So we went out for a fancy French lunch, Piroko and her grandma and I. It was the whole deal, with a variety of choices available for each of the several different courses. The lady serving us was not Japanese, no, she was probably French, considering the authenticity of the place. But our only guaranteed linguistic common denominator was Japanese, so that’s how I ordered. Imagine an American dude and a French lady going back and forth in Japanese: “I’ll have this quiche.” “Are you sure you want that? Its main ingredient is pig’s blood.” “Oh, of course. That’s just fine!” *(Did she just say blood? Oh, she totally did say blood. Oh, man!!)* I was putting enough effort into being polite and speaking properly that I just didn’t have the mental resources necessary to decide that I shouldn’t eat *blood*. I finished it, but I did not enjoy it. The rest of the meal was fine.

Part five in an ongoing series, “Kabukichou from above”. [2002](/index.pl?760), [2003](/index.pl?905), [2005](/?1107), [2006](/?1150). I went to Tokyo in January to pick up Piroko and bring her back to the USA once and for all. I do believe that this marks the first day that I took a photo for this journal, posted to my [Vox blog](http://jetfuel.vox.com/library/post/cd-game-shopping-quest-2007.html), *and* recorded the day’s accomplishments in my [bouquet](http://www.baresquare.com/user/jetfuel). This day was my traditional one geeky day on the town that the lady allows me whenever I visit Tokyo. What used to be my routine, wandering Shinjuku and browsing the used game and CD stores, is now a rare ritual. Thanks to the internet, though, I feel more connected to the geeky Akihabara and Shinjuku culture than ever.

This is the first thing you see on the way in to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport when walking in from the parking area. I’m sure this marketing campaign seemed great on paper, at meetings, and on computer screens. If you take the time to read the tiny copy at the bottom, you find out that the airport is trying to boast how West Coasty they are, or something. I’m sure there are other such ads scattered around the airport, all tying together into some kind of theme. In real life, though, it’s just a picture of a guy with foam on his nose and the word “latte”. Aye, this is the kind of thing my photo-journal was made for.

I just love big info-dense charts like this.

Inside our booth, we had a haphazard dangly collection of adapters for powering the lights. It makes me uneasy when gravity is a factor in a power-cable and surge-protector setup.

Macworld was one of the greatest weeks of my life. I evangelized, supported, advertised, demonstrated, and defended our software. A whole year’s worth of interaction with the people who use our products, and validation of what we’re doing, was compressed into one week. I took feature requests in Japanese, gave a full demo to a deaf guy (who also types Dvorak!) by switching to TextEdit whenever we had something to say to each other, met the lady who designed my MacBook bag, and connected with lots more cool people from all over the place. This is the kind of event for me.

We went to Macworld. I watched the announcement of the iPhone. It says something about my punctuality in updating this site that I have owned an iPhone for several weeks as of the posting of this photo. I got in trouble for photographing this crate. I guess there’s something pretty secret about it.

I went to Chicago for Christmas. The food court at O’Hare is a microcosm of all kinds of travelers.

The night that the Wii came out, some coworkers and I teamed up to go wait in line at Fred Meyer. I chose to be there for the office Wii. We had an chilly nine hours of sitting around, playing DS, sending people off for hot choco and cupcakes, and talking to strangers. When the Wiis were procured, we went back to the office and enjoyed many hours of fun until sunrise-time. My fondest Wii memory so far is of spending my Thanksgiving break playing through Zelda all day, eating leftovers from office meals and drinking awful energy drinks.

I drove down to Portland alone to see Richard Dawkins speak. When I arrived, it was still several hours before the reading was to begin. I secured an up-front seat and camped out by myself in the room, drinking an Odwalla meal-replacement drink and reading my Michael Pollan book. Eventually the room filled up with hundreds of people. After the reading, I went to have a book signed, but my wits were so confounded all I could say was, “Thanks so much for everything”.

Ann and I went to see Sufjan Stevens perform. He had a huge band, all dressed in butterfly wings. His positive attitude, candor, and approach to creativity seem quite refreshing among all of the seemingly so cynical “indie” rock music.

The next day, the fog caused the island near our campsite to fade in and out of visibility. At low tide we walked over to it and ate lunch there among the big rocks.

At the end of the long hike, we settled on a campsite and sat down to eat. It was just getting too dark to see very much of anything when we started eating, so I don’t know what the food looked like, but I can still remember exactly how good it tasted. Grilled kebabs, hard-boiled eggs, and baked potatoes. There’s something about room-temperature food, eaten with your fingers, after a good deal of physical exertion far away from home. I can eat in every fancy French restaurant there is and I still won’t forget that meal.

Andrew, his girlfriend from Ukraine, her son, and I went camping on the Olympic Peninsula. After a long hike from civilization, we arrived at the coast, where we were greeted by these deer, who grazed past us unstartled.

Sometimes, I walk to work. It’s invigorating to start your day with 30 minutes of walking, especially if it’s accompanied by some [good podcasts](http://escapepod.org/) or a [fine book](http://www.amazon.com/Hawaii-Novel-James-Michener/dp/0375760377). One day, I came across this free rubble. Do you want some? Actually, in Seattle you see lots of stuff out on the sidewalk with *FREE* signs. Much of the time, it’s some sort of furniture, and it’s already been rained on.

This makes me think of [this](http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/).

I don’t know about this guy’s message, but I sure do admire his graphic design skills.

While waiting to meet up with hachi, we wandered into this Philippine culture festival. Then, when he picked us up, we drove around while playing with the GPS device attached to his IBM notebook.

Every 50 feet or so in San Francisco, something entertaining is going on. Sometimes it’s a tiny woman with a silly accent yelling at her loudest into a pay phone. Sometimes it’s really good breakdancers.

I love when a phrase means something in more than one language. Maybe if they ever expand, they could become [Super Hang On](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Hang-On). Speaking of AM2 games, San Francisco’s Chinatown looks a lot like Shenmue 2. They’re both very realistic representations of urban China.

I think you should be able to find the “First Amendment Area” on a globe; look for the big chunk of land labeled “The United States of America”.

For some dang reason, they transliterated “gift shop” into Japanese syllables, then Romanized it back, resulting in “GIFUTO SHOPPU”, which they put next to the perfectly-fine Japanese “omiyageya”. I really don’t know who they wrote it for… Japanese speakers who know the alphabet but not any Japanese characters?

Looking up, the towers seemed horizontal, and I felt like I could step onto one and sprint out to the end of it.

Andrew, hachi and I visited the Golden Gate Bridge. The marriage of apparent human sympathy and pragmatic metal signage impressed me almost as much as all the mighty engineering. I really can’t even imagine the state of mind someone would have to be in to consider jumping off a bridge, and I wonder how often this phone gets used. I have also recently wondered how many people regret their decision in mid-air. I think that’s probably one of the worst feelings you could ever have.

Andrew likes to take photographs. He and I wandered around the San Francisco area together for a couple of days after the conference. We found some fine views, like this one near the elevator in our hotel.

One day my friends and I were a bunch of geeky kids. Then, before we knew it, we were working at places like Bungie, Six Apart, and The Omni Group. Shishka, hachi, and I really all landed at our ideal companies. We have the kinds of jobs our past selves would have chosen, given the chance to work anywhere. For years I knew hachi as a guy who worked so that he could survive to hack Perl and build contraptions. Now his job *is* to hack Perl and build contraptions. Here’s the telephone they set up to make voice posts directly to [LiveJournal](http://sixaphone.livejournal.com/).

I have no end of fondness for [Warhammer 40,000](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_40%2C000) and the Games Workshop hobby in general. For a couple of years in high school, much of my time and disposable income went toward buying, building, painting, and fielding a nearly-undefeated Tyranid army. I haven’t collected or played since then, but I occasionally check back on the hobby to see how it’s doing. They have updated the Tyranids a lot since I played, there are lots of big, official campaigns whose outcomes are determined by individual players in hobby shops around the world, and the lore seems as thrilling as ever. In San Francisco, we found a Games Workshop retail store with a life-sized Blood Angels Space Marine. Dang Space Marines; to this day the sight of one makes me want to send a brood of Genestealers ahead to slash up their armor.

So we went to the big party at Apple. Renowned techno musician BT was the surprise musical guest. It was kind of weird to visit the place I’ve been idolizing since I was five years old. Sitting around, eating tacos, joking with programmers, listening to the music, going to the bathroom, all I could think was “I’m at *Apple*”.

Don’t count on your litter falling to the earth when you drop it here.

WWDC was pretty neat, and pretty weird. Like when I went to MacHack, or camped the Apple Store opening in Milwaukee, I found that it’s easy to feel alienated even among what’s supposedly “my own kind”. While around most people I feel too nerdy to fit in properly, at these events I feel like I’m not nerdy *enough*. At least there was plenty of learning to be done, making it worthwhile. I saw a real live [Stevenote](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenote), though Steve didn’t spend a lot of time on stage himself. I attended a bunch of sessions, met and dined with a bunch of important people, and played a lot of late-night Munchkin with my fellow bar-avoiding coworkers.

San Francisco is the kind of town where you can walk into a random cafe for a croissant sandwich and find really good isometric pixel art on the walls. I think I could get used to that.

We had to wait long enough for our luggage to appear that we got to see the legendary LAST BAG.

As we sat on the floor playing Munchkin, we looked out to see these boxes, all labeled FISH. Someone is getting their ω-3 fatty acids.

I love how one section is labeled **NOTICE**, and the other is labeled **FALSE STATEMENTS**. We went down to San Francisco for Apple’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference. At the airport gate in Seattle, we scared folks around us by sitting in a circle on the floor and excitedly playing Steve Jackson Games’ Munchkin card game. Several of us gathered a few times during trip to play such games, instead of going out drinking.

Our weeklyish Dungeons and Dragons sessions have been going well. One person has left, and two people have joined. We had to turn away two more people in order to avoid having too large a group. The characters are about level 6 now, which means I can throw some pretty hefty stuff at them and not worry about them dying. For one session, Rachael and John brought in cupcakes, topped with 4th of July frosting, in Halloween cups. They were scrumptious. On the MacBook you can see one of the 300 kitty stickers I mail-ordered. I used to buy these stickers when I could find them in dispensers, but no one ever stocks them anymore. The fewest I could buy online was 300, for just 20 ameribux, so I went for it, thinking I could give most of them away. Let me know if you want a kitty sticker. :D

Two days later, I had the whole concert, downloaded from Pearl Jam’s site, in lossless format, DRM-free, along with print-ready cover art and photos from the show, for $15. What a fine band indeed.

The sun went down, and Eddie got up on top of a shed in the middle of the audience.

For my second show at the Gorge, Sarah and Jon took me to see Pearl Jam. We enjoyed tasty snacks, talked about video games, and bounced around to rocking rare songs.

Jellyfish are probably my favorite animals, though ants are disputing the title. This aquarium had lots of lovely jellies of several different varieties. After witnessing my fondness for them, and for the stuffed jellyfish in the gift shop, Andrew secretly bought a stuffed one and held onto it until my birthday, months later.

The nearby tree stump and the more distant earth formation made this kind of cool macro-tree shape. The Oregon coast is just packed with scenes like this. Sometimes I think back to when I was in high school and I had a vague desire to live in the Pacific Northwest. I’d never been there or known anyone who’d lived there; it just seemed like it *must* be a great place to be. Coastal, but not tourist-gravitatingly warm. Beautiful, but relaxed. Now I’m here; that’s another item on the long list of things I’d surprise myself with if I could go back in time and say “guess what your life is going to be like in 10 years!”

Before we left, Andrew said that he really hoped to see some pelicans on this trip. We went out to a scenic lookout, and when we turned around there was a big flock of pelicans flying around. Between Andrew’s fancy Canon SLR and my tiny Casio point-and-shoot, I somehow ended up with the better photos. By the way, I’ve been keeping another blog over at Vox, where I post more frequently (and more frivolously). If you find the pace of this journal slow, maybe you’d enjoy keeping up with [Heta no Yokozuki Sekai 2](http://jetfuel.vox.com).

More from the air museum; here’s an aircraft with some history and some character.

This is at the Tillamook Air Museum, a huge old blimp hangar where they’ve got dozens of old restored aircraft from various wars.

We checked a bunch of camp sites, but they were all full. Several of them were just ruggedish bars and restaurants with a bunch of motor homes parked nearby.

Andrew and I took a long weekend to drive down the Oregon coast. We hoped to camp at least one night, but all of the campsites were full up so we stayed at motels, where we hooked up my iPod to the TV and watched Dae Jang Geum. I finished up some books and comics, including Toume Kei’s Hatsuka Nezumi no Jikan, which brings me right back to when I was immersing myself in his comics four years ago.

Hiroko and I have long lamented the state of bottled drinks in the USA. The main bottled drink in Japan is tea: not *tea and high fructose corn syrup and flavoring and preservatives*, but just *tea*. Here it’s difficult to find a bottled drink (other than water) that’s not sweetened to high heck. But at Whole Foods, my new grocery store of choice, I came across Teas Tea, made by Japan’s leading bottled tea company, Itô En. It’s just tea, and I won’t complain that they add some vitamin C. First NIS America announces that it’s bringing Ar Tonelico to the USA, and now I can buy Itô En tea at my local grocery store. Good things are happening in my home country.

My new apartment is all right. It’s aesthetically a pretty nice place to be, and Green Lake is less than 2 blocks away. I can walk to work in 25 minutes, along the lovely Ravenna Boulevard. But my upstairs neighbors are often ceiling-rumblingly loud. One time I went out on my balcony and looked up to see what was the matter, and someone very drunk was punching his friend as hard as he could for fun. And as someone who grew up in a rich Chicago suburb, it unnerves me that less than five blocks from my home is a highway where homeless people beg for money at the offramp and sleep under the overpass. Here’s an informative sign at my building, made from what could quite well be a pizza-slice container. I keep imagining the guy writing **WET PAINT**, looking at it, deciding it’s too ambiguous, and then adding **GREEN**.

Ann convinced me to come along for the Sasquatch music festival, at the Gorge amphitheater a few hours east of Seattle. I like Sufjan Stevens, and I enjoy me some Neko Case from time to time. But during Neko Case’s second song, hail started coming down, and it just kept getting worse and worse, until the stones were as big as gumdrops. Ann and I cowered in our ponchos, listening to the yells around us: “ow!” “*owwwwwww!*” Eventually we gave up and headed home, but along the way we stopped at Roslyn, the town where Northern Exposure was filmed. I’d never seen the show, but Ann’s a huge fan. We ate at the cafe that has some significant mural of a camel on it.

I almost hesitated to post about this, but then I realized that it’s a *checkout lane at a major grocery store*. I shouldn’t have to have qualms about posting such a thing on my journal. For years I’ve been tracking the trends of Cosmopolitan cover story titles. When I’m waiting in line at the grocery store, my choices of activity are that or meditation. Every, every, every issue of Cosmo has the word **SEX** on it. Usually it’s quite large. Sometimes it appears more than once. Often it’s associated with a number (as in **977 sex tricks to try tonight**). Lately, for some reason, **Bitch** is another popular word to put on the cover. This issue is a real winner: **SEX** appears three times (in *HEAT UP SEX*, *Sexy Summer Beauty Tips*, and, somewhat smaller, *Sex Positions You Haven’t Thought Of*). Of eight cover stories, three are collections of sex tips; apparently the diligent researchers at Cosmo are able every month to come up with dozens-to-hundreds of novel techniques that haven’t been mentioned in any of the other hundreds of issues over the years. For bonus points, **Bitchy** appears twice in a row, and **Ballsy**, a new one, appears once. I’m not sure what this says about Cosmopolitan, about people who read it, about the people who decided it is a good product to put in the checkout line for everyone to stare at, or about me. It’s just morbidly fun to calculate the magazine’s score every month. In Green Bay, I tried to patronize Festival instead of Copp’s because their checkout-lane impulse-buy items were fruit, instead of crappy magazines and candy bars. And now in Seattle, I’ve discovered Whole Foods, which is pleasant and deserves a post of its own.

In crowded areas of Tokyo, fast food restaurants are a favorite way for people to sit down and relax. I think many people are paying not just for the food, but for the seat and the relative quiet, in a town where it’s hard to escape the bustle. So restaurants often advertise how many seats they have. The storefront of the first level may be tiny, but there are 150 seats upstairs. If you’re worried that they might all be full, or if you just feel like spying on people eating hamburgers, check out the live camera feed.

Spotted at a home furnishings type store in Shinjuku. My buddy Kang has a similar product with more colorful packaging. At the same store I bought some handsome, small notebooks. I’ve been using them to take notes while reading. Often I think back to books I read a long time ago, and I lament that I don’t remember most of the fascinating stuff they contained. Now when I run into one of those sentences that makes me drop the book to my side and stare at the wall for a few minutes, I can write it down and keep it. Galaxies may be quantum jitters smeared across the sky during [cosmic inflation](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375727205/)? A huge portion of my DNA is actually made of viruses who [spliced themselves in](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000G740PI)? This stuff is astounding, and now I won’t lose it.

Piroko and I went game shopping in Shinjuku. It was kind of strange to have the Piroko part of my life collide with the Shinjuku game shopping part of my life. I bought her a used copy of Dragon Quest VIII for only 3000 yens. This is outside the sushi restaurant featured in [an old post](/?878) and [a very old post](/index.pl?767). Apparently the giant fish heads are intended to express the freshness and quality of the sushi inside the shop.

A complementary maple galaxy.

A maple galaxy, mostly for [Chrix](http://maplepond.ca/).

I think there was something fascinating about this tree that made me photograph it. Whatever it was, I’ve forgotten it. Such is the peril of taking so long to update one’s photo-log. Today (many weeks in this photo’s future) I had the surreal pleasure of meeting [Ethan Schoonover](http://www.kinkless.com) and [Merlin Mann](http://43folders.com) for work. Between them and all of us Omni dudes, the amount of geek love in the room was dazzling. We talked for a long time about productivity type stuff, and it’s at a time that I’m bustling around a lot working our new project planning application. This has all gotten me thinking about the way I *Get Things Done*, and about how I can *close loops* and make sure my *methodology* doesn’t have any *leaks*. What should I use to trigger myself to update this photo-log promptly enough to avoid forgetting what the photos are about? When should I write something in my mini notebook and when should I write something in my *very* mini notebook? Can I trust a printout of my Kinkless GTD document as much as I currently trust my all-paper system? These are all questions that have deep meaning to me, and very little meaning to anyone else. But do you like how I segued into this from the tree?

When I see terrain and buildings at this scale, I always want to set up a Warhammer 40,000 battle. How cool would it be to send Tyranids through a Japanese Imperial palatial complex!

One of my favorite things about ancient Japanese gates is that they tend to have a little mini-door in them, presumably for when only one dude needs to get through and it’s not worth making a big production of opening the whole thing.

There are a couple of ways of interpreting this. Maybe the map’s creators didn’t want to presume too much about where the reader is, and found it safest to assert only their *own* position. Or perhaps it’s just a friendly inclusion: you are here, *and we’re right along with you*.

Part four in an ongoing series, “[Kabukichou from above](/?1107)”. I did some shopping and geeky wandering this time, but it may be the first time since 2000 that I’ve visited Japan without buying a PS2 game. I did get Atelier Marie Elie and Anis for Game Boy Advance, a couple of Ar tonelico books, all three Ar tonelico soundtracks, several other music CDs, and the first five Paradise Kiss comics. And, I accidentally stumbled upon a brand new comic from my favorite artist Toume Kei! Wooo!

So, I went to Japan again. When Golden Week rolls around and tickets drop below $350, there’s really no reason to stay away. But I need to stop shopping for tickets based on who offers the cheapest price. I was already insulted by United Airlines last time, and this time Northwest stepped up to the plate and proved that, given the chance, they can truly make flying as miserable an experience as possible for everyone involved. 1. Do you like advertisements? No problem! The screen 8 inches in front of your face simply won’t turn off for the first 40 minutes of the flight! You don’t even have to lift a finger in order to see a nude man diving off a rock in order to convince you to buy Bulgari cologne! After all, you *love* Bulgari cologne, and that’s why you’re flying coach today. 2. Do you like grating, feedbacky PA announcements? *Northwest has you covered*. Every few minutes, you can count on somebody getting on the PA to let you know some dang thing or another, usually about duty-free shopping. You know, just in case you had your head rotated 180 degrees and didn’t notice the screen. 3. Is English not your native language? Northwest flight attendants will not hesitate to scowl at you and say “what!?” every time you try to make yourself understood. If you ask for something, you can count on a brusque and exasperated response every time. After all, it’s not like the flight attendants are there to help you and make your trip more pleasant or some such nonsense. If you persist, they’ll fetch the only bilingual (and only polite) flight attendant on the plane, from up in First Class. 4. Do you like gossip? Here’s a tip: sit in the back of the plane! Try to get the very back row, near where the flight attendants sit. I sat there, and I got to hear all about how much of a pain the safety training to become a flight attendant is, how people from Washington D.C. are all rude, and which swear-word best describes a certain famous doctor one of the attendants once encountered on a flight. You can even ask them to be quiet, and they’ll keep on going, knowing that you’ll enjoy the flight more if you have access to such useful information. 5. How about Linux boot screens? Just leave your screen alone for the entire flight. Halfway through, it’ll suddenly encounter an error and reboot! There’s Tux smiling at you! How cute! I’m sure that while the PA and entertainment screens are so miserable, the integrity of the plane itself is *just fine!*

I have admired [Mitsumasa](http://mitumasa.com)’s models for years, and I spent months trying to get my hands on his I-No kit. I even flailed about on Google, looking for someone who might be going to Wonder Festival and who could try to beat the crowds and get one for me. I came across [Heisei Democracy](http://heiseidemocracy.net) and implored the proprietor there. He started to decline and apologize, until he recognized my e-mail address. It turned out that we’d actually been in the same anthropology class at Sophia in Tokyo in 2002! We exchanged info back then but didn’t keep in touch. We became friendly online, and he tried his best to pick me up a copy of I-No. She sold out, but he did pick me up a nice [Plug-suit Ayanami](http://www.t3.rim.or.jp/~happy/rei.htm) from Hapoi. Later, as the I-No search continued, Mitsumasa started accepting overseas orders for his Non-Non kit. I couldn’t resist supporting such a cool move for someone in a hobby usually so exclusive of outsiders. When this arrived, I imagined Mitsumasa himself, writing out my name and (work) address. So cool. :D I did eventually get my hands on I-No, through Yahoo Japan and [Akibado](http://akibado.com/). Now I’ve got two Mitsumasa kits to agonize over. @_@

From the day my brother-in-law Thom showed me his ancient D&D books, I’ve wanted to run a roleplaying campaign. That was about 15 years ago. I falteringly tried to start campaigns throughout grade school and high school. I joined a short-lived Robotech campaign in junior high, and played in a semi-successful freeform campaign while in Japan. Then, last year, three of us in the support room were tired of WoW and looking for something more fulfilling. We started in on Neverwinter Nights. It was a fun enough representation of D&D, but eventually we wanted to take it farther and play our own real D&D campaign. I bought the books while home for Thanksgiving, and went to work putting together a campaign setting. I didn’t even know that Omni had loads of miniatures and terrain just lying around from when such things were still considered appropriate uses of the company’s funds. I obsessed for a while about how the official D&D minis are packaged like Magic cards: you don’t know what you’re going to get until you open the pack. That meant I’d have to base encounters on what I ended up with, rather than basing purchases on the encounters I had planned. Now we play nearly every Sunday, and I think things are going quite well. We’re even using the benefits of modern technology, by keeping our character sheets in multi-layer OmniGraffle files and uploading them to an official campaign wiki.

Andrew convinced me to come snowshoeing at Hurricane Ridge, and then at Mount Rainier. We tromped around on snow piled dozens of feet thick. We had a great time; Andrew liked it so much he bought three pairs of snowshoes, so as to more easily convince people to come along on further adventures.

While Jules and Kang were in town, we all took a trip to the Science Fiction Museum. They had a mess of neat stuff, including Korben Dallas’s gun from The Fifth Element! Wowz!

Seattle is the type of city where you can get away with a statue of Vladimir Lenin, a Masonic lodge, and fish tacos, all in one photograph.

My good friend and partner in video game construction [Julian](http://grappa.kuiki.net/) came to town. We played *The Chikyuu Boueigun 2*, ate tasty dinners, watched *The IT Crowd*, munched Cheez-It, and worked on our game. Oh, and I suppose he got to see his fiancée, my roommate, Ann, too. We both took a liking to this sign. In Seattle, even the vandalism is artistic.

It’s good to have a job which, when I return from Japan, is still fun to do. Here’s my desk, with stacks of reading material, boxes from various internet purchases, toys all around, iPods, and miscellaneous paraphernalia. An electronics product doesn’t feel right to me until it’s worn out, and a desk doesn’t feel right until it’s cluttered. We all got new 30″ Cinema Displays, so I went on the hunt for a 2560×1600 desktop image. The first nice image I found was this fine drawing by my friend Peet.

Much of our time in Kyoto was spent walking around Kyoto Station and its environs, trying to decide what to eat. We went into a bookstore and did some tachi-yomi (standing and reading) at the travel section, flipping through books of restaurant recommendations. We found a book of Kyoto’s 100 best ramen joints, and one was just around the corner. The noodles were delicious, and the lady even called out “ôkini!” as we left, Kansai dialect for “thanks!”

Family graves were crowded all around, with countless objects of offering and devices of faith. Perched innocently in the middle of it all was this machine vending smokes.

This is one of the most-photographed places in Kyoto, and for good reason. Thousands of these gates have been built over the years, following a maze of trails all around the mountain. It’s impressive to see, right in front of you, evidence of centuries of conceptual continuity.

This is one of my favorite photographs from this trip to Japan.

Japan’s crows are enormous and deadly-looking. In Tokyo, I used to wake up to them screaming. Every time I see one up close, I imagine how easy it would be for it to kill me, if it really wanted to.

These gates have character.

I guess [2ch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2ch) in-jokes are good enough to use for advertising clothing sales, now. In the process of finding that link, I went on a Wikipedia journey and read about popular online communities. I got a bit stressed out, as I occasionally do, about all I’m missing every day, out there in online communities and geeky subcultures. Just walking into Kinokuniya stresses me out, because of all the stuff on the shelves I feel like I should be keeping up with. But Nathaniel reminded me that I’m doing more important things with my time, and that the good stuff finds its way to me anyway.

Here’s a typical street out in the environs around Kyoto. We had some delicious mini-donuts. Sorry I haven’t updated in a while, but I went to Japan **again**. I really need to catch up, here.

I’m not sure what these rectangles are for, but there they are on the side of the temple.

This is at the famous Kiyomizudera, from its famously high overlook. In Japan, the phrase “to throw oneself from Kiyomizudera” means to commit to some daunting endeavor. In the distance you can see Kyoto’s pointy Space-Needlesque tower.

I’m not sure if this is a great photo or an awful one.

If you pull a bad fortune from the fortune-drawers, you can tie it to a branch in order to prevent it from coming true.

Here are some people’s wishes, written in marker on wooden boards and offered up at the shrine. We saw wishes in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, English, and Spanish; they ranged from frivolous (“I wish I could get better at golf”) to heartbreaking (“I wish my Mom could walk again”).

I’m prelly addicted to coffee. I build myself a soy mocha every day at work, and I often buy a cup somewhere on the weekend. In Japan it was hard to find anything resembling the coffee I am used to. I resigned myself to drinking Starbucks, but while hiking around the hills of Kyoto the best I could do was hit up a vending machine for some can-coffee. This is Kirin’s idea of *Seattle Roast*, approximately 1.5 gulps of pure *mleh*.

“Our awning needs a little… something!”

When we arrived in Kyoto it was snowing. We made a big deal of asking around for a 100-yen shop, going in, and finding an umbrella. As we came out we saw that the snow had stopped, and I burst into laughter. Piroko made a point of telling me to bring the umbrella back to the USA, because they already had so many of them in Tokyo and she didn’t want the 100 yen to go to waste. I didn’t bring it back.

Meditate on that for a while.

Piroko has always wanted to take me to Kyoto, her favorite sightseeing destination in Japan. Almost every time I’ve been in Japan has been during the summer, and Kyoto is unbearably hot then, so we never had a good chance to go. This time, though, it was supposed to be unbearably cold. Everyone told us it was record-settingly cold and that we should beware of instantly freezing to death upon disembarking the shinkansen. Having lived in Wisconsin for four years, we were able to shake off the cold pretty easily. Here’s our favorite spot in all of historical Kyoto, Ginkakuji, or the Silver Pavilion. We prefer its elegance to the Golden Pavilion’s extravagance.

Hello, and welcome to a new _out of context_. I have been working on this new version of the site, with the following improvements: * A redesigned stylesheet; its similarity to what I already had gives me confidence that simple designs are best. * The return of the pink checkerboard patterns. * All of the code rewritten in Python, my current language of choice. * Posting the date a photo was taken, using EXIF data in the image file, in addition to the date the entry was written. This reduces confusion when I take a long time to post photos from an interesting place, and people think I’m still there and can still get them souvenirs. * A new timeline view under the photograph; each segment represents a span of time in one place. Click a segment to visit that time. * The use of John Gruber’s [Markdown][1]. This should be transparent to you, but for me it means I can write my posts in a more natural way, and let the computer figure out the formatting. Maybe you’ll see more [links][2], _emphasis_, **strong emphasis**, and lists, now that creating them is trivially easy for me. [1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ [2]: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/does_this_company_respect_me_try_the_sticker_test.php

After our trip back to Photo Club, Tets and I went to Tower Records so that I could catch him up on today’s good music. I dropped a stack of CDs in his hands and said, “buy these”. We met his new girlfriend there, and headed out for dinner. We went to this old-fashioned-looking tonkatsu joint, which is actually buried in the middle of max-urban Shibuya. There, Tets and I relived our college days, recited inside jokes, and felt sorry for Eiko having to sit through it all.

The surreality of being back in Tokyo was compounded by a reunion with my old roommate Tets. Much of who I am is because of this guy, but I hadn’t had a real one-on-one conversation with him in about three years. We met up in Shibuya and had lunch at a tiny Greek restaurant. We talked about his new job writing local news for NHK. We talked about music, because a major part of our relationship has been based on music. During college, he introduced me to things like Underworld and Aphex Twin, which I never would have tried on my own. We’d listen to them during epic mah-jongg sessions with other Japanese students, as I got a crash course in Japanese culture and language. After lunch, we went to the photo club room at Sophia. It was strange to revisit a place that I used to spend so much time in, but hadn’t thought about for years. All of the photo club stuff was in a new room, but it unmistakably belonged to the same club. My [old photo from Nagano][1], probably the best photo I ever took, was still there on the bulletin board. Tets says that Ueki-san, seen on the far right of that photo, the guy who was so nice to me, is in the hospital with some serious disease and may die soon. [1]: /index.pl?699

We passed a cafe full of iPods and PowerBooks; next door was an Xbox 360 cafe. One radiated cool, the other radiated… green.

Piroko and I went shopping in Shibuya, and at one of the many trendy department stores I ran into these charming stools modeled after Apple keyboard keys. It’s even got a good approximation of the italic [Univers][1] that Apple uses on their keys. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_font#Keyboards

Here’s a traditional Japanese meal at a fancy hotel. Piroko’s grandmother and her sister took us to this place; while standard restaurants are at the tops of big department store buildings, fancy ones are at the tops of big hotel buildings. Much of my trip was spent with Piroko, just walking around stores as she looked for shoes or sitting down to eat together. And that’s just fine with me.

I think my favorite meal may be yakiniku, Korean-style barbecue. Hiroko’s parents took us to a nice place near their house, because they know I love the Korean food. We had all varieties of meat to grill up, assorted kimchis, and various sauces and spicy side dishes. I don’t think any other meal leaves me feeling as content as this one. Hiroko turned me on to the period-drama [Dae Jang Geum][1], about the royal kitchen in 16th-century Korea. Apparently it’s the highest-rated show in Korean history, and has since become a hit around the rest of Asia, especially in Japan. This show contains plenty of facts about cuisine and Eastern medicine. Whenever a useful fact is mentioned in the show, they actually put the relevant information up on the screen for you to note. That’s a show with substance. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dae_Jang_Geum

[Eboy][1] and similar isometric pixel art are the rage these days. Apparently they’re even cool enough for designer handbags in Japanese department stores. [1]: http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/

1. This alleged Harvard clothing must be real, because they are using the official seal of Harvard. 2. This can’t be real, because Harvard should never allow such adverb abuse. Heck heck heck.

Hiroko and I dropped in to the Apple Store in Shibuya just for fun. It was great to see the place so crowded with Apple fans or prospective switchers. We went upstairs to the software area and found OmniGraffle 4 on the shelf. The localizers did a number on the box, cluttering it up with distractions, but it’s nice to see it there at all. I went to one of the Power Macs, found the bundled copy of OmniOutliner 3, and popped open the Welcome document. There it was, as it would be on any Mac in any store, anywhere in the world, something I created one day at work. I realized then for the first time that I had made something that would be seen by thousands, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people. How about that. :D

My employer provides me with delicious, nourishing meals five days a week. On campus at St. Norbert, I had the dining hall and several culinarily-skilled Korean and Japanese friends. But when I was studying in Tokyo and was left to feed myself, I degenerated into a mostly [Matsuya][1]-based diet. I liked Matsuya because I could get gyuudon, curry, or some other kind of teishoku, all cheap, all filling, all tasty-tasty. Upon my return to the USA, I longed for those dishes, and while I’ve yet to find gyuudon in Seattle (and I have tried resolutely), there is a fine Japanese curry place in the International District. Curry has become a weekly ritual for my Seattle friends and me. To us, Sunday equals curry. I bought a tiny replica of a plate of curry for Shishka to dangle from his cell-phone. The dish has been elevated to legendary status. So imagine my delight when Piroko’s mother presented this curry to me, orders of magnitude superior to the fast-food-type curry at Matsuya or Fort St. George. [1]: /index.pl?768

I’ve loved this sign since I first saw it years ago and Try it!! I did a lot of walking between Piroko’s parents’ place and her grandmother’s place; in doing so I finally learned my way around Oimachi, a town that had confused me for years. I have a deplorable sense of direction. In addition, when someone is guiding me, my brain stops accepting input and I don’t learn anything. This was the first time I had to navigate around the town on my own, so it was the first time I really learned where I was going. This diner was a major landmark for me. So was a certain huge industrial-looking building that I knew wasn’t anywhere near where I wanted to be. I have been getting lost and ending up at that building ever since I first tried to visit Piroko’s parents’ house five years ago. It’s my “you are lost, turn back now” building.

Kabukichou from above, part three. Do you remember parts [one][1] and [two][2]? While Piroko was at work, I occupied myself by making the traditional Shinjuku used game shop rounds. The treasures this time around were Ryuu ga Gotoku (a kind of yakuza-Shenmue), and the entire Zero (Fatal Frame) series. [1]: /index.pl?760 [2]: /index.pl?905

Piroko’s family is friends with the proprietor of a superior sushi shop. For special occasions they order trays of this top-notch sushi to be delivered. I thought I might be lucky enough to eat some during my visit, but they went the extra kilometer and ordered some not just for my arrival, but also for the night before I left!

On Christmas 2005 I flew to Tokyo to see Piroko. This second visit in one year brings my average back up to one trip to Japan every year, after having stayed in the USA for all of 2004.