7/7/2020 started playing FE Heroes. mmmmmmmmmmm I'm probaby going to get bored with it in a few days. mercedesbathwater was too long of a username.

coronavirus cases rising again.

Watching Maison Ikkoku, a girthy rom-com that is the genetic grandfather to the slimy to-loveru clones of the 2010's. In fact the setting is highly reminiscient of Hayate no Gotoku Cuties. It's nothing special, but the settings are beautiful and the context to which they're presented is really interesting.

Horny, hungry, bored - the litmus test for something off. Classes are winding down and I don't even want to think about how I'll get those last two units for graduation.

6/8/2020

In terms of new purchases there's been quite a bit. Picked up two Pentax SFXn's for $5. One had a roll of Superia Premium loaded in the camera, the other had a running battery (itself worth $7 new). Pulled the roll out of the camera, after which its shutter died. The other SFX works fine and I'm even tempted to find a lens for it. My first working AF camera that I have. Bought a lot of 17 cameras for $140. It might be a stupid purchase, or I might be able to triple my money. High hopes on the Konica C35, Olympus XA2, Pentax K-01.

Vines propogating nicely. Japanese maple isn't doing too well.

6/11/2020 Finals. Zero stress. I don't care. Back into shows/reading, which is a plus.

5/14~18/2020 Feeling better. Sunlight is important. Web browsing is fun again, I've exhausted my patience on sites like r*ddit or twitter. samachan is dead.

bought a nendroid, dear god what have I brought upon myself

5/21/2020 Watched Mitsuboshi colors.

5/24/2020 A battlestation thread got me to clean my room and rearrange things a bit. Rekindled my interest in interiors. Exchanged my black clothing hanger for a white one, brings my room closer to the earthtone Korean look. Made $400 off selling shit, still no abebux in the mail. I also got my hands on a $30 Canon P to attempt repairs on. Nervous, but if all else fails I can just list it on Mercari. Just realized I'm fairly satisfied with my camera collection. There's stuff like the Jupiter-8 and OM-4ti that have yet to get to me, but I'm satisfied. Still on the lookout for unreasonably cheap XD's or C35's. Still no new Nendoroid acquisitions, I just refuse to spend $50 on a hunk of plastic. Absolutely no regrets on the one I got though. Currently more after Reimu than Inuko (~˘▾˘)~

I've been thinking more about gear for airsoft. It's completely irrational relative to practical hobbies like clothing or interior design, there's little chance I'll get back into it, most of my stuff is back in the US, yet thinking about it is fun. A British PLCE harness is hard to justify though.

Been browing altchans lately and it's been a mostly forgettable experience. Post Office and samachan were nice.

5/25/2020 New plants! String of Pearls for $3, white Ageratum for $1.50, pink Phlox for $1. I kept passing by someone's String of Pearls when walking to the bookstore and I was very jealous for how bizarre they look. Requires very little water, easy to propogate, no regrets.

After reading a tohno-chan poster's intent to kill themselves if diagnosed with the virus I've been thinking about death. Specifically the boring stuff that follows it. Material leftovers are rather simple, they're just stuff. The OM-2 that's now my constant companion might've been someone's first paycheck commemoration or just some boomer's garage filler. It'll sit rank-and-file in a thrift shop like all the other orphaned belongings. And just throw my body in the garbage. My concerns lie in my computer files. Ultimately the sentimental value of all these folders lie in their arrangement holistically, not neccesarily the images' content itself. I flip through albums to arouse a timeline in my head: Each percipitating backdrops, events, people, smells, and interests back to me. The benign and remarkable hold equal value as they compensate for the falliability of memory. On their own though, without decryption, those associations are not there.

But through the anime pictures and cursed images, surely there's something of worth there. Just like my disdain for the exclusionary spheres of Japanese photobooks, my friends have no way of accessing my memories I've had with them. The one-off screenshots and audio recordings belong to more than just me, they're bookmarks to a collective memory that we all share. To sequester that seems grossly unlike the feverish nostalgia chases that have defined my adulthood. So I sort though files like marksboypussy.mp3 and creatureofthenight.png.

Speaking of sentimentality I found a blog that took me right back to 2013, dragging my hollow corpse through community college with the promise that life would get interesting (it did). Just another pastel goth anime blog with Tokyo cityscapes and close-ups of pale body parts. To me it's just chock-full of yearning.

Making buttons is fun, I've settled on 300x106 as a modern equivalent to 88x31. Mixing legibility and creativity with the constrictions of the aspect ratio makes for a rewarding experience. Incongruent to the rather spartan presentation of 88x31 jpgs but my site as a whole is an unoptimized mess so it's thematically consistent.

4/30/2020 I plan on going vegetarian next week. I've gotten tired with how I structure my cooking, and meat is really at the center of it. I expect it's not going to be a huge challenge as I haven't bought any raw meat in two weeks anyway. Plenty of great fermented and grain-based dishes in Japan to more than make up for it. Ultimately eliminating eggs and seafood is going to be the real challenge.

Reflecting back on the stuff I used to enjoy, while more accessible, is a fragile game of extracting gratification while steadily unraveling the associations that made them so significant. I got into Japanese garage rock while in Community college, saccharine female vocals while in high school. The images I archive too, are sorted by year. Those associated memories are always transient and fleeting, almost a sense of negligence in what I've missed. And all the stuff I didn't get into, the stuff I wished I could get engrossed in. Visual novels for example, I feel like there's a prerequisite of emotional discontent to really get into it. One that I don't have anymore. PC-98 and other retro games too, I don't have the sentimentality that will keep me occupied through monotonous gameplay.

And so with these thoughts pushed to the front of my mind, I've started reading Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō and am finally finishing Hidamari Sketch, in my biggest start/finish disparity since evan-jelly-on. Zabadak is great. Listening to a song takes me somewhere, and lately that type of feedback is the most rewarding. Started contributing on Wikipedia too.

5/10/2020 I'm doing alright in my classes but the sleep-shattering schedule and delayed graduation is getting to me. I think I'm back to my old style of journaling now that my daily schedule has fallen apart.

I found a guy's homeless blog. Presumably around 2009 in Sunnyvale, CA. It's strange to read through. Living out of a car, subsisting on junk food, using library PC's, applying fruitlessly to jobs, yet going to arcades and spending a non-trivial amount on entertainment. It's less sympathetic than I expected, whether it's the author's bizarre optimism materializing through his writing or just his obliviousness to his situation. He's atleast 35 too, which makes his women-gawking a tad uncomfortable to read through.

It's by no means short, compiled on his personal web page over 52 weeks. Seemed like an interesting little cultural artifact, with talk of shows like Burn Notice and the Wii release. But he's still homeless, and the blog has ballooned into chapters. He's currently on chapter 12, day 4326. 11 years later, gone are the "tehs" and smiling emojis. His grammar is deadpan now, he's lost a few teeth, still in school, still homeless. No one deserves to live this way but his unwavering commitment to play games on public wifi with a $1000 gaming laptop is a very strange contradiction. Even talks about using his stimulus money on upgrades. Empathy getting tested while reading through it, to be honest.

This quarantine, again, demonstrating my long-standing issues with food. Stress eating, not to a degree where it threatens my health, but distressing in how it radically changes my parameters for self-control. Might be emblematic of a larger issue that I'm using food to cope with.

Got around to finishing a pair of wide pants, they go really well with haoris/kimonos. There's a milieu of other projects I'd like to get to but I'm either missing just a few cm more of fabric or zippers that I'm unwilling to risk my health to go buy. Also played the game Hylics, which I wrote a review for. Delightful game that has no real equivalents. I stopped playing R6s entirely, I would probably enjoy it better on console frankly.

4/18/2020 I recently collaborated with a few writers and artists from neocities in a webzine for the first time. It was a really enjoyable process, I had to make my ramblings as legible and comprehensible as possible.

4/20/2020 Some shit weather lately. Made pasta wih canned whole tomatoes, it was good. Film came back for the OM-2n and 35SP. Not great, the Korean Superia 400 was more expired than I thought. Atleast the 35SP works properly with no light leaks. Speaking of cameras I've been eyeing a Canon VI at around $130. It'll be unreachable until I sell more stuff. Same goes for the anime figures.

Wanting to make an LSD-themed page but I'm borderline html illiterate (~˘▾˘)~

Ate a bunch of fantastic stuff today. I don't usually write about food but today was fantastic. Bought some rice crackers that were on sale at $1.20. Rice crackers are broadly split between salt/soy sauce/misc flavors with a variety of shapes and baking/frying methods. Salted rice crackers have been increasingly adorned with dashi prior to baking, a bonito/seaweed stock that is the mortar in Japanese cuisine. And they were fantastic. Also bought dango with azuki, the hint of salt to balance the sweet alongside the texture was great. Not a huge sweets fan but I'll buy this again. Dinner was a komatsuna/maitake stirfry with some sides from the supermarket. Maitake adds so much to whatever you put it in unlike enoki. The sides was fried saury that crisped up perfectly in the oven.

We've been talking about getting a Switch after the torrent of posts on twitter about Animal Crossing. As everyone says, perfect timing with the chaos of out there. Bought a little animal crossing towel, going to pass this down to my kids.

3/14/2020 Picked up my passport at Kawasaki, glasses at Yokohama. A decent amount of people, but I'd say 60% of normal. Came home to grap some extra food and the grocery stores were packed. People were still buying reasonable maount of food, rice and pasta were looking thin but there was still stuff there. Can't remember the last time I ventured out out of boredom.

My program has been cancelled. There goes my crush. I might be able to graduate early but there's no quick way to find out and relinquishing a semester abroad is a massive disappointment.

3/28/2020 Study abroad office has been ignoring my emails, fantastic. No departure instructions, no class enrollment information, no updates about unit transfers sent out. Classes back at Uni start in 3 days. I learned there's a waiver for staying in Japan, and I only found out through another student who had e-mailed about it. They emphasized how responsible they were keeping track of students during natural disasters, but we're on our own when it comes to a pandemic that they had months to prepare for. What a complete joke.

I badly want to take cherry blossom pictures juxtaposed with coronavirus warning signs but that would be beyond irresponsible. Not as irresponsible as my program though. Americans have been wearing gloves to the supermarket and leaving them on parking lot floors after they're done in the most contradictory and american act since

3/30/2020 This recent virus should have been a slam-dunk for Japan. A tiny industrialized nation with a sprawling transportation system connecting urbanized concrete landscapes, there's no other place that lets you feel your existential irrelevance through pure numbers. The human congestion is beyond parody really, a diurnal sea of black wool hurriedly scurry towards yellowed cubicles in a sort of capitaist Mecca. In an earlier journal I reflected on how something like a zombie scenario would be nightmarish for Japan, with the population density and regular human contact that thousands of people have on a regular basis.

Yet Cases are well under 2000. (as of 3/30/2020) Japan's Health and labor ministry regularly release comprehensive reports on clusters of transmitted cases: age, employment, recent activity, and numbers have not skyrocketed like neighboring countries. While calamity occupies a country with a melting demagogue who values human capital over human lives holding the reins, Japan has been whistling and looking the other way. Only recently did the central government send off advisories to stay indoors in Tokyo and Kawagawa Prefecture, the latter of which was hurriedly arranged by the govenor who emerged after weeks of hiding from the media. Yet they were not directives, only suggestions. A forced quarantine would require amendments in the Diet, a move not considered by the ruling right-wing party. Strange, because their defining ethos is to shit all over the constitution. And it's convenient that these quarantines were hurriedly announced after the IOC's decision to delay the Tokyo Olympics by a year.

Despite whatever "cultural reasons" like mask-wearing or handwashing that r*dditors like to sacralize, Japan stands as an odd anomaly. Italy, Spain, and the US are on their knees with healthcare systems overwhelmed. The UK and France have initated quarantines, shuttling non-essential services. South Korea undertook the highest rate of testing in the world to stomp out new trasnmissions. Yet a neighoring country to the origin of the virus, the highest single recipient of tourists during Chinese New Year, has stood largely unscathed ths far.

3/31/2020 News of comedy legend Shimura Ken's passing has graced the news today. Hopefully a balding pervert becomes the martyr for the Japanese to take this shit seriously.

3/14/2020 I've been preparing an emergency bag lately. I used to be big into camping/wilderness survival as a kid, and going through the motions have really brought those memories back. The idea is to stock PPE, important documents, and a couple days' worth of food in preparation of evacuating to a school or community center. Last year's hurricane got me shitting my pants, and apparently /'s work friends did have to evacuate.

So everything is short-term, a bridge inbetween disaster and settling at an evacuation center. In contrast, US "survivalists" have this rabid preoccupation with the "rugged individual," a perfect allegory for the American "fuck you, got mine" ideology. The fantasies go that after a disaster, all services and utilities are to cease functioning, therefore all needs have to be met on an individual level at home. Stockpiled food, power generators, water carboys, and guns are analogous to American prepping. Does this have a basis in reality? Katrina and Puetro rico come to mind where the state was utterly unable to provide for citizens following a disaster. Both are also populated by black and brown people. Strange how that goes. Anyway, you almost never see gas stoves or tents in American bugout bags for this reason, everyone figures they can just collect brush or firewood for use at home. Everything is in bulk and set for long-term settling before disaster relief in the US.

Here's an absolutely fantastic rationalwiki article covering the rationalizations of American preppers, with SHTF examples from Argentina and Somalia.

I get it though, there's a definite allure to the level of agency during a dire situation. Strangely fantasizing about a disaster is a refreshing contrast to our numbers' based day-to-day of productivity, consumption, and death.

/r/preppers, finding itself rejuvenated with justifiably concerned people, has been lit a blaze with righteous mastubatory posts about peering over sickly bodies panic buying. And yet, posts about donating PPE to hospitals and reaching out to neighbors dot every other post inbetween post-apoc fantasies by posters itching for a justification to shoot someone.

3/15/2020 uni cancelled all courses, encouraging students to fuck off home. fingers crossed my program is untouched.

3/17/2020 What a trash day.

3/18/2020 The US is taking things seriously now with even talks of a universal income up in the air. People in Japan are frankly too complacent. Cases are still in the hundreds but the prevalence of testing is US-levels of pathetic. I brushed up with thousands of people yesterday getting my passport renewed in Kawasaki, that's just what you're expossed to daily. Japan was the top receiving countrys for tourists during the Chinese New year, and it's naive to think we're better off than Italy or the US.

Very content with my PC thus far. It's reliant on the 2400G's iGPU, so I consider it a marginally more capable console. Still, it runs only 25°C on idle and rarely exceeds 75° in games. The main bottlenecks to my enjoyment are wi-fi and playing with russians, mainly.

2/24/2020 Uploaded the film that came back from the lab. I'm satisfied, there were a lot of interesting shots like the protests that I was lucky enough to capture. Most of them were on the OM-2n so I'm eager to get some shots on the new C35 and 35 SP. Bummed that the halloween pictures have a tiny bit of motion blur, even while shooting at 1/60. Two otherwise great photos also had overlapping frames which pains me greatly.

3/1/2020I'd love to get some fish but getting an appropriately sized fishtank is too big for me.

3/10/2020 Adjusted the page colors slightly. Tried to make a vanilla/brown theme but it didn't go too well, pastel colors will stay around for a while.

3/12/2020 Pinterest is good, like an objectively beneficial pandemic. Led me to watch Aleutian documentaries and this site about bentwood hats. Beautiful stuff. I'm also looking into getting silkmoths, they apparently mature in under a month.

I could've done this build 4,5 years ago when I had plenty of free time, make everlasting memories playing and talking with my canadian buds. It was the overwhelming sense of guilt that swatted any big purchase away. Don't want to be a financial drain to my parents, don't want to destabilize my already fragile day-to-day with too many workhours, don't want to fuck up the second chance I was given at school. And on a deeper level, maybe subconsciously I knew that attainment fantasies perpetually floating over my head were something I needed. Tangible, explicit, and at the same time far enough out of reach. This PC cost me less than $350 and it's a crundle punch after coming from my prehistoric PC's. But maybe it wouldn't have been a huge difference. Wider range of games is nice, but only time will tell if my interest in them rekindles at all.

That Falkreath house is the most deadly... Bandits always at my door. Mud crabs keep befriending my gay bitch son and end up burrowing into my floorboard at night. A dragon always spawns there every 2 weeks. Finally, there is a fucking necromancer next door that sends over skeletal dicks to offer me fucking girl scout cookies, and if you deny ends up killing my chickens and cow...

2/17/2020

I felt like the limitations of the software I was coming across was inhibiting my own enjoyment with Linux. The OS' supposed superiority in user modularity was harbored with a level of experience that I didn't have. Making something easier to use isn't a bad thing, and it seemed some FOSS took pride in its spartan presentation. The less I have to fuck about in command prompt, the better. And that's the fundamental crux of why I found Ubuntu only gratingly tolerable. My user experience was always "good enough" and the programs I was completely satiated with were either also offered on windows, or was itself a derivative of a Windows program. The rest of the native Linux programs were always shockingly deficient in one way or another, with my own ineptitude compounding things.

Do I feel like the pursuit in learning the ins and outs would yield a user experience that would be that much more superior to Windows 10? I don't think so. The desktop threads on /g/ look bretty cool though. But Windows 10 is pretty bad. Some elements like the programs and features page are identical to Windows 7, hastily hidden away by a shiny new touch-screen optimized veneer. The automated botnet features are truly frightening, like having bloatware bundled with a system update, or a "get help with file explorer in windows 10" search opening totally unprompted on Microsoft Edge. You never quite feel in control. And the entire thing feels greasy and sluggish, UI elements glide across your screen like the entire thing is arranged on thin-gauge springs. On top of that, unpromted system rebooting is back, boot times are slower even with an M.2 drive, searching for files takes generations, renaming files in file explorer not as quick, there's a laundry list of big and small issues that are fundamental to a Windows system.

2/18/2020

It was a curious little ordeal, everyone anonymous from the eyes down due to the coronavirus outbreak, stuffed inbetween forgotton white walls at the end of Ikebukuro Sunshine. The company reps holding the 20-minute seminars were either stuttering inexperienced office workers sent here as punishment, or robotic decibel-shitters with catatonic stares. Some seminars made it evident to me fairly quickly that this wasn't the place for me, imagining where my brain matter would land after an under-the-chin shotgun suicide to pass the time. A toy company really stood out though, and that was a huge surprise. The way the rep advertised their company culture was really alluring to me, and listening to stories of runaway success products separated them from B2B companies entrenched in mantras of efficiency and margins. Because buying toys is dumb and irrational, it's the farthest to pragmatism as it can get. It seemed like the plastic they were peddling was unshackled by typical conventions of business and marketing, their directive is to make stuff that's just fun, and that's what made it exciting to me. One of the stories the rep told was how employees wearing company pins on their suits 15 years ago would get stopped on the street by random people hoping they could get their hands on (popular toy at the time).

I stayed from 10~5, touring 8 companies in the process. I was sleep deprived, the event location was monotonous, and so I took my 3000 yen and left. It was getting late and the trains at 5pm~1am are like canned sardine LARPing so I quickly headed off to a family friend's house. She told me her kids were so excited I was coming they were waiting outside their house. ｡^‿^｡ They were nice enough to invite me for dinner. Played with the kids as they stacked Ultraman figures in chronologically correct lines. The older kid would proudly show me his collection of japanese history manga and illustration books one after the other, no doubt wanting to share what arouses so much excitement in him. He also proposed we vote ballout-style on what ice cream to eat. The two also helped me remember an Ultraman monster. I also get along remarkably well with middle-aged women, forgot to ask how her breadmaking has been going tho.

2/20/2020

I should go vegetarian for a variety of reasons. I can't see it as a terribly difficult transition in Japan, there's a decent variety of root vegetables and soy derivatives that stand strong on their own. Already cut beef out without heartache. Excising fish, chicken, and eggs from my diet are going to be hard if I ever get to that level. I also need to free myself from structuring meals on meat. Vegetables are always relegated as periphery when I'm out shopping or blankly staring inside my fridge.

2/2/2020

Got started making some pants. Pants are hard. The crotch area sort of bundles up. Got some dad glasses and they make me nauseous.

Interesting news floating around. "Don't let the coronavirus outbreak spiral into discrimination" was deafeningly parraoted on the news over here during the peak of Chinese New Year. Meanwhile in France and Italy... But don't worry guys, the Japanese are still racist. Did you know they eat cats? or was it dogs? Asia's all the same anyway.

2/5/2020

2/6/2020

2/7/2020

The newish 14sai no Koi cover is gorgeous. The live action of Joshikousei no Mudazukai is the most surreal show I've watched in a while. It's like I've come out of a traumatic brain injury. This got made. I'm familiar with the manga and I enjoyed it thoroughly but there's an atmosphere specific to the live action that's such an odd addition it's beyond words.

made a bit of extra money on mercari selling stuff. Bought a disposable camera to harvest the 1600-speed film out of it. Took it apart, shocking myself twice in the process. What a marvel. The flash mechanism in particular is ingenious. PC parts came in from dad and the 2400G's pins were bent. There's a 1/4 scale Reimu figure that I'm craving, just 43cm tall and $300. There's also a gorgeous Sora figure coming out this december, plenty of time to agonize over it. As a show Yosuga no Sora was utterly saucy, gliding over the small bits of context from the VN that tempered the mindfuck. Once you get over the repellent veneer of an show about incest it's a fairly enjoyable love story. Remarkable to think merchandise for a series that ended 10 years ago with no fanservice crumbs since is still trickling out. Especially when it materialized in a gratuitous anime series with a birds and the bees demonstration on A-TX. The Reimu and Inuko nendoroids I have my eye on are still ridiculously expensive at ~$70.

1/27/2020

Revisited /a/ and /fa/ for the first time in 4 years. Not much has changed thankfully. If anything it magnifies how hellish 2012 was with gamergate and SNK/SAO airing. Still not touching /k/ though, that board is too far gone. Reading thread after thread on /fa/ about "whether __ is suitable to wear under __ circumstances" makes me truly appreciate being in Japan. Those are too fem, that's teetering into cosplay, all those qualifiers floating around are something I don't have to worry about anymore. If my Uni professor can come into work cosplaying as a magical girl and not get institutionalized, I can wear anything.

Thinking about getting some floating flowerpots, really looking into the white/brown/vanilla/green korean aesthetic. Finished sewing the bucket hat, it's stewing in a dye of coffee and red onion peel right now. The red onion in particular surprised me with a very dark shade of maroon that reminds me of lingonberry. A torrent of bag/rucksack ideas came to me so that's what I've been bending my mind over.

A new guestbook comment ( ＾◡＾)っ I'm perennially concerned

1/28/2020

Everything cascaded off my desk so I figured it was time to change things up. My mind kept coming back to a picture I saw in a room inspo thread a few years ago, none of the furniture was higher than knee-height and it looked ridiculously comfy. Advantageous in Japan since big furniture is a pain when you move. Advantageous for me since I have a futon instead of a bed, and the full-height chair I had seemed to be a torture implement in a past life. I just moved a shelf horizontally and what a difference. The massive windows are even bigger, my room looks more spacious, Removed the backplate for the shelf so it lets even more light in. Considering getting an identical shelf so I can have them in parallel or lined up in an L shape adjacent to my bed area. I'd be able to set my PC or sewing machine there accesible from my bed area for maximum comfy.

Another guestbook comment ヽ(〃＾▽＾〃)ﾉ I gotta start reading again, my writing has really started to stagnate.

I do think my journals have stagnated. Not neccesarily in its content, for which I will perenially retain a neurotic fixation over. Rather, it's the spirit behind each entry, what compells me to open that editor and spill a little bit more of myself. Until 6 months ago, it was all repletion and yearning. Staving off monotony and suppressing ideation too distant to even consider. Today my journals are much more benign, reports of what I've done and want to do. In a sense this greater agency over my day-to-day has produced much more stoic entries. and that's boring.

1/8/2020

Wore the chuba coat, got the most amount of compliments I've ever gotten. Everything I make isn't explicitly weird unlike this full-length coat.

Completely forgot to mention, I finished sewing a Veschemok-inspired pack. Also made an A-frame with bamboo and provisions for the backpack to attach to it, but ideas are still up in the air. Prioritized minimal seams over everything else, the process of visualizing the final product was so different from sewing clothing it was rather novel.

1/8/2020

There were segments we were able to respectfully disagree on, which made for a really nice back-and-forth. It all revolved around our personal approaches to friendship and relationships. His mindset reminded me of the unrepentantly pragmatic south african guy, even extrapolating into romance. "Sorting through people worth my time" in a sort of shotgun approach. Very competitive machiavellian guy. We nailed it down to divergent goals we have: he's after success, I'm after enjoyment. He framed american friendships as cyclical and surface-deep which I disagreed with.

Been sleeping more than usual, that's a bad sign.

1/12/2020

squeezed in a trip to book-off during consciousness-altering sessions of slamming a keyboard. Figured new years cleaning would bring virgin garage contents into thrift shops and the like. Came out with a new photobook, and some weebshit. The photobook is a collage of innocence, pictures of secret bases built by kids inside suburban forests and inbetween houses. Nature photography but about pillow forts. The photographer even managed to interview some of the kids, and quotes periodically dot every other photo. A comfy book that will unravel any reader's crstallized adult persona. The second is pure weebery, a headphone review book adorned with anime girls. I bought this because it incapsulates the early 2000's, both in the now-antique models of headphones, as well as the now-extinct artstyles.

1/16/2020

Loving dad's old linen pants. They're just unreasonably wide. Skinny pants in every coord is just boring, I now realize that. Re-watching Yuru camp with my yuri goggles on. Late night NHK documentary about alzheimers, following a former Alzheimers reasearcher now in his eighties. His infantilization is crushingly depressing, herded alongside other pensioners by prancing baby-faced virile caretakers in scrubs eager to fire up whatever neural connections are left in that pile of bones. His daughter is starting to lose her paitence with someone who has no agency over his condition. His wife reminds him to finish his food while still referring to him as Dr. But by far the worst ingredient was his lucidity though all of it, expressed in journal after journal that bears down and suffocates you the longer you watch. He becomes uncertain about how much he can trust his memory, cognizant of the progression of his disease, hyperaware of the tension that his condition is causing between him and his adult daughter. At one point he asks, "how am I going to feel when I've started to die?"

1/17/2020

Delightful last Education class, one of my favorites this semester. Spontaneous decision to go drinking, French guy (as always), aus, as well as the nz guy from before. Bitching about scomo, japanese companies, and americans in general. Drank brown sugar shochuu for the first time and went back to campus after grabbing drinks at a convenience store. Went up to the 7th floor at south hall, talking about past relationships. There was a crowd of passing Japanese students oogling at us 4 dumb motherfuckers drinking outside in 5 degree weather. Distinctly remember one doing a double take after seeing our beer cans. Mingled with a canadian guy there who seemed really nice but he decided to spend his time elsewhere. Hopping izakayas and we went to a Chinese place that the French guy's old boss runs. We got a plate of ribs for free, that was cool. The gyoza was insanely good. NZ guy was a bit of an oddity for me, he reminded me of a friend from Irvine. A joker at heart but you can never really read their true emotions because of it. Just a stream of banter coming out of him.

There's an unquantifiable discomfort with how nice mom is. A completely new sensation, to be shocked at the utter lack of baggage from someone who has seen me through all the cripplingly embarrassing regrets accumulated across 20 years of being their crotchspawn. And I thoroughly welcome new sensations. It's what draws me to the urban hell of Tokyo, the crushing isolation of living in a plaster apartment, the impostor syndrome after somehow graduating high school.

But the big one with mom is the word "unconditional." Mom isn't trying to get something out of me, nor does she have a preconceived image of who I am that precipitates into neuroticism that hangs over every interaction. She hasn't changed, I have. The past 3 months I've always been mindful of what I owe, what I've done, anything that will inevitably be used against me during an argument. Because that happens. Every shred of affection I've contextualized as a favor or reciprocal payment towards some debt. It's been all business with /, a sort of ritualized dance of victories and defeats, trying to keep your ratio of contributions and debts even as argumentative leverage. I've learned to be suspicious. And that new framework for dealing with family is so utterly incompatible with my mom that it's frankly distressing.

But I get it, I lost my temper today. Undoubtedly made the situation worse.

1/2/2020

I dreamed that I went to a resturaunt inexpicably run by Gassymexican and my crush was there. She refused meet eyes with me or talk to me I wonder what that represents HMMMMM

Anyways, new years resolutions? 2020 is the year I'm severed from uni permanently and thrown into the meat grinder so a job will probably lodge itself as my most pressing priority. But that's boring as shit. Sew more women's clothes so I can crossdress? Collect furniture so I don't have to live out of cardboard boxes? I think it's sew clothing to the degree that I can always wear something I made. Because I have under 10 garments total, I tend to save them for special occasions and just throw on a middle school sweater when I'm off to the shop. I want my creations to be so numerous that wearing them becomes as casual and carefree as those tattered school uniforms. But that's a bit benign and attainable. Truth be told, I don't know what will happen to me this year. Might become a NEET, might get a soul-extinguishing job, might live under a bridge playing salarymen skinflutes for pennies.

Sushi with grandma and uncle's side of the family. Filling up my green tea repeatedly until it becomes an unrecognizable sludge. Aroused enough courage to take candids of some kids in another booth, fully internalized the possibility of being publicly executed by their parents. Remember that tourist who put his gopro on the sushi conveyor belt to film strangers eating at their booths? I felt just like that shithead, except I can't pretend to not know Japanese. I feel really bad about my uncle. Holiday interactions with him have been inadvertently avoidance. If I was him I'd think "fuck, this kid must really dislike my company." I think he's a fascinating dude and he's taken on a more dad-like persona than my dad. I just can't read old Japanese men emotions so I always clam up. Come to think of it, their side of the family is just odd.

Took a brief trip to Musashi-Kosugi on the way back, the famously gentrified bit of Kawasaki that used to house the factory-working underclass. Lots of department stores and high-rise apartments. Discovered that a Muji was having a closing sale and we looked through it a bit. 50% off is great but the shelves were almost bare, thoroughly picked through by out-of-town proles. Saw a bluetooth speaker for $50, the same lineage as my CD player. Some white sneakers for $30, not terrible but they're not brown. A bucket hat but it's nylon and too small. Off to the women's corner for some clothing inspo and there it was, a Chuba Coat. $30 down from $100 and what else could I do. Still a polycotton mix, but it's just so weird that I love it. Might be difficult to coord though, as it's a knee-length coat that obscures a lot. Maybe a strange backpack.

Realizations and epiphanies of 2019:

1/3/2020

Sedate day cooking, walking around town, taking photos at night. Finished the Fuji Super G 400 rated 100 iso at the small temple nearby with amber lights. Only 2 or so shots that I'm confident in, the rest were rather forgettable. I'm more liberal in terms of what to shoot now, I find that having an unshot roll in my camera hangs in the back of my head. I need to go back to be more deliberate and picky. Looking to put a test roll through the 35 SP next. I know what to expect from the C35, and I'm a bit worried about daily carrying the Petri Color 35.