Cathy and I went to Comiket on the weekend and didn’t have the time of our lives we thought we would. I don’t think doujinshi is really my scene although the Cosplay and homebrew games were pretty fun. Also the crowds there were massive, we waited an hour after the event had finished and there were still hordes of people shuffling out of the convention centre, I don’t think I’ve seen that many people in my entire life. Apparently some guy posted on 2chan that he was going to set off a hand grenade at the convention, I guess we saw a few security gaurds around the place to back that up.

Check out photos of Cosplayers here.

to		Cathy
date		Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 7:16 PM
subject		Re: <3
mailed-by		gmail.com

Finally got to school yesterday, but none of the staff new we were
coming and only a few teachers and the office ladies were there to
meet us.

Today we had the mayor and I managed to interpret a fair bit of it for
the group, yoshida sensei only had to help me with little bit.
Afterwards we had a ceremony where we received our contracts and even
though everyone, the higher ups and all, were in the room and were
waiting quietly and we were making gestures at suda sensei to say why
hasn’t it started yet, he said to us “the ceremony starts at 3 oclock
so we will wait 6 minutes” and so we had to sit there for six minutes
till he said “ok the ceremony will begin now”. lol.

to		Kat
date		Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 5:43 PM
subject		Re: TW dates
mailed-by		gmail.co

There was this talk show on manga on the other night, and it looked
pretty cool. They had manga experts on and they’d display some manga
pages and read out the speech bubbles then discuss it and then show
some anime episodes but there was a storm that night and it messed
with my reception so I missed most of it. maybe it’ll be on next
week.

The problem with blogging about all the numerous crazy stuff you got up to is that by the time you get around to blogging about it you’ve forgotten what you got up to. Anyway I’ve settled into my new town of Iwaki, Japan and just got the internet setup which is why I’m finally able to blog. I guess photos are in order, here’s my apartment: Click here for more photos

Its pretty big and while I’m living in the tatami room, tv room, kitchen laundry and bathroom, I have this room which is pretty huge that I don’t know what to do with. At the moment its my ironing room.

I’ve been to 2 festivals so far, last Saturaday Melissa, another Australian jet who lives in the same apartment complex as me, and I caught the bus down to Onahama ( a port in Iwaki) to see the firework tournament and bumped into James (the british jet) and mat (the american jet), which was an awesome night. Cathy came to visit me not long after that and we went to the Tanibata festival and watched the big street dance: Click here for more photos

As a reward for finishing my translation project I thought it would be great to get it professionally bound like a real book. Avi pointed me in the direction of lulu.com a company in the u.s. that does this service for the common man at an affordable price. After weeks of complaining to my parents that my books haven’t arrived yet, today they finally arrived (in fact I found them at the door step only 5mins after complaining they hadn’t arrived.) I got them hard bound with a dust jacket, when you open the book it has my essay after the contents and title page, then it tells you to turn to the back because that’s where the manga starts (Japanese read from right to left and I saw no reason to flip the pages). After some serious adobe acrobat acrobatics in getting that to happen, I was very surprised to find there were no printing errors (except for a font change on one word in the contents page, but that’s pretty minor and not the printer’s fault.) I had 4 copies printed, 1 for my parents, 1 for the manga library, 1 one for my supervisor and one for me.

This blog is getting pretty image heavy so I’ll just stick some thumbnails up, click on them to see the bigger picture.

I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Spore (simeverything) and grabbed a copy of the demo creature editor. I handed in my last bit of assessment for my masters today and so feel justified wasting my time with computer games until I leave for Japan. I’ve attached some pics of my cute little spore monsters I’ve made so far. Its fun but a bit limiting in what you can make, I guess it serves its purpose as a bench mark for seeing if your pc can handle Spore.

This is Dog Tamping teaching his Dog Tamping spawn about roaring.

And this is Crocospant. I don’t know why but things with a duckbill are pretty hilarious.

(Warning this post contains spoilers which have been whited out, to read them highlight the white gaps) On Saturday night Romesh, Fran (my brother’s girlfriend who just got here from Atlanta on Friday) braved Karingal cinemas to see the new Indianna Jones movie in Vmax. And I enjoyed it, I had a great time, my two cohorts on the other hand weren’t as impressed but both thought it was a good movie. It comfortably fit the mold of an Indianna Jones film with goofy jokes, unrealistic stunts and camera angles that make you appreciate why Steven Spielberg is a supreme deity. My only criticism was that the Aliens were a bit too prominent and could have been played more subtle, but my criticism is based largely on the final scenes of the movie which got a bit too cgi and didn’t satisfy-ably do away with bad guy Cate Blanchett. My other problem with the movie was the lame and unnecessary wedding scene which seemed tacked on and not really built up to, but maybe I’m too cynical to appreciate such things. Over all I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and eagerly awaiting the dvd release even though I’ll probably be in Japan at that point and too poor to afford it. Any if you haven’t seen it yet, get to a cinema and enjoy it the way it’s meant to be enjoyed.

Well it took me a year, but I’ve finally finished my major translation project for my masters. My translation of Osamu Tezuka’s Paper Fortress, an autobiographical manga based on his struggles to become a mangaka during and after the war. Including a 3000 word commentary the publication weighed in at 200 pages making it look like a phone book. Did I mention I need to submit TWO copies! It took me about half an hour to print out, my laser printer is now a smoldering heap and in need of counseling. Now I’ve just got to make two photocopies of the source material (probably another 200 pages) then, with the satisfaction of wiping out a quarter of a rain forest, I can hand this muther in.

Every one else who’s cool seems to have a wordpress, so I got one too.