entries ordered new ~> old

summer. mid 30's weather is here. not feeling well

elephants look fucked up. like reading a word repeatedly until it stops making sense. voter turnout for the govenor race dropped below 25%. afghans with looming threats of death went to the polls more.

Six Days in Fallujah has al-zarqawi quotes on the gameover screen lol a fate worse than getting slotted by a JDAM

gastric cancer speedrun

just saw monster rancher GL on my feed

read salt by mark kulansky, playing crypt underworld and devil spire.

met aidia.pink. The heat gummed up my brain. I'll never get used to hearing usernames like "shishka" out loud

wanting to re-write everything. continuously prodding at the bl page for 3 days

one of my favorite authors got a serial manga series published on pash-up. shimeji simulation is ending.

doing the same with the tv page. hugely appreciative of the guestbook comments. I think instead of flagellating myself for new page topics scrounging together bits of ramblings is the way forward. I've been itching to delete the identity page for years because I'm regurgitating what is apparently a very common phenomenon. It's overwhelmingly gotten the most comments out of all my pages so up it goes.

The Johnny & Associates scandal finally reached TV. Rumors have circulated online for 3 decades but only after the bastard is dead has it finally percolated up. Japan can pride itself on another cultural intersection with England, their own Savile.

900 department store workers at Sogo and Seibu are taking industrial action after a planned buyout from an American private equity firm is being finalized. The last strike was in 1962.

I wonder how much firefighting foam i'm ingesting through Tachikawa's municipal water

very happy with how the fleshrat turned out, i'm not bad at molding faces. deep in a creative block. I need a big project to just lose myself in.

dug up screenshots and saved pages of what I was doing on youtube ~2008. first time I watched strawberry panic must've been around 2011 which is substantially earlier than I remembered. finally updated the sidebar on all pages. it's been a good call to slim down the number of pages, surely there are visitors who skip over some while only viewing half-assed shit and garbage pages like headphones.html.

oh my god the fe8 randomizer works with normal save files. adding human hair to my paper mache.

definitely better at sculpting than drawing, the childhood lead exposure didn't touch that part of my brain. never molded fabric from clay but it's extremely satisfying. i'm making stuff again. it feels good. there's an artist I've been following since 2015, they settled into only drawing really tall women

finished the panpanya bust. yuyushiki must've been a nightmare to translate well.

eva glue sucks. finally found some good sausages. reminds me of sprouts and their woo woo nonsense and the lady at the butcher counter who always called me hun

NHK special on police corruption, a rare show of self-inflicted institutional damage. 3 workers at a small business were arrested for exporting industrial spray dryers to China. Under the Public Safety Agency's massaged definitions the simple spray dryers sold by the company was framed as having the capability to produce aerosolized biological weapons. They later lied to workers that the spray dryers in question were already being used for Chinese military use. One investigator testified that they were repeatedly told "who's going to take responsibility if the investigation falls apart?" by the agency. Incredibly the show got access to internal government communications, commerce officials telling public safety agents "please wait, please cool down" while jointly cooperating during the 3-year investigation. The 3 suspects were released without charge after 16 months in custody, 1 worker falling ill and passing away during that time. A subpoenaed investigator testified with "well, it was a fabrication." It's truly got it all. testimony falsification, suspect intimidation, nothing has changed.

a twitter post reads "how do these people keep on living without slitting their stomachs?

ghibli composer hisaishi joe talking about buying a $200k synthesizer more than double his income that could only handle 8 tracks at once, terry riley listening and nodding along

NHK ETV special on the falsely imprisoned, the 5 arrested in their 20's and most now in their 60's. Panic attacks at movie theatres, being unable to wear wristwatches, being fuctionally illiterate when admitted.

fantastic on the ground reporting following rural kenyan farmers, haven't seen stuff like since since TV Tokyo's early 2000's coverage of china and north korea.

I love cooking shows where they go to the remote countryside to ask the cryptkeeper if they like pancakes

I love the photo op of the PM walking around a supermarket looking thoughtful, spurred by internet users calling him taxes-raising glasses. Presumably the last time he's visited a commoner's hovel operation crossroads residue was still in the air.

thinking about the teacher I worked with, looked like an overgrown teenager except for a thick ainu 5 o'clock shadow. every time he'd pull aside a troubled student he'd hang his head contemplatively and listen to their disjointed recollections, earnestly soaking up classmate arguments and frustrations about sharing, both eyes crinkled deep in thought. His kids will turn out fine.

自転車屋さんの高橋くん. it's good. the kind of story that zooms you out of your own little bubble. more ひらやすみ you'd think it would become unconvinvingly cloy and SICKENINGLY sentimental by now.

do I have scabies? an allergic reaction? I'm getting gangstalked by bugs, I need to start drinking permethrin

dinner with the new guy. american post-war nostalgia, no hobbies, considerations about having kids, idealized jobs, vietnamese coworkers, anxieties about aging manifesting into ageism.

A few of the southern prefectures are getting closer to single-digit voter turnouts

went to a flea market at kokukoen. parents picking up acorns for their kids, pugs drowning in themselves, stalls full of prehistoric looking pottery and chiikawa. housewives turn into beasts when there's a giveaway corner. They were also handing out tangerine saplings, gran's going to go berserk

Still can't get over how those prefectural mascot characters are costumed by city workers normally looking dead inside while helping you with your taxes. It's like if the DMV had dewey the dwi dolphin reminding kids that stealing kias will send you to hell

A topical 2-part NHK special with Meron Benvenisti. kyary pamyu pamyu is on an educational show, you'd think they would keep her away from small children

walked past a comically large house, reminds me of one of those murder mystery pc-98 games

that vacant look in his eyes is so hot

one of the blue-haired japanese youtubers I used to watch, everytime he's listening to someone talking he looks at them as if they're a prey animal. got the 5kg box of tangerines, it's winter.

It's cold. I no longer live on the 4th floor. _ caught something so I brought some cough drops and tangerines.

as those posts say reminding myself that my artifical primate habitat needs more enrichment. The foam rocks spraypainted green isn't enough. Went to Tomato Fabrics. Beret-wearing montbell madams perpetually circle the place with the certainty of a constellation. As always it stinks of naptha and cigarette butts. Indeterminate plans guiding a loose wallet. Bought some gorgeous herringbone wool. Wasting time with the new guy, talking about fears. Stereotypical native american names and japanese surnames are essentially the same. "do you remember your first crush?"

someone got arrested with a sharps rifle. almost done making a kimono. with a scarf and gloves I can soon have the same lonely-woman killing aura as those BL drawings of doctors saying indecent things. Japanese folk clothing has impossibly weird color parings that work. like learning a new language. It's also like a topographic map for your dumpy

interesting segment on Egypt importing elements of japanese schooling spurred on by el-Sisi out of all people. more sakana-kun's fish show. He started as an eccentric middle school fish savant, to fish TV personality, to ichthyology professor. The show is your typical showcase about the miracles of nature, only on more common species the show ends with them being cooked and eaten. Like rural countryside propaganda on the TV it's no doubt to bolster domestic fish consumption that has been dramatically falling among young consumers. Probably a more honest depiction too.

this war of mine and papers please on TV. spent a disgusting amount of money on 6m of linen. NHK special on adopted one-child era chinese-american women being reunited with their birth parents.

feeling better. do you know what ohioan teenagers and indonesians from strict religious families would do to be in my position? I need to make the best of it.

bought sausages, couldn't resist. also got a dubious energy drink called "MIRACLE BODY V" The schoolkids walking home are talking about how their dad smells bad.

NHK special on former PM Tanaka Kakuei. finished the panpanya streetsign. I need to make things or I'll shrivel up and disappear. still one of my favorite artists, narratively much of it borders on pointless showa-era gag comics without having the nihilism get to you. The detailed backgrounds and surreal character designs have a particular fetishistic specificity, thinking about what must give birth to such landscapes gives you the sense that their brain is fundamentally wired differently

holy shit kitai kazuo on the news

remembered that time when a classmate excitedly told me his bank account pin was 3939 (mikumiku). this youtube channel transitions from mormon-themed music parody videos to yaoi-themed christmas songs

it's so cold that when I'm walking around I have to fight the urge to pee my pants for a fleeting embrace. with new years approaching entire families are out at the supermarket, preparations to hibernate around a kotatsu. peering into shopping baskets, the 6 cans of lager takes away this shopper's vitamin b6 and the natto gives it back. the industrial spray dryer company won their wrongful imprisonment case against the government

3 1 Made suspenders for the strichtarn pants. The advisor got really passionate looking over my papers. She must get aimless students asking for advice. If I get this transfer my pay won't move a bit but I got some resume filler. Prestige is a $50k paycut. bit on the news about online skirmishes between chinese and korean nationalists on who invented kimchi. Tempura and castella are portuguese, ramen is chinese, curry is british, culture wars on "ownership" falls on deaf ears. centuries ago the japanese were all sinophiles and india obsessives.

There's an indescribable haze in your formative years, adolescent cataracts that inhibit expectations to what life has ahead. I think living here is terrifying because there are no hazy amorphous expectations about your life trajectory. your value as a collection of cells is abundantly obvious in relationships and workplace interactions without understanding lofty pinko concepts like social capital. I know what to expect now. burden is on me to make my life interesting, no more expectant haze.

3 2 New chapters of ひらやすみ. A conventional story about proletariat suburban living is flavored by the line between idealism and reality that characters toy with. As opposed to seinens glazed with saccharine drama conflicts are strictly internal, self-criticism about personal definitions of romance or gratification or adulting. A failed actor, aspiring mangaka, messy real estate OL, they're all characters in transition. Any sort of cross-pollination between them, the typical catalysts for conflicting desires or bottled animosity is subverted by the author. Horrible Japanese expectant social etiquette is carelessly disregarded by the characters, it assumes the best out of everyone. There's a vicious sentimentality of benign living that imbues every page like Yotsuba does. I love it with all my heart, it deserves all the acclaim from the margins and every award from no-name cultural orgs. It deserves to be seen

mr. beast I would DIE for her

"what does psyop mean?"

3 9 the anorak from varusteleka got here. buying more books. I'm at peace with buying things I enjoy. apparently there used to be grenade turn-in clemency posters in fukuoka in the 90's

3 10 sewing a kosovorotka. something kicked away my anhedonia this week and I'm frustrated that I can't nail down the cause. what a fragile little mind, changing gears just like that.

4 3 Sakamoto Ryuichi died. Oe Kenzaburo died.

4 8 A staggering show on NHK, looking at the role of art during wartime from Shostakovich composing Stalingrad to Goebbels ambushing Furtwängler with a handshake. The japanese counterpart was acclaimed akutagawa novelists sent to Manchuria to document the war. Writers like Ashihei Hino had a guaranteed income of $20,000 from the government when writing sales slumped, culminating in books like Wheat and Soldiers broadcasting the romanticism of war, of men with families, children, jobs, fighting for a "higher purpose." As the war turned his later writings in the India campaigns were censored by the government, men he was attatched to eating dynamite sent by logistics officers because their rations were never enough. The post-war criticism from veterans about his earlier glorification of the war turned into Kakumei Zengo, a book dripping with caricatures of his own guilt, of men being used and discarded. He would commit suicide the same year.

4 9 finished Dissecting the Danchi: Inside Japan’s Largest Postwar Housing Experiment. The author compares their own experiences growing up in a khrushchevka. finished Japan and its Others, Clammer draws lines between the persecution of paganism in europe with Shinto animism's state repression by the meiji government. fascinating to think how naturalistic spirituality colors everything when the japanese are thoroughly non-religious.

4 10 finished The Anatomy of Dependence. books are the poultice to hour-long commutes. Visited old family friends after work, they're like relatives by now. Gave ) a bottle of the liquor I really like, gave the now massive kiddos Eyewitness books. Old stories, old faces. I needed this.

4 13 finished The Culture of Capital Punishment in Japan. Had curry. Been 3 years or so since I've gone out to eat by myself. The interior as always decorated with half-empty jinro bottles and nepali flags. the naan giant, the mutton curry perfectly slick with oil and full of cardamom pods.

4 15 lol

4 18 NHK show on Germany's post-war years. Children playing on a rotating 8.8cm, czech reprisal killings, Bohnenkamp influencing Schmidt in a POW camp, televised orphans looking for their parents some ignorant of their own name, people insisting their innocence to the soviet occupation. The show is fiercely sympathetic but multivalent, it tickles the distant parallels within japanese viewers that germans furiously reject.

4 24 bought linen, made clothes. Sewing machine lugged across 3 prefectures but largely untouched for the last year. Also bought kakishibu dye. Surprisingly still cold outside. Bought ancient digital camera, page soon. feeling better.

Another excellent NHK show on Japan's relationship with SEA with a focus on the Phillipines and Indonesia. Bataan, Nampo tokubetsu ryugaku, Suharto, Laurel, Japanese volunteers in the Indonesian idependence war, post-war ODAs, ASEAN. Leocadio de Asis witnessing children mobilised for the factories remarking about the Japanese's destinies predetermined by someone else.

4 29 Another wonderful オモウマい店, the 4 kids helping at the resturaunt start taking B-roll footage of the food for the show

4 30 god it's been at least 11 years. everytime she's on screen I looking emoji

just saw an ad where pasta is broken in two, placed in a bag, and microwaved. migrating files.

spoke to someone in the neighborhood and their estimate of my rent was off by 700%. must think we have it real easy.

wahoo on autopilot, buying things. fabric and replacement soles and watch straps precipitating into my mailbox. successfully resisted the urge to buy a nomos for an irresponsible amount of money. apparently dyeing with beets results in yellow.

There's a svetlana alexievich manga. creatively bankrupt, considering making a sundress. the question is to make in my size or some hypothetical women's size. been watching this korean-japanese couple's vlogs for a while now, the husband works for one of the big chaebols, either LG or Samsung. chummy videos about visiting relatives and meeting friends and eating out, all fine and good. When viewing anyone else's curated gloryhole into their lives there's always aching, aspirational eyes. Symbolically they're the upper crust of Korean society, very curious as to what kind of true disparity exists between them and the rest and what that looks like visually.

the postman called my name at the door like bioniclekisser95kun~

Interviews with captured Russians and calls with their families. Other than the silent earnest types it's staggering to see the amount of passive disinterest among what are otherwise willing participants. The wives all have a resting death stare that softens into horizontal folds and wrinkles when they smile.

Tonibler was a popular name in Kosovo, my favorite factoid of this decade. In England naming your child Tony is presumably analgous to "Saddam" or "Direlwangler"

played space funeral. working on the nostalgia page. no idea what i'm doing

read Boy A.

10/1/2022 Found a Yashica T for $4. Only mildly broken. Getting back into watches, what a mistake. Completely missed Seiko's new GMTs. _ saw Miyazaki Hayao picking up trash by the park

thinking of going to kyoto before it starts snowing. trying to avoid the snow and boars and monkeys

10/10/2022 Went to Kyoto. because it's the countryside dinnertime topics included chainsaw injuries and boar cholera. Grandad apparently saw 3 co-workers die while he worked as a logger. Gran is still lucid at 93. Regularly pulling out stories told by other people from 80 years ago like they're on queue, talking about other inmates at the care facility who are less there and more uninhibited towards the care workers. Singing praises about the patience of a vietnamese nursing home worker, taking in the responses with a white listening amplifier held up to her ear like a ham radio, it's the polar opposite of what grandad was like during his last days. During my 4 days there _ was compulsively lighting incense in front of the family shrine like a chainsmoker.

Unlike previous trips of eat-sleep-farmwork it was 4 days of non-stop labor sorting through boxes from the US, going through 38 bafflingly sorted boxes on bruised knees all while trying not to catch hantavirus in the rathole-strewn room. Didn't bother organizing family photos, didn't have time. Recovered French BMJA boots, CRKT Snaplock, mom's old casio, Orient Blue ray I bought with my first paycheck, grandad's Zuiko 100/2.8, Kodalux meter, strichtarn pants, and a bunch of CATs and israeli bandages. My journals since middle school and train ticket sleeve collection across 17 years of vacations in Japan were gone, thrown away. Another mystery roll of exposed film also popped up. Excited for that at least.

10/15/2022 Sometimes I get jolted awake to ask myself why am i here? I should be wasting my time in a strip mall parking lot or dodging cars while walking on a stroad. オモウマい店 is my favorite new show. Typical lo-fi inaka propaganda food show but the cameramen get so close to the restaurant staff they eventually work at, live with, and go to vacations together with the places they cover like really personable drifters.

a coworker, one of the old guard, told me that news footage of ukraine and afghanistan reminded her of her childhood growing up in 60's Yokosuka. Gran also refuses to eat pumpkin or sweet potatoes because that's all that was available during rationing.

10/17/2022 I'm satisfied with my film cameras. The bellowing out of parliament regarding the Unification church investigation now contains direct references to Aum Shinrikyo. wild. You can see the PM perspirate through his lizard membrane disguise as he gets questioned by the libs and gommies. Kishida of course resembling the kind of soft-faced vaguely feminine uncle who has a concealed but accessible pair of heels under his bed.

10/17/2022 The news interviewed former senior Aum members and current leaders of Aleph. unreal. Finished And the Band Played On, only took me 10 months. Also read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. For work 44 is done, really satisfing to be able to distance myself from a project. Slow progress on 43, don't know what to think of their manager. Active resistance from the other members for 41. need to find my next job hoo hoo hee hee

"it was like the omega symbol. you know the omega symbol right? for not good reasons"

11/4/2022 another week. feeling good. don't know why. cut down another tree in the garden by gran's request. Took back some lumber to finally start wood carving. Also bought an emergency helmet and soldering iron, both $10 and made in Japan. Now I can larp as a zengakuren rioter.

11/7/2022 Spending less time online. rediscovering stuff I used to enjoy. Spending money on audio while my ears are young and virile.

"your voice is so low my airpods are blocking you out "

12/2/2022 I saw Miyazaki Hayao

12/10/2022 homepage thumbnails now properly display webp files, neat. bought a proxxon rotary tool. finished reading Woman in the Dunes

12/12/2022 "kawoshin is the most iconic yaoi ship since achilles and patroclus"

12/13/2022 making furniture with paper mache, waiting on punch needle so I can start making rugs, looking into making a PC/hifi console. we're back.

the twitch integration mod with rimworld is hilarious.

12/24/2022 Work is over, dinner at gran's. Grimaced through ひきこもり先生 on the TV, It's staggeringly bad in a refreshingly simple way. The story consists of a former hikkikomori turned schoolteacher who stumbles and mutters his way across complacent teachers and viciously malignant schoolchildren. As plot devices there's no shortage of saccharine misery thrown in from bullying, disabled suicidal parents, drunken sexual advances, the doldrum of minimum wage labor, things omitted on Voyager's Golden Record for fear that aliens would dismiss Earth as the bad yield of the universe.

hikki-teacher acts staggeringly unjapanese, figeting and mumbling in conversations, wholly decoupled from social cues. And through all of it the Forrest Gump autistic savant figure solves everything through his unwavering naievety. (or a session of cathartic bellowing to children like a madman) The writers desperately trying to elicit something, anything from viewers, the arched finger resting on the prostate. It pathetically wants you to swallow the unconvincing sanguine message of "wow, his unwavering positivity is so inspirational (especially since it's coming from a dysfunctional person) :)"

The cast is great, even the kids who have been handed a very arduous job of appearing eternally miserable and crying on camera at the snap of the director's tanned, dexterous fingers. It's a shame they were paired with these writers and these political pressures within the NHK that deemed this a neccessary creation. Who watches and enjoys this? Surely people who take the unyielding pauper misery as some distant unbelievable novelty in the same vein as watching Wake in Fright, just scenarios that are hopelessly abstract to Setagaya viewers who regularly defecate gold leaf.

"sorry to abe-san but it was probably for the best"

12/31 New years. There's an electricity in the air that animates everything. While Japanese pedestrians always have somewhere they HAVE to be anyone walking outside is suddenly tranquilized, aimless. The nostalgic romnanticism of family gatherings and kotatus and tangerines all render everyone catatonic. It's new years. automated temple gongs and distant fireworks illuminating the tops of horrible grey buildings like falling VOGs.

1/2 moving. less painful this time. New Can I follow you home? episode. It had a theatre sign language interpreter who started because she wanted to convey how funny a tv show without closed captioning was, recording it on VHS and retroactively interpreting it herself in front of her deaf parents. unbelievably beautiful story.

"the air purifier flashes red everytime i fart"

1/18 found a semi-broken olympus mju for $4. addicted to those terrifying videos of pakistani shop workers refurbishing asbestos brake discs by hand

1/19 2bro playing project zomboid, love the moment otoja hides his infection and abruptly turns into a zombie in front of the other 2. otsuichi finds a maid dress and cooks for 6 hours

1/23 made a button for animatsiya, a site that uploads scanned and subtitled soviet animations. alternatively there's the channel eus347. It's always something to find old orphaned images on internet archive. reverse image searching has undoubtedly gotten worse but it's still impressive to find orphaned images. It's the same feeling as seeing abandoned blogs, it's hard to imagine what would cause someone to cast off their online presence permanently.

man i need to use neocities nmore

1/24 rewrote a few pages that were perenium-tightening to read through. I'd do a lot of things differently in the readingproject reviews for example

On TV there was a nostalgiabait show covering Japan's more affluent past about bowling pin attendants and smoking in orphanges and such. If there's one emblematic crumb about Japan's current standing it would be a Regain commercial, an 80's energy drink that sounds like a minoxidil derivative. Their commercials had greased-up himbos blazing through officework with an amusing jingle. The award-winning catchphrase at the end "Can you fight for 24 hours?" conceptualized when Japan's economy was at its peak with paranoid American predictions about GDP lapping was rebern after the coup de grace of 2008. Today it's been revised to "Can you fight for 3, 4 hours?" the horrible admen settling for an ambiguous, unambitious question to a placated population who knows their place.

2 1 Watched overshare: the links.net story, the same tumblr sexyman-looking speaker from the XOXO talk. Talks about his experiences liberally documenting everything about his life in a pre-search engine internet and how that didn't work. His page on travelling to Honduras includes "there's no real civil unrest." many things change in 25 years.

2 5 pre-ordered plastiboo's artbook. the landlorde fixed the security camera screen in the elevator after 2 years, I can finally monitor my balding

Finished Funny Weather - Art in an Emergency. It's brimming with passion that I can't translate. The author's parameters of emergency seems to be strictly personal, stories of individual poverty and vice that did not stop people from making art. there's no regressive Thomas Merton figure sinking into the fringes of a troubled society.

2/10 Keep dreaming about being in elevator accidents. The one day of snow in Tokyo. furiously buying things to fill the void

2/13 bought a danbo soap dispenser for 100 yen. Saw some adorable Akage no An plates for 900, debating whether I should buy them. Bought this big wicker barrel for 300 yen as furniture and everyone on the street was looking at me as I was donkey konging it to my apartment. It's been a while since I remember seeing around-the-hour news coverage. There's a wild homepage selling camel spider eggs and coehorn blueprints for hunting feral cats

2/18 Saw a death announcement twitter post and thought it was another illustrator but it was a racing horse

2/19 she's so hot I would let her kill me

2/22 looking for new books and some of these titles are beyond unfortunate. "Way of the Urban Samurai" "Kamikaze Management: The Rising Sun and the Sinking Yank" "The Rising Sun on Main Street"

2/24 animated the overchan logo.

2/27 film came back, my favorite was the hello kitty in the window. new old family photos too, it had the light blue polyester jacket that had hard spots from too much washing. fabric prints came, more posters even though I might have to move again in april.

9/1/2022 Flooding in our apartment from a leaky pipe, a first that I've experienced something like this. Luckily nothing got damaged and I learned that 4 liters of water from a carboy is enough to shower with. Bought some linen fabric back at Tokorozawa mingling with the housewives. 700 yen/M fabric and 50 yen YKK zippers can't be beat. I bought a ring. Don't know if I'll like wearing it. Putting off buying this reproduction of an late-period Egyptian ring just in case I don't. Silver really isn't that expensive and making rings doesn't seem that hard. Something on the list.

9/23/2022 Work has been going nowhere lately, global strategy department walking in circles as always. Borrowed the instax this week. Love the results, don't like the cameras. Read アリスさんちの囲炉裏端. Has gorgeous art, the MC resembles a less sexy sonichu with his late 2000's spiky hair. Also read 付き合ってあげてもいいかな, the sort of GL where the two main characters fight over nothing and make up every chapter. Saw a non-functional AT Soundburger at book-off. $45.

9/24/2022 my condolences to the people living on the other garbage island

9/26/2022 Went to Nikko for 2 days, the standard 6th grade field trip destination in Tochigi Prefecture. Like most japanese vacations spots it's mountainous, has a big river, and is dotted with hot springs. The train ride there is streaked with green and yellow fields of rice and canola, flat like the route to narita airport. There were symbiotic colonies of elderly in mesh photographer vests laughing about their health and diseases, father and son on opposite ends of the body spectrum both chewing the same gum furiously under their masks. We hiked 6km or so, I left my sneakers at work so I wore leather shoes like a pervert. The roving gangs of red-tailed dragonflies ensured that we never met any mosquitos. Didn't encounter any leeches either, I'm rather disappointed at that. At the bus stop near a sunbleached green fujifilm bench we were accosted by an old man to look at his plants and talk local tochigi news. _ and _ called him 共産党おじさん because of the 5 communist party posters he had up. Like many elderly he's probably thoroughly bored. After staggering to our ryokan there was a 2 hour wait to check in so we played cards in the lobby with the las vegas cards from 2002. After that it was ping pong. Dinner was a buffet with free alcohol, they even had the fancy automated beer servers. After that it was the baths, again populated with the same middle-aged office laborers with imprinted belt marks around their waist like WWE champions. What is it about hot water that joins the Japanese together? A return to the womb?

9/29/2022 The news is forlorn that so few g7 leaders attended abe's funeral lol

got accosted by some jehovas at lunch. I've had more unpleasant interactions during job interviews.

3/17/2022 bought some mystery IEMs for $8. Was hoping for a Tennmak Pro replacement that doesn't sound like garbage but it doesn't quite deliver in terms of soundstage. They sound fine, bass is rolled off and there's a slight bump in the upper mids which is a very unusual tuning for something like this. satisfied with it.

A few weeks ago at Saizeriya I told / I really wasn't making the most out of my time here. I think it's an easy conclusion to make with how I melt into the furniture but I'm surprised at how easily and concisely it slid out my mouth. Inevitable life circumstances are something you just have to endure. To say otherwise is the big short to yourself, to say that your current living arrangement will never change for the better. I don't believe in that anymore. At the same time I don't have some idealistic landscape to work towards anymore. I can imagine what landing on a high 5-figure income job must be like, I can imagine a post-covid routine, but none of it seems particularly appealing. Turning 25 is as unimaginable as turning 50. I get why all the adults inherited a kind of thousand-eye stare. Repeating the same mistakes from high school. All the more reinforcement to what I wrote in prepping.html, I don't live for just myself.

life is much more benign now

3/19/2022 I got some very nice comments about the identity page a while back. I'm thoroughly grateful that someone's found some personal intersections but it's not exactly positive common ground. It's like comparing blackened buboes with a bro or seeing whose peritoneal cyst is deeper.

3/21/2022 Went to a bathhouse in Hanno. Spent the better time of 8 hours there. My favorite bath was this shallow outdoor pool that you sleep in, feeling like a discarded hubcap in the rain. The sauna was also good, there's this big tub of salt that you take and rub on yourself. now you're salty. then you sit there flanked by ossans not knowing where to look but definitely sure where not to look. Finally you emerge and desalinate yourself in the cold bath. perfect.

Gran loves blood and guts. Every evening after her walk she comes home to reruns of dubbed 80's war movies, watching a throroughly greasy stallone machinegunning men in half. After that it's Aibou with its murder mysteries. For a society that has zero tolerance on violence it's interesting how sympathetic murderers are portrayed in cheesy afternoon crime dramas. It's the reassuring nod that the world operates according to a rational algorithm, there's no twisted artisan killers or unexplainable acts of violence. Criminals are desperate or misguided. gran soaks all this in intently, sitting on the floor close to the TV because her hearing's going, occasionally busting out the loupe and 36x24" world map to look for locations mentioned.

3/26/2022 found a romance manga so overbearingly sticky it's actually quite repulsive. this is the standard human reaction to what I read.

3/28/2022 the articles and news segments about frugal living are back. it's 2008 again.

3/29/2022 bought some oatmeal from latvia. I don't know shit about latvia. Also got some mortadella and it's 10/10. Some stone-ground bread, Al ajillo, green olives and I'm set. Film came back, mostly pictures of friends. Standouts include a discarded pink wand and a man getting intimate with pigeons. The C200 was 2 years expired and you can see it. Didn't get blasted by airport scanners though. Played games with my canadian buds, it's been a while. Still looking for that one game we can all get hooked on.

4/2/2022 Made pants while watching Welcome to the Basement. Wore the pants. Black is a good benign color. At the grocery store 3 policemen were huddled around the produce section measuring the shelves. great use of my taxes making sure the cubby for the spanish garlic is up to spec. Occasionally you see the police in arcades playing claw crane machines suspected of rigging, a testament to their boredom as glorified traffic attendants.

I figured it out. With covid I feel exactly the way I did in the US. The same kind of anhedonia and overall disinterest knowing that there's nothing for me out there, to resign the next 2 or 3 years to a forecast of inaction, anxiety about squandered time and a post-now period. It's all the same.

4/8/2022 sewing another anorak. shit my own hips out when I saw an ossan holding a plain prism Nikon F with a 55mm 1.2 at the book-off junk corner until I realized he brought it in to look for a suitable tripod. I like to think my room is haunted and some horrified spirit is watching me do unspeakable things like eat food off the floor like the Teletubbies vacuum

4/12/2022 5am and already there's housewives on their twin-seater bicycles strolling around outside. they are the delta force of moms

4/13/2022 new job. draping myself in muji and casio, a new uniform. also bought new glasses to soften my resting death beam. someone described muji employees as undeniably stylish but profoundly unsexed, sort of chaste linen cultists. Bought the Tamron 90mm 2.5 for $30 and I was dreading the long focus throw but my fears were unfounded. Turns out the range is just extended for macros, the lens is perfectly usable for normal situations in terms of speed.

4/18/2022 * came by. bought expired instax film for $1. Saw a buzz rickson's USN pullover at a shop. It's a jacket I've been fantasizing over since I was in the US. Buzz Rickson's being one of those extremist Japanese repro manufacturers replicating poor stitching because it's authentic. It was $110 but I didn't buy it, I'm not a fan of how denim ages anymore. I still want the off-white variant. I also got to look at how it was sewn together up close.

5/1/2022 So this is it, huh? The job is fine. I'm not going to buy a house this milennia but I'm not grinding myself into dust. Still can't believe it's April and still can't believe these are the life conditions I've landed on. It's a sensation that's hard to articulate because I don't want to elaborate on those feelings. To accept that I've plateaued somehow seems more miserable than being in that state. I've been stress eating, I'm a slightly more dense skeleton.

5/4/2022 Japan dropped 4 places in the Reporters Sans Frontières press freedom ranking to 71st, placing it above Liberia but below Bosnia and Kenya.

5/11/2022 Aibo had a character who was a former Transnistrian War insurgent. Tokyo MX is so profoundly lo-fi it's impressive. Little movie promo commercials with the actress in front of a poster under horrible office lighting with audio straight from the camera

5/14/2022 Working, not paying attention to anything else. The job is going good. The commute is brutal but the labor is painless, I even get to leave early. It is ass-breaking, the chairs we have are torture devices. Everyone else is a 30-something and nice enough, there's no hormonal ossans in their 50's exploding with petty rage. I was worried that impulsive thoughts on how I could get fired/be excommunicated/get arrested the quickest to stave off boredom would become a problem but that's not the case. That said I know it's not a long-term position and even geographically it's ages away so I've been on alert for what's next. The search for what's next has been predictably fruitless.

Work has replaced all and I'm making some money but it doesn't feel like I'm making progress. Still feels like I'm being left behind, a sensation that I've always tried to worm away from through my late teens. At least my job is benefitting somebody. lots of things on the backburner. I need to make the trip to that twink in Osaka. Need to get back in touch with the Korean guy. The sewing machine is collecting dust. intimacy is scary.

5/20/2022 500,000. that's a number. Still unsure what it means. Thanks to all who have stopped by, I'll add to it when something interesting happens. Been reading a lot. Finished 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Post-Colonial Melancholia, Strangers in Their Own Land, Tunnels of Củ Chi, Across The Fence: The Secret War In Vietnam. Dutch army boots came in. Dreamed that monetochka died

A mystery roll of film popped out in the US, dated 2003. Oddly it's from a Japanese disposable camera so it must be family vacation photos. excited to get it back.

5/24/2022 Some free time next week. The 15-year old film turned out to be photos of the trip to Kyoto with my dad, the top and bottom of frames fogged after being blasted with luggage scanners. included pictures of grandpa pre-10ft soil deposition and some kids I used to play with. I was near-luminescent sitting next to them.

brbrbr

5/29/2022 not feeling good. Reading Okaeri Arisu, a triumphant story that explores the ontological dilemma "would you fuck your bro if he became a woman?" The plot is quite boring but the author's notes are fascinating. explains the ambrosial depictions of sexuality that are inevitably intertwined with the sort of guilt and shame that trails Chi no Wadachi. The end of chapter vignettes follows his adolescent sexual awakening precipitating into this neurotic sense of disgust in regards to his own body-image. The mini comics at the end of each volume just turns into a staggering essay about suppressing the woman inside himself, how feminist criticism about toxic masculinity seemed to viciously attack this facade he has built up.

6/1/2022 god it's june already. dreamed that I got stabbed. every morning i clock in and I offer my wind-blasted skeleton to the thermal camera for review, the tripod it's on is at an accomodating nipple-height so I bend down by the knees, the screen nods that i'm near-catatonic. Finally met with the client. They're a nice bunch. Reiterated multiple times how english doesn't let them properly express their gratitude. I get that sort of disparity. Nothing more infantilizing than learning a new language. Been reading A savage War of Peace, the classic on the Algerian War. There's an onslaught of French phrases thrown in and left untranslated, perhaps out of snooty frenchness or profound understanding of the type of deviant who reads books like these. There's a fascinating bit where Raymond Aron outlines the importance of the Algerian war in a comparative sense with the army's ongoing humiliation from Dien Bien Phu to now Algeria. He warns of a fate in France that has already befallen Spain and Portugal (both explicitly fascist colonial empires)

6/2/2022 TV at gran's. The guy who was accidentally wired $400k in covid aid and subsequently gambled it all away looks exactly as you'd expect. The money came from a tiny Japanese town of 3100. Salameshi was covering workers at Hario. These kiwi commercials are like 2 minutes long, NZ is thoroughly lubricating horrible Dentsu PR men. Grandma was laughing hysterically about a movie where the villans indiscriminately kill people by hacking into pacemakers (she has a pacemaker) "3 people die, one after the other" while chuckling to herself, bloodlust satiated by the TV.

6/5/2022 For all my discontents about life I'm glad that I don't have the messy interpersonal relationship drama that seems to envelop /. None seem particularly serious either, just trifling back-and-forths with co-workers. Fear of alienating someone is as undesirable as inaction it seems like. What a benefit to living near-hermetically.

6/9/2022 My co-worker didn't know what Yu-gi-oh was, I guess speculative card games for children are just for fossils like me. My manager lost paperwork hoo hee ho ho More quirky how-to-save-money variety shows. we're in a recession. A Panasonic electric razor commercial had a drag queen among the salarymen and construction workers shaving in front of the camera. The news had a dedicated zookeeper obsessed with kangaroos who would fight the animals and purposefully lose to stimulate their kangaroo libidos. Anmika was on a variety show talking about how she was so poor canned drinks were a luxury for her family. She's of zainichi korean descent like a surprising number of other Japanese celebrities.

6/11/2022 Bought NOS Zwiling cloth shears for $8, the pricetag was in Deutsche Marks. Finished Newjack by Ted Conover, the same man I realized I saw in a The Moth video about three-thirds into the book.

6/14/2022 Took off a few days and went to Hakone. / said they needed the break as well. 53 minutes by train to Odawara and the rest of the way by bus. Through the 70's there was a general condemnation of the country's modernization with unsightly dam projects all over. Like many parts of Japan (Tokyo included) Hakone remains very untouched, the town located in a valley surrounded by high forests billowing smoke from the natural hot springs. First off to the sulfur fields. Forecast said it would rain both days but we were lucky for a few hours. Went on a short tour guided by two old-timers weaving around the aramid-concrete shelters that dot the hills every 50 meters. Our lead draped in worn polyester vests and HAM radios had a habit of going off into tangents about golf and wrestling instead of talking about the mountain. Heard sporatic artillery fire from the nearby JGSDF base. Then it's off to the ryokan and wander around the shops. Other than your typical regional specialties like fish cake and patterned wooden coasters there were several Chiikawa and Yuru Camp collaboration goods. Found Evangelion bottled water which is just so baffling I bought it. There was also an Eva bus in the same color as the purple mcdonalds monster. Off to a coffee shop decorated with some very specific decor, had apple pie and a cheesecake. / and I both agreed that the kind of specialist fixation we saw there were goals. We're not quite rich enough to stomach large purchases that will get hauled around during moves. Back to the ryokan, hot springs, and dinner provided. Second day we hauled our corpses to breakfast, checked out, bought gifts and stopped at another hot spring before going home. The main baths were outside and I alternated between boiling myself and getting pelted by rain. Perfect.

6/17/2022 So there's 3 projects underway, 44 is going along really fast and it's satisfing to work on. 41 and 43 are still hobbling about despite the extra hours I've transitioned into them this month. Had to reprimand some unruly coworkers. Don't like it but it's part of my job. They're old enough, they should know better. Don't know what to think of my manager, he keeps making paperwork errors (which is completely fine) but he carries this unreadable blank expression at all times. Outright contempt is much easier to parition.

Staying at Gran's continues to be strange. There's such a jarring shift in priorities while I'm there that it's

6/18/2022 working full-time has made my half-assed vegetarianism exceedingly hard. worth doing regardless. Reading Japan since 1980, tracking the economy from the 70's to conveniently, 2007. Its praise for neoliberal beethoven doppelganger Koizumi is retrospectively hilarious. fukuyama moment. there was a hellish magazine circulating on jp twitter titled "how YOU can live LUXURIOUSLY on $20,000 a year"

Reading 隣のお姉ちゃんが好き　and it's good? The dialogue has a rhythm to it and the pacing is refreshing boring for a romance? New はなにあらし , it makes me complete. it's the sort of story you grimace through in order to not betray this eveloping stone-faced personality you've adopted since your teens as a narrow definition of adulting. Watching a Japanese variety show from 15 years that made one of the hosts (victims) buy a luxury item. In 2007 two-tone Rolex Daytonas were apparently 180,000 yen, which would be $1300USD now.

7/4/2022 doing a good job keeping co-workers at a distance. I keep reminding myself they're just strangers that I meet every week. the difficulty sleeping continues.

7/7/2022 Another bit of glittery propo on the box. Keita Machida playing a downtrodden construction worker shat on by classmates at reunions, pathetically dodging debt collectors at his crumbling hovel, they might as well have a flash mob queue to successively rub excrement on his face. it's pretty much the worst-case evolutionary path for a single japanese male despite Machida resembling a glistening long-haired libido machine. After a street fight with some steretypical dyed-hair leather-jacketed baddies he gets arrested and fired from his job. After that he joins the JGSDF to learn the virtues or hard work. I guess the moral of the story is that violence is bad, unless you're paid to do it by the state.

New drama series based off Itaewon Class. I know desperate TV men are forced to compress pilots until actors don't have time to breath between lines but it's staggeringly retro, the TV equivalent of those Cal Worthington car commercials. There's a scene where the dad, dying after a car accident reaches for a picture of his family. The plot is so morally unambiguous there might as well be an approval rating overlay constantly bobbing up and down. It's also staggeringly Korean with montages and slow-motion. I do like the casting choices despite all the high schoolers looking like they're in their mid-thirties, they seemed to have chosen deliberately strange looking cast members like Teruyuki Kagawa. The dad (Ken Mitsuishi especially looks like every korean irvine transplant I've ever met.

7/8/2022 I'll drink to that

7/9/2022 Finished My Dark Places by James Ellroy, Dispatches by Michael Herr. Dana Stone makes an appearance. or maybe he didn't. I like my co-worker even though he looks like a man who has perfected his cunnilingus embrachure

7/22/2022 went back in time 15 years to rewatch はねるのトびら , a show that has a segment where people attempt to pick through items at a fictional dollar store and whatever they choose they have to pay. Half are 100 yen and the other half are luxury items.

7/29/2022 ceramic firing is really interesting, using things like horsehair and corn husks to burn patterns onto the surface of pottery. Watched an NHK documentary about one of those masochistic buddhist temples. The old temple webpage included journal entries from the German trainee titled "2004 Shitpaper" before he was presumably reined in by the head priest. The documentary is odd. Similar to most other glossily produced coverage it highlights the fleeting passage of the seasons, the ritual drudgery, dhukka emanating from the participants, it's all something I've seen before. What I noticed is that the documentary takes a very nihilistic view. The aimless trainees who come from all over the world are still left with open questions about the answers to life that neither the head priest provides nor do they stumble upon during 14-hour prayer sessions. The little excerpts from Nichiren do nothing to allay their fears about squandered time or purpose. My question is does this shit work? Decouple yourself from your material reality, starve yourself a bit, forget about bills and children and careers to pray for 5 years to become a priest. The suicide prevention priest from "The Departure" spoke about his enthusiasm for working minimum wage after enduring the austere (unpaid) rigors of life as a buddhist trainee. Is that what the trainees at Antaiji are seeking when they talk about their existential anxieties? Accepting the four noble truths is one thing, inescapable material poverty is another.

Went back in time again watching old Japanese commercials. Gran would record Ultraman and Hamutaro onto VHS tapes and post them to the US. What struck me were how cheap-looking the toys they used to peddle. Lots of printed and folded paper, plastic injection molding should've been all over the toys space by 1997. I miss warm lighting and soft filters.

A compilation of pulled Japanese ads. except that time nissin used the portrayal of child soldiers in an instant noodle ad most of the complaints are rather sensible. People at dinnertime don't want to see 3D depictions of cockroaches in an insect repellent ad. Sometimes the Siren (PS2 ad is just too scary. The most noticable pattern is how allergic Japanese consumers are to any sort of portrayal of alienation or discrimination. the expectant silence during office meetings or "oh... you're on a different cell carrier" among a group of friends hits home to people

8/?/2022 TV show about the showa era. From burning trash on school campus to casual corporal punishment it outlined the brutishness and unrefinement of people living through the 60's and 70's. The biggest shock was probably housewives casually dropping occupied mousetraps into a bucket of water for liquidation.

8/3/2022 30,000 daily cases in Tokyo, globally Japan was #1 for the first time. came across one of those twitter feeds that reminds you of your aching stupidity, just totally inferior. When I was a teenager I was deathly afraid of become a boring adult, the kind wholly satiated by grilling and doing sudoku on the weekends. The kind whose stylistic kodawari fell away long ago to pragmatic convenience and apathy, the kind who can only feel pleasure through amazon packages and ejaculation. I became one of those working NPC's recently commuting among the black masses. But I'm trying, I'm desperately clawing back the effort to care about what to wear again, the desire to pursue drawing and pottery and gardening and sculpting and stonecarving. I want to care, to invest myself in something beyond my material existence or homeostasis in my bank account. I don't want to continue worrying about squandered youth or careers or experiences. I wish I could pause time so I could accrue these skills, to become skilled and interesting and gratified and fuckable. I want to feel at peace with myself.

8/20/2022 SA came down to visit, two skeletons blowing in the rain and wind. Met up at Musashikosugi, closer to me than him but still took 40 minutes. Walked around a bit before settling down for some yakiniku. Instead of typical babby portions the resturaunt really piled it on. Locally known as "why do you know this? man" I jazzed him with my intimate knowledge of plane crash incidents and internet shock videos. Very effective, he was definitely imagining a future with me. Same as always. After that we oogled at the bougie stuff people here buy at Grand Tree, a 5-story shopping mall.

I enjoyed it. The conversations that always start with "I wonder...," carelessly trading thoughts between two egoless people. Constantly amazed by how long-term he thinks, a bit different to the wandering neuroticism that haunts me. Thoughtful, introspective, curious, like 9 feet tall, his girlfriend is lucky.

8/21/2022 fabric prints came back. I got access to DALLE 2 so some were images from there, morally the least questionable source I've ever used. linen this time. after disassembly I hung up some posters and made camera straps.

8/?/2022 uhhhhhhh made stuff, found stuff

hispanic? wooden carving carsoro from hylics, clay camera strap, print from Bruno Munari's Art as Design

1/5/2022 The Gotō family segments on かりそめ天国 are just the best. Conventional Japanese variety shows parade a few corpses, mostly comedians, to a restaurant to extract their exaggerated reactions. That's it, that's TV. In contrast the Gotōs all have this solemn thousand-eyed stare like they've experienced Dien Bien Phu together. One of them said their A5 steak was like cotton candy. Another said the highlight of their tailored day-long vacation to Chiba was a bookstore. As media iconoclasts they're so profoundly unsuitable for Japanese TV you can see the souls leaving the hosts' bodies once they hear their throroughly strange reception to eating expensive food or staying at expensive resorts.

1/6/2022 Reading And the Band Played On, the famous 1987 book about the AIDS epidemic. For a large child like me a pre-AIDS world is perfectly unimaginable, CDC investigators drawing blood without gloves or unscreened blood transfusions actually happened in a more complacent time. Like mouth pipetting it all sounds like a pathologist's distant nightmare. The arguments levelled toward public health measures is resoundingly familiar today. Retrospectively sexual liberation and the bathhouse proponents sound quite out there, I didn't expect just how radical their positions had been. You also get a taste of gay sectarianism when places like the Castro district were at its peak alongside the workplace politics between the CDC and CDI that inhibited joint HIV/AIDS research.

Still haven't finished The Aesthetics of Degredation, Dilemma in Japan, or Post-colonial Melancholia.

1/8/2022 Went off to Kanazawa-Hakkei to buy film off a housewife. Strange little place, arteries of cars and footpaths slicing apart the surrounding station. I wish we had a central market like theirs. The windowless department store had unsually slow escalators and the maternal intercom telling kids to behave, the sort of tonal presentation that sends an inappropriate jolt down your back. A decent amount of people including pensioners who glide stiffly across the floor like reanimated sex dolls. Met up with the mom, 11 rolls of Superia 400 expired in 2011 for $12. Came with the original 20-roll box it came in, price she paid back in 2009 was $60. She called me an イケメン which I'll remember until I draw my last breath

1/16/2022 Finished Wages of Guilt by Ian Buruma, lessons on the post-war reformations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Post-war memories are a funny thing isn't it. I wrote a reading project review on the Portuguese colonial war last year and the conclusions are completely different from this book. Whoops nazi administrators didn't get weeded out by the West Germans and whoops American occupation preserved the Japanese elite that led to the war. Shatters any comforting fictions that the Germans had adequately confronted their past and the Japanese are actively avoiding it. Very striking interviews from former 1968 student radicals to Japanese veteran confessionals, anti-Vietnam war activists to East German schoolteachers.

The opinions of reactionaries yearing for a past that never existed are always predictably paper-thin but the majority of the book isn't about ogling the ghouls. Instead it's the stories and conclusions of middling political pragmatism. Prime ministers formerly on the Class-A war criminals designation, bureacrats wishing not to the rock the boat, figures in power wholly uninterested in the theatre of justice and accountability. Bouncing from academic and political discourse to public consensus Buruma manages to worm his way through amorphous anxieties and rationalizations without latching onto classic essentialist cultural explanations of genocide and war crimes.

just saw some snufkin BL

1/18/2022 an absolute flurry of inspiration, this time in regards to furniture and interiors. I look at pictures of mushrooms and I see tables, houseplants I see lamps, speakers I see tables. hylics furniture here I come

1/24/2022 found a japanese dad's blog. not brave enough to fill up my apartment with scrap lumber. Need to buy at least a jigsaw first. When I was a kid I used to hold one between my legs as an improvised scrollsaw. Loss of limb is very exciting. Started making an Akabeko, must be 15 years since I've last touched paper mache. I love spending money, steadily skipping towards destitution.

1/27/2022 Playing animal crossing again. A touch of Veep. Randal Park as a "I served in the military" sound device is such good casting. Reading Mao's Great Famine, Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile. Think my last year's resolution was to sew enough clothes to never have "off-days." I've found that while I've become able to do that during the summer it's impossible in 2C weather. The vulgar pragmatism of puffer jackets isn't terribly interesting. Conversation with _ on how to age gracefully while we were at sushiro. By the time I turn 50 it's time to wear suits and kimonos every day.

I am slowly digging myself out of this creative block. Thinking of workspaces, outfits, idealistic landscapes to work towards.

2/3/2022 started wearing N95's. finished The Aesthetics of Degredation. not what I was expecting. The government is moving to take down sites that upload manga spoilers on behalf of publishing companies. they really have nothing better to do. Meanwhile reuters makes the same mistake that your gullible uncle on facebook does.

2/4/2022 bought the miku prize figure. no regrets. still messing about with paper mache. haven't stalked through neocities profiles lately, I need to catch up. bought vieira milenium cookies, I love escabeche but this is the first portuguese object that I've put in my mouth. like a very greasy oreo.

life has been more literal these past 3 years. introspection is pointless when you have tangible worries to focus on. still trying to enjoy things. haven't been drinking.

2/9/2022 Vegetable prices are going up. The interior photos on myfigurecollection are really something. This is a good one. This too. My SA friend is trying to go from a dead Macbook Pro to an M1 Mini, the hoops he's enduring in order to migrate his data off a proprietary 12+16 connector is staggering. bought pottery-finish clay and glue for paper mache at daiso. found another japanese blog looking up stuff to make. In terms of sewing I'm almost finished with a linen jacket but I'd like to tackle a winter garment before spring. Think I'll have to hold off on a wool kimono. you also have to be a very particular person to wear double-breasted jackets. More anoraks is probably the surefire choice. I need to buy interesting fabric.

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"the woman at the post office is so short I could effortlessly breastfeed her"

2/14/2022 Read In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi, a story about reconnecting with her estranged father who came out as trans at the age of 76. You sort of expect familial narratives like this to be embarrassing to read, specially on subject matter this provocative. The usually bay area or Massachusetts upper-class non-practicing jewish author shares a bit too much, self-deprecates their liberal naievety a bit too much, exhausted platitudes about life wrap up chapters a bit too conveniently. Adam Gopnik comes to mind, unironically scaralizing the tenents of milquetoast American liberalism in a 2019 book as an argument directed towards his unconvinced daughter. Or Joyce Maynard's cripplingly exhibitionistic memoirs of her affair with J.D. Salinger, chapters dripping with self-absorption adorned with too many confessions. Faludi reflects on the divorce culminating in a stabbing and restraining order, her father's identity living through the war and nodding along to Serbian-style invented nationalist traditions. Recollections of her father traces a mutualistic respect and disdain. In renouncing the present "I" from her writing Faludi is able to convincingly look at her father's previously undescipherable rationalizations of estrangement.

Faludi's family is of Jewish Hungarian background. What do I know about Hungary? Nothing. I've never even met a Hungarian. Imagine all the redditors out there that can tell you more about Mordor than Budapest. She explores what it means to be trans (Blanchard passingly mentioned like some sort of academic voldemort), what it means to be jewish in Hungary (not good), and what it means to exist in a post-USSR Hungary.

2/16/2022 It's really something to see someone so well-dressed and well-groomed you feel totally outclassed with the exception of your squandered priviledge. going to make a bucket hat like ayu-mi-x. I've made a hat before but it was a bit odd, too odd. Turns out you don't need much fabric and it's a great way to reuse scraps. Found an Akabeko and primed 8x8 canvases for $3 each. Was planning on spraypainting to match my room but I think he's quite cute. Some damage but nothing unfixable.

made the hat. there's something about tau proteins coursing through the folds that renders you productive

2/21/2022 Making a third hat. Bought a linen skirt to dismember into fabric. Had mutton curry, a first in Japan I think. Indian food in Japan is overwhelmingly made by Nepali or Bangladeshi immigrants with the anxiety that their home cuisine isn't as marketable. I grew up hearing the same stories among relatives who worked in US kitchens in the 80's, scornfully making Chinese food because sushi hadn't landed yet. It was good. I want a tandoor in my house.

2/24/2022 well, fuck.

2/26/2022 Came back from Chichibu in Saitama. Took a bus deep in the mountains. Lots of twists and turns, once even driving on top of a dam. A bit of snow on the ground. Went up the mountain, took a few pictures around the temple and came back to the station. Ate yakiniku at the food court first and then off to the onsen next door, lots of 50-something hikers draped in VX21 and wool. The sauna and rotenburo was 10/10, alternating between 40 degree water and the cold outdoor breeze. There were also these giant earthenware pot baths stuffed with 3 or 4 sweaty men each.

made a second hat with the linen skirt. I quite like it. A difficult balance treading into bonnet or daisy mae territory.

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VDV in Bucha were shooting at a static BDRM monument, 10/10.

3/1/2022 Read An Inventory of Losses, a book close to A Compendium of Obselete Objects in spirit. Translated from its original German, Schalansky's prose kicks along rhythmically. Covering subjects from extinct wildlife and Sappho's lost poetry, I expected the sentimental tone of a distant witness, someone observing inevitable destruction. Instead she sets the stage with hypothetical could-have's presented in a straight-faced chronological narrative. She speculates about what the Mangaia natives must have felt during their contact with James Cook. The second chapter narrates the internal monologue of two captured caspian tigers during the Roman empire in a segment of conjecture that makes my romatic daydreams seem unembarrassing.

I don't think this is an inherited tone borne from translation and the author's excellent prose is unwavering throughout, but I feel as if those ultimately subtract from An Inventory of Losses. To me the stories of neglect, appropriation, erasure, and destruction should not need ornamentation to be vivid. Bad history is always born not through malice but congenital falsehoods or narratively convenient half-truths, and this book sits on the murky demarcation between fiction and non-fiction, objective fact and aspirational fantasy.

r*ddit is suddenly pro-nuclear proliferation lol

3/3/2022 Ordered some printed fabric. Started reading Behind the Urals an American enigneer's memoirs of working at a Soviet blast furnance in Magnitogorsk. His experiences are filtered through his unvarnished interactions with the other workers, recollections bordering on ethnography. Bringing in foreign advisors and equipment, the plant was modelled after American industrial cities like Gary, Indiana. Today Gary police recommend drivers not to stop at red lights because you'll get carjacked. He's quick to outline the post-revolution successes in literacy and education but that doesn't blind him to the mismanagement and shortages that normal people had to vigilantly navigate.

As a reaction to sanctions Anna News published some racial caricatures and wrote "Where is your ninja and samurai spirit japan?" in a move so puerile it's actually quite cute.

3/4/2022 Someone on twitter scanned A Short History of the Anarchist Movement In Japan, very grateful. Had some alright luck at bookoff today. First a basic muji jacket that was on sale down to $3. Wanted an apron so I'll wear it as a work jacket, maybe cover it in embroidered patches. Also found a japanese version of the The Eco-Design Handbook for $2. Filled with pictures from furniture to clothing to cars, right up my alley. Finally I found a for-parts Minolta 35II for $5. It's an M39 rangefinder made by Chiyoda Kogaku back when Minolta was still a brand name. Fairly basic Barnack Leica derivative with a narrow combined rangefinder, my copy had a bricked shutter. What's special is that it came with the lens, a moldy Rokkor 5cm f/2. Looking forward to cleaning it up and shooting my Canon P with it. What a far cry from the sticky Nikon N8008's and EOS 1000QD's that I always grimace through.

bbbb yuno approximation

3/6/2022 Actually looking for music, going through my shazam screenshots. Between 1994 and 2014 the median income in Japan has dropped by $10k for 35-44 year olds and $18k for 45-54 year olds. Imagine that, people have less to spend today than after a country-defining recession.

3/8/2022 i hate my life but i love this music

3/11/2022 played Golden Light, a first-person roguelike bodyhorror comedy. I actually miss souplantation, I miss their chowder that was like drinking wallpaper paste.

3/15/2022 I remember a swedish tourist looked at me and laughed in kyoto because I was holding the curved handle of my umbrella with my mouth

got the fabric prints in, they look fantastic. Using them as posters/tapestries for now, will sew with them later. no photos because I'll get kaczynski'd for using art without permission. I still need to browse neocities, haven't followed anyone in a while. Still averse to being seen, being noticed.

(∩｀-´)⊃━☆ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ back to top ⤴

11/12/2021 Bought the photobook on Nakagin Capsule Tower. There are 445,000 books published by Palgrave Mcmillan on libgen. My goal for next year is to go through them all. "Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures" and "Fetishism and the Theory of Value" are first.

異世界美少女受肉おじさんと・天地創造デザイン部・ おとなりに銀河・ひらやすみ ・・・

11/8/2021 another nice guestbook comment (ノ´∀｀)ノ

11/9/2021 あさりよしとお released something new, wasn't expecting that. I remember reading his science comics in middle school. just learned about swedish banana pizza, ruined my day

11/13/2021 a nice guestbook comment ´･ᴗ･`

11/17/2021 Got some Lomo 400 for $5 each. Marathonning Parts Unknown. Tangier, Jamaica, and Congo are my favorite episodes so far. BF2042 looks like a f2p game. There's a theory that it's just a half-aborted BR which would explain a lot. Love ji-soo's character model though, she looks like someone you'd see sleeping in a UCI library

Feeling all kinds of bankrupt. Typing it out feels cathartic. Translating volatile urges and feelings into form.

11/19/2021 bought some rum and brandy off yodobashi. The government is destroying the Japanese Post through privatization but it was still delivered in a day. The rum tastes like a tire. There's a South African version of the documentary series 7 Up, the show that interviews a set of people every 7 years from childhood. Interesting view on the transition through Apartheid. In the original British version I was surprised at how conscious the intervewees were regarding their class, even at very young ages. Except for the Zulu girl everyone starts off a polyglot.

Apparently my uncle wants to go out drinking with me, his workplace is filled with the kind of weirdos that just love what they do to a perverse degree. He's undoubtedly older through all the years I've known him but he doesn't exhude the sort of elderly surrender from other 60-somethings. It doesn't happen if you have money. Don't really know what to think of my uncle. I think my qualifiers of what it means to be an agreeable person in japan is a bit muddled.

11/20/2021 / came by. We had sushi and they were doing a crab fair. I like crab. None of us really eat tuna. Back in the Edo era tuna was regarded as catfood, now it's front and center in sushi. Ordered fries at the end like gran always does. Slimmed down the homepage, added pages on stuff I collect and books.

11/23/2021 god neocities is so good. I forget how good we have it. windows update wiped out my interview notes HA↑ HA↑

read ひらやすみ, a really delightful slice of life about manipulating the elderly for their property. It's rare to have sympathetic old characters or old characters at all, the gran in this one is a sort of replacement mother for the aimless main character. The 30-something has a very unique characterization and you can tell that no one is really in the periphery, side characters continually morph and change outside of the reader's perspective. As a story about surrogate motherhood the parental relationship is preserved within the institution of the Japanese houshold, carried over through death, inheritance, and obligation. in this twitter thread I will attempt to

there's a 10th anniversary madoka event scheduled and there's no mami

drawing is utter alchemy to me, my pattern-recognizing monkeybrain can see when something looks off but doesn't know how to translate those thoughts into effective change. photography is the laziest shit in comparison, you just steal perspectives from views that already exist. that doesn't take 5+ years or consecutive practice to produce something agreeable.

11/24/2021 off to gran's. New Tokyo cases are down to 5 (five). There was an Alpa at book-off, they're catching onto the film photography boom now. On the walk home there was a green plastic cutting board by the sidewalk. It was clearly used but not trash.

As my problems become less and less tangible compared to just a few years ago I seem to have decided they're not worth introspection or any sort of serious scrutiny, the stakes are higher but they're a measurable reality instead of some overbearing anxiety. Some of the worries I carried as a kid of come true, I've ended up in unpredictable places, but there's no sense of continuity. I can't sympathize with my thought process when I was 16 anymore. My current situation is untenable and I feel like I've let all the chances pass by my fingers for the past year. now this is adulting.

11/25/2021 It went fine. 70%. Walked to Tokorozawa, bought some YKK zippers, gay shit at Animate, Shooting with the Canon P and Industar-50 so it wasn't a rock around my neck. Still have no idea where those photos of the anime manholes went. Saw a bottle of calvados at the department store but I stopped myself. $30. I shot an entire roll of Superia in two days, never done that before. It was good, it was fine, I still have a place that I can nostalgically revisit without shame. The department store we always went to hasn't quite made its recovery but the area around the station hasn't been gentrified into an unrecognizable horror. If anything it's evolved into quite a nice place.

I walked past this neighborhood whose needlessly wide roads and column layout reminded me of the planned-city sterility of Irvine. While I don't doubt it would be a great place to grow up I felt uncomfortable.

Late at night while cooking with / I was making calamari and I felt this second spine inside the squid. Out comes a juvenile mackerel.

9/15/2021 Got my second shot. Thinking back The Sorrows of Young Werther was probably the worst book i've read. Smoke gets in your Eyes & other Lessons from the Crematory was a decent book, even with the first few chapters. The lengthy plots of self-referencial adolescent retrospection seemed a tad heavy-handed. More lessons on natural burials and water cremation would've been good but I assume that's in the realm of her later books. Forgetting what the other mortician book I read was.

I've been playing Cruelty Squad and it's the perfect pessimist's depiction of a 21st century dystopia. It's a hellish mental landscape of a hyper-violent hyper-capitalist future where you're employed to liquidate corporate enemies. One of the levels has you in a gunbattle with the police after your landlord evicts you from your vermin-infested hovel. The ultimate goal after you trade stocks and human organs is to buy a Mcmansion.

On a technical level it's a fun game as well, the maps are engaging and full of secrets in the same way Dusk is, the reloading gimmick actually feels like a worthwhile addition, every weapon has deliberate character on a level that your typical developer would just gloss over. George was right, easily my favorite game of 2021.

I find it absoutely fascinating that the D&S podcast's reaction to the Chinese gaming restrictions wasn't just blind disapproval. Modern internet g*ming culture, microtransactions bordering on gambling, while the disbelief that many Americans still support this kind of 90's inertia is there there's a tinge of understanding with the current state of the industry. A bunch of metal gear solid fanatics nodding along is...different.

Started reading How to do Nothing. Crash by Ballard is up next.

9/20/2021 Went out to the park to take pictures of cats. What a luxury, ambushing the neighboorhood cats. Back in California you can only mingle with coyotes. The Industar-22 with the focus tab feels good in the hands. Excited to compare the medley of Russian lenses I've been accumulating.

Been wanting to make a page about stuff I collect like stamps and subway ticket sleeves.

9/22/2021 "my heartbeat probably sounds like a blender with all the salt I eat"

"this apartment is a low-oxygen environment"

9/23/2021 XOXO talks are great but there's too many "I got roasted on twitter" talks. Found 5 rolls of expired Super 400 for 300 yen at Book-off. Expired for 17 years, low expectations but I've had relatively good luck so far. Also bought a camera, A Fuji Cardia 28 WP.

9/28/2021 Started watching The Office again. I don't think I gave it the proper respect when it was on, it was always secondary to Community. I know today there's a miasma of shame around liking the show but it's good. Being a furry is fine.

9/29/2021 Read Imperial Nostalgia by Peter Mitchell. I've seen some embarrassing statistics on how the English view their imperial history so this should fill some holes. Interesting to see how looking to an idealized past actively informed the start of colonialism. of A similar book called Post-colonial Melancholia is also on my list, one of the chapters is titled "The Negative Dialectics of Conviviaity" which sounds as entertaining as Hegels explaining how roofing tiles are made.

I feel good. Not much progress but feeling productive isn't such a cloud of fatalism. Almost finished Cruelty Squad.

This actual picture of actual stasi agents is fucking me up

10/1/2021 good god it's october

10/3/2021 If I was a videogame boss you'd attack my knees to do double damage

怒り新党 just compared the broken windows theory with getting complacent while living alone

I think preppers.html is the only page where I'm absolutely pissed and fascinated by what recent events have made me realize. I quite like the line "Welcoming a nuclear holocaust is antecedent to becoming a homeowner for the first time"

雨と君と・ギャルと恐竜・たぬきときつねと里暮らし・可愛いだけじゃない式守さん・魔女怪盗LIPS・ウタカタノミナト・君は放課後インソムニア

8/3/2021 Played Gartic Phone with the buds, a poorly named drawing game. it's been at least 3 years. It was great, been a while since I've laughed into lightheadedness.

8/8/2021 There's a youtube channel that uploads thoroughly obscure visual kei from the late 90's, the sort of band names that don't bring up any search results. Peering into these bubbles is fascinating, otherwise lost stories of debuts and tours and disbandments. I think it's the contrast between the enigmatic personas and ridiculous costumes juxtaposed with throroughly lo-fi album covers and abandoned band member blogs talking about drinking Contrex or eating cornflakes.

apparently "going to the store to buy bionicles" is a very common dream

8/18/2021 I don't feel very lucid these days. I am for sure on autopilot, reading journal entries from 2 months ago feels like sitting through a foreign language film.

・

I feel like Tokyo Marui is filled with MGC-era modelgun loving ossans, their products are very conservative and very 80's. A recoiling AKM or MP5 AEG would've been relevant 10 years ago. Collecting pictures of Bedouin women in traditional dress, it's remarkable how simple yet functional some clothing is. One picture that caught my eye has this sort of cloak that's pinned in two places with brooches at the shoulders and that's it. Just a rectangular cut of cloth folded and pinned around the body.

Hospitals in Tokyo getting overwhelmed now.

8/28/2021

Got my first shot. Some inflammation but no other side effects. Most of the serious covid cases have shifted to younger people now. Most under 25 are still having trouble finding an appointment.

I feel like I'm in a bubble. In a new bubble anyway, it's a very familiar feeling only this time it's beyond my control. Vegetable shops advertising Aichi strawberries and Taiwanese pineapples with a distinct Bangladeshi twinge, the window views that make the city look like toysets, the same metronomic sights have replaced previous memories of popcorn ceilings and mcmansion suburbia.

9/2/2021 lunch was gross. it's been a while since I've given birth to a horrifying creation. panpanya got a shelf display directly next to Kimetsu at the Shibuya Tsutaya. insanely impressive.

9/3/2021 film came back, took less than 4 days this time. a great diversity of emulsions from 90's Fuji to Gold 200, none of which had severe fogging or color shifts which is good. the 1B filter really pulled its weight, counteracting the blue hues creeping in from the expired film.

photos were eh. a predictable outcome considering I mostly took pictures of family. got some great shots there. photos that aren't about people are boring. ume kayo is still my spirit animal. looking forward to using the pingu and canon p more. I think my keep rate is rather high with generally 3 4 good photos. People like Eduardo Goye who proudly cram every shot they take into a video are the real sigma males.

Finished Five days at Memorial to commemorate Hurricane Ida plowing through the East coast.

9/5/2021 pears are good

weather back down to the 20's now. addicted to Mary Beard documentaries about life in ancient rome.

back to top ⤴

7/6/2021 Reading My Dark Places by James Ellroy, another true crime book that's really about freudian obsession. It's quite lurid in a way a car crash scene is. Found out about in on a Beer and Board Games episode.

made a mushroom pastry with the combined microwave/oven. had a craving for wine, a first. Just wanted something really grapey and astringent.

7/8/2021 Went back and watched Louis Theroux's episode on American survivalists. It's from 20 years ago and the talking points are both staggeringly outdated and depressingly timeless. The prospect of a global UN police state lacks its weight in legitimacy now but some of the things the Aryan Nation members wheeze out are still familiar. The show does a good job showing the entire spectrum of polyester frontiersman from former hippies to ethnostatist larpers.

7/9/2021 I'm too cheap to buy a proper whetstone so I sharpened my kitchen knife with the back of a porcelain bowl like those Chinese line cooks. / brought over gran's old knife, a short little thing probably made for fish. It's so profoundly old you could probably melt it down and make background radiation-sensitive equipment with it. It's also thoroughly rusty, I've seen artifacts pulled out of bogs that look better. The blade is a simple single bevel and the tip is chipped but it's perfect. The spine is very thick, blade length is just right, it's got a weight that modern knives don't.

へんなものみっけ！・ダンジョンの中のひと・可愛いだけじゃない式守さん・可愛いだけじゃない式守さん・ 新米姉妹のふたりごはん・血の轍・

Otoja is back on Tarkov, love the sort of scenarios he runs into. He's with Anija and meets a friendly player, after which Anija dies. Friendly anonymous player is thus labelled "Aniita," a sort of reproduction Anija.

7/9/2021 Haven't been feeling good. It's the rainy season, the 2 weeks out of the year that smells like sticky bodies and moldy laundry. To a Californian like me it feels like I'm slowly decomposing. It's probably a taste to languishing under a perennially gray sky in England.

been replacing items in the emergency bag and stockpiling food. It's a good mental exercize. You rotate out food anyway so it's not a total vaccuum for money.

7/10/2021 Finished the anorak, painless because I didn't have to gripe over length and drape. It looks good, a $10 alternative to the $250 US mountain parkas. Need a coyote ruff to finish it off.

uhhh bought more books

7/13/2021 i really want some tamales

7/21/2021 I sort of want to die but dying is for dummies

7/25/2021 Reading Shijukara, a story rendered so sticky with drama it's quite like witnessing a clowncar pileup. people engulfed in the gasoline fire of envy, obligation, dysfunction, it's romance manga written by women distilled to its bare essense. All the characterizations surprisingly repulsive in a very subtle way.

also reading Caveat Emptor, a memoir/confession by American art forger Ken Perenyi. Roy Cohn makes a surpise appearance, Andy Warhol is a described as a sort of strange surveillance device. I had the same sense of jealosy as when I was reading Gopnik's memoirs of gallivanting through New York City casually namedropping people like Richard Avedon.

a new guestbook comment. yup, that's an accurate assessment of who I am (ㆆᴗㆆ) Still in a massive slump, need to go out and do things. I need to find that first rock of crack and gets me in a creative frenzy.

7/29/2021 Found a women-only imageboard, it's really a mirror image of what you'd expect. Both are anti-porn but are eager to hornypost themselves, both rail against people in their head depicted in caricatures (stacy/chad), they're staggeringly similar. One less unknown.

束の間の一花・久保さんは僕を許さない・私は君を泣かせたい・君の涙を飲み干したい o Nomihoshitai・シジュウカラ・てるみな・神達に拾われた男

At Book-Off I found a 1995 Nikkor club photobook on post-perestroika Russia. A nice coffee table book size. $3.

8/1/2021 started on some pant, total cost $7. need to add front pockets. still out of outerwear ideas.

6/15/2021 I've got an interview lined up. They need me more than I need them which is a strange thing to say, would never come out of my mouth in real life regarding anything. It's a company described as "the worst parts of American and Japanese corporate culture" so I'm not exactly in cloud 9, and the moral considerations aren't helping either. Reminds me of when I worked in a microbio lab, the process of moving on from research into a position in pharma was referred to as "selling your soul."

I don't know. You have all these companies selling ideas and expertise to other faceless transnationals fronted by exceptionally virile looking CEO's in their 70's, men who look like semen courses through their veins. As a lowly prole I don't find this transaction terribly interesting. I'd eventually like to move onto a company that doesn't emmanate these lingering questions, something where "the product" is something tangible with a visible relationship with normal consumers, not faceless office buildings. Still a big name so it'd be useful to hoover up some more experience.

Everyone says you never really lose your childlike bewilderment at the world, not really believing that all the other adults don't know what's going on either. I can't imagine myself in my thirties, nor has that ever been a desirable landscape. Aging has been somewhat on an unknown to me. If I died tomorrow I'd be able to say I've have a good run, but that could be an indication that I feel like I've peaked rather than any measure of satiation. harm reduction.

6/18/2021 Interview went well. Couldn't remember food insecurity as a talking point. They seem to really want me to get involved with healthcare-related projects. I walked past a mass vaccination site by Tsukiji. Last time I went to Tsukiji must've been around 8 years ago but I was shocked at how urban the landscape looked. Very Mita, full of manicured greens and wide roads and tall skyscrapers. Corporate Japanese cityscapes are fine, they're functional, they're views only the Polish would fantasize about. The building I went into had a massive 5 towers with 40 floors each, the ground floor being a mishmash of stores to cater to the black masses. Dollar stores, convenience stores, suit shops, restaurants, these sporadic dots of color were sprinkled around on this thoroughly grey backdrop. It's like a fleshlight. It's functional, it'll satisfy you on a biological raw animal level, but not on a human one. Walk outside and you see the traces of the old city. Overgrown houses, rusty apartment scaffolding, remnants of the past are stubbornly hanging on. They too will disappear once the cost of tearing down midcentury earthquake hazards becomes nothing compared to the land it's on. Hour on the train, masses of uniformed schoolkids on the way back.

New wiki article and blog to explore about the Ashley Treatment, a moral dilemma in bodily autonomy. Bought a new plant at Inageya, a pink Chinese bellflower. The Cyclamen that I bought 2 years ago is again coming back to life, its annual transformation is fascinating. Orchid isn't doing well but that's to be expected.

6/20/2021 New Bunnyhop video, george went full chairman george. Working on the anorak and i'm satisfied at my progress. I'm only up to about 2m of fabric which translates to $9 in material costs. All that's left is the hood and pockets. Getting the shoulders right is far and above the hardest element, they drape and move with you. Also still trying to decide on which pockets to sew on. A great big kangaroo pouch or a three-cell pocket like the Gebirgsjager anorak would be sensible but I already own clothing with both. Anoraks are definitely the kind of clothing that looks better on a hanger than on a person.

bud is set to go to Osaka. I knew it was wishful thinking on my part but I couldn't help but fantasize about living together.

6/22/2021 It's good to go outside and feel insignificant for a bit.

エルフと狩猟士のアイテム工房・深海魚のアンコさん・薄花少女・よふかしのうた・花野井くんと恋の病 ・極主夫道

6/23/2021 Some more manga. As always there's plenty of smear campaigns against all men, stories that inadvertently satirize the male gaze. If To-loveru suddenly turned into a psychological horror series then I'd buy all 200 volumes of it while apologizing for my past transgressions. But that'll never happen and that's why publishers are going through their 2008. 6 years for the anthropomorphized deep sea fish series to pop up, I do love waiting for my trash. Anything Kotoyama writes is incredibly odd. Dagashi was fine, good, conventional, alright. But you could tell there was always something extra bubbling underneath through the extra page illustrations and such. I'm talking about a psychopath who regularly draws wide-angle perspectives for fun. You could tell they found "their" artstyle, their stylistic little touches but it never went beyond the art. The story in Dagashi was predictably simple but I think they've been able to inject their weirdness into this series, it's one you can't pin down with one genre. The tone changes throughout, and its unpredictability makes it interesting. The detective is my favorite character, she's like a genderbent Sakata Gintoki. She's scary but in an arousing way?

Watched Louis Theroux's Life on the Edge. Can't remember the first time I marathonned his documentaries but it should've been at least 4 years ago. Haven't watched his newer ones about TBI patients and trans children. Enduring the psychological horror of dementia documentaries is just the worst. Documentaries about loss are abstract. People get dressed up and buried, they trail memories and ideas of a person. With Alzheimers it's an incomplete death. Good thing only cardiovascular disease runs in my family.

Had the dream again. I'm in a great big house that's both familiar and unfamiliar. It resembles gran's but doesn't smell of mosquito coils and the veneer floorboards don't ring out with every step. Instead of hitting my head on doorways it's sized for me. Mom and dad are downstairs, it's dark out, and lightly raining. I go to close the window, the Japanese style channel lock is exaggerated in proportion and made of wood instead of stamped steel, its shape resembles an elephant's tusk. As I force it down to unlock, the mesh door rockets open on its own and I hear a startled voice from above, from outside. I try to shout that there's a thief but nothing comes out. my throat feels like it's dialated, like a kazoo without its innards.

6/24/2021 I can't get drunk anymore. Before coming here I wanted to experience angst and repression and existential dread japanese-style in a dirty off-white tokyo hovel. There's a sort of a masochistic allure to suffering, chasing new emotions. But this ain't it. The sort of novel curiosity has been replaced with anhedonia, for now. I've been getting bored. That's a bad thing. I distinctly remember sociology class at the boarding school. There was this incessant fervor on part of the Japanese teachers similar to the American in-class moral encouragement not to drink and smoke crack and have kids at 11. There were less christian-normative lessons about wearing jonas brothers-branded chastity rings and sleeping with bundling boards but the general expectations about adulthood were still there. Japanese teachers were a bit more explicit in their mission to turn us from school kids into human capital. "Shakaijin" is a word thrown around a lot. "Member of society." Horrible little exclusionary word isn't it. Its presence deletes the family unit, deletes social mobility, deletes self-interest.

The sociology teacher was a special guy. He looked like a character from an 80's Japanese crime drama, a contradictory vessel of a slowing metabolism and a sun-blasted veneer. You could easily imagine him spinning a featherlight revolver around while chasing suspects around Ikebukuro, constantly adjusting his aviator sunglasses. Despite this he didn't eat meat, something about the stuff resembling people. He did eat fish though, of course he did. In his paternal crusade to keep us from slagging off the metamorphosis into adulthood he said "you don't want to be like the guys who hang in front of convenience stores all day, saying 'anything interesting happen' to each other, do you?" Poverty or moral destitution wasn't the worst case scenario but boredom was.

6/28/2021 / didn't e-mail me back. _ leaves tomorrow. I wish we had more d e e p conversations. The first ever was at that izakaya in Kyoto. We fought so much on that trip I barely remember it. We talked about parents, schooling, nothing particularly unusual but it really was the first time for a back and forth like that. All part of the very late realization that other people's perception of you is indepedent of your own self-image. There's a certain reservation I have in contrast to the sort of talks I regularly have with my friends, a cautious hesitation that I have with _.

I thought $6 cans of Spam were just Japan prices but apparently that's what they go for in the US now.

6/29/2021 _ is off. Packing into the last hour as usual. Gave them an N95 mask. The airport was quiet like a library. The people who were boarding where families of tourists. Eyebrow raising.

7/2/2021 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

back to top ⤴

6/1/2021 I've been getting too caught up in writing something to publish. Some of my essays have been cannibalized from others, either unfinished or uncomfy to read. The solution is to just write. I'll mash it up later. Started on the japan page, hoping to list out the good/bad and other oddities of existing here. Redid the dual identity page. Added some lab information on the film cameras page. Working on the ReadingProject book review, trying to stave away the broscience paired with brohistory and bropsychology.

staring down into the inspo channel gets me horny for my hobbies, the flash of idealism that gets me wanting to work on things. Just spent like 3 hours looking at pictures of petroglyphs

夜さんぽ・不安の種・江戸前エルフ・イジらないで、長瀞さん・ 地縛少年花子くん

Just read Yorusanpo, sanpo being one of those words that don't translate elegantly into English. It's more or less "short walk" but carries a casual, proximate sort of feel. Predictably it's about two characters that walk around the neighbood at night. The art style isn't one I'm usually drawn to but it hits all the right buttons for me, the sparks of curiosity that accompany every round around the block. The manga is expressed with this Yotsuba-esque childlike wonder. Staring at the landscape and the passage of time, taking out the trash and experiencing loss, every chapter is imbued with some fleeting thought. The story isn't advanced by action but internal monologue. It's really slice of life at its peak, monotony rendered interesting, bits of profundity sprinkled here and there. It perfectly expresses why I enjoy wandering around so much. I read Juuza no Ulna last year so I can say with confidence this is my favorite manga of 2021.

another nice guestbook comment (ノ´∀｀)ノ

6/2/2021 Yaser Said was arrested and Duncan died two months ago, 2021 is a treat for true crime fans.

god these milk bars are so good it's like frozen condensed milk on a stick

6/4/2021 I'm ashamed to say I really enjoy watching Saturday Kitchen. A couple of people talking and cooking on a set that's much too long. The lack of background music and meandering conversations grants the show a distinctly lo-fi feel. It's like peering into a gated neighborhood dinner party as a vagrant. The photobook got here. As with most of my purchases I was regretting buying the thing, $30 for yellowing slices of dead tree wasn't terribly attractive despite pristine copies fetching ridiculous prices. But I was dead wrong, it's filled with stunning photos by Kikujiro Fukushima.

6/5/2021 I need to get back into worldbuilding. Gets your creative juices flowing when creating your own universe, a sense of linear time, a pulsing organism with culture and geography and politics. When creating your own world you usually try to shy away from archetypal humanoid races or slightly spruced up real-life objects. Something needs to be different, thematically consistent, and believable. And through this thought process worldbuilding lets you appreciate benign things in your real-life day-to-day. Take a frying pan for example. It's a companion to a waist-level stove so the handle juts out the side, perfectly shaped for human hands. A flat, circular bottom dissipates heat emmanating from below. A lip keeps objects contained against the constant force of gravity.

Apply the curiosity of worldbuilding to that and there's an explosion of factors you can play with. What your new race's hand anatomy is like, material properties of metals, degrees of atmospheric pressure and gravitational pull. It really lets you pick apart objects with a child-like innocence, freed from the droning inherency of adult life. And to think something as benign as a frying pan is really a masterpiece of anatomical design, a solution melding dozens of factors into a cohesive form. This entire thought process behind worldbuilding is also why I love surreal games like LSD and Hylics so much, there's something inspiring about someone fully committing to create their own immersive, tactile universe:

I loveeee blurry textures—real world forms reduced and stretched, removing detail, leaving vague ideas and shapes of what it was. It feels like wandering around dream versions of places you’ve been, half-constructed foggy architecture and people and objects, existing in the context of a place you can believe, but pulled from that reality and put in its own context...A lot of my defining memories are alone in mazelike hospitals, long road trips and strange hotels, staying at psychiatric wards, forced inside with only artificial light for days. I fixate on these images a lot. I’ve always felt alien—like I’ve slipped between the cracks and exist outside the world. To that end I feel pretty connected to things that are broken, ‘bad,’ trashy...things that exist outside of legitimacy.

6/6/2021 today's finds:

manga

You really feel the stagnation swirling around your life when you maintain a blog. When writing feels cathartic the lack of it makes you feel sort of empty. Becoming a paragraph-shitter isn't the goal either, it's just that this new and interesting way of interpreting the world is left unfulfilled when you feel you don't have a subject to write about. Fuck that, I finished the second ReadingProject submission after a flurry of inspiration. Wrote it on the book about the Portuguese colonial war.

6/9/2021 Been watching Keith Floyd's travel-cooking shows lately. As the gruff sort of spotted-hand presenter, Floyd necks more alcohol than a biofuel engine. Every episode is a hit with its authenticity, cooking whatever country's cuisine he visits. I should try to cook more with wine in a kind of demi-glace.

reading Soviet Communal Living - An Oral History. The stories are staggering, it carries this brutish unrefinement that conjours up images of pimpled chimneysweeps and untreated chlamydia. The diversity of the people in thse recollections are fascinating as well, there's transient faces from all over the Baltics dropped into these cramped communal apartments.

6/10/2021 Off to Saitama. The train was so painless it felt like 30 minutes instead of 2 hours. Eating edamame off the stalk at gran's, homemade yogurt with homemade jam. Time seems to slow down here. The sound of bamboo leaves rustling and distant piano lessons are all I hear when I take a walk. I was worried that my infatuation with this place was from some hazy nostalgia but its luster has stayed the same. I get it, I get the sentiment of people refusing to leave where their family lived for generations, the house set to be bulldozed for a car park or whatever.

6/11/2021 Manhole hunting in East Tokorozawa, that's one checked off my list. As usual it's a sedate neighborhood with a fancy station and flanneled otaku men who walk too fast.