Okay, there was another earthquake just now equal in size to the one two days ago – a shindou 6 centered in Niigata. And the biggest typhoon in a decade was less than a week ago. Japan really needs to get its act together. For serious.

Please go vote. Please. Please go vote.

Here is a totally nonscientific ranking of Red/Blue states by average I.Q.. I don’t believe in I.Q. testing as an accurate way to measure intelligence, so I don’t really think this list means anything. I just find its … symmetry amusing.

So I own a new TV now. I ended up getting the Sharp model; I wandered into Yamada Denki this evening, and they had that model on sale for 9.4 man (not too great), but with free shipping and a ludicrous 28% points! 28% points brought the price down to 6.6 man, about $50 better than the best price on kakaku.com – a sort of Japanese Pricewatch. I convinced them to let me use the points immediately instead of waiting 48 hours, so they’re applied towards a new TV stand and some most-necessary component cables. It arrives on Thursday!

About A/V standards: Japanese TVs don’t have component connections. This is good, because component is an absolutely embarassing video standard. THREE COMPOSITE VIDEO SIGNALS? It’s like some poor time-traveller from the future had to hack together a solution out of 1986-era technology D-cable is an all-in-one digital cable for use with modern televisions. D1 is standard resolution, D2 is 480p, D3 is 1080i, and D4 is 720p. The connector is the same for all resolutions and backwards compatible; a D4 input can accept and decode any signal, from D1 to D4. It’s awesome and sensible! (and unavailable in America)

I just got back from Akihabara – but I didn’t visit a single game store! I’m in the market for a new television, and since work brought me one station away from Aki today, I thought I’d stop by the world’s biggest electric playground and see what’s available. I want a D4 (1080i/720p) capable widescreen TV. Also, since my current 4:3 TV is 21″, I want a widescreen TV with an unstretched 4:3 area larger than 21″. That means 28″ is right out; I need at least 30″ or 32″. (Fun with math: a 32″ widescreen TV has a 25″ 4:3 viewable area.)

I’ve settled, I think, on this 32″ Sharp model (about $700). Another store had this Panasonic 32″ for about $800, limited to stock on hand. That one seemed mighty tempting, too … sny suggestions for someone taking their first HDTV plunge? Any pitfalls, brands, or technologies I should be sure to avoid?

I mention my TV search because: I visited Ishimaru TV Tower, an Akihabara building with six floors devoted to nothing but televisions. I was somewhat surprised after visiting all six floors that I hadn’t seen a single CRT (“Braun Tube” in Japanese, after the inventor). I checked the floor guide, and sure enough, “Braun tube televisions” had been masking-taped out of the directory. There’s something not right about that – six floors of televisions without any, you know, actual TVs. And what if I don’t want to spend $2000 on my set?

My friend Christian and I figured out what was probably up: in Japan, you tend to move straight from your own room at your parents’ place to your own house with your wife/husband. If you do live on your own – unusual but increasing – then it’s in a tiny one-room apartment and you have no money. The guiding principle of Japanese TV price points, then, is this: if you have the space for a large set, then you have the money for your own house. And if you have the money for your own house, having no options but ludicrously overpriced plasma/LCD screens isn’t going to overly faze your pocketbook. This is why you see photos of Japanese game otaku with collections worth tens of thousands of dollars playing on 15″ CRTs. This is why I – who just what a midrange, midsized, widescreen, progressive CRT – have about five available options. It’s a totally different A/V market. Living in the future can have its disadvantages.

If you’re living overseas and haven’t gotten a ballot yet for some reason there’s an emergency solution now.

So it’s 8:30 PM on Wednesday night, and I just tromped outside in the prewake of the largest typhoon of the year so I could reach Jiyugaoka’s sole Internet cafe before it’s too late. I spent over two hours chatting with technical support, today, about half of that in Japanese: due to some colossal international DNS mixup I can’t even begin to fathom, Yahoo BB users can’t access any of fuitadnet.com’s hosted sites. Like, for example, this one. Pings, IPs, traceroutes all just die off on the San Jose-DFW hop. Yahoo BB users can access any other site on the Net just fine, and folks who use other ISPs can reach this site and others sans problemo … it’s just not fair, I tell you
. I’m changing Yukihime’s hosting provider soon, and I applied for 100 MB (down AND up) fiberoptic Internet last week, so hopefully these problems will be soon resolved with style.

In any case, I swam my way over to the net cafe to check the last day-and-a-half’s worth of mail, positive that some cute girl was going to ask me out this weekend and I was going to get her missive too late. No such luck. I did, however, get 50 spam notifcations mails for Movable Type. More importantly, I set up a temporary autoforwarder to send anything sent to @yukihime.com to an address I can read. Since most of these mails will no doubt be further spam notifications – and I’ll be unable to actually access the site to delete/block said spam – I expect it will be more frustration than it’s worth.

In any case, I hope to be able to access this site again soon, and don’t expect too many updates in the next few days. I’d be too busy playingmy newly-arrived copy of Shin Megami Tensei III to update, anyways, but at least now I have a technical excuse to mask my regular laziness.

And I will write TGS up, honest, eventually. Just not at 480 yen per hour. Bye for a bit.

Thanks to Dreamhost’s recent $0.77 / month hosting deal (over, though they’re still a great value) I now own a domain name I’ve had my sights on for a while: goviolet.com. The name was being (un)used by some Internet startup for the last few years and expired just last month. I registered it and have currently repositioned it as a tribute to one of my favorite short stories. But where should it go from here? Suggestions welcome.

Some Kiryuites came down to Tokyo today and we all went shopping for Halloween goods. I’m going as The Sorrow, a character from Metal Gear Solid 3. I have a penchant for choosing costumes no one can identify, but dressing up as a game character before the game’s release is definitely a new personal obscurity best. (If you don’t want to know about The Sorrow’s appearance, skip to the next paragraph.) I had incredible luck at a military surplus store in Ueno we visited at the end of our day. I didn’t just get clothes that looked similar; I got clothes that are actually from the era of the game (or replicas thereof). I found a great grey wool turtleneck sweather with leather reinforced shoulders and elbows, a pair of 1969 forest camouflage pants, an olive green utility clipbelt, and a pouch. I may skip the gun holster and boots for financial reasons; the straps, holster, and gun would run me about $100-120, and the boots, though
available for around $30-40 used, would not get worn much outside the costume. The sweater and pants, though not inexpensive, are at least general purpose enough I can use them as part of my regular wardrobe. A gun holster is not so multifunctional. I figure that people won’t look at my feet, and if I wear my olive green hooded jacket over the sweater, like he does in the promotional trailer, then I can basically bypass most of the accessories brouhaha.

One question though – are those gloves black or a very dark green? Colorblindness makes cosplaying ever so difficult.

I also found a miniature Taiko no Tatsujin figure that drums itself when you push a button. I also found a stationery store that sold things in bulk, so I got forty blank CD cases and forty padded envelopes for a song. So expect monster eBay listings in the near future.

die.

edit: or don’t! all’s well.

I had forgotten Mawaru! Made in Wario came out this week, but some gushingly positive impressions at the Gaming Age Forums soon reminded me, I biked over to my local game store to pick it up (and twist it around). They had it there, behind the counter, and were in the middle of putting price tags on it. Success!

But then! They wouldn’t sell it to me because it doesn’t go on sale until tomorrow. I kind of stared at them, aghast. I’ve been in Japan over three years and never, ever seen a store enforce a for-sale date. They, in turn, seemed awfully offended that I thought they were the kind of store that broke street date. Is this a city thing? I need to find a new game store.

I biked back home, dejected, and found waiting in my Inbox a cancellation for my weekend plans.

It was the worst Christmas ever. :(

One of my favorite things about the cheap ramen hovel a few blocks from my apartment – besides that it’s really, really tasty – is how, depending on the time of day and the chef on duty, the same order will be prepared entirely different ways. During the day, for example, asking for yakinikudon (a beef bowl) during the day gets you thickly sliced beef in a sugary, sweet sauce, piled on top of a crispy fried egg, strips of sauteed garlic, and lots of fresh lettuce. Go late at night, though, and the yakinikudon is far more savory, made of thinly sliced beef stir-fried with heaps of garlic, cabbage, and onion. The evening version’s rice
comes in a separate bowl, too, violating the fundamental tenets of don-ism. But there’s a special spicy ground beef garlic sauce on top of the rice, so I’ve yet to notify the Food Police. Both versions are great, but I’d give the edge to the daytime verion.

I really approve of such a high level of inconsistency in a restaurant. Given that most modern restaurants are completely soulless, it’s a pleasant surprise to find a place with multiple personality disorder.

I just got a lovely surprise in the mailbox: a White Mage keitai strap for Final Fantasy I+II Advance! Nintendo sent 10,000 straps out to gamers who registered their copy with Club Nintendo: 4,000 White Mages, 4,000 Black Mages, and 2,000 Red Mages. The White Mage is actually the one I wanted most, as the Red Mage sucks (the Red Wizard, he’s cool, but before the class change? not so much), and the Black Mage has been more-or-less ruined for me by 8-Bit Theater.

The strap is quite a bit nicer than I expected; the strap itself is faux leather, and the crystal, though plastic, catches the light nicely. The pixel art of the White Mage isn’t just “suspended” in the center, but actually formed from prismatic distortions of varying lengths inside the crystal itself; the longer the prism, the lighter the “pixel” appears. The upside of this is that the White Mage looks like a cool digital blur as you rotate it.

This has been a good day to be a gamer!