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.)

Good God, Is This What Being an Adult Feels Like?

For the past month and a half I've been back in school, formally learning the language I've muddled with for the past few years.  I've never really sat down to learn Japanese properly, which is a sign of my laziness, but also a sign of my financial situation.

Learning is not cheap.

Learning should be cheap, but it is not.

As a result, I've penny pinched my way to Shinjuku Nihongo Gakko.  This is not an advertisment for them, but I thought you might be interested in where I've ended up.

I chose them for two reasons.  Firstly, they're on my line which means a forty minute ride with no changes, giving me ample opportunity to do some work to and from school.  This is great, because a lot of the busy work when learning language is memorisation.  There really isn't a lot of logic, problem solving or argument construction when trying to learn a language.  This is obvious if you think about it, but you can't argue your way out of a grammatical error until you get into exceptionally high level arguments over the correct usage of obscure particles or whatever the case may be.

Unfortunately, the stuff I loved about studying in university is the construction, deliberation and execution of a well (sometimes not so well) thought out argument that oftentimes ended in me looking like a pillock.  For the sake of coming to understand the impetus behind a particular literary trend, I will suffer that indignity.

The astute among you may have come to realise that I am (in a long winded way) saying that language learning is boring.

There is literally no challenge in it.  I have to memorise verbs, nouns, adjectives (of two varieties) and a smattering of other stuff, then learn how to put them together.  Learning a language is more like learning a bizarre alternative maths, where all the rules are already known and you are told to plug in components to get an already known outcome.  The most rewarding part comes when poking at the boundaries and seeing what sticks and what doesn't, which is absolutely infuriating as a teacher, particularly when you're teaching a low level class like mine.

Coming from the other end of the profession, I know how tempting it is for a simple 'BECAUSE IT JUST IS,' to slip out of the mouth without really thinking about it, but to their credit, the teachers do their best to explain their way around the problem.

Being one of the oldest, if not the oldest student, and coming from the workforce, has also had a profound effect on my understanding of the learning experience.

I haven't stopped working.  I am working so much.  This past month my schedule has been as follows:  Wake up.  Study.  Get on train.  Study on train.  Study at school.  Get on train.  Study on train.  Get home.  Study at home.  Make dinner.  Study.  Clean clothes, then study until bed.  Sometimes there's a shower in there.



One of the facets of learning Japanese is learning Chinese too.  Their writing system is based on 2 alphabets of their own, and Chinese.  It's difficult to explain without spending hours on the who's where's and why's for's, because I'm not sure of the rules myself, but the upshot is that there are literally thousands of characters to learn.

Each one of those characters will have up to four different sounds attached to them.  If we're counting, we are already up to very many thousands of sounds and meanings and whatnot.  Combining this smorgasbord of characters gets you the words that are used every day.

The Japanese and Chinese will tell you there is logic behind the way the kanji are constructed and subsequently combined, but that's utter bollocks.  It's all a hodgepodge of lines and squiggles.

Anyway, I have to learn about 2,000 I think?  I'm going for a specific test, and while I have done the research, I can't remember off the top of my head what the requirement is.  Those 2,000 will then combine among themselves to give words and meanings and make an entire language.  So I'm told.

So far I have about 300 under my belt, from a month or so of trying to memorise them.  If you say the meaning, or show me how they are spelled, I will be able to write those 300 kanji, with about a 5% error rate.  Reading those kanji is harder, but is what I am focussing on at the moment.  Next week, I start on the next 300 and then so on and so forth until I die, or learn the 2,000.  There are way more than 2,000, but that's what they decided is the level for competency.

All in all there's a long, long way to go.  I've not even mentioned the grammar which is bonkers.  How many ways can you conjugate a verb?  You would be surprised.

I'll leave that for another post though.

Literally, the Best Picture Ever Taken by a Human

This is literally the best picture taken by a human being in the history of mankind.

I qualify human, because I'm sure in my lifetime a robot will have taken a better picture.  Perhaps it will be an automated drone type thing, perhaps it will be floating in the ocean when an elusive giant squid floats by, being chased by a school of ocean faring piranha somehow.  Maybe there are aliens involved.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the picture:

Actually, before I get to the picture, just note that I've made some modifications to it, to ensure that no one steals this amazing picture and puts it on facebook with some misattributed inspirational quote.

Please feel free to e-mail me for a copy of the original.  (Only 2500 USD, one copy, digital, 240px by 320 px.)

Blue Planet 2, Electric Boogaloo

So the new blue planet is out, to some amount of interest.  The only reason I know about it is through the internet, via osmosis, so I assume it has gained a fairly sizeable viewership despite only being one episode in.

The videography is amazing.  It's absolutely stunning.  I can barely fathom how long it must have taken the cameramen to capture the images they did, especially when filming migratory behaviour.

Of course a lot of it is fake - the last series was renowned for using footage from inside aquariums and passing it off as the real deal, but what programme isn't a complete lie in this day and age?  For the sake of the overwhelming majority of the footage being spectacular, it's easy enough to overlook the lies for a few scenes.

The voice over is done by David Attenborough, who we can only assume isn't writing what he says.  We can hope, at least, because the script is entirely forgettable.  As in, it just narrates what's on screen and doesn't offer any insight into the animals we see.  For example there's an extended sequence where a fish uses a rock to open shellfish.  This is incredibly cool to watch, and something I had previously assumed was reserved for mammals.  Or at least animals with thumbs.

But the voiceover for this section consists of, 'this is cool, we didn't know fish were intelligent enough to do this, but look he has no hands and he keeps dropping the thing.  Oops.  Oops.  Dropped it again.  Oops, he dropped it.'

Insightful stuff.

But I'm skirting around the real issue.  The sound work is fucking atrocious.  Holy shit.

I don't know what their budget was, but the producers spent literally all of it on the visuals and had their toddlers do the sound for free on their TOMY (tm) Copyright 'my first animal phone.'  You know the ones, they have a picture of a cow, you press it, it plays a recording of what is obviously a bored man saying 'moo.'

I can't believe how badly they fucked up in this department.

Every.  Single.  Shot.  Is accompanied by the sound of roaring ocean, regardless of whether the shot is ten miles underwater or ten miles above it.

Fine.  You are making a documentary about the ocean.  Let's assume it's more of an art piece.

Some dolphins rub up against a coral to clean themselves of parasites or whatever.  Quite interesting - but why does it sound like sandpaper rubbing against a wood railing?

A fish flings itself at a bird that's in mid air and manages to grab it.  Really, really cool shot that must have taken the video guy ages to shoot.

The sound effect they use?  I implore you to watch it because no one who hasn't seen it will believe me, but they dub over the sound of a lion or tiger, or some kind of monster, roaring.

I shit you not.

Go to one minute and 10 seconds.

The very next scene.  THE VERY NEXT SCENE, has a bird preparing to fly for the first time.  It kind of gently puts its foot on the ground while it stands in place, as animals are wont to do.

The narrator makes it sound like it's preparing for a fight against Mike Tyson in his prime, and the audio fucknut plays a sound effect of a HAMMER BLOW, AS THE FUCKING BIRD STEPS ON THE GROUND IN SLOW MOTION, TO MAKE IT SEEM LIKE THE FUCKING BIRD IS PSYCHING ITSELF UP. 

HAMMERS.

The producers were one meeting away from playing eye of the tiger at this very moment.

Christ, this garbage isn't a documentary.  How dare they call it anything other than populist trash dressed up as science.

It's an absolute crying shame because the producers have rightly surmised that we, as a population, have the collective IQ of a pickle farm, and need a story to make it interesting for all us idiots.  We need these animals to have human traits, otherwise they're not relatable, and we need ridiculous sound effects because that's what hollywood does.

Go fuck yourself producers.  Go fuck yourself David Attenborough, for putting your name to yet another soap opera dressed up as a documentary.

The funny thing is that this will win hundreds of awards for being the most realistic, lifelike documentary ever to have graced a human eyeball.  Idiots will lap it up as the most spectacular, honest, truthful stuff ever sent over the airwaves.

It's garbage.

But, just as trash humans get by on looks alone, so will this.


I might go back and watch it muted, while listening to music.  But for the love of god don't spend money on it.  Pirate it and mute it, play Beethoven or some classical shit over the top.  All the amazing slow-motion scenes will go great with some classical music instead of the Godzilla soundboard the director decided upon.

Fly, My Dragon

So part of my Grandads camera gear were a set of lenses.  There were enough that I might even call them a suite of lenses.

One of the highlights is a macro lens that lets you get within centimetres of your target, allowing a really large photo on the other side.  I was interested in getting a macro lens before I came across this one because they're way, way cheaper than their telephoto counterparts.

Note that I'm talking about stuff for getting up close and/or magnifying macro, not the type to take photographs of people.  I'm sure there's a name for the different types, but I don't know them.

Anyway, as a bonus to buying the adapter to see if I can get Grandads slides onto the computer, I can also use his cool macro lens with my digital camera.  The result is this:

And this:

The video shows how hard it is to keep this thing still.  Modern cameras have image stabilisation, some in the body, some in the lenses.  Canon have chosen to put their system in the lenses, and because I'm using an old lens, it most certainly does not have image stabilisation.

The colours are also wonky, so I had to pep them up in my video software.  The result is an imperfect picture, but I quite like the image even in video.

Getting up close with a dragonfly is hard, especially at arms length without a tripod.  Next time I'm going to try to find a co-operative insect that's at waist height.

I don't know what the green insect is, but it was a piece of cake to take a picture of.

Luckily for me I managed to take a few more pictures at the park we went to, and I still have a ton from the UK to go through.  Tons more pictures to look at on a rainy day!

Cameras and Whatnot

So I recently came into possession of a bajillion 35mm slides.  They were my Grandads and are a chronicle of his time as a photography enthusiast.

Unfortunately, no one looks at slides anymore and the only way for me to check them out would be to find, or fashion, a projector.  This would happen exactly once in my lifetime, then the pictures would be stored away, never to be seen again.

The solution is to digitise them.  This presents problems, all relating to money.

If I send them away to a company to digitise, it will cost a fortune and the quality will likely be pants.  If I send them away to a company to do them properly it will cost more than buying my own studio in the Bahamas full of photography equipment, yachts and supermodels.

Clearly, these are infeasible.

The second solution was to buy a scanner and scan them in myself.  My time is worth nothing to anyone, so I win on that front.  Unfortunately I don't win on the buying a scanner front.  For the kind of scanner I would want (top of the line of course) it would be just shy of one thousand dollars.

Clearly this is also unfeasible.

To make scanning matters worse, in order to get the best quality scans possible, you have to employ a wet scanning process.  Once you've invested in the 1,000 USD scanner you behoove yourself to go the whole hog, buy the fluid and gloves, and scan everything in properly.

This is terrible and I would hate myself every time I squirted a tenners worth of mineral oil all over my scanner.

For psychological reasons, then, scanning is less than ideal.

The final alternative is something Grandad unwittingly provided for me.

Back in the good old days, the easiest way to reproduce a slide, enlarging areas or changing the shot, was to buy a big tube with a slide holder on the end, which twisted and turned every which way to line the slide up correctly.  You could then twist the cheap, plasticky barrel to zoom in and rearrange the shot.  Hold this monstrosity up to the light and presto, you have a new negative or slide of your original photo.

Grandad had one of these, which I didn't think anything of (I'm not reproducing his pictures, enlarging or cropping them with film) until it came time to wonder as to how to commit his slides to digital.

I wondered how to best go about the process, and while mulling it over came to the realisation that a lot of people use their digital cameras to commit prints, negatives and slides to their computers.

Clearly, I was onto a winner.

So without delay I found a Beschoi adapter for C/Y to EOS mounts (this adapter has no way of releasing the C/Y half of the setup without long nails and/or 3 sets of hands, so I cannot recommend it) and hooked it up to my camera.

This is a sample shot.  You'll notice it's on the piss.  That's fine, I can fix that with a rulers or a level.

One of the great things with this system is that once it's set up I can slide the slides in and out quickly, take a ton of simple pictures at this decent level of quality (this picture was taken with 10 seconds of setup pointing at a lamp) and then pick out the ones I want to do properly.  To do them 'properly,' is then a case of bracketing however many shots, shoving them into photoshop and asking it to do the rest.  This will give a nice dynamic range, ensuring as much of the subtlety of film is captured as possible.

Another bonus with this bizarre setup is that I can zoom in 2.4x the original size, so I could go absolutely overboard and capture however many shots zoomed in, then recomposite the final image in photoshop to ensure the maximum quality.  (each of those images would have to be bracketed, so dozens of images.  Clearly something I might only consider for the single best photograph in his entire collection).

So I think this will do.

It's not as good as wet scanning with an Epson V850 or whatever the hell - but it is a lot cheaper.

A Musical Accompaniment

So I know a guy, through a friend, that makes some pretty damned good music.

In the age of collapsed advertising structures and mostly free information, it can be really difficult to find music that you like because there is just so much stuff.

With this increased freedom I assume it's become more difficult for the creators to cash in on their craft, despite the enormous potential listener base.  There will always be super megastars (enter current pop idol here) but I assume the availability of great quality, free music has made the middling artist a thing of the past.  The group that scrapes by on a few album sales, a few tours and a little bit of luck are probably working normal day jobs at this point right?

This isn't due to quality.  If there's a net positive for humanity in the democratisation of tools and knowledge, it's that the 'average' person is now capable of producing some exceptional work.  This goes for books, music, painting, comics, even documentaries and films.

So now that we can all, within reason, produce high quality stuff - who gets to choose what makes it big?  Luck?  Or boning the right producer?

Who is to say.

Anyway, here is the music.

https://soundcloud.com/doctaters

Back to School

So my plan at the moment is to enrol in a Japanese language school here in Tokyo.

I've been around to a few different schools and decided upon the school I want to attend, sent out my application and now we play the waiting game.

In the meantime I'm working on writing.  It turns out that being able to read and being able to write are two completely different skills that require work.

Who would have thought.

Anyway, part-time work, rugby and my own studying are what I'm doing right now and, assuming I get accepted, will be for the next month or so.

That's about it.

Foot or Mouth Syndrome

So I've not really updated for a long time.

I've not really done anything for a long time.

Such is my life at the moment.

One thing I have been doing though, is training.

Training when it's hot, training when it's very hot, even training when it's extremely hot.

One such training day saw me run for a little while, sweating an awful lot, then returning home for a shower.  It was a normal run.  The abnormality came that night however, when I had a fever and was sweating with coldness/hotness/coldness all night.

Then my foot looked like this:

So I hobbled to the hospital (more than a mile on this foot nearly killed me outright) and obtained some 'painkillers,' and antibiotics.

That was nearly a week ago, so I've not had a lot of opportunity to do anything other than get fat, which is only a change to my normal life in that this time it's been forced upon me.

Only a few more days until I can walk around though.  Things will change then, just you wait.

(But probably they won't)

In case you were wondering what the demographic breakdown for the European Leave bloc looks like, here's a helpful article.  Draw your own conclusions.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-poll-leave-voters-death-penalty-yougov-results-light-bulbs-a7656791.html

When all the current OAP's have passed on with none of these wishlist reforms having been enforced and the UK at the bottom of all quality of life tables for developed countries, will my generation finally stop being blamed for the state of the country?

The maddening thing is that our elders hanging us out to dry, the ones who were supposed to leave the world a better place for us, probably think this is in our best interests.

Sigh.

To be fair though, energy saving light bulbs really are a bit shit.

Another Day, Another Aquarium

So we had some time off, along with the whole of Japan.  No one here wants to go abroad, so whenever there's an extended holiday (any holiday longer than one day) everyone goes out with their families.  As such, we didn't want to be stuck indoors with everyone else outdoors, but we also didn't want to go anywhere that might be particularly popular for a long time on account of there being little enough space at the best of times, let alone during a holiday.

I took the initiative for once and decided upon another aquarium, this one somewhat nearby.  Kasai Rinkai Sealife Park is surprisingly large and houses fish, rays, small sharks and even a few birds.

There's not a lot more to say so here's a video, much like the last I shot.

(Bear in mind it was pretty busy, so it's not the best shot thing in the world)

Aquarium Sumida

So I went to an aquarium with some people and took a few pictures.  I also shot a little video, which you can see here:

I spent most of my time looking and reading, so didn't end up taking many pictures.  As such, here are one or two that turned out alright.

This one looks good in colour, but I like the fronds and shapes of the anenome, and you don't often see clownfish in black and white.

It turns out I am horrible at photographing jellyfish.

This guy looked bored, which is a shame because they're incredibly intelligent creatures.

Clownfish in colour, because they are bright orange after all.