A new movie from Sofia Coppola, “Lost in Translation,” seems to star a confused Bill Murray as a washed-up American actor spending a week in Tokyo filming a CM for Suntory Whiskey. The trailer (streaming only, sorry) is absolutely priceless, if only for the deadpan accuracy with which it captures the hyperkinetic nonsense of modern Japanese culture. It’s hard to accuse it of broadly stereotyping the Japanese experience when it’s so, you know, accurate. Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine is scoring the soundtrack, which also includes Air and Squarepusher. I guess what Sofia Coppola lacks in acting talent she makes up in directing and musical taste.

I climbed to the top of Mt. Fuji this morning.

Here is a picture of me at the top of Mt. Fuji.

And here is a picture of me and Piglet at the top of Mt. Fuji.

And now I’m going to bed.

I couldn’t possibly describe this video better than memepool.com already did, so I won’t even try.

Wouldn’t it be great if Kabuki actors could somehow render the game of Ping Pong to be superhuman, like The Matrix … oh wait, they can.

I’m pretty sure this team won that evening’s variety show competition.

I completed Silent Hill 3 last night. Some spoiler-free thoughts follow.

First: having completed the game, I would recommend that folks planning to pick up Silent Hill 3 in a few weeks go replay Silent Hill 1 right now. I really, really recommend series fans replay Silent Hill 1 before Silent Hill 3. Really! If you don’t have the time, then at the very least check out a President Evil’s informative, spoiler-free plot FAQ. But if you’ve been meaning to replay Silent Hill 1 for a while and haven’t gotten around to it yet, now is the time. Ahem. Having Silent Hill 2 save data on your memory card opens up a few in-jokes and easter eggs, but there are no real narrative hooks to the second game.

Overall, the game is stupendous. You play a Silent Hill game for one reason: to be scared out of your wits, and Silent Hill 3 is perhaps the most frightening yet. I say perhaps, because it’s a different kind of terror than the first two games. The first game had an austere purity to its scares, with little of the narrative or reasoning directly explained. It was based on the unexplained lurking horror of Lovecraftian renown. The second game upped the stakes significantly with the addition of a strong personal, psychological element. The scariest thing in Silent Hill 2 wasn’t the town itself, but the people in it. The third game combines the tone and feel of the first game with the stronger emotional intensity of the second.

But even then, it’s slightly different. A thoughtful British soul at GameFAQs has transcribed the informative commentary (NOTE: the file is SPOILER FILLED, please do not read it) from a Making Of DVD. This spoiler-free quote from the developers does as good a job of summarizing the differences between the two games as any:

“The feeling of fear prevailing in Silent Hill 3 differs from that Silent Hill 2. In Silent Hill 2 we tried to create a sense of fear sustained by silence. That silence lying within each individual which is progressively transformed into anxiety. It was a kind of fear that built up little by little. Gradually it escalated into horror. For Silent Hill 3, a different approach was used. We wanted to create a more violent, direct feeling of fear. Something shocking, to contrast with the atmosphere in the previous title.”

Don’t worry: the game hasn’t devolved into cheap monster-jumps-through-window style gimmicks, a la Resident Evil. It’s a more subtle “shocking” and “directness” than that. In fact, in execution, the game is fairly identical to the first two titles. The horror still builds and unfolds slowly, but the cumulative effect is slightly different. The difference is in the emotional goals of the two games. In Silent Hill 2, the player’s feelings build towards a dull dumbness of fear … the “silence” mentioned by the developers. The player is literally too scared to move or continue on to the next room. It cultivates a fear of action, leaving the player helpless and uncertain of what to do. In his fright, he wishes to do nothing. In contrast, the pieces of Silent Hill 3 build slowly towards a sort of incoherent panic. The tension rises bit by bit, threatening to boil over, leading the player towards a point where he or she snaps and goes on a blind, unthinking rampage of running and shooting in cathartic self-defense. Silent Hill 3 cultivates a fear of inaction; the game’s scenarios push the player towards a violent, panicky response.

Much of this increased “violent, direct feeling of fear” comes from the stunning graphics. Silent Hill 3 doesn’t have the most technically impressive or artistically inspired graphics I’ve ever seen; I could think of a number of games that outshine it on both counts. What it does have is the most effective graphics I’ve ever seen in a game. Everything about the graphics engine is laser-focused towards scaring the living shit out of the player. And it works really, really, really well. Silent Hill 3 has a number of cool, never-before-seen graphical effects designed especially to scare the living shit out of the player. A number of these effects don’t start showing up until near the midpoint of the game. I’d recommend staying away from reviews, even “spoiler-free” ones, once the game is out – these special graphical effects, though not plot-related at all, will still have their impact lessened if you know they’re coming. The music and sound design is up to the series’ usual impeccable standards. Silent Hill 3 adds a number of vocal tracks, and they fit into the extant soundscape nicely.

The one disappointing point about the game for me – and it’s a fairly major one, unfortunately – is the story. I vastly preferred the intense, personal psychological horror of Silent Hill 2. That game also had an absolutely classic endgame scenario that has yet to be equalled for pure, abject terror. The plot of the third game is fine enough … I just felt that Silent Hill 2 was a major leap in a great new direction for horror titles, and Silent Hill 3 is a shaky step back towards the expected.

But it’s clear enough from the differences that the designers weren’t just hoping to remake Silent Hill 2 with a new story, and the game succeeds well enough on its own merits that it really doesn’t make sense to compare the two games directly. They’re different games with different goals, and the story of Silent Hill 3 is aiming for a different sort of fear. The title is still packed to the gills with horrific monsters and locations, special terrifying set pieces, and creepy narrative twists. What’s not to love?

Overall, personal preferences mean that Silent Hill 2 is still my favorite games in the series, but Silent Hill 3 is still a fantastic addition, absolutely worth playing and replaying (there are a ton of secret endings, weapons, and costumes). Well worth discussing, too — I look forward to hashing out What It All Means with my U.S. friends in a few weeks. Until then!

…

My new apartment is just two blocks away from a new supermarket that opened a mere two weeks ago. It’s brand new, big and well-stocked, and totally great. Anyways, today a yakitori stand with 80- and 100-yen yakitori sticks opened up in front of the supermarket today. It’s super cheap, and super delicious!

These are so wacky.

I’ve been plotting and planning all day for trips during the forthcoming summer vacation, correlating bus, plane, and train schedules in a scheduling nightmare. But, somewhat shockingly, I appear to be done. Huh.

I also picked up the tickets I’d reserved for SummerSonic 2003. It’s nice to have the physical tickets in my hand and know that yes, it really will be happening, for reals. (So you can stop hyperventilating now, Charles). Chuck and I will be going to the Tokyo Sunday show. Highlights include Radiohead, The Strokes, The Doors (!?), the Polyphonic Spree, Blondie, Sum 41, the Rapture, and Interpol. Which is to say: Radiohead. Looking forward? Oh yes!

Nonsense in action: I ordered the tickets online, but had to go to a convenience store to pick them up. That much makes sense, I suppose. But when I got to the convenience store to pick up my tickets, instead, I was made to pick up a phone and push a single button on a control panel to be connected to the main ticket office. I gave them my information, they confirmed it, and they then faxed a notice to the store. The store then took the fax, typed in some information, and printed out the physical tickets on a special machine. Which I then paid for in cash and took home with me. I have the tickets in the end, but it seems like an awfully roundabout way of doing things.

A few more opinions on recent things, then:

Read or Die: Highly disappointing. The premise is fantastic: a bookworm librarian from the militant branch of the British Library, with the power to telekinetically control paper, joins up with a special forces team to take out a supervillain group made up of clones of history’s most evil and obscure inventors, authors, and scientists. Yet all that offbeat potential is wasted in the execution, and what we get is yet-another-anime filled with generic characters, ham-handed morality, awkward dialogue and pacing, and lots of gratuitous fanservice. Worth a rental, perhaps, but far from the wacky classic I was hoping for. A superhero story based around obscure literary and cultural heroes of the 20th century … it seems a shame to squander such potential.

A Game of Thrones: Large, bookstopping fantasy novel, first in the series A Song of Ice and Fire. The difference between this one and other large, bookstopping fantasy novels is that this one, surprisingly, is good. I ordered it on a friend’s recommendation nearly a year ago, and it had been sitting on my shelf, large, foreboding, and neglected. It just seemed too scary to deal with. But I finally tackled it, was almost immediately shocked at how wonderful it was, devoured it in entirely about four days, and immediately went online and ordered the two sequels. (The fourth book out of the planned seven is due out Spring 2004, with the remainder coming out one per year thereafter. The author has explicitly stated that he will NOT be adding multiple extra volumes a la Robert Jordan, thank you very much.)

So what makes it so great? Well, the setting is rich and nuanced. It’s political intrigue set against the backdrop of a politically unstable alliance of the Seven Kingdoms, with assorted factions jockeying for power both within and without. There’s no “epic quest” at hand, no young farm boy discovering a sacred journey upon which to embark blah blah zzzzz. There’s not a “main character” in the series to speak of, though there is a single family, the Starks of Winterfell, whose adults and children we hew to closely (though far from exclusively). The series’ greatest strength is its fantastic characterization. Far too often, fantasy fiction seems like a rote exercise in dragging out the dungeons and the dragons, and what should be “fantastic” ends up being impressively boring. George R.R. Martin’s characters feel like real people, not just archetypes generated by dice rolls. There is a humanity to these characters that makes the reader sympathetic to almost all of the individual viewpoints, even many characters who would seem to occupy a “villanous” role, or at least one in opposition to the Starks.

The story is told from a third-person limited omniscient perspective, with the “main character” focus changing by the chapter. This device highlights the thoughts, personalities, and motivations of several of the major characters in the story, and gives each chapter a “short story” feel. Each chapter has chosen its “focal” character over the others for a particular reason, to highlight some decision the character makes or change they experience. Each chapter stands on its own delightfully. So instead of feeling strung along without purpose, as is all too common in genre fiction, the reader can enjoy each chapter as a sort of self-contained vignette. The reader isn’t toyed with, but rewarded. One of the greatest rewards is the prose itself; the writing is excellent, frequently exceptional. Even more impressively, Martin isn’t afraid to let bad things happen to good people. Terrible, permanently bad things. It’s cruel, but it makes for great, gripping reading. There are no guarantees in this world; as the Starks’ family motto promises: winter is coming. And it’s going to be very, very cold.

The final aspect that I loved about this book was the austerity and scarcity of the supernatural in the world. Though magic and religion are omnipresent, their influence is usually merely felt or implied, not outwardly shown. In all of nearly 900 pages, there are only two events that are explicitly and insurmountably magical; the rest of the book’s events can be explained and viewed as purely secular happenings, if one so chooses. (The two explicitly magical events, however, and are certain to have far-reaching implications in future volumes.) The overall feel is of a historical drama a la the War of the Roses, with great families and factions feuding, alliances shifting, people and personalities loving and fighting. It’s just fantastic. Look … what it comes down to is, I hate fantasy fiction, and I loved this book. If you are curious at all, please check it out.

69 Love Songs: As the title promises, this three-disc collection features 69 love songs by a single artist (person, really), Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. Astoundingly, they’re almost all good. I’ve only listened to the first two discs – it’s a solid mass of quality musicianship that covers every genre under the sun, plus some new ones invented explicitly for this collection. So I’m taking my time through it. It’s the first album I’ve heard in nearly a year that makes me absolutely giddy to think about. This one album contains more great music than some critically acclaimed artists ever produce in their entire careers. It’s sprawling, undefinable, classic stuff so great and funny and moving and beautiful and frightening that I feel compelled to go out and evangelize it, to tell people that they must track it down and listen to it. So … you must track it down and listen to it!! There. Mission accomplished.

The Famicom turns twenty years old tomorrow! Celebrate with Christian’s super blow-out feature at Gamespy.com.

This video is extraordinarily dramatic, considering it consists solely of footage of people entering, leaving, and standing on a train. I’m at 2:22, if you want to skip to my brief-yet-thrilling cameo.

There’s going to be a special screening of the movies they’re putting together for the event in Tokyo next month, on August 24th. Apparently this time they’re taking a while to edit the movies, so they won’t be done for another few weeks or so. Christy, Brian, and I will definitely be going – Kiana, sadly, willbe back in the states. There’s a teaser trailer for the event up, and it looks great!

First, the complaint I promised yesterday. As many of you may be aware, Japanese language features keigo, or context-sensitive polite language designed to exalt others (the school principal, company chief, a customer) and to humble oneself. It’s also incredibly ornate and far more difficult to understand than “regular” Japanese. The technical support representative I spoke with at Yahoo BB, unsurprisingly, used keigo when speaking with me. That’s not surprising or offensive at all – it’s to be expected. What bothered me was her peculiar Japanese habit of using keigo even after you specifically ask her not to. You say, “it’s difficult for me to understand keigo.” You say, “please don’t use keigo.” You say, “I can’t understand keigo. If you use keigo, I won’t understand. If you use regular, easy Japanese, I’ll understand.” And nothing happens. Your pleas bounce right off them, unheeded. This behavior is not exclusive to the Yahoo representative; it’s distressingly common. So instead of her asking “Is the modem plugged in?” she’d say things like “Could sir confirm that the electric plug of sir’s modem is successfully able to receive electricity?” And I’d say “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand, could you please repeat that more slowly in easier Japanese.” And then she’d hem and haw and finally come up with … “is the modem plugged in?” Every question we went through this, and every question she’d fire off a question in rapid-fire keigo before backpedaling and using words I could understand.

Japanese people are not good at breaking routine.

So, while I was offline for two weeks, I enjoyed a large amount of offline media. It’s too much to talk about in-depth, so I’m going to give you short, one-paragraph capsule reviews of all that I enjoyed.

The Animatrix: Pretty good, especially for fans of the Matrix. The nine shorts contained within are from a number of different artists, and the cumulative effect is similar to a short story collection: a few terrible ones, a large number of decent contributions, and one or two real standouts. My favorite was definitely the Japanese-soaked Beyond, about a “glitch” in the Matrix that manifests as a haunted house where children gather to play. I also enjoyed the hyper-stylized, almost aggressively ugly World Record. Shinichiro Watanabe’s contributions, Kid’s Story and Detective Story, were both visually fantastic, if narratively limp. The rest, I felt, were a mixture of strong and weak points, worth watching, but not particularly worth remembering. Oh, and Final Flight of the Osiris was completely atrocious, and eliminated any tiny goodwill I might have had left rattling around my heart for Square Pictures.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie: I’m a big, big fan of the series, so I was surprised to find myself left so unaffected by the movie. Maybe it’s because the draw of Bebop has never been its story, but instead its relaxed tone, cool characters, kinetic action, and overall fun dynamic. The movie had all these things, yeah, but it didn’t really add anything to the mythos that we hadn’t seen before. It’s basically a high-budget, feature-length episode of the TV series (which makes sense, as it takes place between episodes 22 and 23), and as such, it works. I guess I just wanted more than that from a film based on my favorite anime series; in the end, the film just made me eager to rewatch the series. Perhaps this is a case of expectations unfairly coloring my feelings towards a piece, but hey: that’s life.

Voices of a Distant Star: Everything you need to know about this stunning disc can be found in Anime Jump’s excellent review. But here’s the short version: Voices is a 25-minute animated short created by a single person, Makoto Shinkai, on his Macintosh over the course of seven months. The story is reminiscent of Joseph Haldeman’s The Forever War (which is a good thing) but it one-ups that seminal SF novel by placing the confusion and lengthening time gaps of a vast interstellar war against the backdrop of a young couple’s personal love story. The animation is sometimes a bit rough about the edges technically, but never short of stunning artistically. The personal moments are quiet, the lighting and shadow breathtaking, and the zero-gravity space battles are confusing, frenetic, and quiet in a way that makes the standard anime backdrop feel fresh and new. And honestly, I’ll never look at my keitai quite the same way again. This DVD also includes several versions of Shinkai’s first five-minute animated short, She and Her Cat, which is entirely different and equally good. She and Her Cat is the most spot-on representation of the apartment-dwelling life of a young single person in Japan I’ve seen, painfully dense with acutely drawn details. In any case, at only $19.95 MSRP, there’s absolutely no excuse for anyone to not own this disc. It is not just good; it is literally awe-inspiring. It is humbling.

Have to run to dinner now. More to follow later.

I am posting this from my new apartment, via my new Yahoo BB 12 Mbps ADSL connection, and life, by and large, is good. The ADSL modem showed up far ahead of schedule (it came at 7:45 PM tonight, which strikes me as unusually late for a package to be delivered, but I’m not complaining.) There were some issues getting it setup at first – of course – but after a call to Yahoo BB (which accomplished nothing – more on this tomorrow) and some wireswapping on my end (which accomplished, well, a lot, as I’m now online), all is well. I’ve spent two years being a good little Andrew on my 64K ISDN connection, and it totally sucked. I intend to queue a good 10 gigs of media downloads this evening before I go to bed. Making up for lost time.

To summarize: happy! happy! squee!

I spent the last two days saying “oh, to hell with this moving crap” and playing Silent Hill 3. It’s very good, and very scary. Which I suppose is the point, right? But sometimes I wish that Team Silent weren’t so good at scaring the bejesus out of me. I really wanted to spend the last two days in marathon play, but that’s kind of hard with SH3. As good as it is, after about two hours, I’m usually ready to get along to something else. I suppose that’s a mark in the game’s favor. “So good you won’t want to play it!”

Impressions after about 5-6 hours of play: it’s great, it’s terrifying, it’s well-done, it’s Silent Hill. If you liked the first and second games, you’ll feel right at home here. Weapons are cooler and more varied than ever before, but combat has been deemphasized. Puzzles are also deemphasized … well, silly “Myst-style” puzzles where you push piano keys or rearrange soup cans for no reason, that is. What puzzles there are are stem more naturally out of the objects and situations in the environment. Only a very few puzzles so far have felt like “hrms, it’s time to solve a puzzle.” With less fighting and less puzzles, it might sound like there’s less game, but that’s not the case at all — it just feels less “gamey” and more “adventurey” than the first two titles. It’s a good shift, I think.

Also, like Derek Zoolander, the game is really, really ridiculously good looking. The lighting is probably the best I’ve ever seen in a game, ever. I’m sure that there are some more technically impressive titles out there, but the lighting in Silent Hill 3 simply looks like the best. It’s truly stunning, and I’m sure must be handled at some terribly hardware low-level. There are some other graphical effects and flourishes I haven’t seen used before (on any hardware) that come into play late in the game, and they’re all used to great effect.

And really, effect is what the Silent Hill series is all about. You play these games to be frightened out of your wits, and Silent Hill games – unlike Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, or other “survival horror” games – really are scary. The Silent Hill games succeed where other survival horror titles don’t because of the time they spend not scaring you. The games lull you into a false sense of complacency; letting you think, “sure, this is scary, but I can handle it just fine.” But what you thought was “scary” was really just the developers going easy on you, and when sooner or later they pull the floor out from under you and ratch things up a notch. And then a bit later, they do it again … and then again … it’s layers within layers of terror, each more tense and terrifying than the last.

Silent Hill games aren’t based around “gotcha!” terror, they’re lengthy set pieces that build over the course of an hour or so. There’s no one moment where you go “oh, I’m so scared!” The trick of it is: you don’t know when that moment was. It builds and build, until moment when it became too much to handle passes unnoticed … but suddenly, you realize, it must have been ten minutes ago, because boy: you’re scared now.

The one weak point in the game so far is the story; perhaps I’m expecting too much, but I really, really liked the psychological layering of Silent Hill 2’s story, and Silent Hill 3’s story seems to be a return (in multiple ways) to the sort of straightforward Lovecraftian narrative found in Silent Hill 1. It’s fine, so far, but I found Silent Hill 2’s internal characterizations to be a large part of what made the game so memorable and frightening. That said, there’s still a lot of time left for Silent Hill 3’s story to shift gears, so I remain optimistic.

The Japanese version is full English, for anyone looking to import should do so without worries!

Time to queue up some more movies to download and head to bed! I will try to update Yukihime this weekend with any number of photos and stories. Tah.

I’m supposed to write about being a Smith sometime. So I will, sometime. But not right now.

Yahoo BB messed up my application for ADSL. Of course, they didn’t notify me about the problem or contact me in any way. I only found out because the NTT construction date for ADSL activation has come and gone, and the ADSL modem never showed up in the mail. I called them yesterday afternoon – they have 24 hour technical support (Japanese only), but all the Japanese woman could do for me yesterday was tell me to call back this morning. I did, and they said that there was a problem with my address and they hadn’t sent the modem out, and if I’d give them the corrected address then they’d start the process right away and I should get the modem within a week.

A WEEK! And they promise that 99.9% of all applications are resolved within six business days. It’s been six days, now, and my modem is still sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting to be packaged and addressed. Don’t I feel special, being in that last 0.01%.

I wouldn’t be so upset except that I provided them with a webmail address for correspondence (that I’ve been dutifully checking every day, despite the cost and frustration during the past week) as well as my keitai phone number. And they made absolutely no attempt to contact me! I would have hoped that trying and failing to send me a modem would trip some sort of warning flag. But apparently not; apparently it’s my sole responsibility to detect errors in their shipping line and act accordingly to correct them.

But perhaps I’m most bitter because if you live in any sort of non-urban aof any sort of size, you literally cannot walk 100 feet without running into a Yahoo BB girl in a red vinyl jacket trying to sign you up for Yahoo BB service, standing in front of a pile of ADSL modems just sitting there in big red tote bags, ready for you to take home and keep until the service activates. So if I lived in a city that wasn’t atrocious, none of this would matter, because the modems would literally be free for the taking.

But I’m posting this, aren’t I? So I must be back online. And yes, Internet is back at school – sort of. The downtime last week was to install a new, restrictive firewall. I can’t visit a lot of my daily websites, I can’t get on IRC during (given the time difference, between Japan and the US, off-periods during work is the only time I have to catch up with a lot of people), I can’t FTP into my home computer to grab lesson plans or into yukihime.com for a quick update. I can’t do anything, and it’s all I can do for the next week.

My kyoto-sensei (vice-principal) just returned the last month’s worth of business trip forms to me to fill out again. Every Wednesday I go to Omama high school, and every Monday morning I fill out a business trip form in preparation for that trip. (I used to do them on Tuesday, but the kyoto-sensei wanted them at least 2 days in advance). I fill out a transportation expenses form, too, and then on Thursday or Friday, I get the business trip back form, write about what I did on the trip, and resubmit it for final approval. Each and every week, though it never, ever changes.

Anyways, my trip summaries have always been “Went to Omama as ALT,” because, you know, that’s what I did. It’s hard to say much more than that, and why would I want to? It’s not like a three-day conference in Tokyo which I have to justify. It’s my job. But kyoto-sensei has determined that “Went to Omama as ALT” isn’t informative enough, and has instructed me to write more lengthy and detailed summaries about my Wednesdays. In English. Which he can’t even read.

Q: What’s the difference between Japan and Douglas Adams’ Bureaucracy?
A: Bureaucracy eventually ends.

I haven’t touched Silent Hill 3 all week. I’m still saved 45 minutes in, and I’m not sure when I’ll get back to it. I’ve been moving, and when I haven’t been moving, I’ve been too tired to play videogames. I can’t even watch movies properly. I just kind of lie there, feeling weak.

I’ll probably write some funny stories about moving and my new neighbors and being an agent and whatever later, but right now I’m tired and I’m angry and I want to go home.

Apologies for ranting so vehemently in public. But when you can’t access your regular e-mail, IRC, or even websites specifically devoted to this purpose, these sorts of flare-ups happen.

So, as expected, I’m without internet access for about a week as I move to the new apartment and wait for Yahoo BB to set up ADSL. What I wasn’t expecting is that my school’s internet would suddenly go down this morning with an estimated repair time of “unknown.” And that Brian and Christy would be unable to find a replacement for their LAN card anywhere in Japan, leaving them without internet access indefinitely. And that Brian’s school would take down the internet indefinitely for “repairs” during finals week. Etc. etc. etc.

So, I find myself once again living out in an empty, unfurnished apartment, and telling the world about it via Mannet, Kiryu’s resident internet cafe. Just like two years ago, when I came to Japan. It’d be downright nostalgic, if it weren’t so frustrating.

In any case, yukihme.com could be switching from “low power” mode to “no power” mode. Be forewarned!

I moved over my entire kitchen (minus the fridge) and a hefty chunk of my living room today. But now it’s 8:00 PM, dark outside, and as might be expected – raining. Clearly, God wants me to go play some more Silent Hill 3. And who am I to argue with God’s will? See ya!

The Great Move has begun, and my phone line has swapped over. This means I’m without ready internet access for the better part of two weeks; I can get online at school, but a wonky firewall means e-mail access is all but right out. If you have something really important to tell me, you may need change your approach.

In any case, updates will be terribly light for a while, and new photos from the event will have to wait. If you check out the official site mentioned a few posts back, however, you can find links to lots of photos and even a few videos. And I’ll still write up my experiences as a Smith sometime later this week, so don’t fear.

In any case, tho, things are going into low power mode around here.

Fun fact: Silent Hill 3 comes out today, and because it’s concurrent with my move, I’ll only be able to bring myself to play it when it’s dark and rainy outside. That should add to the atmosphere, I’m sure.

Want to hear the stupidest thing in the entire world? The student who won the speech contest, right? Well, first prize was a trip to America. Was! The trip was cancelled … because of SARS. THERE IS NO SARS IN SPRINGFIELD ILLINOIS YOU RETARDS. I swear, sometimes I think that Japanese people literally see the entire world as a scary, dangerous place, with Japan alone protected by a Mysterious Force Field that wards off viruses, firearms, bad weather, and what not. It’s the kind of insularity that’s so intense it doesn’t even register with most people.

Not that most Americans are more worldly, of course. The difference, I suppose, is that Americans are simply blissfully unaware of the rest of the world, whereas Japanese are fully aware … which makes their rejection of leaving Japan all the more frustrating. Here it’s a choice, whereas in America, it’s by default.

So instead of a trip to America, she got a 5-man savings bond that matures over the next whatever years. Whoopity-doo.