autumn tactics

Heading towards Kyoto with 80s pop

Hazy Shade of Winter

I think that they use several different models of Shinkansen, maybe depending on what time of day it is. I’m on a Nozomi right now but things feel kind of cramped and older. I don’t remember the last time I took one it being like this. This actually reminds me more of the Komachi that runs up to Akita. Though the Nozomi is hella fast, I have my best Shinkansen memories on the Hikari. Oh well, another reason for the green car I suppose.

I’m not sure if it’s just a fluke, but I seem to be noticing a lot more ordered ambient thinking lately. Usually I’m reading a book on the train, and if I’m not then I’m going over some schedule or budget in my mind. Occasionally I’ll do some kind of introspective contemplation, but it is rare. But recently, this has been quite prevalent, and not just on the train. Walking, standing in line, any time I’m not actively doing something that requires a significant amount of cognition. The subject of my ruminations is quite interesting, I find it mainly consists of rationalizing my behaviors, thoughts and feelings. It’s quite fulfilling, though I’m not sure if it’s a good thing that it’s grossly logical. There has to be a reason and a method to everything. This in itself is probably a foolish simplification made for a sense of power and control (See? I’m doing it right now). It is oddly satisfying. Why does North Korea need to have nuclear weapons? Why do I find something attractive? How many of my choices and feelings are built on generalizations and half-informed judgments? God it’s hard to write now, my hand feels weird.

…

I hate writing, it’s too hot. I just want to record my thoughts directly into a PC. I could write a book in a day.

…

Trade secrets are silly. It makes working even more ridiculous, if you think about it. I mean, you’re all cooped up in a little office for sixty-five hours a week and all you can do is tell people what line of business you’re in. I’m not even really supposed to talk about stuff I finished one _year_ ago. I want to take a picture of my desk at work to show you, but if I did, you’d see what I have sitting next to my monitor and thusly one could speculate as to what I?m making, which would be bad. I’m not sure if it comes more from what will be made or what it would seem like if we failed and didn’t finish. It may seem strange to you that I’ve been working for two years and still can’t point to anything and say, “I did this.” There’s a reason.

Up Where We Belong

Take this song for instance. It reminds me of my dad recaulking the bathroom. He has a bunch of cassettes he made from LPs he bought in the 70s and 80s: Prime Cuts I, II, III, IV… themes from movies he and mom saw when I was just a little kid. Reagan, Richard Gere, Joe Cocker. I’ve never seen Officer and a Gentleman, but it’s got a hell of a lot of meaning to me. It’s 80s movie stock, pink-tinted blurred edges, [or is that the twenty year old VHS?] tape decks, Z104, summer days, a younger America; my parents when they were perfect and infallible.

The Robinson family’s string of Pontiacs purchased at Renn Kirby. Fox’s Pizza downtown on Market Street when it was still good. Pinecliff Park, how it was the newest and most nouveauriche’ playground I’d ever been too. Our mothers thought that too. That’s probably why they drove all the way out past the south east part of town to take us there.

You’re the Best Around

This is the Karate Kid, of course. I saw this a ton of times. Before I realized how phony and slightly demeaning all of the Japanese stuff is, it was one of my favorite movies. I even had it in my “employee recommendations” shelf at Blockbuster. That was probably the best thing I ever got out of that place, the pride in my employee recommendation shelf.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure *
Glory *
Bladerunner *
The Karate Kid *
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves *
Intersection *
Frantic *
Vertigo *

Reason #134 why I like Japan

Is how the people look at you; or don’t look at you. In every other non-Caucasian country I’ve been to, I got this sort of ambient unease or resentment. The looks on people’s faces when they see me. Maybe I’m only remembering the bad points, but Mexico, China, Thailand? the men looked _at_ me, and no one ever smiled; quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. I felt the scowls, I could feel the distaste in the air. I got asked for money or to buy some junk. I’ve never once gotten that in Japan. People don’t necessarily smile at you, but they just don’t look at you at all. And that tension just isn’t here. It’s easy to just be. Everyone minds their own space, and rarely minds anyone else (even the well-dressed woman in Shinjuku station last weekend who was shouting something unflatteringly about the governor of Tokyo).

One expat whose travel journals I read a lot left Japan because he didn’t feel that way. He said that he got tired of all the eyes on him, of being a spectacle. So he went back to the US. I don’t know, I don’t feel that way at all. I’m comfortable living here. I have almost no reservations about any of the processes thare are needed to survive here. It’s great.

Someone needs to say it

I’m sorry, but CodeWarrior just really sucks. I have some good friends at Metroworks, and I’m saying this here because I’m pretty sure they’ll never read my blog, but I’m really getting fed up with the dev environment. It’s clunky, it crashes a lot, and the UI is just piss poor. I hate MS Dev Studio for a lot of reasons, but after using CW on a daily basis… it’s like having a shitty girlfriend and then leaving her for even a shittier girlfriend. Except I do both MFC and game platform development daily now, so it’s like getting back together with the shitty girlfriend and missing her half-assed apple pie every time you have to eat your shittier girlfriend’s au gratin potatoes.

The data and member function recognition is terrible, finding classes and references is impossible, and navigating the project tree (which you can only see if you drag it out to take up half of the screen), just makes me want to drive nails through the monitor. Dev Studio looks like it was designed by developers (that’s not a good thing), but CodeWarrior seems like it was designed by a team of wall-eyed interns who all hated each other.

The features are undiscoverable, all of the widgets and metaphors are non-Windows based (don’t tell me Mac design is like this), and the things you have to do to build a project are just ridiculous. Looking at more than one thing at a time is unworkable. It’s like they expected you to write the entire program in int main() (which is probably how the app itself is constructed).

I don’t CARE if they gave away shot glasses of tequila at the GDC booth crawl two years ago. I still loathe every second of using the package. [Last year it was beer and the Lara Croft look-a-like wasn't there anyway. They obviously had to save some cash for the rising tide of complaints their customer support center has to handle.]

…

If you haven’t tried it yet, look at Google Maps. It’s good. I can’t believe MapQuest hasn’t done any kind of recognizable upgrade in the last ten years. If I still lived in the US, I’d really be happy about this.

return TRUE;

YOU CAN’T EVEN DOCK THE FRICKIN’ DOCKING WINDOWS!!

Throwback

Friday is kenkokukinenbi (national foundation day), which celebrates the ascension of the first Japanese emperor, Jimmu, roughly 2600 years ago. It is believed that every emperor since then has been in the same blood line, providing the world’s oldest dynasty and holding mortal ties to the original emperor, who was kin of the sun goddess, Amaterasu.

What this means in 2005 on a very small scale is that I have the day off. So I’m taking advantage of the three day weekend and going back to Kansai (the region where Nara, Kyoto, and Osaka all are situated in close proximity to each other). I will be seeing some of my oldest Japanese friends [Getting close to three years now!], and doing what I do best, riding around taking pictures of things. Armed with the acquired knowledge from Mr. Greenspun’s excellent tutorial, I hope to take new and interesting photographs. I will also cook for some very kind folks who are giving me a place to sleep.

The best way I can describe how I feel about going “home” to Nara is it’s like having laid half awake for hours in torment on a cold, Monday morning, and then deciding to burrow under a newly discovered acrylic comforter, leaving the pains of day behind me.

Welcome home, to your dreams.

This is probably one of the biggest walls I’ve been running since I started my “Type A” life (around 1999, but this is a misnomer since my blood type is B negative). However, unlike my drinking problem, I usually face it brimming with optimism and when it hits me I don’t fall anywhere near as flat. A wise man once remarked about college, “There are so many classes I want to take, and it sucks because I don’t have time for them all.” [Then he taught me about soccer.] I’m paraphrasing, but basically what he said was about as true for the world as death.

So usually the way I work is I get a long-term goal, and fantasize about it, then build mid- to short-term goals in between that lead up to the realization of that larger goal, and then I fantasize and bask in those. From time to time I get a little turned around and stumble off the narrow line I paint, or I run too hard and trip, getting the wind knocked out of me. Then I spin around for a bit, and go through a “dark” period until enough people say the same empowering (and accurate) thing to me and I get moving again. Then after I get the long term goal, I kind of float on a cloud for a couple months and it starts over.

Right now I’m just coming out of the empowering and returning to positive acceleration phase, and I’m starting to just barely brush against that wall I was talking about. In any case, I started reading a wonderful online photography primer by Philip Greenspun. This whole week the cobwebs just keep falling away, and a bunch of stuff that I previously had a vague and misconstrued notion of is coming into focus (really, no pun). This is going to help me refine and narrow my artistic goals for the short- and mid-term, and I think in the end I’ll grow a lot this year if I continue to assimilate knowledge at this pace.

Tangentially, I’ve stumbled into one of those fuzzy periods precipitated by the advent of ubiquitous information and digital publishing, and found a “person” to be infatuated with. Well, not so much a person as a personage. I’ve idolized enough people farther along than myself in some respect or another to realize that they’re just people like me, and idolatry breeds incorrect perspectives on a subject, much like pointing an SLR upwards at a tall building. [See!]

In any case, whilst going through my friends/communities list on my LiveJournal, I found a photo post in futurecity of the Prada in Aoyama, something I take pictures of every time I’m down there. So one photo post leads to other photos, which lead to the person’s blog, which leads to a website and skimming over the background of this person who takes photographs that intrigue me. This person is of particular interest to me as she a) seems to have quite a bit of energy, b) travels a lot, c) goes to Waseda, and d) listens to In Search of Sunrise white writing. If I were five years younger I’d probably really be skeeving myself out with this digital voyeurism. However, I swear the greatest thing about making naive mistakes is how it mellows you. So don’t worry, Yuki, I’m not stalking you. I just want to know what kind of film you have in your LC-A.

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Conservation of Energy and The Net

This past week I was privileged enough to bear witness to two of the great fundamental laws in physics, namely that there is a (supposedly) finite amount of energy in the universe that must be conserved, and that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. These axioms manifested themselves to my naivete in the surprising way that after increasing my physical activity (most notably running the morning), I find my daily rations more than a little inadequate… I’m hungry.

Even a heaping bowl of macaroni and cheese with half a loaf of bread with Miss Granny’s stewed tomatoes is insufficient to fully satiate my appetite. After a mere two and a half hours of lunch I’m needing another vast chemical energy intake. I’ve also been kind of drowsy at work and nodding off in the afternoon, though I’m not sure if that’s from running in the morning or only getting five to six hours of sleep a night.

To further complicate matters, Newton’s law has further ramifications in that doing more = hungry more = (presumably) eating more = more money and time required for the acquisition of food. What a cruel world we live in, where I attempt to better myself physically and intellectually, and am only met with even a greater strain on my finances (and patience). Alas…

Similarly [always a fun word to sneak into conversations], I got a BIG geek rush tonight. Well, actually this has nothing to do with the previous paragraph but it’s worth noting that I wholeheartedly enjoyed one of my favorite movies tonight, The Net. It not being a number one ticket item, it has been a little hard to come by in the normal conduits through which I screen films, but fortunately People Video down by the station happens to carry it. In Japan, it is called “The Internet”, which while admittedly far less cool, is a necessary nomenclature for a foreign culture not up on English .com slang.

But yes, The Net is a wonderful movie for two great reasons: 1) it’s a thriller about technology, and 2) (more importantly) it stars Sandra Bullock, one of my (non-so) secret joys and a prototypical example of the type of women I’m attracted to (read: definitely NOT Paris Hilton, Pamela Lee, or Shakira). The movie isn’t even bad either! It’s great. The only negative thing I can say about it is that Dennis Miller shouldn’t have died. He’s way too cool and should have been able to get back together with Sandra at the end. Everyone knows it was meant to be. They’re both incredibly intellectual and sweet.

Anyway, it’s a fabulous movie and I’m happy to have it. Though if you’re ever over and think about suggesting we watch it together, you must know well that I will unrelentingly mock the (surprisingly few) technical errors inserted to the script, which are there presumably for dramatic effect.

I’ll give up anime’ for any girl that knows how to use telnet and wear incredibly stylish bangs.

[PS - This movie first came out when I was working at Blockbuster. We used to get all the posters when they came down, if a customer didn't specifically ask for them. I think I remember wanting this one but one of the other employees wasted it before I got a chance to cart it home. Upon my termination with Viacom, however, I had managed to get over forty custom and limited edition posters, in addition to full size cardboard standups of The Nutty Professor, Casino, and Babe. Oh Sandra, when will we ever meet and LARP together? ::sigh::]

A full weekend

This weekend was definitely one of the most productive and fulfilling that I’ve had in a while. Still, it wasn’t up to par since I slept in until eleven and one on Saturday and Sunday, but in my defense at least I didn’t get hammered (on the contrary I was up late doing sober, self-indulgent things).

Saturday I decided to fly north again and struck out at quarter after eleven for the Arakawa. I took a couple befuddled detours down shoutengai (small shopping streets) in Higashi Nakano and Ochiai, but more or less I stuck to Yamate dori until I got to Kawagoe kaido. I stopped for a set lunch at a small shop near north Ikebukuro and had a nice full meal of rice, tofu soup, pork cutlet, cabbage, and Japanese pickles. I had no problem eating any of this and actually enjoyed every bite. Two years ago this would have been a completely different story with me leaving food on my plate and a longing in my stomach. Much of Japanese food has a taste quite foreign to what I was raised on, as it employs different vegetables and vinegars that initially didn’t sit right with me. However, through perseverance (and little choice) I have proven to myself that if people eat it, it’s edible. Any barriers between you and the enjoyment of a meal are built only from preconceived notions of what is “tasty”. Your appetite gets used to a certain weight and flavor, and admittedly that takes time to broaden, but I’m convinced that most of it is just getting set in one’s ways.

After lunch I took the Kawagoe expressway up to the edge of Itabashi-ku (where there is actually quite an interesting range of urban development going on), with the intent on taking the Omiya bypass up to Sasame (not Sesame!) bashi over the river into Saitama ken. [Note: in Japan a "ken" for all intents and purposes can be considered a state (albeit with fewer independent laws). There are forty-seven of them in the country, including special classifications for places like Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka; you can think of these areas as equivalent to the District of Columbia.]

Unfortunately, the beginning of Route 17 (the Omiya Bypass), was restricted to vehicles with engines only, which although annoying, was probably a good thing given all the C02 that had most certainly accumulated in the tunneled portions. So I spent about forty-five minutes to an hour fighting overpass mixing bowls and convoluted side streets until I got out to the actual bridge, which I could ride across into Saitama. I trucked along the riverside over a jogging path, past pet-walkers and kite-flying kids. Holding Little League games in sandlots on riverbanks seems to be a pretty common thing in suburban Japan. Again I only wish they had more useful trees and bushes to suck up some of the smog that hangs over the city. Tokyo isn’t anywhere near as bad as Shanghai or Bangkok, but it’s still a far cry from Seattle or Vancouver in terms of environmental equilibrium.

I met a cat next to a small gazebo on my way east to the next bridge into the city. Though not the most malnourished animal I’d ever seen, it wasn’t in too good shape and crying pretty weakly for food. I think one of her front legs was broken, because she didn’t put weight on it directly and it was bent around at a disturbingly unnatural angle. It reminded me a bit of the stray I took to caring for near my old apartment in Sendagaya. Though quite passive (probably from lack of energy), I knew there was no way that she was going to let me take her to a vet or at least to get something to eat. I had a hell of a time before transporting another cat on my bike to a doctor. I really wanted to do something but ended up feeling like I couldn’t really do much of anything, and I wondered how many animals without homes and loving owners would die in the cold that night. So I left the poor, lovely white cat under the gazebo and continued on my way along the river. She looked after me as I left, and I started pondering human compassion and what endears us to animals.

I got back to my place around quarter after four with about three hundred megs of shots and my battery about to die. Between a shrine, the Arakawa, an old Corvette, and that cat I got a hatful of some really good shots. The amount of half-decent photographs I take is really outstripping the amount of time I have to work with them now, and I’m beginning to wonder just how much effort I should be putting into their editing, management, and presentation. If I’m really going to be serious about it, I don’t think it’s going to work in tandem with my current job, or at least not with the other five hundred things I try to do each week. I think I might like to try my hand at freelancing, like for a magazine or journal. But for that I need to stop being a hack and do some real studying of the underlying principles. Like all things, you can only get so far on raw talent.

[Having now spent over an hour working on a very small sampling of these photographs , I've become really frustrated with the quality of my materials. The truth is that as nice a camera as the PowerShot may be, it is still just a digital camera, and the CCD breaks down in low light and high contrast conditions, rendering revolting halftone color noise and cheap boundaries, respectively. As much as it pains me to think of the time and financial commitment required, I suppose I'm just going to have to go back to traditional film unless I want to settle for inferior art (which is of course, for me, impossible). You can probably notice some of these artifacts in the pictures, especially with the Volkswagen. I had to downsize and screw with the lighting to try and make the best of a bad situation, but it still looks like crap at anything above 320x240.]

過去に戻る

今週お母さんは新しい車を買いました。過去五年間「VW Cabrio」を持ってたけどけっこ大変でした。いつも色々な問題が有った。ドイツの車は必ずハイスペックと思ってたんですが、その事ない見たいですね。確かにメキシコ製だった。そういうわけかもしれない。

とにかく、お母さんはその車を売りました。それから2005年期ホンダを買った。えらいぞ、母さん！やっぱり、ホンダは良いやろうね。家族は1978年から2003年まで色々なホンダAccordを持ってた。運転勉強時に1988年期「Accord Lx-i」で練習した。懐かしいその車。席の臭い。。。ダッシュボードのテクスチャ。。。パワー月窓。。。ね！どこまでも乗りました。最初のデートもバージニア大学にも乗りました。ホンダのエンジン音を良く知ってるですよ。

では、今回お母さんは「Civic Ex Special Edition」を買った。近ごろアメリカの車は段々大きくなってたので、このCivicはこの前のAccord大体同じぐらい。大分カッコイイですが自動シフトです。僕にはやっぱり、ステッキは最高。

This is mirin

That’s what this sign says, in just about as simple Japanese as you can get. I spent a good deal of time worrying about how I would find something at Seiyu which I had no idea what it looked like, but apparently I’m not the only one that harbors such fears. Well, either that or this is a really low budget advertising campaign. Either way, I found the mirin I needed to make my niku jaga. Much to my chagrin, when I got home I discovered that I already had some. If you’re astute and know me well you can probably figure out why and feel a little sorry for me.

In any case, I did make the niku jaga, and it was ok. No where near as delicious as when I’ve had it in the past. This time I felt it was a little too sweet. Perhaps I used too much sugar. Or perhaps it was the fancy Kakunodate sake I used. In any case, it was the closest thing I’ve ever made to Japanese food, and I look forward to improving on it in the future.

I somehow have managed to eat every meal by my own hand this week. I’m not sure if this is a fluke or the start of something wonderful and new. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for the latter (I _am_ dai kichi, after all).

Seen above next to the niku jaga is a typical breakfast for me, consisting mainly of eggs, oats, fruit (blended), and soy milk. I may try the regular Japanese breakfast of miso soup and rice before too long, as I actually have taken quite a liking to just plain rice. [What's happening to me?]

Groundhog Day

Behold the power of varmints!

Was actually yesterday, but I watched the movie tonight over dinner and homework. I’ve probably seen it about seven or eight times, it’s a pretty decent picture all around. I am, however, quite disappointed at the alterations made by the film in regards to Punxsutawney.

I actually went there for Groundhog’s Day 2002 with Ray, Shawn, Todd, and Carolyn. [If I ever get the video from Shawn I'll let you know.] We drove late into the night, played one of those buzzword games at a church, and not-slept for about three hours on the floor of a community room full of babbling children before taking one of the first buses up to Gobbler’s Knob (which is actually in a rather inconvenient location, contrary to what the movie would have you believe).

We stood on the hill with a crowd of some twenty THOUSAND other revelers for about four hours in sub-zero temperatures and mud. Why I chose to wear only one pair of socks and my boat shoes I’ll never know. There was a “family” side, and a “college kid” side. You can probably figure out why. Unfortunately not even two flaskfuls of Jim Beam could take the edge off of the freezing weather. On the contrary it just made my voice all the more hoarse after singing/shouting at an Elvis impersonator throughout the night.

But yeah, it is/was Groundhog’s Day. And it seems that Phil predicts six more weeks of winter this year. This is all the more intriguing when laid next my story earlier today about Setsubun no Hi; the Japanese pretty much say it’s spring now, regardless of what any prognosticating rodents may think. The most amusing part of all of this is of course that scientists take the back seat regardless of which country you’re in. March 20, bah! Go back to your lab and play with your astrolabes, eggheads!

鬼は外！福は内！

Today is Setsubun no Hi (eve of the beginning of spring) in Japan.  Though it may still be cold for a while, today is observed as a time of change.  Seasonal changes have a lot of significance in Japan, in both a spiritual and a romantic sense.  Each period has its own score of celebrated imagery, events, and food: on a cold winter’s day a cat sleeping under a kotatsu (short table with a heated blanket to put your legs under), a clear spring day drinking sake under falling cherry blossom petals, or spending a summer evening watching fireworks, eating fried noodles, and dancing.  Today is symbolically the end of winter.

As such, when we had our company’s little eight-year anniversary party last night, one of the younger guys was picked to play the role of the oni (devil), and everyone threw beans at him, shouting “Oniwa-soto! Fukuwa-uchi!” (“Out with the devil, in with luck!”).  This morning while eating my breakfast and watching NHK (the Japanese equivalent of PBS, but much, much, MUCH stronger and more pervasive), one of the children’s shows had a story centered around today being Setsubun no Hi.

I am quite full and nearly popping from an oversized dose of niku jaga (meat and potato stew) that I made last night, but more about that later.  In the meantime I have to muster every ounce of strength I have to continue my MFC, and not join the cat in the cozy space under the table.

*pResult = 0;

Memento

You can just feel the details. The bits and pieces you never bothered to put into words. And you can feel these extreme moments… even if you don’t want to. You put these together, and you get the feel of a person. Enough to know how much you miss them… and how much you hate the person who took them away.