Archive for the ‘Self’ Category
An article and an interview
About two weeks I had my first ever paid-for article published. “Are Videogames Conservative?” appeared in the September edition of The IPA Review (57:3).
Today, Libby Price, a presenter on Melbourne radio station 3LO, got in contact with me to do a radio interview. I managed to schedule a break in my Berlitz training so I could do the interview live from Ôsaka at about 16:40 Australian time. Thanks for the opportunity, Libby: it was great fun. Dad managed to tape the interview for me, and played it back to me over Skype tonight. It sounded really nice: a good, relaxed interview. Not bad for a first try.
First article, first radio interview. What a couple of weeks it’s been… And that’s even without considering my move to Ôsaka, and my new job.
Ôta, I hardly knew you
Last Tuesday, I confirmed that I had a job interview with Berlitz in Ôsaka, on Thursday. I called in my resignation from NOVA, with one day’s notice, at about 11:30.
By 11:00 the next morning, I’d sent my luggage to a guest-house in Ôsaka, and was on the train to Tôkyô, ready to catch the shinkansen to my destination.
I was only in Ôta for four weeks, and though I felt like I’d exhausted the possibilities I had there, I hardly knew the place at all. But I didn’t want to know it, either: I just wanted to leave.
Sayônara, Ôta-shi.
Here’s one last photo that I took at the Bell Town mall, because now I’m gone, I feel happy. Super!
A month in Japan (part the fifth)
After a whole weekend in Tôkyô, I was broke, and feeling like I couldn’t wait to get out of Ôta so I wouldn’t have to spend 4000¥ every time I wanted to do something interesting. Also, I’d finally settled in: I had internet access, a mobile phone, I’d finished my training, and I was working a regular schedule. With all that out of the way, I started to realize how little there was to do in Ôta.
Tuesday 20 September
Some time during the week, I think on the Tuesday, I asked where the transfer forms were at work. Brendan, the branch manager, told me where they were, but said that my request to transfer probably wouldn’t be processed until after my probation ended on December 1. The area manager, Tracey, was on the phone to our branch at the time, and Brendan confirmed this with her. What Tracey neglected to mention was that by refusing to consider my application before December, she’d get to keep me in Ôta until February, since NOVA offices are closed on January 1, and transfers can only take place on the first of a month.
Even so, I got the impression that NOVA wouldn’t transfer me out of Ôta in a hurry, so I started to look for jobs in Tôkyô and Ôsaka in earnest.
Saturday 24 September
During the week, I managed to get my MENSA membership transferred to Japan, and the membership secretary invited me to a function they were having on Saturday. I was looking forward to building a social network in Tôkyô, ready for a move there. The secretary had sent me several emails telling me she hoped I could come. But despite several requests for an exact address and time, the woman never gave me anything more specific than “it’s in Daikanyama, at an actor’s house, in the afternoon.”
Having planned nothing else, I decided to go down to Tôkyô anyway, hoping for an SMS with the address. It never arrived. So, I went to Ikebukuro to collect my sunglasses from Jim and Co.’s hotel, where I’d left them the weekend before, then walked south through Bunkyô-ku, Shinjuku, and part of Shibuya-ku to Harajuku, where I got thoroughly lost around Yoyogi park. The walk took 4.5 hours!
I was extremely tired by the time I arrived back in Ôta around 22:00, but there was a big party on to say goodbye to Ken and Georgina, two NOVA instructors in the area who were going back to Ireland. I’d been dreading it a little, expecting more izakaya-style billing problems, but was also excited about meeting some more of the gaijin in the area. Sure enough, there were billing issues: the staff charged our table 73,000¥ for the night, and the money we’d put in based on what we ordered wasn’t enough to cover it. When asked to, the staff refused to give us an itemized bill, so there was about 30 minutes of messing around with the money (in which I stood silently and let other people cover it, since I only had 1000¥ left for food until Wednesday) before we finally had enough.
On the upside of the night, I met a Samoan-born rugby-player for Sanyo called Afai. He had one of the best attitudes of any of the gaijin I’d met in Ôta, and was super-keen to learn Japanese. Good work Afai! You cheered me up.
Aside from that, though, by the end of the night I was burning with rage. How dare NOVA place me in Ôta: didn’t they know who I was? I had a publications list on my resumé, for crying out loud! How could a MENSA member tell me several times she was looking forward to meeting me, but never tell me where I was supposed to go? And what was the deal with these izakaya? What made them think they could just make up a bill at the end of the night and expect us to pay?
As I said, I was burning with rage, and I was starting to hate Japan.
Hate Japan? Me? Wait a minute… This story’s no good…
Let’s start again…
Tôkyô Game Show 2005 or a month in Japan (part the fourth)
Note: I compressed the thumbnails too much when posting this, so please click on the the images to see the full-size, full-quality versions.
Saturday 17 September
Even though Tôkyô was 2 hours and about 3000¥ in train fares away, I could hardly not go, given that I’m a videogames researcher and all…
Makuhari Messe, where TGS is held, is, in fact, not actually in Tôkyô, but about 30 minutes away, in Chiba prefecture. Getting out there requires changing trains at Tôkyô, and crossing to the new platform takes a good 10 minutes. The two different lines are nearly 1km apart, and there are airport-style travelators for lazy commuters to take between them. The Chiba area is quite nice, since a lot of the buildings are newer and less cramped than in Tôkyô, and the presence of the bay near parts of the train-line impart a feeling of spaciousness that I haven’t experienced too often since I came to Japan.
The convention-centre area in Makuhari. Note the clear blue sky, which is not a regular feature of Central Tôkyô.
Another shot of the Makuhari area. Most places in Tôkyô don’t look this new or this clean.
Entry was cheap at 1400¥, but considering I spent around 4000¥ on train tickets, it didn’t end up being a cheap day.
Inside, I was struck by a mixture of awe and disappointment. TGS is an internationally significant trade show, and this year had never-before seen footage of games like Metal Gear Solid 4 (for PS3, no less) and a load of demo pods with playable games for the as-yet-unreleased Xbox 360. Despite that, though, it’s still a trade show, just on a larger scale than anything I’d seen in Melbourne.
The most impressive thing about TGS, dare I say it, was the booth-babes. (I’m fully aware that if Sam still reads this blog, she’ll have a field-day with that.) Seriously, the publishers showing at TGS had hired some of the finest looking women I’ve ever seen to pimp their brands. What was particularly striking about them was the toned-ness of some of the bare legs and bellies on display, though that may just be a consequence of the Japanese physique and lifestyle. There were loads of guys decked out with digital SLRs taking photos of the booth-babes. I can only hope they were photo-journalists, but they were probably more like the owner of this blog, whose hobby seems to be travelling around taking photos of race-queens and booth-babes. For myself, I was too modest to take photos of them, so for a representative shot, I have to poach from the race-queen guy:
Taito probably had the most ridiculously skimpy costumes of any booth.
On the games side, it took me a while to figure out what was important, just because everything was treated in such a blazé fashion.
Though I hate Microsoft’s desktop software as much as any other *nix-loving, markup-language-coding computer geek, I’m ready to give them credit for the best showing of TGS 2005. Microsoft put in a lot of effort, and came up with the best-designed booth based around a concentric-circles design concept. It featured a digital-lifestyle showcase in the vein of those mock rooms at IKEA, a giant screen for show-reels, and most importantly, banks of actual Xbox 360s for playing demos on widescreen, flat-panel HD monitors.
The front of Microsoft’s stand.
The digital lifestyle area, from far-enough away that no-one would stop me taking photos.
The Microsoft stand from above.
One of the Microsoft booth-babes. I’d say the concept for this costume didn’t quite work. It’s a shame I wasn’t taking pictures of the girls, because there was a woman in a great one-of-a-kind outfit behind the Microsoft desk, who no-one on the web seems to have got a photo of. It was in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey: kind of 1960s air-hostess, but in white and green.
Unfortunately, the Xbox 360 itself doesn’t seem to live up to the best-of-show booth design. It’s nice to see high-resolution graphics on the HD monitors, but at such a level of detail, it’s easy to see some of the graphical shortcomings of the first-generation titles. They’re beautiful, but I can see the PC catching up with Xbox 360 in a year or so.
Harder to catch will be the PS3. Showcased by the MGS4 demo on show at the Sony booth, PS3’s capabilities are a massive jump from PS2, albeit with a disturbing indication that, like PS2, the PS3 has inadequate on texture memory. Next to near-photorealistic character models, blurry textures on close-up wall surfaces were an extremely unwelcome sight.
Sony’s booth also had lots of PS2 and PSP software on show. Of the PS2 stuff, Level 5’s Rogue Galaxy and Capcom’s gorgeous Okami caught my eye. Despite most gaming news outlets complaining about a dearth of PSP gaming software at the moment, there seems to be a lot in the works, judging by TGS, including online titles like a PSP version of Capcom’s Monster Hunter. The software on display looked extremely polished, shaming the software on show for Nintendo’s underpowered, but conceptually interesting, DS.
Also worthy of note were some new or developing trends in evidence. Mobile gaming is huge in Japan, and there were loads of booths dedicated to mobile software, some of it of very high quality, like Taito’s port of Ys, a scaled down version of the latest PSP version. Square Enix’s mobile iteration of the Code Age IP could also be interesting. There was also a huge array of online games, many of them from Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean developers. Several colleges offering courses in game-development and game-related graphic design also had booths at TGS. It’s pleasing to see that there are now plenty opportunities for formal education in the area, although there’s arguably still no better way to learn a skill (like game development) than by practicing it as a hobby while working in some soulless part-time job.
So that was TGS 2005. Not bad, but I’m not sure I’d go back next year if I wasn’t already in Tôkyô. Seeing new games and hardware trimmed with hot Japanese booth-babes is fun, but it’s no substitute for just sitting down with a good game, which is the heart of the videogame experience.
Sunday 18 September
After going back to Ôta after TGS, I again came into Tôkyô to meet some friends from Melbourne in Ikebukuro. The end result of so much travelling was that I spent about 12000¥ over the weekend. Ouch! Though there’s nothing to do in Ôta, the expense of going to Tôkyô was really hurting me.
I met up with Jim, Hamish, and J***** (I’m so sorry J: I messed up your name when I met you, and I still can’t remember!), in Ikebukuro. The two J’s are animators, and had just finished a big job on the upcoming Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows before heading to Japan on the pretence of going to TGS for work. Our first stop was Gyôza Stadium at Namco World, a sort of theme-park inside a shopping centre. Gyôza stadium is basically a hawker centre that sells nothing but a bewildering array of gyôza, and drinks. I could only afford to sample the daiichi megumi (if I recall the name correctly – 500¥ for 5 pieces), but they were pretty good.
After that, we went to Harajuku, where we walked through the Meiji-jingû shrine and surrounding gardens before taking to the busy shopping strips.
A giant shrine-gate at the entrance to the Meiji-jingû area.
The guys did want to check out the famed ‘Harajuku girls’ that get costumed up and show off on the bridge outside Meiji-jingû, but it was too hot for many of them to be out. Something worth noting about the bridge and TGS is that of the apparently significant number of men who like doing cosplay in women’s clothing, most if not all are quite ugly to begin with, and make horrendous-looking girls. [Shudders…]
After Harajuku, we headed for Akihabara so the guys could check out the huge stores there specializing in comics, animation, and related paraphernalia. In one store, I found this great example of Engrish:
What a jerk!
Then it was back to Ikebukuro, where we watched some Family Guy and talked about geek culture. :-) The guys went to check out Shibuya in the evening, but sadly I had to leave about 8pm to make sure I’d get the last train out to Ôta.
That was probably the best weekend I had while living in Ôta. (Was? Past tense? Stay tuned…) Thanks to Jim, J*, and Hamish: Japan is the most fun when you’re in good company.
Technorati Tags: anime, Japan, media, Tôkyô, videogames
A month in Japan (part the third)
Monday 12 September
The LDP won the election! Hooray! Gotta love that Koizumi Junichiro: he’s a gutsy guy, and he’s got great hair.
Monday, I got up early to climb Kanayama, the local mountain, as I’d intended to the day before but hadn’t been able to because of the rain.
To call Kanayama a mountain (that’s the yama part of the name) is overly generous: it’s more of a hill. It took me about an hour to get to the top from the Daikôin, but that was only because I didn’t know exactly where I was going: several of the tracks up there say they lead to car-parks, including the one that leads to the ruins at the peak. It was around 30ºC on the day, and by the time I reached the top, the bottle of Pocari Sweat I’d bought to keep my fluids up was all gone. Fortunately there were taps in the appallingly kept toilets at one of the peak car-parks.
Ôta doesn’t, in the main, have a lot going for it; it’s a visually uninspiring town. But the Kanayama ruins were by far the nicest thing I’d seen in Japan so far, with a collection of stone structures and shrines on show. Here are some highlights:
The natural environment in Japan is often very beautiful. This is a view from the track up Kanayama, just after passing through the Daikoin complex.
This pool is one of the first notable things one will see passing through the Kanayama ruins. I don’t know what it’s for, but it’s nice.
This appears to be the main shrine on Kanayama. In the shade to the left, the ground is green. That’s the same moss that my brother Daniel said he saw covering the ground near temples in Kyôto. For me, this was the first time I’d seen it.
Some temples and shrines have pillars like this, that read “may peace prevail on earth.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s too bad some cultures haven’t grown up enough that we can give up fighting just yet.
A corridor of shrine gates (torî). These mark out sacred spaces.
A statue of a fox (inari). I’m not sure if this fox and its partner (not pictured) are meant to guard the shrine, or whether the shrine is to placate the fox spirits. In Japanese superstition, foxes are supernatural, and often take the forms of beautiful women to play tricks on humans.
A view of the countryside West of Kanayama and Ôta. I did take pictures of Ôta, trying to get one showing my apartment and workplace, but it was my first day with the camera, and it didn’t work out.
So, that was Kanayama. It’s probably the best of what Ôta has to offer. My next set of stories, like this one, deserve a post of their own.
A month in Japan (part the second)
So, I’ve been slack. What started out as a series of posts on two weeks in Japan still hasn’t been finished after a month here. It’s been long enough that I’ve started to forget what days I did things on, so this may be a little bit vague. On the plus-side, the boring bits have probably faded from my mind. The saga continues…
Monday 5 September
I can’t remember what I did on the Sunday, but Monday the fifth was my 24th birthday. With nary a person to wish me well, I decided to go to Tôkyô. Until this point, I’d been unable to recharge my laptop, because I couldn’t find, in Ôta, a power-plug adaptor for Australian appliances. Ah, actually, now I remember I’d spent Sunday riding around Ôta looking in vain for adaptors. So Monday I went in search of them in Akihabara, a district of Tôkyô famed for discount electronics.
I used the 2-hour train-ride to study Japanese. Already, I’d started to understand my textbook a lot better, leaping ahead through lessons from one to another recognition of something someone had said to me in a store.
At the end of the line, Asakusa Station, I was thoroughly bewildered about which way I was facing, and asked a man standing outside, in Japanese “which way is north?†He pointed uncertainly in a direction I later discovered was something more like east than north, and delivered the first English word I’d heard out of a Japanese person’s mouth since I arrived “perhaps.†I arigatô gozaimashita-ed him and went on my way, trusting my own instincts rather than his.
As it turned out, I wasn’t totally wrong, for heading what I thought was North I did in fact arrive at the Sensô-ji, a famous temple north of Asakusa station. The Sensô-ji’s most striking feature is, hanging on its front gate, the most gigantic red lantern I have ever seen. I didn’t have a camera at the time, so here’s a picture I poached.
Something worth noting about Japanese temples is that while they’re nice to look at, there isn’t really a lot you can do there. For visitors, the bulk of a temple is screened off. You can see the main hall, but through a screen, and you certainly can’t walk in on their tatami with your dirty gaijin shoes. And yes, there are definitely people around Tôkyo who would walk in with their shoes on. People can go around the side to enter and pray, but I’m not sure what they’d think if a foreigner took a seat in there and started meditating. As a Western Zen practitioner, the idea of praying to a Buddha seems antithetical to the ideals of Buddhism, but whatever…
From the Sensô-ji, I continued to get my bearings, wandering into a department store before resolutely setting out to walk to Akihabara. Map distances in Tôkyo can be deceptive, and it probably took me the better part of an hour to get to there, given that I went the wrong way at least once. It was raining all day, too. Fortunately, I had an umbrella, but the city streets were covered in a layer of water, and I had holes in the soles of my shoes. My feet got soaked, and very sore into the bargain.
Though Den-den town in Akihabara has a reputation as a good place to buy discount electronics, I didn’t find it particularly mindblowing. I did see some interesting things not available outside Japan, such as Sharp’s Zaurus [model number], an Linux-based PDA with a built-in 4MB hard-disk. Computers, in fact, are extraordinarily cheap and small nearly everywhere you go here: a lightweight Sony Vaio that might cost you AU$4000 in Australia is about 120,000¥ here (maybe AU$1500). But then, I spend most of my time working with computers, so Akihabara was pretty mundane. What was interesting to me, though, was that a lot of the electronics stores in Akihabara employ Indian guys who can speak English to foreigners. I managed to find out, from one such guy, on the seventh and top floor of a multilevel electronics store, that the power adapter I needed was of a kind that I’d seen numerous times in Ôta: I just hadn’t known what it was.
Though my trip was, in a sense, unneccessary, it introduced me to what I was missing in Ôta, what I’d come here for: some of the major cities of the world. Tôkyo is a sprawling, sometimes stinking, sometimes very shabby metropolis. But it’s damned impressive, even the most unkempt parts like Asakusa, part of the old Shitamachi (literally downtown, or under-town). With all its obvious flaws, Tôkyo is still a monument to the great power of human intellect and industry, a great congregation of humanity in pursuit of happiness, wealth, and progress. As important as Ôta, a factory town, is to human industry, it’s not at the center of things, and at the center is where I want to be.
Tôkyo is inspiring. After seeing it, Ôta seems like a prison.
(After returning from Tôkyo, I went out to an Ôta izakaya called Gin for a few birthday drinks. Great sashimi and interesting yakitori [including skewers with nothing but chicken skin on them]. Thanks for taking me out, guys.)
Tuesday 6—Thursday 8 September
For the next three days, I had training at Takasaki in Saitama prefecture, about an hour from Ôta. On Tuesday I yet again caught the wrong train, to Akagi, got off early at Aioi, made a phone call to NOVA HQ in Tôkyo to say I’d be late while waiting for the train to Kiryû, but then managed to get to Takasaki for training with about 2 minutes to spare. It was a mistake I haven’t made since.
As with orientation, training was for me alone. Paul, the trainer at the branch, had a great sense of humour, as did the staff at the branch, and though learning to implement the extremely packed lesson format at NOVA was a little stressful, the three 8-hour days I spent in Takasaki were fun. I got to meet several more instructors, and see them at work. One, Brendan, had an MA in Japanese Studies, which he’d got for writing a thesis on how Japanese attitudes to Nobunaga Oda had changed since the Meiji Restoration (based on an analysis of textbooks). Again, I came face to face with instructor lack of Japanese ability. Behind Brendan, and Richard, a guy from Adelaide who’s been here six years and has a Japanese wife, my Japanese was probably the third best in the office, and at that stage I was only up to Chapter 8 or 9 of my beginners’ textbook. Disappointing.
Friday 9 September
My first day teaching a full schedule (a whole 5 lessons over four hours) at the NOVA branch in the Aeon shopping centre here in Ôta. For the most part, unremarkable. Preparing lessons and filling out reports in the meagre 10-minute breaks allotted is a hard task for a newcomer, but in the days to come, it turned into a habit rather than something to be thought about too much. As a beginner, one can teach only a very small range of ability levels, and one doesn’t take free conversation (VOICE) or kids’ classes, so shifts can be a little monotonous. But it’s a pleasure to meet students, and the shifts, for a part-timer, are very short. Easy money, perhaps…
Saturday 10 September
Today I took the plunge and went up to Yamada Denki to secure my own mobile phone, no thanks to NOVA who led me to expect they’d help and then didn’t. Though I asked, reciting a phrase I’d meticulously and (I now know) incorrectly composed in my notebook, if anyone could help me in English, the only person in the store who could was busy at the time. If you thought Japanese people learned English at school, and could speak it, think again: if you’re out of the major cities, odds are they can’t. So I tried in my broken Japanese, and to my surprise, once the woman who spoke English was free to help, it was usually easier to keep the explanations in Japanese. So, I got a phone, a Sharp 903SH with a 3 megapixel camera built in. 15000¥ (about AU$180) on a 1-year contract. I swear the same phone would have cost me at least AU$600 in Australia. We sure do get ripped off at home.
At night, I went out to Gin again, this time with a much larger group of gaijin, including instructors from schools other than NOVA. Though it’s fun to go out drinking, staff at the izakayas around here don’t have the best ordering and billing practices. I kept getting sent beers I hadn’t ordered, and as a result ended up being both drunker, and poorer, by the end of the night than I intended. Once Gin closed, we went to an all-night place where my intention to order nothing but Coke was actually heeded, but we didn’t stay there long.
Sunday 11 September
The national election is today, so I can say goodbye to the vans waking me up with blaring political slogans at 8am in the morning. I was going to try climbing the local mountain today, but it was rained all day. Just as well, since I was hung over from drinking beers I hadn’t ordered. I stayed inside and… I don’t know. Did I read a book? Somewhere around this point I managed to get internet access by plugging an Airport Express into my upstairs neighbour’s broadband modem, so creating a wireless network that I could use in my own apartment. So I may have spent the day Skyping or something.
An uneventful close to a big week. More coming up.
Two weeks in Japan (part the first)
On 31 August 2005, I left Melbourne on a Malaysia airlines flight from Melbourne to Narita airport near Tokyo, to take up a job working in Japan as an English instructor at a NOVA language school. The last two weeks have been fairly hectic, but I’ve finally secured constant internet access and am settling down. Here’s the first part of the long awaited (and just plain long) story of my first two weeks in the land of the rising sun (and giant robots and cool vending machines).
Wednesday 31 August
It takes seven hours to fly from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur, where I had to change flights. There were six new NOVA instructors on the flight, but we were scattered across the plane, so we didn’t get to talk much. I watched Garden State on my PowerBook on the way to KL, which was okay. The food wasn’t bad, but the cakes that Malaysian Arlines served with every meal were quite bland.
At KL, I started to feel like I’d flown out of the world and into a book or the TV. Malaysia, I was surprised to find out, is actually a real country, and I was there! Flying around the world (or even just across a little bit of it, as the case may be), you finally experience the reality of living not just in a city or country, but on a planet. It’s a great feeling.
Thursday 1 September
By the time my plane flew out of KL, I was too tired to be worried about whether it would crash and I would die. I got a good 5 hours sleep before being woken up for breakfast. As we flew across the countryside surrounding Narita, I got my first glimpse of the blue-glazed, tiled roofs that I had previously thought only a figment of anime designers imaginations. The Japanese countryside is a very different sight to the Australian landscape: a patchwork of deeply green fields, sprinkled with houses and crossed by rivers and canals. There’s a lot of water in Japan, and it makes it a beautiful country to look at.
At Narita, I discovered that squat toilets aren’t at all difficult to use, and met Simon, a British man who is one of NOVA’s human resource managers. Simon was a pleasure to talk to all the way to Kita-senju, where he left me to catch the express train to Ôta-shi by myself, but he was overly focused on what happens in Tôkyô. He failed to explain that since I wouldn’t be doing my orientation at Shinjuku with everyone else on my flight, NOVA wouldn’t help me organize a mobile phone connection. This had follow-on consequences later. He also didn’t help me learn to use the old ticket machines which you tend to see out in Gunma prefecture, where I was headed, assuming that, just as in Tôkyô, I’d have access to ticket machines with English language instructions. Okay, so he lives in Tôkyô, that’s understandable; but when you consider that he manages NOVA’s HR for all of Japan, you’d expect he’d know something about Gunma, which is only 2 prefectures away.
Chris Goulburn, otherwise known as Kit, met me at Ôta station to take me to my apartment in a block called Shido Palace. Since the one guy who lived there before had left that morning to go back to the UK, a professional cleaner was doing his work on my apartment, so Kit gave me a tour of Ôta. First, we picked up some lunch at a nearby 7-11, before heading to the Daikoin temple complex at the base of Kanayama, the mountain at the north end of town.
When we got back to my apartment, the apartment still wasn’t finished, so we continued our tour of Ôta on bikes, riding down the major roads to see the assortment of mega-stores (such as PC Depot and Toys ‘R’ Us) that Ôta is home to, and to the big mall on the outskirts of town, where I now work.
Kit was a good introduction to the gaijin here: in England he was an illustrator, whose specialty was Victorian-style etchings. He’s an intelligent guy, he speaks a little Japanese, has a Japanese girlfriend, opinions on numerous topics, and has flown small planes. That kind of thing impresses me. He was also kind enough to pass on to me the bike he’d inherited from a previous tenant here at Shido Palace. Bikes are essential around Ôta, which is relatively sprawling for a Japanese city, so kudos to you, Kit.
Friday 2 September
In Australia, I am too small to buy clothes at most stores, so I didn’t bring many work clothes with me. My mission for the day was to buy just one shirt, which proved somewhat difficult. After recieving some help about sizes at a shirt store, in Japanese, I proceeded to present the shop assistant with a ladies’ shiirt, which was the only plain white one I could find. With a little more help, I finally got a white men’s shirt.
The store’s slogan, by the way, is “Well Best Selection Shirts.” Brilliant.
The rest of the day, I think I slept or something.
Saturday 3 September
My first Saturday was spent at NOVA orientation in Kiryû, about an hour away by train. Ôta and the surrounding areas aren’t exactly jumping with activity, so I was the only orientee. I was extremely miffed to discover that though Simon had hyped NOVA’s ability to help you get a mobile phone, the service was not available to instructors doing their orientation outside of Tokyo. Had I known that, I would have tried to get a phone earlier.
Orientation was made more adventurous by my not knowing how to use the trains properly. I first bought the wrong train ticket (express rather than local), then caught a train to Akagi instead of Isesaki. My next “mistake,” getting off the Akagi train early, at Aioi, proved to be a good decision, because it was only one stop away from Kiryu, albeit by a train that only comes once an hour or so. Even though the station attendant was relatively unhelpful, he did show me how to use the Japanese-only ticket machines that you find in this area, which was obviously something I needed to know.
Up until this point, I had been thinking that Ôta was a pretty decent place. Things here are very convenient, you can get great food at the supermarket, and my Japanese was getting better as a result of being asked strange questions I’d never encountered in my textbook, such as “would you like ice in your coffee?”, “would you like chopsticks?”, and “eat-in (kochira de) or take-away (mocchi kaeri, テークアウト)?” My main frustration was that very few of the instructors here have bothered to learn Japanese, and don’t even understand basic phrases like “oyasumi nasai” (good night) and “matta, ne…” (see you later). Otherwise, Ôta seemed like a place good enough that I was worried I might like it too much, and give up my ambition of moving to Tôkyô.
And then I actually went to Tôkyô...
Buy my stuff!
Since I’m moving to Japan, I have some stuff to get rid of… to sell, even. Let me know if you want it (contact details on the about page). Purchasing will be easiest if you live in Melbourne and know me personally. If you don’t like the prices, we can negotiate.
Here’s what I’ve got:
[Update 1 July 2005 : the headphones and some of the CDs have sold (shown in strikethrough). So, too, probably, has the fridge, but that isn’t quite sewn up yet, so let me know if you’re interested.]
Sony MDR-V700 DJ Headphones, $100
(In original box. Ear-pads slightly abraded from use.). These are the best headphones I’ve ever owned, so much so that they’re actually a bit too good for me (they’re better than what I need). Suffice to say, these are pretty close to the ultimate in hi-fi headphones. For serious audiophiles and people with some kind of professional need for accurate sound reproduction. They also cause stuff like this to happen…
Yes, I’m selling that exact model of headphone. (Warning: Claims made about these headphones’ ability to make hot girls kiss each other are intended only to generate humor. I cannot guarantee that the headphones actually will do this, but nor can I guarantee that they won’t…)Palm Tungsten T3 with 1GB SD card and other extras, $300
64MB RAM, 400MHz Intel Xscale Processor, 320*480 64K colour screen. (Not in original box.) Light abrasions on input area, some scratches on body.
Extras: 1GB SD card, USB link-cable/charger with car adaptor, USB card reader.
50-foot-tall book meme
Any fool can tell that I haven’t been posting much, so today I again resort to keeping the blog active with relative nonsense. You know you’re clutching at straws when your last post was a link to an online quiz, and the one you’re writing is a meme iteration.
Thanks to Myst for this, anyway. It is, apparently, the “50 foot tall book meme.” I’m not sure if it is attempting to generate a list of books that, if stacked, would be 50ft high (I suspect it’s there already), or a list that, on-screen, is 50-feet long. If it’s the latter, I suspect people are going to give up before it gets that long.
Whatever the stated aim, it is a fabulous opportunity to show off how many books you’ve read on a list to which others have added titles they deemed worthy of mention. Myst’s already done an admirable job of flaunting how well-read she is, so now it’s my turn.
The deal, by the way, is that if you replicate this meme on your own site, you have to mark the books you’ve read, and add three more of your own to the end of the list.
Books I’ve read all the way through are in bold. I’ve also added some commentary. Note that the markings for books I’ve read become sparser as the list gets longer and ever more obscure.
Eight Virtues
If you don’t get this post, don’t worry. It’s a geek thing.
Today I’ve been redrafting the chapter in my thesis about the history of RPGs, and had to find out what the Eight Virtues from the Ultima series were. Ultima IV was a real milestone in videogame history, in that its hero, the Avatar, appeared in a world that had just been saved from villains three times. The people of Britannia were looking for ways to transcend their bloody past, and were building a code of ethics to guide them into a glorious future. It was the first RPG I know of that really thought about what was needed to build a good society, and possibly the first videogame that incorporated an explicitly formulated moral code that the hero was expected to adhere to.
Those whose memory of the games is clearer than mine may remember that the Eight Virtues of the Avatar are:
- honesty
- compassion
- valour
- justice
- sacrifice
- honour
- spirituality
- humility
Ultimas IV—VI asked players a series of questions to discover what virtues they favoured, to determine what the PCs attributes and class would be. Some of those questions have resurfaced as online, Ultima-themed “personality” tests. There’s one that uses graphics from Ultima IV (lots of clicking through required to get to the test), which, like Ultima IV itself, asks so few questions that you’ll have an affinity with a different virtue every time. Alternatively, there’s one that asks loads of questions but doesn’t conclusively tell you which virtue you favour.
These tests are so far from being valid that it’s ridiculous, but the questions are all based on imaginary situations, and they’re fun for nostalgia’s sake. If you’re looking for humour, there’s also the oddly-named Test of Avatarishness Purity Test, which doesn’t really test your personality, or have anything to do with the Virtues, but is a lot more fun than the others. It asks, among other things, “Have you ever been threatened by big red evil faces on your computer screen?” I have, and was deemed 32% Avatarish.
Tests aside, which of the virtues do I favour? Well, I think it’s honesty.
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