almost completely incapable of simply ignoring ignorant statements. Because a vastly disproportional amount of America’s (and the world’s, for that matter) population can’t, in fact, tell their ass from a hole in the ground, most of us are constantly bombarded by stupid statements, usually about whatever the hot political topic is at the time.

Today, it was (surprise!) Iraq and how evil we Americans are for being there in the first place. Now, I’m not here to debate the moral and ethical quandary that the Iraq war has become (or perhaps always was). There are lots of strong opinions on that topic and I’m not certain I have the ability to successfully argue one side or the other and so I won’t try. The statement that roused my ire went something like this:

“There are a lot of really bad men in this world doing very bad things. Why aren’t we going after them?”

The statement itself is, in fact, a reasonable question: why aren’t we going after all the bad people in the world? Thus, on its own the statement is fairly acceptable. The problem, of course, is one of context. Since it was dropped in a conversation about the dubious morality of the Iraq war it was used as a reason why we should never have gone in there to begin with. After all, if you’ve let evil tyrants live in the past (or, worse, propped them up) you forever forfeit your ability to correct those mistakes in the future. Far be it that a country who is, admittedly, partially or entirely responsible for the unsavory atmosphere of our current world ever take steps to fix it.

It’s an interesting study in the paradoxical behavior of humans. Often we find ourselves so enamored with a particular point of view that we will reject all logic to defend it. Too rarely do we stop and ask ourselves: does anything I’m saying right now make sense? Clearly, the above statement has no basis in reality; the fact that you, in the past, made a mistake is rarely a reason why you should not correct it. In fact, if people fixed the stuff they screw up rather than leaving it for the next person who comes along I have a feeling the world as a whole would be much better off.

Update

So, as I type this the video is currently uploading from the family computer. I say this to you because my family does not, in fact, have what you would call a real broadband connection and, thus, the video is 25% up and CuteFTP says it’s a good hour away from being complete. Since it is late and I am tired (and need to be at work on the morrow anyway) I’ll give you a link to where the video should be whenever it gets done. My only request: don’t bother to click on it unless it’s a least an hour after the timestamp of this post. Keep in mind that you’ll need the latest version of Windows Media Player (or something like Media Player Classic) to view this video.

I have already done a fairly elaborate and detailed anaylsis of this video myself, but I of course would love to here comments from the kaikan crew as well. Mitsu has already generously created a forum thread where such discussions can take place in a most expediant form. If you happen to read this before I finish you can rest assured I’ll be adding my own comments to it post-haste, which roughly translates to “whenever I get around to it.”

Moving Along Slowly

After weeks (or, more accurately, months) of delays due almost entirely to my own lack of motivation and effort the visual re-design of this site is nearly ready to go live. You can navigate here if you want to keep a voyeuristic eye on the final evolution of the style…it’s fully functional and all posts and comments dynamically update with the same content you’ll find here. Once I finalize a few minor points (finishing the text-adjustment script, creating the new header graphic, fixing the gaming search error, removing the paragraph tags from the linkups) I’ll apply the new template to the entire site.

I’ve got the video from last weekend’s tourney rendered but I can’t seem to post it from my C++ classroom; I’ll do my best to get it up by midnight tonight. The file is (unfortunately) in Windows Media format, not because I have any love for Microsoft but because it was the easiest to accomplish using the software I have on hand. You’ll need the latest version of Windows Media Player 9 to view the video, which should weight in around twenty megabytes.

Owned

As you may have surmised from the title of this post, last weekend’s tournament didn’t go very well. There are numerous reasons for this, most of which will sound whiny and pathetic, but I feel like I need to defend myself a little bit.

Obviously, the fact that my job and classes have kept me from playing SC2 more than a handful of times since I returned to America was a major factor, but more important was my lack of real tourney experience and luck. There isn’t much I can do about the luck factor…the seeding for the tournament tree was random and I ended up facing the guy who would go on to win the tourney in the second round. This was bad enough, but the problem was compounded by the fact that he played as Berserker, a character who was previously illegal in SC2 tournaments. I had no experience against him, and the fight was so incredibly one-sided that there’s really no point in discussing it. In the end, I left the fight with badly shaken confidence that was a major contributor to my third-round loss against Surge, a guy I’d beaten twice in practice. I’ll post the video of the second loss soon for any of you who may be interested.

Is that it? Maybe not, actually, as several people have encouraged me to travel to Indianapolis this weekend (and Louisville the next) to compete in those two regional tournaments. According to the man in charge of the tourney (who is a very cool guy, I might add) both of these venues are similar to Detroit; a relatively small number of competitors who aren’t Rob the Destroyer, which is always a plus. If and when I go I’ll of course let you know the results.

//_Norm out

Ohio Is Nothing But Corn

At this moment I remain in Ohio despite my best efforts to the contrary. It seems as though my bondage will be released sometime tomorrow around noon, which is good because I really need to be back in Detroit in time for the tourney warm-ups and practice session that afternoon. Yes kids, the Michigan Regional leg of The V Games is finally upon us and, I must confess, I am not even remotely ready. This is partly my fault, as I’ve gotten heavily involved in FFX, FFX-2 and Ico in the recent months but mostly the fault of my employer. Between work and classes (and the homework for those classes) I haven’t touched a game of Soul Calibur since the Nerdlan back in mid May. Combine this with a depressing lack of local talent to challenge myself and you have a rather impotent Talim player on your hands.

However, I am not despairing. I will play hard and spend as much time as I can Friday and Saturday playing against the people who will be in the Sunday tournament. There’s always a chance, particularly since I’ve learned that two of the best Michigan SC2 players are in Chicago this weekend for that regional match because they have schedule conflicts with the Detroit one. The one, the only Bryan has pledged to be on hand to make good use of Pat’s camera at the event and, assuming we get permission, tape my matches. This is both so I can one day toss them up here for you all to see and also so that I can send it in with my game reviews for that contributing writer thing I mentioned a few weeks ago. They want videos of you playing your favorite game and showing how hardcore you are, and I figured that there aren’t many things more hardcore than videogame tournaments…for gamers, that is.

//_Norm out

Insidious Or Awesome? You Decide

I’m in Ohio right now, which is arguably the more interesting and/or important of the things I could tell you about right now but I decided I’d rather talk about this radio station I found on the way into Columbus. See, I (like many others) have grown weary and jaded of music on the radio in general as it tends to be overplayed, generic, manufactured crap. One of the few exceptions to this back in Detroit is 89X, a station I listen to quite frequently. When it’s signal finally faded to un-listenable levels I switching in the car-kit for my CD player only to find out that my car’s tape deck no longer like tapes. I considered feeding it my foot as an alternative but I didn’t want to let off of the accelerator long enough to do it properly.

Anyway, in desperation I started scanning around looking for something moderately listenable and found something that shocked me to my core. In the exact spot of the FM band that I normally listen to (88.7) was a station that played nothing but amazing music that I had (get this) never heard before. If I had to classify the genre I’d call it something like alternative gothic punk-rock, which may or may not have helped you picture it in your mind. For real world examples, think Evanescence and Lacuna Coil. This litany of awesomeness went on for over an hour with hardly a commercial break and continued to supply songs I had never heard, not even once. I was astounded.

Eventually, they got around to playing that god-awful Hoobastank song that the local radio stations in Detroit have destroyed even further by playing every twelve seconds, and event which served to confirm that I had not, in fact, crossed into some sort of music Twighlight Zone. Closely following this acceptable flub (I’ll give them one) they played one of the best songs I’ve heard in years, by an artist I can’t remember but I was sure I’d heard before. Something nagged at me, though, about that song…something I remembered but couldn’t quite put my finger on.

It became obvious a few minutes later.

After two hours of relatively standard inane DJ chatter (the 89X DJs are much better) I was suddenly treated to “on the street” testimony from teens who had found God (that’s capital G God). I thought that was a bit odd, but hey, maybe it’s a local church’s paid advertisement, right? Wrong. Then the DJ starts telling me about how important God is in his life and how I really need to find him and let him into my heart.

Woah! All this time I’d be listening to Christian Rock! I had absolutely no idea that any religion had produced music this awesome. I mean, sure, I’ve enjoyed DC Talk and Jars of Clay for many years, but they’re pretty much generic soft rock and heavy on the Jesus references. This stuff was much harder and had managed to go on four hours without a single obvious reference to higher powers. In hindsight it was fairly obvious, but at the moment I was totally floored.

And so the question arises: why isn’t this extensively advertised? It’s not like it did anything to change my agnosticism, but if I’d known about it back in the day it might have made religion seem a little less mired in antiquity and, at the very least, held my attention for a few more years. As it stands now, I want to know about it anyway because the music is great. After all, Evanescence is some sort of Christian group and they totally rock, so I suppose, why shouldn’t the rest of them?

//_Norm out

Streptococcal Is Spelled Like It Sounds

I’m fairly proud of my immune system, as previous posts may have highlighted, but there is a down side to not getting sick very often. The problem is that when I finally do take ill it’s something strong enough to place me rather solidly on my ass. I don’t actually know what virulent strain of bacteria or jungle-incubated virus has penetrated my defenses but I suspect that it’s some sort of strep infection, the one ailment to which my body seems to regularly succumb. My immune system, on the other hand, is none too pleased with the situation and is enthusiastically raising my body temperature and attacking my muscle fibers in an attempt to annihilate the invaders. The whole situation is reminiscent of sand-blasting a saltine cracker.

My incapacitation couldn’t have come at a less opportune time. I’ve got a ton of testing I need to cover here at work (my boss is on assignment elsewhere so I have to take care of all of it) and the Soul Calibur regional tournament is on Sunday, which is of course a subject for a post all by itself. My plan for now is to tough it out the rest of today (as I did yesterday) and then dope myself up with NyQuil and sleep. If I still don’t feel better tomorrow then I’ll probably break down and see a doctor. Or maybe replace the muffler on my car. One of those two.

//_Norm out

Things I’ve Learned At Work

• If you leave work at any time between 4:00pm and 6:00pm you will arrive home at 6:30. This has been tested; it is a law of physics.
• Never, under any circumstances, work harder than is absolutely necessary. If you do you’ll just end up getting ahead of schedule, which is bad because your boss will always look at this situation and see that you do not have enough to do (rather than realizing that you’re a good worker) and give you even more. You will not be able to finish this and you will be blamed when the project falls behind.
• Do not check your e-mail after 3:00pm on a Friday. If you do you will lose plausible deniability and will have no choice but to come in and work on Saturday. They’re also gonna need you to come in on…Sunday, mmmkay?
• The surest way to make the ambient outside temperature jump from a comfortable 75 degrees to a blistering 95 degrees is to have the air conditioner inside your test vehicle break. Since you now have no choice but to roll down all the windows (or broil yourself, which I suppose is a second option) the humidity will also jump to anywhere between 40 and 90 percent. The exact amount depends on how many Fortune Spheres you had the foresight to collect.
• You know that book you bought? Donate it to your local library; you will never get a chance to read it.

//_Norm out

Just Remembering…

Militant Soccer Moms

When was it that olive-drab became the color of choice for minivans in America? I ask only because I’ve seen no less than three dozen of these things (most of them Fords, which may or may not be important) in the last few days and I’m at a loss to explain it. Maybe people are going for the military look to show their support for the troops in Iraq? Of course, if that were the case it might make more sense to have a hummer in olive, but then all of the ones I see around here are in bright fruity colors that have no business on a vehicle originally intended for combat theaters. So, minivans in camo, hummers in yellow…would someone stop the world, please? I’d like to get off and clear my head for a bit.

In other completely unrelated news Jeff dug up and old Wired article that I found truly fascinating. It deals with Autism (and the closely-related Asperger’s Syndrome) and the startling rise of cases being discovered in the Santa Clara area (a.k.a. Silicon Valley) and the rest of the developed world. If you have even a passing interest in psychology or neuroscience you’d do well to give this a read. I found it truly fascinating and it raised a few interesting questions about the effects of our increasing knowledge of genetics on the future of human evolution.

//_Norm out

Public Service Announcement

For some reason America has not yet come to realize that, barring a few unique exceptions (and perhaps radical design concepts that have not yet been developed), the flip-phone style is by far the superior design for a cellular phone. There are many reasons for this statement but perhaps the best one was (once again) highlighted for me today.

I, of course, have a flip phone as I am aware of their inherent design supremacy over the lesser form factors. Some of my friends decided that the formerly more mainstream Nokia style phones were the best choice for them, however, and because of their arrogance the rest of us are made to suffer. You see, on a flip-phone the buttons that call people are cleverly shielded from accidental press by the phone itself. Conversely, “regular” phones put their precious buttons right out in the open where anything that feels like it can press them. It’s kind of like walking around without pants on except you don’t get the same feeling of freedom.

Anyway, this friend (we’ll call him or her Pat, as it is both fairly generic and androgynous) who owns one of these accursed technological blasphemies proceeded to call me seven times within sixty seconds while I was at work this morning. I picked up the first one, thinking that it might have been important, only to be treated to the wondrous sounds that make up the aural atmosphere of a pocket. Each and every time I attempted to hang up I was, within five seconds, immediately called again by the offending device. Attempts to call the moron and inform him/her of the grievous harm they were inflicting upon my person were largely futile as the phone was busy calling me and activating my call-waiting features.

In a call to all you phone owners out there, I beseech you to throw down your heathen non-clamshell phones and replace them with ones that won’t war-dial your friends while we’re at work. Thank you, and good night.

//_Norm out

No Longer Free

So, it seems that Movable Type 3.0 has finally been released. I don’t know about you, but I can’t say I’m entirely impressed with their new licensing scheme. One of the major bonuses to the previous versions of MT was the fact that they were, in fact, completely and totally free with almost no strings attached (unless you were a corporation or business). I understand that this in not a sustainable business model and I am fully aware of the unwritten protocol that surrounds freeware. I have no problem at all donating a few bucks to the MT cause, but I have no plans to spend seventy-dollars on a real license.

Call me cheap, call me a freeloader, call me an asshole, whatever, but the fact of the matter is I’m not willing to pay for blogging software, especially not when there are several other free alternatives. They might not do as much as MT, but then I only really use a fairly limited set of MT’s features anyway so I’m not sure that matters in the least. Yes, I am aware that they have a free version, but what’s the deal with the limit on the number of authors? I know that the gaming section of this site has never been properly run but I continue to hold delusions that it someday might be. Were I to upgrade to version 3.0 I would have to use a totally different piece of software to do that portion of the site, something that has no appeal whatsoever to me. I think I’ll be sticking with the current 2.6 version for the time being unless some truly compelling new features turn out to have escaped my notice.

//_Norm out

Armageddon Weather

I hate my job. Not that this is anything groundbreaking or insightful, it’s just a comment I felt I had to get on the record. No use in people thinking I’m outside the mean by mistakenly assuming that my lack of comments regarding the mindless tedium that is my method of support is somehow an endorsement of it. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it; several people went through a modicum of effort to get me this job and I’m grateful. I’m also grateful that in a depressed (but recovering) economy I’ve got a job at all, but that doesn’t change the fact that given half a chance and a quarter an opportunity I’d tell the whole damn place exactly where to go. I’d also enjoy doing it, in case you were still uncertain.

Friday couldn’t go by fast enough, and I gotta say that the weather it brought with it was like something out of the Bible, I’m not kidding. It’s a seriously disconcerting thing to walk into a building after lunch with the sky showing a high chance of rain but still looking like a midday sky and then, barely an hour hence, to walk by a window and see that it is in fact pitch black now. When I say it’s dark I don’t mean it’s a little bit hard to see, I mean it’s midnight sans-moon somewhere near the bottom of the Marianas Trench dark. My twenty-one years of existence on this smallish rock have developed a certain expectation from me regarding what the sky should look like at around one in the afternoon and this was most definitely not it. After gaping for a few moments I briefly entertained simply going home right then and there on the grounds that, as any idiot could clearly see, the world was in the process of ending. It was only the lack of horsemen and a dearth of easily identifiable messiah figures that kept me from doing so.

//_Norm out

More Web Design Stuff

Work on version three continues. I’ve posted a re-done preview version here (for the curious, it’s in the same spot as the last one) and I will continue to update that as I go. The visual elements are now almost finished (there’s just one more watermark that needs to be created) and thus I’ll move on to actual functionality probably tomorrow. First up will be the text controls followed by the search engine and forum spotlight areas of the sidebar.

The goal is to template the new design by the end of the week and apply it to the main weblog page (the one you get by default). The rest of the site will stay in the old, shabby layout with the same utter lack of content as before, but that will not last for long. With the visual and structural elements complete (arguably the toughest parts) I’ll move on to drafting the fresh content. I’ve got a lot of ideas that I think you’ll like and once I finish the template I’ll be creating a new thread where you can find a list of these ideas. Feedback will be greatly appreciated, and if in the meantime you have a burning idea feel free to e-mail it to me.

Oh yeah, and keep commenting in the thread I made for design critiques. Everything you guys say is being considered (as you can probably see from the many but subtle changes in the new design). Keep ‘em commin’.

//_Norm out

The Trailer

We are, by degrees, approaching the point at which you will be able to download the final, re-mastered version of Kill The Last Geisha. I don’t have an exact time frame for you just yet, but rest assured that when I know, you will also know. For now, those of you who care can satiate a bit of your desire by devouring this delicious trailer created by the director himself. Enjoy.

//_Norm out

Back Again…Sort Of

So, here I am, one week hence and I doubt if many of you actually noticed the difference. After all, it’s not like posting droughts are unheard of on this site…heck, one might even say that they’re the rule rather than the exception. Regardless, this is a new post, a post I wasn’t sure I’d actually ever make as of this morning.

What changed? Strangely enough it was a post by Jeff (and the article that started it) that set the shift in motion. Actually, it was less a shift than it was a return to origins. Back when I started this site (not version two, think way back) I had a deeply rooted aversion to “blogs.” I hated LiveJournal and everything associated with it and couldn’t imagine how or why a person would create an entire website solely for the purpose of talking about themselves. Based on this I launched my site as a group effort directed at topical discussion and humor, neither of which it was particularly successful at. The problem (or the main one, as there were many) was that my distaste for personal posts meant I had to strip my posts of all the content that made them, well, personal, creating a site that tried to be journalistic without having any of the credentials to back it up. Combine that with numerous e-mails declaring the site dry and boring and you had a mix that pretty much killed my drive to update.

Fast-forward to mid-November or so. The site has been completely redone, both visually and contextually. Instead of focusing on discussion and news it became what I had previously sought to destroy…a blog. The posts were, by and large, completely devoid of thought or substance; most of the time I talked about how my day went or how I disliked the current weather patterns. In an ironic twist the e-mail flames turned to accusations that the site had become a journal and that I had better stop denying it and just accept the fact that I had become a dirty blogger. In the span of a few months I’d managed to swing from one extreme to the next.

That was my state of mind when I made my last post. I had a site that had become the expression of everything I’d hated about the blogging movement. It wasn’t necessarily that Pat Tillman’s death specifically altered my state of mind so much as it did expose it to oxygen for the first time. I realized that I wasn’t happy with what I was putting up and, thus, decided to stop putting things up until such time as I could figure out what to do. I think that time is, while not right now, very soon.

I’m going to go back to working on the version three update in my spare time. I’ve got a plethora of ideas for the site that extend far beyond simple visual updates. There will be new content galore in the finished product that will include submission from the community as well as my own personal contributions. The focus of the weblog posts themselves will attempt to strike a balance between personal anecdote and intelligent commentary, one that I hope will satisfy both segments of my readership (and, perhaps most importantly, myself).

I’ll keep you posted as events warrant.

//_Norm out

Time For A Sabbatical

Pat Tillman died today.

I don’t if that means anything to most of you out there…for that matter, I’ll bet most Americans don’t even remember his name. He was a professional football player for the Arizona Cardinals, which is not in and of itself remarkable; there are lots of football players out there. No, what’s remarkable about Pat isn’t how fast he can run or how many tackles he had but the choices he made in his life.

What I am talking about? I’m talking about his decision to turn down a 9.6 million dollar contract from the St. Louis Rams in 2000 because his fierce sense of loyalty compelled him to play not for money but for the team that gave him his chance, a team that was (and still is) one of the worst in the league. I’m talking about the fact that he graduated from ASU with a 3.84 GPA, something that a lot of college players bound for the pros never bother to do. Most importantly, I’m talking about how he gave up 3.6 million dollars a year playing a game he loved and left behind his brand-new wife and family to join the Army Rangers after September 11th.

Every once in a while something happens that cuts straight through all the bullshit we pad around what really matters and call our “lives.” You find yourself sitting there, thinking about how you hate your job or maybe wondering what parties might be happening this weekend, and all of the sudden it all seems meaningless and insignificant. You look around at your life and wonder why it isn’t you out there, putting yourself in mortal danger everyday, giving up the comforts of home and the security of living in suburban America to serve a higher cause. Pat Tillman knew this feeling, and he made the ultimate sacrifice so that people like me could have websites and play videogames.

It a lot of ways it sickens me somewhere deep inside my core to think that someone as brave and courageous as him should die while I sit at home and do nothing to help. He answered the call to defend the country and people that had given him everything…and died.

I’m not saying that we all need to go out and join the military…armed combat is not something just anyone can do. To be honest, I don’t know that I could do it, that I would be brave enough in the face of it all to do what he did. It hurts to admit that. I like to think, as most people probably do, that I’m brave and that if it came down to do or die I would do, and die, if necessary, but it’s another thing entirely to actually transform those words into action.

Most of us in the developed world are self-centered by definition; it’s a luxury that comes with living in rich, free, stable nations. The fact that I have this website, a place that serves no purpose other than to talk about myself as though that has any relevance or importance in the world is possible the greatest example of that hubris.

I think I’ll be absent from posting for a while, an in-determinate amount of time. I can’t give you a date, nor can I even say that I’ll ever actually write here again. I need to think a bit, to contemplate, and to decide what it is that gives me the right to continue this exercise in egomania. I have no idea what that answer might be.

//_Norm out

It Somehow Fit In The Mailbox

For as much as I bitch about how much winter sucks here in Michigan (and I may have said this whole thing before), I’d totally forgotten how awesome spring can be. In a way, spring in Michigan is like nature’s reward for putting up with all the bullshit for six months…we get warm (but not uncomfortable) temperatures, blue skies, light breezes and, perhaps most importantly, the budding of leaves and flowers pretty much anywhere you care to look. Animals, too; this time of year the birds all return from their winter homes, the squirrels come out to play and the tree frogs chirp their chorus all night long. You guys in San Diego might get great weather all the time, but one thing you’ll never know is spring (so there).

The relative isolation of the past month or so should be coming to a close soon thanks to the impending (and in many cases currently occurring) final exams of most universities here in Michigan. Several of the core members from my usual crew will be returning to Novi, at which point there will be much rejoicing and probably also some tears as I make them sob like little girls while showing them previously undreamt-of humiliation in SC2. Speaking of which, it seems as though there’s a kind of “geek party,” colloquially referred to as a “lan,” scheduled for sometime in the opening week of May. Not having been involved in one of these in many months I’m naturally a bit excited, so to celebrate I made the official background. Actually, I mostly just had twenty minutes to kill and wanted to play around with the new version of Photoshop.

Oh right, one more thing: the redesign of the site won’t be going up on the twenty-third as originally planned. Work being what it is I simply haven’t had the time to work with it, plus I decided to make it both a graphical and code update. The last update went a long way towards moving my web-design skills into this millennium, but there was still a lot I didn’t know. I’ve learned a ton about the new paradigm (or rather, the final realization of the original one) that good designers are using thanks to a book I picked up yesterday and I’m looking forward to applying my new skills here.

One last note to all my friends back in Sendai: thanks. You all know why, and I really don’t deserve friends like you.

//_Norm out

I Do Love Spring

Not a bad day today, all things considered. It started out raining but quickly segued (in the way that only southern Michigan can) into sunny, seventy degree weather (Fahrenheit, not Celsius) that would have been even more enjoyable had I not spent the majority of it cooped up inside the Siemens office doing alpha testing for a new code release.

Speaking of which, there are few things more depressing than being the only (and I mean only) person inside of a darkened, silent office building on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, but then that’s why they invented interns. Actually, there is one thing more depressing than that: keep the scenario exactly the same, but instead of a lazy Saturday it’s seven am Easter Sunday. Not that I had to do that, of course.

Anyway, I didn’t actually stay at work all that long (six hours maybe) and I managed to get home early enough to drop in my brand-new copy of Kill Bill Volume 1. I’ll say this: it’s every bit as good as I remember, perhaps even better because I could understand the rest of the Japanese since it had English subtitles this time around. Actually, I was sort of surprised by the amount of the Japanese I was able to understand…I didn’t think I had any particularly competent command of the language, but it looks like I know more than I thought I did. Which is, of course, better than the alternative.

//_Norm out

Kiru Biru

In a change from my normal modus operandi I picked up Kill Bill Volume 1 yesterday afternoon when I was in Circuit City. It’s not that I don’t buy movies; I do, but I generally don’t buy one part of a multipart series by itself. Take Lord of the Rings: you could buy each DVD by itself as it comes out, but if you do you miss the extended versions. Once all those are out they’ll doubtlessly release a special edition boxed set that will include all the extended stuff plus bonus material. My general practice is to wait for all the parts to come out as one set with extra material and then pick it up, but the combination of Volume 2’s impending release tomorrow and the ten dollar sale price conspired against me. This probably means I’ll own two copies of Volume 1 once the inevitable boxed set it released, but I guess there’s just no way around it.

In other news, it’s starting to look like my summer schedule is going to be quite cramped indeed. I already have the job to occupy the hours between seven am and five pm or so and I’ll be adding around twelve credits worth of summer courses on top of that. The classes will (collectively) run Monday through Thursday from 6pm to 10pm, which means there will be basically no time from when I wake up to when I finally fall asleep for any of my usual distractions (like videogames). The answer to this situation: play as many videogames as I can between now and the middle of May (Soul Calibur doesn’t count…I’ll still play that one even if I had to stay awake all night to do so). The weekends probably won’t be an option either because the software I have to test gets a new build every Thursday or Friday, which means the testing team works all weekend to get it tested so that the programmers can fix any errors on Monday before it gets sent to the customer. Potentially, I could be working fifty-six hour weeks plus the sixteen hours of classes for a large portion of my summer.

What was that about things killing you and being stronger or something? I dunno, I can’t quite recall just now.

//_Norm out

Those Pearly Gates

The default setting for the ruler units in Microsoft Word is centimeters here at work…which strikes me as odd, but then maybe it’s just their small attempt to bring sanity to the confusing world of the old English measurement system.

Or maybe it’s just because they got bought by a German company a year ago. Eh, who knows.

Anyway, I came across an interesting little poll yesterday in my daily net cruising. Apparently, somebody thought it was vitally important to find out just how many people in Michigan (well, the Detroit area anyway) think they’re going to heaven. The article is here, but I’ll spare you the reading if you’re not inclined to do so: 71% of Michiganders believe that they’re destined for a little slice of paradise when they die.

The really interesting part of the study wasn’t the straight numbers but the way the numbers got divided up by location. Oakland Country, where I’m located, seems to have a substantially lower opinion of their chances at eternal salvation (58%) compared to Macomb (76%). This makes sense, I think, since Oakland is a country of rich white yuppies who put their jobs and cars ahead of pretty much everything else, while Macomb has a lower average income and probably spends more time thinking about stuff that matters. What does surprise me is that the Oakland natives are aware of this; I fully expected them to fall in line with the rest of the state despite the fact that we lead less than stellar lives.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done this, so why not give it another go. I’ve created a thread in the forums where I’d like to hear your opinion as to whether or not you’ll be going to heaven. Let’s set aside any debates over the actual existence or absence of such a place for now and just assume that there is, in fact, something that resembles eternal reward (in whatever fashion you like). I haven’t weighed in with my own opinion yet for two reasons: one, I’m at work and I really shouldn’t spend any more time doing this, and two: I’d like to see what you guys have to say without being influenced by me. Discuss.

//_Norm out

You Need To Read More

Is it fair to be annoyed when you lose your company-wide day off (Friday) because the company decides you really, really need to test that software now? I mean, considering that I didn’t even realize we had Friday off until yesterday (and thus thought I was going to have to work anyway) and that I really could use the extra money, what right do I have to complain? No right, that’s what, and that’s the logic I’m going to continue to use for ten hours or so tomorrow while I’m wishing I was sleeping like I’d planned.

Before that, though, I plan to spend a little time tonight delving deeper into my new literary love, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I don’t really even know what the book is about yet but I do know that Stephenson’s writing style tickles me in ways very few people are aware can be done. The guy just drips dry, sarcastic humor (if you can imagine something dry that drips…can’t come up with anything just now) that manages to be incredibly witty while still taking things to outrageous extremes of logic. Take this passage, for example, which you run into just five pages in:

I have been informed by various parties that the reason I like Stephenson so much is because he writes like I do: managing to take paper-thin topics and stretch them to paragraphs or, god willing, pages, to which I respond: you gotta be good at something.

//_Norm out

Hanging From The Ceiling

My world has turned upside-down… what do you mean Leo’s leaving TechTV? Are you kidding me? He makes that network all by himself…there’s no way the Screen Savers will be the same without him; if G4 doesn’t hire him back when they finish their takeover of the network I’ll be both pissed and surprised. To add to the pole-reversal my life is currently suffering, when the heck did USC get a masters program in videogame design? Well, actually it doesn’t have it just yet, but since EA just handed down eight megabucks I assume they’ll have it soon.

This, of course, leaves me with an interesting dilemma. Until now I had absolutely no plans to go to graduate school. My general antipathy towards schooling in general is fairly well documented, and the though of going there for another three years or so quite frankly gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies…until now. Suddenly I have choices to make: do I actually want to try for graduate school? If so, what does that mean for my current dual-major plans in Computer Engineering and Computer Science? If I’m going to get a masters, which some advisors told me was a better idea anyway, is there any reason to get both BS degrees? For that matter, which one should I choose? CS feels like such a cop out (it’s a vastly easier degree) but I can probably finish it off next year…and then maybe on to graduate school. In southern California, which for all its faults is still infinitely warmer than northern Michigan.

To top this all off, Namco is reportedly making noise about the successor to Soul Calibur 2, a game whose virtues I have expounded upon often (much to the despair of my peers, I imagine). I’d link you to some sources but they’re all in German and I’m far to lazy to link you through a translation site. Of course, if you read German feel free to hit up Evil Avatar and look for the newspost…I think it’s like halfway down.

//_Norm out

Interim Update

Sometimes events conspire to screw with you. For example, imagine you’ve recently flown a few thousand miles across an ocean and crossed fourteen or so time zones. While we’re here, continue imagining that after spending two weeks there you’re finally fully adjusted to the new time schedule. Now, if you can, pretend that as soon as this happens, the entire country decides that, seemingly arbitrarily, we should all move our clocks one hour ahead.

Jerks.

Anyway, updates have been sparse lately for three reasons. First, my new job is keeping me quite busy and since I still don’t have a login there I can’t jump on the net and make updates. Second, there really isn’t anything interesting going on in my life right now (see previous comments about the job) and since I don’t have much time for net access I can’t even post interesting news tidbits. Third, I’m working on a re-design of the site. Does it need it? I think so, but then I’ve never been a good judge of what’s important and what’s not. For now my release target for this update in April 23rd, although I’ll almost certainly put up some preview editions in the forums before then to get comments and suggestions. If all goes well, not only will the site itself look new and better but those sections I’ve been neglecting for months (photo galleries, cams, gaming) should all be receiving fresh content.

//_Norm out

Ubi Owns My Soul

I was going to do another April Fools day post, a rather long and elaborate joke that probably would have caught a lot of you, but it turns out that my laziness and apathy know no bounds at all. My train of thought went something like this: I did a post last year and people seemed to like it, maybe I could do another one. Of course, if I do it two years in a row that establishes a trend, maybe even a tradition, that I’ll feel compelled to continue down the road. That means more work for me, and really I don’t have time to get a post up in the morning anyway…screw it.

Pathetic, I know.

Actually, I could have written it up last night like I’d originally planned if it weren’t for the fact that Beyond Good and Evil is one of the best games I’ve played in years. I was already pretty sure I liked it when I first started into it, but the farther I get the cooler it becomes. The game is an almost perfect blend of intriguing and engaging plot, good character design, simple but satisfying controls and gameplay elements and a wonderful soundtrack that adds so much to the experience. Even the graphics, which I was originally disappointed in, have taken on a kind of style all there own, not quite cell-shaded but not striving to be realistic either. BG&E simply exudes style and wit from every surface and I can’t help but be drawn in.

Along with BG&E, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time are also waiting in the wings. Add that to the previously released Splinter Cell game, Ghost Recon, and the recently released Far Cry and you have a lineup from Ubisoft that is absolutely stellar. At this point I could almost dump every other publisher and feel little if no remorse at all; Ubi continues to put out gaming gold, and I can only hope other publishers pick up the slack and follow suit.

Tomorrow, I promise to talk about something other that videogames. No, really, I meant it.

//_Norm out

Those Videogame Things Again

This is going to be a quick one, mostly because I have to get up early for work tomorrow so I’m tired, plus I don’t really have a whole lot to say…but I feel a little guilty about not having updated in a few days, so here goes.

First: why will it not stop raining? It’s been raining almost since I got back from Japan and so far shows no signs of abating. To be honest, I didn’t mind the rain back when it was still warm, but at this stage the rain has cooled things way down to the point of being cold (and everyone knows that the only things worse than being wet or cold is being wet and cold). Rain also means no Frisbee golf, which in and of itself is a crime punishable by life in prison and/or caning depending on your local ordinances.

Since I can’t go outside, I decided to grab my copy of Beyond Good and Evil from Bryan, which turned out to be the best idea I’ve had in weeks. This game is absolute gold: the combat is simple but incredibly fun and well engineered, the story is intriguing, the voice acting is spot-on and the dialogue is often quite funny indeed. To top it all off, this game has some of the best sound design I’ve seen since Half Life…good ambient mood music, adrenaline-inducing battle music and varied sound effects all add up to listening pleasure. If I do say so myself, it’s a damn shame that this game got lost in the holiday rush, and at it’s current price of $19.99US you have absolutely no excuse for not having played this game (it’s out for all four platforms, PC included).

//_Norm out

Same Old, Same Old

Today was, in almost every way, the surest sign that I’ve well and truly left Japan for good. Not because of some startling cultural revelation or personal epiphany but because I spent the day doing the stuff I spent pretty much all of last summer doing.

No joke.

Aside from waking up at eight in the morning (brought on by the last clinging vestiges of jetlag) today was wrought from the same mold as most of the others I spend in America; Frisbee golf at Kensington at noon, drinks from the convenience store outside the park afterwards, and then back to my place for some Soul Calibur 2 action. Actually, I guess that last part is a little different…back in the summer the jackholes I hang out with were capable of putting up a fight; at this point, I’m pretty sure I could take any of them while a retarded monkey chewed on my face, a theory I’d test if not for the legal difficulties involved in acquiring a monkey (retarded or otherwise) and my deeply-rooted aversion to facial lacerations.

Anyway.

All (or most) joking aside, I’m genuinely torn in my feelings about this. On the one hand, if feels good to do this stuff and hang out with the old crew again…I really do enjoy Frisbee golf, and Kensington is a nice place to go on a warm sunny day like today turned out to be. On the other hand, after my time in Japan it all feels somehow less exciting that it once was. In a lot of ways Japan was like swinging with a weighted bat: when you don’t know the language or the culture particularly well, even things like buying food at the local grocery store can be an adventure. Now that I’m back in the country I grew up in everything just feels easier, I guess, and thus less interesting by comparison. I’m not sure how long this feeling will last, if it lasts beyond today, but I’m also torn as to whether I want it to or not. I mean, I’d like to be able to enjoy the stuff I do here on its own merits without constantly comparing it to stuff I’ve done before…but at the same time, the feeling might compel me to take other risks and trips in the future that I might not otherwise do. I guess it’s something to ponder.

//_Norm out

Oh Yeah…

I didn’t actually notice this until now, but it seems that yesterday’s post that was actually from the 20th (the one about Tokyo and snow) was the 100th post made on this site.

I was thinking about throwing a party, but then I remembered that this is the internet and every twelve year old has a website with more than 100 posts. Maybe I’ll just wait and do something wild and crazy when the site hits it’s one year birthday, which I think is coming up this summer.

Or maybe I’ll just forget about it entirely…yeah, probably that.

//_Norm out

Big, Hairy Bugs

Working at Siemens, or perhaps I should say sitting at a desk and pretending like I actually have something worth doing, has been an interesting experience so far. Of course, by interesting I mean frustrating, mostly because I’m the intern and nobody tells me anything, not even what time I’m expected to show up in the morning (turns out it’s 8am) so that I manage to miss my meeting with the Human Resources guy. The result? I’ve worked my second consecutive day for this company without actually being an employee. This normally wouldn’t be much of a problem for me except that not being an employee means I’m not on payroll, and being paid is something I’ve grown rather attached to when spending time inside white corporate dungeons.

It’s not like I don’t deserve to be paid, after all. I managed to find a bug in their software today during a testing sequence in which I wasn’t even supposed to be doing anything other than playing around and familiarizing myself with the equipment. The fact that I found this bug while simultaneously confirming that something they thought was a bug was actually a feature just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. You now, the kind of feeling you get when doing your job successfully means someone else now has to work that much longer.

What can I say? I get my kicks where I can.

//_Norm out

I Hate Ties

Well, here I am, three days, three thousand-odd miles and eighty-percent less jetlag later. Oh, also about a month’s worth of non-posting later, too, but we’ll just ignore that and move on to the present (I’m sure the silence was deafening).

Anyway.

I’ll start off with the ritualistic comments about how much jetlag sucks; it’s no mistake that William Gibson referred to it as “soul delay” in his latest novel. The feeling of being absolutely exhausted but totally unable to sleep is not one I relish, but I guess it probably falls under the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” category or some bullshit like that. The jetlag itself wouldn’t be so terrible if I hadn’t started my new internship this morning. According to my original plan, I was going to spend the first week of my return just hanging out, relaxing and re-adjusting to a new country and time-zone. Instead, it seems that my new employer is quite understaffed and would like me to be working as soon as possible. What’s interesting about this is that, despite apparently needing my help, they managed to have me spend my entire first day doing nothing but reading pointless spec sheets…they didn’t even get me down to Human Resources to get an ID badge or login; I’m not even technically an employee yet! Can I hear a few cheers for corporate efficiency?

Oh, I’m going to change a few things about the way this site runs. Firstly, as you may have already noticed, I ditched the “updates” thing on the sidebar because it was pointless. Instead, I’ve added a “quicklinks” section that holds links to other weblogs I find worthwhile…whether this is any more useful remains to be seen. The second thing, as you may also have already noticed, is that I’ve decided to turn on the comment system for each of the posts. Think of this as a test run or experiment…I was never a fan of the stupid crap that tended to happen on LJ-styled comment systems and I was hoping to use the forums as a more robust replacement, but the forums are less convenient to use for mundane comments and I’d like to make things more accessible for you, the reader. Thus, starting today (once I update the template files) I’ll be turning comments on for every post; we’ll see how it works out.

//_Norm out

Sad Norm In Snow

[Editor's Note: this was originally written on March 20th but couldn't be posted until now.]

It’s snowing in Tokyo right now. Being late March I wouldn’t really expect it to, but then life doesn’t really much care for expectations or wishes; it does what it will and you’re often given a choice between being dragged along or run down where you stand. In a lot of ways, the little flakes of crystallized water melting against the train’s window closely parallel how I feel right now. I know that that’s a stupid metaphor and an even worse explanation but I’m really not capable of putting it into clear, concise words. Introspection is not a pastime I relish, especially not on a public forum such as this, but for some reason I feel compelled to at least say something, anything, about it now.

My life wasn’t something I spent much time thinking about before I came to Japan. I mean, your life is what it is, and unless you’re doing something that’s either wonderful or terrible to the extreme you tend not to notice it. As I sit here on the Tohoku Shinkansen heading down to Tokyo for what will be my last few hours in Japan, I can’t help but reflect upon how sharply I see the boundaries of my life, or perhaps I should say lives, now. I switched to the plural form of life for a reason: I now have, or at least had, two different lives, one in Sendai and one in Michigan. Two lives on different continents, in different countries, dominated by different languages. Different schools, different housing and different friends, even…in every major way one can define their “life” these two are dissimilar. In the seven months I’ve lived in Japan I have created an entirely new life, perhaps even an entirely new me to live it, and now I’m forced to face the reality that this life is over, done, never to be lived again.

I’m leaving behind people who I’ve come to call friends, people that I would never have thought I could get close to in such a short amount of time; I’m leaving behind a city that I’ve come to call home, a city whose streets and nuances I’ve learned so much about; most importantly, I’m leaving behind her.

I don’t know where I’m going with this…for that matter, I’m not even sure where I started. It’s a strange thing, leaving home to return home, and I can only assume that this is part of the problem. Where is home? Where do I belong? These aren’t questions I normally ponder, but I have a feeling that they’ll occupy my thoughts for the few nights.

//_Norm out

I Think I Might Need To Fire Someone

Okay, this is a plea from me to any readers I might happen to have out there: please, please, please get yourself a virus scanner and clean your systems! Now that my e-mail address resides on a public domain, anytime you guys run dirty attachments I get inundated with virus e-mails like this one:

I didn’t actually realize that I had a management team…I wish I’d known earlier, as this would no doubt make the maintenance of this site a whole lot easier.

Anyway, it seems that taking two trips in a row is starting to wear my body down a bit; I got a slight cold while in China that seems to have returned for round two in Okinawa. Also, for reasons that are entirely unclear, pretty much every joint and muscle group in my body is sore to some degree. Jason seems to think that is has something to do with all the sitting I did over the last few days, but this seems like such an incredibly sad reason that whatever it is I have that passes for an ego won’t let me accept it. Of course, I am in Okinawa, so it seems stupid to complain about, well, anything really, so I think I’ll stop. Tomorrow morning we’re heading over to an aquarium that is reported to multiple whale sharks, which seem like incredibly large things to have more than one of. It’s been years since I went to an aquarium or zoo and thus I’m rather looking forward to it…although it’s possible that I’m looking forward to a lot of playing frisbee on the beach afterwards even more.

//_Norm out

Back And Soon To Be Posting

I’ve been trying to type up a post for the last three days now, and I think this time I might finally get one off. Every other time I’ve either been distracted in the middle or run out of battery…or both. Not that it matters, really, because my ability to write about my experiences in China is non-existent. I mean, I could sit here and tell you about how it was awesome, and how I absolutely loved it and it was possibly the coolest trip I’ve taken in my short existence here on Earth, but I won’t because that doesn’t really tell you anything. The fact is that, currently, my command of the English language is insufficient to convey the how and why of my time in China, so I’m going to let it lie for a bit. You can rest assured that I’ll talk about it (probably at great length) in the near future, but I think I’ll stick to reporting Okinawa-related happenings for now.

Speaking of which, heading to Okinawa was as painless as traveling is capable of being. I have to give props to ANA (the airline I flew)…their automatic ticket check-in machines are an example every travel service should follow. It took me literally thirty seconds (with a little help from Haesung went I ran into kanji I didn’t know) to get my seat assignment and print it onto the boarding pass. A few hours of smooth, on-time flying and I arrived in Naha more or less intact (aside from being very, very tired). The weather is currently overcast and rainy, but even with that it’s still a lot warmer and more pleasant than Sendai. Hopefully the weather will improve soon and I’ll be able to make a post about how great the beaches are, mostly because a lot of you reading this can’t be at beaches just now and I feel like causing you pain.

//_Norm out

China

Well, there’s less than an hour until Haesung and I have to head down to Sendai station to catch our overnight bus to Tokyo. I’ll be on my way to China, where I’ll continue to be for the next ten days. I doubt if I’ll have any internet access while I’m there so posting will be largely non-existent, but I’ll see if I can find a net café or something like that to at least give an update or two. After China (immediately so) I’ll likely be winging my way down to Okinawa, so there could be as long as twenty or more days until my next update. Be prepared.

//_Norm out

Quickie Update

So…final exams, finished. Soul Calibur 2 tournament…completed (congratulations to Yuta on his victory). “Kill The Last Geisha”…rendered, edited, and shown at tonight’s premier.

The tourney went pretty well, with most of the matches going more or less according to seed but with a few really close calls in the upset department…in fact, the eventual champ was almost unseated by the seventh seed in his first match. Playing SC2 on a giant projector screen (made from a bed sheet on a wall) was totally awesome and we even managed to draw a small crowd by the end.

The movie went even better. The Tohoku University Foreign Student Association came through with a projector (also used in the tourney) and full sound system that totally rocked. All the various effects and sequences came together pretty well despite the fact that a lot of the gags were based on inside knowledge, and I think that as a whole the audience was quite entertained. There were a few scenes in particular that came out really well…the Geisha Ranger fight and the ending of the roof fight spring immediately to mind. If I can, I’m going to get a DivX encode of the movie up on the site in the next few days so that you can all enjoy the fruits of our labor. Or maybe just scratch your head and wonder why the heck we put so much work into this for what we got. Whichever.

//_Norm out

There’s A Reason It’s Called Studying…

…and not learning. See, you’re supposed to learn the material as it comes, spend a little time working with it, make sure you know what’s going on. Then, when the exam comes, all you need to do is review a bit, fill in the gaps, go over the tough parts. Study. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually performed that term by its dictionary definition, and once again I find myself trying desperately to memorize vocabulary that I never bothered to learn. It doesn’t help that a lot of it seems stupid…this book was clearly intended for immigrant workers so that they know what their boss in the factory is yelling at them.

Yesterday was, apparently, Valentine’s Day, although I must say I scarcely noticed. Two things finally tipped me off: the chocolates in my mailbox (in Japan the women give the guys chocolate on February 14th and the guys reciprocate on March 14th) and the veritable explosion of self-pity among the weblog community. I swear, from post to post it’s nothing but people being bitter, remorseful, reproachful, pathetic, or, in most cases, some combination thereof. I really don’t get what it is about a Hallmark Holiday™ that manages to depress so many people. Here’s a suggestion for all of you: get over it. The fact that you don’t have a significant other didn’t get any worse or more noticeable yesterday than it was the rest of the year. When you don’t have money for food, when someone you know dies, when you have to bail out of school because you have to work to support your family, when you have real problems, then you can whine. Otherwise, do us all a favor and shut up.

I know, I know, this is why you’re not supposed to read weblogs in the first place, but pretty much everyone abroad here in Japan has one and so I’ve taken to reading them. For whatever reason I’ve been on a bit of a reality kick lately, trying to put things into perspective and make sure that I’m not giving myself any more credit than I deserve. Part of the process was getting thoroughly disgusted with any self-pity, especially my own, and this has just sort of carried over from that. How long will it last? Hopefully the rest of my life.

//_Norm out

I Do Love Fried Shrimp

I’m just about ready to crash, but I figured I’d tell you about this cool (and by cool I quite clearly mean totally sweet) restaurant we went to for dinner tonight. It’s a fairly new place in downtown Sendai with an Applebee’s or TGI Fridays type of atmosphere that does a unique “tabehodai” (all-you-can-eat) buffet.

Here’s how it works.

Once you get seated at your table you get two dishes, one that has tempura batter and one that has breadcrumbs. Set into the surface of the table’s center are four square (about six inches on a side) containers filled with hot oil for deep-frying. You go up to the buffet part and it has dozens of bite-sized cuts of meat and vegetables including beef, pork, shrimp and fish in addition to potatoes, peppers, mushrooms and things that turned out to be tiny egg rolls. Anyway, you get a rectangular plate that you fill with whatever catches your eye, then you take it back to your table. Once you’re there, you dip them in the batter, roll them in breadcrumbs, and stick them in the hot oil to cook. The tables have little charts telling you how long to cook different foods for and a triangular wooden block with three sand-clocks inside (one measures a minute, the other three and the last five). The buffet part also includes rice and curry, tons of fruit and salad making material, sauces and a fairly impressive desert spread. You pay in time blocks, and we did two hours for two thousand yen in which you can eat as much as you please, which was quite nice indeed. The staff was friendly, and when they realized that we were celebrating a birthday (Zen’s) they all got together, did a birthday song type of thing, and gave Zen a bottle of wine.

In other news, the days only seem to be getting crazier and more packed as I go on…the movie premiers Tuesday night, and pretty much everyone involved in the technical end is putting in absurd amounts of hours trying to get the editing, sound, and visual effects completed on time. Add to that the fact that pretty much all of us involved have Japanese language finals on Monday plus the Soul Calibur 2 tournament to prepare for and you have zero empty time. Hopefully things will slow down a bit after Tuesday, but even then it’s only seven days before I leave for China at which point a nearly month-long travel session begins…and five days after the end of that I should be winging my way back in the general direction of Detroit.

It’s all a touch overwhelming, and right now I’m not sure I actually grasp everything that’s going on. Either way, the remainder of my stay in Japan should be quite interesting indeed.

//_Norm out

This Is The Title

I have been, as seems to be the constant case lately, busy. In between studying for my last two finals (kanji and Japanese language, the first of which is already done) and doing work for the movie I’ve been managing to wedge in planning for the spring trips, exit paperwork for my return home, making my Windows UI less ugly and organizing a Soul Calibur 2 tournament. I think I already talked about my preferences in the area of being busy, so I won’t expound upon them here. Instead, I’ll just plug ahead through sheer bloody-mindedness, which I assure you is a word (or maybe a phrase).

I swear to you that I’ll try to get something of value up in the photos section before I head to China…I’ve been putting it off for far too long, and I’ve got a fairly substantial backlog of stuff to post. I’ll toss up pictures from Yamagata, my winter trip to Hokkaido, the “around the kaikan” faces gallery and probably a bunch of pictures from the combined SC2 tourney and movie premier coming up on Tuesday.

Speaking of China, which I wasn’t explicitly doing, I really have no idea what my internet connection situation will be like over there; probably I won’t have much, if any, but that doesn’t mean the site will lack for updates. I’ve lined up two posters to take over for me during my ten-day sabbatical, and I think you’ll find their post to be a fresh and witty change from my mundane rambling. I’ll spend a little more time introducing them as the date approaches.

//_Norm out

Working Hard Or Hardly Working?

I think everyone needs a good kick in the ass once in a while. Not in a malicious manner, but just something that snaps you out of whatever fantasy world you’ve built around yourself and swings your focus back onto the real world. I’ve been watching Niea_7 lately (is there anything Abe touches that isn’t gold?), and if its current mood is any indication I think it might end up being my latest prod. Sometimes this stuff just comes right out of left field.

Living in Japan has been both good and bad for my grasp on reality. On the one hand, finally living in an actual apartment, having to do things like pay and keep track of monthly bills, do my own shopping and cooking, etc. have all worked to show me just how padded and sheltered life in the dorms can be. I’ve realized that I really don’t know how to cook anything more complicated than eggs, and being thrust into an environment where I have to not only cook but cook using foods I can barely pronounce has been a sort of trial by fire. I’ve realized that my ability to forecast expenses and keep intelligent budgets is also mostly (if not entirely) on par with that of a retarded monkey; being here has done a lot to show me just how little I know about anything.

On the other hand, the idea that I’m actually handling these aspects on my own is far from accurate. Every once in a while since I’ve been here I catch myself thinking that I am finally experiencing something of the stereotypical “starving student” life…and then I wake up. I take a look around, see the laptop sitting on my desk, see the food in my refrigerator, and realize that I’m in Japan. Not just in Japan, but in Japan and taking trips around the country itself…seeing parts of it that most Japanese people have never been to. Hell, I’m even going to China! If this is the life a starving student lives than we should all be so lucky.

The point I think I’m trying to make here, if there is one at all, is that I might finally have had an epiphany, not in the form of some creative new idea but in finally realizing just how good I have it. I can look at the characters in Niea_7 and see the kind of things I should be doing. I shouldn’t be allowing my parents or anyone else to help me out in the sort of frivolous bullshit I continue to pursue…there’s absolutely no reason why I’m unable to things entirely on my own and every reason why I should. It the end, I suppose this just me finally coming to peace with my decision to cut my stay here in Japan short; this is really a first step in finally taking some responsibility for my own actions rather than just doing whatever I please without worrying about the consequences, confident that someone will be able to bail me out if it all truly goes wrong. I guess we’ll see if that works out or not.

//_Norm out

Return of the King Indeed

I finally got a chance to see Return of the King last night at a special pre-showing at the Movix theater in Nagamachi, the term “advanced showing” being a bit of a misnomer since the movie has been out pretty much everywhere else in the world since at least January. I think even Zimbabwe got it then, although I could easily be wrong about this seeing as how I did not research into that statement at all.

Anyway.

The movie itself was very, very good, just like everyone back in the states told me it was. The battle scenes were suitably epic, the dialogue well delivered and full of emotion, the special effects were grandiose and the pacing was fast and furious, aside from the ending that dragged on a bit longer than it had any business doing. That last part isn’t Peter Jackson’s fault though…he chose the best place he could to end the movie (for those of you who didn’t know, the book doesn’t actually end there) and he had no choice but to cover all of the stuff in between. I was also a little bit disappointed by the overuse of CG, but then I am a bit of a stickler when it comes to that sort of thing and, for the most part, the scenes that made heavy use of CG really couldn’t have been done any other way. In fact, the CG sequence where Legolas takes out the giant elephant-thing was one of the best rendered sequences I’ve ever seen and cemented the idea that Legolas is not simply a badass but actually the Lord Of All Badass Kind. Either way, if RotK doesn’t win any awards it will be an incredible injustice.

At this point I’ve managed to finish all of my final projects and complete one of my two final exams. The second exam is not until next week Monday which gives me plenty of time to prepare, but the time in between will definitely not be empty. Filming on the movie was completed today, but there is still a lot of editing to be done and there is a possibility that I will be tapped to do filming for a trailer (we’ll see if that happens or not). I also have to photoshop a menu for the DVD in addition to any photoshop effects we need for the editing itself. Once we actually finish, I’ll compress my copy in DivX and post it to the site so those of you who don’t see me often can enjoy our cinematic escapades.

//_Norm out

Kill The Last Geisha

Well, it turns out that I didn’t actually have time to post anything substantial today, but I do have something that I think is pretty darn cool. Remember that movie I said we were making? This weekend marks the last two days of shooting (there is still a weeks worth of editing left) but I managed to get the promotional poster done a little bit early. We’re going to be off to the printers on Monday, but I have a little jpeg sneak preview for you right now.

It’s not the best poster ever, but I think it came out decently and I happen to like it. Oh, and you probably can’t tell at this greatly reduced resolution, but the text at the bottom actually does say something intelligent; I went all-out on this.

//_Norm out

Nemui

Just taking a little break from studying for my kanji final tomorrow to toss up a few things. First off, I’ll try to actually make a post with some content on Friday after I’ve finally taken this final exam and Haesung (the sweetheart) comes back from the immigration office downtown with our passports and re-entry permits. I’m beginning to question my sanity, as the relatively passive life at the kaikan has suddenly been thrown all out of wack for the last couple of weeks. I know that finals are like this back at home too, but at least at MTU I felt some form of pressure for the rest of the semester too, even if only a little bit. This has been like lying on the beach for a month and then suddenly realizing you have to build a subdivision using only a hammer by tomorrow morning.

I exaggerate, of course, but it really is tough and I’m starting to wear just a bit thin at this point, so you’ll have to forgive my lapse.

Anyway, last night I had to say goodbye to Monique as she left to return to The Netherlands this morning. Her departure was both unfortunate and (relatively) unexpected so there wasn’t a whole lot of time to do the whole goodbye thing, but Lane and I managed to catch her in Fatima’s room (who I’d never met before then) and spend a few hours talking. Speaking of which, I can’t say for certain that Fatima isn’t somewhat of an anomaly among her people, but if not I gotta say that the Arabs treat guests like royalty, on a level most Americans probably can’t even begin to comprehend. When we arrived, unexpectedly I might add, she went over the top to make us feel welcome. She made tea (good tea, too), gave us fruit and candy, all sorts of other food, put on incense and music and even gave us gifts that she insisted we take despite our protests. It was almost to the point of making me uncomfortable, especially when she continually apologized for not having done enough, but not because what she did was wrong. Instead, it made me realize just how much of an ass I can be to people, even people I know well, and the contrast was just a little to much to swallow right then. I think I might have to re-evaluate some of the things I take for granted, but that’s a whole different matter.

Yeah, so, back to studying. Hopefully I’ll have something more to say tomorrow.

//_Norm out

Football…Woo!

Another year, another exciting Super Bowl; I don’t know if it’s just me, but the last few games have been consistently exciting, more so than I remember them being in the past. I’m beginning to wonder if they aren’t scripting this stuff, and spectacles like the Janet Jackson “mistake” only server to re-enforce these suspicions. Speaking of which, I do wish that the NFL would remember that the Super Bowl is about football, at least for people like me, and just stop the entire over-the-top half-time shows they’ve been doing. They get less interesting every year, serving as nothing more than a short publicity shoot for whatever pop starts are in at the time. Maybe if they gave a good band a chance once in a while (like Evanescence) this type of crap wouldn’t happen.

Oh yeah, one other thing about post-game revelry: evidently the fine citizens of Boston are completely incapable of self-restraint or intelligence and have managed to kill at least one person in their rioting and mayhem. It honestly makes me think it might be better if the Lions just go on sucking for the rest of their existence…can you even imagine what it would be like if they won after all these years? I think the whole city would be reduced to slowly dying embers by morning.

//_Norm out

Weekend Update

I don’t like being busy. In reality, being busy is often better than being bored, which is a state I am quite familiar with, but I just can’t seem to get myself motivated when I’m locked into a specific schedule. Finals week is, by definition, a busy time, but I think that this one in particular is worse than the others.

Not that I have room to complain, mind you. The reasons that this time is so busy have less to do with actual studying than all the stupid “extra-curricular” activities I’ve somehow become involved in. For example, when not writing my papers or trying to remember two hundred-odd kanji I’m usually working on the film in some capacity or attending Mitsu’s going away dinner, which was on Saturday and I’ll talk about shortly. I also have my lab work to complete, which needs to be done soon, and this means that any given hour in my day is pretty much locked in a particular task. I’m the kind of person that prefers to have flexibility in his schedule…I don’t have a problem doing homework, it’s just that I’d rather do it when I want to rather than when I am forced to by circumstances.

As far as Mitsu’s party is concerned we were mostly successful in keeping it a secret from him. He’s not stupid, and he started to put the clues together at the end, but he was still surprised when Nick led him into the restaurant to see all twenty or so of us waiting there. The place was a pretty nice Chinese restaurant whose name I can’t remember, the sort that serves your meal in eight small courses instead of one big one. All the dishes were of the communal variety, which was cool, although I think most people were still hungry when we finished. That was nothing Mister Donut’s 100 yen donut sale couldn’t fix, and I might go so far as to say that this was actually the best part of the meal.

Oh yeah, and I have most of the pictures for the “faces” gallery I told you about early last week, I just need to find time to upload them. Hopefully this will be tomorrow, but that depends largely upon how much of my Japanese Culture paper I get finished.

//_Norm out

Quickie

You may remember that I mentioned a movie, probably only in passing, that was being actively developed here at the kaikan. This very same movie, despite the fact that the lead producer/director is leaving the country almost a month before I do, is currently being made at a furious (one might even say overly so) pace that is consuming most of the free time we have now.

This is my way of saying: you don’t get much of a substantial post today because I am a rabbi and I must portray myself as such about…now. That is all.

//_Norm out

I Still Don’t Eat Brussels Sprouts

Those of you who know me know that one of the [many] things I cannot do is cook. Maybe I lack some necessary gene, maybe I don’t properly stretch before hand, or maybe I’m just plain incompetent, I’m not sure which it is, but the important part is that anytime I try to make something it ends in disaster. This is why I was only too happy when Jason offered to cook stir fry with me today, since I though it would be a great chance to actually learn something about making food that doesn’t suck.

Jason is a cook on an entirely different level than I’m used to…first of all, he has a set of really nice knives, the genre of knife that lets you slice the tips of your fingers off and not notice until your carrots are gooey and red. Second, he actually has food in his refrigerator. Not that I don’t, but the type of foods he has are the kind that are useful in the act of cooking, things like carrots, cabbage, and other vegetables. He also has a cupboard full of various spices, sauces, and flour, something I can never claim to have owned at any point in my life.

Long story short, at his direction (and with him doing much of the work) we made a chicken stir fry that was entirely delicious and made me realize that being in Japan for half a year has actually changed a few things in regard to my palette. I am, or was, a picky eater…and when I say picky, I mean that I ate in much the same manner as a six year old. Vegetables? Yucky. What, why does that have a weird sauce on it? Oh no, the mashed-potatoes are touching the corn! Call the fire department, this is madness!

I knew, however, that when I came to Japan I would not be able to eat in the same way I did back home. Armed with this knowledge I have been able to force myself to eat things that, had they been presented to me in America, I would sooner have jumped off a bridge than eaten. Over time, I think my mouth has accepted the idea that it is okay to put things that are not cheeseburgers inside, and I think that this is better for everyone involved. I actually like cabbage and carrots now, enough that the stir fry was delicious not just for the chicken and rice but also for the veggies it contained.

I think that next we’re going to make some curry or something, which will probably also be good despite my attempts to foil it through stupidity. I’ll keep you informed.

//_Norm out

Two More Books You Should Read

I don’t really have anything specific or pressing to talk about today, so I figured I’d let you know about some books you ought to be reading because they’re just that good. For starters, you may remember that I got Snow Crash for Christmas, and I have to say it’s possibly the best gift I got. The book is totally outrageous in its portrayal of a future America, but at the same time it manages to weave intelligent social commentary and satire in a way that says something while still being funny. The plot was fun and unique, the characters where believable and the writing style itself was incredibly cool. At the very least read the first four pages or so…if Stephenson’s over-the-top descriptions there don’t get you excited I don’t think you’re reading in the right language.

Next up is Ender’s Game, a book that (despite being linked on the sidebar) I just recently finished. I had been avoiding this book for years because of some pretty poor reviews, but it turns out that those reviews were mostly, if not completely, wrong. It manages to bring up interesting questions of morality and the place of genetics and government in our future while avoiding the typically preachy nature such books tend to have. While I found Card’s portrayal of the kids to be a little bit too mature (geniuses or no) it hardly matters in the context of the whole. It’s a good book, one that even makes you think a little, but not so much that it detracts from regular enjoyment.

Sorry for the “book review” post, but I haven’t done one in a while and it’s rare that I read two books as good as these one after the other. Do yourself a favor and pick them both up (I even linked the Amazon pages, so not even laziness can be used as an excuse).

//_Norm out

The Book Also Has A Picture From Osaka

I was originally going to write yet another post complaining about how much I loathe C as a programming language and extolling upon the virtues of Java and how if C did just a tenth of the compile-time error checking that Java does we wouldn’t have so many system crashes. Two things changed my mind:

One: with the exception of Pat and my dad, none of you care.
Two: Zen gave me a going away present.

It seems stupid, in retrospect, but I honestly think now that I hadn’t actually realized how many friends I’ve made here until that moment. The fact that the gift was a little aqua book for holding contact information only drove the point home even harder. Until now the prospect of leaving Japan for America had been more or less like the prospect of going the other direction…something I was going to do because it seemed like the right choice at the time. I think now I finally recognize the possibility that I might just miss some of these people when I do.

You’ll have to excuse me if a wax introspective for a moment, but I figure you can deal with it since I made sure not to burden you with the standard, trite sorts of new-year bullshit you might have expected. Up until now, I think I was viewing the relationships I have here in Sendai as temporary; they’re the sort of thing that I enjoy now but probably won’t think twice about within a few months of leaving. They were contacts of convenience, created because I was in a land where my usual circles were no longer available and because I needed to have a group of people who were in a similar situation for support. It was very much a pragmatic thing, although not consciously, and I think I’ve more or less treated it that way since the beginning.

Zen’s small act, though, along with a few statements from various other kaikan residents, has gone and thrown that all out the window. For better or for worse I’ve met a lot of people and made a few friends here that I’ll miss when I go, and I’ll be damned if I’m just going to let the contacts stagnate and die as I’ve done so many times in the past. These people aren’t just friends I made because I was forced to, as I’ve shown that I can live with people and manage to get to know very few of them (my dorm hall freshman year springs readily to mind)…instead, they’re people I’ve shared a lot of good times with and it would be stupid to just drop them once I go. It’s not every day you get a chance to become friends with people from Australia, Sweden, The Netherlands, France and even people from other states in my own country all at the same time. The fact that Zen added a personal picture he took in Osaka and an entry for “Soul Calibur” (in katakana) with a drawing of Talim’s tonfas and Ivy’s are small but poignant examples of the things we (and this is the royal we, not just me and Zen) have shared in the last six months.

I think I’ll fill that book with names, numbers, and e-mail addresses from everyone I’ve met here and do the best I can to stay in touch with them. I’m not going to get all weepy and emotional when I leave them, that’s just not the sort of person I am, but rest assured I’ll miss them all and, to a greater or lesser extent, which I’d been able to stay for the full year program.

But then, that would only have delayed the problem, not solved it.

//_Norm out

Since When Am I Busy

There are good things and bad things about being busy. On the one hand, it feels nice to always have something to do, to never been sitting somewhere bored and wishing that you had something to occupy your mind. On the other hand, constantly having something that awaits your attention can get a bit taxing, particularly when it comes towards the end of a semester. I’ve got two final papers due at the end of next week, a third class whose project we still haven’t been told about, and two final exams for my Kanji and Japanese Language classes that I don’t really feel ready for.

It’s not really the finals aspect that makes me slightly stressed, though. For one, having gone to college for two years already I’m used to it, and two because I decided sometime last year to take a rather Zen approach to tests and homework that mostly keeps me from getting overly concerned. The bigger problem is that, in addition to the standard scholastic stressed, I have to deal with setting up two major trips (China and Okinawa), dealing with all the exit papers I have to fill out to leave in March, dealing with state loan issues and working on my lab project which is, probably, the biggest of the concerns. It’s one thing to write a program about a concept you don’t entirely understand…I’ve done that before. It’s another to have to do this in a language you don’t actually know, in a development environment whose features you don’t know and using math that’s at least two levels above you.

Anyway, don’t be too surprised if the rest of this week’s posts are somewhat devoid of exiting anecdotes (are the normal ones exciting? I suppose not) because of my workload. I’ll do my best to be interesting, however, so don’t write me off entirely.

//_Norm out

Watch Out, Spielberg

Although I’ve never mentioned this before, largely because my involvement is only peripheral, we [the international students] decided to make a movie. Or perhaps I should say, Mitsu decided to make a movie and dragged the rest of us into it. Not that I mind…I haven’t done any real “film” work since high school, and getting back into the art of camera angles and dialogue is actually rather fun. The details of the plot are largely opaque to me, as I have not actually read the latest script revision sitting in my inbox, but I can tell you that it somehow manages to parody The Matrix, Kill Bill and The Last Samurai with copious Soul Calibur 2 references tossed in for good measure. My part in the movie is mostly as a technical consultant and taskmaster (I try to reign Mitsu in when his ideas get overly grandiose) but I have apparently been cast as the rabbi in the opening scene were I believe I get killed, though I must request that you refrain from quoting me on this. I also have no idea where we can find a yamaka in Japan, but I’m nothing if not resourceful.

It has also come to my attention that the humans out there who read this site would like to have some faces to go with the names I have a tendency to toss out as though you should know who they are. I have begun work on this, and will try to have something posted by the end of the week, probably on Saturday. It’s likely that I won’t actually have everyone up at that point, but I should at least have most of them.

//_Norm out

Do People Still Get Rabies?

The end of my classes for this semester is rapidly approaching. This is made most evident by the piling up of final papers I must write and the sudden realization that I don’t know jack about anything when it comes to speaking Japanese, which could be a problem in the classes that require me to do so. Either way, it looks like it’s time to buckle down and make sure that I know my stuff, both because I’d like a decent grade in those classes and because it would be nice to go back to the states and know something about the native language of the country I spent half a year in.

I’ve also confirmed the earliest details for my trips this break; China is a go, and the tickets have been paid for (plane leaves around 5pm on February 22nd, for the insatiably curious). It looks like most of the time there will be spent in Beijing and Shanghai, which is cool with me since both cities have a lot to do (consequently, if you have suggestions on what I should see please let me know) and Beijing itself is one of the locations from which you can tour the Great Wall.

Looking at the US travel advisories for China, Lane informs me that rabies is the number two problem on the list for foreign travelers…which, to me, seems absolutely insane. It does make it likely that I will pop over to the student health center for a vaccination, I would feel stupid dying of rabies.

//_Norm out

Manga-kisas

For those of you who do not know (and I imagine this is most of you) I’ll try to explain exactly what a manga-kisa is, although it might be tough to get your mind around since I don’t think there’s anything analogous in America. For starters, try to envision an internet café, back before those things ceased to exist stateside. Next, instead of just an open café with tables and net connections imagine that it has rows and rows of cubicles like an office would. Finally, picture these cubicles having a comfy chair (or small couch if it’s a double), PS2, and a computer with high-speed net connection and you’ve more or less got the idea.

People come to these to play games and read manga (both of which are available in large amounts), I guess, which is their supposed aim, but I think that the reality is that most people use them like I do: as really, really cheap hotels. See, many of the manga-kisa chains offer “night packs” where you can get a single cube at around a thousand yen for eight hours. The cubes are just big enough to sleep in, and then only barely, and only if you can handle sleeping in a sitting position. I can do that just fine, but it does cause interesting muscle cramps come morning and, let’s face it, you just don’t sleep all that well. The manga-kisas also offer shower facilities (further indicating that they fully support the hotel idea) and free drinks all night (none of which are alcoholic).

I thought we would try it out, because it seemed like the sort of thing students traveling on the cheap are supposed to do, but I think that doing two nights in a row was probably a bad idea…by the time Sunday rolled around I was quite tired and largely incapable of doing the studying I needed to do for my language class the next day. It also didn’t help that they were out of singles and Tim and I elected to split I double…Tim is a tall guy, and there just isn’t enough damn room for two people to actually get any sleep in those things.

//_Norm out

Akihabara

Right, so, at some point I said I was going to talk a bit about Akihabara and what makes it so cool. It seems that we have finally arrived at said point, and thus the talking will be done. Ready?

For those of you who don’t already have at least some background knowledge of Tokyo I’ll clue you in. Like many other large cities, Tokyo is divided up into many districts including Shinjuku, Harajuku, Roppongi, and others (think Manhattan and such in New York). Akihabara is one of these districts and is sometimes referred to as the “electric district” as almost all of the commerce in it (and there is a lot) involved electronic goods and services.

Akihabara is not just a large collection of major chain stores, either. In fact, while we were there I don’t think I saw a single major franchise; instead, there are literally thousands of small, independent shops selling everything from coaxial cable and capacitors to CPUs and mini-disc players. It’s all laid out in a marketplace or bazaar sort of fashion, with some vendors inside buildings but always with frontage that has tables laden with cheap CD media or used keyboards or something like that. There are also vendors who are strictly on the side of the streets, and these guys call out to you just like you would expect, hawking their wares and trying to make a deal. Even the more legitimate places have hustlers working the surrounding street trying to get you into their store. It’s not only computer parts, either…you’ll also find tons of stores selling movies and music (on all kinds of formats, from LD to VHS to mini-disc) and a whole host of places selling you anime and related merchandise (a lot of which is quite dodgy, but we’ll ignore that for now).

The entire place is like some giant geek fantasy, a little place in the middle of Tokyo where we can all go and not feel weird about pouring over stacks of motherboards or racks of Saturn games. Unfortunately, the back-alley areas that are normally packed with street vendors were largely unoccupied because of the cold, but I think I might try to stop back there again in mid-March when the weather should be perking up and they’ll be back out in force.

Coming up next: why staying in manga-kisas for an entire weekend is a bad idea.

//_Norm out

Technical Difficulties…Please Stand By

Just a little heads up: I’ll be making some alterations to the base code of the website over the next few days, and thus things may appear broken from time to time depending on when you visit. Rest assured that any errors you see are being actively repaired, but if you think I should know about them anyway feel free to e-mail me and let me know. Hopefully everything will go smoothly and you won’t even notice, and once the update is finished things should be faster and less likely to freak out under alternative browsers (read: not IE6).

//_Norm out

MegaSendai

I return again after yet another inexcusable posting drought…I promised myself that I wouldn’t let this sort of thing become a habit (or lack thereof) and yet I have. I am going to make a statement here and now: baring any time-zone stupidity, I will make a post every single day for the next ten days…which should put us to the end of next week.

We’ll see if that actually happens or not.

I still plan to talk about the second half of my stay in Tokyo (and Akihabara in particular) but I thought I’d hit up a more recent event today instead. As you may remember, Tim and I hit up ACen last Saturday more or less on a whim and ended up meeting Fred Gallagher, creator of the fairly popular comic MegaTokyo. He’s working on a new project that takes place in Sendai, and thus he was up here on Tuesday checking out the city, taking pictures and trying to get a feel for it. Having exchanged contact info the last time, Tim and I ended up heading down to hang out with him along with Andy, Jeshua and a high school exchange student (why didn’t anyone ever tell me you could do that?) named Beth for most of the night. Nothing spectacular, just hanging out and eating ramen underneath Sendai station, but it was cool to meet someone whose work I’d been watching for the better part of a year.

I was quite concerned that some of those present might allow themselves to degenerate into pointless (not to mention annoying) fanboy gibbering, but the night turned out to be just like hanging out with any other group of friends. Fred himself was personable and laid back with a bit of a cynical streak that I can identify with (yeah, it’s a stretch, I know) and an total lack of the artistic snobbery that would have earned my enmity. It’s nice to know that Regular Guys™ can end up doing something they love for a living.

//_Norm out

I Don’t Even Watch Much Anime

Here I am, back in a manga-kisa in Ikebukuro for the night. I’m still seething over yesterday’s events, but it’s more of a dark undertone than any real anger, so I think it’ll be alright.

First things first, we hit up the Tokyo Anime Expo, for no other reason than it was a few blocks from where we slept and we needed something to do. I know, I know, what the hell is wrong with me, right? Well, I’ve never been to any sort of convention, anime or otherwise, and I figured that so long as I came all the way to Japan I might as well see something of another side of geek culture. When I got there, I was almost immediately treated to the dark side of anime geekdome…cross-dressing cosplayers. For those who don’t know, anime geeks have this thing for dressing up as their favorite anime or videogame characters. This can be totally sweet, like when the cute girl at the check-in counter decides to dress like Yuna from FFX-2, but it can also be absolutely terrifying, like the white guy dressed as sailor something or other, it’s not important, sufficient to say he had a dress on and a blue wig.

Anyway, only two things saved me from going totally nuts: the relatively small attendance the con attracted, and the fact that Fred Gallagher of Megatokyo fame was there. He was doing some autograph thing, and so the three of us had him draw us little sketches while chatting with him about his other project, Warmth. Since Warmth takes place in Sendai, we were curious as to just how accurate his drawings were. It turns out they weren’t, but Fred is heading up to Sendai on Tuesday to rectify this situation, and upon learning that we in fact live there had us leave cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses in case he wanted some extra guides. I’m not much about celebrity type stuff, but it was fairly cool nonetheless.

We spent most of the rest of the day in Akihabara, which I am powerless to describe in detail in this short amount of time. Sufficient to say it was awesome and I’ll no doubt tell you more about it tomorrow when I’m once again bored on our six-hour train ride home.

//_Norm out

What The Fuck Is Wrong With People

I’m sorry if the title of this post offends you, but I promise that I at least have a justifiable (to me) reason for voicing it in that manner. See, I do not consider myself easily angered…I do my best to have a fairly mellow, laid-back outlook on life and the generally stupid people who inhabit it (myself included). Although you may see me get worked up over various issues (like games, which I need to stop) I’m almost never genuinely angry at these times; I just like a good argument or discussion, and the best way to get that is to be contentious.

There are a few things that anger me, though, and one of them happened tonight.

I’ll try to keep this short but I do need to set the scene for those of you who’ve never been to the more populated parts of Japan. The Tokyo rail system is one of the most impressive feats of civil engineering I’ve seen in my short life, but it’s also the most crowded. You might think you know what I mean, but you don’t…when I say crowded, I don’t mean you have to stand and maybe be near other people. I mean that you are literally crushed between people, your breathing labored because of the pressure on your chest, and in most cases your appendages are trapped and completely outside your ability to use. When the train comes to a station you get off, regardless of whether or not this is your stop, simply because there is no way not to. When the doors open the people nearest literally fall out, and everyone behind them sort of rushes out like a shaken can of soda…like a leaf in a river, you are powerless to stop yourself or control your direction.

It is in this sort of atmosphere that a certain class of people in Japan have become famous, or rather infamous…the so-called subway pervert. These people generally (but not always) target females, and will use the close quarters situation to grope and fondle women who are completely powerless to stop them because they cannot even move their own hands to stop them. Japanese society being what it is, this is a torture that is silently endured by the victim and, if noticed, often ignored by those around her. It’s sick, terrifying, and something that I never dreamed I would come into contact with.

As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, I did.

George, Tim and I were on our way to Ikebukoro from Shinjuku on one of Tokyo’s more crowded JR lines. It was my first experience with this level of crowding, but I had be thoroughly briefed before hand and knew what to expect. After being pinned awkwardly, the train left the station and it was no more than thirty seconds into the ride when I heard a sort of sniffle from somewhere behind me. Now, a sniffle is a tough thing to classify…it can just be a nervous sound, or maybe something you do when you have a cold. This one was different, though…it had that feeling of emotion behind it, some sort of complex, ineffable harmonic that reaches right through your conscious brain and down into some primal human connection to jerk at your heart. It was obvious that this person, who I was fairly sure was a female, was doing everything she could to choke back tears. Had this been America, or perhaps even another English-speaking nation, I would almost certainly have asked if she was okay. As it is, I know how to say that in Japanese anyway, it’s a very simple phrase…daijoubo desuka. I didn’t say it, though, I didn’t even fucking turn around, because this is Japan and I don’t speak their language well enough. This is Japan, and people just sort of let this shit happen. This is Japan, and even in Tokyo I’m just a hulking white-man to be feared in this sort of situation.

I’d heard the stories of this kind of thing, I knew that on some Tokyo train lines there are cars for women only specifically to combat this problem, that’s how big it is. I also knew, somehow, that this person behind me was being violated and there wasn’t a god-damn thing I could do about it. It’s a terrible feeling, a sense of complete impotence and uselessness. She (as it did indeed turn out to be) got off with us at the next station, and when she did I knew immediately that I had been right. Tim had also noticed it, and even thought he knew who had been the perpetrator of this despicable crime. Lucky for him, and probably for me as well, as I wasn’t thinking entirely critically, there were way too many people for Tim to pick him out by the time I knew he had seen him. If we had, I don’t know that I would have been able to stop myself from creating an incident that would almost certainly have had my ass in handcuffs on a plane to LA. The only thing that made the situation even remotely palatable was that, according to Tim, the actual act had taken place pretty soon after she got on and the girl was able to elbow her way next to the three gaijin (us) and get some other, apparently decent men between herself and the assailant. I guess I was just hearing the after-affects of the groping, not the act itself, which doesn’t really make it any better but at least tells me there was little I could have changed anyway.

Not that it makes me fell any better about it.

//_Norm out

Boredom Relief

I don’t actually have anything intelligent to talk about, I’m mostly just trying to relieve the boredom as I sit for the fifth hour on a train going to Tokyo. Remember those tickets I used to go to Hokkaido? Well, turns out various people throughout the international student apartments had one or two days leftover that they wanted to get rid of. Since they expire on the 20th, we went about collecting them and now myself, George, Tim and Yuta are on our way to Tokyo. Because we have to use the slowest trains, we’ll really only get Saturday to do anything substantial, but I think it’ll be worth it if I can actually find a mod chip for my PS2 while in Akihabara.

The other interesting thing is the way the train has been, slowly but surely, getting more and more crowded the closer we get to Tokyo. This not surprising, but really just foreshadows how bad things could conceivably get…we’ve still got a solid two hours of riding time left, and if it keeps filling at the rate it has things could get quite cramped indeed. Probably we’ll end up spending tonight in a manga-kisa, so I’ll have both net and power connections tonight and I may post something later.

//_Norm out

I’m A Traveling Man

For whatever reason it hadn’t really dawned on me until sometime in the last few days that I’ve been in Japan for a little over three and a half months now. It didn’t seem that long (although I might not have said that at other times) and it seems even shorter now since I’ve realized that I only have about two and a half months less. Although this might seem like a lot of time, pretty much every spare minute from mid-February to the end of March (when I’ll likely be returning) is gonna be booked solid with traveling. As it stands now, I’m trying to arrange a hop over to Beijing courtesy of Zen and his benevolent grandparents who have offered us free lodgings for the time. In addition, I’m attempting to stick a trip down do Okinawa (by air) and a subsequent rail trip north from there through various cities on the way back to Sendai. Money permitting, I hope to be able to do both, but the timing is somewhat of a bitch and I’ve got to make some decisions pretty quickly.

In other news, I’m desperately behind in my kanji class, so I think I’ll stop wasting time here and go back to trying to memorize a hundred identical-looking (to a gaijin) symbols that have two or three meanings and pronunciations each. I beg of you, lord, strike me down where I stand. Or type. Whatever.

//_Norm out

Here I Go Again

This post is only sort of relevant, as the information I’m going to rant about is a bit out of date now. However, my Hokkaido trip and subsequent posting drought mean that I’m a bit backed up on things I wanted to shout about, so you get to listen to it anyway. I promise it’ll be quick (or as quick as anything I write ever is).

Basically, it’s fallen upon me and other like me to do the job that the news media is supposed to handle but, as always, entirely fails to do. You see, I’m sure you all heard something or other in the last few weeks about the latest ruckus over Grand Theft Auto 3 and the Haitians issue, or maybe just a general statement of some overly concerned mother who wants Wal-Mart or Target to never, ever again sell “murder simulators” or some other equally stupid rhetoric. On the other hand, I’m also reasonably sure that none of you, perhaps even those who are gamers themselves, have heard anything about Childs Play. Childs Play is, or was, a charity program setup by the boys at Penny Arcade to raise money and donate toys to Children’s Hospital in Seattle. Their donations weren’t just limited to videogames but included a full range of toys from Legos to board games. Since the drive was done almost exclusively through the PA website (and a few other gaming related websites) you can be reasonably certain that almost all of the nearly two hundred thousand dollars of toys and cash came directly from twenty-something gamers like myself. I’m going to repeat that number because it bears repeating: two hundred thousand dollars.

What makes the situation so irritating is not that you didn’t hear about it in the news; at this point, gamers (like skateboarders or metalheads before them) are used to a general feeling that our hobby is somehow offensive to the general public. One thing we haven’t gotten used to yet is the abject apathy and stupidity with which your average journalist will treat a shining example of gamers who aren’t murderers. I’ll quote Tycho himself, as he says it better than I can (be warned, this contains a few swears):

The first time the news dumbshits came out to talk about Child’s Play, though they were clearly told who was responsible for it they excised one of the people behind it. I consider this a fairly minor issue, but they’re still retarded. When they came to the Children’s Hospital itself for the toy delivery, there was no reporter even down there with us. A cameraman got some footage and then (I believe) ran away. I thought I heard him say “Ghosts!”, but that’s neither here nor there. When this footage was aired, I learned something new: that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That’s above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand. Here’s where the depression sets in.

What we – this is a grand We, which includes you – what we did was completely amazing. It was worth doing purely on account of its own virtues. But the other part, what we might call the “Secondary Objective,” was to promote the idea that we are not fucking murderers. This is an effort to combat media portrayals. Here’s the trick, the dark revelation, the Empire Strikes Back which produces our moment of darkness: we need to rely on that selfsame inept machinery to broadcast our new message as well. They’re simply not capable of it. I understand that there’s just no story in people being good to each other, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened from time to time.

This is in stark contrast to the New York Post [note: link goes nowhere, I can't seem to find that article] article I linked in the sidebar around a week ago…that got full media attention, complete with lines comparing violent videogames to the alleged actions of one Michael Jackson, which Tycho again illustrates better than I am able:

The money quote is thus: “This is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy.” Let us endeavor to approach greater understanding. I don’t know what the worst thing people think Michael Jackson did is, but I know what he was charged with – seven counts of child molestation and two counts of using intoxicants, drugs or alcohol, in order to get the other yucky thing done. I can’t believe I’m being made to enumerate these charges, to name that beastly procession like some perverse Adam. But there you have it, this is the reality that these articles have constructed: Producing – or playing? – a game where you portray a mobster is just as bad as drugging and then subsequently raping ten thousand children simultaneously.

What is it about videogames that invites such invective, such over-indulgent use of hyperbole? I’m honestly curious, to some degree or other, and I’m hoping that those of you on the “outside” of gaming culture would hit me with your opinions or thoughts on this subject. You can do so via e-mail or, preferably, you could talk about it in our forum.

//_Norm out

A Tale Of Swords And Souls

I suppose now is as good a time as any to explain the comment I made at the end of the previous post. You see, Joey and I were in Sapporo at the time, just sort of wandering around the city and seeing what sorts of things there were to do. We eventually came across a Namco-sponsored arcade on the sixth floor of a building near the train station. Being that Namco is the company behind a game whose virtues I have extolled upon on many different occasions, Soul Calibur 2. Thinking that they might possibly have an SC2 machine in there on which I could own some scrubs we headed up, only to discover (after a few minutes of searching) that there was no such console available. As I prepared to leave, Joey grabbed me and led me over to the back of the arcade with a comment like “you just need to see this, trust me.” Imagine my surprise when I was treated to a five-foot cardboard standup of Talim from, you guessed it, SC2.

Talim, in case you did not know, just happens to be the character I play with the highest degree of skill, and thus it might be asserted that I have a bit of a soft spot for her. Upon recognition of this element I was immediately struck with an intense desire to posses said promotional item, causing long-dormant devious sector of my brain to begin formulating all kinds of appropriation plans. After agonizing over the possibility for a few moments (and assurances from Joey that he would be of no help) I decided against any rash actions and we left to grab some ramen and then head back to our room at the local youth hostel.

Although gone from my immediate vicinity, the Talim cutout was in no way out of my mind. I still longed to own it, and thus Joey suggested that we pose the question to the other guys with whom we were rooming at the hostel: should I take the Talim? There were three other guys present, two guys from Singapore and one from Korea, and the Singaporians seemed to be neutral on the issue (likely because they would have been caned for this in their country) while the Korean was definitely giving me words of encouragement and, dare I say, challenge. Let me make one thing clear here: I do not normally steal things. It was a combination of verbal challenges to my masculinity and the fact that the poster was of Talim that pushed me in this direction.

Okay, so, finally we have arrived at the actually act of thievery itself. After returning to the arcade, I proceeded directly to the back and scoped the area out. Joey was along for the ride, although he made it clear that he would not be an active participant. There were two uniformed employees nearby, staked out like they worked at some Vegas casino or something. There was a small hallway that lead to a door marked (in Japanese) “employees only” just off to the left of the Talim, and I decided that this was the most advantageous area to make my egress. Then, all of the sudden both of the nearby employees turned and wandered off to some task or other that took them out of sight while a trio of guys dressed in normal streetclothes headed towards me with trash bags in their hands. Not about to waste this opportunity, I waited for them to arrive at my position and then calmly scooped up the Talim and walked with them through the employee door as though I were taking it to the trash. Joey followed, and we waited with the guys for one of the freight elevators to take us to the basement of the building. After following them towards the dumpsters for a few hundred feet we peeled off and made a beeline for the loading dock exit that let out onto a main road. After realizing that the signs covering the area strictly prohibited walking up this ramp, we booked it like the criminals we were and eventually made it back to the safety of the hostel.

To this day I have no idea just how much those guys realized about what we were doing…I have a feeling that they must have at least suspected, but much like I would have done had someone pulled this at Circuit City, they thought it was far too funny to mess with. For that, I thank them. Oh yeah, and as a treat/reward for reading all the way to the end of this boring story I present you with a picture of the actual Talim itself. You may now go about your business.

//_Norm out

Back From Sabbatical

Okay, first off I need to apologize to anyone who still comes to this site…I’ve been absent far longer than is reasonable, and there’s really no good excuse for it. The same apology goes to those who’ve e-mailed me, as I likely haven’t responded to you either. The week coming off of break was, for reasons I’m not entirely conscious of, a bit odd, and thus I just haven’t felt the compulsion to post anything. Anyway, that’s over now, and I suppose I ought to at least mention the interesting end to my Hokkaido adventure.

As you may or may not remember, the last time I posted I mentioned that Joey and I were headed to Hakodate to spend a day looking at the various temples and museums that city has to offer. What I haven’t told you is that on our way there (from Wakkanai) I found out that the Postal ATMs were going to be closed from January 1st to the 3rd. For those of you who haven’t spent time in Japan, the idea of ATMs closing might sound really weird…indeed, it still does to me as well. However, after several months here I’ve come to accept that ATMs will close at 5pm in Japan. Knowing this, I assumed that the ATMs would close for New Years Day (which is a huge holiday in Japan) but I had no idea that they would remain in this state for three days. To make a long story shorter, when I arrived in Hakodate I had slightly more than one thousand yen (around ten dollars) in my pocket and no way to get more.

Knowing as I did that my last all-you-can-ride ticket would not get me all the way from Hakodate to Sendai, I knew that I had to do something fast. In Japan, almost no business establishments take plastic (credit or debit) aside from Japan Rail (henceforth referred to as JR). Since Joey still had around one hundred and fifty bucks, he stayed in the city (like I had originally planned) while I booked it over to the station and blew four thousand yen on a red-eye train through the tunnel to Aomori, which I knew I could get to Sendai from in one day. Being that it was around eight pm when we arrived in Hakodate and knowing that my train didn’t leave until three am, I hung out in the station playing Advance Wars 2 on my GBA and wondering if my limited Japanese was going to be enough to get my ass out of this situation (Joey knows far more than I).

Without going into gritty details, I managed to make it to Sendai Station by about five-thirty the next day and the kaikan itself by around six. Since I had awoken the previous day at around five am, I managed to stay awake for forty-two hours, which seemed like a proper number at the time. It’s not something I particularly want to do again, but it did serve as a useful “trial by fire” for my command of basic tourist Japanese.

Anyway, there is another aspect to this story that I haven’t yet related, but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow. Sufficient to say for now that it involves a life-size cardboard cutout of a particular Soul Calibur 2 character. Stay tuned.

//_Norm out

Hey, I Can See Russia From Here

Well, yeah, Happy New year and all that stuff, I guess. I may write some sort of introspective reflection on the previous year, but then again I may not. It’s all kind of up in the air right now, and besides I’d much rather tell you about the bodily function of the guy in the capsule diagonal from me last night.

Trust me, that one will make sense at the end.

Anyway, we made it to Wakkanai with as little trouble as can be expected when you do no prior planning at all. The youth hostel we stayed in this time around was really, really nice…nice like a decent hotel should be nice. The rooms were carpeted with TVs and their own heaters, a lounge area with beanbags to chill on, a library full of manga to read and a kotatsu to keep warm with while doing so. It had a dining area with yet another lounge that was also entirely too nice to be in a youth hostel and has a giant forty-inch or so television residing in it…all for about the same price we paid for the last one. We also met another set of really cool guys there, although these ones sort of stretched the “youth” in youth hostel, which I guess doesn’t actually matter. Either way, we swapped stories about out travels through Hokkaido and then hitched a ride with one of them up to the northernmost point in Japan, a trip that saved us about 1500 yen. After hanging there for a bit (the place has winds that will strip flesh from bone in mere minutes) we went back to Wakkanai and decided to get the hell out of that town, as there really isn’t much to do there. Thus, we grabbed a bus ticket and made it down to Sapporo (again) in about six hours time, a trip that simply leaves the trains standing. They had movies going via satellite link, music selections to listen to, and facilities for cooking food in the back (a microwave). This might not seem like much, but compared to the trains it’s like a friggin luxury yacht, not to mention the fact that it took half the time that the trains would have.

Anyway, all of this eventually lead us to the same capsule hotel you may remember me mentioning a few posts back, the one with the onsen in it. We ended up staying there (as all the hostels close on the thirty-first) and I got my first taste of the whole Japanese bathing thing. It seems incredibly stupid to me now, but at the time I was scared to death…you see, onsens are one of those Japanese cultural things that has no real parallel in American society. There are a myriad of rules, mostly unspoken, that you are simply supposed to know; I, of course, did not. After consulting Joey and his Lonely Planet guidebook, I went ahead and gave it a shot, and you know what? It was totally worth it. There’s nothing like being all dirty from traveling five hundred-odd kilometers and then getting squeaky clean and relaxing in a hot mineral bath. Basically, you go down into this warm, humid, underground marble warren that has a big, hot mineral-water wading pool, saunas, etc. In one portion there is a communal shower sort of thing with waist-high partitions making little nooks for cleaning. You sit on a stool and use the various soaps on the little shelf in front of you (body shampoo is something I hadn’t used before) and get all soapy, then use a detachable shower head to rinse yourself completely clean. Once you’re done with that you can go chill in a sauna or take a dip in that previously mentioned hot mineral bath, which just feels totally awesome after days of sitting on trains and busses.

I could stop here, but I figure I really should explain the whole bodily-functions comment, so I’ll just do so quickly. See, there was this (rather overweight) Japanese man sleeping in the capsule diagonally down from mine. Being a light sleeper, I am easily awakened by noises and thus his incredibly loud snoring kept me awake most of the night. The interesting thing was that anytime he paused in his snoring he would loose a most impressive fart, often for several seconds, and then immediately return to snoring. I suppose his body simply couldn’t handle expelling that much gas through two orifices at once.

Yeah, I apologize to all of you for that last mental image. Talk to you later (maybe) from Hakodate.

//_Norm out

It Was Also Raining

Once again I find myself sitting in the waiting room of yet another Japanese train station, this one somewhere between Sapporo and Wakkanai, I don’t remember which (despite its status as second largest in Hokkaido). We spent most of yesterday touring around Sapporo itself, or perhaps I should say that we tried to do so. Unfortunately, pretty much everything cool to do shuts down between December 29th and January 1st, so we couldn’t go to any of the museums or hit up the tours of the Sapporo Beer Garden (which is Japanese for brewery). In reality, Sapporo was the best place to have this happen…it may be a big city, but that’s pretty much all it has going for it. On the one hand, it would probably be a pretty cool place to live…it has the advantages of a major city, like Tokyo, but without the massive overcrowding they have there. It was also designed by an American, and so the street layouts actually make sense, which is really rare in Japan.

We finally broke up the litany of capsule hotels last night by staying in one of Sapporo’s two youth hostels. It worked out pretty well, as the hostel itself is real close to the [train] station and the other four guys we were bunking with were very cool. The proprietor was also a great guy, and he didn’t even bother to see if we were members of the youth hostel association (I am, Joey isn’t) and gave us the discounted price anyway. Nothing like saving money to perk your day up.

While not directly related to our trip, I saw a set of Sony noise-canceling headphones while we were browsing through a Best Denki in Sapporo. These things are simply phenomenal…they’re as small as the set I have now, they’re of the “behind the neck” variety that I prefer, and they fold up quite small if you want them to. The best part, of course, is the noise cancel feature…it runs off of a (triple or double, I don’t remember) A battery and cuts down background noise to almost zero. It’s really quite astounding…when you turn it on you can barely hear yourself talk! Previous noise-canceling headphones have been very expensive and of either the ear-bud or air-traffic controller variety, but these are both affordable (at 7000 yen) and stylish. I really want to get a set, but I will definitely have to wait until just before I leave for America if I do so.

//_Norm out

Que The Music

Here I am, reporting to you from yet another capsule hotel, this one in Sapporo. For some strange reason I have always wanted to experience one of these things, and I actually think they’re a bit of okay. They’re not nearly as small as they were rumored to be, and they all include regular shower facilities and such. In fact, this particular hotel has a whole spa and onsen thing going on below us, all included in the base fee, which is kind of nice.

On the traveling aspect of things we’ve had some issues. Not yesterday, mind you; yesterday we managed to cover probably around 800km or more of track distance that took us all the way from Sendai to Aomori in around fourteen hours. This was no small miracle, really, and we had to go all “Mission Impossible” towards the end and jump on one of the express trains (which our tickets do not allow) for one station to get us there in time for the last regular train to Aomori…yeah, we’re like a couple of super-spies or some shit. Anyway, the problem was with today…even though we spent almost eleven straight hours on trains (there were no layovers this time) we couldn’t get any farther then Sapporo. Our goal had been to reach Wakkanai, the northernmost city in Japan, but when we suggested this to the nice ticket lady in Aomori she practically laughed out loud. It turns out that the trains in Hokkaido are slow, incredibly so. It actually throws a bit of a wrench in the works, and we may end up needing to procure a second set of the tickets we’re using now.

As it stands, our revised itinerary is to spend all day tomorrow roaming around Sapporo, seeing the sites and probably hitting up a few Book-Offs or something while we’re at it. We’ll crash at one of the youth hostels near the station, and then, pending investigations as to just how slow the trains will continue to be, we’ll either take the JR or hop a bus to Wakkanai. After that things get a little hazy…we’d like to spend a day in Wakkanai and then head back south into Hakodate, but that depends largely on train speeds and monetary situations. I’ll keep you posted as events warrant.

//_Norm out

Hokkaido

Okay, so, in a about an hour or so I will be on my way to the northern island of Japan, Hokkaido. I tell you this mainly so that any lack of posting on my part will be understood, since I will likely be away from an easy connection. You will definitely get at least one or two messages from me, seeing as how I have this lovely PHS cellular network connection that (supposedly) works anywhere in Japan. I guess we’ll see.

I still haven’t gotten the new image gallery software working, I don’t really know when I will, so I will probably try to put some pictures into the actual posts themselves, which is something I’ve avoided in the past. I’ll make an attempt to get the software working in the free time I may or may not have this week, but right now it’s five am and I am way to tired to even comprehend it.

//_Norm out

A Moment (Or Two) Of Weakness

I opened my Christmas presents yesterday. While I won’t attemp to deny my weakness, I did have a relatively decent rationalization. See, Joey and I (were) going to be leaving for our Hokkaido trip on the 26th, which meant that if I waited until Christmas day to do the opening I would have very little time to partake of the bounty inside. Of course, once I had done the opening Joey informed me that he would prefer to have a day’s rest after getting back from the skiing thing, and thus our departure date has slipped to the 28th, completely invalidating my excuses in the process. Eh, such is life.

Of course, the things I actually received were well worth the guilt anyway. A copy of Final Fantasy X-2 which is, interestingly, the first FF game I’ve owned since FF2 for the NES. I also got the new Civ III: Conquests expansion, the Indiana Jones trilogy box-set, and two books: Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Philosophy of the Matrix. Oh yeah, the box itself also contained applesauce cake, of which I am a completely unabashed fan. Once my copy of FFXI arrives from the states courtesy of Tim, I should be more or less set on the gaming front until I leave this island in March (especially with Blizzard finally finishing The Frozen Throne).

I know it’s still just the beginning of Christmas Eve for those of you back in the states, so I’ll reserve any mentionings of Christmas cheer, Christmas joy, or anything else Christmas-like until sometime tomorrow, when I will probably be more coherent anyway.

//_Norm out

Free At Last

With only a modicum of difficulty (including my studying the wrong chapter’s vocabulary last night) the final day of classes before winter break has been completed. It would not be inaccurate to say that I am relieved, although it would be a bit much to say that I am ecstatic. To celebrate the beginning of two weeks of relaxation and exploration we made a stop at the local cinema to catch a showing of The Last Samurai. I wasn’t expecting anything particularly wonderful, especially since the movie start Tom Cruise (of whom I am not a fan), but it ended up being pretty good. Sort of like a far-east Braveheart, only not nearly as long or as well done. The movie was, on the whole, formulaic and predictable, and the ending drags on a bit more than it has any right to do, but I think I was satisfied. It has some decent acting, a nice morally-inspiring plot (if you can ignore the obvious over-romanticizing of Japan and the Samurai in particular) and some pretty funny dialogue if you know any Japanese. I’d give it a recommendation if you can catch a matinee or if you’ve simply got nothing to do on an otherwise boring rainy day.

In other news, the Christmas Box (TM) has arrived and is currently in my possession. While I have opened the box itself, this was only to get at the foodstuffs I knew it contained. The actual Christmas presents are individually wrapped with little stickers instructing me not to open them until Christmas, which I suppose settles the entire debate. One other note about the contents of the box itself: upon opening, I was treated to a modern miracle of package engineering on par with the Roman Coliseum or the Great Pyramid, no joke. There was no wasted space, and everything that couldn’t be crammed with merchandise was instead cleverly crammed with bubble wrap. Don’t quote me on this, but I’m relatively certain that it could have survived a direct strike from a nuclear warhead or three.

//_Norm out

The Christmas Box (TM)

My parents have, according to them, sent me a package that I have started referring to as the “Christmas box,” as it contains things that are indeed Christmas presents. My appreciation for this is boundless, but it has created a rather difficult situation for me. You see, the box should arrive sometime tomorrow instead of, say, Thursday, which is actually Christmas. This gives me nearly four full days, three of which I have no classes for, before I should open it and delve into its goodness. The fact of the matter, however, is that I have very little willpower when it comes to stuff like this; the box will be sitting there, easily within reach, constantly mocking my attempts to resist opening it. When you add in the relative lack of people who are actually still here besides me (having left either for their respective home countries or perhaps the ski trip) and you have me, mostly bored, starting at a box that could very well relieve said boredom if only it were to be opened.

Such a dilemma. To aid my decision, or at least to take the weight of it off my own shoulders and transfer it onto the community’s, I have posted a poll that asks the really important questions.

In between cleaning my room and studying for the last test (quiz really) that I have before break, I’ve been doing my best to make some long overdue updates and additions to this poor neglected website. First off, you may notice that, finally, there are some new linkups on the sidebar. The old system required me to edit the html directly in order to post such things, which is an obviously stupid way to do it. After spending the requisite ten minutes or so delving into MT’s more esoteric features I came up with a system that required me to right-click on the page I wish to link to. This is, I assure you, a much better system than the one I had before.

//_Norm out

It’s About Friggin Time

I do my best not to get riled up by the things ignorant, uniformed people do. It wasn’t always this way, but I find that there’s rarely any use in getting angry when a stupid person says or does something, well, stupid. There are a few things, though, that I am so much a part of that I can’t help but get annoyed when outsiders drag it through the mud. I am talking, of course, about video games, but this isn’t going to be a rant about how some other guy ranted about how all games are muder simulators that do nothing but train our children to kill. No, instead I’m going to link you to an article that says something completely different, something that’s been a long time in coming.

You see, this is what needs to get coverage in the media today. Sure, it’s easy to write a sensational hype story based on the ravings of extremest protection groups whose sole purpose in life seems to be the irradication of all things video game related. The general public has proved over and over again that they’ll not only watch but actively believe when games are compared to, and blamed for, school shootings, serial killings, or robberies. It’s no trouble at all to take a group of people who are, on the whole, considered to be social rejects or, at best, willful outcasts and make them out to be raving lunatics ready to snap and kill entire busses of school children at the slightest provocation.

It’s about damn time that people started looking beyond the Grant Theft Autos and Postals, and started looking at what the gaming community itself is represented by. We gamers are more than just the sum of the violent games we sometimes play.

//_Norm out

Connection Established: 32.0Kbps

It seems that, for once, I’ve managed to fullfill a statement I made on this website. Don’t get excited, I don’t think this will end up being any sort of pattern, but it’s nice to have it happen once in a while. You may now be asking: what exactly have I done? What I have done, my friends, is no less than secure myself a permanent internet connection via the folks at AirH. While the speed is no better than that of a typical dial-up connection, it does have the added benefit of being cellular and thus usable pretty much anywhere in Japan sans-wires. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a vast improvement over my previous state of not having a connection at all. Huge props go to Mitsu, who acted as my translator and senpai for internet procurement; not only did he help me get the thing at all, but he got them to drop the price of the CompactFlash card itself from 5850 yen to 850 yen because he is crafty.

What does my newfound connectivity mean for you? Basically, it means that this site will (hopefully) start living up to what I had originally intended for it. More frequent updates, updates to things like the sidebar (which were too hard to do on public computers), bug fixes, and much more will all happen with regularity from this point forward.

It also means that there is a chance I will end up playing FFXI…seeing as how two of my neighbors here have offered to pay for two months of the service for the opportunity to spend a weekend wacking omega rabbits, which seems like an immensely good deal to me.

//_Norm out

That Internet Thing Again

I don’t suppose there’s any point in linking stories since I’m sure all of you have already heard the news. I just think it’s funny that I found out from my Japanese language instructor about the whole Saddam thing, as opposed to regular news sources. It just goes to show how much not having a damn internet connection removes me from, well, just about anything that happened less than week ago.

My search for a stable net connection continues, and I think it’s possible, if not likely, that I will have one before the coming weekend. I know that I’ve said this before, but the situation became a bit more important when I realized that the International Student Center (the place with the public lab) will be closed for the whole of winter break. Now, I will be away in Hokkaido for a good week or so anyway, but I have research and stuff that needs to be done when I’m not. Either way, I think I will have to bite down and just get that stupid cellular net service.

For those of you who may have missed it, Penny Arcade has been doing a fundraising drive for their local Children’s Hospital for a while now, and I can’t believe how much they’ve raised. It’s absolutely insane, and it does a good job of showing what playing videogames does to children: it makes them grow up with big hearts.

//_Norm out

The Elder Cow

I got my train tickets for the Hokkaido trip today, and I must say that I was shocked at just how good a deal they are. I got five “all you can ride” tickets for about $100US…granted, their not usable on the shinkansen (bullet trains) but it’ll probably take two to get to Sapporo, which is fine with me because I want to stop other places anyway. Since we’ll use four of them for Hokkaido, Joey and I now plan to make a trip to Tokyo with Zen using the last ones; Akihabara is so close I can almost taste it, and it tastes like…well, electronic stuff I guess.

The trip to the high school was quite interesting, though a bit less so than I’d hoped, and I’ll probably hit that up in more detail tomorrow or so when there’s more time. For now, I direct your attention to the evil cow sign I found on Sunday in Nagamachi. I think the place is some sort of restaurant, but it could just as easily be a PETA protest against the eating of beef.

Leave it to the Japanese to come up with something like that.

//_Norm out

Stay Cool

I have, through means that are still somewhat hazy and unclear, come into possession of (or at least access to) a copy of DDR Extreme and a pad. This is a problem, as DDR has proven to be just as fun and addicting and, worst of all, time consuming as I always imagined it might be. It even has a diet mode, where I can enter my weight and other things and it will then set up a dancing program to loose weight, tracking calories burned. I have no idea who would use this, but that is not the point. The point is that this game is fun, so fun that Jeshua seems to have done rather serious damage to his feet after a three and a half hour session last weekend…he said something about bruising bones and doctors. Luckily, I am so good as he and probably don’t have the stamina to play that long anyway.

Elsewhere, Joey and I will be going on a field trip (apparently colleges still have those in Japan) to a Japanese high school today. I am not entirely sure what we’ll be doing, but it will probably involve observing teachers and classes and talking to people, which seems like a worthwhile endevor. Also, the fact that it is an all-girls high school has rather excited many of my fellow students, but they seem to forget that we are college juniors and they are in high school…to me, at least, this seems like an issue that must be considered.

//_Norm out

Biological Assassin

So, it seems that the Japanese love for arbitrary heirarchy is once again causing them to blindly do incredibly stupid things. Consider: I have a friend here, let’s call him Andre, as that is indeed his name. He’s from Costa Rica, and he’s having rather severe troubles with his abdominal region, namely his appendix. Normally, this is not a huge deal…it happens a lot, and you get it removed. But no, Japan is somehow afraid to do this to a foreigner. They’re screwing with all sorts of antibiotics and refusing to operate. This is despite the fact that the two foreign doctors at the hospital have said that they must operate now.

This is just offensive, to be honest. The entire situation is an unnecessary risk; you can die if your appendix explodes, that’s why they just yank it out at the first sign of trouble. After all, so far as medical science can tell, it serves no purpose other than to periodically try to kill you.

Thus far we of the gaijin persuasion are attempting to get something done, but the nature of Japanese society is such that the doctors simply will not listen to anything anyone else says…after all, they’re doctors, they know best, right? We can’t even bring an embassy into this, because Japan could care less about Costa Rica. If he were an American, shit could be done, but since he is not this is far less likely.

I’ll keep you posted as events warrant, I suppose.

//_Norm out

Oh Yeah…

I also need to apologize to all of you who’ve e-mailed me in the last week or so…I did get all your messages, and I assure you that I will do my best to respond just as soon as I am able. My inbox is quite literally exploding with mail right now, and I even had to resort to using Outlook to download it all for later perusal, as opposed to using my custom webmail interface that I usually do.

Moral of the story: just give me a few days.

// Norm out

I Need My Internet

My god, taking my WiFi internet access away was like stealing a glass of water from a man who was lost in the desert for weeks under a hole in the ozone layer, every day cloudless and zero humidity while a really fluffy towel constantly sucks what little moisture he has left away…and, well, you get the idea. The point is that I haven’t had any net access at all in nearly two weeks, and what I have now is being gotten on an old iMac with an impossibly difficult Japanese keyboard.

The result of this, combined with the fact that I need to do research for my lab project when my lab has made it clear that they don’t particularly want me within a thousand meters of them, has pushed me suddenly and unexpectedly towards the aquisition of a cellular modem and contract. I did not want to do this, previously, because the idea of spending close to sixty US dollars a month for anything less than an optic fiber net connection seemed ludicrous. It still does, really, but now that I have more or less decided for certain that I will be out of here at the end of the semester (not enough cash) I would only need to pay this fee for three or four months instead of, say, seven or eight.

The result of this is that I may, in fact, be back to 24/7 net access by the end of December, and maybe I will even be able to slip it past the rational portion of my brain by calling it a Christmas gift…I suppose I’ll just have to see how that goes.

In one last quick anecdote, it is entirely possible that Plaristocrates.com will have its own line of merchandise shortly. Though I can’t elborate on what that will entail, exactly, I can tell you that it will have to do with Japan (or rather its native tongue) and should be quite funny in a dry, sarcastic, almost inside-joke sort of way. I’m sure that you can barely, if at all, contain your enthusiasm and excitement.

// Norm out

Happy Birthday

It might be a day late (I blame the time difference) but I just wanted to wish my grandma a happy birthday! I would tell you her age, but I’m not sure if she’d be cool with that or not…so, a hearty happy birthday will have to do.

//_Norm out

Don’t Read This Post

First of all, this is some of the best news I’ve heard in months.

Second, I endevoured to prove that Americans can turn anything into a competition by declaring myself the winner of the TB test today. See, after they inject stuff under your skin, you come back in two days and they see how big the bump/red-spot is; the smaller the better. Mine was only 5mm by 5mm, which was a full 6mm smaller than my nearest competitor.

I have the immune system of champions.

//_Norm out

Maybe I Just Can’t Write HTML

So, the search engine was fux0red, apparently. This is no longer the case, so you may once again search with impunity. And, yes, I am aware that the archives for the gaming are also broken; I can assure you that I’m working on it, and also simultaneously working on setting up the XML RSS feed, so that any of you who are into that sort of thing can, you know…do you thing. Or whatever. I’ll put up a tutorial for setting it up for Trillian 2.0 users once I’ve gotten it all figured out.

One other thing to note: Evanescence has a new video out, this time for the song My Immortal. The video itself is decent, but the really great part is the new version of the song they recorded for it. It is absolutely titilating, and you would do yourself a favor to give it a listen.

//_Norm out

Is It TB Or TBC?

Two major events today, one of which has already occured (and just so) and another that is still a few hours away. The first is that I got a test for Tuberculosis, which I suppose isn’t particularly groundbreaking aside from the fact seeing someone inject a foreign substance under your skin (thus creating a little cone-shaped structure that grows most disconcertingly) is not something one does everyday. There’s also the fact that someone in one of the labs actually has TB, and one of the international students is in that lab, so pretty much everyone is doing the “better safe than sorry” thing. I mean, I’d feel pretty stupid if I died of TB having passed up the chance for early warning because I was lazy. Hell, there’s lazy, and then there’s lazy.

The second event was the unveiling of my research project for my lab…finally. It looks like I’m going to be working on data compression, more specifically the Context Tree Weighting (CTW) compression scheme, one that I believe is responsible for the mpeg standard and its derivatives (mp3, jpeg, etc). I don’t know much about it now, but that’s why the first phase of my project is to research the algorithm itself, then write a program to implement it (in C++, a language I don’t know) and then find some flaws and improve upon them. This is actually just the sort of project I wanted, one that is based in theoretical computer science (something I have no experience with but want to learn about) while maintaining real-world, practical application.

In other news, I swear to you that I actually have photos from Yamagata and I will, one of these days, finish the php gallery script and actually get them uploaded. In my defense, you have no idea how hard it is to write code when you don’t know the language very well and have no way to test it as you write it.

//_Norm out

Haibane Renmei

I try not to spend entire posts reviewing or discussing obscure pieces of entertainment media unless I feel confident that the majority of the viewing audience shares (or might potentially share) my interest in it. This excludes a lot of what I read and watch, but every once in a while there’s something that I just can’t help but comment on, regardless of the odds that you guys give a shit. Before I get into the review, however, I should probably preface it with a few statements regarding the medium itself. Let’s get one thing out of the way: this is an anime, something most of you should have at least heard of before. Having been in your position in the recent past, I know exactly how you feel about it…but I’m here to tell you that it’s bullshit. Forget whatever preconceptions you have about animated films, because that’s exactly what this is: a film. It’s not a Saturday morning cartoon, nor is it a Disney production. This is a high quality, intellectually stimulating piece of work of a style and substance that I’ve yet to see replicated in the “real” movie industry.

I don’t want to turn this post into a rant against the narrow-mindedness of most people, so I’ll cut this part short with a few final closing statements. The most important thing (for those of you with pre-conceived biases against this medium) you need to understand is that I am not an anime “fan,” just like I don’t consider myself a movie “fan” or a book “fan.” Just like Hollywood cinema and works of literature, not everything is the same or, indeed, even equal. I don’t watch movies just because they are movies, and I don’t read books simply because they have words on paper; I read and watch things that pique my interest, plain and simple. On the same token, I don’t watch anime because of what it is but because of what it can be.

Anyway, those of you who are still with me probably have enough of an open mind to really appreciate Haibane Renmei. If you’ve read this for any length of time you already know that I loved Serial Experiments Lain, an anime done by Yoshitoshi Abe, the very same man behind Haibane. With that in mind his influence is immediately apparent to anyone who cares to look and practically guarantees a deep, intelligent and well conceived story, albeit with the slow, methodical development that seems to be the hallmark of his work.

Haibane is particularly difficult to classify…its slow, almost languid pacing and initially cheerful, bouncing gait belie the darker undertones that permeate the plot. Right from the start you know that something isn’t right with this world, and it’s only a matter of time before that comes to light. What makes Haibane so wonderful is the way in which it does this…rarely does any work of fiction manage to genuinely surprise me like Haibane did. It doesn’t use any sudden plot twists or mind-bending philosophical metaphors, but simply drifts along on an upstream course that ran counter to almost everything I thought it would do. Another thing that separates Haibane from most other literary works is the a pointed lack of initial exposition. In fact, even the later stages of the plot lack any attempts to explain the world in which the story takes place. It’s obvious that the entire thing is a metaphor for something larger, but the story itself is what’s important here. Haibane, unlike Lain, is very much a character-driven tale, and the reality of the universe simply doesn’t matter in the context of the work.

In fact, this lack of explanation is yet another point in which Haibane excels. The anime sort of meanders its way through the story, leaving far more unanswered questions than answered ones, but it somehow manages to resolve what really matters. I’ve been thinking about this last phrase practically since I started typing this post, and I want to be very careful about the word I end up choosing. I have to think that, for reasons I’m not clear on, I enjoyed Haibane far more than most people would despite that fact that I’ve had my statement agreed with several times. The best way to describe the way I felt after finishing Haibane is, and I mean this honestly, catharsis; I just can’t think of any other way to put it. I just felt good, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, as the final credits rolled (which I actually watched all of, which is, for me, a sign of great respect) and found myself wishing that I hadn’t seen it, not because I didn’t like it but because I wanted to be able to watch it again for the first time.

I was going to close this out with a few quid pro quos for those of you who are thinking of taking up my advice, and they were going to be things like “you might not like it if you can’t handle a slowly moving plot,” but I decided against it. The absolute last thing I want to do is give anyone a reason why they shouldn’t give this series a try. With only thirteen episodes at about twenty-minutes apiece, there’s no excuse for not giving it a shot. I promise that you won’t be disappointed, regardless of whether or not Street Fighter is your idea of a totally awesome movie.

//_Norm out

The Ground Isn’t Suppossed To Move

Apparently there have been three earthquakes in Sendai since my arrival. This is interesting because I have failed to notice all of them, aside from the first which I shrugged off as my inability to walk properly (I was going across a bridge when everything just seemed to bounce once). It’s not like these were small earthquakes, either. The second one was a magnitude eight and lasted for forty-five seconds. It happened at 10:04am Japan time, which would have put me just out of the shower. Didn’t notice it. The third one happened sometime yesterday, I think around six or seven, and lasted a good thirty seconds, complete with rattling windows and such. This, too, I completely failed to notice.

Now, I’m not sure if this is just because people are making a bigger deal out of these than they should be or if I simply lack nerve endings. Or maybe proper inner-ear balance detection. Either way, we keep having small earthquakes and I keep not noticing, so the question seems largely academic.

I guess (according to my Earth Dynamics professor) the Sendai region has a major earthquake every 30 years, and the last one happened 27 years ago, so the geologists (or seismologists) have given a 99% chance that they’ll get one in the next three years. Really, these are the kind of things one should probably find out before traveling to a foreign land, but then what kind of adventure would this be?

In one last unrelated note, the “Wire the Foreigners” campaign now has an actual petition and might get some results. This is good, because every day I can’t play FFXI is a day I feel a little less like a human being.

//_Norm out

Dead Air

Okay, so I first I have to apologize for not posting in almost a week. In my defense, the weekend was quite busy, as was Monday, and when I tried to make a post for Tuesday the SQL server went down for several hours. This doesn’t mean much for you, as the site was still accessible (minus the forums) but it did mean that Movable Type couldn’t get to the database and thus no posting could be done.

Sorry about that.

Anyway, this past weekend I and around forty of the other international students made a trek west to Yamagata where we made things out of clay like first graders. Actually, the potting class was strangely fun, and it was made all the more surreal by the gaudy aprons we had to wear to keep the clay off. It was also useful, after a fashion, since I made a cup and a plate that I will almost certainly end up using (less stuff I have to buy) whenever it is they get back from the kiln.

The potting wasn’t the only thing we did, either. Afterwards we were treated to the most traditional Japanese meal I’ve yet had since arriving here, complete with low tables and cushions that we had to sit cross-legged on. There was some sort of rice and mushroom mixture, a soba-noodle soup, some imoni soup, a plate of pickeled vegetables (bleh) and an entire fish. I stressed that word so that you would understand that it really was a whole fish, head, eyes, tail and all. It was heavily salted, and taking it apart with chopsticks was, for me, an exercise in futility, but when I finally did get pieces into my mouth they were quite tasty indeed.

After the meal we explored an old Budhist temple at the base of a mountain. It was pouring rain by this point, but we decided to make the trek up the more than 1000 stairs to the temple at the top of the mountain, and oh man was it worth it. The view was spectacular, both on the way up and from the observation points once we were there. The rain had covered the entire forest valley with mist, and some of the views were quite simply breathtaking. I have a whole slew of photos, but I’m waiting to post them for two reasons: one, they need to be cleaned up a bit, because while heaving fog may look cool, it’s a crappy photo environment. Two, I’m trying to finish the new gallery script and put them up using it. We’ll see how that goes.

//_Norm out

Lack of Proper Metaphors

I know that I said that I’d get up a review of the new Matrix movie just as soon as humanly possible, but it turns out that that’s longer than you might expect. The fact is that I just can’t say, for certain, how I felt about this movie…I’m definitely going to have to see it a second time before I feel comfortable enough to put anything to official record. It’s sufficient to say that it’s probably worth a viewing, but I don’t know that I would rush out right now. It’s not necessarily a compelling must-see…but then maybe it is.

I dunno, this is pointless. Either way the review will probably have to wait until Monday, when I’ve (hopefully) had a chance to get in a second viewing.

//_Norm out

I Am The One

In case you didn’t know (and shame on you if you don’t) the third Matrix movie opens around the world today at the exact same time. The first showing will be at 11:00pm in Japan, and I am my band of brothers will be down there a few hours early to get us some ticket action. I’m actually quite excited about this movie, for reasons I’m not entirely certain of.

Okay, that’s really all I’ve got, but I figured I’d let you know. You’ll doubtlessly see a review of the movie here just as soon as I can get one up.

//_Norm out

Technical Difficulties

Okay, the majority of the v2.3 update has now been uploaded and tweaked. You probably won’t notice any visual differences, and if you do, those are probaby the errors I have to fix still (they might wait until tomorrow…my net time is running short). The majority of the update is “under-the-hood”; that is it makes the code much cleaner and fully CSS2.0 and XHTML1.1 compliant, which is a good thing, trust me. Everything has been completely re-written, and the site should also be cross-browser compatible now (or at least it will be once the last few errors are removed). It’s been tested in Mozilla 1.5 (and thus Netscape also), Opera 7.21 and Internet Explorer 6. This is a lot harder than it sounds, let me tell you.

So what’s left? There are still two major updates in the works, one to the forums (which will receive a complete stylesheet re-write to bring their appearence in line with the rest of the site) and another to the photos section. The photo gallery presentation has remained largely unchanged since v1.0, and I wasn’t even happy with it then. I’ve gotten several suggestions, and I think I have a handle on a much more useful and smooth PHP version that I hope you’ll find more pleasing.

Here’s a quick rundown of the new features v2.3 brings along:

1. The cams section! There are still some kinks (like the date function) but the cams section is fully-functional. This is a totally new addition to the site, so be sure to check it out and see what it has to offer.

2. Instead of pussing out with a mailto: tag, I’ve re-done the contact section to provide you with a handy-dandy form mailer script. Just go to that page, type in your message, and then choose the author to which you wish to send it (more on that next).

3. I love videogames, but with my limited net access here in Japan I’ve had to make sacrifices, and one of them has been the neglected gaming section. I’m happy to announce that this is going to change as I’ve added four new authors to this section. They are, in no particular order: Gary, Darryl, Dustin and Pat. I too will continue to post in the gaming arena when I can, but these guys will do as good a job, if not better, than I would when I don’t.

Okay, that’s it for the tech update. Sorry to those of you who either don’t care or have no idea what I’m talking about; just know that things should be faster, better and smoother from here on out.

//_Norm out

Happy Halloween

Halloween is finally here, and for some reason this is a holiday I’ve always kind of liked. They don’t really do halloween here in Japan so I’ve decided to make do with what I have. There are a few things that can make even an average day feel like All Hallows Eve, and I recommend you do them as well.

First, pick up and read a little bit of HP Lovecraft goodness. The guy basically started the entire modern horror genre, with greats like Stephen King and Clive Barker citing him as a major influence. Hardly anyone has heard of him, but if you pick up some of the collections (he wrote almost exclusively short stories) I promise that you won’t be dissapointed. Well, at least as long as you stick to his later work…some of the early stuff was pretty awful.

Next, if you have broadband, go get yourself a copy of the Silent Hill 3 demo from Konami. This game, next to Eternal Darkness (which, at $14.99US, Gamecube owners have no excuse not to own) it’s one of the best survival horror games ever made. Nothing says halloween like running through dark, foggy locales while haunting noises and etheral glimpses taunt you at every turn. If the game doesn’t scare you, at the very least the absolutely insane 468MB file you’ve got to retrieve to play it ought to.

If you’ve done all this, chances are you might be a little high-strung, which is entirely understandable. Should you feel the need to cool down a bit afterwards, feel free to have yourself a Japanese lesson by downloading and watching this hilarious bit of video I took during my Kanji class on Wednesday. In case you couldn’t tell, the teacher is trying to make motions while counting that more or less corespond to the look of the kanji you use to write it. I’m pretty sure she must have been (or currently is) a kindergarten teacher at some point in her life…things like that just don’t come naturally!

//_Norm out

I Don’t Write So Well

Why is it that girls always wind up with assholes?

This is a question that gets posed so often that it’s practically, hell, it is, cliché. You hear it all the time, be it in an article somewhere, from a friend, or just a sort of general consensus among people the world over. It used to be a question that I myself would occasionally toss out, either in reference to a specific situation or just as a general poke at the state of my love life.

Regardless, with time comes wisdom (or so they say) and I no longer think about this. Why? Because it’s stupid, plain and simple. Not just stupid as a question, but stupid as a statement, stupid at its very core. Nothing better symbolizes the general lack of responsibility that people, and guys in particular, take for their own actions. Whether you want to face up to it or not, your lack of a girlfriend (or boyfriend, I’ve heard the phrase from the other side once or twice) has as much to do with your own inadequacies, perceived or otherwise, as it does some genetic predisposition women have towards jerks. The question is self-defeating; by making a blanket statement like that, you shift the blame from yourself to some ethereal, unchangeable natural law and thus make yourself feel better about your situation. Nothing could be worse than this.

Why am I talking about this? I’m not entirely sure, although I do know that it was touched off by a post Rob made about a week ago. I don’t think my ire is even specifically about guys who blame others for their own problems, but about society in general. In our haste to make ourselves feel better, we shift the blame for anything and everything that happens to us somewhere else. Though it might make life easier, you’re doing nothing buy lying to yourself when you harbor these sort of beliefs. Life will not change nor get better without some action on your part, and blaming others for your troubles is definitely not the sort of action you need to take.

//_Norm out

8-Bit Childhood

Here I am, still talking about my weekend (last weekend, that is) which probably says something about how interesting my life is.

Anyway, after the Imoni-kai myself and a few of my fellow American international students (George, Joey, Tim, and Jeshua, for the insatiably curious) headed out to another district of Sendai…I can’t seem to recall the name right now, but it required that we take a short train ride out beyond Sendai station and then hop on the subway and take that until it ended. That was the boring scene setting part, now comes the (in my view) cool part, and which will likely also be deemed cool by 5% of this site’s audience: we spent the next six hours walking around the city going from one videogame/book shop to another. It was like a pilgrimage or sorts. Even the most casual gamer is at least peripherally aware that Japan is a Mecca for all things videogame related. What most people don’t realize is that, in Japan, videogames have an actual heritage. Unlike the US, where most people get rid of and have no need for older, outdated consoles, in Japan it’s hardly a challenge to find mint-condition consoles of old, from Super-Famicoms (SNES in the US) to Sega Saturns, not only can you find the consoles themselves, but you can find a bewildering variety of peripherals and, most importantly, games. In fact, most of the stores we hit had more Super-Famicom games than they did Gamecube games (the Gamecubes lack of titles notwithstanding).

It is a credit to my sudden foresight that I left most of my cash at home (and plastic is essentially useless in smaller stores here) because, despite my steadfast decision to not buy anything and my general lack of funds, I’m not sure I could have resisted. Xboxes that looked brand new went for less than $100US, there were special edition silver and metallic-blue PS2s, there were games I knew still wouldn’t be out for months stateside that I could get used for less than half the price! It was roughly like having walked around my whole life and never seeing the sun, then one day realizing I’d just been wearing too big a hat (thanks Doug).

I will most definitely be going there again, probably next week sometime, and that will only whet my already barely-controllable apetite to see Akihabara in Tokyo. We have a plan to get down there, and though I can’t share all the details yet, it may involve us making use of the Shinjuku loop-line train for sleeping. I’ll keep you posted as events warrant.

//_Norm out

Imoni-kai!

I actually had a pretty full weekend this time around, which is why you haven’t heard from me until now. I suppose I’ll hit it up point by point, and I promise I’ll try to keep the summaries quick and interesting, although I make no promises.

The mainstay of Friday and Saturday were the Imoni-kai parties (which is technically a redundant phrase, since –kai mean party or celebration) hosted by my lab group and the international house, respectively. Imoni parties are only held in the northern part of Japan (and Tokyo, but Tokyo does everything) and occur between the months of September and November as, traditionally, a way of welcoming autumn. The word imoni doesn’t have a direct translation, but it’s a sort of potato-like vegetable that the Japanese put into soups made especially at these parties. The soups contain (in addition to imoni) thinly sliced beef or pork, onions, taro (which are like very small potatoes) and something that looks a lot like cubes of animal fat but is actually a high-fiber vegetable of some kind. The soups also come in two flavors, miso and soyu. The miso soups generally have the pork while the soyu soups usually have the beef, but this might just be a coincidence that both the parties I went to followed this.

Friday’s party was, as I mentioned earlier, thrown by my lab group. It was interesting to actually hang out with them as I haven’t really had much interaction with them (aside from the professor). Though very few of them spoke English, there was one guy who’s going off to Austria in a few weeks and wanted very badly for me to teach him more English. I spent the bulk of the time talking with him, trying to have the sort of conversation he might have when arriving in Austria. I tried to use an Arnold Schwarzneggar voice for a bit, but the joke passed over his head so I dropped it. There was also an interesting bit of social awkwardness when they offered me my choice of beer or tea for drinking…I don’t like tea, but I don’t drink alcohol, so I went with the tea anyway. The assistant professor (who does speak English) was puzzled by my choice, and I told him that I don’t drink. I sort of saw it coming, but this confused him even more that I had expected. All Japanese people drink, period, and the idea of not doing it of your own volition is largely alien to them. After a moments pause, he asked if it was for religious reasons, and then fretted that I might be a vegetarian and thus would have nothing to eat at the party. It was pretty funny, and I eventually managed to convince him that meat was not a problem. There were a bunch of other food there as well, but I can’t particularly remember their names…there was something like coleslaw dipped in a batter than was fried, a sort of fish-on-a-stick (a whole fish, mind you) and little pork pieces dipped in a sweet sauce that were absolutely delectable.

The Saturday party was largely the same except that most people spoke English, at least until the local Japanese population showed up and, as always, tried to get us to agree to teach them English for free. I didn’t mind it much, but some of the other students were actively offended by this, which I guess I can understand. Pontus also made some delicious Swedish bread that was wrapped around a stick and cooked over the fire; it had some cinnamon and other spices in it, I can’t remember what, but it was damn good. Speaking of fire, I neglected to mention that both parties were held on the riverbank, and the food was all cooked on traditional campfires, which was cool.

Okay, this got pretty long, and I still haven’t covered the events of Saturday afternoon. Since they’re a completely different subject, I’ll leave them for tomorrow where I’ll probably mix them in with something far less blogish so that you can be less bored.

//_Norm out

And The Posting Continues

I was going to write a post, but then I realized that I really don’t have anything to say. Also, there is someone in the lounge who is eating something that smells like curry and it’s reminded me that I haven’t eaten yet today. So now I’m hungry, and I have to ride all the way back to the apartment to remedy this situation.

Such a hard life I have.

In other news, if the Yankees continue to win I think I may go on strike. I’m not sure exactly what that strike would entail, or how it would properly hurt New York and the Yankees in particular, but I figure I can work out the details later. Besides, at this juncture the Japan Series is far more important to me than the World Series…not because I care about Japanese baseball, but because one of the teams playing (and the one currently leading the series) is the Daiei Hawks. In Japan, sports teams are usually not named after cities but instead the companies that own them, and Daiei is a major department store chain. There is one in downtown Sendai, and I figure that if the Hawks win the will have no choice but to have a big sale so I can get useful things. And maybe frivilous ones too, if I can sneak them in.

Oh yeah, one more thing: the Penny-Arcade store is finally up, and there are several clothing items I find appealing. I may have to order one, probably not now but when I get back, and I suggest you do as well. At the very least you can proudly proclaim that you paid PA to advertise for them, instead of the more common method of being paid to do so. It’s the American way.

//_Norm out

Curses

It turns out that the OSX theme I found earlier is only available for resolutions up to 1280×1024. Normally this would be a big deal because, let’s face it, you can’t use Photoshop at lower than 1600×1200, but it’s even worse this time because my laptop has a native 1400×1050 display.

Foiled again. Maybe I’ll just break down and use Windowblinds or something…there must be a theme on there somewhere, but will it have the dock? This question must be answered.

//_Norm out

Oh Wow…

Who says that the Catholic church doesn’t have a sense of humor? Thank to Mac Hall for the article itself, but I can’t help but post the best quote here:

Vatican City – Masturbation is like owning a Ferrari and driving only in first gear, a senior Catholic theologian said in an article published Wednesday.

“Driving only in first gear, not only do you prevent the Ferrari expressing its full power, but gradually you wear it out and thereby ruin a masterpiece of technology,” Father Giordano Muraro wrote in the magazine Vita Pastorale.

Metaphors like that make me think I should just never write anything ever again. I mean, seriously, how the hell am I supposed to compete with that?

//_Norm out

Love The American, Hate The Country

It’s one thing to know, intellectually, that a distressingly large portion of the world’s population harbors and extreme dislike for America. It’s a different matter entirely to have that fact laid out in front of you. I was in the first session of my Kanji course and was talking with a girl named Monique, who is from the Netherlands. We were in a group working on some game designed to increase our familiarity with the iconic origins of the kanji themselves. Anyway, long story short, we ended up talking a bit about the differences between Europe and the United States (attitude wise) when she said, after a brief apology, that she hated America and everything it stands for. This was after probably an hour of congenial conversation and was followed by another twenty minutes of the same (albeit on other topics) which is, I think what caught me off gaurd. Here was a girl who had, a few moments prior (and actually, now that I reflect, leading to the conversation about Europe) asked for my phone number so we could stay in contact (we live in the same building so it’s no big deal). She said it so nonchalantly, as though I should have been expected it, and did it with a friendly smile.

It’s somewhat of a paradox. She clearly harbors no ill will towards Americans themselves (as evidenced by our conversation) but at the same time actually hate the country itself. Despite being faced with an actually American citizen who was, as she admitted, totally unlike what she thought Americans were, she still tossed the comment out. She’s not the only one, either; most of the European students have made some sort of similar comment at some point, though few at straightforwardly (is that a word?) as her.

In other completely unrelated news, Napster is coming back as a legitimate pay service (which you no doubt already knew). They have a series of flash videos available here that are somewhat humorous. They’re quick downloads so if you have a few mintues to kill, give them a look.

iTunes continues to rock. I put off some of my initial enthusiasm to the delightfully wrong feeling of running Mac software on my PC, but even after the maturing of our relationship I still am completely enamoured with it. The interface just makes sense, everything is intuitive and intelligently laid out, and it doesn’t have some stupid skin that just gets in the way of being useful. The only thing I miss about Media Player 9 is the ability to minimize it into a toolbar on the taskbar…but I’ll get over it. In fact, my affection for Apple’s software (not hardware) is well documented, and I think I might actually get around to digging into XP’s system files and registry to finally do the OSX interface conversion I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I’ll let you know how it goes.

//_Norm out

iTunes For Windows

It seems that hell did indeed freeze over, although I am somewhat dissapointed that it has chosen to do so for this. Not that I don’t like iTunes…in fact I find that it rocks in ways I didn’t think were legal in the states. The issue is more that I was really hoping that hell would choose to freeze over for something like, say, myself finding a girlfriend.

Maybe the pigs will hold off for that one.

//_Norm out

French Matters

There is a smidgen of truth in the old stereotype that French guys get girls. This was proven to me beyond a doubt at yesterday’s International Festival, where Chris (or Christoph, if you’re feeling pretentious) managed to exude an almost palpable aura of attraction. I’m not joking either…tell me, how many times have you had a woman call you beautiful? I mean, can you even use the word beautiful for a guy? We were talking to a Japanese girl there when Lain mentioned that Chris was French, to which she [the girl] replied “well of course he is, he’s beautiful.”

No joke.

It has a lot to do with his confidence, I think, which is easy to mistake for arrogance. He just says to himself “hey, I’m French, there’s no way I can fail. And if I do, the Americans will bail me out anyway.”

Okay, when I start taking easy shots at the French it’s time to switch tracks.

Anyway, the festival itself was pretty cool. It went practically all day long, from like ten in the morning until eleven or so at night. There was a ton of food from all around the world (of which I partook extravagantly) including things like Indonesian barbeque and some sort of impossibly delicious apple-donut things from Denmark. There were also various traditional performances from around the world (mostly East Asia, surprise) that included an almost all-female percussion band, which was quite cool. I made a short video of it, which you can view here. The quality is pretty poor, since I used my digital still camera instead of a real video camera, but it works well enough, I suppose.

I also have a bunch of pictures, but on review they mostly seem less interesting than I originally thought. I’ll probably still put them up, but it’ll be a few days at least (and probably sans comments this time around). I’m also making some backend updates to the site itself, so if things break for a bit don’t be entirely shocked. Barring that, you shouldn’t notice any differences (but I most assureadly will).

//_Norm out

Loss For Words

Sorry about the lack of posting action in the last few days…although, in my defense, it hasn’t actually been four days…my Tuesday afternoon is your Monday night.

The truth of the matter is that I haven’t really had much to say lately. The initial shock and awe of actually being in a completely different country have largely worn off, and things have started to become routine. I am no longer phased by the lack of spoken English or the strangeness of the foodstuffs. I can navigate the city, I can find my classes (which have finally started) and the housing situation is, for the time being at least, under control.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. Maybe it means that I’m just not doing enough, but then again this isn’t really a vacation…I can’t just jump on a train and go to Kyoto or something like that. I have classes to attend and homework to do, so I suppose it’s only natural. I do think I’ll go down to see the relatively nearby botanical gardens, though…at the very least it will provide for some interesting photogenic material.

//_Norm out

The Least You Could Do Was Send A Memo

The instructor for my “Dynamics of the Earth” class did not show up today. Apparently this is quite common for the first few weeks of class at Tohoku, as you haven’t actually registered for classes yet and the instructors don’t feel like they actually mean anything. This seriously makes me question whether the Japanese actually learn anything at college, and the answer seems increasingly likely to be no. I mean, the classes are once a week for fifteen weeks. Subtract the first three, since they don’t seem to count. Then subtract at least one class for holidays (they have a lot of them here) and possibly two more for the professor just being lazy and canceling, and you’re left with only nine classes total. In an entire semester.

Doesn’t make much sense to me, and apparently it doesn’t for anyone else either.

//_Norm out

Listing to Fill Space

Metropolitan Japan is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not dissimilar from what we in the United States are used to seeing. Aside from the obviously difficult language barrier, the typical American would likely have little trouble surviving in a modern Japanese city. Culture shock, as it were, is not a major factor; with so many familiar brand-names (both US companies that have a presence in Japan, like Coke, and Japanese brands that have a presence in the US, like Sony) and clothing styles the casual observer might mistake parts of Japan for America.

Of course, that’s the casual observer. A more astute observer (or at least, one who spends a substantial amount of time there) will note that it is not the major differences that contribute to culture shock anyway. When you go somewhere and they speak an entirely different language, you knew that in advance. You knew that they eat different food, or that they drive on the other side of the road, or that their books open from right to left. It’s the little things, instead, that get to you. The ones that just sort of bug you from the back of your mind, but you can’t quite say exactly what they are. For your benefit, I have included a list of those I’ve noticed thus far.

• All Japanese people smoke, or at least, all the ones between about 16 and 24 years of age. I don’t know if they’ve just never seen the cancer studies or if they simply enjoy the acrid aroma given off by a cigarette, but they pretty much all smoke.
• Japanese hotdog buns open from the top, as opposed to the side as they do in America. This actually makes more sense, I think, since the bottom is the flat part and they are less likely to roll over.
• In Japan, the only proper way for an employee at any business to greet you is in as high pitch a voice as possible. The greeting also tends to have a chain effect, where every employee immediately shouts out their hello whether or not they can actually see you, or in fact anyone at all.
• The Japanese stick cartoons on everything, regardless of whether or not it makes any sense. Why would you put an anime-inspired character on a box of hair dye? Is that bright orange supposed to represent what my hair will actually look like if I use this?
• Mopeds (more like motor scooters, really) do not obey any traffic regulations, period. Unlike cars, which will pick and choose, mopeds will ride on sidewalks, run red lights, drive in the wrong lane, and just generally put themselves and everyone around them in serious danger.
• Few Japanese people will ask you to move. You could be standing in the middle of an isle in a store for ten minutes, and the person whose advancement you block will stand silently in your blind spot until you notice them.
• Bank in Japan…well, no sense in mincing words, they suck horribly. They keep asinine hours and generally don’t offer ATM access outside of normal business hours. What, I ask you, is the point of an automated teller if it’s only available when I could go inside and use a human one?
• Much like the Europeans haven’t quite got refrigeration figured out yet, the Japanese don’t understand the concept of a dryer (for clothes). The purpose of a dryer is to dry, not to make the clothes lukewarm (but still sopping wet). To top it off, Sendai is incredibly humid all the time, so my clothes have been hanging for 22 hours and counting and they’re still not dry.

This list might seem negative, but it’s really not. With the possible exception of the last two, none of these things are inherently bad, just…different. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes these to become normal and for me to simply stop noticing them. Or at least to stop comparing them to things back home.

//_Norm out

Transportation

So, I finally broke down and got a bike. It’s not a great bike, as such things go, but it cuts the time it takes me to get to class almost in half, which is a great relief. It does not, however, make the transit any easier. There is almost no flat land between my apartment and Kawauchi campus, so no matter which way I go (there or back) it’s about half uphill. The hills are fairly steep, too, and my pansy ass has had some trouble getting all the way up the last few. Not to mention the almost complete lack of sidewalks in Sendai, which can make bike transit somewhat harrowing.

Also, though I hadn’t noticed it at first, it seems that being of the caucasian persuasion (rhyme unintentional) draws a lot of stares while you walk around Japan. The people are, in general, very good about being discrete while they do it, but after a few days I’m now able to notice it. Once in a while, though I sometimes feel bad later, it’s funny to turn to them and ask them if you have something on your face or something like that. They turn the most hilarious shade of red and will apologize profusely. It’s sort of a guilty pleasure, but in my defense I didn’t come up with it (blame Jon).

//_Norm out

Photos

Okay, I’ve uploaded the first set of photos from Japan, which can be found in the art section of this site (use the menu up top). I’m not entirely happy with the way the layout and organization of the photos came out, so I will likely be making some adjustments later. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know at norm@plaristocrates.com

//_Norm out

I’m A Big Kid Now

Okay, so I had my first two classes for the semester today and yesterday. It seems that these will mostly be a cakewalk, which I don’t know if I’m happy about or not. On the definite plus, my instructor for Japanese Culture is (ironically) British, and his accent is the soothing sort that makes him easy to listen to. Which is good, because good god does that man like to talk.

I also met my academic advisor, Akira Maruoka, and went over some stuff about the research I’ll be doing. It looks like it’ll end up being in the field of data mining, which is a theoretical area of computer science. I don’t have any experience in the theoretical aspects of computing, so this could get interesting indeed. Maruoka-sensei did calm my nerves a bit by saying that he understands that I’m not a graduate student and has the proper expectations for my work, which is good. As for the man himself, he seems to be right in the middle of the two extremes I’ve seen. Some people have advisors who are so busy that they barely got to speak with them, while others (like Vaughn) have professors who took them out for a drink, showed them around the city, and just generally did anything they could to be helpful. Maruoka seems to be pretty laid back, which fits well with me, and his English is passable, so this should work out well.

In other news, I managed to navigate my way around downtown Sendai (and its bus system) completely on my own, which I am more proud of than is probably healthy. I am starting to be able to pick out the important phrases and words (like Sendai eki, which means Sendai Station) that allow me to navigate properly. I got a pan that won’t leave its nonstick surface all over my food from Daiei, which is a local department store. If I end up getting a bike (which I would really like to do) it’ll probably end up being from there as well. And maybe a toaster oven. That would be good too.

Okay, that’s all for now. Time to make some lunch.

//_Norm out

For the love of god, I don’t speak Japanese

Today started off with a bang as I bombed my Japanese language placement test in a rather spectacular manner. Well, maybe not bombed, as such, since you can’t exactly fail a placement test, but leaving the thing mostly blank is still bad either way. I mean, I knew, mentally, that I don’t know jack about speaking, writing, or reading Japanese, but it was another thing entirely to have my suspicions confirmed in an official manner. Looks like I’ll be in Japanese I, which sucks because it means I’ll have to sit through lesson on Katakana and Hirigana again. Such is life.

I’ll be attending my first class today, which is Japanese Culture. I will also be meeting my academic advisor for the first time, a prospect that has me slightly nervous. I’ve heard some horror stories from the other JYPE students (as well as some good ones) that leave me wondering how I’ll deal with it if I get a bad one. In addition, I’m not actually certain what he thinks I’m supposed to be researching, as I’m not even entirely sure. I believe I put something about cryptography, but Akira (my advisor) is not in the math department, so I’ll just have to see what that means.

In other news, I need a bike quite badly. It takes me about forty-five minutes to walk to Kawauchi campus, and an addition ten or fifteen to make it to Aobayama (where my advisor is). This might not seems like much to most of you, but it’s quite a drastic change from MTU, where I was never more than ten minutes from any given class. Add to this the fact that the route I take is full of long, steep hills, and you end up with shins that hurt like hell (I wasn’t aware that such tiny muscles could get so sore). A bike would probably halve the time it takes me to get here, which will help me recoup all the sleep I’m not getting for my morning classes. Of course, bikes in Japan are rather different than what we in the states are used to. To imagine the typical Japanese bike, think of those bikes from the fifties in the US. Fenders, banana seats, curved handlebars and, more often than not, only one gear (three if you’re a high-roller). You would think that with all the hills in this place they would ride bikes with a few more gearing options, but no. The few ten-speed mountain bikes you can find cost well over $200US, which seems to me to be entirely absurd.

On a positive note, Vaughn and I have located a resale shop that has a ton of electronic stuff for very, very cheap (at least for Japan, anyway). The stuff is in great condition (practically new) and we can get a twenty-one inch TV for about $100US, which we might do. They also have a few Super Famicons for $20 and tons of games for less than a dollar, something that no videogame aficionado could possibly pass up and still sleep at night.

Unless, of course, he needs to use that money to even have a place to sleep at night, but then practicality has never been a strong suit of mine.

//_Norm out

Heh Heh Heh…

There are so many jokes I could make right now, but I think I’ll just bask in the moment.

You may all go about your business now.

//_Norm out

Paperwork

For reasons I am completely unable to fathom the Japnese are incredibly fond of forms and the filling-out thereof. You would think that a country that goes this crazy over robot dogs and tiny cellphones would have computerized their record-keeping systems decades ago. In an interesting bit of irony, it turns out that Japanese people are actually terrified of computers. Although they love broadband internet and laptop computers they absolutely will not commit anything truly important to digital format. Not even money. This means that I have to carry disconcerting amounts of cash around with me at all times if I have any hope of paying for services outside of major department stores. To make that better, the Japanese have coins in values all the way up to the equivalent of five US dollars…so I can’t even put them in a jar and forget about them! I have to carry ten pounds of metal in my wallet in addition to several uncomfortably large bills.

I’m not making this shit up.

Anyway, so this means that I have filled out more registration, record keeping, and god knows what other sorts of forms in the past few days than I have in probably all my years in the good ole USA. What makes this even more annoying is that everyone one of these forms wants the exact same information, so I end up repeating things over and over and over. Clearly, all this could be done with one easy form, but apparently this never occured to them. It’s probably a self-initiated attempt to attone for national sins or something like that. If I have to fill in my birthday one more time (on the Magi calendar, no less) I think there will be serious consequences for whoever it is that asks me to do it.

On a positive note, I did find a place to buy a pan that won’t leave its non-stick surface all over the bottom of my pancakes. You would be surprised how hard it is to pick out the phrase “only use with weak flame” (like a damn cigarette lighter) when you don’t understand Kanji.

Speaking of lighters, frigging eveyone in Japan smokes. There are cigarette vending machines everywhere, and they [the cigarettes] are the one thing that is much cheaper here than in the states. Don’t these people read? Don’t you know they cause cancer? Don’t you know that they smell disgusting?

Any Japanese people reading this should feel free to answer the above.

//_Norm out

Second Class

The Japanese, or at least Tohoku University’s representative sample, treat their international students a bit differently than we do back in the states. That’s not to say that we [the international students] here have been treated poorly, by any stretch of the definition, it’s more that we’re not being treated like real students.

For example, everyone here is all hot and bothered about getting themselves a cellular phone despite the obvious drawbacks to paying ¥4000 (or around $40US) a month for fifty minutes of talk time. Yes, you read that correctly, fifty minutes. And there are no free nights and weekends, free long distance, or any of those fancy features that the Japanese seem absolutely bewildered about when you inquire about them. Anyway, students (who, it turns out, are actually fairly well respected in the arbitrarily hierarchical Japanese society) are supposed to get half off, which makes things a bit more reasonable, especially once you consider that in Japan you’re not charged minutes for incoming calls. Unfortunately, me and my kinfolk here are not entitled to this because we are, and I quote, “special students.” Whatever the hell that means.

It’s not just something so shallow as monetary discounts, either. We can’t check books out of the library (we can read them there, but not take them out) nor can we use the library computers to access the internet because we don’t even have student ID numbers! We are, as I was told once again, special students. Apparently there’s a translation issue here, as I’m pretty sure that when they say special they actually mean second class. At Michigan Tech (and most other US universities) we treat international students like royalty. They are given immense amounts of help and support, they usually get first dibs on the best on campus dorm facilities, and they’re actually treated like genuine students, replete with student ID cards, computer login access, email, etc. Comparitively, Tohoku’s international house is about as far from the main campus as is possible without, say, being in a different city entirely, and the dorm itself is…well, let’s no deal in euphemisms, it’s essentially a dump. The walls are in serious need of a fresh coat of paint, the floors need a good scrub, and finding a truly massive spider web (complete with large yellow spider) in the corner of your room upon arrival do not make for a good impression. Add to that the generally shabby appearance of the outside of the building (they don’t even mow the grass in the courtyard) the myriad of hidden fees they spring upon your rent and the complete lack of a competent internal wiring system that prevents you from getting internet access (you would think international students would have the most need for this) and you can see why we might feel less than appreciated.

This is, of course, borderline bitching on my part, and I should probably give it a rest. The people who have been showing us around and helping us get necessities like bank accounts and our foreigner registration cards have been nothing short of benevolent, buying us lunch twice and just being generally kind and eager to please. Of course, it is telling that most of these people are part of a volunteer ground in Sendai called Group Mori that helps all foreign residents of Sendai and are not anything sent by the university itself, but that’s just being bitter.

Also, I’m not sure if the “Gaijin Ghetto” sign we placed over the one that formerly said “International House” out front will do much to improve our relations with the university, but I’ve never been very good a subtlety.

//_Norm out

Quickie

This is nothing important or groundbreaking, but I just thought I should give credit where credit is due. The Pentium-M is simply the best damn notebook processor ever, and when you combine it with a competent multi-standard wireless receiver (802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth) you end up with a lightweight, compact and powerful notebook that you can lug around for an hour and then sit and use for more than two hours while pulling stupid amounts of data over a pirated WiFi network.

If I only had an issue of 2600 to lay on the ground next to me, I would look like the hacker icon. Which is probably not a good thing when you’re trying not to make the local authorities suspicious (and, cosequently, make them lockdown the network).

//_Norm out

Stolen Bandwidth

I feel like a thief…which is not a bad way to feel, since that’s basically what I am right now.

I’m currently typing this post from outside one of the buildings (not sure which) on Kawauchi campus. What makes sitting outside this particular building better than sitting outside of others is its open, un-encrypted WiFi network. A WiFi network I am current hijacking to get some much needed internet access.

It’s not like I’m doing it just for the hell of it, mind you. I needed to be able to send some emails to let people know I’m alive, I needed to activate my copy of Windows XP, and I needed to see the hilarious antics of Gabe and Tycho. Okay, maybe that last one wasn’t such a good example. The point is that Tohoku is probably the only university in the modern world that uses 18 phone lines to serve all two hundred odd residents of its international house, a charming little dump whose network deficiencies mean I can’t even pay for DSL. DSL, cosequently, is maddeningly cheap and fast in Japan (about thirty dollars a month for 100Mbps). I swear, whatever I did to piss the karma gods off, I’m sorry already!

Anyway, so far Japan has been mostly cool. I am still reeling a bit from the sticker shock of just how much stuff costs here…I have taken to leaving the lights off in my room pretty much 24/7 because I’m afraid of what my electric bill might look like otherwise. Add that to incredibly high food costs, high electronic items costs (aside from cellphones, which I’ll get to later) and the unexpectedly high nature of my rent (1750 yen for a “management fee”? what the hell is that?) and you have a recipe for disaster. I might just have to eat cereal and eggs (which are suprisingly cheap) for the remainder of my stay, which I may also need to cut down to six months rather than the year I was planning on.

What else? Sendai itself is a pretty cool city, and the downtown area is more or less a picture-perfect example of what you would probably expect a modern Japanese city to look like. Lot’s of neon lights and vending machines, busses and bikes everywhere you look, and some pretty remarkably designed pedestrian crossing signals (of which I’ll hopefully have pictures later). The food is decent, though far different from the sort of things I go for. It’s not that it tastes bad; it doesn’t. In fact, I rather liked their version of spagetti, which included squid (in ring shaped pieces) and some sort of mollusk, either clams or oysters, I’m not sure which. The issue is really with the sort of food it is. American food is quite hardy by comparison, and Japanese food seems somehow watered down or something like that. I’ll get back to you when I have a better metaphor.

Okay, that’s probably it for now…it’s a good hours walk back to the international house from where I am, and it’s already mostly dark. If I can’t get some sort of dial-up service worked out in the near future, it’s likely that my updates will be far fewer than I had anticpated. What updates there are will likely come from the same place I am now, as this campus is reasonably near the engineering one (which is distressingly far from my apartment).

//_Norm out (this is my laptop, so I know where the underscore is)

I`m Alive

I`m currently writing this post from an electronics store in downtown Sendai. I have no internet access in my apartment (possibly ever) and thus I am reduced to this. In other news, Japanese keyboards are a pain in the ass to type on.

Things are going more or less well, aside from several flight delays and other sorts of escapades, which I will no doubt elaborate on if I ever get a better connection than this (I`ve heard that the Kawauchi campus has a leaky WiFi network).

Either way, hopefully we`ll have more to talk about soon.
// Norｍ out (I can`t find the underscore key!)

Miscellanious Debris v2.0

My first post was used a sacrifice to the computer daemons. Now, back to our regularly scheduled program already in progress.

DSW rocks. While I am not into shoes or shopping or any combination thereof, the very concept of purchasing something that normally costs seventy dollars for only fifteen of those very same dollars gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling in my nether regions.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the previously mentioned feelings arose more from the new trailer for the next Matrix movie, which you can get for yourself right here. It contains a bit of information that seems to jive with the theories I built up after seeing the last one, but of course a trailer is never a good thing to base impressions on. It’s worth a look, but the server was getting hammered pretty hard earlier in the day. If you have trouble (or simply like it as I do) you can use the bitTorrent link which I have generously provided for you here.

Am I not merciful?

//_Norm out

Oh God

Whose idea was this? Seriously, who at Lakeshore Entertainment thinks this is a good thing? For the love of everything sacred, Underword was awful! Please, please, please do not continue to make this crap.

//_Norm out

Simplicity

Sometimes the things that make you happy are largely without reason. I spent most of today over at the home of a friend of my dad’s setting up his WiFi network. I took me the better part of five hours to get everything nailed down; between CD-ROM drives with bad bearings and Windows ME installs that should long ago have been put to pasture (or at least reformatted) a process that should have taken no more than an hour stretched way beyong my estimates.

Was I angry about this? The funny thing is that I wasn’t. In fact, I’m not sure there was even a time I was frustrated, not even while trying to download the 50+ updates the machines needed. I think that I’ve spent so much time mucking about in the higher-levels of computers, writing Java and C code and worry about memory usage, that I forgot what got me interested in the first place. I love tinkering with computer hardware, regardless of whether the memory subsystem uses a red-black or a balanced binary tree.

I’m not big into sentimentality or nostalgia, but there is something to be said for getting back to the basics. In many ways, a few hours setting up a wireless network gave me a strange sort of satisfaction I haven’t had in quite some time.

//_Norm out

Cold

The heat is out in my parents’ house.

Normally this wouldn’t be such a bad thing, as it gives me an easily defensible excuse for staying in bed much longer than normal. The fact that the air underneath my blankets is, on average, twenty degrees warmer than the air outside them, the arguments for leaving quickly break down. Unfortunately, I have a myriad of things I need to do today, which required braving not only the frigid temperatures inside the house but also those outside of it (including twenty mile per hour winds).

On the bright side, my camera arrived today. This excites me in ways that are probably neither normal nor healthy, but then I never claimed to be either of those things.

//_Norm out

Connect to the Wired

My Lain DVD set finally arrived a few days ago, but I’ve only just now been able to find a few spare minutes to watch them. I must say, it looks a lot better in a lower compression rate (my DivX copies, while decent, were still grainy). It’s sort of like experiencing the series again for the first time.

On that same topic, I have successfully drawn Robbie into Lain as well. I feel rather like a proud father, or maybe a tutor. For those of you who haven’t experienced it, I would encourage you to give it a try. You won’t be dissapointed (unless you’re a fan of Steven Segaul movies, in which case your opinion can and will be discounted).

//_Norm out

One Of Those Days

It’s been raining since sometime last night, a fairly heavy rain that does a good job of, say, soaking into fabric and padding. You know, the sort of padding and fabric one might find in the seat of a car. Now, normally car seats don’t need to worry about the fact that they’re little more than glorified sponges since cars have things like roofs and doors to keep water outside, where it belongs. The design is almost foolproof, assuming, of course, that you underestimate the resourcefulness of fools.

See, there’s a slight chink in this water-tight design. The chink is this: cars, in addition to having doors, have windows. These windows, more often than not, are able to open. And if someone were, hypothetically, very busy the day before and, for the first time ever, accidentally left their windows rolled down overnight, some water might conceivably find its way inside said car. The seats would then proceed to greedily suck up water until the entire car came to resemble a small swamp.

Not that I would ever do something that stupid, of course. Pay no attention to the thirty cubic-yards of linen I’m currently carrying into the garage; I need it merely for moral support (and certainly not its water-absorbing properties).

//_Norm out

Half-Time Report

The Tippmann Challenge went remarkably well, and I’ve got the sore muscles (not to mention the occasional welt) to prove it. I really must say that Tippmann seemed much more enjoyable that July’s Monster Game, probably because there were a lot less people there. The Monster Game attracts so many participants that the fields become glogged and congested, with no real way to fight other than just lining up and arcing balls at each other. The number of players at Tippmann (around a thousand) seemed just right…I never had any trouble finding a large-scale firefight, but neither did I feel closed in by too many players. I will most definitely be attending next year, possible in lieu of the Monster Game (depending on monetary issues).

In other news, my laptop and camera are both ordered and should be on their way soon. I ended up going with a Dell 600m, which is sort of a compromise. I would much rather have had a Voodoo m355, but the high price and long build time made it impractical. I would much rather have waited for the Mobility Radeon 9600, but in the end I realized that I’d rather just wait until I get back to play Half-Life 2. I know that probably sounds like heresy, but I want to use my nice Klipsch 5.1 speaker setup, Radeon 9700 Pro and other a amenities to get the full experience and enjoyment of the game. It’ll be hard, but somehow I’ll persevere. The camera is a Cannon S400, a good compromise between size and ability. I’m not into the super small cameras, as I think they’re mostly just a pain in the ass to use, but I figured that it needed to be small enough that I could easily carry it while touring around Japan.

Okay, that’s all for now…the Lions are back on again.

//_Norm out

Little Balls of Paint

Despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary, it turns out that I will indeed be attending this year’s Tippmann Challenge. For those of you who don’t know, the Tippmann Challenge is an annual paintball event that attracts thousands of players from around the country (and, occasionally, from around the globe) to play for two incredible days. The format is similar to that of the Monster Game, another annual event, which also offers incredible amounts of fun for your dollar.

I wasn’t originally going to attend as I need to be fiscally conservative (for me) over the next few weeks as I prepare to journey across the Pacific. Although paintball is indeed a great sport, it is a sport that sucks down money like nobody’s business. I rationalized my attendance thusly: I already spent a fair amount of green getting gearing up for the Monster Game, and much of that gear can be used for Tippmann. I figure that by spending a few dollars to attend I can get a better return on my earlier investment and help justify the purchase.

“Logical rationalizations” like that make it entirely unclear how I have any money at all.

//_Norm out

A Response

Well, it’s good to know that people liked my Detroit post. I figured I’d post one of the better emails I got, and from a native Detroiter no less.

Sent by Gary:

I Didn’t Even Get Mugged

Detroit has, for the most part, a pretty bad reputation. When most peoplet think of Detroit they think dirty, high crime and low rent. Though I held no serious opinions one way or the other, if cornered I would probably have voiced sentiments that leaned in that direction. After all, the last time I’d been in the downtown area was probably five years ago when I went to see a game at the old Tiger Stadium.

Anyway, circumstances required me to make a stop at the Renaissance Center to aquire the proper papers for my Japanese student visa. When I mentioned this to others they became rather apprehensive, wondering if I wanted them to go with me to ensure saftey in numbers (or something like that). With such nervousness on the part of people who weren’t going, I was somewhat skittish myself. Upon my arrival, however, I was pleasently surprised and, dare I say, impressed with the improvements the past few years have seen. The downtown area is clean and vibrant, a bustling high-density district that lacks the almost claustrophobic air of New York. The boulevards and riverfront do a nice job of opening the area up and giving it a high class feel. The RenCen itself has been updated with a very contemporary, high-tech feel thats a welcome change.

What’s the point here? Basically, this is a mild rebuke of all those who unjustly malign Detroit without having ever been there in years. The city has made impressive strides, and though it has a long way yet to go I think it’s done quite well. When I go back tomorrow to pick up my visa, I think I might actually be looking forward to taking a stroll around the plaza.

//_Norm out

It’s So Very Hard

I have tried, so far sucessfully, to resist the temptation to purchase a GBA SP. But recent events are doing their damndest to make me break that promise. What with the two new colors (Onyx and Flame, which is just a complicated way of saying black and red) and releases like Super Mario Advanced 4, Harvest Moon: Mineral Town and Advanced Wars 2, I don’t see how a just and loving god could possibly allow these things to exist and not understand when I bought one. I mean, I’ve even got the logical rationalization that I am going to be on a plane for some 15 hours or so…I need something to do!

Of course, I also want an XBox, a PS2, and a myriad of games to go with them (Panzer Dragoon Orta, KOTOR, Silent Hill 3, FFX-2) so I don’t see how I can start buying things now. Once I start, I may never stop.

//_Norm out

Piracy

Why is it that people steal? That’s the basic question you have to ask when looking at the entire “culture” of piracy. When asking a person why they download mp3s instead of buying CDs you’ll find all sorts of rationalizations: they’re fighting against the RIAA’s Gestapo tactics; they’re fighting to get lower CD prices; they aren’t going to pay for a CD that only has one song they like. The list goes on and on. These are the kind of almost understandable, semi-intelligent excuses people like me have listened to for years, but there’s a disturbing new trend developing. Now, when I ask someone why he or she pirates, they no longer claim that what they’re doing is somehow legal. Almost universally, people will admit to being consciously aware that stealing music is not only illegal, it’s also wrong (in the moral sense). They just don’t care.

Despite what some might tell you, piracy is an increasing problem in all areas of media and art, not just music. If you browse any of your favorite P2P applications you’ll find full copies of computer games and software titles. This is nothing new. What is new are the PDF files containing high resolution scans of magazines and books weeks before they are released in stores. The fact that any movie can be found prior to theatrical release is also a rising problem. With all this stealing going on, it’s rare for the thief to try to take the moral high ground any longer. It’s one thing to claim to be fighting The Man when you steal from an organization like the RIAA (who we all agree needs to be taken down) but it’s another when you steal a five-dollar magazine. How do you justify that? Is five dollars too much for a hundred plus pages of information on whatever special interest you like? Five dollars is more than you’re willing to pay for content tailored exclusively to whatever geek interest you might have?

The fact of the matter is that when presented with the choice of paying anything and paying nothing, people will always choose nothing. CDs could be fifty cents and people will steal download it all from the net. Magazines can drop their prices below a dollar and still you’ll find the PDF files. No matter what you think, what your rationalization, if you steal any copyrighted material you are just that: a thief. A crook. You’re no better than they guy who goes into Seven-Eleven and walks out with whatever he decides he needs.

Yes, the concept of fair use needs to be explored. It is entirely unreasonable (and, I think, illegal) for record labels to stop people who have purchased a valid album from ripping the content into whatever form they like. Fair use is important, but the concept has been so twisted and corrupted by piracy that no one in the upper echelons of industry or government takes it seriously. And can you blame them? Look at all the obviously illegal activities done under the guise of fair use and tell me that you don’t have some doubts.

I don’t know what the solution is. Though I think the RIAA is wrong in their methods, I can somewhat understand their position. They know that no matter what they do, from here on out no music will be purchased. As broadband kicks up the number of users who actually care about the well being of bands they like will dwindle against the number of standard, manufactured pop lovers. I mean, does anyone really care if Britney Spears makes money?

The reason I am so angry over piracy is not because people steal music; hell, I hate the recording industry as much as the next guy. The real issue is the signaling of the last few public morals crumbling in the face of convenience. It’s become clear that Americans as a whole no longer care about truth, justice, freedom, or any of the rest of the bullshit this country was founded on. All that matters is that you can get instant gratification for whatever pleasure you choose that minute, and quite frankly, you sicken me.

//_Norm out

Forum Spotlight

For those of you who don’t look, I figured I’d highlight the post of the week for you.

//_Norm out

One Thing Down, Thirty Or So To Go

After weeks of procrastinating I’ve finally gotten my plane ticket. I even got a really good flight, which is probably a bad thing as it simply re-enforces the notion that I don’t have to do anything on time. Not apply for FAFSA loans, not filing my tax returns, and certainly not buying airline passage.

In other totally unrelated news, I bought some new jeans today. While this might not seem like an earth-shattering revelation, it was for me. I am not what you would call a stylish person. The clothes I wear now are likely the same ones I wore two or three years ago (it would be longer, but I was still growing back then). Either way, I bought some jeans as was shocked to find that they hug my ass like some freaky, alien material that is not denim. I am of the school that believes jeans should be loose and not ass-hugging (at least, not guys jeans anyway).

Believe me, if you knew me you’d understand why any article of clothing that enhances (as oppossed to obscures) a portion of my body is a bad thing.

//_Norm out

Lazy Sunday Report

There’s really not much too say except…go Lions!

Damn, the President is on…time to go.

//_Norm out

Think Metroid Prime

Just a quick heads up: I encourage all of you to check out the works of Anthony Kyriazis, an incredibly talented digital composition designer whose productions are interestingly biological or organic in nature (think on the molecular level). Some of his stuff is vaguely reminiscent of Digital Blasphemy, if you’re familiar with that, but on a whole different plane of existence.

I mean, Ant (or so he likes to be called) is to DB as DaVinci is to your little brother.

//_Norm out

Happy Dance

Sometimes things come along that take an otherwise average, hum-drum day and turn it into something that leaves you excited and feeling good. Of course, these things are usually not television shows (or announcements concerning them) but I never pretended to be anything other than a geek.

Anyway, it turns out that Family Guy is coming back. Not only is the show coming back, but they’re making a feature length movie! This is absolutely awesome, and just goes to show that the executives at Fox don’t have a fucking clue. Between the show’s ratings on Cartoon Network (which are better than The Tonight Show and other competing late-night bits) and the astounding sales number for the first DVD, it’s finally become clear that Family Guy was cancelled well before its prime.

On a related note, the second DVD comes out in a few days. Don’t forget to buy it! Also, a very special thanks to Rob for the heads up on this one.

//_Norm out

Townies

I am so bored I can barely think straight.

It’s not like I don’t have stuff that I could be doing. There are books to read, video games to play, websites to finish and dozens of other things to work on. The problem, I think, is something I refer to as “towny syndrome.” As of right now most everyone I know or knew has returned to college and is already involved in classes and such. I, on the other hand, am still here, stranded in one place with very little to break the monotony. I have become, in essence, a towny.

Now that’s not really true, and I know this. I’m not here because I quit school, I’m here because for me school won’t start for another month, but I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m somehow wasting time. I’ve already reached my goal of reading every William Gibson book in existence, and I don’t know if I have the patience to start a whole new reading marathon with what amounts to a few weeks left before life begins again. It’s a weird timeframe, sort of the purgatory of time management: too much time to just chill and enjoy the nothing, but too little to do anything substantial.

I think the real problem is just the lack of opponents to test myself against in Soul Calibur 2.

//_Norm out

Three Times What It’s Worth

You know, the internet was supposed to be this wonderful tool that allows the common person (like me) to do things that would otherwise be impossible, like finding good prices for airline tickets. As with everything, however, it’s quickly turned into yet another tool for major corporate conglomerates to fuck you in the asshole.

Explain to me why all the major airfare searchings site (Travelocity, Cheap Tickets, Priceline, Orbitz, etc) saw fit to offer $2700+ as the best possible price for a round trip ticket to and from Tokyo? I mean, I understand that flying is not cheap, but give me a break. Not quite believing that this actually constituted the “best price” I drove twenty minutes to Ann Arbor to check out STA, a student travel company.

Imagine my shock when they were able to get me flights for just under $900! Now, I understand that these people specialize in getting cheap fares for students, but how the hell can the other sites justify prices that are three times more than STA’s? I can’t figure out if the airlines are just enormous cocks or if the flight I am getting is, say, on the back of a bald eagle or something.

The moral of this story is that major corporations suck, whether they’re on the net or in the mall.

//_Norm out

And We’re Live in 5…4…3…

Well…here we are. After a hiatus of more than a month (sometime in July, I think) Plaristocrates.com is back online. We’ve got a brand-spanking new server courtesy of Powweb complete with php, SSL and MySQL support. The site is now faster, sleeker, and more feature-packed than ever, although the value of the actual content I leave to your judgement.

This isn’t the final version just yet. There are still a lot of improvements and changes that are in the queue, but for now it’s good enough to post on. The sidebar has a lot more that will go there, the links section will be revamped, and I’ll probably add a form to send email rather than just cheaping out and using the mailto tag that’s there now. A list of some of the new features that currently work are:

The forums! We now have our very own fully-functional message board! The search box on the sidebar is actually functional (unlike the original site’s) and the art section has content. The gaming section is currently empty, but rest assured it will be filled post-haste.

That’s all for now. Also, if you’re wondering about some of the changes to the site, feel free to check out the about section for a little more information. It’s good to be back.

//_Norm out