After five years of flying thousands of miles every winter, I finally got a mileage card. Stupid, I know. I’m positive I’d have become a gold member in a year if I got one when I moved to Japan… Either way, I’ll keep gathering miles now (and hang out in elite lounges at airports as soon as I can) – although I’m a little concerned if I’ll have time to fly whatsoever in the coming few years. I have no issues with working all day every day, but visiting my family around Christmas is something I’m not willing to give up.
Whitstable Bay
The last of the Shepherd Neame beers on shelf at the nearby supermarket was the organic ale named Whistable Bay. I don’t know if it’s because of the “organic” or not, but it’s a really (taste-wise) smooth and quiet beer. Don’t get me wrong, it’s full-bodied, but not in a heavy way, so it’s quite refreshing. Even I recognize a subtle grapefruit-ish aroma from the hops in it. It somehow reminds me of classic all-butter shortbread.
The best part of this all, which I only noticed today, is that these imported ales in 500ml bottles are only 3 yen more expensive than the 300ml can Japanese beers. I think you can guess which am I going to pick.
Mainbrace IPA
Now I get it why people are all going on about IPA this, IPA that. (Although I see people going “it’s not even a proper IPA” in the reviews all around, I don’t have any other point of reference…) It’s pretty damn good indeed. It stays an ale while having all the hops and bitterness that I like in beers. It was a bit surprising that I could taste the alcohol in it, which I usually can’t in good beers. It has what I missed from the other two Shepherd Neame I tried the past days: a lingering aftertaste. Out of the three so far, this is one I definitely would buy again if I got a chance.
Midway (or not)
After a week and a half of struggling, today I finished the spring event of Kancolle. This was the second event I completed after the Christmas Arpeggio collaboration, as I gave up on E3 during Iron Bottom Sound.
1698
Tonight I opened another Shepherd Neame beer, a Kentish strong ale called 1698. Even if I’m not a big fan of pale ales, this one made me go “yumm”. It’s sweet and smooth, and reminds me of the ciders I had in England. I was a bit surprised when despite its entirely different character I discovered some of the beer-ish tones I was familiar with. To be honest, because of its well-rounded caramel sweetness, it feels like a crossover between a pale ale and a stout.
But here I am again trying to sound smarter and more knowledgeable about beers than I am, so you’d be better off with some pros’ reviews instead.
Beer beer
For a change I’m not talking about music, but about the actual beverage. I ran out of food so today after I got out of the studio I went shopping to my usual supermarket “nearby”. (Reminds me, this was the last day of my tutorial month, I’m gonna get assigned to a studio finally next Wednesday.) As I was about to pick up my usual six-pack of Sapporo Black Label, I noticed a few interesting-looking bottles nearby.
Doing stuff you don’t like
There are these people who do stuff they don’t like. I don’t get it.
It’s one thing when you just have to do something to survive, even if you hate it (like working some shitty job), but apparently for some people online hobbies are like that too. Yesterday, in response to my earlier post, I was told “you and Xythar have this idea that fansubbing can be compared to like passive entertainment. But that’s you – other people treated it like a job.”
On fansubbing
I just read koda’s post about fansubbing and I couldn’t agree less with it. She claims the same thing she’s claimed already when I showed up on Rizon four years ago: fansubbing is dead as it’s pointless to keep it up with simulcasts all over the place, and people who still stick to it are either delusional in that they can do better than the official, do it for the e-peen and/or simply don’t have a life.
I still call that bullshit.
Reasons
“Why did you come to Japan?” I don’t know if I’d written about this before and I just forgot or it’s just the almost-daily repetitions of this question that make me feel so bored of it. I just realized that I didn’t really elaborate on this part when I wrote about how I learned Japanese earlier.
Plus effort
I feel that I must add one thing to that earlier post about language learning: I didn’t put any effort into it. Sure in the first year I had to study pretty hard to keep up with the curriculum, but in retrospect even that just felt like a nuisance. I wasn’t actively learning vocab and I’d never sit down to memorize kanji if I didn’t absolutely have to. I just went with the flow and did what was necessary to get a pass grade.
On the other hand I know people who really care about Japanese as a language and were as fluent when they first came to Japan as I was after three years or so. The point is rather that even a slacker like me can pick up a language eventually. (It might be that translating loads and loads of stuff during my university years helped a bit.)
