I watched the last episodes from How i met your mother, and a couple of Yozakura Quartet (must conclude, though the latter i have not finished yet, that i love these), and now i feel strange, and i have no idea why. Probably because i’m tired, at least it feels so, but at the same time i’m not tired, my brain just feels as if it has to lift some heavy curtain to maintain my conscience, and this effort makes me… Repeat. It’s crazy that while i’m at home i must not engage anything that would just hurt to stop a week from now when i’ll be leaving, and especially anyone, which would be even worse, but it’s so difficult, because it’s easy to be crazy at home, as i know all the way, and it’d just take the “i don’t care” attitude, but then again next day i’d be holding my head and write whiny and extremely crappy posts here about what a damn fool i am. But i rather go and play StarCraft with my little brother cousin (this always sounds like “cuisine” to me, thus i hate to use it) nephew.
Just strange
Ended Eight
Finally Kyon figured out how to get out of the loop of Endless Eight. Suzumiya again, as expected. This episode was a huge relief. I mean, if you watched almost the same thing seven times already, this one would be a great ending for that. I could feel the adrenalin rushing through my veins as the turning point got nearer and nearer (the point when Haruhi’s about to leave the restaurant). And then, a hilarious solution. Once again the obvious message: share as much with your friends as you can. Too bad it’s very difficult to find people who are ready to share almost everything. It seems to be difficult to realise that together even chores could get fun, while alone it’d count as a method of torture. I think that just two animation works, this Suzumiya series and the Yes man i mentioned in an earlier post express my view on life more than anything else i encountered so far.
Electronic
It’s funny. Really it is. For a long time (more or less my whole life up till June – this could be a sick allegory to Here comes the summer by the Fiery Furnaces) i considered electronic music something i can’t take. And that changed, quite suddenly when once we went clubbing in downtown Tokyo. Since i went to Japan i try to live a “yesman”-ish life—i didn’t go there to be low and lonely. Thus i went clubbing as well and i enjoyed it (though then i had to pay attention to keep the mood on), and so my view on electronic music has changed a lot. I checked at Ishkur’s guide which ones are those i can take (not all, as expected), and ended up with goa-psy-trance trio. And been listening to such music for days now and it feels just as natural background music as if it was some of my “native” genres, such as heavy metal or progressive rock. I don’t yet mix it with those genres though, but that time will come as well.
And thus i can say i got even more open musically (but sadly there are still hell a lot of those i can’t stand).
Ultimate
As for now.
There was never any good old days
Gogol Bordello: Ultimate
They are today, they are tomorrow
It’s a stupid thing we say
Cursing tomorrow with sorrow
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Yesterday in Shibuya we watched the sixth Harry Potter movie, and i must say that it was great. I wanted to watch it in japanese, because that’s very funny (i’ve seen the fifth in japanese and it was simply hilarious), but this one was the english original. I remembered most of the story, but i feel i’ll have to read the last two books a few more times. So, the story was great, the acting was great and everything just passed together. Also, it brings back a lot of memories.
I read about the actors since then, and i’m always surprised by these details. I knew that Alan Rickman was Hans Gruber in the first Die Hard, one of my great childhood movies, but i didn’t realise he was the wealthy and powerful lord from Perfume, and i really want to see both the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy in english and the Sweeney Todd movie, since he’s the voice actor of Marvin in the former and acts the villain judge in the latter. And he’ll be the Caterpillar in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Same goes for the strangely familiar and scarily mad Bellatrix Lestrange from the movie, Helena Bonham Carter. She was the fantastic Marla Singer in the even more fantastic Fight Club, she was also in the Sweeney Todd movie and she’ll be the Red Queen in the same Alice in Wonderland.
After reading even more character summaries, i really feel like i have to read the last two books again. And again.
Naruto Shippuuden: Bonds
To be exact, 劇場版NARUTO−ナルト−疾風伝絆 (Gekijōban Naruto Shippūden Kizuna), the 2008 Naruto movie i just watched a few days ago. It was good… With fun parts. But with the followings, i will go into spoilers, so if you haven’t watched the movie yet, rather don’t read on. (It’s worth watching.) I had the Dattebayo subbed version.
Markup
I’ve been reading A List Apart since i woke up (two hours now, whoa) and started wondering again how a proper website should work. The three main fields: valid markup of the data, accessibility of the data and a nice design. Except for accessibility (which is a pain for me, because i’m not familiar with it) these are not too much trouble–at least in themselves. But they need to be put together…
Techniques worth considering: (at first) SVG, MathML, CSS @font-face. SVG is strange for me, because it’s XML markup of an image. Wikipedia has a couple of SVG pics, but i don’t really like them. The reason is simple: it takes ages to render a world map from SVG. On the one hand then, it’s small, because it’s just text, but on the other hand, it’s huge, because it burdens the user’s computer. Not to mention marking it up by hand seems to be troublesome (GIMP can’t save to SVG apparently, at least i couldn’t find it at first blick), and i can do well with PNG’s and JPG’s so far. For MathML: Firefox renders it correctly (been lazy to check on other browsers), so the only thing i’d leave it out is that i don’t need it. @font-face is very useful, for i could include my own fonts into the page with it, it seems to be supported (who cares about IE6 anymore), there’s only one issue with it: speed. I don’t mean rendering, that’s not a problem i think, but download. Since my pages are in multiple scripts, i need UTF8. And a more or less complete Unicode font is around 15 megs (just for japanese consider the roughly 3000 characters…) which takes time to download, even with a very fast connection. May be a short time, but it’s still annoying. The solution could be a flash-like “loading” animation with JavaScript, but this is still subject of consideration for now.
Furthermore, i’m considering doing the blog output in XML-XSLT-XHTML, since i’m (once again) reconsidering the working of the engine, as i think i finally grasped how i should work with OOP properly.
Part 1
Summer cleaning, part one, done. I could go now and jump around a place shouting やったぁ～ (Yattaa!) a’la Hiro from Heroes, but i’ll rather do that after part three will be finished as well. Today i fetched the vacuum cleaner, and cleaned the floor in the room everywhere, and the table as well. Part two will be tomorrow morning, when i’ll clean the bath and the sink. Part three will be the fridge. (That last, because i plan to turn it off, and until i have food in there i’d rather not do that.)
I also checked the Analytics after a long while, and was surprised that almost the whole globe is green now, meaning i got visitors from a lot of countries. A few countries in South America, most of Africa and the Middle-East is still white though. There’s always somewhere to improve…
Oyye
Now comes the really fun part: two days of studying. Actually, it will sum up to around one whole day, since today is a half, and so will be tomorrow. That’s how weekends go. But i really need to study, i have about 300 kanji to learn and 300 to review. (Memorizing the kanji just ten minutes before everyday’s tests now backfires, since i forgot most of them just ten minutes after the test.) I’ll just wash the dishes, and head down to the study room with all the necessary tools: books, dictionary, phone (for the dictionary), notes, pen.
Yesterday’s exams were interesting. The composition thingy, as expected, was something very [undefined] (to use JavaScript vocab): five topics given, all focusing on an experience since we came to Japan (good, bad, surprising, regrettable, and one more absolutely freely chosen). I wrote the good one (so did most of the others as well), but i made it up for the larger part… At least i could move my fantasy a bit. The economy basics exam was a joke. Not because it was so easy… First: numbers. Write the population, area and gdp of Japan and your country. Second, describe the connection of gdp and population, focusing on your country. Third, what’s the biggest difference between your country and Japan (not necessarily economy-wise).
Wud?
Half past seven? Since when? What’s going on here? This is scary. At least tomorrow is free, and i surely will study. Sadly, because of the exams on monday and the coming days, i’ll skip the weekend’s club activities. If i spent all saturday at the training and sunday at the club old boy’s meeting, then i surely won’t have any energy to learn all the kanji and words and grammar i haven’t yet. Vocab is usually not that very difficult, but everyone’s beloved maths is just crazy. So is the politics-economics stuff, but at least that’s not a hundred pages, just a topic to research (“the connection between the GDP and the population of your country”), though one freaky for sure, and i guess we’ll have to write about it or something like that. But for now, i think i’ll just play the guitar and chill out. Or something along those lines.
