It's an Interesting Thing

Last week I put up some pictures I'd taken of a park.

I thought they were absolutely fantastic, but interestingly enough I didn't get many page views on the particular post, which leads me to believe that they weren't anything special.  It's an interesting thing, taste.

As an aside, I've been given a load of photos from the game against Hino, so here they are!

A few are from training.

It's starting to get really cold so I'm wearing an awful lot of clothes.  It's starting to feel more and more like England.

I've started a few games now so I've got some game fitness, but there's nothing like running some laps to get breathing.

This is the warmup before the Hino game.

As we walked onto the pitch.

The ground was in a park from the 1960 something olympics held in Japan.

You can't see it but the in-goal areas are about 2 metres long, given an extra 2 metres by laying some carpet.  Literally carpet.

The solo effort from a kick our wing and fullback fielded.

You can't really see the carpet from this angle but I made sure to dot down before getting anywhere near it (I was actually tackled and just fell over the line).

The first time I've scored and had such congratulations from the team.  Feels good!

Smiles all round!

This is probably me walking right after the try, attempting to catch my breath.

The Australian guy was playing centre, but switched positions after the try to cover my position.

This is me scoring the second try, pulling a sexy face.

Unfortunately the second try was judged to have a knock on during the build up.

After the game.  Annoyed at the score and extremely tired.  I attempted 12 tackles, the most attempted on our team was 13.  Needless to say it's strange to see a winger trying so many tackles in a game.

This face sums up the game pretty well, I think.

Rikugien

It's Autumn time.  That means the leaves are changing colour and there's a chance you might snap a few reds among the greens.

Before I move onto the pictures; IBM played against Hino this weekend.  We lost, but I scored our only try and made any number of tackles.  I missed one, and in the process broke the vice captains nose.  Not exactly ideal, but we look past the mistake and try to improve.

The try was an absolute beast of a solo effort by the way.  Amazing.  I'm not allowed to upload it for the whole world to see, but it's great.  Honestly!

Anyway, onto the pictures.

As you can see, I took a lot of pictures of the same place.  Apart from the lack of colour elsewhere (it's still a little early for the true Autumn show) this place had a nice combination of light falling through the trees and shades of orange and red.

This one is slightly more contrasty making the reds a little redder.  As a result I think I prefer this one.

This one also looks quite good in black and white, but everyone's had enough of that.  I might go back and deepen the reds a little.

This is the view from the bridge above.

Aha surprise!  Black and white!  I over compensated for the lens I was using, hence why this pillar bends in really awkward ways from the middle third upwards.  It's easy enough to correct if I ever want to come back to this picture; for now it's fine.

This is the view looking back towards the entrance of the place.  It's supposed to look like this all the way around the park at this time of year, but this is the only really pretty stretch at the moment.  I'm sure it'll look good in a couple of weeks, maybe less.  I'm not sure how long it takes for the whole place to change before the leaves start dropping.  If it's like England, you'll only have a relatively short period of time before everything looks drab.

Bloody Interesting Stuff

I'll get round to giving this a write up along with the titles I promised to review earlier this month (last month!).  If I could just stop reading damned books for five minutes I could actually write about them!

It's very interesting to look back at what you've read and try to think about it because if you're like me, it'll end up being a blur that you vaguely remember reading once and never properly digesting.

As such, the idea is to solidify my memory of these books.  An entirely selfish act for your reading pleasure!

The actual interesting point is this:

http://rosetta.esa.int/

The European Space Agency is trying to land a probe on an asteroid.  The thruster that's supposed to push the craft onto the asteroid while its drilling legs and underbelly harpoon activate and secure it to the rock is no longer working, and as such I'm not sure what's going to stop the thing just bouncing back off into space.

The comms delay is roughly 30 minutes (half a light hour,  which makes it what, 3 and a three quater AU from earth?) and the expected landing time is roughly 6.30 GMT.  I'll be in bed when it happens, but you might not be!

Before Bed

So I'm off to have a nap now, but before I do I thought I'd share the low quality scans of the pictures I took with my brand new (enormous) film camera.

There is one portrait that came out nicely, but the rest were a bit 'meh.'  They were, in fact, very 'meh,' so here they are for your viewing (dis)pleasure!

Plants are often viewed as being colourful and therefore people think they require colour photographs to do them justice.
Trees on the other hand...

Of course they are black and white, because I have a digital camera for the colour stuff.

That aside, as these are the low quality scans the quality will be comparable to any .jpg created by a low end digital camera, or by scans from 35mm saved as .jpg

The benefit comes when I want to get one of the negatives blown up really big like.

That's not entirely the whole story though - the feel of medium format is slightly different and, for mine, gives a slightly ethereal quality to some of the pictures.  Not all of them of course, but on the occasions when you get it just right, there's a style that you can't replicate elsewhere.

This plant seemed to be rather old and was definitely shapely enough that a decent picture should have come out of it; I just couldn't find the angle this time.

Exactly one picture in this series has something approaching that feeling.

I'll leave it up to you to decide which one you think it is.  It might well be wishful thinking on my part, and you might decide none of them have 'it.'

The water is so featureless - it'd be an alright picture if there was a skyscraper reflected in it.

I won't disagree if you think these aren't very inspiring, but look at them as a proof of concept.  I mostly figured out how to use the camera!

There's a title about driftwood or bare branches or something here.

I also learned that hand holding it viable if you have decent light, and even if you don't have tons of light you can still walk away with a picture or two despite the weight of the thing.

Divine Headquarters

I don't usually bother editing .jpg's because for every edit there's bound to be a loss of information in the resulting file and I'm habitually saving over old files by mistake (decades of using computers has taught me to save without thinking, which in this case is inadvisable!).  But in this instance I made an exception because I wanted to emphasise the rays peaking over the top of the building.

The camera works.  I figured out how to use it.  There's still half a roll left in the camera waiting to be used up somewhere before I throw another roll in.  That contains the rest of this load of pictures (in truth there are only 2 shots left in that enormous monster so I need to pick up some more film) and a couple of test shots I took to check the film still wound after I dropped the bloody thing (clumsy bastard).

It took a couple of weeks for the film to come back but it was nice to pick it up.  It's like a Christmas present because you forget you put it in to be processed and a week later it's there to be picked up!

My Biggest Fan

So after the game against Secom I met the sponsors of IBM (besides the company itself) who had turned up for the big game at the national stadium (Chichibunomiya).  Those guys aside, I also met my biggest fan - click here to see.

My second biggest fan was this girl and her parents, along with her friends.

The youngster was practically thrown at me as we were leaving.

The woman on the right is the wife of one of our props, an exceptionally nice guy (as seems to be the case with the tight five in any team) who writes his own blog about food in Japan.  Occasionally he writes about boxing, but seeing as boxing is a dying art and food will never be so, there's a lot more to write about in the world of cakes than the ring.

Purely as an academic exercise as to how often and how much he writes, here is his blog:

http://ameblo.jp/shimoyaman2009/

It's incredible how much he writes.  Of course I can't tell you how good the content is or if his foodie credentials are up to snuff, but I assume through sheer force of volume, he has at least figured a few things out about noodles.

As another purely academic exercise (although this one involves some pictures) here is the blog I stole the picture of me from:

http://ameblo.jp/emifit/entry-11944727753.html

I include this because it has a number of pictures of the team, and the stadium, and from a neutral perspective it might be interesting to see the scale of the place and some other faces in the team - to gain a context for IBM rugby and the league we play in.

It's also my intention to write a review of the recent books I've finished.  The lack of sleep decimates critical thinking, but does wonders for working through backlogs of books.

To try and trigger a google search, here are the names of the books I've recently gone through:

The Hobbit

(The) Silmarillion

Ancillary Justice

Revelation Space

London Falling

So as per my usual timetable, those reviews will be up this time next year.

IBM vs Secom

So we played a company team called Secom at the weekend.

They were in the same position as us in having lost their previous games, so both teams were battling to keep out of the bottom two.  The last two in the league have to play relegation matches against the top two in the league below us.

We played in the national stadium in Japan with the Secom fans on one side, and our supporters on the other side.  Despite the relative emptiness of the stadium the noise and atmosphere were great.  They don't do the Japanese baseball thing of making up chants for the players (there's SO MUCH downtime in baseball, I guess the fans have to keep themselves amused somehow) but they get behind the action nonetheless.

The game was played at a thousand miles per hour and there were a lot of mistakes, particularly towards the end.

I don't know how far I ran (no fancy GPS units for us) but it felt like I ran gauntlet as I came out somewhat bruised.

Knocked six bells out of a couple of people and won a few turnovers which isn't really a wingers job, but I scored a try which makes up for the lack of attacking I did all game.  Kind of.

Next up is Shane Williams and Mitsubishi.  I think that's another away game?

Don't Even Bother Trying to Sleep

So for the past few days I've been experimenting with not sleeping.  Again.

It's a recurring theme in my life and one that I will fight against until the day I die.

During the many, many hours I've spent awake I've thought about any number of things, but instead of boring you with them I thought I'd share a picture I took with a film camera a couple of weeks ago.

It's not the enormous film camera I showed in the last post, it's just a normal 35mm camera of unknown origins.

A sunset, not a sunrise.  Despite the number of sunrises I've unwillingly been witness to, I've never found the strength of will to overcome the headaches and actually do something productive with a camera.

I like it, which is unsurprising because I'm showing it to the internet and I took it.  It's a very low quality scan (250kb) done by the photo place, and I don't have a print to see just how it would end up looking in the real world - but I really quite like it nonetheless.

I definitely suggest blowing it up to full size and just looking for a few seconds.  It grows on you.

At least it did with me.

The usual disclaimers with my insomniposts, I can't be held accountable for readability or spelling due to the fact my brain is eating itself instead of sleeping like a normal brain.

Oh and I almost forgot, I saw a cool train on Sunday:

Bought a Camera

So I bought a film camera.

I had some experience taking pictures with a 35mm film camera a couple of years ago, and it was really enjoyable.  I made a lot of mistakes and I didn't/don't really know what I was/am doing but not being able to edit a picture after the fact is completely different to the digital need to endlessly tinker.

As such, I bought a camera yesterday.

It cost 257.2958 British Pound Sterling 

at todays exchange rate.  That's for the body and the lens.

It also takes comedy sized film:

It's a really square thing and I half expected it to come with a cloth to put over my head and a stand on which to place it.

The camera on the left isn't mine, but it's also a film camera.  Just for the sense of scale.

I haven't had the chance to take it out for a spin, but the first 5 rolls  are black and white so if that isn't your bag I probably wouldn't bother coming back for the pictures out of this thing!  (At least for a while).

The Ultra Music Festival

So this thing lasts for 2 days, but I decided against subjecting myself to that; instead opting to forego the Saturday and just arrive fashionably late on Sunday (after our game with Tokyo Gas (I couldn't play because my ankle is still sore; I'll be up and running in a week or two)).  What better way to alleviate the blues stemming from not being able to play?


I'll get round to annotating these at a later date (it's late and I've got work tomorrow).

In case you were wondering what it was all about, here's a video of the same event somewhere else. *hint*  You won't like it.

So there were probably 30,000 people or so (at a complete guess).

We started off miles away from the stage, but nuts to that so after fighting with a security dude who wouldn't let us into the area we had tickets for, we jumped a fence and went right to the front.

At that point my phone battery ran out and I couldn't take any more pictures, obviously.

These guys were outside, I don't know what they're meant to be dressed up as.

The guy I went with had a japanese and english flag just knocking around (I don't know why) so I repossessed the flag (for the queen).

YMCA was actually playing somewhere outside the main event.  The instant I took this photo, it stopped.  Portentous.

I don't know what they're dressed up as.  I, however, am dressed as the hunchback of the commons.

Again, what?

The stage was really big, which struck me as a bit odd because the people doing the whatever it is they were doing at centre stage, were tiny.  I guess the people at the back had no chance of seeing anything so they just made this enormous thing for them to gawp at.

As the sun crept away for the night, something profound was said.

What on earth.

The venue was sunk quite far below the main road away from the station, so you could view the entire scene before you entered.  It must have been quite a sight for the myriad conservative salarymen on their way home.

This giant robot was also outside the event.

I've shown my non understanding a couple of times already, but this time I REALLY don't know why this thing exists.

A Bit of Rugby

As always I only have nominal control of the order in which these pictures are shown, so we'll be jumping from the beginning to the end and back again.

We (IBM) played Kurita (they produce super pure water for manufacturing purposes) at their ground in Ebina.  It's about an hour and forty-five minutes from where I live now, so it wasn't the most pleasant of journeys.  Luckily I met a couple of the guys as we headed down there, so I could just turn my brain off and follow them from train to train.

This picture is at the end of the day.  The sky was fantastic, but we didn't feel much like appreciating it on account of the 40-18 loss we sustained.  We were well within reach until the last ten or fifteen minutes when they put a try or two on us.  As with other leagues around the world, if you're within seven of the opposition you get a bonus point.  I assume the four try rule applies too, but don't quote me on that.

This is right at the beginning of the warmup.  It's suddenly dropped a few degrees which is normal for this time of year, but knowing it doesn't stop it being any more of a surprise to the system.  Up until last week I'd been seriously considering buying another aircon unit to supply the entire apartment with legionnaires.  And cold air.

This guy comes to all our games.  He waves the flag with much aplomb, and is quite vocal in his support.  Last year IBM lost by 50 or more points to this team, so us being within a try to the last must be encouraging for the supporters as well as the staff.

I only included this one because I'm obviously being pulled off the ground finger first by a mysterious force, although you can't see the shock on my face at this happening.

We made some room down the right and our fullback put a ball through to chase.  I got there first but it didn't bounce kindly as I bent down to pick it up.

Despite quite obviously NOT having a rugby ball in my possession, I got tackled.  This isn't american football so that's rather illegal.  Despite his best efforts I managed to chip it on further for our outside centre to dot down.

I just included this to prove that I can run.

I turned my ankle about 50 minutes into the match which fucking hurt.  I can now walk on it fine, but I can't really perform any dynamic movements.  It'll be okay in about two weeks (less if I do all the physio, eat well and all the rest of it) so no problem.  If you promise to keep it a secret, I'll be available for the next game should the coaches choose to pick me.

The sky was actually several shades of red deeper than that; the photo doesn't quite do it justice.



All things considered we played alright.  We lost, which is unfortunate, but we improved over the last match substantially and that's important for the long-term.

I played well.  I knocked one ball on which was unfortunate, but that was right at the beginning and nerves were probably to blame.

I turned over one ball, didn't miss a tackle all game and made a couple of breaks.  I didn't make much ground, probably only 25 metres total which frankly speaking isn't good enough, but they were clean metres with one of the breaks resulting in an out of the tackle offload which gained us another few metres.

When we were on our line due to a penalty, they played the ball quickly with our entire team having their backs turned huddled near the posts.  I ran across to their centre who was over the line and falling down but I was too late.  I hit him and stuck an arm in under him in order to dislodge the ball but he was absolutely going to score regardless of what I did.

Regardless I managed to hit the ball out of his hands and force a knock-on.

I saved an absolutely guaranteed try.

Exactly two people congratulated me by saying 'thank you,' in the most muted manner possible.

Sheesh.