Tim’s Ramblings

…and the Power Rangers and anime and manga and Yu-Gi-O and Digimon and most video games….

Yes. Japan has exported quite a bit to the US. I always joked that Pokemon and the Power Rangers were our way of taking over the US from a younger generation. Mwahahahahahahahahahaha.

But…I was wrong. The US is not going down without a fight. The US is fighting back with an export of their own!!! NOOOOOO!!!

Scary….so…so…so…scary…

But, do you think her dad makes her sing “Achey Breaky Heart”?? Because that’ll just be creepy… Like that would be taking the whole “parents reliving their prime through their kids” thing to a whole new level….

*shiver*

…for 2 totally different reasons…

Example number 1!!

Behold. The Haishasan!! Or translated, The Dentist.

Yup. You got it. A DS game where you get to be the dentist. You get trained. Then various patients come in. You have to find the cavity. Drill it. Fill it. And all the time making sure the patient doesn’t freak out. Various types of characters come in and they each have a different problem. Time to pull out the drill and get to work!!

Yeah. I don’t like the sound of the drill as it is. Do I really really really want to listen to it through headphones through a game?? Really???? Though deep down inside, being only $25…I almost bought it. Almost…

(^_^)

And now. Number 2!!!!

And I repeat. This will never make it to the US for a TOTALLY different reason.

Behold Duel Love!!

The subtitle states “A Maiden in Love is a Goddess of Victory”.

Rated 15 and over, this is one of those “only in Japan” dating sims. Though this one is directly aimed at the girls. As you can see on the cover there are various guys (yeah…those are guys…) in your school who are doing various sports including boxing, basketball, and…well…I have no idea what the hell the dude on the left does…. Anyway, you learn their traits, their likes, their dislikes, and you do what you can to help them win the big one!! Wooo!!!

Yeah…

Girls get to live out the soap opera-ish storylines to those shojo manga (comics for girls) with all the effeminate guys with big sparkling eyes and the rival girl who’s out to ruin your chances at love with the captain of the (insert sports here) team.

I know game companies in the US are trying to get the teen and tween girl’s market. Something tells me though…this won’t really fly in the US. Though in Japan, it’s pretty much accepted and it’s no big deal. In the US? I can see the conservatives going crazy. The feminists going crazy. And frankly, though I don’t know much about 15 year old girls (ok…I know very very very very very very little), I have a feeling this won’t sell anyway.

(-_-;)

Happy 4th everyone!

Mine was spent working… Woo…

But it’s ok. Not much you can do and I AM in a foreign country so…eh. Though I will have to admit…it’s about has hot and humid as some years in Cleveland. Though I wasn’t in a suit walking around with a laptop then! It’s nasty humid today. Ew…

Funny thing about the heat though. The G8 Summit is next week here in Tokyo as I have mentioned before. But I found out today on the news that for some reason, whenever the G8 is here, the spouses of the world leaders tend to bow out from coming. Even this year about 4 of them dropped out with various excuses. Looking back at who came when, it seems Japan is far from the world leader spouse’s top list…

So naturally they had the “experts” chime in on why they think that is and the popular opinion is, “it’s too hot”… Nice… Needless to say we’re a bit miffed about this… Just a bit… :/

Ha.

Anyway, besides working, I had a tasty dinner at a popular Chinese diner (rice, authentic style sweet and sour chiken, and gyoza). It’s one of those tiny places where you are crammed in at a counter and the food comes out in like 2 minutes. But damn it’s good. But damn was it HOT. Truly one of those places where, it’s good enough to sweat through the dinner :) Then blew money at the arcade where I had NO luck today…couldn’t drop a damn thing… Did some shopping (new Vampire Hunter D volume came out and I needed to get a few boxer briefs since I miscounted…oops…and a travel bag so I can take my laundry home tomorrow) and stopped by the 7-11 for snacks and a drink.

So, I will drink to the birth of the USA with a can of lemon chu-hi and peanuts and rice crackers. Mmmm.

The chu-hi is basically Japanese gin (shochu) with real lemon juice and a dash of soda. So kinda like a Zima. But tastier. I think at least. Only about 6% alcohol so it’s just a nice drink while watching TV.

The one great thing about tonight is that since it’s the 4th back in the US, I can go through the night without fear of any nasty e-mails I need to deal with! Of course it’s 7:30pm on a Friday and I am still getting e-mails from Japan like it’s the middle of the day in the middle of the week (these guys are insane…INSANE) but at least I can sleep without any anxiety. Happy about that.

Hope all of you readers in the US have a great holiday weekend and for everyone else a great weekend none the less!!!!

(^_^)

Yup. Some of you may remember one from a while back.

We’ll do it again.

Once again, it’s a shot of me in the middle of translating for a presenter at, this time, an insurance seminar. I have no idea what I was saying or when this was taken by J…

So. The person that comes up with the best caption wins something unique from Japan :D Of course the judge is me…soooo yeah. Fair? Probably not. But eh. At least I’m willing to look at my own pic and go “what the HELL was I saying??”

(^_^)

Been a while since I last posted. Why? Because this trip, as with most other trips, is kicking my sorry ass…

One thing after another after another…no time to worry about jet lag…actually, the jet lag helps since that means I get up earlier which means I get more work done during the day…which also means it’s draining me…blaaaaaaaaah.

Also, I totally forgot that next week is the G8 Summit here in Tokyo. Tons of police at stations. The lockers can’t be used at all. And there are possible delays and such with the transportation. Dammit. All I really care about though? That I don’t run into any protests between me and where I need to be…

Of course it just took 1.5 hours to write this much since in between I got a bunch of phone calls and work e-mails that was urgent…fun times…fun times…

HOWEVER, throughout all this there is a silver lining.

I got some pictures :) It’s the typical “picture tour” of the normal, weird, and yummy.

We will lead it off with a buttload of bicycles. For the rest, make sure you click on the link to see the rest!

This isn’t anything strange or unique here in Japan and probably in most other Asian and European countries. You don’t see it much in the US though. This is along the side of a narrow street and went on forever and every single one of the spaces were taken. That’s a lot of bikes. And since the street is too narrow, the bikes were all up against the wall. This went pretty far back behind me (about a 10 minute walk) and went all the way to the station. I have no idea how you find your own in this… I have enough problems finding my car in a parking lot…

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Sounds like a punchline to a really bad joke…

But in fact it’s the entire premise of a new manga (Japanese comic) that has gotten pretty popular the last few months. Volume one is already out with volume 2 supposed to come out sometime this month. I was out with mom buying her a new stereo with my points and stopped by a bookstore to pick up the last 5 volumes of Berserk (I’m caught up now…woo) and picked this up too.

The name of the comic is “Saint Oniisan” which literally translates to “Saint Young Guy” (or “Saint Young Men” as it says on the cover…). “Oniichan” has a few meanings including “big brother” and “a young male” (most of the time in your 20’s and it’s a sad sad sad day when someone calls you an “ojisan” which is a middle aged guy…and yes…I have been called it already…but in my defence it was by a very young child so…I guess to him I’m old…dammit…).

Anyway, the comic follows Jesus and Buddha who decided to take a few months off and come down to earth on vacation. They get a small cramped apartment in Tachikawa (a town on the outskirts of Tokyo) where they have to save up money to pay the rent and is surprised by various things in on earth, mainly in Tokyo. Jesus gets crammed into a rush hour train only to get yelled at by a drunk guy when his crown of thorns pokes other people in the head… Buddha finds out the hard way that the dot on his head really hurts when people push it… Jesus gets really happy when he goes to a convenience store and a few HS girls think he looks like Johnny Depp. So on and so forth.

It’s not laugh out loud funny but it’s still imaginative and at time kind of endearing. The two of them are portrayed as very good friends with Jesus being the more brash and outgoing of the two while Buddha is more quiet and naive. The author admits he really didn’t know much about either religion or the actual characters other than what you hear and learn just in general but it’s still nice without being insulting (well…to most people).

So I made it safely to Japan despite the plane from Cleveland to Newark being turned around due to “an emergency light in the landing gear but nothing to worry about”…and we had to switch planes and go back to Newark only to find out the plane from Newark to Narita had to also be swapped out to do a mechanical “issue”… Eeesh…

Rained all day today. It’s humid…not too hot but sticky…blah. Tomorrow work starts. Gonna be a long week. Packed. Blah….

But the important thing is, mom got a stereo, a new tiny iRiver MP3 player, and a charger for my old Canon camera that she got fixed. I also handed over the paperwork to renew my passport. Tonight I plan on watching some dumb TV, getting with J later to talk about work, and then go to bed early. Yahoo.

So, back to TV :)

It’s been a while since I’ve seen live standup comedy and so, when D from work told me that the show was on Wednesday and why did I tell her I couldn’t go, I quickly said “why yes, I would LOVE to go!”

See, he was supposed to come here like a month or so ago but had to cancel and it got rescheduled. Back then I thought I was going to be in Japan this week but I’m not and now I don’t leave ’till Friday so I got to go! It was great!

It was at Pickwick and Frolick downtown and, with the baseball game on tonight too, the traffic and the parking was a bitch…soooo valet parking it was. Took forever to get the car back in the rain after the show but it was actually cheaper than parking across the street so…eh.

Anyway, for any of you that have not heard of him, he’s one of the newer guys that are making it pretty big recently. His CD sold really well and his blog or, as he calls it, his “Secret Public Journal” is always fun to read. You can see that here: http://www.birbigs.com/spj/

D from work is a huuuuuuuuge fan his and she somehow managed to get amazing seats. We had 4 tables, 2 right up against the stage and 2 right behind that one. It was cool. Oh, and since he’s not the “audience participation” type comedian, I was able to fully enjoy the show without the “don’t pick me don’t pick me don’t pick me” panic.

He has a way of going off on a tangent but still coming back to the main story line and really does a great job with the delivery. Much of it is self depreciating but he does it in a really funny way. If you don’t see him on Comedy Central or something, you should at least check him out on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL59mauFEsc&feature=related)

Anyway, that’s it. It was a fun night out though. And must thank D for the great seats. Other than that? The drive home was a bit scary since it was raining pretty hard and on 90, by downtown, they just repaved the road so they didn’t have the reflector thingies to mark the lanes and I couldn’t see shit… No idea where the lanes were or anything. Scary… They should fix that…like soon…

But yeah, 2 great comics in a month! Eddie Izzard and Mike Birbiglia! I should go to see these shows more often since I really like watching standup on TV as it is. Oh, and I wonder if Mike will see this post since he gets gmail alerts on his name as we found out tonight (^_^)

I love cable. Especially when programs line up juuuuust right.

AAAA. Do I watch a show on slimming down?? Or a show on all you can eat paradise??

I mean…it’s…paradise. PARADISE!!!!

Is it a ultimate slimdown paradise? No. It is not.

I watched neither since Kari Byron up there distracted me on the Discovery Channel… But I thought it was funny enough to snap a pic.

(^_^)

Uh…only 2 of them are truly related to eachother…

New computer continues to work well though I will admit…Vista is a bit of a change. I can do the Window Button + Tab thing and go “oooooooooooh” at the 3D flippy thing but other than that? Eh. It’s ok I guess. I still use it the same as I always used windows. I know you’re supposed to be able to do the whole searching for the program whithout knowing where it is thing but…yeah…

Slowly becoming my own. I hooked up the HP scanner / printer / photoprinter thing and it works great. Even though it’s an ink jet the color is imperssive. I printed the HDR shot of the Buddha that I took that I really liked and the color reproduction is really really impressive (this one - oh…it’s about 3MB so just a warning if you click: http://www.timarai.com/images/tokyo_1107/HDR/asakusa03.jpg). Since I have a 10% off coupon to Best Buy, maybe I’ll go buy replacement ink (the sample ones run out so quick) and some paper. Might as well since it’s 2:20 and I haven’t even showered yet… Ahh Sundays…

Meanwhile, last night I decided to try out GIMP, that free open source image editor. It’s nice. It’s come a long long way since I last checked it out a few years ago. Still no RAW support but I think there is a plugin for it so I’ll check it out. I think I still might go back and reinstall the old Paint Shop Pro 8 and get rid of the trial version of the new PSP though. GIMP I will keep using and it works great for portraits and real down and dirty photo work. But for the run of the mill quick edits, PSP is still so handy. Lots of little features that lets me tweak the contrast and hue and such without resorting to phyically manipulating the color curves. There is so much you can do though but I think Photoshop still wins. I want Photoshop to play with. I’ve seen people do some amazing things like it’s no big deal in Photoshop. Like J at work. TEACH MEEEEEEE.

Anyway, it’s going to suck when I go away next Friday for 2 weeks :( I’m going to miss my new baby.

Meanwhile, yesterday evening, I went out to run some errands in that damn storm and I picked up some toilet bowl cleaning tablet things. You know…the ones that look like hockey pucks. I picked up the one by Clorox and holy hell…that thing is POTENT. I know it’s bleach. I know it says it kills germs with every flush and all. But WOW does it smell strong. My bathroom smells like bleach… I suppose it’s better than smelling like…you know…but yeah, I didn’t think it was going to be THAT strong.

Anyway, might as well do something with myself today, even if it’s to go back to Best Buy to buy more stuff for my toy.

Finally got myself a new desktop.

My Dell which I bought back in 2003 has been slowly…agonizingly slowly dying. Every 2 days or so when I come down in the morning it’ll just be dead. Locked up with memory all used up for no reason. Poor thing. But it survived the big move to the townhouse and it has served me very well. I still have it connected next to me on my desk and over the course of the next few months I will do the standard data transfer.

But my new baby is nice too. It’s gotten so…cheap! And good quality too! I went to Best Buy and plunked down about $1k to walk out with an HP Pavilion with an AMD 2.1 GHz triple core processor with 3 GB of RAM and some ridiculous amount of HD space. Yeah yeah yeah, it’s running Vista. Whatever. I’ll eventually make it into a classic view and it’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m going to be doing some hardcore programming or anything. Got a nice widescreen monitor which I will eventually replace with a nice 22″ like a Samsung. Bells and whistles and it also came with a printer / scanner thing that I will get to tomorrow.

Now I get the joy of slowly convertuing my new machine to the way I like it with all the programs and bookmarks and everything that I typically use. Blah. But at the same time kinda fun in a sick masochistic nerdy way…

The big issue right now though is this damn keyboard. Anyone know of a good one? I like the contoured ones but the new MS one sucks. The keys are incredibly heavy and it just doesn’t feel good for me. Though this one is way too…cramped. I type on a Japanese laptop keyboard all day long…would rather have a nice one when I come back. Blah. Maybe I’ll go find one this weekend. At least my ever faithful Logitech wireless trackball is still working. I love this thing. It’s awesome. LOVE IT.

I also should look at upgrading some software. I downloaded the latest version of Paint Shop Pro that is geared towards photography but…it’s…kinda clunky. And one thing bothered me. Back in the old PSP program, when I was changing the size of the image so I can upload it to my blog and such, it TOLD me what the final size was. That way I can tweak the resizing percentage and all was well. But this new program? Nope. Tells me the ratio of pixel to inches and such but no final size. How dumb.

Sooo either I go back to the old PSP though that thing can’t deal with RAW files. Or I finally break down and buy Photoshop. Blah. Oh, and while I’m at it, learn how to use it. How much is it these days??

Well anyway, I leave for Japan next Friday so I can only use it for so long before I’m going to have to say goodbye to my sweet new machine for a while. But at least I’ll get to use it for a week! Oh, and Warcraft runs nice on it too :) Other than that? Oh, that little thing up on the shelf is a USB wireless adaptor. This townhouse was build during the DSL days so there are 2 phone lines in the office but no cable jack or anything. So I have to run wireless. No biggie. However, this damn thing lost connection all of a sudden and I had to physically pop the thing off and pop it back in. Man…I hope that was just some weird glitch or something…otherwise it’ll suck if it happend during Warcraft…

Anyway, now, to go play some more. Oh, and Firefox 3 is niiiiiiiice. Yes…this was my Friday. Though I DID play social by going out to buy this thing with J and even did some shopping and had dinner with her too so ha. Not TOO pathetic on a Friday (^_^) …not that I would think it was even if that didn’t happen.