Tag: english

Skins season 4

January 29, 2010
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Just now beside dinner i watched the first episode of the fourth season of Skins. It was pretty harsh on me, considering that since the third season ended i only watched a few anime episodes, four seasons (and so far all of the fifth) of How i met your mother and two (third in progress) of The Big Bang Theory, which are so to say more centered around entertainment and laughing, i got unused to the brute shocks of Skins. It’s only first episode as of now, but that 45 minutes just hit the spot, same as the third season did. Actually, since as i said i got unused to it, i was waiting for someone to shout “buzzinga” and everything turns out fine and shiny. Not here… I’m really looking forward to watching the whole series.

But in the meanwhile i’ll start Firefly and pick up Samurai Champloo again, because i caught up to all my series now (to be exact, in two day i will, TBBT being the one with episodes still left), and i really got used to watching something while having lunch or dinner. This is how it goes.

On Wittgenstein’s private language argument and solipsism

January 28, 2010
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Yesterday while researching solipsism for my report for japanese class, i came across Wittgenstein‘s private language argument, which states, as in my understanding, that language is a tool for communicating mental images, ideas and thoughts to other minds, thus if the solipsist has a language, that implies the existence of other minds that he could communicate with.

I’m not a solipsist, though i have to say that i long considered the possibility, but it’s an endpoint of ontology and epistemology at least, of the branches of philosophy, and as such, it’s not fun. Of course this is not an argument about the philosophical validity or possibility of solipsism, what i want to point out that philosophy is a “love of wisdom”, and as for me, i enjoy developing or even just understanding a system that could explain how and why the world is, how we sense and so on. Solipsism simply kills that fun.

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Sabo

January 27, 2010
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Kang and me sabo’d school today, went to Tokyo instead, main goal being the stock exchange marketplace. It was kind of different than what we both expected—there’s this common image of the stock market, as the brokers running around, shouting, waving with papers towards each other and stuff. Well, no more, at least not here… Just as video killed the radio star, computers killed the good old stock market. Thanks to the cloud (Binh’s topic for presentation, by the way, really can’t wait to hear the whole thing), everyone can handle this kind of operations from anywhere, in case of billionaires from their huge bed with a laptop, and a girl on each side.

We also checked a huge bookstore, with a whole floor of foreign books. I almost bought myself a book, seriously considered Vanity fair, but then i realised that i have loads of books here anyway that are all waiting to be read, and that Vanity fair might not be the easiest and lightly entertaining literature that i was looking for… Also, i have manga, Twilight and a german translation of Sherlock Homes novels for easy reading and Finnegans Wake, Nietzshe and the Bible for deeper times…

And once instead of “remembered” i managed to say “覚え‘d” (oboed), same meaning, just… somehow not in the right language.

Stars

January 26, 2010
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At first i didn’t get it why i can see the stars now when there were hardly any on the summer sky: humidity. Summer’s so terribly humid as if we were inside a cloud all the time (even though the japanese claim that last year wasn’t even all that hot), even if it’s not visibly apparent during daytime, it’s quite evident at night: it was really an event when we could count more than five stars altogether. Even now, that the air is “clean”, there’s light pollution, so if you consider the sky a half-sphere then the “bottom” 45° from the horizon is still some strange yellowish glow, but after that, stars appear all right.

In addition to my surprisingly long “outline” presentation, today held another good point, which was the table tennis training now in the evening. Although it was quite cold, as usual nowadays after dusk, i kind of started to feel the racket and the balls (table tennis ones, before someone claimed misunderstandability, just like reasonable in case of this word itself), my smashes and cuts started to go where i wanted them and i even managed to do some surprise serves, proud.

The even better part was that Haruka brought along a friend of hers who lived for a year in Hungary, and i was astonished how well she could speak hungarian. At first i was careful to speak slow and use simple words only, but even if i sped up or accidentally used “hard words”, she could keep up. Amazing. And even her pronunciation was correct, at the sound level, which must be very difficult to start with. (Of course intonation and fluency was far from perfect, but still, she could speak, for God’s sake.) And she gave me a Balaton. I’d say “instant love” if it wasn’t misunderstandable (again) in the case of a girl…

Sober and irrelevant

January 25, 2010
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Oh, i’m both and it sucks (unlike the In flames song of the same title, which also centers aroud the same topic). Mostly the irrelevant, because there’s no easy helping that. Six-seven times ten on the ninth (billion or whatever you call that in whichever english) people is just too much inertia in the world, and i can’t see that unstable point where i could be the “small change” in a chaotic system that results in large effects—you know, that flip of the butterfly’s wing in China.

Even Naruto (what a banal example, isn’t it?) is about how plain hard work can bring results equal or better to naturals or genii (genius (plural: genii (classical roman mythology) or geniuses (colloquial)), and now i’m mythological too, though not logical). The only problem is that it still is terribly frustrating to see the talented get to a much higher level much easier and much quicker. Of course most people (i dare not write everyone) has talent for something. If i was in a shiny and optimistic mood, i’d write that of course you can still do better than any genius, if you work hard, and it’d probably be affirmed as true by many. Just not too many people will take on the challenge of competing with naturals in their own field, simply because it takes tremendous efforts in most cases. On the other hand, after a while they (the genii) have to work just as hard as well, simply because there are limits as for how far their talent goes. And the hard workers will always be catching up. Always. The good point, that will make no difference to aforementioned hard workers to work hard further. But it will take a hell even out of a genius to learn how to learn and work hard, if all went light and easy until then.

Sour candy

January 24, 2010
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As the next photo of the Series, please welcome Sour Candy by ~PaintedClocks. It might not seem to be the greatest choice, but there’s a lot behind the few colors. Cute girl, lots and lots of stripes and… well, that’s enough for me to collect this photo…

Sour Candy

The first lines

January 23, 2010
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The first few verses of In Flames‘ Sober and irrelevant are simply too relevant.

used to be original,
but now i tremble in fear
i am like everyone else

alabary spell

is this how it feels
to reach black bottom
want to know how it feels to be forgotten

i become the distance,
i am the sober and irrelevant,
i don’t feel but in this,
what is there to believe?

In Flames – Sober and irrelevant

Pull the trigger: In Flames we trust

January 23, 2010
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Yesterday i made the last class finish a bit earlier, but still i could only hear two or three songs from Each of the days, a japanese band (Tokyo Zepp is quite far from the university). It wasn’t that outstanding, and it was funny that the guitarist used the guitar i wanted to buy (very cheap) (at least it looked the same). They had two drummers, and one of them was a girl, quite unusual. Actully, i didn’t even know there were this many bands, this made the event kind of a festival, i thought it’ll only be CKY, Atreyu and In Flames. Not quite…

Then came the first break, and i met a couple of american navy people, they were long into drinking, but still really nice people. From then on i appear on a couple of photos i guess, as a “random hungarian guy”. I also got to know a japanese girl, whom i helped out when she couldn’t understand what the drunk americans were saying anymore.

Endless Hallway played really nice catchy music, sometimes with quite amazing riffs, and they all look the favourite of teenage girls way. They played for roughly half an hour, just like Each of the days before, it was just how it had to be before the bands coming after. I guess this was the time when beers started to fly.

That break i met new people again, more and more from the navy (of various countries) and japanese as well, two girls and two guys, talking away the whole break. And realised that Asahi draft is more water than beer.

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Homesickness

January 21, 2010
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I don’t miss it… I mean, homesickness. Just a Tokyo reloaded post reminded me. I have this little pathway in my mind, which for some mysterious reason is mostly blocked when studying, even though it would be extremely useful, lets me just accept a situation and don’t whine about it. Of course it has downsides as well, because even if i wait for something a lot, when it’s time it’s just another event of my life, not all that interesting at all. One more thing to live through. Such was my turning into a dred a few days after my birthday—i really waited for it, but somehow it wasn’t all that high and mighty feeling (unlike the concert) as i’d expected. I just got there to actually really like them.

Of course it’d be nice to meet the people again from home. Of course it would be great to sit down for a good beer in the pub, and rise our wooden pints and yoik talk and drink late into the night. And all the others that we used to do. Now that i think about it, i’m nearing one year here, and i hardly achieved anything except for learning some japanese. I can’t really speak fluently for a longer while about anything, if i hadn’t prepared in advance, and can’t read aloud, though i have no problem with reading comprehension, even that i don’t know how to read most of the characters.

I’m perfectly fine here. Nostalgia and feeling homesick is not the same. I try not to live in my memories, neither go crazy of homesickness. (This post didn’t exactly turn out the way i thought it would, but whatever.)

On the internet connection

January 20, 2010
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Again. In the past one hour it was especially interesting. I mean, i was listening to streaming music from Grooveshark whole day, in preparation of the friday In flames gig, and for most of the time, it didn’t lag even if i was browsing. Then something switched on or off, just when i went to buy milk and Halls, and from then on (around eight) till now it was… well, let’s just say it calmly, either it was working, or not. For like fifteen minutes just now, when i was writing the previous post, the router wasn’t responding to pings. (I tried when the connection couldn’t get an ip.) I’m not a network warlock, i can’t (or just don’t) hack through firewalls or anything like that, but i know that we have a really nice bandwidth for the router. What the heck, then?