Tag: english

Summer Wars

Great movie, isn’t it? Sadly I haven’t had the chance yet to see Wolf Children yet, but i’ll be sure to go and watch it sometime. Definitely.

Anyway, my summer didn’t feel like a summer break at all. I was bumping between (japanese-style) intern interviews and exams, then the actual interns. I had about zero free time, considering i was going somewhere everyday early in the morning and when i got back in the evening i had something to translate.


Mountains

If a mountain could talk
It would tell us a story
To reign in love means
Just how to say sorry
If an ocean could cry
We would drown in its tears
Dusk breaks to dawn
Which we cannot survive
Without love

Helloween – If a mountain could talk


Brain in the vat

A meme pic led me to check the wiki page of The Matrix, and it pointed out lots of philosophical (etc) references in the movie (i don’t even consider the latter two of the trilogy a part of the “trilogy”, they are worse than fanfics).

One was the brain in the vat thought experiment, which is a very fascinating problem – but is it really a problem? From the perspective of the brain in the vat, it’s impossible to tell if what it senses is really reality or just an image sent by a computer. If the Matrix was perfect (no bugs, no hacks), then it no one could ever notice that something was wrong. Most of humankind didn’t notice anyway.


Gadget

Until a while ago, whenever i got the sudden urge to go and buy a smartphone or tablet, i managed to stop myself by saying that i simply don’t need it. It was true too, since if i consider what i use my cell phone for (texting, tweeting and a call about once a week), even the money i’m already paying for it seems like a lot.

Getting a smartphone wouldn’t be smart, because it costs a lot, and i’d end up being stuck to it all the time. I’m constantly on the net when i’m at home, so i thought that having a net-able terminal close at hand all the time wouldn’t have a good effect on me. (Probably still true.)


Rakugo

Saturday I went to a rakugo theater in Asakusa. I was in Tokyo anyway for an “internship” (in the japanese sense of the word), so it was a chance i didn’t want to miss. Too bad there were hardly any real rakugo performances… I got the impression that the actual rakugo storytellers only just finished with the introduction by their time was over.

Maybe one or two of the zenza (lowest of the three rakugo performer ranks) actually told a whole rakugo story, the rest (even the shin’uchi) only did the smalltalk introduction. I don’t know if this is what’s to be expected from an afternoon session (it was full house by the way), but i’d’ve (hell yeah double penetration contraction) loved to hear one of the few rakugo stories i know. It was fun anyway, and although i was dying from the aftermath of last night’s party, i still laughed my ass off at a few jokes.


Fear

I’ve read a few tweets just now that made me think. America’s war on terror? Don’t make me laugh. English is supposed to be the USA’s official language, right? Then how can you mess up such an elementary preposition?

It’s not a war on terror, it’s a war of terror.


When

I’m really looking forward to an age when shutting down the computer wouldn’t require me to close everything and then reopen them at boot time. Or more like, an age where the concept of “booting” itself gets outdated.

With a dozen programs and a lot more windows open on six desktops, I really don’t feel like reopening and repositioning them again when I boot up next time. (This is the main reason why I haven’t shut down for days now.)

Just now I was going to insert a screenshot here of those six desktops, but with the current blog engine that would require manually uploading the image to the server, and that’s more of an effort than I’m willing to take.


I wish

I wish I could finally find a normal internet provider. I’m having terrible luck… Back when I lived in the dorm, the line would randomly disconnect, sometimes even for days.

Then once I called them about this matter and it turned out that in some cases the reason was excess traffic. So they’d disconnect me without notice or warning on the basis that I used too much bandwidth on a service advertised as unmetered and which doesn’t even offer a way to check how much data I actually transferred.


Plaintext

I just applied for a summer internship at one of my credit card providers (Mitsui-Sumitomo) and guess what, they sent me my username and the password i set in a plaintext email.

The only single time i can accept that they email me my password after registration is when the initial pass is random generated and i’m required to change it at the first login. But sending me the password i set myself and been using for the past month? What the hell?


Legend of Korra

So yesterday I watched the first episode of Legend of Korra, this year’s new season of Avatar. Then in two days I watched the rest of it as well.

This is what I call a good series. It’s american, terribly so, full of cliches, even more so, but it still made me watch “just one more episode” of it until it was all over. Looking forward to the next season next year.