hiidenkonttibeta

The trees looked good last night, being white with ゆき and frost, and the moon was almost full.

Too bad today is so cloudy. But maybe I’ll still go out with a real camera tonight..

-18°C outside, dark metal inside. Kaamos rocked (or metalled? doomed?).

This is the first band I saw (at around 23時, I might have missed some), no idea who they were:

They played pretty powerful metal, but weren’t particularly interesting.

Swallow the Sun:

STS’s first song was slow and heavy doom metal. They never become especially speedy, but luckily they had a bit faster songs too.. Slow is good, if it isn’t ultra slow all the time. Swallow the Sun wasn’t bad at all, I’ve got to check out their album.

Silentium:

Wow. Dark and doomy gothic metal, Silentium is definitely worth checking out! Long and interesting songs, and they even had a violinist on stage (during one song they had 8 people on stage, since there was also an extra girl doing some singing and “banshee wailing”). A really pleasant surprise, leaving a desire for more live metal.

Sun shines from a low angle this time of the year. There were white, snowy trees, some fog and low flying thin clouds, all of which accounted in very brightly sunlit area in the end of the street:

More snow fell down (or actually arrived horizontally on high speed) during weekend, mainly on 土曜日 evening. Returning from anime club video session after midnight (it had been snowing for eight hours or so), we admired the brave souls who had traveled the same path by bike. There was 15-30cm of snow.

Here’s a couple of snapshots from the following day:

Videoillastakin on näköjään yksi, tauolta juuri ennen FLCL:ää:

As a side note, Morning Star by Entombed is pretty powerful metal album. Reminds me of Sepultura. No tricks, bare straightforward metal – whether it’s a good or a bad thing after a while, I cannot tell.

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.