hiidenkonttibeta

The fluorescent light in my bathroom turned into a stroboscope. What a strange experience to brush teeth or take a シャワー in unsteadily blinking light – now I see me, now I don’t, in 0.2-10Hz frequency.

A packet from Amazon.co.jp arrived a while ago. Three CD’s:

• 陰陽座: 煌神羅刹 (こうじんらせつ)
• 陰陽座: 鳳翼麟瞳 (ほうよくりんどう)
• The Brilliant Green: Terra2001

Luckily 陰陽座 (Onmyo-za) has their album names in hiragana on their home page, so it’s possible to refer to them in other ways than copy+pasting kanji’s :-)

Then there was some まんが:

あずまんが anime is so great that getting the manga was mandatory. It’s slow reading (no furigana), but it seems possible..

Yesterday was my 29th birthday. Friends of mine got this surprising idea of celebrating in the bar, and they bought me good whisky (Laphroaig 15y.o., and some Lagavulin’s special – after a quick net search I guess it was 1986 Pedro Ximenez Maturation edition). Me happy. I feel obligated to return the favor, which in turn means that I’ve got to remember birthdays – so far I’ve barely noted my own :-)

The first thing I did today was going to my first Muso Shinden Ryu iaido lesson. I’m not switching away from Tai-Shin-Mun kung-fu. Iaido seems completely different from kung-fu, so there shouldn’t be any problems in practising both. 刀 is such a fascinating object that I find the idea of learning to handle it very appealing.

Some pseudoartphotography:

Using a scientific method (Opening A Dictonary On A Random Page And Pointing A Random Word With Finger) I named them “Colleague”, “Potential” and “Minor”.

I watched American Ninja. Better check what other films the same director has done, to avoid them.. Well, it shouldn’t be too difficult. His best movie has imdb score of 4.4/10.

Not that all movies with low scores ain’t worth watching: Beowulf has 3.7 points, but it’s still fun, with all the PA systems in the medieval times and other pure silliness. Not a keeper, but worth seeing once.

Year 2003 indexes scanned! うれしい! I also picked “good” shots for hi-res scanning, and there’s quite a lot of them.. But this includes not only shots I consider worth sharing, but also those I have only personal interest in (places I’ve been, technically interesting, and so on).

And the last note: whoever categorized Lake of Tears album Forever Autumn as symphonic black metal in All Music Guide obviously has a ちょっと different description for SBM than I do.. Not that it’s a bad album (it’s sad and beautiful), but black metal it isn’t.

Here’s the second set of kanji I’m learning:

vuori, alku, iso, pieni, keskellä, riisipelto, nyt, keskiviikko/vesi, viikonpäivä, lauantai/maa, tiistai/tuli, torstai/puu, vuosi, puoli
ymmärtää, mennä, vapaa-aika, tulla, jokainen, kuukausi, perjantai/kulta, edessä, takana, keskipäivä, viikko, väli, aamu

These might take a bit longer. There are some pretty good pieces of software available for Palm Pilot for learning kanji. I made KingKanji lessons for these kanji, if I use it daily there might be some hope..

Karate Kid was on TV today (or yesterday, actually). I’ve only seen it once before, and that was in elementary school. Not a great movie, but could be considered a required viewing since quite many references to waxing practise sequence exist.. It would be nice to know if the crane kick actually exists in some karate style.

Korean romantic comedy My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀), on the other hand, is a good movie. The girl (whose name never comes up) is just a wonderful character, and Jeon Ji-hyun is simply awesome playing her! It also doesn’t totally rely on someone being incredibly stupid and/or clumsy, as too many comedies do. Highly recommended!