Hey look at this stuff:
Recently went to an izakaya (after-work drinking place) that was themed like a school. Lots of fun.
Blah blah blog title
Adventure Time!
Today I set out to be a tourist again. It’s amazing how quickly anywhere in the world can get comfortable and boring if you don’t take it upon yourself to go out and see what’s around you. So I found the One Day in Tokyo itinerary on Wikitravel and decided to sort of follow it.
I started off strong by waking up around 9 therefore abandoning the whole “go to the fish market and have sushi for breakfast at 5am” part of the plan. No thank you. If clocks were people their butthole would be 5am, and fish for breakfast sounds like something that is illegal to do to prisoners.
So I went to the Edo-Tokyo Museum and learned about Tokyo’s history.
Check out the incredible process of woodblock printing. Step 1 is on the right, and each step adds more detail. I was impressed.
Next I went to the Meiji Jingu temple garden. That was a nice walk in a park which was frequented by the Emperor and Empress themselves when they were alive.
Then I walked through Shinjuku’s Harajuku and found a place called Calbee Plus, dedicated to nothing but treats made of fried potatoes.
Masaaki Yuasa spoke along with some other folks I didn’t know (but that probably just makes me the Philistine here, not them the unknowns). Here they are discussing the episode he was given free reign to create in Season 6:
OK then I came home and burned some gyoza for dinner and wrote this.
Image & Video Update, Plus Rakuten Tech Conference
Today I put a pin down randomly in the middle of Tokyo on Google Maps:
Then I hopped on a train and went there.
I guess they can’t all be winners.
Anyway, the title says “Rakuten Tech Conference,” which I attended yesterday. Had a great time, and most of the talks are on Youtube. I gave a “lightning talk” about successfully implementing process changes on your team. In lightning talks speakers have a strict 4 minutes to talk on their topic, so I had to rush, but it was a good experience.
Afterward I got to hang out and talk with Nathan LeClaire of Docker (super smart guy working on and showing off some really neat things for a cool company) and the accomplished Jim Coplien who’s been in the software biz for decades, is well-read, and has strong and intriguing opinions on many things from scrum, kanban, & agile in general to organizational patterns and international politics, all of which were extremely fun to discuss with him over beer and Japanese food.
Now for some images and videos I’ve made recently.
The look of horror as this train realizes he’s about to kill some people.
OH GOD NO NOT AGAIN
Finn, Jake, and the Ice King keep me company at work.
Indian Prime Minister feels a 40% success rate = “near impossible.”
This atrocity is Burger King’s limited-time only black burger. The black is mostly food coloring but the cheese has squid ink in it. Try one today! hlgrk…
Open mic at Ruby Room
I probably drink one of these per day. And now you can get them from the vending machine hot!
Ate some delicious Italian style pizza here at Massimottavio.
Ate some delicious Italian style pizza here at Massimottavio.
To our customers who have food allergy and can only read English: fuck you! (At least now you know there’s something you don’t know about our food.)
My latest cat cafe visit
Me and Cope had a good time drinking and eating and talking
Walking off the train, I have to take these baby steps and get knocked around by other commuters. Watch and feel my pain.
A kitten at a cat cafe wants to chew my phone cord (of course).
A man fights sleep outside of a McDonalds and loses. I have been this dude so many times.
Thanks to this walk to Doofles, the neighborhood arcade, I’m sort of OK at Tekken Tag Tournament 2 now.
A photo update regarding music and friends.
It’s a beautiful, rainy day here in Tokyo. Let’s look at some pictures.
I’ve spent a few nights at Shibuya’s Ruby Room. They have a Tuesday night open mic, and I love open mic nights. There’s always such a variety of skill levels and musical styles, and I have a special place in my heart for amateur artists performing for the love of the music. For me the soul of lo-fi and live beats a polished and produced recording any day.
Apart from open mic nights, I also checked out show by The Casablancas there.
Good stuff. They actually opened for another band that night but in my opinion stole the show.
Also, had dinner with coworkers the other night. I love these folks! They really know how to have a good time together and have been super welcoming to me.
I love this country.
Music!
Check out this awesome studio that is a five minute walk from my apartment. I have this space to myself plus use of all the equipment in it for less than $8 an hour! It’s called Gourd Island Studio. I’m pumped: I can play drums again, I can record music and sing loud and plug into nice amps, all without worrying about bugging my neighbor.
Also, I finally went to the Ruby Room last night, which sounds like a strip club, I know, but is actually a pretty well-known music venue in Tokyo.
I had pretty lucky timing, five bands played and they were all really fun and there was a lot of talent on display. Met some cool folks, too. They have a Tuesday night open mic I’ll be back for this week.
I Get To Learn What a Japanese Hospital Is Like
I went to the hospital in Japan. Hooray for new experiences! Mom, I’m fine.
I was doing some squats a few nights ago—no weights, just down and up with my hands in front of me—and I guess I was doing them wrong because after I finished number thirty (the last one) my back sent a very angry letter of resignation to the rest of my entire body.
The next morning I hobbled to the hospital.
When the shift began, all the hospital staff lined up and greeted all the patients in unison with a “good morning,” a bow, some other Japanese I didn’t get, and another bow. That was pretty awesome.
I had an x-ray, two consultations with a doctor, and blood work done. Then I got a week’s worth of two different kinds of pain medication plus about 50 disposable heat pads. The total bill was around ¥8600 (less than $80 USD). Americans reading this will be amazed. Anyone else will be wondering why I’m even mentioning it.
Anyway, may I never spend more than 2 minutes talking about my health problems, a genuinely boring topic, I know. But for what it’s worth, I had a visit to the hospital in Japan and as usual even the worst of experiences was better in every way here.
A Dream
Sometimes I look around and just say to myself, “Wow. I’m here.”
Japan is not heaven or anything but it’s a place I wanted to live. Now, whatever that place’s reality turns out to be, it’s a place where every day I have the ability to look around and say “I did it.”
If you have a dream, no matter how big or small or absurd to others, pursue it now. Make it happen. You can make your dream come true, and nothing will change your life for the better more than proving that to yourself. Nothing can rob you of the knowledge that you set your mind to something and accomplished it.
If you’ve already accomplished something you set out to do, take time as often as you like to remind yourself that you did it.
And if you’ve never had a dream, what are you waiting for? Take a minute today, imagine something that makes you smile. Then go after it.
–Abraham Lincoln
I Get a Package From America (and Other Little Updates)
This one’s for Gina. Thanks for reading!
There are a few difficulties with having a blog and living here:
- I get new and amazing experiences so regularly that if I don’t blog for a week I feel overwhelmed by how much I want to share (which causes me to put off writing for another week and the snowball begins to grow…)
- If I approach an experience with the mindset of wanting to write about it later, I take photos and think about how I would describe it. I spend the moment, as my photojournalist friend Kelly once told me, documenting life instead of living it.
So, lately I’ve just been trying to experience these moments, getting immersed in them and letting myself forget how I would describe it later. It’s been nice.
Now it’s time for a huge messy brain dump. I think I’ll just lay out whatever’s on my mind. Enjoy. 🙂
I got a package!
My friends Vanessa and Moses sent me a box!
They also sent me a cool collection of sci-fi stories based in or about Japan, and toothpaste because I heard it can be hard to find toothpaste with fluoride in it. I think there’s a different fluorine ion in it here instead but readers familiar with chemistry are already noting that I have no idea what I’m talking about so let’s just move on.
I got a guitar and I’m discovering the Tokyo music scene.
Shimokitazawa (“Shimokita” as all the cool kids call it) is an awesome little area near where I live, littered with vintage clothing shops and houses playing live music. I’m going as often as I can.
I got a Yamaha FG-251 acoustic guitar for ¥6000 (about $56 USD), restrung it and adjusted the truss rod. Now I’m trying to overcome my fear of bugging my neighbor by playing it. I mean, I can hear his microwave beep through the walls, so there’s no question whether he’ll hear my strumming. Probably should’ve bought an electric.
I’m also writing music in Garageband while riding the trains. None of it’s any good of course—I think music is the first (only?) thing I’ve ever been able to just give up trying to be great at and started doing just because I love it.
I’m introducing software development process improvements at work.
I’m going to write a separate post on this and link to it here later. Unless you’re into software engineering you’ll probably wanna sit this one out, but it’s making me happy.
I’m learning a lot about not judging and seeing myself in others.
Things can seem pretty different at times. Discovering that a laugh is not always a laugh and can mean many things from “I find this humorous,” to “I have no idea what you just said,” to “I’m feeling pretty uncomfortable right now,” can make you question all of your judgments of others. And that’s been a good thing to question.
Learning you can’t trust your assumptions about another person’s intentions forces you to fall back on faith: what do I think is in the heart of the average person? If you think people are basically good, you’re going to respond to culture shock and culture clash positively, assuming the best when in a situation you don’t fully understand. Think people are basically cruel and every puzzling situation will leave you wondering if you are the butt of an ill-intentioned joke. I’m glad I’m able to believe people I meet are more likely to be kind to the stranger than rude or hateful.
I discovered the mille crepe. Oh my god.
OK I guess that’s enough for now.
Coding in a Shared Office Space
This is the only chair I have to sit in at my computer at home:
Art majors will recognize it from any renaissance painting depicting the seats in hell.
So this morning I said to myself, “I’m in Tokyo, I should be able to find anything I want, and today I want a cheap shared office space to go code in.”
Half an hour’s worth of Googling later and I was on my way down the train line to a shared office space in Shibuya called Allincco.
It was great! 15 minutes is ¥100 (about $1 USD), but the max you pay per day is ¥1000 (under $10 USD). There’s whiteboard and office space available, and in general was just a pretty good temporary work space.
There was free wi-fi of course, free Coke and other sodas, a dozen or so free coffee drinks (making it an obvious choice over working at Starbucks and paying ¥450 for a tall café latte), and cheap ¥100 snacks.
It was no Cat Cafe mind you, but for the price it couldn’t be beat, and after about 10 hours total (some of it last night in my infernal torture device) I was able to throw together a new web version of my pet project Washington’s Rules. 🙂 Today was a good day.
My Not-Allowed-to-Stay-In-The-Apartment-All-Day Day
My company is on break for the Obon holiday for most of this week, and I am determined not to spend it in my apartment watching South Park and Seinfeld on Internet TV. So I gave myself a rule today: out by 10am and back no sooner than 7pm.
I hopped on a train in a direction I never go and asked my girlfriend to pick a number between 1 and 30 (she picked 22). That’s how many minutes I stayed on the train.
The results:
1. Got off the train and started walking around, ended up walking into the area around Sensō-ji, my second time there in a week but this time from behind the temple. Saw a lot I missed by coming in through the Kaminarimon Gate, like the lovely works inside the free admission Taito City Edo Shitamachi Traditional Crafts Museum.
Ate some delicious fried custard stuff and did a little shopping:
Moved on, hop another train and ended up…
2. At Yashio station where I looked at some clothes
And then I stepped into the spot to which, unbeknownst to me, destiny had been leading me all day: The 3rd Planet Game Arcade.
And finally, I rounded the corner to witness a miniaturized horse race betting game. O_O
By the way, did you miss the fact that one of the jockeys’ bodies was horrifically snapped off at the waist? He was just a set of legs. I think that should disqualify him.
I was wandering around inside 3rd Planet thinking “This place smells just like the bowling alleys back home,” when I rounded the corner to discover:
I played one game. One sad little game.
Finally emerging from the incredibly fun and diverse gaming experience that my day had become, I grabbed a bite at the finest McDonald’s I have ever laid eyes on.
And now I’m writing this on the train at 7:30pm. Google maps says I’ll be home in 15 minutes, where I’ll upload all those pictures you just saw. My random train-riding journey took me to the opposite side of Tokyo from my home and cost me about ¥3000 total. Success.
If you’re ever looking for something to do, stop looking and just get outside. Something to do will find you.
Now for some South Park…
The Computer Cheats 
You must be logged in to post a comment.