Plans

I have decided that I would like to try to pass the JLPT 1 in the next few years.  Thus I started analyzing the amount of Kanji I would need to learn.  The current list of daily use kanji comes in at roughly 1948 characters.  Of which I immediately recognized something like 400 of, and was fairly sure I knew what another 100 meant.  Leaving me roughly 1500 more to learn.  Combining that list with the firefox addin called Rikaichan which roughly means “little comprehender” I can study all of them.  I’m planning to make flash cards using a Heisig style story approach combined with an Anki/smart.fm style increasingly spaced out review.

Here I come Kanji study!

Hello strange technical problem

Yes, all of a sudden.  Hello!  Then a week later it suddenly resolves itself.  I couldn’t connect to the internet at home for about a week, then all of a sudden today its fixed.  Since I changed no settings, and both of my computers failed I knew it was a problem on their end.  I dunno why it happened though, or how they noticed it because I was still working up the nerve to try to deal with it on the phone.  My supervisor had been to busy to call, unless he did, they fixed it, and I didn’t know about it.

At any rate, it was a nice surprise after beating Cave Story.  For those of you who played Super Mario Brothers, Commander Keen, or any of a hundred other side-scrolling platform games out there, you should know about Cave Story.  It was developed by a Japanese programmer who goes by Pixel in 2004.  It is sort of an RPG-Platform game.  I like to think of it as a perfect combination of the first NES Zelda game and Commander Keen.  The graphics are primitive, but very good.  The sound is one of my favorite parts, it’s chip programmed like an NES game would be.  It’s truly a retro game with some new spins.  The story is totally original as far as I know and features a nameless robot sometimes referred to as the savior in the English translation.  Anyway, it’s probably the best game I’ve played all the way through since Planescape: Torment.  Just google Cave story, there’s a version for just about every computer platform as and even a few console systems.  Someone apparently even ported it to graphing calculators.  Oh fine, Ill give you a link, because I know you’re too lazy to actually click on your google search bar and type in Cave Story.

No Faces

For the past few years I’ve been interested in making art showing vaguely Victorianesque, or at least suit wearing people (especially men) where their face should be visible somehow, but is blocked or obscured by something.  I don’t know why but I really like the idea.  I was hanging out with a friend of mine last night and we were both drawing, and as usual I requested a topic to draw (because I suck at thinking of them myself).  She said, “A man in a hat cleaning.”  Immediately my mind went to Barenaked Ladies’ “When I Fall” and the same idea of a man without a face.  Combining the two you get a window washer wearing a suit, looking at his reflection.  All of which we can see, except his face, which is obscured by the squeegee and the water dripping off it.

D&D and a Pizza Place

Had our first Dungeons and Dragons session last night.  Only three of us all together, so its not ideal, but it is still pretty fun.  The ideal group size ranges from between 5-7 including the Game master (In my experience).  That way everyone can take the lead when they want and relax and listen other times, and there’s just more opportunities for player interaction.  I’m pretty happy with the way it progressed.  I’ve got a bit of homework to do before next time!

Also, I finally stopped by the nearest pizza place.  And what do you know, its freakin’ amazing.  Beautiful shop with a beautiful outdoor seating area as well.  The pizza is among the best I’ve had in Japan, and thats good because most pizza in Japan is pretty much crap.  The place is called Hatayama Garden, its right on Route 33 between Hidaka and Ino, almost at the border actually.  Price is about par, roughly 1300¥ per pizza.  The coolest thing is, if I read the Japanese correctly, they mostly use vegetables they grew themselves, and otherwise local ingredients.  I love that, go green!

Mikan Run Productions

I chose the name of my independent production studio.  I was thinking I wanted to do something with mikan, it’s my favorite Japanese fruit.  Easily peeleable, seedless tangerines.  Would’ve just gone with Mikan Productions but that just sounds way too general and is probably a lawsuit waiting to happen.  So I am now officially Mikan Run Productions.  This graphic is mostly just a placeholder but it’s also the concept drawing of the kind of thing I’d like to make eventually.
In other news I downloaded Blender, a 3D modeling program.  After I work through the countless tutorials needed to begin to understand how this extremely complicated program works, I’m going to make the Mikan Run production studio Splash animation.  You know, like 20th Century Fox’s spotlights, and Joss Whedon’s Mutant Enemy animation with  “Grrr. Argh”.  Yeah well, mine’s gonna be a Mikan in the middle of the screen “Mikan.” Then it will sprout legs and run across with a little trail of dust. “Mikan Run.”  Then my logo will show up, something like above.

What is Mikan Run Productions gonna make you ask? Videography, Short Films, Music, Radio, Podcasts, who knows what, now I have a label to slap onto it.  Thus I begin my own indie brand identity.

P.S. Other than my logo (and possibly this too after I look into some legal stuff) most everything I make will be licensed under Creative Commons – Attribution.  I’m not out to make money, just havin’ fun.  Let’s go Copyleft.

David – The new Computer

I now have a sexy little 6.5 x 6.5 x 2 inch box on my desk beside my 19 inch flat widescreen monitor.  It is a Mac Mini.  2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 4 GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400 Graphics Card, DVD/CD Reader/Burner Drive, and 500 Gigabytes (0.5 TB) of Hard Drive space.

I initially had some problems getting Final Cut Express to properly handle my AVCHD video files from my JVC Everio HD nonsense video camera, but with an upgrade of Finalcut downloaded once I got my internet going, everything was happy, especially me.  I’m now just a few steps away from having a full fledged indie production studio in my living room!

The remaining steps are: Purchase a pressure sensitive Midi Keyboard for playing my million and a half synth instuments in Logic Express.  Purchase a moderately decent microphone for voice and live instrument recording as well as voice-overs and sound effects.  Purchase a tripod so I can actually shoot decent still shots.  Lastly, I must name my studio.  Well I dunno about the studio name yet.  But I decided on David for the computer because it is so mind blowingly normal of a name, but it also has such a nice parallel to the David and Goliath story which seems fitting considering the little box’s dimensions.  I have worked under a few different studio labels before, mostly just combinations of our names like ZAusMark, and ZAusMaik.  I’ll spend today thinking about it while I go out and ponder buying Spore…

Japanese vs. English Visual Processing Comparison

I had a revelation, of sorts, regarding a bit of psycholinguistics.  One of my first culture shocks in Japan was entering a store and feeling visually assaulted with information.  The signs were everywhere, hanging off of everything in terrible color contrast, everything striving for attention simultaneously.  I saw this same thing repeated over and over in other stores, down streets, in trains, and especially on TV advertisements.

In America, good designers pride themselves on the ability to make an impact with minimal resources (visually speaking).  Sometimes in America we see huge billboards that are almost completely blank, and have a small graphic or text logo.  These are effective in America because we are drawn to the information surrounded by “negative space”.  Negative space is a big fancy design word for area where there isn’t much or any information.  This could be the white/empty parts of a webpage, or even the individual spaces between words.

The last point is where I had my realization.  In English, our ability to quickly parse meaning out of text and written words is aided by the spaces between words, after punctuation, as well as indentation and line breaks.  WhenItypesomethinglikethisitsveryhardforyoutoreadquickly.  It’s possible, but its noticeably slower than reading a portion of text that has customary spacing.

Japanese text on the other hand, doesn’t rely on this technique much at all.  Instead it is quickly processed by reading of Kanji clusters which contain primary blocks of meaning.  These kanji clusters are interspersed with hiragana which are used for phonetic purposes as well as grammaticalizing the kanji as well as representing uncommon words and grammatical bits and pieces.  Japanese design doesn’t focus on negative space at all, instead it seems to get as much meaning to you in as little space as possible.  To that end it gets crammed into and onto anything and everything where ever space is available, and sometimes where it isn’t readily.

I havn’t done any academic studies on this, but it seems like a pretty direct correlation.  My knowledge of visual language processing is limited to one university course of Cognitive Psychology and a linguistics major, but I think it’s intuitively obvious that something’s going on here.  I’d be interested to know what you think.

Japanese New Year, 2010

Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu! Happy New Year!

I experienced my first New Year in Japan last night and today.  It is now Heisei 22 according to the Japanese traditional empirical date system, and 2010 by the widely recognized international date system.  This difference in dates is massively confusing, since the emperor is mortal and eventually passes away and another emperor takes his place, and the year gets reset.  In order to make sense of this, or try to, businesses and government organizations have date charts to match a year in the Japanese system with the year in the international/western system.  Pretty much all official Japanese business is recorded in the Japanese system, whereas in popular media everything is written in the international one.

So… as Jonathon Coulton said, “It’s gonna be the future soon.”  The world’s changing faster and faster every year, see Moore’s Law.  The marine ecology of Earth is changing wildly because of overfishing, the ice caps are melting, we’re starting to get near the point of continuously increasing fuel prices, and technology… well They’re building an elevator into space.  You ready for this?

SH380029.jpg

SH380029.jpg, originally uploaded by Mark Mrwizard.

I <3 Japan

Vacation and more on Helena

Currently spending my vacation doing little to nothing. I need to set a few goals to accomplish before vacation’s over. These must include: Get Silk and Silver website v2.0 operable. Finish D&D adventure. Finish book 2 of the JET Japanese language course.

More on Helena: So. I’m beginning to think Helena is a little buggier than it should be. Browser embedded wmvs show a random gray bar that shouldn’t be there. Ubuntu developers remarked on some “oops” factors with compiz. Battery low notification can no longer be turned off. Opening splash is no longer editable. Games that should be running perfectly are slightly buggy, possibly due to a java problem?