[  Mood: Happy ]
Two years ago today, our rebooted, reanimated, almost totally spam-free Message Boards were reborn. Happy Re-Birthday!

Yeah, that’s pretty much how I felt the next day, too.

OK, I know worms don’t have knees, but you know what I mean!

Right, I have entered geezerhood. I’m 40.

Took the day off, relaxed. Planned to go to Hard Rock for BBQ ribs, but a typhoon got in the way, so instead went to the video shop before the wind got dangerous and rented Casino Royale and Nacho Libre. Watched the former–damn good stuff. Best Bond ever? Not sure yet, but a contender. They managed to make it reasonably realistic, and yet still feel like a Bond movie–but not like a cheesey Bond movie, which is nearly all of them. For a real review, see here.

Hard Rock and presents tomorrow. Monday is me and Junko’s 10th anniversary. Holy cow, I need to buy a present!

My geek project deadline is today. Did I succeed in getting myself into the best condition I’ve ever been in? Yes and no. I’m the strongest I’ve ever been, with, like, actual muscles all over the place. Not huge muscles, but bigger than ever before. But I still have a beer belly hiding what I am sure is a perfectly sculpted sixpack. Anyway, the project will continue.

Monday night, Junko (my darling wife) had her first recital before an audience that didn’t consist solely of family, friends, or the students from the singing classes she takes.

She says she was so nervous that, after practicing earlier in the day, she lay down on a sofa and just felt sick, saying to herself, "I want to go home, I want to go home…" Luckily, she had no ruby slippers, and when the time came she did a great job. She probably wouldn’t have gotten a ticket to Hollywood, but Randy would’ve been nice to her, Simon wouldn’t have been too mean, and Paula would have been very complimentary.

She started this hobby of taking singing lessons a few months ago, and I’m really happy that she’s getting on stage now. She has a strong lower-range, rich-and-sultry voice. She needs some more practice, but she’s already a good amateur. I’m proud of her for going for it, and I know she’ll only get better and better.

Saturday, 07/07/07, was Tanabata, a romantic holiday in which the star Vega, representing the weaver princess Orihime, and the star Altair, representing the cowherd prince Hikoboshi, who were in love before they died and were placed in the heavens at opposite ends of the sky, can cross the Milky Way and meet each other, as long as the sky is clear.

This is cruelly ironic, since the sky is virtually never clear in Japan on July 7th, as it’s in the rainy season. On the other hand, it must be clear somewhere–after all, this is an international festival, which we in Japan inherited from a Chinese legend. Not that logic should come into play in fairy tales…

Or should it? I’m reminded of an excellent book I read a couple of years ago, Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart, who wrote a series of three mystery/fantasy novels set in ancient historical/mythical China, called The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox. Bridge of Birds is the first one and the only one I’ve read, and it’s the story of Orihime and Hikoboshi written as a mystery story. Great stuff, very exciting and funny.

In fact, you can read it for free here, or at least the first draft of it. You can also find an interview with the author there, and see why he only wrote three of the novels. I’m planning to track down that omnibus edition of all three of them.

Anyway, highest recommendations–if you find it, get it.

So, today’s Independence Day. Happy 4th to all my fellow Americans.

Notice the lack of exclamation points. I’m in Japan, where it’s just pouring down buckets of rain, as this is the Rainy Season. When I first got here, I tried to celebrate the 4th like a good Amerikanski, but what I soon discovered is that trying to take over a section of beach and turn it into a little slice of fireworks-poppin’ America is, well, kind of pointless. Since it’s during the rainy season, nobody is there to be overawed by your patriotism, and even in those years when it’s not raining on the 4th, nobody cares. People on the beach and in parks are setting off a few bottle rockets all the time in the summer.

And it really gets silly when you witness your first Japanese summer fireworks display. On August 2nd, we have the biggest one here in Fukuoka, but there are several others here in the city, and dozens out in small towns, from the second half of July to the first half of September. And they make the biggest July 4th display in America look like a damp squib. I’m talking 90 minutes of amazing, overwhelming, absolutely gorgeous explosions, one after another with only brief pauses to let the accumulated smoke drift away. And they go off at a much lower altitude than would ever be allowed in America, to the point where you have to watch for sparks setting your hair on fire. The explosions make your internal organs vibrate. It leaves you numb.

It’s kind of weird that Japan, which in many ways has such a "nanny mentality" government and has far stricter safety laws about things like food safety and gun control, is so much more permissive than the US when it comes to fireworks. Here, you can buy big bundles of them at 7-11 and set them off just about anywhere, anytime, as long as you don’t make the neighbors complain. In Texas, it’s far, FAR easier to buy guns and ammo than to buy firecrackers. (You might have a two-week waiting period on guns, but you can only buy fireworks three weeks a year.) I think this is related to what Sneezy talks about here.

So anyway, Independence Day has joined that growing group of American holidays where I just go, "Oh, today’s the 4th…" And then I feel a bit homesick.

I went by Mandake, a big manga/anime store, a couple days ago, hoping to find a cool figurine to use for my huge, somewhat retarded Paladin character in one of the D&D games I’m playing in. Fukuoka doesn’t have anyplace that carries the little lead figures or the new plastic ones that you’d find in a US game/comic shop, so I was trying my luck with collector’s figures from anime shows. Some of them are small enough to be usable on a battlegrid.

Anyway, no luck. The ones that were small enough were all unsuitable–schoolgirls with magic wands and the like. But it did remind me of what a weird place these shops are.

The first time I went there was with Alexandra, one of my fellow players back in the days of the Hakata Hackmasters. Everybody else in the group was at least 10 years younger than me, mostly JET Program members just out of university, come to Japan for a couple years to teach at public schools. Wendy, another member, found me online through a review I’d written of the Call of Cthulhu rulebook. She got some of her friends together and we started gaming.

Anyway, Alexandra was helping me out. The Man in Black (the one from the Delta Green Mailing List, not Johnny Cash) had done me a favor and I was paying him back with spaceships he could use in a game of his back in Hawaii. Alexandra was a regular customer of Mandrake, so she took me there to show me around.

Now, the 4th floor is where the figures are, and there’s a lot of them. Sadly, there’s a strict no-camera rule, so I can’t show pics, but it’s probably somebody’s idea of heaven. Tons and tons and tons of stuff, and a lot of it quite cheap. But very narrow aisles, and very little organization. I get exhausted just looking around every time I go there.

The weirdness really started when I was done looking around and Xandra took me downstairs to the 3rd and 2nd floors. 3rd floor is "girls’ comics," which means original or spoof hentai made for (and mostly by) ladies, which means it’s mostly stories about gay guys having lots of romance and a little sex. It’s also the cosplay floor, which was pretty cool to look at, and which was what she was there for. Some seriously elaborate costumes from anime were on display.

2nd floor is "boys’ comics," which means hentai, hentai, LOTS of hentai. Some of it was of interest to me, but most everywhere I looked was very heavy sanity-damaging stuff. While I was trying to pop my eyeballs back into my head, I was worrying that one of my students might show up. "Oh, David-sensei, are you into lolicon tentacle bondage?" [strangled voice] "No, just lookin’ around…"

Back on the 1st floor, what a relief to be surrounded by regular used comics and used video games. Anyway, these days it’s just straight up the escalator to the 4th floor when I go in there once every few months. I always have to have a long pause between visits, so I can forget how tiny and cramped the place is, and the musty smell. It always makes me miss Dragon’s Lair, my old shop back in Austin, with its big, open spaces.

In some of my classes, I give a quick little weekly quiz, just to make sure the students are keeping up with the homework. This was from a first-year English conversation course–first-year university, I might add. We’d been doing a section that used mystery stories, so it had some crime vocabulary. She didn’t know the answer to number five, obviously.

Hey, if you don’t know the answer, bombard the teacher with cuteness!

Ah, I love this country.

[  Mood: Shocked ]
[  Currently: Working at avoiding work ]
We had a game the other night, and Kelly brought over this:

Yes, that’s right: cucumber-flavored Pepsi. I’ve seen the stuff on the shelves in a couple of convenience stores since then.

How does it taste, you may ask? Well, about as vile as you’d expect. Imagine taking Pepsi, which is pretty much like drinking battery acid anyway, and trying to make it taste like carbonated, liquid, acidic cucumber. And of course they failed to make it taste even vaguely like cucumber, which I suppose would be a little refreshing in this heat–but at least it’s day-glo green!

I had to drink a whole Belgian beer to get the taste out of my mouth. Game-mastering while drunk is a small price to pay.

[  Mood: Happy ]
Didn’t have a chance to use my computer yesterday, but it’s still the 19th in America as I write. On June 19th, 1865, Gen. Granger arrived with his troops at Galveston, Texas, and announced that all slaves are henceforth freed, thus ending slavery in the United States for once and all, and thus pushing forward by a huge step America’s long journey to become the country it’s supposed to be.

We may never actually reach the goal, but the journey is worth making nonetheless. Whenever we wander off the path, we’re being untrue to ourselves. Same for when we decide we’re perfect as we are, or that we’re always right. Don’t let anyone scare you into going backwards. Onward and upward!

"STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
— Introibo ad altare Dei."

Almost forgot, today is Bloomsday.

"Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and saw that Stephen Dedalus had been turned into a zombie. He ran screaming back up the stairs, only to meet Kinch, also zombified, waiting for him at the top. He hurled the useless razor away and held out the mirror, which froze Kinch in place, an undead Narcissus. The bowl made an effective blunt instrument of dispatch. As Kinch fell to the floor, truly lifeless, Buck pirouetted to meet his fellow student shambling up the stairs."
–excerpt from Ulysses II: Leopold vs. the Walking Dead