I started changing servers this afternoon. Site on temporary hiatus as I move things over and the new DNS propogates.

Does anyone know any good, cheap hosts with a healthy amount of bandwidth? My current host has been most excellent; the price is great, features are everything I need and more, and support is disturbingly fast. However, YH has been pushing up against the 5GB/mo bandwidth limit the last few months, and I’m fairly certain the completed Penny Arcade Remix project is going to blow that away.

I’m looking for something with about 20 GB/mo and MySQL support, at the minimum. I’d like to pay $20-30/mo. If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

I try to only update my blog when I have something of substance to say; the Internet is full enough of whiners without me adding my voice to the fray. I just don’t want you to think this is going to become a habit.

I’m tired. The last week has been mentally and physically draining. Monday to Monday, I spent 5 out of 7 evenings out with friends or coworkers. Many of those evenings advanced to second or third parties. I didn’t sleep on Saturday night. I’m literally exhausted; I have no energy left to expend. I was supposed to go into Tokyo this next weekend to finish up Four Swords, but the meeting got delayed a week. The others were worried I’d be disappointed – ha! I’m ecstatic! I can sleep in this weekend. I used to think that getting older was a gradual process; now I know it goes in fits and starts, like evolution’s punctuated equilibrium – long spans of static sameness interrupted by short, sharp bursts forward. I could feel myself getting older this past week. It wasn’t pleasant.

It’s spring break now; school starts up again April 12th or so. In fact, my contract with JET runs through August, but emotionally, I’ve already divested myself from the job. I’m not going to finish out the year with this new group of students – why should I get close to them? I’ll still do my job and do it well – but I won’t have any of the emotional investment I had my first two and a half years. I spent the bulk of today polishing (writing) my resume and sent it out to a few places. I’m terrified I’m going to have to choose between the job I want in America and the job I don’t want in Japan. I don’t want to go back to America yet. But I don’t want to take a job spinning my wheels just to stay in Japan. There’s no sense worrying about difficult decisions that haven’t happened yet … but since when has fretting made sense?

The GIA’s two year shutdown anniversary is just around the corner. Somewhat relatedly, today I finally shut down andrewv@thegia.com.

In any case, here’s something to know: Japan recently passed a law that, starting April 1st, price tags must display the tax-inclusive price. Why, I have no idea; sales tax in Japan is a flat 5%, obvious and easy to calculate. This law has had two amusing and unintentional side effects. First, as of March 30th, everything in the country has two price stickers on it. It’s somewhat surreal to go to a store and see everything – but everything! – stickered twice. Second, all the nice, marketing-safe, low-sounding prices have been shot to hell. 1980 yen has become 2079 yen, 6800 yen has become 7140 yen, and so forth. Overnight, everything got seemingly 1000 yen more expensive – and those last two significant digits must have been chosen by a drunken monkey.

What happens when first-year Japanese high school students are asked to rewrite a popular American webcomic with their own words and jokes?

The Penny Arcade Remix Project

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Coming Soon…

The Gaming Age Forums (registration required but unlikely) are 5% cutting-edge, interesting commentary from industry insiders, journalists, and informed fans … and 95% uninformed whining from idiot fanboys. It’s easy enough to tune out, but once in a while, someone says something so mindbogglingly stupid that you can’t help but pay attention.

For example: Stormfront Studios is developing Demon Stone, a game set in the Forgotten Realms universe. Someone on the GAF boards complains that this game just looks like a Lord of the Rings ripoff – and since Lord of the Rings is in turn a Dungeons and Dragons ripoff, they find it difficult to get interested in this copy-of-a-copy. (To be clear: Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings in the 1950s; in the 1970s, Gary Gygax &c. ripped off Tolkien for their Dungeons and Dragons game; Forgotten Realms is a campaign setting in the D&D world.)

It’s like a twisted moebius strip of wrongness. It’s like watching a car crash in reverse.

Last night, at 3:00 A.M., it seemed I had a wonderful well of experience I couldn’t wait to share with you. A half-night’s sleep reflection later, it appears that I just got really drunk. But I might as well tell give you a behind-the-scenes look of a Japanese end-of-year celebration.

Yesterday was the day when teachers learn their postings for the next school year, which starts in April. Americans are used to the concept of a luxurious three-month summer vacation in between two school years; Japanese teachers (and students) get about two weeks. The Gunma Board of Education is nothing if not capricous and arbitrary in their reassignments, so a teacher might learn on March 22nd that, starting April 7th, they’re going to be teaching at a school forty-five minutes away from their current posting. There’s not really time to move – you’ll probably just be reassigned, anyhow – so the two week respite is good for little else but mental acclimation. One of the teachers I teach with, Kobayashi-sensei, just learned that he’d be teaching at Maebashi Commercial High School starting next year. He was transferred after only six years at Kiritaka, which is unusual – most postings last for eight to ten. He was a bit surprised and a lot upset. Last night’s party, then, was also sort of farewell … though I’ll certainly still see him around, as he lives in Kiryu.

It’s been raining pretty constantly since last Thursday. Japanese people insist that the “rainy season” doesn’t start until late May or early June. I guess March and April are just “the months it rains a lot,” and not a season, per se. Worse, it snowed heavily last night. This is so unusual as to be ludicrous. It’s spring! We were wearing short sleeves just last weekend! Someone needs to notify the weather.

Let’s talk about the enkai. The main enkai starts at 6:00 P.M. (a chartered bus leaves Kiritaka around 5:30). Probably three-quarters of Kiritaka teachers participate. The enkai takes place at one of the many public meeting halls / non-denominational wedding chapels scattered around Kiryu. Japanese folks aren’t too terribly Christian – they’re mostly low-key Buddhists, if they’re anything at all – but Western imprinting has convinced couples they must tie the knot in a high-domed, stained glass cathedral, and that anything less … would be uncivilized. The enkai is two hours of all-you-can drink beer, sake, whiskey, and sho-chu and a succession of time-release courses. First was a collection of tiny, hardly satisfying tidbits: pressed fish paste squares, sweet dango balls, grilled chicken cubes, and some kind of miniature white artichoke variant which was never explained to my satisfaction. Next came some sashimi, followed by a bowl of thick, creamy clam chowder. Then, some Thai-style ebi chili; shrimp, that is. Really hot and spicy, but cooled down by leaves of lettuce. After the shrimp came sauteed potatoes and lamb chops (!). Some ikura (fish eggs) on rice were the last main dish, and dessert was chocolate fudge cake with strawberries and whipped cream. Second dessert, for me at least, was extra lamb chops I could talk out of other teachers. Or steal when they weren’t looking. Don’t worry, by this point they were too drunk to care or notice.

It should be noted that thoughts of “pacing yourself” or “nursing your drinks” are wishful, impossible thinking. Teachers roam the enkai room, oversized beer bottles in hand, demonstrating their thanks and respect for your hard work over the past year through refilling your glass. If your glass is full, social niceties require you take a large enough sip to permit a meaningful refreshment. Even after two years at Kiritaka, many of the non-English teachers are terrified to approach me, let alone talk with me. “Giving the foreigner alcohol” is the level of social interaction they’re comfortable with, and who am I to deny them their twice-yearly chance to get a real, live American horribly drunk?

At 8:00 PM, the enkai is over and everyone goes home. Just kidding! It’s time for the nijikai, or second party. About seven teachers continued on at this point. The nijikai almost always involves karaoke; in Kiryu, the most popular destination is our local karaoke palace, Shidax. Many bars charge you outrageously for drinks (700-800 yen / drink) and for karaoke (100-200 yen / song), so Shidax’s 2600 yen for all-you-can-drink-and-sing is actually a decent value. A good mental investment, too; drunk people are notoriously bad at financial mathematics. I was thrilled to discover a number of most excellent karaoke additions in the past month: Daft Punk’s Digital Love (vocoder effects ON), Outkast’s Hey Ya! (FINALLY), and Junior Senior’s Can’t Stop the Beat (woo). I sang those three, as well as my usual Japanese standbys: Spitz’s Cherry, the Aikawa Nanase version of Roppongi Shinjuu, a random Globe song and a random Cocco song. On the English side of things, I always, always, always sing With or Without You and – embarassing admission time – Backstreet Boys’ Drowning finds its way into my karaoke repetroire with alarming alacrity. Baby, I can’t help it! That’s not all I sang, not by any means. We’re just talking about my baseline karaoke playlist.

While paying for karaoke, I saw one of my female Omama students waiting in line to check out, her female Omama student standard-issue older boyfriend slash sugar daddy in tow. (The Japanese term is “papa.”) I try not to think about what a 16-year-old ni-nensei student was doing at Shidax with a 30-year-old businessman Monday at midnight. And I try extra hard not to think about what she must have been up to post-Shidax.

Karaoke finished, everyone went home to get a few hours of sleep before the next day of work. Just kidding! It was time for the most hardcore five to continue on to the nearly-always-a-bad-idea sanjikai – party #3. I wanted to go home, I really did, but another teacher I work with cajoled me into doing it “for Koba-chan.” Nobody likes a party pooper, so against my better judgement – hell, even my lesser judgement was sounding alarm bells at this point – I got dragged into The Filipino Hostess Bar ™.

This isn’t as scandalous as it might sound – it was a very low-level hostess bar. Hostess bars mostly come in three different varieties.

• The first kind has nice Japanese girls in respectable outfits who politely bring you ordered drinks and food. Otherwise, they wait demurely behind the bar smiling and looking adorable. You could take your parents to this kind of hostess bar without fear.

• The second kind is staffed by somewhat sketchy yet still mostly good-hearted girls, often from foreign countries and looking for a quick way to earn a lot of money and pay off student loans, wearing miniskirts and too much makeup. They sit next to you and make idle conversation and refill your drink and applaud a bit too enthusiastically after you butcher a song in karaoke, but these places are very much an eye-candy only affair. You almost certainly wouldn’t take your parents to this kind of hostess bar, but you might write it up in your online journal and hope they have a good sense of humor about it.
• The third kind has a room in the back you can visit for fifteen minutes with your girl of choice for 10,000 yen. You would passionately deny ever visiting this sort of hostess bar even under sworn oath.

This bar was the second kind.

I don’t understand the hostess bar mentality. The other Japanese teachers were quite into it, immediately settling into some sort of flirty, chatty groove with the girls, placing their arms around their shoulders and having a grand old silly time.

I, on the other hand, was sitting there awkwardly, trying to minimize contact, making stilted small talk before giving up and saying outright, “don’t worry about me, I’m fine, really.” I sang a lot more karaoke, because every moment spent poring over the karaoke book or up on stage singing was one less moment I had to spend pretending to be interested in a girl pretending to be interested in me. I think they caught on that it wasn’t anything personal and that hostess bars just weren’t my style. This may sound like unmanly behavior, but really, the fun of flirting with attractive girls is undercut significantly by paying them exorbitant hourly fees.

If you sing “Tombo,” a pleasant enough Japanese karaoke standard, the girls all get up and do a sexy dance. I kept trying to look around them to read the furigana on the lyrics. I’m not gay, honest.

Fun fact: when you walk home at 2:00 AM on Monday night, you can pretty much ignore the hell out of the traffic lights. This is fortunate, given the most likely circumstances leading to such a return trip.

I fervently pray that Thursday and Friday will be calmer.

It’s 2:20 AM on Monday night – Tuesday morning? – and I have to wake up in five hours and oh God no no no. I am 42.7 times drunker than God (God is very drunk). Tonight was Kiritaka’s end-of-year enkai (drinking party) and it kind of devolved twice after the main party to subparties and sub-subparties until it’s 2:20 AM and I’m just getting home and oh noooooooooooooo. More on this tomorrow assuming I can wake up under any circumstances.

The most terrible part is, my job has me teach at three different schools. Meaning I do this twice more this week. I should take advantage of my off night this week to write up a last will and testament.

I make a joke out of telling people that I write my name in kanji as . These three characters are read “an-do-ryuu,” and could be loosely translated as “Dark Furious Dragon.” (darkness-anger-dragon) I like it, but those kinds of characters are generally considered unsuitable for use in names.

Today, while ordering something from the Japanese Capcom website, I was informed that my name in katakana was “too long.” So I decided to choose some “real” kanji to make up my name. After a bit of thought and research, I decided on , also read “an-do-ryuu,” and which kind of means “A Style of Careful Consideration.” (planning-hard work-way of)

I go to Tokyo for 72 hours, I come back, and Mr. 213.91.217.15 has posted over forty comments about generic medicine resources to my blog. I want to firebomb his house, but I’m worried he might not be in.

Playing Jeopardy again this week; after exhausting such reliable standbys as “Music” and “Movies” and “America” during the first two tries, the third round has fun categories like “Cows” and “” and “Video Games.” It’s always fun to watch students fumble on Countries’ Money for $800 (“What is the name of India’s money?”) only to have them get it when I casually mention it has the same name as Zelda’s money. And everyone knows who Pokémon #151 is.

Final Jeopardy category this time is Winnie the Pooh; the question is, “Who are six of Pooh’s friends?” Tiger and his Italian friend Piguretto always show up, and Christopher (Quristofar?) Robin usually follows. But since Japan’s Pooh knowledge originates almost entirely from the Disney variant, the rest of the gang show up haphazardly if they do at all.

Spelling “Eeyore” phonetically works about as well as you’d imagine. One group brought out a previously unexplored subtext of this beloved children’s classic by naming Pooh’s owner Christopher Lovin and his donkey friend EO – no relation to the Captain, I hope. Another mentioned Roux, whose curriness makes me think of a bindi-wearing, accented marsupial. The generic “boy” and “bee” showed up as last-gasp efforts. Three groups have been convinced that Pooh’s friends with a hardhat wearing mole, though none could remember his name. Maybe he showed up in one of the Disney movies, I dunno.

Finally, one group proudly declared that Pooh’s closest compatriots were “Christfar Robin, Bob, Tom, Ben, Mikel, and Beckey.” Sounds like a fun crew. Luckily, their wager was a mere $0.30, so they came out okay.

I unlocked Pyoro 2.

Wednesday, all day, the other Kiritaka teachers are debating about the composition of next year’s incoming class. Yours truly is left to his own devices, puttering around the computer lab, studying kanji, reading British science fiction, etc. The teacher’s room is even more barren than the test-taking days; those only require the proctoring of about half the teachers at a time, and even then only for the first 2/3rd of the day. Wednesday, poring over the results, is an all-day affair.

Usually on Wednesdays I visit Omama, my secondary school. I thought I’d go there today as well, but my Kiritaka teachers told me no, every school in Gunma will be going over entrance exam results today, there’s no need to go anywhere, just stay at Kiritaka. So I do. Then, at 10:15, I get a call from my English-inept English teacher supervisor. (All the other English teachers at Kiritaka are super-competent. Only my supervisor, randomly assigned each year, is continually surprised by the English language.) Per usual, her halting attempts to communicate with me in English soon give way to Japanese. “Omama’s kyoto-sensei called. He wants to know why you’re not at Omama. Omama has class today.”

“Excuse me?” I ask.

“You should go to Omama. Be careful,” she says.

“YOU TOLD ME I DIDN’T HAVE ANY CLASSES TODAY,” I say, shouting not out of anger or frustration, but sheer panic.

“Sorry,” she says, clearly not.

Timetable update: my regular first class at Omama is third period, which starts at 11:00 A.M. It takes me 25-30 minutes in the morning to drive to Omama. I have yet to Xerox any printouts for today’s classes, assuming they were cancelled; this class takes double-paged B4 materials, so it takes about 8-10 minutes to generate the papers.

I run home, grab the papers, hop in the car, and start driving. Traffic is lighter at 10:30 A.M. than at 8:00 A.M., so there’s plenty of room to speed. I do about twenty kilometers over the speed limit the whole way – it might not sound like much, but it’s a 50% increase over what’s recommended on these country roads. I’m not so worried about getting a ticket; I’m more worried about my rattling kei-car falling apart. My car doesn’t have a working radio, so I often sing to myself while driving to stave off boredom. This morning, I sang the “Bullshit!” song at the top of my lungs the whole way here. (Sample lyrics: “Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit this is bullshit bullshit bullshit!”) Miraculously, I pull into the Omama parking lot at 10:40.

Just in time to hear the chimes.

Goddammit! They’re on an accelerated schedule today! If it’s a 5-minute acceleration (45 minute classes), I still have ten minutes to make copies. If it’s a 10-minute acceleration (40-minute classes), then third period just started.

I rush into the genkan and find that someone’s moved my shoes. Someone ALWAYS moves my shoes. I don’t have a regular teacher’s cubby at Omama, so I always leave my indoor shoes in guest cubby number 19 at the end of the day. They’re rarely there by the next week. There’s over fifty guest cubbies; I can’t understand why someone is compelled to move them. I start flipping the guest cubbies open willy-nilly, finding my shoes in number 34. I slam the open cubby wall shut three, four doors at a time, strap on my shoes and run upstairs.

“Class just started,” says Moroda-sensei.

“I HAVEN’T MADE COPIES YET,” I shout, eyes wide in panic. I run through the teacher’s room to the copy room and take out the four A4 papers I use in today’s lesson. I make a snap judgement as to which two live and which two die and start making a single B4 sheet, planning to fake/jettison the rest.

I’m in the classroom, out-of-breath, copies in hand, by 10:45. Takeda-sensei is surprised to see me. It turns out that he was planning to review the recent final exam with the students today. I propose that he do this some other time and let me teach the lesson I have with me instead. I think he can see from my physical state that this is a good idea. He acquiesces.

We teach the class and it goes well enough. By 11:20 I’m back in the teacher’s lounge, a bit calmer, ready to make a decent set of materials for the afternoon’s pair of classes, coming to grips with my expected Wednesday off turning into the regular grind.

“There are no classes this afternoon,” Moroda-sensei tells me. “We’ll be going over the entrance examinations.” I guess when your academic standards are as low as Omama’s, the afternoon is enough. It’s noon now, and that’s my day to date: boredom, panic, speeding, panic, thirty-five minutes of class, and now I’m done.

WHY DO PEOPLE DO THE ABSOLUTE STUPIDEST THING EVERY GODDAMN MINUTE OF EVERY GODDAMN DAY?!