Neography 2.o  -

The last year was kind of a waste for me. Living in Japan, far from everyone that I know or who speaks my language, has kind of drained me. Here's hoping next year sees changed the things that need to be changed.

From Cryptome.org I bring you scenes of incredible devastation:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Remember kids, without the people we're nothing. Treasure your friends, and if your family's not evil, treasure them too. When the uncaring universe takes your world away the people prove their worth. The reverse is likely not to be true.

Carry on.

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After posting my thoughts on the PSP someone asked what my impressions of Nintendo's DS were. So I wrote some down.

Sony's PSP has been out nearly a week now and after playing it for a while I have to say I'm hugely disappointed in it. The two games I picked up, Ridge Racers and Lumines are really quite cool, Lumines especially, but the hardware is total ass.

The D-pad catches on the LCD inside the system. The discs have no sliding cover so are partially unprotected (and this is right where yout thumb goes when you remove it from the case!). The door doesn't close flush with the case. If you twist it (A lot, it's hard to do) you can cause the disc to eject and fly out of the machine.

All this and more for the import friendly price of $500+, or $250 if you live in Japan. Check out my review.

In the mornings I like to check my IRC logs to see if anyone tried to talk to me during the night. I found this:

here's a haiku about neo
Lawrence and Japan
We need to hunt him down now
He has all the games

Thanks sik. =)

The last book I read was Alastair Reynolds' Absolution Gap, the latest in a series of books including Revelation Space, Chasm City and Redemption Ark. The first book starts off a bit slow and I confess I had a hard time sticking with it until about the second third. Chasm City was very good, but it was Redemption Ark that was teh kickazz. A veritable gale of space opera goodness sweeping me from start to finish in short order. This really cements Reynolds as one of my favourite authors, along with Vernor Vinge and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Absolution Gap was harder to get into than its predecessor, but not for any reason I can put my finger on. The whole series is highly recommended as some of the very best sci-fi you will likely find.

You see in the news an awful lot how crooks call old people and somehow confuse them into believing the caller is a relative in desperate need of cash, defrauding them out of thousands and often tens of thousands of dollars. It's called "It's me" fraud in Japan and it's quite an epidemic, if the news is to be believed.

Zumi's friend's mother received a call like this recently, and I'm surprised at the amount of research the crook put into their attempt. First, the caller knew

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Here's another batch of amazing fun-filled Japanese commercials for you! This batch includes Nintendo, Sony, Rena Tanaka, Waka Inoue, Hikaru Utada, and more! See this page for reasons I think these commercials are interesting and perhaps important, not just entertaining. There are lots more commercials for your enjoyment here, here and here!

A special welcome to boingboing readers! Please note that you're allowed a max of 2 simultaneous downloads per IP. Living in Japan affords me as much bandwidth as any minor deity but I discourage mass leeching. Take as much as you like, but no being greedy ok? ALso, share!

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I still get tons of hits from people looking for Waka Inoue stuff, so this one's for you guys. She was on TV tonight as part of a celebrity chick cooking contest. Japanese TV is full of these ridiculous time wasting shows featuring 'talent', people famous for being famous, doing ridiculous things to make the guy behind the camera laugh. Waka's a bit of a dimwit and her cooking is apparently terrible - a croquette, which is supposed to look like this turns into a chunk-ridden shapeless lump which is described by the judges as 'incredibly salty' and 'not a croquette'. "Tastes like lard" was another comment. She didn't win. Enjoy the video.

According to the Mainichi Daily News (A large and respectable paper in Japan) "Of the 632 women recently interviewed at Tokyo, Shimbashi and Shinjuku stations in the capital, 66% said they have been groped in trains ..." The article also said 30% of the women asked would "hope for women-only train cars to keep molesters from them," this according to a Tokyo metropolitan government panel.

66% have been groped, but only 30% wanted a car free for women only. I can only draw two conclusions from this:
1. 36% of the women polled like or don't mind being groped
2. 36% of the women polled think sometimes women do the groping, and car for women only won't save them.

Couple of new signs in the sign gallery for you. One's a warning not to hop over the fence and play in the river, but it looks more like a warning about the lions. The second was put up in a parking lot near a little park and large river. Littering is a problem in Japan like you wouldn't believe, it's a filthy country. The general rule of thumb is: If it's bushy some old fucker'll dump his trash there. Including but not limited to cans and bottles, printers, laptops, TVs and other appliances, bikes, scooters and cars.

-topic change-

JAMMA is a term you hear a lot if you're into arcade games. It stands for Japanese Arcade Machine Manufacturers Association. When spoken, it sounds like the Japanese word for "In the way". While mailing a few parcels this afternoon I saw this scene. A few minutes ago the guy in the sweater parked his little econobox right behind the crane truck as it was backing along the road. The guy in the white hat yelled at him, telling him he couldn't park there, he was in the way. In the image above he's telling the driver of the car, in the inimitably polite Japanese fashion, that he'd have to wait to get into his car 'cause they're quite busy and maybe if he hadn't parked in their way in the first place they wouldn't be blocking the road and his car now.

Speaking of in-the-way, I nearly rode my bike straight into the side of a car on the way home from the post office

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It was as if the legions of Hell had erupted from their confines, spewing incandescent bile. Enormous masses were consumed to feed engines of annhiliation, massive batteries, instantly exhausted, give life to unimaginable wretched fury.

There was no chance for us.

I'm desperately keen on the new JVC video camera, the Everio MZ-GC200. It's a palm-sized video camera with features that make me drool, hardcore: 10x optical zoom, 2-megapixel camera, dual memory card slots (SD + CF) and far more. It's about a grand street price though, so it's going through a more rigorous vetting process than is normal around here.

I was drooling over the live demo unit in Yamada Denki yesterday and thought it'd be fun to try out the camera part of it. I shoved my SD card (which is always nearby in my cellphone) into the video camera and snapped a few pics around the store.

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this little girl was giving me grief today. she's apparently camera-shy but didn't hesitate to pull one eye open and stick her tongue out at me. If you've ever read or watched Japanese cartoons you'll know what I mean. It's the kid's version of the finger, a cheerfully rendered "you suck!"

it was the highlight of my day.

Since we got back from Canada I've been suffering from a not-too-terrible cold, with accompanying cough and mornings full of phlegm removal procedures. As far as plagues go this one's really not too bad. The shame is it's kept me off my bike for the four or five days of wildly unusual hot weather. Early November isn't supposed to be 20-25C in Japan, it's freakish. I got one afternoon out on the bike when I first got back, but since then I've been inside being bitter.

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Yesterday we went out for sushi lunch and we realized after we'd eaten that we had no money to pay. We had tried to get cash from a 24-hour ATM the night before, but in Japan the 24 machines don't dispense cash 24 hours a day. Yay! I ended up being collateral while Zumi ran to a bank machine to get some lunch money.

While on our way to the airport I picked up a pair of Sony's new MDR-NC11A noise-cancelling headphones. I've always wanted some noise cancelling headphones, every time I take a trip on a plane I think "Fuck, this might be tolerable with some noise cancelling headphones!"

And how do they work, you ask?

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In the HBO series Oz there was an episode where the narrator talked about goldfish, and how they had a very short memory. It was suggested that with a total memory of about thirty seconds a goldfish who is happy for that length of time believes he's been happy his whole life. It makes sense, if you can't recall anything before that thirty seconds it might as well have never existed.

I have a bad cold. Zumi asked me if it's worse than the colds I normally get. I don't remember any other colds; I don't get sick often and every time I do it seems to be the worst cold I've ever had because it's the only one I remember.

I am a goldfish.

There's another earthquake shaking my stuff right now. Pretty mild, goes on for about 10-20 seconds. Kind of a swirling motion, nothing falls over but you can see things wobbling and swaying. Freaks me out, wondering if the swirling will be followed by a BANG as the big tremor hits, or a massive WHUMP as the ground shifts to a vertical movement - which is far more dangerous - and then my house collapses.

There was a vertical quake the other day, tho I'm happy to report it didn't break anything. They're becoming frequent and I don't like it. It's definitely time to get the hell out of town. Onward to Australia! Or something.

This one measured 5.8 on the Japanese scale. Here's a screenshot from the TV. I'm off to the left on this map.

I fixed my bike. It was a 4-step process:

1. find bit what launched itself
2. reinsert bit
3. ignore spongy response, compensated for somewhat by thick new pads
4. loooooooooooove to ride.

Pics of Canada Trip!

While in Canada I bought a new rotor and two sets of brake pads for my bike. Disc brakes are great. Or at least, they are when they're not exploding and shooting streams of brake fluid across the floor... The old pads were so thin the pistons in the calipers were extended and needed to be compressed so the new pads would fit. This is what the Hayes instruction manual said at any rate. Problem is when compressing one piston the other would come out, and vice versa. After an hour of fucking with it

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Today I got sick of the loose power connector on this IBM thinkpad laptop (i-series, model 1445 if you care) so I took it's ass apart and beat it into repaired submission. The IBM is a piece of junk compared to the Sharp Mebius Muramasa I just finished repairing. It was a nightmare of screws and snap-together plastic bits, I'm honestly surprised I could put it back together, but I did - and it works!!


PICS ARE HERE!
Pieces all over the couch
Pieces all over the table
Closeup of teh flawed bit

So we're back safe, after our much-dreaded 11-hour sardine-class flight turned out to be ten uber-comfortable hours on a brand new Airbus A330-200 with video on demand (not just different channels, but movies that start, stop and fast-forward as you like) and happy friendly staff. A new plane does wonders for everyone's morale.

Stopped taking the beta-blockers to see what happens with my BP and there's a small increase, but nothing out of what I'd consider a normal range of fluctuation. See what happens over the next few days I guess.

No food in the house, and I'm hungry. Good to be back, feels like we've been gone forever. My space is a cluttered mess, must resolve. Pics coming soon.

Heading back to Japan again. Leaving Kelowna @ 6am (an hour and a half from now) and then the reverse of our trip to get here, hopefully not including any five hour waits on account of unqualified immigration wenches.

In case I asplode nastily 'fore alighting in Japan again,

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Tonight I went and saw Nolan again, which was fun as always. He gave me his copy of PS2 Frequency, for which I cannot properly express my gratitude. I showed him my PStwo and he did exactly what I did when I bought it: Looked at it, marveled at the size, checked the ports, opened the lid, then checked to ensure the little PS logo could still be rotated for use in horizontal or vertical positions (it can). Except for the 3-inch Atari logo he has tattooed on his neck we're damned alike, he and I.

Last night

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I came to Canada to see a doctor about some issues I was having. Turns out the Japanese doctor basically didn't do his job and failed to let me know I was suffering alarmingly high blood pressure. Well my doctor in Canada, a happy and personable new doctor, hasn't really instilled confidence in me with his recommendation for this hypertension. His recommendation was basically "Take these beta-blockers". These are high-powered pills that dilate my blood vessels, slow down my heart, reduce the effects of adrenaline,and have some potential - but not certain - side effects,

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Today after driving my baby around for a while I decided to have the increasingly irritating rattle examined by someone who knows their stuff, and lo!! The bearings in the alternator are shot and it's essentially just grinding metal in preparation for a massive seizure. So we're bussing into town tomorrow to find a rental for the next week. That kind of sucks, it's a $200 dent in the travel fun, and this is in addition to the other expensive thing I want to buy before returning to Japan...

In other happy news, Zumi's laptop was snared by a virus exploiting one of the ridiculous many vulnerabilities in Windows and, only four days after we fixed it for this trip, it's dead again from a corrupted registry. All hail an OS that gets viruses just from being connected to the internet, and that won't boot if a single file is damaged. Yaaaaay!

My BP was measured yesterday at 150/100, and in order to give the new numbers some sort of context I had the records from my exams in Japan pulled and this is what we got over the last few years:

2001/Oct - 140/110
2002/July - 152/100
2003/Feb 180/102!!!

Fucking hell, 180/102 while I'm in the bloody hospital for heart palpitations, and NO ONE THOUGHT TO TELL ME ABOUT THE BP!? Is it any freaking wonder I dislike Japanese doctors!?

So we made it to Canada, and we learned a few things:

1. Most young American men have goatees most of the time. Note to the herd: you're a member of a horde.

2. Narita's terminal one, the old terminal, is for the B airlines, and all the cheap-ass economy fliers are there. If Wal-Mart ran an airport, it would look like this. Filled with the older and less friendly staff, dirty, grubby customers all being loud and stupid. It was creepy compared to the clean, smile-filled Terminal 2.

3. Canadian Immigration sucks my ass. We were an hour late leaving Seattle 'cause of a delay in Vancouver. When we got to Vancouver, now with only two hours to make our connection, the stupid bimbo running the immigration desk decided Zumi's intention to enter Canada as a visitor - perfectly legal and above-board - wasn't going to fly because she also had an expired spouse visa, never mind that the rules have changed and it effectively doesn't expire as long as she's outside the country WITH ME.

So we spent a solid two hours in a fucking lineup only to be told that we didn't need to be there!! We missed our flight and had to wait another five hours for the next plane to Kelowna. Vancouver airport's the most beautiful airport in the world, but five hours of entertaining it ain't. Zumi was livid,

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BTW, the new Battlestar Galactica (The first 1-hour episode after the 2-part pilot last year) is every bit as fucking great as the pilots. I can't fault the show. Every single complaint I have is a niggling matter of style, but I can find nothing wrong with the acting, the writers, the plot, the pacing, or the camera work. It's amazing, I'm really really digging it. Which traditionally means I'm dooming it to failure, but it's still great.

Also, season 6 of the West Wing started up and it's off to a good start. Season five really left me kind of cold, the show kind of... wandered. I miss Rob Lowe, but Martin Sheen kicks ass as a pres.

And that's all the ridiculous blog-alike TV babble you get out of me today!

Some days, in fact too many days, I feel a bit like this guy.

There's a Lupin movie on TV tonight, from 1978. It's surprisingly funny, once you learn to ignore the appalling animation. In one scene buddy with a sword leaps into the path of an oncoming helicopter, samurai-style, and they pass in the air. Cue mid-air introspective moment, they pass, and a pause. Guy lands dramatically, helicopter travels a bit and hovers, brief wait and BAM!

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According to this article on ScienceDirect.com there's been a link made between bright lights at night and cancer. Turns out bright lights in the early morning hours trigger blue receptors in they eye which signal the hypothalamus to suppress melatonin production in the pineal gland.

Basically, bright lights with blue content will signal the body to produce less melatonin, which can allow cancer to grow more rapidly.

That's pretty alarming.

Another typhoon is rolling in, this is the 23rd of the season for the area, a new record. It's also the strongest so far this year. It's expected to pretty much roll it's whorly way across the whole country, passing Tokyo 2 days before we're due to leave for Canada (which would be tomorrow). All the TV channels are running footage of people bent into the wind crossing streets assaulted by rain and wind, evacuated old folks in gymnasiums, and the ever popular pedestrian having his umbrella blown inside out. Whee for weather!

Coming to Canada again! Here's the schedule:

Saturday 10/23
Leave Narita @ 3:25pm
Arrive Seattle @ 7:55am (8.5 hour flight)
Leave Seattle @ 10:30am
Arrive Vancouver @ 11:20am (50 minute flight)
Leave Vancouver @ 2:15pm
Arrive Kelowna @ 3:20pm (Be at the airport to see us greasy, tired and cranky!)

We'll be leaving Kelowna @ 6am on November 4th.

As for why...

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Just in time for our trip to Canada Zumi's Sharp Mebius laptop - which we bought earlier this year specifically for trips as it's about 2cm thick and weighs as much as a magazine) suffered a complete harddrive failure. It was doing odd things and, 54% through a windows-mandated disk scan it started spinning up and down, and making a happy 'clack' sound every few seconds.

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The Typhoon the other day was pretty big. The overflow reservoir that has never had more than 10cm of water in it, even after torrential rains, was almost two metres deep. The large river 7km north of me was three or four metres deeper than normal - it returned to the normal level a few days later. Astonishing.

Traffic for the Mario Sprite History article was astounding, over 48,000 visits (not hits, visits!) to that page alone in the last two weeks.



I took a bunch of new pictures lately, including this interesting this raptor (not sure what it is, a falcon? hawk? It was gloriously predatory and large when it flew away), this Kawau (A river cormorant), this really wicked looking caterpillar, and some pics of consoles and other crap. (this month's and last month's galleries).

Been raining up a storm here lately, got caught out in it yesterday while biking. Made it to within 3km from the house before it was really annoying, but that's 3km on a fenderless bike slinging road muck against my ass. Sucked, but ah well.

I spent the greater part of my evening putting together a PC Engine CD (with case) system that I could call my own. I pulled out all the stops, with a white (not yellow!) PC Engine system, the cleanest CD ROM I could find, RGB amp, LED swap and region mod. It turned out great, though there was a brief nightmare when a design change at the 50% mark caused intense grief at the 98% mark... Had to backtrack and add another two inches of wire for the RGB amp....

Lots of pics to show you!

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I hit the Tokyo Game Show today. It's all about the booth babes, right? The G in TGS stands for GIRLS.

Because the girls are all anyone wants to see, that's all I put in the gallery. Later, maybe, I'll include some pics of, oh I dunno, games, or something similarly lame.

Here you go!

A Japanese website has decided that their "delivery health" service (and by that they mean house-calling whores) would be well served by offering QRCodes to the visiting public. This is fine and dandy, as we all know how cool QR codes are. The problem is they're using a script located on my server to do the job.

I don't normally have a problem with people linking to my content,

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Yesterday evening I had a rather freakish hardware failure. My decade old (good god, has it been that long!? Very nearly, figure nearly 8 years) computer, a P2 450 which has been serving me reliably as a web/mail/ftp server, decided it was going to dis-recognize my 120GB drive and corrupt the 6GB boot drive. Hilarity ensues.

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The Japanese people, as homogenous as they are, all share the same dream: Get a job, get married, get a house, get a dog. Putting aside for a moment the fact that they consider it a dog's duty to bark incessantly and their apparent unwillingness to train them, everyone with a dog walks the dog at least once a day. This creates a rather serious problem with squishy landmines on every paved surface (which is most of Japan that isn't a ricefield). In order to combat this they've made a concerted effort to encourage people to carry little bags around into which the doggy joy is to be scooped, and carried home for disposal. Most people are good with this, though from the dodging I have to do when riding my bike I'm prepared to say with conviction that not quite enough people do it.

It's spawned a rather interesting situation where many fashion-conscious Japanese women carry around name-brand (Louis Vitton, Chanel, etc) bags in which their plastic-ensconced squishy pet love is carried. It's a good thing, I think, when carrying dog shit doesn't mean you can't still be fashionable.

Also, there are a lot of signs encouraging the lazy to clean up after their goddamned animals, and as soon as the number of cutesy dog doo signs is matched by the "Stop throwing your garbage in the fucking creek" signs (to date I've seen none of these so the trash problem continues unabated) I'll be a happy. More happy, that is. And by that I mean my rage will be alleviated by a miniscule amount.

Please ignore this test.

Tonight I spent some time putting the finishing touches on an X68000 power supply repair. Once I got it all finished and put it together, it failed to function.

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Today I was in an electronics store where they sold phones with cameras in 'em. I wanted to sample the image quality so I took the memory card from my phone, shoved it into the functional demo phones, and made a few snaps. And then realized they were stuffed full of pics people had taken of themselves and their friends. So I copied them all to my phone, and now please say hi to these fine folks!

While you're there, check out the images of people from these Dreamcast DreamEye cameras.

I swear this actually happened. Every word is true!!

My doorbell ceased to function a few days ago. I only noticed 'cause, as a complete fluke, I happened to be on my way out the door when a delivery arrived. The first time I watched the guy through the window as he filled out two forms, put 'em in my mailbox, and left. I was furious, how dare he not even try to ring the bell before leaving his detritus in my box? The next time it happened the guy knocked as a last resort, and I answered it, and tried the bell. "It doesn't work," he said, or words to that effect. "Well I need to pull pins out of your comrade's voodoo doll then!" was my unspoken response.

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[update] Opera has added the QRCode Generator page to their panel selection!

The QR Code Generator is finished! Now featuring some of that wacky Java the kids like so much. You can create random text QRCodes as well as web, address-book and email shortcuts for Vodafone + i-mode (DoCoMo) systems. This QR Code Maker is suitable for use as an Opera panel or Firefox Sidebar as well, so please feel free to use it as often as you like! Though naturally if you're living in a 3rd-world cellular country (ie: not Japan) you can't really use the codes for anything... But they're fun!

Thanks again to the indefatigable Mr. Fodder for his ceaseless battery of fixes, tweaks and problem solving.

Don't forget these other handy links!

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In this interview with the creator of Craigslist, the term 'moral compass' comes up a lot, and he talks of his company's recent acquisition by ebay, and how he likes their moral compass. Now my understanding of this phrase is that it refers to a company's sense of responsibility; which way the compass points isn't as important as the fact that they've GOT one at all. I was given cause to wonder a moment, what is ebay's moral compass all about?

I think it's fear.

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the house we're renting came with an imperial (not metric) thermometer. this morning is the first time it has been under 100F in over a month. in fact it's a LOT under 100F as you can see. This heat has set a new record for consecutive days over 30C,
and it's finally over!
now if it would just stop raining!

Unlike the publications of a certain North Korean dictator, when I say 'my works have been published' I mean they've been done in a format I expect more than six people will actually read. Nintendo Official Magazine in the UK has, in their most recent two issues, published quite a bit of my writings, check it out.

Some readable versions of some of these can be found here.

we're off on a little road trip this morning and it occurred to me that my little array of goodies would have made the old me - as recently as two years ago even - quite envious.

There's the handheld GPS, the great camera, the complete music library and the phone used to make and send this image.

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Scott Kurtz draws a daily comic that's quite successful. He announced his intention to give away his strip to newspapers for free, which would bypass the syndicates' lock on the funny pages (which ain't so funny these days thanks to the geriatrics that keep Blondie and other tripe in print) and many hopeful or already syndicated artists kind of freaked out at him.

"How can you make money!?" they cried. Again, and again.

Don't any of them do it for love of the medium?

I should rename this category to Cellphones.

Taito's finally put up some screenshots of their newest DariusDX for Vodafone in Japan. One of their deluxe 256k Applis, costs four hundred Yen to download and looks as good as the PC Engine version, I'd say.



PC Engine on the left, Vodafone Appli on the right.

So i fried my phone by adding the new switch. Camera no workee. Phone completely locks up when i try to use the cam. Took it in for repair today.

If they replace it i lose my expensive downloaded games. There's only a tiny chance it can be repaired, if they deign to try to fix it at all.

This loaner sucks! It's an SH-52, same phone MrNES had when he was in Japan. No English menus, low-res camera, shitty screen. Bah! Please enjoy this picture of my old (pre-recently fried) phone while you're here:

Remember that speaker killswitch I made for my celphone? It was externally ugly so I remade it with a different switch and a button I ripped out of a dummy (demo) phone I bought at a surplus shop. It looks damned near factory now, shame it works in reverse now - no sound unless I push the button, so there's no ringer at the moment. I'll fix that soon I think. Pics forthcoming. (Pics attached, read more to view 'em)

In other news I spent a lot of time working on combining two PHP scripts,

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Here's a few more commercials for you, including several game ads and the usual assortment of oddities.

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Because I can't get enough of these nutty QR Codes I made a page that allows you to make your own!

[update: Fixed!]

A surprising number of people find their way here looking for Waka Inoue, and probably don't find what they're looking for. There's a Waka Inoue commercial here for a Japanese loanshark called Promise. You can see more J-commercials here and here.

This post's a bit terse 'cause the last verbose one was a bit annihilated.

I love these QRCodes, they're like modern machine-readable heiroglyphics, I think they're pretty neat indeed. Here's a few downloadable or web apps for creating your own QRCodes if you haven't got a capable phone,

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The other day I was out riding and I came across the most beautiful cloud formation I've seen in a long time. Here they are. Sorry there's so many, but most of them are simply stunning on their own. Perhaps you get numb by the end, but I was just gobsmacked. Here's a couple of my faves:
Clouds!
Clouds!
Clouds!

Also a couple of new shots I snapped with the phone recently:
Some cicada shells under a leaf
A sunset outside a sushi shop

Why does Canon hate me? My beloved and uber-capable Powershot G3 developed a really strange issue with horizontal lines in dark shots, so we called Canon. "Sounds like a problem with the CCD!" they said.

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Someone recently asked me to modify their US Sega Saturn with one of my switchless mods and last night I did it. Since my camera's in the shop, I had to use my celphone to take pics. It did a fairly decent job. Here's the pics of the job:

Closeup view of jumpers
Jumpers with jumpers removed, wires attached
Reset switch that changes region
Location of unused capacitor, handy power for the 74157 chip
Overview of finished mod

My phone makes a loud chime sound whenever I take a picture, as part of an anti-upskirt measure all Japanese cellphone makers adopted. I'm not particularly against this, tho it'd have been nicer if I could choose my own sound...

Recently we were taking care of a kitten, a very cute photogenic kitten, and I was taking pictures of it with my phone - but the chime woke him up.

So I made a speaker killswitch. Now I can take silent pictures!

This was a bit of a chore to install,

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So I'm learning some more CSS, and this is what I've come up with. The white block will scale with the width of the screen, the orange one is static. Or, at least, they were when I wrote this. If I can come up with a fix this post might be irrelevant.

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Just a few more commercials for you. Windows has a weird issue when I connect my ASCII pad, it assumes the pad's mic input is my preferred audio input device so, when recording commercials, all the audio is just a static hiss. No matter how many times I change it the preferences aren't saved by the shitty recording software so, next time I load it up, it's still recording the wrong audio. What pisses me off is it PLAYS the right audio, but when I record it gets the wrong track so I'm none the wiser until I go to trim the files and find there's no audio. And of course I forget to check it, 'cause for fuck's sake this isn't brain surgery! Remember what I chose last time. Damned thing. Grr. etc.

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Today I made a QR code with my phone.

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Just before sleep claimed me last night I noticed the screen light shining on my half-closed phone looked really nice. Tonight I took a picture of it. It was really hard to do, pesky gravity kept pulling it closed. The final result (on the second try!) turned out about as well as I could have hoped. Have a look.

There's a new gallery here too. Gonna put whatever random images I take on there.

I picked up a new cellular phone the other day, and it's a bloody amazing thing. Never mind that it's more powerful than the average computer a decade ago, it's jam-packed with unreasonably astonishing fun stuff.

[Update June 30 2004] 256k Appli Gallery

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Recently I was contacted by someone claiming to be a researcher for a TV program, and they were interested in my opinion (as a somewhat disreputable seller of pre-abused crap) of the rarest game ever. Here's my response.

comments are closed due to spam, sorry.

It's been a while, but here's a stack of new Japanese commercials for you. Some are good, some are weird, some are just commercials. All are chosen to highlight the differences between your culture (Whatever that may be) and the Japanese. There's Japanese idols, western stars, goofy strangeness and strange goofiness. To view, click

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Dentist's appointment was today, first one in 15 years. I was apprehensive, 'cause I expected bad news. What I found was: "I haven't seen teeth this nice in years." Not only do I have no cavities the tiny hole that's been worrying me is so tiny as to be unremarkable. It may in time need work, or it may not, but for the time being i've got happy healthy teeth and gums.

You hear that kids? 31 years old and no cavities so far! All hail parents who're sugar nazis for their kids.
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There's a refreshing openness in the consumer electronics industry that's lacking in the game industry. When I wanted to learn more about my Pioneer LaserActive LaserDisc player I called Pioneer and asked for the service manual. No problem, they said - call this number and ask for document #whatever.

When I called Sony and asked for details about their Playstation I was told in no uncertain terms that a. I didn't need to know and b. I should be ashamed for even wondering, let alone having the gall to pick up the phone and call Sony.

That Sony assumes I'm a filthy pirate or thief and Pioneer acknowledges their customers' occasional eagerness to prod about and occasionally fix their hardware does not escape my notice. I'm sure you all know what happened next: Sony conquered the gaming world while I took over the lucrative LD-playing market from Pioneer. It's obvious, really - screw the customers to win! Give them what they want if the idea of massive layoffs appeals to your stockholders.

Mario vs Donkey Kong is killing me, 'cause I have to race through it to make screenshots + write 4 pages for the new job, and I want to slowly savour it. It's a really phenomenal game. To solve the problem I'm running two sessions concurrently, one for ripping-through screenshotery, one to actually play and enjoy, to get top scores and find all the stars to unlock secret goodies.

See?

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Someone brought up the concept of reforming the English language, creating a unified spelling structure.

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I have a dentist's appointment in a week. I'm absolutely dreading the truth of how decrepit my teeth are. It's been a decade and a half since I've seen a dentist, and while I had no fillings then I am reasonably confident I won't escape the molten metal wrath this time. I can feel holes. My teeth don't hurt, but they're becoming more sensitive to hot and cold, so I'm going to try and nip this in the bud, so to speak...

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Last night I had a dream. I won't clutter up this page with it, click

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Here's something I dredged up that I found a couple of years ago and put online, but I can't remember if I told anyone or not. In addition, I found news images + clips of a Sep/2003 bombing/suicide in a Japanese office building. Recently found Nintendo's F-Zero cartoon on TV, it's a pretty appalling blend of crappy animation + CG. Speaking of Nintendo, here's their Club Nintendo offerings for points holders. Not a good item in the bunch, and nothing good on the horizon.

Something fresh, the spam I started seeing a lot of until I filtered it.

Nothing but GameBoy Advance updates today. Last night I decided to try an old Super GameBoy game (Donkey Kong) on the GBA to see if it did, in fact, function the same as the GBPlayer. It does - it has the same flaws as the GameCube's GBPlayer, and the GameBoy Color. You can see what I mean right here.

Turns out my GBA was broken.

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Today I finally figured out was RSS was. Opera supports RSS directly as of version 7.5 and I wanted to know what the fuss was about. Lots of news sites and blogs do RSS, and now that I'm running the incredible Pivot system on this page, which does RSS, I thought I should figure it out.

RSS is, at its most basic, a standardized way of labelling headlines and content so that automated apps can gather the important bits and present them to users. It's always required a separate app or scipt to do the gathering and presenting but with Opera now it's easier. I wanted to put RSS on my games page and needed to learn how. Read on for fun with RSS, XML and more!

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The heat and humidity kicked into full gear today, a little early, and more humid already than it was at the worst of last summer (which it must be said was unnaturally dry). So what did I do? I went biking. Twice. Nothing beats the moist sweaty feeling like making yourself totally drenched, then having a cold shower!!

Converted most of the old archives to the new format, clear up to March last year (or May, or something) which means I'm nearly done but - as is the story of my life - I'm done for now. No one cares anyway.

I'm liking the new blog format. I've even come to terms with the word 'blog' which, while it still fills me with some rancor, doesn't send me into frothing fits like it used to. The layout is the bog standard pivot intall, except for some tweaks to the background colours (and I added some lines). It's far prettier than the old Neography but it's also a little more... Generic. Spiffy, legible, better, but generic. In the same way a shiny new Corolla is better than a beat up old Hyundai. Sure, it's nice, but it's not exciting. And as you can see from the games page I live to excite. Also, boobies! Now if only I could work the moblog into this layout the way I want it...

Went to Akihabara today.

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I have a Microsoft Natural Keyboard. The learning curve was steep, but my wrists thank me for the effort. They don't hurt like they used to. The keyboard however has a serious bug: If I hold down SHIFT and type anything ending in CK quickly the K doesn't show up. This means when I'm exceptionally angry and yelling SUCK or FUCK it comes out SUC and FUC. This only makes me angrier, and of course it's Microsoft's fault. What isn't these days?

Welcome to the new home of Neography, with a new system and - wait for it - news!!

I've been published (again). Two of the most recent issues of the British magazine Computers + Video Games have articles that I wrote. You can see the covers here and the articles themselves are here and here.

The old Neography can be found here for now.

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I've whipped up a more detailed mod than normal over on GameSX.com, showing in detail how I made a Saturn pad into a USB pad. Have a look-see!

This is just a test post, etc.

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Here's a few non-sunset pics of Australia for you:

A sleeping Koala. They sleep a lot.
Isn't he cute?
My sister's husband, and Oliver.
Me chasing a ghost-crab.
Kookaburra
Me, feeding the Kookaburra

There are more pics on the photos page.

No one wants to hear about the trip in this modern age, it's all about the visuals. So here's some visuals for ye:

Sunrises and Kookaburra
Sunset in Howlong (1)
Sunset in Howlong (2)
Sunset in Howlong (3)
Sunset in Howlong (4)
Sunset on the road
A plague of locusts upon ye bumper

Here are some pics I've been taking on our little journey.

Narita airport at night, looking at the moon rising over the control tower.

The beach up at Childers where we spent an afternoon waiting for my dad. 20 mins in the sun and I had a lovely sunburn.

Brisbane at Night as seen from the top of a lovely little hill. Zoomed in on the city center.

Brisbane at night showing the moon and the crowd on the mountain.

The Family. Me, Zumi, my dad, my sister Adina and her husband Andy.

Sunrise from the plane (1)

Sunrise from the plane (2)

Sunrise from the plane (3)

Yesterday we drove up to Childers with my dad. He had a demo to do with a potential customer so we tagged along and checked out the scenery on the way. While he was busy we took off in the truck and went looking for the beach - glorious sandy beach from horizon to horizon, with a total of about 3 other people on it at any time. Just lovely. I've got the sunburn to prove it, after 20 minutes on the sand.

Today's Good Friday, and apparently all the shops are closed so we're kinda stuck for something to do. Big dinner tonight, lots of seafood apparantly. Looking forward to that.

We made it to Aus safely. Got some great pictures of the sunrise from the jet. My dad's place is a lovely sprawling house with all manner of wildlife in the backyard. Great fun, lots of pics forthcoming. Six hour drive today, going way up north to see what we can see. More updates soon!

What if Synaesthasia IS thinking? What if there is no center of thought, some phantom consciousness of our brain that accounts for our sense of self?

It struck me while I was biking today that synaesthasia might be just extra communication among brain components, that these components were already communicating and that synaesthasia was just an extreme of this interlink phenomenon.

Now it's been said that creative people are seven times more likely to be synaesthetic, but what I'd like to know is: are intelligent people likely to be MORE synaesthetic!? One way of measuring intelligence is raw computational ability. Another is memory or recall. Another is lateral thinking, the ability to piece together parts of a puzzle that might not be related at first glance but later prove to be so.

What if this is intelligence? What if the synaesthetic condition is just an extreme form of the interconnects that drive our brains?

We have vision centers, sound centers, shape processors, facial recognition, sound buffers, 'fight, fuck or flee' centers... They're all connected - what if smarter people have more connections, or more efficient connections?

Have there been studies of any correlation between synaesthasia and intelligence? Damn damn damn, this is amazing to think about.

And I was thinking about the nature of consciousness - still not more than 5 pages into these new books I got (was reading the Vernor Vinge novel instead) but I was thinking (heh)...

Perhaps there is no consciousness, per se. The brain is a big lump of specialized interconnected data processors, each gulping down as much input as it can and sharing the symbolic, digested concepts with other centers. The more interconnects (or more effient ones, I don't know which is more likely to prove true but the result is the same) you have the more information can be shared and the smarter you are... But what if these processors, tied together by a shared memory, ARE consciousness?

I imagine one possibility is the temporal lobes, largely believed to be the foundation of actual thought and/or consciousness, are time-sensitive correlators of data. This region of the brain simply (hah) monitors the entire symbolic network and pieces together an entire world view from the echochamber of babbling processors we call a brain. I wish I could find confirmation of that idea presented in a Dilbert cartoon that the brain doesn't show any 'conscious thought' activity until after actions have been decided, 'cause this would lend credence to the idea that the lobes are merely an after-the-fact piecing together of what the brain has already done.

This is how drugs affect the brain, we can't control this because there is no "we", we're a processor trying to make sense of the babbling output of a collection of processors!

This doesn't absolve us of responsibility, or show that we have no 'free will' but instead reinforces the idea that we are what society makes us. Our brains are wired up from the moment we're born, making sense of this onslaught of data and creating a worldview based on things that the brain centers and memory consider consistant. If the brain decides 'good kids' are really a survival priority then we'd create more systems were kids are instructed properly, programming them in effect to have the values and interconnects necessary to function the way they should...

Suppose the brain really does work this way, we don't have a consciousness so much as an animal instinct to preserve and prolong life, and the brain - based on a lifetime of observations and accepted relationships - instinctively picks the proper path! I don't see a huge leap between "fire hurts, must avoid" and "if I teach my kid how to act fairly and honestly it will be easier for me to work with him, and he with the world, and my survival chances are better when others pull for me instead of push against me."

Now assuming this is the case, we've got a massively complicated parallel processing device that's designed to input data and sort it into relationships. These relationships are stored in a communal memory which all centers share, and the entire mess is driven by an instinct to avoid pain, fear and ultimately death. It's true that a few simple rules can create forms of infinite complexity, and from these simple parts we've arrived at a brain that seems conscious, seems aware, and functions as we've come to expect.

Wow.

[oh yeah]

I meant to wonder: Language is passed to us from our parents and our society, it's one more set of input, another tool to forge relationships between concepts. How much does language affect the sense of self, and if there are languages without a word for "I" do people natively speaking this language lack the sense of self we're seeking here?

So I got a few new books from Amazon today. Part one of two, the next set should be here in another 10 days or so. I splurged on international shipping after I realized there was really no savings having it shipped to someone else's place first.

The first item on the list is the newest novel from my current favourite author Vernor Vinge. The Peace War seems a short (300p) read but if it's anything like his other works (A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep) I imagine I'm going to dig it hardcore.

Next up another couple of Brain Books. One's a 1200-page monster from the MIT Press called Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness detailing the latest studies into the nature and function of human consciousness. This should be fun, if I can manage to sink my teeth into it. First glance seems to put it beyond the layman. O_o

Lastly is the popular-audience (ie: easily digested) Mind Wide Open which is a much slimmer tome weighing in at a mere 260 pages. I expect to chew through this one in no time, but it was recommended so what the hell.

As you probably don't recall I had written about the concept of a modular mind with regards to creating an artificial intelligence. One thing I had thought about (but not written down yet) was the creative process, which a strictly logical computer simulation would have trouble replicating.

I thought about a random 'synaptic misfire' system where parts of the brain, subprocessors if you will, would connect and shoot off random images or concepts to other subprocessors. I thought perhaps this would stimulate a creative process where the individual components would struggle to reconcile hard facts or 'truthful' data with the spurious ones randomly shuttled about the brain, drawing unusual conclusions.¹

A couple of days ago I was reading up on V. S. Ramachandran's studies into synaesthasia and the idea that creative people were seven times more likely to be 'afflicted' with the condition and I was struck by an epiphany as if a bell had rung in my head.

The synaesthetic condition seems to have remarkable parallels to the creative process I was trying to replicate, except where I had considered temporary, random connections and images the synaesthete experiences a more 'hardwired' condition. It is this connection, where certain subprocessing nodes are always connected and certain kinds of data are always shared, that the perhaps inappropriate data is processed as creativity².

I think in my synthetic brain I would start experimenting with these cross-wired conditions on a more temporary basis. I don't see an advantage to a permanent communication between two normally disconnected nodes except in a larger pool where one mind can be completely bent and the rest 'normal' enough to compensate. Perhaps short-term synaesthetic connections between random centers?

The synaesthetic condition fascinates me, and I always wonder how many of our modern phrases or cultural traditions are a result of crosswired brains? "Green with envy," "Cowardly yellow." Was the first person to use these a synaesthetic writer? My mind at least is fascinated by the idea.

1. Naturally this wouldn't be occuring all the time or legitimate thought processes would suffer excessive corruption. Perhaps though this would mimic real life thinking in a tired, drugged or dreaming mind? I've had days like that. =)

2. I've been thinking of the nature of consciousness a lot lately as well, and one thing I come to repeatedly but can't verify as truthful is a statement made in a Dilbert strip. "The region of the brain responsible for conscious thought doesn't show activity until after a decision is reached" or similar. I envision a 'conscious' center that doesn't plan the actions so much as reverse engineer the processes completed by the rest of the brain. 'A decision was made to turn left, deemed correct because the memory center recalled a left at this location at a previous time resulted in a favourable result' or 'A decision was made not to trust this man because men fitting the profiles flagged are reinforced as dangerous. Flagged attributes include dirty, mean looking, holding an ice-cream towards me, and driving a freshly painted van with no license plates. And that's why I'm running, I get it now.'

NOTE: Comments on this entry are closed on account of excessive spam. Sorry!

So yesterday I was looking up V. S. Ramachandran, the author of a book mentioned in the last post's recommended reading list, and found a list on his official site which had links to PDF articles he's written. Recently it seems he's been researching synaesthasia, which can best be described as a cross-wiring of the senses or regions in the brain.

Below are some of the most fascinating bits I gleaned from his research.

Initially they were concerned with the specifics of synaesthasia, whether it was perhaps a memory, or imagined or actual 'cross wiring' in the brain. One test they cite involves people who see numbers in different colours. Subjects were told to stare at a mark in the center of a screen, and a number was presented to one side, in the subject's peripheral vision. Most subjects could identify the number easily.

Next this number was surrounded by another number, a 5 with several 3s around it, for example. The resultant image was more complicated and normal people couldn't tell what number was in the center. Synaesthetes, however, saw red surrounded by green, and could deduce "It must be a five." Clearly then though the visual part of the brain is overwhelmed by the peripheral data, the crosswired parts - normally dormant - are active on the image. They received and processed the numbers into their synaesthetic colours when the vision center could not identify them.

A similar test involved a 5 made of tiny 3s. Depending on the synaesthete's focus, on either the larger number or the component smaller ones, the colour would change.

Also intensely interesting: colour blind synaesthetes perceive colours they're not physically able to see. One subject called them 'martian colours'. I can't help but feel jealous of a brain that can vividly see colours never seen with the eyes.

Research also showed that the synaesthetic condition is seven times more common in creative people than the normal population. Very curious!! I wonder how much of our history has been driven by defective hardware.

More of his articles can be found on his bio page, here.

[With apologies, I suffered a rather incomprehensible outflow of ideas around the halfway mark and it gets a little wordy.]

Something that I often wrestle with is the idea of our brains as being mere machines, machines that when presented with different chemicals - either natural or introduced - function differently. You can essentially change the man by changing the chemical cocktail his brain is soaking in.

To me, this raises the question of value, of worth. Is a human more than the sum of his parts? Is this steaming pile of neurons what defines and creates a man? When the system breaks down the man is changed, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability, and what then?

A construction worker who suffers brain damage on the job becomes a vegetable, and his friends and family are now dealing with two people: The man in their memories and the new, lesser man in the old man's body. The man himself may not even realize he's been changed; consciousness is a funny thing - when our brain is altered we are not, and cannot be aware of these changes. Witness the many documented cases of people who lose a limb but still feel it and try to move it. Observe the woman who, after a stroke, is no longer aware of the right side of her body, and consistantly fails to straight clothes, apply makeup or clean one side? Or the woman who no longer recognizes her own arm as belonging to her body and when asked replies "Someone must have left that here!" If your brain is changed and its perceptions are altered though drugs or damage or stroke your conscious self is unaware and in effect is recreated. Changes to the brain via drugs or damage can result in debilitating operational deficiencies or milder changes to the personality. If the person is so easily changed or erased, it is the machine that in effect controls us. A man in England had a tumor that caused him to exhibit pedophiliac tendencies. Remove the tumor and he reverts to his normal pre-tumor non-pedophile behavior.

These are not insignificant changes, and they are not under our direct control! When a man's brain is changed the man changes. Change it enough and the new man is not recognizable as the old man.

What good is 'free will' when a chemical injection can make you more violent, more restrained, happier, or depressed? When a knock on the head can make you forget who your family is, or where you live, or how to talk? If a tumor can make you a pedophile is it much of a stretch to suggest that by tweaking the brain you can make pedophiles NOT lust after children? Where's the border of good control versus bad control? Mood altering drugs are commonplace. More active tools can directly stimulate the brain. One region, when stimulated, causes people to 'see god' and fell very fervently religious.

The world we know is basically defined by our brains; as two people have different brains they also exist in two different worlds. Tweak them both and you can bring them closer together with regards to how they view and react to the world. As we learn more about the brain, and can more often and safely tweak it to root out undesirable behaviour or correct 'deficiencies', we must face the idea that a man is a pliable and ultimately changable animal.

What value does a machine have if reprogramming it changes it entirely? It seems to me then that a man is nothing on his own, and is instead given value only by the people he interacts with. A man by himself is a pile of naturally occuring elements, nothing more than a fast moving plant with a mouth. It's the people around him that give him value, that make him real, that create the collective image of the man.

When we die, and at this point it seems inevitable that we all will, will we be remembered fondly like the Ataris and Amigas of our youth? Or will we be swiftly forgotten as our carcasses rot in a box under the earth that we used to tread on?

At this point I'd just like to digress and say "Screw god." People should do what's right because they feel it, not because some giant phantom overseer is cracking a whip and threatening Big Bad Things if we're bad! If a man is defined by what other people think then a man's afterlife is defined by people's memories.

Do unto others, etc. The golden rule makes sense. Respect, yo.

Also, you should floss.

Suggested reading:
Salon Book Review
Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter
Phantoms in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran

Someone I know once summed up how I feel in a few short words: "What the fuck is wrong with you fucks!?"

Trying to decide where to move, now that the decision has been made to leave Japan. As much as I want to sit on my ass making easy money my whole life I want to get the fuck out of here before the country shakes itself to pieces, starts a war, or I shoot myself out of pure boredom. I've been looking at both Canada and Australia, and I've come to the decision that basically everywhere sucks. A lot.

Canada's job situation sucks ass. Trying to find work may be tricky no matter where I go 'cause I haven't any letters like BSc or MD after my name, nor have I any specialized training or, in fact, any recent job experience. Who's gonna hire a guy who can only put on his resume that he's been smart enough to pay the bills and buy lots of toys without actually doing any real work for the last eight fucking years? Trying to find a job would not be unlike trying to get a loan when you're self employed: You'd have better odds if you were dead. All I've got in my favour is my brain, somewhat less than the tack sharp monster it used to be, and my attitude - which, it must be said has soured somewhat. So basically it's back to The Grind no matter where I go... Which doesn't bother me so much as the very thought of working for some asshole for minimum wage.

There's the relative situation. My sister's family is great, they live in Kelowna. Pretty much the entirety of the rest of the relatives live in Australia, but despite their sheer quantity I confess I've never really enjoyed their company. Well let's face it, I don't really enjoy anyone's company!! They're nice enough in their own, quaint, primitive kind of way. We're not all cut from the same cloth, it would certainly seem.

There are no beetles in Canada to speak of. The ones in Australia don't really compare to Japan's but they are at least as plentiful, and as colourful. I like insects.

Australia's a legislator's wet dream, with strict laws about fucking everything. You can't bring anything into the country that might have been alive at one point, including sausages or seasoning for your rice that might have had something resembling an egg involved in its creation. When we moved to Japan we brought over some really large, really heavy boxes full of our gear, but Australia's luggage limits are half what they are for either Canada or Japan, and the overweight or oversized rates are so extreme you might as well chuck your old gear and buy it all anew when you get there. Which, I'm sure, is the intent.

Biking in Canada is world fucking class. In Australia I've been told it's not at all bad, so that's kind of a wash. Canada wins the snowboarding competition tho, kind of a no-brainer there. Housing prices in .au are good, but let's face it, it'll be decades before that's an issue for us.

Cellular phones in Canada or Australia are three years behind what we have in Japan, and they're three times more expensive. That's nearly ten times shittier, all told, and the situation doesn't appear to be getting better. It depresses me to now end that in either .au or .ca I'll go back to being some sort of fucking technophobe, disgusted by anyone who has a sexy phone, because of their extreme cost and retrograde features. When I hear people saying things like "I only want a phone that makes calls!" I want to tear off their skull and then hurt them real bad - but after seeing how shitty their phones are I expect to be one of them, and that pisses me off. Cellular carriers in other countries are dragging their feet bringing out new features, counting on their virtual monopolies and price fixing agreements to keep prices high and devices antiquated. It's fucking disgusting, but when I read about the prices and feature availability ($989 for a phone in Australia that's not as good as the free ones in Japan!) I can't decide if I should shoot them or myself. Where's their sense of national pride? Of competition? Of self fucking respect!? There isn't any, it's all about milking the old cow and dragging the feet.

Which brings us to internet access, about which I have really nothing good to say. In Canada at least prices and availabilty are decent - Australia's restricted services and high prices are what I'd expect African fucking Jungle tribes to be paying. I like to run my own servers, I like the level of control and reliability I get out of the effort, and there's a shred of accountability this way - I have only myself to blame when the server slags itself. Canada doesn't allow servers of any sort, and Australia's ISPs permit in a month the traffic I chew through on a busy DAY. And let's not talk about the SPEED! Australia's 1.5mbit connections for a mere $100AUD per month may sound good when you're a 56k user, but that's 1.5% of the speed I get here now for triple the price! And fuck me - 100mbit in Canada is $1788 per MONTH and there's traffic fees on top of that!!

The same non-competing foot-dragging assholes beating you to death with cellular phones are in charge of the internet!! And don't give me that shit about Japan or Korea being so small that it's cheap to wire everyone up with fibre - I paid $450 CDN to have fiber installed at my house - and then I moved across town and paid it again! It's cheaper by 50% to leave my computer running as a server here in Japan than it is to pay hosting anywhere else, and I get the whole system to myself, can run it how I like, and never pay for traffic.

The only drawback to Japan is the language barrier, total lack of professionalism, shockingly incompetant doctors, corrupt goverment, earthquake threat, warlike tendencies, and infrastructure that's wound so tight it'll go completely spastic the very nanosecond Something Bad happens.

So basically I'm fucked. I'm bored. I'm depressed. This shit enrages me - every country's filled with greedy self-centered assholes trying to fuck their fellow citizens and I can't stand it.