Rocking in Hakata

I’ve been sort of fleetingly consumed by motion graphics ever since I used an Apple IIe in the computer lab at my elementary school to program complicated LogoWriter operations to fill my screen with wildly flickering shapes and colors. I thought I’d share a quick history of my amateurish attempts at making a polished logo.

This one is something I cooked up to tag on the front of a video my friend Chris and I put together for our church years ago as an early teen. I had been inspired by a fellow that I met on a plane – he used the program Bryce to animate something while we chatted. I later tried my hand at it, and I turned out this super-jerky ride through a jagged canyon I modeled in the program. It’s a bit embarrassing to look at now, what with the jagged polygons where the land meets the water, and how the logo is backlit at the end, so it’s darkened by shadow. But it was a good first start, I think.

I made this hilariously pretentious logo to tag on the front of the (equally pretentious) student film I made at Waseda University. The assignment was to create an anthropological short. You can see my video here. I’m working on getting it split and re-uploaded to YouTube, which currently accepts videos up to 10 minutes long. For this logo and the next I used Adobe After Effects and a lot of spare time. Ha ha.

Here’s the latest logo that I’ve made. I designed it to be part of the ongoing Japan-related social web project JapanSoc.org – specifically JapanSoc.com. (JapanSoc.org is sort of a nebulous group of bloggers, whereas JapanSoc.com is a social voting site like Digg for Japan-related stuff. The video project is part of the latter, which is itself contributed to in large part by the former.) This was my first dip into HD. The logo was rendered in 720p High Definition, which means a resolution of 1280 x 720. Nice. Hopefully you’ll be seeing it at the front of a JapanSoc video soon!

Deas Customary Drivel, Media, Video

So, the government of Japan decided to follow the silly US economic policy of granting “stimulus” checks to the people. (I call this silly because I’d rather the US government just let us keep our money to start with, not pretend to be so magnanimous in doling out cash we used to be holding… I didn’t actually pay Japanese taxes last year, so this is free cash for me. Sorry Japanese taxpayers! I promise to spend it here.) If you’re currently a registered foreigner in Japan, you’re probably eligible for the payments – but you should check. The money is being meted out by the local governments, so if you don’t live in Imabari City, this may not be of use to you.

I checked this site and found that the notices and application forms were mailed out on Monday (the 13th of April). Comb through what you thought was junk mail and double check. You’ve got until Tuesday, October 13th to apply for your stimulus money. I’ll do a quick summary first, and the application procedure second. Read more…

Deas Customary Drivel, Politics, Unsolicited Commentary, 日本語

Hey all. Got the idea to create a series of Japanese tongue twister lessons and post them on YouTube. This is the first video. I decided to start with easy ones and build, because if I just started with the super chaotic ones I’ve covered before it might intimidate people and turn them off from the get-go. Instead, I hope a bunch of folks will become interested and follow along. I will be building a page that links to all of my tongue twister stuff soon. In the meantime, enjoy the first (super easy) lesson! Video responses with you attempting this tongue twister are highly encouraged!

Difficulty: Easy
Kanji: 生麦生米生卵
Hiragana: なまむぎなまごめなまたまご
Romaji: nama-mugi nama-gome nama-tamago
Meaning: Raw wheat, raw (uncooked) rice, raw egg
Audio:

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Deas Customary Drivel, Humor, Media, Video, 日本語

Deas Customary Drivel

That’s right, I took some pictures of this year’s cherry blossoms in THREE DIMENSIONS. To view these 3-D pictures, you need to be able to cross your eyes. (Sorry!) If you have no idea what this is about, check the original post. These pictures were all taken early last week at Osaka Castle. Stopped there after arriving in Osaka from Taipei, before hopping on the Orange Ferry back to Shikoku. Lemme know what you think! Note – usually clicking on my thumbnails will open the larger versions in an overlay – this time they’ll open in a new tab or window. Some folks said they wished that they could get a larger version – so I linked to the edited originals. They’re big. Hope that works. Enjoy!

Leave me a comment, and if you liked this article, consider submitting it to JapanSoc! (Or if it’s already there, vote for it in the Upcoming section!)

Deas Customary Drivel, Media, Photos

Remember Yahoo’s social weather reporting? Well, they’ve adapted it specifically for this spring’s sakura (cherry blossom) season. If you visit the Japanese Yahoo Weather site, you’ll see links to the page. It’s called 「お花見特集２００９みんなでつくる桜情報」 or “Cherry Blossom Viewing Special Feature 2009: Sakura Forecasts by Everyone.” You can use an interactive map to click through to find viewing areas in your location. If you’re a contributing type, you can submit photos of the blooms. I still haven’t found a voting portion of the site, but I imagine there isn’t going to be one – it’s more collaborative, and such a short-lived thing that the work needed for that seems a little out there.

When you’re looking at a region, the various parks will have their trees rated in one of 5 categories. I’ll briefly explain them here.

My favorite time to go viewing is obviously mankai, followed closely by chirihajime. Ah, sakura. Showing us how sweet and beautiful transience can be. (Watching cherry blossoms falling to the ground is an exemplary occasion to discuss 物の哀れ or mono no aware, the heightened appreciation of beauty intermingled with a kind of entropic pathos. Candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long and all that.) I only wish that the sakura-flavored goodies would stick around longer than their real world counterparts… Ha ha.

Deas Customary Drivel