Category: general

A rainbow cloud was spotted in Gunma prefecture recently. (Wonder if Takumi saw it ;P)

After the iridescent cloud appeared, the meteorological observatory and the Gunma Astronomical Observatory received about 20 calls asking about the phenomenon, with one of the callers saying, “Isn’t it a sign that something bad is about to happen?”

Well, that’s rather pessimistic! Just enjoy the pretty cloud!

On a somewhat related note, Chris (Man in Japan) writes about how conformity is praised and innovation is not.

We were learning how to make chairs last week, and the guy teaching us suddenly realised he’d shown us part of it wrongly, and that the seat would now be wonky. He looked appalled with himself, and shamefully told us we’d have to start the whole thing again. Chris and I ignored him and figured out a way to repair the damage ? it was steering away from the initial design, but it would result in an unwonky chair. Our teacher couldn’t really comprehend the fact that we’d just done it our own way; as far as he was concerned, the design was the one and only way to build that chair.

The next day we carrying on with our chair when the staff member in charge of the overall project came to see how things were going. Our supervisor (he’s a half-teacher) told the manager what had happened, and how we’d found our way around the problem. A few minutes later the guy in charge came back and said that we’d have to start the whole thing again because we’d made it the wrong way. I couldn’t quite believe it, an entire day wasted in the name of rules and efficiency. I said so, I explained how pointless this would be, but he refused to budge.

Well, they do have that phrase, “出る杭は打たれる” (deru kui wa utareru, or “The stake that sticks up will be pounded down”).

Just watched the one with Krieg and his fish poop. Bwahahahaha!

I watched the pilot yesterday, and the first regular episode just now, and I have to say…I am amazed by all the cheese. Somehow, when I was a teenager first watching the show, the simplistic natures of the character interactions and plot weren’t apparent to me. Now, though, they are practically jumping on my face.

The characters are actually fine. They are all unique and have depth. But the situations that bring this depth to the surface are hokey, poorly planned, and hastily executed. I have a hard time understanding how they get from point A to point B. It’s like I have to just accept on faith that there is some sort of logic to it all, somewhere.

Then there are sci-fi elements that are thrown in with no explanation, hardly dealt with, and then removed with only the barest of resolution. Case in point: Lt. O’Neill’s brief bout with dolphin telepathy in “The Devil’s Window”. I mean…what?

I am hoping it gets better in future episodes, to justify my long-held opinion that seaQuest is cool. But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe this is why, back when I was a teenager, when seaQuest was up against Lois & Clark on Wednesday nights, I chose to watch Lois & Clark.

Today, the Cynical Traveller points and laughs at Harajuku! And you can all feel free to point and laugh at me, too, because the whole time I was reading the article, all I could think was:

(cf. Kyou Kara Maou eps 8 and 41)

My hair is down to my shoulders again, and I don’t like how it looks. I want a new haircut, though; I don’t want to just trim it. I want something with style. Probably with layers, too, to add fullness.

Here are some pictures of hairstyles that I found online. I like all of them. Not sure if I can pull them off though…

Any preferences, readers? Or any other suggestions? I’m actually leaning towards the first one, myself…

Democratic leaders back Dean, don’t want ‘wimp’

“I hope Governor Dean will remember that he didn’t get elected to be a wimp,” said DNC member Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a South Carolina state representative. “We have been waiting a long time for someone to stand up for Democrats.”

You can stand up for each other without abandoning the principles on which your party is supposedly founded. I thought the Democrats were supposed to be tolerant. I thought they were supposed to preach equality. I thought they were against racism and religious discrimination.

How, then, can they stand by someone who stereotypes and polarizes?

You can be strong without being oppressive. You can be opinionated without being a bigot. Howard Dean has balls, yes. But I fail to see how engaging in rhetoric is going to help the Democrats. Especially when that rhetoric goes against everything the Democrats claim they stand for.

Wow, bicycling naked. That’s…dangerous. (Here’s a reference to some more naked protesting. Don’t you think the shock factor of nudity is pretty much nonexistent by now?)

How’d you like to have the father of innovative video games on a T-shirt?

This article’s title is better than anything I could come up with: Japan’s Middle-Aged Men Start to Preen. I also like this quote: “Mr. Company President is sexy!” (I wonder if that’s “社長さんはセクシー”?)

Speaking of good quotes, here’s a funny one from Global Voices Online: “A Welsh View points to how to buy a pint of Guinness. I’m not sure why a Welsh site points to a Swedish site for instructions on how to order an Irish beer–perhaps we can blame globalization.”

Global Voices Online also links to a comparison of a new Japan-China-Korea history textbook to the recently-approved Japanese history textbook that has Asia up in arms. (At this point, I’d like to link to a few Japundit articles on the subject: one, two, three.) It would be interesting to see this new book compared to China’s own textbooks…

Slashdot links to an article about “a subject often pondered by Star Wars fans: what is it like to watch the six films in order with a fresh perspective?” It’s actually not as thorough as I would have hoped for, but it is interesting!

Okay, so that was weird.

I was getting something¹ out of the oven, and when I straightened up I got all dizzy and lightheaded. It didn’t clear up right away, either; I had to stand there just blinking and staring for a long moment until my eyes decided to come into focus and my brain decided to stop swirling around.

It felt really strange, like how you feel when you take demerol the first time². Loopy.

I wonder what that was about…

…I finally got around to tagging (and quasi-captioning) the photos in the last seven galleries I’d uploaded. So now you can really get a lot of pictures of the Lamar building. Or of flowers. There’s a new tag, too: construction. And check out the quarry!

:>

I’ve grown increasingly unhappy with my photographs. Most of the time I don’t succeed in taking the pictures I’m trying to take, because I don’t know what I’m doing. Today, when preparing my photos from the past two days for upload, I deleted quite a few that were out of focus or washed out or just boring. I’m at the point where it doesn’t serve a purpose to keep photos that aren’t interesting–at least, not if I’m going to keep taking photos of the same places over and over. Which is apparently what I do these days.

To wit, two new galleries at my smugmug site: the Greeneway on the 8th, and downtown Augusta on the 9th.

I have been trying to get decent pictures of flowers. Ben showed me how to use the manual focus on my camera, which has helped a lot in getting close-in shots, but I ultimately have trouble seeing whether or not I have the proper part of the scene in focus on that LED screen, especially when it’s as bright out as it was yesterday. That brightness was detrimental in other ways: none of the pictures I took of the beautiful white flowers along Riverwalk came out at all. The flowers were odd white spots with no detail whatsoever.

Still, I did manage to get a few pictures I liked.

For the most part, though, I’m unhappy. I need to start learning more about photography.

Fortunately, I got a book on sale at Borders recently called The Photographer’s Manual. I’ll stick it in the bathroom and see if I don’t start learning new tricks.

I have a few things I could–and should–be doing, notably shopping for food and getting the laundry off the dining room table. But I really don’t feel like doing anything.

Part of it could be because of how I slept last night. I’m not sure why, but I don’t feel rested at all. When Sean bent to kiss me on his way to work this morning, I felt like I was struggling out of a coma just to respond to him. I managed to say something like “Mwur” as he kissed my cheek, and then I slipped back into darkness.

My mother-in-law called at 10:42, waking me up. Normally I can struggle into coherence when someone calls while I’m asleep, but this morning I am not sure that was the case. I did understand what she said, but, afraid I would forget about it completely, I got up and wrote it down. Then I went through my morning routine, because I felt that it was too late to stay in bed any longer.

But I still feel like being in bed would be the best thing ever. I wonder if I should just go back.

Next Wednesday is the opening of Batman Begins, which promises to be a very cool movie. I’m really looking forward to it.

Here’s an article from Sci Fi Wire about Sir Michael Caine, the actor who plays Alfred.

Caine added that he hit off with star Christian Bale right from the start. “I’d grown up in very big country houses,” he said. “Not because I’m in a noble family. My mother was a cook, and so I was always backstairs with the butler and everything. So I knew that relationship, and Christopher is himself very against the master/servant [relationship]. He’s very egalitarian, personally. He brought that into Batman, and I knew the lines above which a real butler wouldn’t go. … Familiarity. It worked perfectly.”

According to Asahi, cancer patients in Japan must deal with either sub-par treatment in their home prefectures, or long commutes to Tokyo for high quality treatment. Even large prefectures like Osaka have this problem.

Even a panel of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare acknowledges a glaring disparity among regions in the quality of cancer treatment. It says there is a gap of up to 10 percentage points in the five-year survival rates for cancers of the stomach, large intestine and lung among six prefectures, including Osaka and Yamagata, that it studied.

No simple nationwide comparison is possible because of a lack of long-term statistics on incidences of cancer and survival rates.

But a separate survey of 30 cancer hospitals nationwide recently found gaps of up to 13 to 20 percentage points for cancers of the stomach, lung and breast.

To Tomoko Ogura, a company employee in Kochi, that fact hit home when she underwent an operation for stomach cancer in a large public hospital in Kochi Prefecture in early 2004.

Soon after having her stomach and gall bladder surgically removed, Ogura, 33, found that her cancer was in a much more progressed stage than she had been told. Her doctor, who had tried to shield her from the truth so as “not to discourage her,” was not comfortable about recommending chemotherapy to prevent a recurrence. She couldn’t find another local specialist to consult for a second opinion.

The article goes on to compare Japan’s cancer treatment facilities, doctors, and technicians to those of the United States. Japan is far behind, pitifully so in some areas.

Hopefully, articles like this one, combined with the government’s 10-year anti-cancer program and efforts by the health ministry to spread awareness, will help turn this situation around.

In the meantime, this sort of thing is one of the main reasons why I’m very reluctant to give up my US citizenship, even though I could imagine myself living in Japan for the rest of my life. (A person cannot hold a dual citizenship in the US and Japan.)

‘MacGyver’ Actor Dana Elcar Dies at 77

Actor Dana Elcar, whose role as Peter Thornton on ABC’s adventure series “MacGyver” depicted his real-life struggle with glaucoma and blindness, has died. He was 77.

He died Monday of complications from pneumonia at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

So, you may have noticed that the Elf Life banner is gone.

The other day I checked Elf Life and found that Carson has added merchandise. I thought, “Yay! This is great! Character T-shirts and mugs! Posters! And maybe a book to come in the future!”

So I went to the store.

And I found about fifty bazillion T-shirts with pictures of a pencil in the shape of a bolt of lightning on them, and a mousepad with a caricature of Carson on it.

There was only one other design besides those at the time. It was, miraculously, related to Elf Life: Filis preparing to whack Baughb with a tree. While this is a great image, I didn’t think it was the best choice for a shirt. Maybe the back of a shirt, but not the front.

When I saw those poor merchandise selections, I removed the banner.

I mean, I put that banner up out of pity. You may have gotten that out of my post about it. I feel sorry for Carson because he is so stupid. But god. Even I didn’t think he was that stupid.

When people write in saying they want merchandise for your comic strip, give them merchandise that has something to do with your comic strip. Give them a variety. And if you are going to insist on including designs that are just there to be “cute”, use categories so people can find the comic stuff and ignore the rest.

Today I checked the store again, and was delighted (not) to discover some new designs. Only one new design is directly pulled from the strip–and it’s a panel with extraordinarily secondary characters, a bartender and a band leader who is probably a parody of something or other.

Why am I going to buy a T-shirt featuring background characters?

Then there are shirts featuring Baughb’s “transformations” from the donation drive. Since these transformations are not comic canon, I’m not interested in having them on a T-shirt. In fact, since those images represent to me an artist begging for money, I don’t see why I would ever want to wear them.

And that’s it for Elf Life stuff. The rest of the new shirts just have stupid slogans like “Got lead?” and “Cartoonists do it sequentially” with a picture of that ridiculous pencil.

Okay, look: I thought that reader who wrote in asking for merchandise made it clear enough, but apparently not, so I will spell it out.

Things I will buy:

1. A polo shirt (or baseball cap) with an embroidered picture of the sprite.
2. A T-shirt with a main cast image on the back (Baughb, Filis, Glee, Airek, and Leukothea in prominent positions, with Ryley and Val and the new mermaids perhaps in the back) and an Elf Life logo over the left breast.
3. A coffee mug with the Elf Life logo on it.
4. A “main character” (Baughb or Filis) T-shirt, with that character’s face and name on the back and an Elf Life logo over the left breast.
5. A full cast poster, with everyone who’s ever been in the comic making an appearance. (This would be incredibly cool.)
6. An Elf Life book. I have wanted a book for a zillion years. (I still want the rest of the comics I paid for, too.)
7. Elf Life archives on a CD/DVD with a screenprinted logo, including an archive menu system that makes sense of the rich story and its multiple wandering plotlines.
8. A sprite plushie.
9. Baughb and Filis action figures/models.

Things I will not buy under any circumstances:

1. Anything in the current shop.
2. Anything featuring things that have nothing to do with the comic.
3. Anything featuring only characters that are so minor no one would recognize them.
4. A Carson Fire mousepad. I mean, come on!
5. Seriously, I probably won’t buy anything unless it is one of the items in my “Things I will buy” list.

Because I’m some kind of freaking masochist, I’m still reading the comic. Even though I have to load a huge page and then click a button to get past a gargantuan block of self-serving text to read it.

Because the comic is still good. I still want to know what happens. I still want the comic to go on.

But I am, once again, feeling utterly weary of Carson Fire’s ineptitude. It’s no wonder he’s not making a living at his art. All he does is update infrequently, answer fan requests with indignant monologues or piles of stupid “special features” that he somehow thinks are cool, make the comic harder and harder to find and read, and wonder why the money isn’t rolling in.

So I’ll still read Elf Life, but I’m not going to promote it anymore. I don’t want to endorse that kind of business model.

Update 2005/08/07 1:04 am: Carson Fire wrote me an email in response to this post. I commented on the email here.