[  Mood: Distorted ]
We all know LOLcats, right? Very cute. Here is more to my taste:

The iPod Touch has finally arrived at the local Apple Store, and I got to play with one a couple days ago.

Oh man, I am so tempted to impulse buy.

The interface is amazingly cool–it’s like something from a cyberpunk movie set twenty years in the future. It weighs a tiny fraction of my PSP, my current portable-video choice, and has a footprint that makes the PSP look elephantine. The screen is smaller, but it seems bigger, because the picture quality blows the PSP out of the water–especially because video played from the Memory Stick in the PSP is purposefully crippled to lower resolution, to encourage people to buy videos on the hilariously mis-named Universal Media Disk. I never minded a maximum of 15fps until I watched OK Go’s amazing "Here It Goes Again" and Muse’s fun "Knights of Cydonia" on the Touch.

Using the Safari browser was quite easy. The first demo model I tried wouldn’t let me click links by tapping them, but I switched to another one and it was fine. (An employee rebooted the malfunctioning one and it was fine after that.) Zooming in on web pages is fun, and switching to keyboard mode to type in text is ridiculously easy compared to the PSP and any cell phone. Sure, I wish I could install Firefox, but what the hell, eh? People complain that it doesn’t have built-in email, but that’s what Gmail is for. I’m so mobile, I pretty much have to use web-based mail anyway.

With all the other features, I’m sure to get one eventually. Have to wait a few months, though–there’s got to be something wrong with it. I stopped being an early adopter long, long ago. In six months, any serious bugs should be fixed, and it’ll probably have twice as much storage for the same price. 32 gigs is more than my notebook’s hard drive.

I’m in the process of working out my travel to Australia, wading through the accounting office’s arcane rules and so on, all of which is taking time away from research and writing, but it looks like I will be arriving at Melbourne Airport on the morning of Tuesday, Dec. 4, and departing on Saturday morning (the 8th). I’ll have to stay overnight in Seoul, S. Korea, and then arrive home to the family on Sunday morning.

Junko and Natsumi are going to have to take Lili the dog for 6am walks for six days! Will they survive?

Anyway, if by chance anyone reading this is a Monash student or otherwise lives in the area, let me know. I’d love to see you, and I hope to stop by a shop well-stocked with RPGs (that’s Role-Playing Games, not Rocket-Propelled Grenades, for the Homeland Security guy who has to read this), comics, and miniatures.

I just wrote a proposal to do a presentation at a conference called "Demanding the Impossible: 3rd Utopias Conference," which will happen in December at Monash University, in Victoria, Australia. I came across it because I was considering applying to Monash to do my PhD. I recently got a paper accepted for publication, on utopias in Melville’s early novels, so I thought I ought to put my recently acquired knowledge of utopian thought to use. Also, it would be nice to check out the university in person.

My presentation aims to look into the moral questions raised by Iain M. Banks’ novel, The Player of Games. Haven’t read it? Right, off with you, then–go find a copy and read it. I’ll wait.

OK, so as you now know, the first part of the novel is set in Banks’ "Culture," his anarcho-communist utopian SF society that he has written several novels about. Only in this one, the Culture has come up against an aggressively imperialistic society that might prove a threat someday. So they pull a bunch of strings to destabilize it and cause it to come crashing down. This dangerous society sounds suspiciously like a combination of the USA and Iraq, though the novel was written almost 20 years ago, near the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

I wanted to examine the morality of a beautiful utopian culture basically destroying an ugly hierarchical culture that does not pose any threat to it, at least not for centuries to come. Sounds like a fun way to spend my free time, anyway.

Japan’s space agency has successfully launched a lunar probe. Woot! Hopefully this means the interminable technical problems with the launcher rockets are over, and Japan can get its whole space program back on track. I want my orbital love hotel!

In other local news, Abe is resigning. No, not Abraham Lincoln, I mean Prime Minister Abe (ah-bey). Everyone’s been expecting it for some time now, almost since he became PM after Koizumi. Put simply, he was always just a poor-man’s version of Koizumi, without the charisma and forcefulness and rock-star hair that allowed Koizumi to last so long as PM.

That’s something that had caught my attention long before I ever even dreamed of living in Japan: when Japanese politicians get caught screwing up, or even just honk the public off, they resign. They, like, take responsibility and just frickin resign. I always thought, wow, what an alien concept. American pols have to be hypocritical sponsors of anti-gay laws, caught soliciting gay sex in a bathroom, before they’ll resign. Even starting an unnecessary war without planning, and then ignoring history to mismanage it in the worst imaginable way, is not enough. Well, it’s enough to get rid of a few flunkies, but not the bosses.

This is not to say Japanese politicians are perfect–in fact, they’re just as corrupt as American politicians, if not moreso. But instead of hanging on forever and denying, denying, denying that they ever made any mistakes, once they see that they’re becoming a problem for their party and constituents, they just apologize and get the hell out. I can’t help but wish we’d take a lesson from that. Americans might not feel quite so cynical about the political process.

So I just wrote up all this for my custom block on the sidebar, and then found out that this blog template doesn’t display the custom block. I thought about changing the template, and then thought, "Nah–I like the monkey." So since I don’t want all that time to be a waste, here is what I wrote for my self-intro:

[  Mood: Amused ]
My friend Jan is going to visit us in Japan soon, and I wanted to show her why she’ll actually need training to use our sci-fi toilet. So I googled "Washlet," and found the Toto company’s American website. It is a trip. I never knew butts could be so happy! And why do those people seem like cultists?

Warning: Not safe for work if your employer considers a bunch of attractive naked butts with smiley faces on them to be pornography.

[  Mood: In Love ]
I’m not much of an Apple guy. I certainly don’t hate Apple–in fact, I often think maybe my next notebook computer will be an Apple, and then I think, "Damn, for the price difference, I could buy two Dells with the same power." And I wouldn’t be stuck with a useless one-button touchpad.

And I kinda like my Sansa MP3 player, especially the MicroSD card port, that lets me add a gigabyte of storage for $20. Soon that’ll be 2 gigs.

But I tell you, I may finally be ready to buy an iPod. The just-announced iPod Touch, to be exact. It’s a little pricey at $399, but that’s the 16GB version, and it (finally!) has a full-face screen, like the iPhone, so it competes with my PSP as a video player. Plus it has WiFi, which means I can check Gmail without booting up my PC at home, and check it in some places while I’m outside. And it has all the neato features of the iPhone, without, y’know, being a phone and forcing me into some multiyear contract with a different company that I don’t have a family plan with.

I really groaned when the iPhone came out, because I figured Apple wouldn’t make a full-face-screen video iPod, as it would compete with the iPhone. But they’ve gone for it. This is the iPod I’ve been holding out for for about 3 years! Bye-bye PSP.

Now if only it had a memory expansion slot…

[  Mood: Confused ]
Our Rick Klaw passed this "Which Book Are You?" quiz around.

Hmm, I think a few more questions would be in order…I’m The Guns of August, and I haven’t even read it! It says I’m far more focused on Europe than the rest of the world. Whaaaa? I just answered that I’m more focused on the whole world than on America. I’m more focused on Asia and America than on Europe. On the other hand, they got this exactly right: "Though you’re interested in war, what you really want to know is what causes war. You’re out to expose imperialism, militarism, and nationalism for what they really are."

[  Mood: Sick ]
I finally had to remove the Digg.com module from my Google start page, because I was getting no work done at all–just too addictive. But I do watch Diggnation on iTunes, and on there I saw this:

OK, so apparently that is a real pizza from Pizza Hut Japan, and I have seen some insane pizzas here, but this one takes the prize. OK, those things around the edges? Half of them are Sausage Rolls, and the other half are Cheesey Rolls. No, that is not cheese they are wrapped in, however–it is fish paste. The Sausage Rolls have bacon inside, as well, and are topped with "Fruity Ketchup," whatever that is.

The Cheesey Rolls have parmesan, mozzarella, and cheddar in their fish-paste tubes, and they are topped with–get this–Honey Maple Syrup.

All right, after a moment to calm my stomach, I’ll continue: On the Sausage Roll half, we have those tiny grilled hamburger patties plus corn (hey, that’s on almost EVERY pizza here), red bell peppers, tomato sauce, and something else I can’t read–I think it’s either green bell peppers or possibly (the horror) edamame. Hey, I love edamame, but on pizza? Jesus.

On the other side: Italian sausage, ham, bacon (man, am I glad they’re using English loanwords for these), tomato, mushroom, onion, green bell peppers (oops, I guess that IS edamame on the other half!), garlic, basil, and black pepper. The whole thing has tomato sauce–that’s important to note, as many Japanese pizzas have cream sauce. Which is often topped with mayonnaise.

Damn, I always though of America as the king of really shocking unhealthy three-ring-circus bad fast food, but it looks like the Japanese are beating us at our own game. Quick, call R&D!