Milestone. 10000 kilometers. (6,214 miles.) That’s the distance I’ve driven my little Honda Today scooter. Awesome. Meaningless, maybe. But awesome nonetheless. My commute is longer than I thought. I made this video for one reason: to observe (and share) the full rollover of my odometer. As a wise man once said, “Blessed are the easily entertained, for they will never be bored.” 
Here’s the second lesson. It’s one that a bunch of commenters have mentioned. It’s still pretty simple, though. I don’t usually say the bus guide part, though, usually. I dunno, I guess I feel bad calling someone ugly. By the way, the “busu” comes from the word “busaiku” (不細工) as far as I know. It means “homely” or “plain.” Not very nice. But when you shorten it into a slang expression, which is then spelled in katakana, it becomes stronger. Hence “ugly.” One thing that’s helpful in saying this one quickly is to remember that the u sound on many words that end in su can be sort of…de-emphasized. (That’s why desu sounds like “dess” sometimes and not “de-soo” all the time.) Be judicious when applying this shortcut, and mimic native speakers to use it properly – but for tongue twisters, I say it’s fair. Video responses with you attempting this tongue twister are highly encouraged!
Difficulty: Easy
Kanji: バスガス爆発(ブスバスガイド)
Hiragana: ばすがすばくはつ(ぶすばすがいど)
Romaji: Basu-gasu-bakuhatsu (busu-basu-gaido)
Meaning: Bus gasoline explosion (ugly bus guide)
Audio:
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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!
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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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!)
Silly little video on Friday the 13th. Ha ha. It’s all I had in me today. Tomorrow I play the part of Goldilocks in a play for the Kids Party put on by ICIEA in Imabari City. I look forward to it, but I need my beauty sleep! 
Night!
