Lockdown

SO obviously the whole world is stuck at home right now.

Honestly, watching american and English news is kind of like watching a few dogs look at a steak on a fire that's absolutely scorching hot, going to pick it up, burning themselves and then going back again.

After a few minutes, more dogs join, and by the hour mark there are dozens of dogs constantly burning themselves over and over again.

In this metaphor, you can assign any group you like to any part of the metaphor. The liberal media is the fire, corona virus is the steak, politicians are the dogs.

Conservative politicians are the meat, true-believers are the fire and the average person are the dogs.

Russian twitter bots are the fire, government handouts are the meat and the aliens living on pluto are the dogs.

My point being that this whole thing is stupid and everyone is dumb. One day we're going to look back at this and a lot of people are going to think, 'what the fuck was I doing back then?'

Actually, who am I kidding. No one is going to reflect on themselves.



In less stupid news, I've had a massive, MASSIVE infestation of aphids.

It is genuinely amazing how many of these bastards there are. I noticed the first one a couple of weeks ago, and they annihilated both my pots of pansies within the week. Apparently spraying them with milk is supposed to stop them. It dries out, coats them and the plant in a kind of oily, crustiness that they can't escape.

Needless to say, that didn't work.

I was then given some kind of foul vinegar looking stuff that they use here for this purpose. It's organic, which is to say it's a concoction of roots and leaves and some pretty gnarly stuff by the smell of things - but it's safe to consume. So I tried milk for a week, then this stuff for a week.

The aphids won.

Around that time I was given a bunch of welsh leeks, some melon seeds, a watermelon plant and a bunch of other small things to try out.

I didn't think aphids would go for anything with big thick stems and whatnot, on account of them being tiny bastards with, presumably, small mouth pieces.

I was wrong.

They went after the leeks, but the leeks won. They went after a few of the smaller plants I was given and were driven back.

But.

They found the melon.

Now, I've tried growing melons a couple of times, and they've always succumbed to aphids and then disease.

No more. I drew my line in the sand.

First of all, it's in my hydroponics system (a pipe with water in it) so the plant is weaker to bugs and whatnot than it would otherwise be (side-note, this is because I haven't figured out the right nutrient/acidity balance yet) so I needed to act fast.

First of all, I sprayed it down with the black goop. Then I realised it's a tiny plant so I should just crush them in my hands. So I did that.

Now my hands are covered in something and aphids. I re-sprayed the plant down with the black stuff. Then after that dried out, I sprayed it again with full-fat milk.

I must admit, it didn't smell great the next day.

And the aphids were still multiplying.

So I kept doing this over the course of a few days, to no avail. Their pace of production far outstripped the killing potential of my bare hands.

Honestly, I wasn't sure what else there was to do. I had to leave for a few days, and didn't expect there to be much left.

However.



I returned to this new enemy formation, and not a single aphid in sight.

I was confused and worried - what new tricks had they discovered while I was away?

I tried searching online but this is the one weakness of google. Searching for 'bastard bugs on me damned leaves' doesn't yield much.

I kept searching though, and found this:



I just went outside and confirmed that the troops look almost identical to this. There were a few, so I've moved one to a separate planter to begin his attack there.

Hopefully they have enough to eat to get big and strong, and continue the fight well into the future.

Vive la ladybird!

Bye Bye PC PC

So my old, old PC of nearly 10 years finally cycled away. It's been on the fritz for the past few years (as least) and was definitely a cranky old lady for the past 12 months.

All things considered, I think it didn't do too badly. It's visited a number of countries, has spent time at sea and in planes. I've only had to replace the motherboard, but aside from that every other component has held out well.

Unfortunately, there's nothing much for me to salvage. I've taken out the hard disks. I'll throw them into the new PC, copy everything over, then bin them. The graphics card is ancient, the ram is old DDR3 with not particularly fast timings so I doubt anyone would want that. I'll give it to the local recycling centre and maybe they'll give me a fiver for it. That aside I don't know if there's much else I can do with it.

I was hoping it would last another few months until the new cpu's and cards come out, but things never really work out as planned. I have to save up for some life stuff in the next few months, but after that I should be able to get a decent PC. It'll be fun to catch back up on the games I couldn't play for the past few years, not to mention rendering out scenes in my little personal project will be about a bajillion times faster which is nice.

That's all future talk, however, so for the time being I'll just have to keep working hard so I can save up enough to buy the mystical future PC.

Perfunctory Update

It's been a while, but as has been the case for entirety of the past year, I've been fkin busy.

I also left the last post without a follow-up because it was post number 666, and I thought that was kind of funny.

I'm not sure whether I've talked about this before, but I'm working on a personal project outside of work.It's almost entirely for the sake of experience, to give me something that I can pin to my name and say 'I made a thing off my own back.' I'd like to think it'll make a difference when the world collapses in on itself, but it probably won't.

It turns out that they have chicken nuggets in certain shops here. I've got a local place that sells them, so whenever we go shopping I pick them up.

It also turns out, that chicken nuggets are the Japanese apocalypse food of choice. The last 3 times I've been shopping, they've been sold out.  It's a weird choice in my opinion, but I'm not going to judge. They're super easy to make, and (in my case) a kilogramme of them make a fine meal in of themselves.

Perfect.

That aside, I titled this post perfunctory because it really is - this is it. I just needed to move past the 666 mark so I can post more regularly from now on.

(I can't wait until I'm able to post screenshots of my project on here, that'll be a lot of fun.)

Argh, Busy

So it's pretty much a given that I'm going to neglect my blog writing duties at this point, given that I'm a fully-fledged member of society and actually doing work now.

But I found this cool insect on my veranda today.  Considering it's the dead of Winter, I'm a little worried that it won't survive on account of there being no food around. On the bright side, my plan of leaving a trough out with bare soil, and letting the natural flora grow there seems to be working. I've already seen a few ladybirds, some spiders and now this guy out there.

Compare that to last Summer even, where the only insects that visited were moths, flies and spiders.

Unfortunately, I'm going to spray down my hydroponic system with some insect killer, and go after the stuff that's attacking my strawberries because no matter what I grow in there, it gets infested almost immediately.  I now understand why all the professional hydro growers maintain their spaces as clean rooms.

I wonder whether that's going to make a dent in the issue, or whether I'm just going to have to grow my hydro stuff in a cold frame looking thing.

I've already got a metric ton of different seeds I want to try in there, so hopefully I'll find a crop that is pest resistant.

I'm including this one for two reasons. First of all, this was shot at f22 which is as wide as it'll go, and the focal plane is still only millimetres. Very difficult to get good pictures handheld.

The second reason is look at his evil little feet. Kind of cool.

This one is the best of all the ones I took. I haven't done any editing, so it's a little bright, the colours aren't great etc. This lens is still pretty damned cool, and I'm reminded of that fact whenever I get time to use it.

P.S. The net is to stop the bloody pigeons.

Kept You Waiting, Huh

So it's been a while.

Turns out, getting a real job leaves a lot less time to do fun things like take pictures.

Fortunately, I managed to get out this weekend to a rose garden.

I took my massive bazooka 645 film camera, and my 5Dmk3 with an adapter to use with a Yashica 55mm macro lens from about 1970, if I had to guess. Needless to say, the pictures aren't exactly the sharpest things in the world, and the adapter is pretty janky, to the point where you don't even need to press the button for it to twist off.

Not exactly ideal when you're trying to turn the focus ring (not really a focus ring on this lens, more of a ratio selector) or change aperture.

Anyway, I came away with a few decent pictures.

I think the two types of photography that interest me the most are insanely close-up macro, and insane telephoto wildlife shots.

The telephoto lenses go for 5 grand at the lowest end, and I have a free macro lens.  Guess which one I'm 'into.'

These look a lot better on smaller screens with higher pixel density, because like I said before, they're not the sharpest things in the world. I wasn't allowed to use a tripod in the park either, so these are all handheld.

I can't remember what settings I was using, but focusing macro is a nightmare, the focal plane is so narrow that you (see: people who are bad at photography like me) have to use as narrow an aperture as possible to get as much in focus as possible. This means less light, which means either a lower shutter speed, or a higher ISO.

Combine these problems with the fact that all the plants were blowing around, and cutting the roses is frowned upon, making the entire endeavour quite tricky.

P.S. You know all those cool insect macro shots you see where every single detail is immaculate? All those insects have been killed and posed. The photographer then takes a bajillion pictures moving the focal plane along the length of the insect, then stitches them together. Stacking the pics like this ensures the entire length (or however much the artist wants) of the insect is in focus.  Not my cup of tea, really.

One of the cool things about going to a rose garden is the sheer number of varieties.

I had assumed that Summer would be the time to go flower peeking, but the park was full of visitors.  They were hosting some kind of chorus/band type event thing and there were tons of blooms.

I was even tempted to try growing a rose in my hydroponics setup... But I thought better of it.

What I did buy though, it a fungus branch. It's a bough that's been seeded with mushroom spores.  They're edible, so hopefully in about 2 weeks we'll see what's for dinner!

Through sheer tenacity and relentless button pressing, you can sometimes fall into an opportunity.

Like, for example, when a bee lands on a flower in just such a way that allows you to take a picture that isn't totally balls.

This is about 1:2 magnification, probably as high as it'll go and in direct sunlight. I can't think that there would be any other way that it would be this sharp (look, I know it's not sharp, but it's relatively sharp).

So we're coming onto the pictures I'm most proud of.

I'm not sure that there isn't some information missing in the whites in this one, but I really like the spiral leading into the centre of the image.

Sometimes you just have to roll with what you've got, right?

And now, onto my two favourite pictures.

I can't decide which one I like more. They're both excellent (in my opinion) for completely different reasons.

The first one is busy.  There's pollen everywhere, the colours are deep and contrasty, and the shapes are all over the place. This feels to me like the bud burst open and the flower was just there, exposed to the elements.

This one feels like a soap advertisment.  Where the petals are gently unfolding, slowly growing outwards.  The amazing thing to me is that they're both roses, but everything from the shape to the smell (you'll have to trust me on this one) were completely different.

So, these are the pictures from the weekend.

Not sure what the next photography outing will be, but I'm all in on macro at the moment. It's just such an interesting thing, seeing tiny stuff all big like.

What's All This Then?

So it turns out, not having the internet makes it difficult to write things and upload them onto a blog.

Turns, out, just because Japan is tiny and has a massive supply of people sitting around doing nothing in the public sector, doesn't mean getting internet hooked up is quick or easy.

As such, it's taken two months to get internet hooked up to the new house.

Oh, I moved house by the way.

Unfortunately, the new flat is utter garbage for a thousand different reasons. There's no sunlight, which (I've heard) makes growing plants difficult. The drains stink to high shit, quite literally, and the landlord told us to get fucked when we asked to have them fix it. The superfast internet I was sold on (one of the reasons I OK'ed this flat) is 10 meg. Running at less than 8. I get 800kb/s down. Turns out 1080p youtube doesn't work on such a slow connection. Turns out, 2 people watching 720p youtube doesn't work either.

Also our neighbours suck ass and this move is easily the worst decision I've ever made in my life. With the prohibitive cost of moving (for some reason the government doesn't want people moving here, so they allow the moving companies, real estate agents, landowners et. al to gouge the population. Eg. Moving out of the old house cost 6 months rent.  That's before the price of moving INTO the new place gets taken into consideration, or the price of moving vans (the wife wouldn't let us rent a van) or utilities reconnection etc. I've been told by the wife that we're not allowed to move for at least 6 years.

So my options are never come home, never be at home, or suicide.

As such, I've been doing tons of overtime at my job, and spending all day fishing.

Today though, there is a fireworks festival on the river I fish on, so I don't think the fish will be biting, and I don't think there would be any space for me even if they were.  As such, I decided to update the blog and upload a couple of pictures I took.

These are actually incredibly blurry. Not because they're particularly out of focus, or because the shutter speed was too high, but the lens is probably close to 40 years old, and it's using a JANKY adapter I bought off some dodgy chinese website. Regardless, if you look at these on a small enough screen they look alright.

I quite like the black background too.

I know everyone loves spiders, so here's another one.  I took one a few years ago that looked positively deadly, with red and yellow all over.

This guy looks a lot calmer, although I wouldn't want to meet him if he were scaled up to the size of my screen.  It looks pretty gnarly at this size.

Oh, duh. I just figured out why the government doesn't want people moving house. It's because the politicians are the landowners and landlords. Duh.

STRAWBERRIES

So it's been a crazy month or so.

First of all, I finished school.  This led me to job hunting, studying, and doing not much else.

The plan was to find a job and then find a new place to live.

After a few weeks of searching I found a job.  I'm making choose your own adventure style games (they have less freedom than that, but the same principle) for mobile phones.

The first game I've worked on is being checked over by the production team, and after feedback I'll fix it up and hopefully it'll be ready for release.

In the meantime we have started house hunting.

The market is fierce here, as you might expect of a city of 25 million people.

We found an awesome place that was within budget, was within commuting distance for both of us, and was first floor in a small apartment complex, so it even had a garden.  Frankly, beyond all expectations.

I was refreshing the page every few minutes on the train to the real estate agents, because we've had a few cases where we've found a place, sent a link across and had it be taken before we've even managed to look at it properly.

I joked that there must be a reason that it was so cheap (i.e. Within our budget) with everything going for it.

Turns out - I was right.  There was a reason.

The owner is a psychopath who demands quarterly inspections of the property.

Apparently they were supervised inspections, meaning we would be there the whole time, but would you trust someone like that to not just let themselves in and wander around whenever you weren't there?  Someone with that much time, with such a dark soul (might be projecting about the dark soul part, but it was such a nice looking place that I'll forever be annoyed at the bastard) probably has spy cameras set up around the place to do his weird perving.  Bastard.

Anyway, we stayed on at the real estate agents to search for other places nearby, and for once they weren't completely shit.  Our guy found us four places that fit the bill, and we checked them all over that day.

The first was an honest to goodness house.  Something I never thought I would be able to live in, while here in Japan.  It was obviously tiny, with a living/dining area, small square kitchen and three upstairs bedrooms.  One of the bedroom is for us, the other is for all our crap/guest room and the last one is my one selfish desire from this whole moving thing - I was a room to call my own.  Colloquially known as a man-cave, I prefer the term 'home office.'

Anyway, it was yet to be cleaned and the bathroom was in a dingy state.  This put the misses off, and the walk to the station put me off a bit.  It did have a patch of land at the front (a few square metres at most) that they called a garden, but it wasn't enough to tip the scales.  The back had a thin strip of land that I could have grown something along, but it was off-limits for some reason.

Way, way more than I was ever expecting to live in - but with problems.

The next house was essentially a brand new apartment, with brand new fittings and features that made it by far and away the most presentable house I've ever seen in a showing situation.  It was showroom quality.  It even had a pull-out dishwasher built into the cupboards in the kitchen, which is something you just don't see here.  Every wall was shelves hidden behind posh sliding doors and fancy cupboards with push-button doors were everywhere.  It even had a bath with a Jacuzzi mode.  Internally it was perfect.

Externally, I had a few concerns.  It was part of an enormous dystopian complex in the middle of the town, home to probably a thousand people (there were easily 250 apartments in this place).  All of them were young families.  The flat was on the second or third floor.  It was difficult to tell, but the south facing balcony didn't look like it would get any sunlight in summer, due to the sheer height of the building and the overhang from the building above.  The back rooms were utterly dark.  The walkway that connects all the front doors to all the apartments was at the front of the apartment, where the bedrooms were.  Not ideal, considering it was all families who would be up at god knows what time on a Sunday running around and being annoying, right next to the bedrooms.  The reason those rooms were so dark is because the windows were obviously heavily shielded from prying eyes.

If you could transplant this apartment and put it almost anywhere else, it would have been the perfect place.  Rent would have probably also been four times more.

At this point we hadn't seen all the places, so we didn't have much to compare to, but there were a couple of problems with each.

House number three was a fair amount older, but allowed cats.  The vast majority of places in Japan don't allow pets for obvious reasons.  The ones that do are much more expensive, again for obvious reasons.  This meant that for the same money we would get less apartment, but would get a cat or two.

(I really want a cat)

But there was just something a little bit off about the place, and I wasn't really thrilled with it.  I can't describe it, but luckily the wife felt the same way so we passed that one over.

At this point, we've been looking at pieces of paper with flats on them, and walking around to a few places for around 6 hours.

We went back to the estate agents to mull over our choices, and see if the last of our shortlisted options was view able.

Turns out it was, so we piled into the car again and drove to see it.

This is an odd thing to be enthused about when talking about a house, but it I absolutely love how weird the shape and layout are.  It is truly bizarre.  The living/dining area is square.  The spare room is square (and styled in the traditional Japanese manner, with tatami floors and sliding Japanese paper doors, IN FRONT OF GLASS WINDOWS?!?!) but only half as long.  Every other room in the house is triangular, or has weird lumpy squares poking out.  It has three verandas.  Admittedly, one is barely a sliver, designed to hold an external air-con unit, but still large enough to hold some pots and plants.  (Accessed by climbing out of a window.)

It's on the second floor, and is an eight minute walk to the station according to google, which makes it about 5 or 6 minutes for humans.  The station is thirty minutes to work for both of us, and isn't the most insanely busy line - although rush hour everywhere here is bad.

It's situated at the top of a hill, so even though we're low-down in the building, you can see the sky from all the windows, and the surroundings are farms and greenery.  Generally much more pleasant than some of the other places.

It also has a front doorsman who can take in any parcels and packages and whatnot that are delivered during the day.  Weird.

As you can probably tell, this is my favourite place so far.

The downsides are twofold.  Firstly, it sits along a back entrance to the apartment complex (unlike some of the other places, there aren't that many flats, so there aren't that many people, and being a corner unit means we would be right on the end so less foot-traffic in front of the door) with the route passing in front of one of the bedrooms.  As such, a strong set of curtains and some kind of plant barrier will be needed to make that room voyeur-proof.  I would make that room my 'home office.'

The other downside is the initial move-in price.  Since the end of the war Japanese housing has tons of fees and codified bribes that are seemingly designed to stop people moving house often.  Why you would want to stop people doing that is beyond me, but I'm not an economist so who knows.  This place is particularly egregious on that front.

We have one more place to look at, and then we can make a decision about which to choose.  So far it's looking like the corner place - but never count your chickens.

In other news, the strawberry plants are really picking up pace.  This was todays haul.  There are four different varieties in the planter, and interestingly the plant that produced the enormous strawberry in the middle isn't throwing off any arms for me to grow new plants.  The others are throwing out baby plants left right and centre and despite their bizarre shape, are easily the best tasting ones.

Look at the size of this!

I'm interested to see how long they fruit for considering this is their second and potentially most prolific year.  I've already started growing more baby plants in pots in anticipation of moving, so hopefully I can get even more next year.  We'll see.

The Wholesale Dream

So one of the problems with living in Japan, is the chronic lack of choice when visiting supermarkets and whatnot.

In moderately sized supermarkets you might get a couple of choices for each of the staples, then beyond that you're unlikely to find exotics like lasagna, or cheeses beside cheddar.

(Obviously nowhere has marmite.)

But a leaflet came in the post the other day (apparently they do work) advertising a local wholesaler.  Normally you'd need a business to be allowed entry, but those living within a certain radius are allowed in on Saturdays.

So we went down and had a look around.  The prices were at least as good as the cheapest local supermarket, with some stuff like meats being quite a lot cheaper.  Frozen food ended up being up to 30% cheaper, which is good.

But prices aside, this place was great for two reasons.  You can buy 5kg bags of pasta.  It cost about 7 quid, so we bought one of those.

The other thing was variety.

I always assumed there was never any variety in Japanese supermarkets because there was no local demand, but this place had at least 15 different types of cheese.  If no one is buying it, why is it there?  Clearly someone wants it.

It's still fairly expensive, but you can also buy these cheeses in 1kg+ bags.  Amazing.  That's at least a weekends worth.  We didn't buy any of these this time around though, maybe next time.

There were breaded chicken breasts, pies, gravy's, waffles - all things you'd never see within 500 miles of a normal supermarket.  If I can find a chicken kevin, oven chips, a whole chicken or a steak and ale pie, I'll be set for the next 10 years at least.  I'm not a complicated person!

Some of the other highlights were 20kg bags of flour, kegs and legs of ham.

Unfortunately, no pictures allowed, but imagine willy wonkers factory with more pallets and forklifts.

End of School

So I'm finally done with school.

I'd have preferred staying on until the end of next term, but I ran out of money.  Alas, the next JLPT exam is in June/July (somewhere around there) so I've got a while until I can try again.

In the meantime, I'm continuing to study and look for work.  Considering how expensive everything here in Japan is, the money problem comes first.  As such, I've been taking on jobs wherever I can find them.  The only bummer is that I can't find anything permanent.

Of the three jobs I've done this month, only one lasted for more than one day.  It was also the worst paying of the three.

Sigh

I've been applying for more permanent jobs, and I've been trying to keep busy in other ways.  We'll see how long it takes me to get cabin fever.

Considering where I am, I shouldn't be getting my hopes up, but I can't help but think of the stuff I'd like to buy and do if I got a job.  I'd go to a sushi place.  I'd buy a new PC.  I'd go somewhere other than this house or my old school for the first time in a year.  I'd take some photographs again.

Oh well.  I'll start thinking about doing something interesting if I find a job that pays well enough.

In the meantime, I'll keep studying.

Working

So while I've been primarily studying for the past year, I've also been goofing off to do some 'work.'

This has involved everything from writing to visiting a tourist area in the south.

While it has become clear that I will never be a linguistically agile person, what with it taking so long to learn Japanese, I've found that I'm decent enough at dropping in and out of a variety of situations to do a variety of jobs.

I'm coming to the end of my language learning, having spent the last of my saved money on this terms tuition.  With that, my options are basically as follows:

Sponge
Mooch
Work

I don't really have it in me to sponge any more than I already have been.

I don't really know what mooch means.

I guess that leaves work.

So the next question is, where to work?  I still don't have the necessary language qualifications to work full-time at a 'real,' company, so it's probably going to be a part-time job somewhere.  If you will indulge me patronising the reader a little, if you are under 50 or so years old, you might misunderstand the term part-time here.

It used to mean fewer than X hours a week (depending on country, somewhere around 25 hours a week).

Part-time now means a job that pays terribly, has zero benefits (health insurance, pension, etc) and can be any number of hours a week.  To put this in perspective, I was a part-timer while I was teaching, because I was paid for X number of hours despite working much longer.

At this point you're wondering what on earth I'm talking about and why I've written this confusing screed against the current state of employment law around the developed world.

Don't worry about it.

This post is entirely for me, reminding myself why I quit my previous job and am working to improve myself.  Everyone has to write something like from time to time.

2018 in Review

So it's still January, which means I am still able, legally speaking, to make a top ten list for last year.

The problem is that I didn't buy, do, make, watch or play ten things last year.

Because of that I'll have to rank everything together.  That's why none of this makes sense.

10.

The Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra

My school offers free tickets to the philharmonic for some reason (you're practically losing money if you don't take them!) so I was able to see one of their performances last year.

Despite not knowing a damned thing about music, I enjoyed it.  I have no idea what was played or who was playing it, but there's something great about listening to live music in a concert hall.

9.

Marmite

This year I didn't get as much marmite in the mail as I have in past years.  This led me to rationing it out, but also using it in as many different places as possible to avoid just toasting it all away.

It turns out you can use marmite in almost anything.  Truly the most versatile condiment.

8.

Pineapples

2018 was the year that I learned you can take the top off a normal pineapple and grow it into a brand new pineapple.

It takes about 4 years for them to grow big enough to bear fruit, but the ones I have now have rooted, are growing (albeit slowly) and will hopefully survive the Winter.

7.

Chocolate

Chocolate is great.

6.

Tea

I've been drinking way more tea this year.  It's very good.  Much better than coffee, although about once every three months I will partake of the devils bean.

5.

Japanese

I hate Japanese.  It is the worst language ever, will never ever make sense and I doubt I will ever really understand much of anything.

But being able to sometimes (15% of the time) read an ad on the underground is sometimes cool.  I've also spent almost all my 2018 free time trying to learn.  Every time I think I'm progressing I come across something that may as well be written in windings for all the sense it makes.  When I come across something too advanced for me I have to confirm that it is, in fact, written in Japanese.

4.

A bedside table I made

We needed somewhere to put all our crap (phones, chargers, etc) so I made a bedside table.  I'm not going to take a picture and put it here because I'm not going to take a picture of my bedroom and upload it to the internet.  That's just weird.

3.

HSBC

I've not been able to buy anything online for 9 months because HSBC fraud protection stops me buying anything online, from a Japanese IP address, with a UK card.

Wankers.

The entire point of the internet is to be free and open, available to anyone, anywhere.  It's pretty easy to spot fraud - if I was buying 5,000USD worth of google play cards with an american card and having them delivered to Russia or China, that's a fraudster doing fraud stuff.

If I'm buying 15 quids worth of cider with a UK card and shipping it to Japan, TO AN ADDRESS THAT'S ATTACHED TO THE CARD AND IS KNOWN TO THE BANK, that's not fraud.

Not difficult guys, come on.

2.

Jurassic World Evolution

One of my friends worked on this game, so I like it.  You can also watch dinosaurs eat people, which is always pretty fun.

If HSBC ever pull their heads out of their collective asses, I'll even buy it.

Fuck you HSBC.

1.

Fishing

I've had very little time to go out and do fun things this year.  I've read very few books, taken very few photographs, made very few things.

I've been fishing a few times though, and even caught a few fish.  Fishing is fun.




So now the year has been listed and categorised appropriately, here are some aims for the upcoming year that is almost 1/12th finished already.

1.  Get a job
2.  Save money

Far future (never going to happen):

1.  Get a cat
2.  Get a fishtank
3.  Get a study to put the cat and fishtank in

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.