autumn tactics

I have a new keyboard. This keyboard’s space key should work 100% of the time. The last keyboard’s did not. You can imagine how no space key would impede writing. Japanese was especially frustrating because the conversion key from kana to kanji is the space bar. Oh yes, it was most impossible to do any sort of writing at home.

Mail, blogs, chat, GOOGLE!

Time after time again I had to CTRL+C a space from some random web page and then CTRL+V it between every word. Maddening. Yes.

But I’m back. Slightly crazed, but back. Expect much more writing (tonight I want to get at least three posts in.) This again is a good time to recommend the RSS, because these entries are dated retroactively. A feed will inform you of them nonetheless.

Huzzah for space bars.

Missing the War

All is quiet, his tired eyes
See figures jotted down
And clothes all strewn around the bedroom floor
Now nothing’s adding up
And nothing’s making sense
She’s sleeping like a baby
She doesn’t know he wasn’t meant for this
I’m missing the war
I’m missing the war, all night
Missing the war
I’m missing the war

So much time so little to say
-Ben Folds

This is the view looking down my street to the west. Depending on the time of year and weather, the sun gets low enough to cut through all the air pollution and make a glorious golden light, which reflects at just the right angle off of the sound-dampening panels on the outside of the highway. In person it’s actually much, much, more beautiful, and much, much brighter; so bright that you’re nearly blinded by the reflection. But the computer monitor is a poor medium for portraying such majesty, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

So all of the blog-synching and photo-adjusting madness is finished. As you’d expect, going through and touching up hundreds of Venetian photographs was as monotonous and stressful as scanning them. I could very well have made many more interesting photographs out of the material with the right adjustments, but in the end it was too repetitive and too much tedium. In any case, a so-so batch of seventy-nine shots are in the gallery.

Here is the equally dry set of journal entries from the second leg of my European trip, mostly for record-keeping purposes:

Ah, Venice
Uneventful
Old, new, and always the music
The islands
Stalling
A little bit of everything
Pensive; tea
Phony
Picky
Recap
In Soviet Russia, beard grows you
In Soviet Russia, security go through you

Tonight I finally finished scanning all of my film from last month’s European vacation. I haven’t run through the dust-and-scratches phase of Venice yet, but Vienna is complete, so now you can check out the photographs. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of variety in the material, you may very well give up half way through the album. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I still haven’t eaten dinner so a detailed analysis will have to come later. For now, here’s a summary of the blog posts from the first half of the trip.

In Soviet Russia, plane boards you
In Soviet Russia, drink consumes you
In Soviet Russia, subtitle reads you
In Soviet Russia, baggage check you
Vienna smells of autumn
Wet and the colds
Memories
Quest for the Crown

Shatter.

Crickets, incandescent bulbs, and the same day, the same night, the same everything, for the hundredth time. I will die with so few memories from this year.

You’re so nice, you tie me in a web,
And cradle me ’till dawn.
You’re so deadly that I can see your breath
Beneath me when you’re gone.
You’re so windy, I’d like to pin you down
And tack you to the wall,
Spiderman, spiderman.
spider sunday, you blaze up from the south
With oil on your hands.
I’m streaked in grease and grime and idle mouths.
You’ve spoiled all my plans,
Whoa, ho-oh
Spiderman, spiderman, spiderman.
– Veruca Salt

久しぶりの日本語の文書です。

別に日本語で日記を書けないけれど、何故か日本語で書くと、以外と詰まらない話なります。よく物重い耽るが、考えてる事が英語でも十分ややこしいから、日本語に頑張って伝えるみるときに、殆ど相手の顔が全く把握していない様子です。自分の意思疎通を行う能力はその弱いからさ。だから、平凡なはなしごめんね。

次の十日間は大詰めです。自分の職歴の中で、一番不満な感じします。これは皮肉です。段々自分の潜在能力をもっと深く理解したら、その水準を達しないと愈愈がっかりします。だが、一生懸命します。上司のため。仲間のため。会社のため。自分のため。

そうじゃなかったら、自分で自分が許せない。疲れのせいかもしれないけど、論理を捨てて奔放な全力でやるしかない。

夏が起こらなかったように、秋なります。雲、雨、内省。命がゆっくり消えてても、今日と明日を考えます。十月と十一月間に二回展示します。11月またデザイン・フェスタに「複視」が開催します。今回の相手は五年間の相棒の廣田さんです。新作のテーマはまだはっきり決めてないけど、九月末位に発表予定です。

十月のイベントはまだ内緒です。ふふふむわはわはわはわは！(\＾W＾)/

I’d move to Rockferry
Tomorrow
And I’d build my house, baby
With sorrow

I’d leave my shadow
To fall behind
And I wouldn’t write to you
‘Cause I’m not that kind

The midnight trains are boarding
All wrap up eights
I pick my load and I fill my truck
Before it’s too late

I leave the stars to judge
My every move
I’m not going to think of you, oh
I’d get the blues

There’s no sleep on the journey
Away from town
A bag of songs and a heavy heart
Won’t make me down

I’ll give it all my strength and my mind
I’ll make this decision with or without

I’d move to Rockferry
Tomorrow
And I’d build my house, baby
With sorrow

The summer that never was continues and life passes me as I sit in a puddle of convenience store sandwiches, canned coffee, and unshaved Fridays.

I will be working like this for probably another five weeks. I am stalling on using the GPU to export pixel shader contents directly to memory. Thread safety and frame rates follow me into my dreams where I ask my artists once again, are they _sure_ that the alpha is cleanly feathered in all of the UI textures?

Sample photographs are back from the ST801, and unfortunately it seems that the iris blades will not close, leaving the camera perpetually locked at F1.8. This did cost me a roll of Centuria 400 and I should have checked the mechanics of the camera before taking any pictures. Now I have the task of dismantling the lens in hopes of repairing the aperture control.

I am going to try very, very, hard to get to a highly talked of party at the end of the month, which as my good friend Futoshi says will provide, “some really great photographic material.” It is the weekend before _the_ milestone though, so my hopes of making it are waning.

A significant period off is rumored to occur in the next two months. The thought I could stop working and actually go somewhere seems unreal; I am hesitant to believe and even if it did manifest it would most certainly fall dramatically short of my expectations for the fabled multi week time off game developers supposedly get after a big project. Nevertheless, I am starting to study Italian again…my first instinct was a multi-country crawl through central Europe.

Today I am going out to the east side of town to get some precision tools for the Fujinon lens, and see an exhibition of the Japanese master painters. I also need some honest to goodness epiphany for planning my next collaborative show. We meet today and hopefully will make some significant headway towards a concept we can be invigorated by.

So…tired…natsubate.

I have some writing from Taico Club, but it’s on scraps of paper right now and I’m still disorganized. However, the photos are up, so please have a look. For some reason the gallery RSS isn’t working right now it seems.

The longer I spend wrapped up in work, the more disheveled I become and the more frustrating the moments of free time are. It’s when I take a step off the merry-go-round that I realize how much time has passed and how many virtual dishes have piled up in my personal life.

How many dozens of rolls of negatives are piled up on my desk?
I haven’t replied to that person in three months?
The friend’s concert I missed was when?
…
Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t put too much stock in our relationship either then.

Every time I wake up on a Saturday at noon and do a quick mental check on how many promises to myself I’ve broken, I feel sick to my stomach and roll back over, pulling the blankets over my head once more.

Why can’t I have the strength to be able to sort through all the perishable parts of living and consume them by value, in turn?

せっかく日記を復活したけど、二ヶ月が過ごして、連絡していないね。ごめん。普段は毎月10-15回くらい書きますが、今年はなかんか余裕がない。来月はまた展示会があります。しかも、固くて決心しても今回が一番中途半端になっています。仕事はきつい、毎日23：30ごろ家に到着してる。なぜか、ライフがもっと複雑か、年取っているか、毎日～6時間の睡眠が足りなくて、だるい。

とにかく、今日も、明日も、仕事ですが、深夜製作中．．．

1983. Annie closes on Broadway after 2,377 shows. Gandhi wins Best Picture as Return of the Jedi picks up steam. Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the solar system. The De Lorean Motor Company ceases production, and the McNugget is introduced. I am three years old and love Ernie. Konica also produces a charming little pocket rangefinder with auto focus, shutter, and film winding, all for the low, low price of 47,800 yen.

For some time now, I have wanted a lightweight “junk” camera that I can always have with me and throw in any number of bags. The A-1 is too versatile and valuable a piece of equipment to have jostled around in my backpack all the time. The 70-210mm zoom lens is also intimidating to a lot of people.

Anyway, I didn’t want to put a lot of money into said camera because that would defeat the purpose. So I’ve been coming flea markets and Akihabara back alleys for a couple of months. I finally found what I was looking for last weekend while helping out the Nihon Furosato Food Festival. I bought shiny, black, brick from a kindly, well-traveled old man who spoke way too much like a used car salesman. But the camera was impeccably well kept, spotless and hardly a scratch on it– inconceivable for a 25 year old consumer shoot-and-forget camera.

Though I have had a decent array of camera bodies for a while, this marks the first time I’ve ever had film bodies at the same time. I realized today how nice this was when shooting the annual hanami raves in Yoyogi park this afternoon. The weather was a real drag, frigid, raining, and dark. But having 1600 Natura pushed to 3200 in the A-1 and 400 Presto in the Konica, I felt confident that I could handle any number of shots without feeling the pressure to finish a roll for switching stock.

For the first time in a long time I have a considerable scan backlog now, so once I get through my slides I’ll make an album in the Gallery dedicated to Konnie.

Just a short note to say that this morning I processed and got another album up in Gallery. This time the subject is my walking trip of Kyoto during last New Year’s. A number of interesting posts came out of the trip, so you may enjoy reading them again while watching a slideshow of the photos in the background.

Cheers!