Before I post the videos, I thought I’d do a follow-up and tell you exactly where I went, what I did, and why. So, here’s a rough Google Map of the route that I took around the Central Visayas. Below it I’ll chronicle each day. For those who are interested, that is. Ha ha. The entries are pulled from shorthand notes in my JET Journal. Needless to say, this is a gargantuan entry. 
Read on if you’re curious!
Wow. I am awesome. How awesome? Lemme tell you. I was recently inspired by a crazy nostalgia kick to hunt down the first video game I ever played to completion. That game was LucasArts’ Loom. (The second and third games I played to the end – over and over again – were Mad Dog McCree and Street Fighter II.) Anyway, after a long bout of searching, I found the version of the game that I used to play, which runs perfectly on the ScummVM emulator.
To quickly convey the story of Loom is difficult. It’s a point and click adventure game, with you controlling a character called Bobbin Threadbare. He’s a member of the great guild of Weavers. They used to do cloth and stuff, but they became so good at it that they weave directly in the fabric of reality by wielding light and music. This basically means that you’re gonna point at a lot of stuff with a stick and then play 4 notes and hope something happens. It’s magic, see. It’s cooler than I make it sound. Anyway, if you follow along and keep reading, you’ll get more than just the gist of the game.
During my searching, I came across a few sites that mentioned a radio drama that was included with boxed editions of the game back in the day. Being a colossal nerd, I had already collected duplicates of the documents that came with the game. The manual, the hint book, and the Book of Patterns (a place to collect sequenced musical notes called patterns), to be specific. I looked around, and sure enough, I found the audio tracks. I first nabbed the English version and the official transcript. Then, on this site, I scored – I found the original audio drama in Japanese! (Ogg Vorbis format audio files, English language PDF only.) There was no transcript, though, so that’s my goal – to create an accurate transcript of the audio drama. If you’d like to come along for the ride, I’m more than happy to have you. Read on for the introduction to the drama in English and Japanese. Read more…
Fail. Don’t just go laughing at the classic Engrish shirts, and feeling smug and superior to Japan. It happens in America too. Ha ha.
(For those who don’t get it, the shirt is grammatically incorrect – as a commenter has noted on the page. The design is what you’d get if you just swapped out the I and NY in the I♡NY design for their Japanese equivalents. 私は♡日本 is wrong. 10 cool points to the commenter who corrects it first. 
Hint: SVO / SOV.)
This is part 2 of 2. The following pictures continue my two week long adventures scuba diving in the Philippines. Look for a video post next week at some point, along with a recap post, and possibly a diving related post. But for now, let’s get to the pictures!
Side notes: yes we went to the Bohol Bee Farm twice (got rained out on the tour the first time), the ketchup is made of bananas and is sickly sweet, those are blacktip reef sharks in the ponds at the Maribago Bluewater Resort, and I only took the last 3 pictures to tell the time by timestamp since I didn’t have a watch. Yay! Also, as long as the 2 picture posts are on the same page, you should theoretically be able to see all 103 pictures in the same set – just click on the thumbnails and go to town.
Shane, from The Nihon Sun, wrote a quick heads-up notice at the JapanSoc Blog that caught my eye today. I found it because Ken Y-N, brains behind What Japan Thinks (when it’s up – ha ha, sorry Ken!), soc’d the article in an attempt to get the message onto the Jams.tv front page. Here’s the success in a screencap. [EDIT: Here's a newer, giant screencap with THIS very article being displayed underneath a story that I soc'd on JapanSoc! I'm all over the page!]
JapanProbe did a really concise and to the point write-up about it, too. Get the word out, and if your blog is being scraped, check your email account for a message from G’Day Japan. Respond to it. They apparently think that silence on a dubious one-shot opt-out notice gives them carte blanche to profit from your blog’s content. Uncool. Read more…
This is part 1 of 2, because I prepared 103 photos, and just can’t imagine putting them all up at the same time. Ha ha. You’d glaze over, I’m sure of it. So I’ll do the pictures today and tomorrow, then I’ll post something Japan-related at the beginning of next week before dropping a trip video on you. Besides, I’ve gotta sift through the nearly 34 minutes of clips I took. Sound like a plan? Yes? Excellent! Let’s look at some pictures!
