I Am Completely Serious

Several months late, I reveal to you Tokyo’s very soul!

It’s basically a grumpy cat in a chair.

I hope you’re not too disappointed.

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(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Photos of stores in Tokyo! And one in Shibata.

(Actually, I think the only one of these places at which I spent any money was the shinkansen...)



Akihabara loves slimes.

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(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Its image management. The metadata for JPEGs includes tags. I can tag my photos offline! And Windows Photo Gallery Live allows you to upload to Flickr, and actually works right! (Flickr Uploadr doesn’t seem to work with Vista - I’ve been using jUploadr instead. The problem is probably Microsoft’s fault, but it’s nice that they’ve set up a work-around.)

Also, there’s a feature that allows you to offset the timestamps of a batch of images to correct for inaccurate timestamps. This is A Good Thing - I get this problem a lot due to my habit of switching time zones. (Japan is thirteen hours ahead of Kentucky. I live in the future. Thirteen hours in the future.)

However, as with all things Vista, there are caveats. Cut for caveats. (They’re long.)

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(Though he actually did show up.)

My life is a long series of headaches and essays about Japanese transvestites that I can't finish on time. Or maybe I just can't remember back very far, I don't know.

I'm at home, alone, because my family is uhhhh... basketball... and oh god this puppy is just dumb. And I have to carry the keyboard around with me because there is only one in the house, but two computers, both of which I need.

Here is a picture of a book with a plan of some sort.

I made katsudon (pork bowl) today. I kind of burned the katsu part a little. Hahaha I can't fry stuff without hurting myself ha.

I felt the urge to try this because of the book Kitchen, by Yoshimoto Banana. This is an excellent book about death, soft fluffy couches, and cooking, to whose plot a specific bowl of katsudon is extremely important.

Mine tasted fine, but still, somehow, I suspect that it wasn't tasty enough of a pork bowl to bear that great of an emotional and symbolic weight. Though of course, I've only had it once, so perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps, here, today, in a dorm kitchen in Ohio, I did inadvertently create the pork bowl of the gods, the Platonic ideal of katsudon, of which all other katsudon are mere pale reflections and flickering shadows.

But I'm pretty sure I didn't.

Murgatroyd showed us this Sock Baby thing at anime last night. I'm having trouble articulating why I think it's so awesome. Oh, wait, no, wait, I think I can articulate it - everyone talks in funny voices. Yeah, I articulated that there pretty darn good.

It is sort of a 70's martial-arts alien-robot parody thing, filmed on location at a house. It's apparently by the creator of Earthworm Jim, which I'm sure is very meaningful to many smelly boys. For myself it is not, nor to Murgatroyd - when pressed for explanations, she said, exasperated, "It's just some college students screwing around with a camera! My gosh, people!"

Anyway, if anyone with a large pile of investment capital wants to dig these guys up and pay them to make a whole movie like this, you've pretty much got my seal of approval, and everything.

I think I'm going to design myself a seal of approval.

The Aforementioned Red Bull Mole Encounter:

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have the 9:00 PM-to-midnight shifts at the library. This is obviously not ideal, but Jenan grabbed the midnight-to-2:00 AM shifts, so, you know, what are you going to do. The other person on the shift is presently a sophomore who only just got hired. Which isn't a problem, because she's not a crazy person or anything, but I've still got to answer a lot of questions and show her how to work stuff and all.

Little did we know that there was another new hire in the library Tuesday night. Little did we know that we stood, that evening, under the same buzzing fluorescent lights as the Red Bull Mole.

Or as they dub it, "the student brand manager".

The Mole waited until after eleven to make its move. It struck at a moment when the senior supervisors had retreated into the back office to do computer stuff, and the junior supervisor had gone to the bathroom. It might well even have been listening in, earlier, while I was explaining cargo procedures to the new girl, marked which was the senior student worker, and decided to wait until she was too engrossed in her gigolo comic to take notice of its unseelie shenanigans.

At any rate, it was she who turned to me and said, "Oh, wow. What do you think this is?"





(Aw, isn't that cute. BUT IT'S WRONG)

She asked me if I thought she should go find the person who'd dropped them off, since she "didn't see anyone go outside, so they must still be in here somewhere" - but I'd remembered the fliers that had showed up around campus at the end of spring semester, soliciting applications for the exalted position of Denison University Red Bull Student Brand Manager. I assured her that this was definitely an intentional Red Bull "drop," calculated to addict people who might be falling asleep towards the end of their shifts, and that much the same procedure was used by cocaine dealers to addict affluent suburban ten-year-olds on Halloween. Or maybe I didn't say that second part. I then, immersed in my own fuming anti-consumer bigotry, asked what the person had looked like. She said she thought it had had been "just some girl." My holy quest to slap a person in some way associated with the marketing of soft drinks had been thwarted... for now.

She asked if I thought we could keep them, and I told her they were all hers, but asked her to wait to dismantle it until I'd taken some pictures. And that is the tale of My Red Bull Mole Encounter On Tuesday.