Green Toes

So I went to the garden centre recently and saw this cat alcohol:

Uhm...

 I had no idea you could do that.

I was buying some pots for my pinapple plants.  They've rooted quite well, so I thought I'd go and buy some larger pots for them.  I read that they need 30cm pots (fkin enormous) in order to fruit, so I thought I'd just go out and buy the final size they will eventually need.  I've already got the soil outside doing nothing (it's Winter) so I just filled them up with that and voila.

It'll take them about 3 years to fill these out, apparently.

If you ignore the drying clothes, the horrible windows and the terrible side stand thing it might look nice

I've bought the strawberries in because the wind gets absolutely bitter, and it'll freeze over Winter.  Apparently the strawberries might not like that.

The mint is moulting for Winter, and I'm trying to make the rosemary grow tall on one side, medium on the second and shorter on the third, so it's a bit bald at the moment.  I don't know if that's even possible to be honest.

I'd love to have a room in a house that I could just do whatever I wanted to, but owning property isn't feasible in this life, so this is the best alternative I can come up with.  Pineapples, strawberries, mint, rosemary, cactus and a spider plant all in one area - at least it's somewhat unusual!

The Final Countdown

So December is hurtling towards us.

For most people this won't really mean much beyond Christmas and a nice break, but for those of us who are studying the worlds most difficult language, December is the time of reckoning.

On Sunday December the second, the bi-annual exam will happen all over the world.  All five levels are taken by hopeful combatants at dozens and dozens of venues.

In all, more than 100,000 entrants will battle against the nefarious puzzle masters.  This always astounds me, who knew so many people were studying Japanese?

Around 40,000 will pass their respective exams, although this will obviously vary year by year.  Sometimes you get lucky and they make it easy, but more often than not some xenophobic old fart bemoans the lack of Japanese language understanding among foreigners living in Japan, forcing the examining body to make the questions more difficult in order to prove the academic rigor of their tests - thereby completely ignoring the single biggest problem with that JLPT (there is no interview or spoken portion, nor any writing section, meaning two pillars of language understanding are completely ignored).  This makes the JLPT great for receptive skills, terrible for production.



Last time I took the test I had been studying Japanese for exactly 6 months (I've lived here for ages, but was working and training all day, every day (including weekends) which left me no free time to study) and failed the N2 by 20 points.  This wasn't a huge surprise given how little time I had been studying for, and the experience was both a great measure of my progress and an excellent practice run.

The test is out of 180 in total, so I wasn't too far off.  Hopefully, after another 6 months study, I will pass it this time around.

I have confidence in my listening ability, and I've been working my ass off to learn as many kanji as possible, so I think I can probably break even on that front.

The final section is reading comprehension, which is my weakest area by far.  If a combatant gets less than 25% (I think it's 25%, but even if it's not exactly one quarter, it's around there) on any one part of the test they automatically fail, regardless of their scores in the other sections.  I am absolutely terrified that I will have a mare on the reading comprehension section and essentially invalidate the hard work I've put in elsewhere.

In preparation I'm working through two or three reading questions every night, along with the obligatory kanji practice.  The reading questions I am studying can take me anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour depending on how difficult they are, at which point I recruit my wife to check over my answers.

This is in addition to my school homework which usually takes an hour or two a night, and my kanji review.  For reference, I usually spend between 4-6 hours a day on kanji alone, so between 6 and 9 hours a day of private studying.  I mention this so that in the future, regardless of whether I pass the upcoming exam or not, no one can accuse me of not trying hard enough.

(I am a tryhard, with everything.)

(Although I did take this past weekend, Monday and today off to do some writing work.)

Also, in unrelated news, I published a book.  Buy the ebook here, UK, america, Japan, France, India.  Buy the physical book here, UK, america, Japan, France.

I don't know why I included France, because it's ENGLISH ONLY.  Do not buy it if you can't read English.  Also, if you can't read English, why are you here?

It's not the best book in the world, but it is mine.

Another Typhoon?!?!

So there have been a lot of typhoons lately.

This would be great, if I were working.  I say this because it means all the public transport shuts down for a day which means the possibility of going home early, or not going into work at all.

It's not such a great thing when you consider people usually die.

The biggest one this year was no joke, killing dozens through flooding and landslides.  The problem is that the areas most affected are always rural (there's no land left to slide in Tokyo) which makes access difficult at the best of times (narrow one lane roads are fun to drive around, until you need to fit an ambulance and fire engine on them).  Couple this inherent inaccessibility with the destruction of the already cramped roads and you have a knotty problem.

Adding yet another layer is the demographics - rural dwellers skew older, meaning they are more fragile and less mobile.  Not a set of characteristics you want when you suddenly have to run away from a wall of mud that's bearing down on your house.

Anyway, todays typhoon is much weaker than that, and has created that gentle rain that I find incredibly relaxing, borderline soporific.  Perfect for writing, dozing a bit, then writing some more, so that's what I will do.



I attended an event last weekend, took some pictures and wrote a thing.

A few of the pictures I took are on that page, but I ended up with about 650 or so from the event which means I have a lot left over.

Smile pls

 So these guys made a game called Projection Remains.  It was actually really well made, felt good to play and was polished beyond reason for a student game.  The only downside was that I got there almost immediately after the event had opened on the first day and they were still sorting their stuff out.  The lights went out and there was a mouse cursor in the middle of the screen for the entire time I was playing.

I came back around towards the end of the event and they were much more relaxed so it was probably just first day jitters.

Seriously, smile!

 This guy was studying to be an environment artist and had made some pretty cool things.  I tried chatting to him about his work but no dice.  He probably couldn't understand my crappy Japanese.  Seemed like a nice enough guy though.

The robot future approacheth, one finger at a time

 I didn't see it moving, but I assume this thing is a robotic chess playing arm?  It looks like it would be a fairly formidable presence at any chess tournament, not least because it looks like it could flick a piece at you with deadly force and accuracy.

Oh Japan...

Look.  If the internet has taught us anything it's that the world is full of perverts.  The world has always been full of perverts, but now it is plain for all to see.  What I don't understand is why we're suddenly seeing weird shit like this pop up outside of the seedy sex shops.

They were pretty soft though.

Jazz hands

 This little thing was a great example of why VR is so cool.

It's a tiny demo, where you walk along that piece of wood in real life, but you're outside on top of a fucking tall building in the virtual world.  You walk along a short plank, pirate style, and try not to fall off.  If you go out of bounds (step off the plank) you fall to your death.  You may also fall over in real life because the disconnect between your eyes seeing the fall and your ears not feeling anything makes the brain freak out.

I was fine with the heights aspect of it - although it did make me step back (literally) and appreciate the view before I walked the plank - but the falling part of the demo was absolutely not okay.  Guys, seriously.

Plummeting a bajillion feet was fine because I could remind myself that I was in a game, but when the ground got very close, very quickly, I had a mini crisis of being.

When the ground was about waist level (I was falling very fast so I don't know exactly where the switchover occurred) I went from being consciously in control of my everything, to be subconsciously very afraid for my well-being.  It was much more primal than, say, a horror film.  It was a realisation that things were very not okay and that I was about to splat on the floor.

If you ever find yourself falling a long way to your death, take this advice:  Look up.  Look anywhere but the floor.  If you're going to splat, there's no need to pile on the dread before you do.

Then I took the headset off and all was well with the world.

10/10 would fall again.

Fully playable, if you are a pixie

This dude made a very tiny space invaders clone with an arduino, a tiny screen, and (presumably) the world smallest soldering iron.

I have literally no idea how he made something so delicate with those big paws, but it was fully playable and was surprisingly vibrant considering the size of the screen.  It has a speaker in it too.

Brilliant.

Ah yes, I too can relate to this scene.  I can't count the number of times I find myself playing a phone game with a controller, while laying down on the floor in my room with my stuffed toys and talking into a microphone strapped to my face while being watched by dozens of people and being filmed at the same time.  Truly a scene we can all identify with.

Look how fluffy her socks are.

I have no idea why I'm including this picture, but I didn't want to interrupt her stage show performance (demonstration?) to say thanks for the pic, so I threw up the peace sign and she reciprocated, then immediately got told off by a producer.  I felt bad.

Sorry.

Damnit Bill from marketing, you had one job

This costume looks like it took flippin' ages to make.  Then they stood her in front of the single busiest backboard at the entire show, making it nearly impossible to make out any of the details on the costume itself. 

The model was good (she actually smiled!) but I have no idea what game this was for, so I don't know if it served its purpose particularly well.

The same hat for 4 days too...

Indies are where it's at.  This dude stood behind this screen for four days, showing it off to anyone who wanted to play.  I'm not entirely sure whether he has any intention of ever selling this, whatever it is, but that dedication is something to be admired.  Also, he was wearing a chicken hat.

I mean, it's nearly a smile.  Sort of

The cosplay section was absolutely jam packed.  The effort they put into their gear was universally amazing, and I don't think a single one of them were anything less than 100% committed to the thing.

I don't really get it personally, but talking to some of them outside the show it's an interesting mix of getting to be something they are not in real life, designing and making clothes and accessories, and outright showing off hot bods in a somewhat socially acceptable way.

I feel like the last type of person would be better served going to the beach and wearing something skimpy, but there aren't any good beaches within 100km of Tokyo, so it's certainly easier this way.

This character is from a game called Nier Automata which no one can pronounce correctly

The cosplayers are overwhelmingly female, and this is going to surprise no one, the photographers are overwhelmingly male.

I didn't know it, but it turns out there is a definite 'nerd with camera,' type, and he is a distinct beast from 'doesn't leave the house and only plays games,' nerd.  I don't know how, but 'nerd with camera,' has absolutely shit tons of money (seriously, I saw a guy carrying four Nikon SLR's each with multi thousand dollar lenses) and absolutely no manners.  'Nerd with camera,' is, alas, easy to dislike because of both these factors.

I was, at first, worried that I too was 'nerd with camera,' but then I remembered my bank account balance and worried no longer.

The character is called 2B, and yes it has a distinctly philosophical bent

I don't know how this woman sees where she is going, but she looked at the camera the whole time so I assume she can.  Either that or she is secretly a bat and doesn't need her eyes to see.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is the show these characters are in.  Yes I consider the robots characters.  No I do not know what 'Neon Genesis Evangelion,' means.

 The dude in this suit was sweating his ass off the entire time.  It wasn't even that hot outside, but I don't think inch thick acrylic is particularly breathable.

Hakodake no blues.  The sadness that comes from only having a box?  The blues of only having a box?  Only having a box sadness?  That feeling you get when you've only got a box?  I'm not sure how to translate the title of this one.

 This game was another fun one.  The guy on the screen is constantly running to the left (side-note, games run from left to right (think Mario) because early platformers (like Mario) did, and the tradition has continued ever since.  A lot of the world, and most early game designers wrote with their right hands, from left to right, so games followed suit.  This guy is breaking with tradition, go guy!) and when you lower the cardboard box and hide inside, the running guy does too.  The objective is to make it home without being spotted.

The one pose to rule them all.  If you want to be a model in Japan, learn how to do this.

 This is probably my favourite model photo.  The background is a bit busy, the hair is a bit frizzy, there's some moire if you look hard enough, but overall I think it's pretty good.

Shout to shoot.  Writes itself.

The great thing about the indie and student section is that there's always a game with a simple premise that is surprisingly fun.  This guy is shouting into a microphone in order to fire a gun which he is aiming with his right hand.  Simple, effective, fun, makes you look like an idiot to any observer.  Ticks all the boxes you need for a good VR experience.

Overall it was a solid event with tons to do.  It helps that I played all the games on Thursday and Friday before General Public came in and made the lines really long, but I'd probably still go even if I didn't have a press pass.

What's Up

 So we start with a sign I saw on the way to badminton.  I'm not entirely sure what it's trying to say, nor am I sure what the picture is of.  For reference this was taken outside a hairdressers.

 I've been growing strawberries for a while, and the harvest has really increased towards the end of Summer.  Apparently strawberries are at their best one year after planting, so year two will hopefully be even better.

 I've got 3 different types.  One is a great plant with amazing red flowers, that produces half a malformed strawberry ever 3 months.  One is a monster that creates great big thumb sized things, but once ever month or so.  The last type is what produced the above.  Sometimes they're big, sometimes they're small, sometimes they even look like strawberries - but they're far more productive than the other types I have.

 I don't know about you, but I love playing happily to exhaustion.  Especially when I can do so at the popular spots of the metropolitan area.

There are so many native english speakers in tokyo and they couldn't find a single one to point out how weird this sounds.  Amazing.

(Foreign visitors only)

 I went to watch the sumo this week.  I'm not sure what this sign is trying to say, but I hope Will is okay.

It turns out that I'm not a big fan of sumo.  It's pretty dull, and the slowness isn't helped by the fact that each bout lasts less than 5 seconds with a 10 minute break between.  I'd like to think I'm fairly patient, but good lord a whole lot of nothing happens for a long time.

One weird thing I noticed is that even though I had less than zero interest in proceedings, when the crowd roared the hairs still raised as if I were watching something I cared about.  I found it pretty interesting that this is a human reaction seemingly regardless of situation.

Bonus - Wally of Where's Wally fame is somewhere in this picture.  Can you find him?

 After finding Wally, we found this burger in the local supermarket.

 It was less than a quid, and tasted bad.

 Really, really bad.

 My latest plant growing project is the mighty pineapple.  Pineapples are great because they're the only fruit/vegetable I know of that eat you, as you're eating them.  They also looking incredibly cool when they're growing in your house.

So the search was on for a system that would let me know one.

There are basically two techniques people use to grow them on.  Both start with buying a pineapple.  You rip the top off (or cut it off, making sure to get rid of as much flesh as possible) so you're left with the above.  Take off the bottom few leaves.  And this is where the techniques begin to diverge.  Do you take off a lot, or a few?  In the early stages there aren't many roots which means the plant will be losing a lot more water through evaporation than it will be pulling in through the roots.  I'm not sure how bad this is, but I bought 4(!!!!) pineapples and did a test.  I left a lot of leaves on two, and only a few on two.

The next step is another divider.  Do you leave the bottom of the this bundle of leaves to dry for a day before planting?  I did with this one, but the results were unfavourable, so I didn't with the others.

The last point is whether to plant these stems directly into soil, or start them in water first.  Those initial 4 were split 2 by 2, water/soil.  Unfortunately only one survived.  So I bought a couple more.  So far, of those two, only one is left.

For those interested, what keeps happening is the middle leaves keep rotting from the inside out, so I'm fairly sure that you have to stop water getting into the leaves before they're growing.  One has tons of tiny little roots sprouting and I'm hopeful it'll turn into a plant one day.

The other has a few roots but is much younger than the other so it's still early days.

The plants take 3 or 4 years to mature and develop fruit, and require another plant to fertilise the fruit (which is why I've bought so many). 

In Vietnam we saw loads, and they look like they've been glued onto an entirely unrelated plant by a vandal.  Seriously, check them out on google.

This is my mint plant.  It's growing like mint, which is to say like a weed.  What I didn't know was that the mint flowers are absolutely miniscule and incredibly dainty.  Totally at odds to the plant itself.

I'm including this picture because it made me laugh.  It's an ad call for engineers, but if you make them look like utter idiots why would they join your recruitment company?

Anyway, that's it for now.  I've finished some more exams, but I have some more important ones coming up (nearly finished with it all!) which is why I've not updated in a while.

I'll keep taking pictures of engrish wherever I see it though, so next update hopefully I'll have some more pics.

It's Very Warm Right Now

So Japan is experiencing something of a heat wave right now.

There are a number of areas in Japan that have experienced temperatures over 40degC, but around here it's generally around 35-36 degC, with the highest temperature being around 37.

For the most part this just means sweating a lot whenever the idea of moving around outside arises.  It also means the electricity bills go up quite a lot, as do the clothes washing costs.

However.  Someone in this household (not me) thought we needed more socks.  But.  Not socks for humans.

These cute socks with a bear waving are for the sofa.  I end up moving it around a lot, and the socks stop the legs scratching the floor.

Understandable when explained, still weird though.

Don't be a Prick

So here's a story from today.

It was 37-38 degC in central Tokyo, and on the way to school I saw a homeless dude drinking a half full bottle of water on the stairs.  I thought I'd be a good samaritan and go buy some water to give to him, so I headed over to the convenience store.

Inside the convenience store there is an obnoxious, balding, smelly bastard from god knows where, shouting and screaming at the cashier.  His horrible, obnoxious wife from the deep, pushes past everyone and starts shouting along with the horrible husband.

No one is doing anything, so I walk up to the guy and tell him to shut up and fuck off, because picking on a poor defenceless 50 year old woman who is just trying to do her job is what a monumental cunt would do.

Alas, the prick does not speak english, and his japanese is also dogshit.  He starts giving me middle fingers and shouting unintelligible shit - but at least it's at me and not the clerk.  So I get closer, nose to nose and utter what can only be described as the two most inane, lame and genuinely embarrassing words I think I'll ever utter: 'bring it.'  Luckily captain twatnozzle doesn't speak english, and/or realises the jig is up.

The fuckwit starts threatening to call the police, so I say 'okay,' and wait for him to call the police, at which point he starts screaming like the giant manbaby he is.  At this point the wife he dredged up from fuck knows where, dragged the slime into the street and they were gone.

I went over to the homeless guy, gave him the water and went to school.

I have never wanted someone to punch me more, just so I would have a legitimate excuse to fight back.  I would have been kicked out of Japan immediately, so it's best that the pillock didn't actually punch me, but goddamn would it have been sweet.

It doesn't matter how bad your day is, don't shout and scream at a poor defenceless store clerk.  Just don't do it.

One More Week

So I've been studying Japanese for the past 9 months now.  I don't really feel like I'm improving at the rate I would like to be, but considering that I come from a country that doesn't use chinese characters I'm not surprised.  It's a real uphill struggle to learn them, but without knowing the first thousand or so reading is a real chore.

I was told that it gets easier after learning the first hundred.  This turned out to be untrue, but didn't surprise me on account of people suggesting that Japanese is a logical language.  It's as logical as any other language with thousands of years of history, which is to say it's not.  At the very least it might be considered consistent, which is a step up from English which is wildly inconsistent in so many ways.

Anyway, I've been banging on about learning Japanese for so long that I'm sure everyone is completely bored of it, so I shall move on.

I went fishing again.  This time I caught a boatload of catfisheses.  I think I've got the hang of float fishing that one particular river, and I'm making headway into legering it too.  The later will require some kind of floating bait I think, because the bottom is incredibly silty and the weight will often sink deep into the mud.  This leaves the bait potentially buried in the crud and away from enquiring mouths.  I'm sure a popup boilie would work well, so I'm investigating popup recipes currently.  Or at least, I will after the JLPT N2 exam this Sunday.  That's the exam that will yield a 'business level Japanese,' qualification, showing employers that I'm not a complete novice when it comes to the language.  I'm not going to pass the test this Summer, I'm just not there yet, but come the Winter exam I expect to be in a much better position.

I don't know how that exam talk snuck in there, but back to the fishing:

Not a fish, but on a slow day I went caught a few crabs for fun.  I love crab fishing!

It's incredible just how ugly catfish are.  It's like someone went out of their way to design the ugliest fish imaginable, giving it fitting traits to boot.  I'm told people eat these things.

The first five I pulled out of the river were small, but the thrill of being able to catch something with some kind of regularity was more than enough to make up for the size.  I ended up floating a cockle at about 2.5 metres, letting the flow of the river take it to a shallow spot.  I ground baited that spot, then had to wait all of 5 minutes for the bites to start.  It took me a few hours to get this tactic down, but once I found the depth and a few good spots they were easy picking.

They're awfully spiny too, I got stabbed a couple of times.

The leger was a case of wanging a weight upstream and leaving it.  I had a heavy weight left free on the line, so anything taking the bait wouldn't be fighting the weight.  I left the reel in free spool mode or whatever it's called, and let the fish hook themselves.  I'm told this is a good way to catch the bigger fish out there, but I didn't have a way of weeding out the smaller ones, so of the two I caught this way, neither were more than 40 cm long.  The problem with catfish is their mouths are as big as the fish is long, so even if I were to use the biggest boilies the small fish would still be big enough to nab them.  I might try boilies at some point in the future though because you never know, it might be an effective deterrent for the tiddlers.


With both leger and float I found that catfish are harder to catch than, say, carp.

A had a fair number on the line that managed to wriggle free, and I had a fair number of bites that didn't connect.  I think they're more wary by nature and don't swallow the whole bait immediately like other species do.  This might just be poor technique on my part (highly likely) but even the leger that is theoretically self-hooking had to be taken up pretty quickly, otherwise they'd get away.

That was not the case with this fish though.

This monster fish, measuring 3 hands from thumb to little finger, and weighing a beastly 7kg (15lbs) absolutely devoured whatever I had on the end of the float at that time (I forget).  I was using a cheap 7 ft telescopic rod of questionable quality, on a cheap reel, both designed for light lure fishing all day and as such, both incredibly lightweight.  Needless to say, there was a lot of involuntary unspooling of line to keep the rod from bending too much, and to keep the line intact.  I use heavy line in the 8lbs range because I'm not a very subtle person, but I was still worried about the knots and whatknot.

It had a big fat belly which I did take a picture of, but I was panicking and didn't get a clear shot.  With the lightness of the rod and reel, it took a fairly long time to bring in.  It was great fun, and with this I think I'm hooked.  At the very least, I'll go back to this river whenever I have cause to.

In non fish related dealings, I'm growing a lot of stuff this year.

I've got a strawberry pot that's growing out nicely.  There are always four or five flowers on the go, which gives me a strawberry every other day.  This will hopefully pick up going into Summer as things get even warmer.

I've got a sunflower in a pot.  The head fell off almost as soon as it started growing, which has given rise to a frankenflower that has half a dozen flowers growing in weird positions all over the stem.  My plan is to have at least one yield seeds, which will hopefully give me a self-sustaining sunflower situation.

This picture is from 3 weeks ago.  The plant hasn't really grown, but there is a wicked pepper on there at the moment.

These flowers belong to a pepper.  There's an amazing green pepper growing on there right now, which I'll get round to taking a picture of at some point.

Foot for scale

Finally, the spuds.  They are ginormous, and threatening to take over the whole balcony.  This picture is also a couple of weeks old, and you can't really walk past them without doing damage now.  They're growing over the top of the railing, which I can't say I expected when I tentatively threw the spuds in a couple of months ago.

And that's about it.  I've just been studying mainly.  Not a lot else has happened, but I'm going to try and get out and about with the camera now that the main exams are nearly finished.

I've finished archiving all my analogue photographs, and am moving onto my Grandads film and slides.  I've just checked, and I have 2,000 film pictures of my own scanned now - which is significantly smaller than Grandads collection, so it may take some time.

I chose to do mine first so I could get a hang of using the scanner, colour profiles and all that nonsense.  Hopefully I'll find a few gems once I start, but we'll see.

I Caught Another Fish!

So I went fishing again, and caught another fish.  I didn't lose any equipment either, so that means I got another one over the fish gods.  5-2 to Poseidon, as it currently stands.

My planted strawberry pot is also coming along nicely.  I've had a few strawberries off it so far, and although I'm not really expecting a bumper crop it's nice to go out there and find something nice to nibble occasionally.

There are four different varieties in there, each fruiting at different times.  The ones that are out now are the least prolific, but fruit right through until October (supposedly).  The others will hopefully start up next month, and go for about 3 months non-stop (again, supposedly).  They're pretty tasty, although I've never really liked strawberries.  I just like the colour and their ease of growing.

One of them has red flowers which I've never seen before.  The strawberries on that one are coming in now, so we'll see whether they taste any different.  I'm interested to see what the difference in fruit will be between the different varieties, and whether the distinctions are the growing seasons and colour alone.

We had an entire week off last week, which afforded me the opportunity to take a couple of fishing days.  Honestly, I spent way too long outside instead of studying, but I got a fish, so it was (maybe) worth it.  I spent one day, during the day, catching nothing but a sunburn.  As I was heading home I noticed an absolute ton of activity in the water, so made a note to come back the next day around that time.  It really picks up around 6PM here, to the point where I was constantly getting nibbles from around 6.30 onwards.  I suspect I was seeing a lot of smaller fish picking at the bait, because the float would never fully submerge, it would just bobble a little.  As before, the fish I caught monstered the bait.  In doing so it must have scared something else because there was a lot of fuss at the surface when the float disappeared.  It was a good fight, with a couple of dives at the end to try and keep away from the edge.

my shoes are around 30-35cm long, for comparison.  Caught with some kind of shellfish innards, maybe a cockle or something.

It was some kind of catfish, but which kind is still up for debate.  I'm going to take proper pictures next time, to try and get a verifiable identification.  I'm also going to buy a net and mat, or something to act as a mat.  The netting here was as good as anything to rest the fish on, but I got very wet pulling it out.  Also, look how fat this thing is. 

Last thing for this update - mystery plant.  The scale is off in this picture, but this plant is in an enormous pot, around 50 or 60 litres I think.  If I reveal any of the particulars of how I've prepared it, you'd probably guess what it is, so all I'm giving you is this picture.  I'm pretty excited, although I honestly have no idea how it will do.

I've got about 6 or 7 completely different plants on the go, with a couple of insect attracting varieties, so I'm really, really hoping there will be enough insectoid competition to keep the stuff that killed my melons at bay. 

There really isn't much chance of that, but I can hope.

I caught a fish!

Before I start, there are a couple of things I should point out.  Firstly, I never thought I'd ever actually catch a fish, so I didn't have a net.  I had to lean over the edge and pull it out by the mouth and tail, which isn't great.  I made sure I didn't just support all the weight by the mouth though, so that probably wasn't particularly harmful to the fish.

Secondly, because I never thought I'd ever actually catch a fish, I don't have a mat.  I put it on the grass, but it was half grass and half concrete.  Definitely not great for the fish.

Thirdly, I was shaking so much after hauling it out, that it took ages to get the hook out.  It barely nibbled the hook, so getting it out should have been a piece of cake.  Unfortunately it took ages.  I'll definitely be better about it next time.

Luckily, I pulled out a catfish.  They are hardly dainty, and this one swam off with great haste once it was back in the water.

Two hand lengths

From head to the tip of the tail was about two hand lengths.  I have literally no idea how much it weighed, and I have no idea what a decent sized fish is around these parts.  I just checked, and it was probably a smidge under 40cm.  I caught it on spam, which was a real bastard to keep on the hook.  Next time I'll take a smorgasbord of disgusting and smelly nonsense that humans would never want to eat, just like spam, to throw in instead.

The river was incredibly active, with (I would guess) at least 3 different types of fish all flopping about on the surface.  No idea what any of them were, but they were going strong until at least 10.30 pm.  They all seem to love spam.  I had probably half a dozen enormous bites, but I wasn't quick enough to haul in more than the one fish.

Exceptionally happy with the one fish, having offered up a float, weight and 15 metres of line to Poseidon earlier in the day.

The score so far:  Water Gods 5, me 1.

Kanji Tree

I still haven't caught a fish.  Let's just get that out of the way up front.  I still haven't caught a fish.  I actually saw some fish at my local place though.  They were jumping around like madmen, flip flopping all over the place trying to escape a predator.  The reason I know they were trying to escape a predator was because I saw said predator also jump out of the water, presumably chasing the smaller fish - possibly showing off.  Hard to tell without asking.

So there are definitely fish out there, now all I need to do is catch them.  I've bought some floats so I'm going to try float fishing next.  I'm going to shell out the 5 quid for some spam (bleurgh) and try using that next.  I'm loathe to use fish, crab or other sea food because there are few enough fish left in the sea as it is - using fish to catch other fish sits poorly with me.  Besides, if I use all the fish for bait, there will be no fish left to catch.

Can't argue with that infallible logic.

I'm moving onto the next level of Japanese classes soon.  It turns out Japanese is a difficult language to study, particularly for westerners.  Everything that could possible be different is, making the entire exercise a frustrating and slow process of retraining decades of thought processes.

Yeah...

This is a picture of my Kanji tree.  I think it looks more like seaweed, so I'm calling it my Kanji Kaiso.　漢字海草。 That's probably wrong, but whatever.

This represents so many hours of my life that I don't want to think about.

Each card is a word.  Each word has an English translation and the Japanese Kanji equivalent.  Kanji is chinese characters that have been repurposed by the Japanese for use in their language.

Each single character can have a few different pronunciations, so one kanji might have up to 4 cards in this monstrosity, each with a different word (as an example of the pronunciations).

As far as I can see, there are two basic ways of learning kanji.  One is to learn a single character and every reading of it, then move onto the next and so on.  This has two advantages.  Firstly, you only need to remember a single kanji when writing and reading, and know all 3 or 4 pronunciations.  This makes reading new words a lot easier, because you can puzzle them out with the different sounds, just like in English.

'A,' when read like this is pronounced 'eɪ,' but can also be read as 'ɑ:,' 'eə,' or 'ɑ:,' depending on the letters around it.  This is a stupid way of making of a language, but that's English for you.

Using this method of kanji learning, you know all the variables of a single character, and can just go through each pronunciation until you get the right one.

There are downsides however.  Firstly, how do you know if you've got the correct pronunciation?  If it's a word you've never seen before, you can probably guess the meaning (each kanji sort of represents an idea, concept, verb, noun etc. so seaweed is literally two kanji, 'sea,' and 'plant,' which combined make seaweed) but the pronunciation is more difficult.  After a while you can intuit what is likely to be correct, but not as a beginner like me.

The second downside is personal.  It is physically impossible for me to learn the kanji this way.  I have spent hours over the course of weeks trying to learn half a dozen kanji in this way.  I do not know why it is so hard for me, but taking sounds in isolation and learning a bunch of different pronunciations for a single character is very difficult.  I can't think of an equivalent situation in English, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's why it's so difficult for me.  It's completely alien.

The second method, and the one I'm having more success with, is learning words.

In this way, instead of learning individual pronunciations, you learn entire words based upon the individual kanji.  Sometimes the words are the individual kanji, with an extra character or two afterwards.  More often however, they are strings of kanji.

This has a gargantuan downside that is immediately obvious.  I am basically trying to learn a dictionary.  This is patently stupid.  Unfortunately, it's the only way I can even begin to retain the information.

The other downside is recall speed. 

When reading this, you won't be consciously thinking of the words you're reading - the eyes present information to your brain, bypassing a ton of active thinking areas, presenting the processed information for your consideration with little fuss.

When you're learning, every single word is a struggle.  Every single word has to be considered by various parts of the brain, and processed, and then presented, which takes ages.  Eventually you start understanding a few words here and there on an innate level, and you can read a little more quickly, at a slightly more advanced level.  This continues until you're (theoretically) fluent.

If you learn individual words, really learn those words properly, this is an enormous boon when reading.  You can read passages much more quickly than someone who has to puzzle out sounds for each word as they go.  BUT, when you come across a new words, you have to reach into memory, pull up an entire word with that single kanji in it, break off the useless information, take that sound you've just found, then apply it to the new word.  This takes the grey matter equivalent of an eternity and is a pain in the ass.  To make matters worse, you have a 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4 chance of picking the incorrect pronunciation, which makes the entire process even slower.

I suppose the two methods are basically indexing versus some kind of web.

If you can file away a neat, ordered list of sounds directly related to each individual kanji, you have them stored away to pull up whenever you need them.  But they won't be as fast as a native speaker, until you've used them enough to assimilate them.

If you are a moron like me and throw words into your brain blender wholesale, you'll pick up some words more intuitively, and given enough time be able to puzzle together the semblance of normality through the jumbled web of connections.  But it will take forever.

Oh, and writing uses a completely different part of the brain, so knowing how to read a kanji != to knowing how to write a kanji.  It also takes me longer to learn how to write a kanji than read one...

AAAAARGGGGHHH!!!

Almost Christmas!

So I'm fairly sure Christmas was yesterday, and tomorrow will also be Christmas.

I say this because it's been more than a month and a half since the holidays and yet it feels like minutes have passed.

As a quick recap of the year so far, I was surprisingly ill for a long time, even by my own lofty illness gathering standards.  This spiralled into a few hospital visits where I was brushed off (booooo Japanese healthcare!) towards finding a clinic that I actually think might be halfway decent.  The doctor seemed to care which was nice, and I have hope that I might actually be able to find pain medication now that I'm not simply laughed out of the facility.  Things are looking up!

Now that I've finished with rugby, I've started playing badminton and occasionally fishing.  I've only lost about 7gbp's worth of gear on the three separate occasions fishing has been attempted, which is pretty good in my books.  I've yet to catch anything but rocks, so I'm looking forward to working through shoes, boots and eventually towards shopping trolleys.  At some point next year I expect to get a nibble, then towards the end of this decade I expect a fish might bite.  At my current pace, this is actually the cheapest hobby I've ever partaken in.

I am terrible at badminton.  I cannot play doubles to save my life.  It doesn't help that there's a language barrier (in most other situations a half second pause to consider what to say is acceptable, in a game as fast as badminton that is less acceptable).  What I have found is that I am pretty damned competitive against any of my opponents (they're all either 80, or heavily pregnant) if I just play by myself and ignore my partner.  This is of course bad form, so I only do it when I've stuffed up a dozen previous shots and feel like I need to make amends - or once an hour, whichever comes first.  I am not a team player.

Awa odori festival from a few years ago

A tall building in London, it might be famous or something.  I don't think many people know about it though.  Weird that the tour bus would even drive past it.

I've also bought a scanner, and I'm in the process of digitising all my film.  The eventual aim is to get to my Grandads slides and 35mm, and digitise those before they disintegrate.  At the moment I'm doing mine so I can perfect the process.  If I end up faffing about with his slides and film, there's going to be a fair amount of damage done because some of the slides are fragile to an extent that leads me to suspect he used them to cover roof tiles, or patch up glass in his greenhouse.  Either that, or they're quite old.

I still haven't dialed in the settings for the scanner properly, but I'm getting there.  I'm probably a thousand pictures in at this point so the act of physically loading the pictures is easy enough, but I'm not quite sure of the settings I want to use.  You can scan the pictures to ridiculous sizes with zero increase in quality, to the point where a single picture runs towards 2 gigs.  This is plainly ridiculous, although there are one or two pictures that I really like, that have had this treatment.

I will write a blog post about the process required to ensure as little dust gets into the final picture as possible though, because it is unbelievable how much crap comes through to the end product.

My main monitor isn't colour balanced which is also another problem, because the pictures look completely different on both my monitors, and then when viewed on a phone look completely different again.  It's a tricky situation, so I'm trying to save the pictures with the highest quality, with the most neutral colour balance possible.  This leaves a lot of otherwise good pictures looking quite bland until they are edited.

I've also recieved half a dozen lenses from very old cameras (they still use screw thread mounts, that's how old they are) from a friend, so am in the process of finding adapters for those.  There's a totally radical (dude) 180 degree fisheye that I desperately want to try out, and a crazy 600mm telephoto.  I have no idea of the quality, but they were going in the bin until they found a home here.

Now I've written that, back to studying Japanese.

When Ears Explode

So I went to England and France over Christmas.

It was a lot of fun despite the ridiculous flights.

A quick word about the flight from Japan:

We went to Europe with Tianjin Airlines (I think).  They flew us from Haneda to somewhere in China, where we disembarked having all our stuff x-rayed (along with us) before we reached the baggage area.  We proceeded to pick up all our bags, walk around to departures, then go through the rigmarole.

We were then x-rayed again, along with all our stuff.  We're up to three scannings at this point.

We got on the second plane and flew to somewhere else in China for what was advertised as a 'technical stop.'  My understanding of a technical stop was similar to the scene in Airplane! where a crew kick the tyres, clean the windscreen and 'fill 'er up.'

This is not the case.  We were ordered off the plane, through more x-rays (4) and immediately shuffled back onto the plane.  As far as I can tell we neither gained nor lost passengers.  An interesting side-note.  As we were walking to be scanned there was an empty, unattended scanning machine with its conveyor running.  Everyone was putting all their shit on this scanner, some were taking off their shoes and whatnot in preparation.

The catch was that there were no officials to be seen at this particular point, so I just walked past and onto the escalator.  Downstairs held the actual border guard and all their scanning equipment, so some people were potentially up to 5 scannings (I don't think the machine was even turned on).

We were shuffled back onto the same plane we were kicked off, then proceeded to fly to Europe.

I think this technical stop was for refuelling, but I don't know why they kicked us off.  The plane was not cleaned as far as I can tell.  I assume it's just the psychology of making everyone get up and piss about for an hour to ensure no one gets cabin fever, or starts complaining or something stupid.  I would much rather be left alone, asleep, in my seat though.

The food was hilariously bad.  I enjoyed it for the novelty factor, which is something I don't usually do.  Ironically liking stuff is the trend among people who would like to hide the fact that they enjoy objectively terrible things.  Like bad movies, rubbish music or Harry Potter.

The reason I enjoyed it?  Until this point I had often wondered what prison food was like.  Now I know. 

The flight from Japan to China had the attendants just throw down a small pack of crackers in a red packet.  Of course red.  There was no drink.  I think they forgot, or maybe they ran out.  Who knows.

It's not really dark to make an artistic statement about my view of the food - they just left the lights off for feeding time.  Presumably so we couldn't see what we were consuming.

The subsequent flights were hot food, on a tray even.  High fallutin' stuff.

It was very hot.

The foil was in the shape of the food holding pot thing, but was not actually secured.  It led me to wonder whether they were saving money by reusing the foil.  It was only gently placed on top of the container, the mere suggestion of cleanliness.  Nothing so gauche as crimping.  Presumably they do this at the factory and not on board, although the crew were strangely absent for most of the flight...

The orange things were food.  They were kind of crunchy.  Maybe carrots?  Maybe melon?  They were sort of dry, crunchy, entirely devoid of flavour.

The tissue packets were printed with 'welcome to this flight,' which was nice, but I could not help feeling that 'motherfucker,' was implied at either the beginning or end of that sentence, what with the abject lack of full stops or capital letters.


A quick note on chinese immigration.  They are, as you would expect, arseholes.  At every stop of the way they push, shove and shout at you for no apparent reason.  I don't know whether it was because our flight was coming from Japan, but at every given opportunity I was fingered by their security guards, shouted at for having a mostly empty bag and pushed into the wrong queues.  I suspect any non chinese visitor will get this treatment, but they are all horrible people.  I looked into the eyes of one of the 'organisers,' and saw the fires of hell.  I looked into the eyes of one of the men sitting at the scanning machine and saw a pit of despair I had only previously seen in fellow teachers.

A second note - when we left the plane in London, it looked like someone had left a window open.  The place was absolute chaos.  Chinese travellers are world-renowned for being disgusting, but the absolute filth the cleaning crew were been greeted with is utterly mind boggling.  I should have taken a picture but I was too tired to think of it at the time.

You could not walk a single metre without kicking wrappers and bottles.  Every chair had headphones thrown about them, discarded at the whim of their users.  Blankets were all over the place.  It turns out that the Chinese earn their reputation and reinforce their stereotypes at every given opportunity. 

There did not appear to be any fecal matter in the aisles, which is something to be thankful for.

After all this, I feel it appropriate to write a summary review for your consideration.

The food was comical.  The staff were acceptably bland.  The plane was a relic.  The trip time was actually decent.  The airports varied from dingy communist terror hole, to cutting edge touch screen zero personality cut and paste ultra modern boringness.

Would I fly with them again?  Absolutely.  Not only were they the cheapest by a stretch, they offer an experience like no other.  They are the airline embodiment of the Shakespearean comitragedy (sic).  From the 1960's plane interiors, to the gruelling immigration experience, nothing about the flight was dull.  Everything was something I have never experienced before.  In a world of unrelenting homogeneity there are few places to see the abutting of so many conflicting systems, from analogue/digital to communist/capitalist.

Rating:  0/10 and 10/10


(I ended up writing way more about this than I though, I'll have to save photos and stuff for another time.)