saki-otakism inc.

2003-10-07T08:13:00.000-07:00

anti-hiatus post
gorgeous. assuming that you just recently forgot your 20months anniversary, and assuming that your gf is a little bit pissed about that, then distracting yourself with [the original illustrated catalogue of ACME products] doesn't make really make you hate yourself less, but it's still worthwhile. :)

2003-10-06T20:25:00.000-07:00

sort of hiatus
duh. i guess u realized by now.

i'm really working on moving the whole thing to a "movable type" platform, and to another url, but i'm simply not done yet. sorry :)

2003-09-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

greetings from nerdhausen.
great. my lan-card broke this morning, sort of. well, it didn't really break, it could still send data, but not recieve, somehow. this caused mysterious ping errors, since my pc was pingable from other pcs, but it couldn't ping other pcs in the network, and this sent people from the network-team searching for hubs hidden behing walls and such.. well, i sent them running around, since i was already getting shakes from being offline for like three hours. :)
didn't solve anything..even hir3z's 1337 haxx0r skillz couldn't rock anything. finally, at like 10pm, i suggested that we could maybe try the lan card from my old pc. as it seems i should've suggested that earlier.. well, nobody asked :)

[bigger]

anyway, sorry for the lack of updates, i'm somehow still in the process of getting settled..

2003-09-13T04:58:00.000-07:00

it's not raining, for once..

[groesser]

still quite unpacked, since i lack shelves there are like 5 unopened boxes , temporary serving as tables / tv-stands. will pick up my table and stuff later this afternoon.
icquing with koalabaerchen and d'ol g at the moment...

2003-09-10T05:47:00.000-07:00

back in good old oldenburg.
five days -or so-, and i'm already so sick of it. complained a lot about it on [larvenstadium.de], my german moblog.
my new room in the dorm is quite nice, i'm sharing bathroom and kitchen with a rather relaxed and decent guy, no problems so far.
bought a gprs/bluetooth/i-mode mobile phone with camera, ordered a phoneline and a dsl-flatrate, tried to register myself at the ward, kept myself busy with all this bullshit.
i'm still not really done unpacking all my stuff, but i'm already quite sure that i forgot a couple of pretty important things, namely my remote-control, without which i can't change to the AV-channel to use my consoles. major suckage..
hehe

will start major redesign-works once i'm settled down, saki-otakism inc. will move from blogger to movable type, from blogspot.com to slurmfactory.com etc etc.. and hopefully hir3z will give me a short css tutorial, to get rid of all these tables once and for all..

2003-09-03T20:38:00.000-07:00

k, last post from japan, for some time at least. will leave in about 24 hours...

2003-09-01T10:19:00.000-07:00

171 / 175
been the first german moblogger who almost froze to death on fujisan, but nobody cared.
now day 171, sucks.
check [play:game] for some me-bashing.. or check here for the picture.

2003-08-27T22:59:00.000-07:00

night-hike
will hike fujisan tonight. wanted to be the first german moblogger to blog the sunrise from the highest mountain in japan, but since yesterday i can't update via my university-account, therefore i am not sure whether i'll actually be able to moblog tonight. we'll see..

2003-08-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

just discovered
the key to ultimate prosperity.. to be a brain-fried retard monkey from outer space.

puppi:
Will start reading some rules tonight.
zoidberg:
which games?
puppi:
I haven't decided yet. Do you have any request?
zoidberg:
nope.. everything is fine with me..
zoidberg:
i'd die to play a japanese table-talk game, but not with my japanese, i guess.. unless i play a brain-fried retard monkey from outer space
puppi:
hehe that would be funny.
zoidberg:
what? to be a brain-fried monkey from outer space or to see me struggling to get at least one sentence in japanese? probably both
puppi:
both =)
zoidberg:
guessed so..
puppi:
Its like me trying to figure out the difference between sausage and wild land the other day.
zoidberg:
yeah
zoidberg:
just that you did better

2003-08-22T10:03:00.000-07:00

saki otakism inc. is on a "the best of the english blogs in japan" list. yatta!
saki-otakism inc.
(Clean cut German dude blogs about his life in Tokyo)
* via [jblogs]

met mister blake himself today, seems i've got a new neighbour. shamelessly pimped biidoro and my various blogs and chatted about the manifestations of evil, from ancient proto-nazis to japans giant cockroaches. way to go, blake!
been to a couple of museums with koalabaerchen today, best was -of course- the ghibli-exhibition in the MOT, chilling on the sea-deck of the [tokyo sealife park] was also nice. will hike mt. fuji on thursday, trying to be the first german moblogger blogging the sunrise straight from fujisan to [larvenstadium.de].

2003-08-21T09:44:00.000-07:00

totally unrelated moblogging. the pic shows ultraman in front of sunshine 60 in ikebukuro, which has absolutely nothing to do with just having spent two wonderfull days in nikko, including -of course- all the standard attractions, and, as a bonus, a major lobster-red sunburn, a boat-trip across chuzenjiko and visual contact with some wild monkeys. yatta!

2003-08-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

the calligraphy-exhibition in ikebukuro..
blogged about this in german already, so you might want to go over to [larvenstadium.de] for the full post. if you can read german, or just to look at the pics..

neat, ne? reminds me of this orson-based series...
koalabaerchen complained that i blogged more in german than in english lately. true, but saki-otakism inc. won't go on hiatus or anything, i bought the domain slurmfactory.com and a neat chunk of serverspace, and i'll move the whole blog to movable type, since i'm damn sick of blogger. ;)
alas, with moving back home from japan, it might take a month or so until things are settled. sorry

2003-08-14T21:15:00.000-07:00

oh boy...
time to grow up, ne?

@koalabaerchen's place, watching [oinkernet], reluctant to leave the bed, cold and rainy outside. what happened to summer in japan? earthquake-season, rainy season, typhoon season.. damn.

hehe, spent some quality time browsing through cnn and the likes, by now it seems that the [blackout] was neither a new terrorist attack, nor a terrorist attack, bush even said that a terrorist attack as a cause could be ruled out. some people however, especially those working / living on higher floors suspected that it was such an attack, since they had to take the stairs.. cute.
ok, so it wasn't terror, the canadians said it was the americans fault, the americans said it wasn't, and bush said: "We're better organized today than we were two and a half years ago to deal with an emergency and the system responded well" -via cnn.com , which is nice, i guess, but what exacly happened two and a half years ago? i read up on [previous blackouts], but no blackout two and half years ago was mentioned, and we'll be treated with yet another re-run of five-second "plane smashing into tower" clips looped for half an hour next month, when sept. 11 will turn 2. so what happened two and a half years ago?

favourite quote:
Michael Sheehan, deputy commissioner for terrorism of the New York Police Department:
"There is no evidence of any terrorism at this point. ... We've talked to Washington and there are rumors, but none of them pans out." -via blackout quotes / cnn
paranoia...

2003-08-12T08:57:00.000-07:00

merchandise confessions

had a wonderful day with koalabaerchen yesterday, been to odaiba, bought gorgeous futurama-merchandise, some souvenirs for friends, took a ride on the ferris-wheel and gambled, cause i won free coins.. ;)

been to a museum in ueno today, ate out with koalabaerchen and bought more merchandise, this time action-figures from one of my most favourite comics, bone.. so now i own [gran'ma ben - with smiley bone's mystery cow suit] and if you turn gran'ma's head she throws a punch. neat.. if only i had smiley bone, who's supposed to be inside the costume, but -of course- sold seperately. guess i gotta buy some more stuff next week.. ;) yatta!
added permalinks, wanted to do that since like a year or something. great... will move saki-otakism inc. to a new domain next month, and run it via movable type anyway...

2003-08-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

trackback
yatta! see me making the ultimate zertz-moves, on puppi's [play:game] blog. (japanese ability would definitely be a plus, otherwise you can have fun watching the pics, almost exclusivly featuring me..)
stayed at jean's and puppi's place all sunday, for my weekly dose of boardgaming-fun and, as a special treat, for a pay-tv live broadcast of the [pride] "total elimination" 2003 grand prix.
both playing games and seeing some sweet knock-outs (check for crocop's left high kick!!) was great fun. like almost every weekend, i returned home happy, well-feed and with a couple of new games on my "to buy" list for the spiel 2003..
this weekend it was [pangea], a game i'd like to blog about more, but i'm running out of time.. sorry.. damn internet-cafe...

2003-08-08T09:45:00.000-07:00

another small update
stayed over at koalabaerchen's house yesterday. tried to fix her pc, played mister driller for ages, and finally, on my way, just when i was sooo sure i was going to make the hard-stage, the batteries died. damn. watched a lot of tv too, english news - happy bilingual tv - and cartoons on "cartoon network". didn't realize how much i missed my daily doses of no-brain entertainment...
no big news besides that, thanks to number ten it's nice and windy outside, will meet up with koalabaerchen tomorrow, then go over to puppi's place on sunday, for a treatment of aircondition, satelite tv, and, best of all, [pride] via pay per view.. gorgeous.. ;)

2003-08-04T22:36:00.000-07:00

blog connections.
while sending mails i overheard a conversation at the table next to me, where the sensei was encouraging students to find out something about the internet-usage of mobile phones.. since i just recently joined the mobloggin' society i couldn't resist the temptation to go over and talk to the prof, [james curry].
showed of my blog, as well as [koalabaerchen's cool moblog] and of course [tokyotidbits.com].

other news:
h1r3z is back! the only person ever to use my comment feature (which is broken btw, can't fix it in the near future, sorry...)

2003-08-01T00:47:00.000-07:00

another mobile post.. featuring a photograph of a photograph. great. for interesting moblogging, go to [the koalabaerchen files]. and the best thing is, like 50% of koalabaerchen's posts are about me.. yatta!

2003-07-31T23:50:00.000-07:00

mobloggin' rocks.

yatta!!! (second try)

tadaaa. thanx to mfop2 even dummies like me are now able to moblog. still, i'm not really satisfied yet... so while trying to set up mfop2 i also e-mailed nico from [couchblog.de] asking for tech-help. neat, eh? just because you've got a neat looking blog - and a couple of smart sounding links with words like php and rss in them - you get annoyed by strangers asking you to help them, because they (err.. that would be me then) can't tell tell unix from perl, or whatever..

ah, the picture is from kyoto, by the way..

2003-07-31T23:41:00.000-07:00

sigh.. work, damn thing

2003-07-31T23:19:00.000-07:00

my first moblog. please work..

2003-07-31T21:39:00.000-07:00

stumbled across another damn cool online comic, [buttercup festival].. especially liked [this] strip a lot...

2003-07-30T10:18:00.000-07:00

lazy day
to complete my multi-medial attack, for the fourth and last time: happy birthday steph! (via larvenstadium.de, e-mail, phone and now saki-otakism inc.)
spent some time updating the links on this blog, and - as usual - ended up reading comics. this, in addition to cam-sessions with [koalabaerchen] (check the pics!!!) proves to be a real time-eating-monster. anyway..
met up with koalabaerchen today, cancelled fishing due to heavy rain this morning, went shopping, karaoke and to the arcades instead. need to ask koalabaerchen for the japanese name of the taiko-game we've been playing a lot lately..

will play futsal on monday (in yokohama), hike fuji-san sometime next week, help takashi moving and hopefully find time to blog something coherent by this weekend..

2003-07-28T10:25:00.000-07:00

kinkakuji, kyoto

sooo cool. the gold looked so surreal, almost cheap.. strange, eh? dodged almost all the busloads full of tourists, yatta!

don't really get time to blog so much lately, (damn you, msn messenger) hehe, since i've been videochatting with koalabaerchen and puppi a lot lately. went eyeshopping today, checked the electronics-stores for a webcam for koalabaerchen.. bought super-discounted and extremely comfortable reebok travel trainer (for women?) shoes.. i guess i was so happy to find something cheap and in MY SIZE that i just had to buy them.. ;)

2003-07-26T00:18:00.000-07:00

sorry for the lack of updates..
spent some wonderful days in kyoto.. altough there were so many beatiful temples and shrines, i think the one that had the deepest inpact on me was the [sanjusangendo], with it's 1001 kannon.. will blog more about kyoto later, just got wrapped in my (too short) yukata by a collective effort of koalabaerchen and her mum, and will go to see the hanabi (fireworks) along the sumida river tonight..

2003-07-20T12:19:00.000-07:00

another online moment.
chatting with puppy and endless rain (see picture below).
will meet up with puppi tomorrow, play some board-games and chat, i guess.

been to the biidoro-live today, mailed mie from tokyo tidbits asking for help, since we'd like to morph koalabaerchen's blog into a moblog, so that she post via her mobile. will go to kyoto from wednesday to friday, will shop for a me-sized yukata on tuesday.. dude, that almost resembles some sort of a social life, ne? hehe.. and above all, there's koalabaerchen, drop-dead cute..
shiawase..

2003-07-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

tokyo moment
chatting with puppi at moment, via web-cam.. in a korean i-cafe, packed with people playing war-craft,
and chinese people talking *yelling via internet-phone

2003-07-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

small update
ahh, another cool page [have some hats].
karaoke with koalabaerchen, visits to the library, a trip to kyoto next week, my family going to sweden tonight, felt wanderlust and longing for nature upon hearing that..

sent an e-mail to [exploding dog] and requested a picture.. ;)
will go to the zoo with koalabaerchen tomorrow.

2003-07-16T21:51:00.000-07:00

comics..
weheehee.. [this] is soo damn funny.. [upper pond visit].
other fun webcomics: [machall], [bob and george] (currently offline), [megatokyo], [little gamers], [slackerz] etc... oh.. and [he is just a rat]

stumbled across a rpg-shop in shinjuku the other day (part of the "yellow-submarine"-network), and ended up buying [sworld world], a japanese rpg set in the [record of loddos war] world. since it's in japanese i get almost nothing, and the lack of graphics (except for some cheesy ones that look like low-quality xerox-copies of illustrations used in the very first rpg-books) doesn't really improve that, but still, it's the first japanese rpg i own... oh, and it's hardcover, yatta! (say hi to "baggage allowance exceeded")

oh, forgot [homestarrunner] and [weeble and bob] while linking the comics..

2003-07-15T09:42:00.000-07:00

darn blogger.
first a couple of posts showed up double, then the last two weeks were suddenly gone, then, after random republishing, back again. stupid thing..
anyhoo, it's tuesday night, and i haven't blogged (in english) for the last couple of days..
sunday was damn cool, went over to ro's and kyoko's place, played some boardgames ( [dvonn] [dvonn] [pueblo] [new england] ) and met their friend masaki, the first japanese guy i met that shares my love for roleplaying games ("table talk" in japanese). had the same way back, and with a bit of luck caught one of the last trains from shibuya. exchanged mail-adds, chatted about rpgs and gundams.. despite being really hyper while we talked i got quite blue later that night, when finally realizing that with my crappy japanese i could never join a japanese "table talk"-group, since rpgs are all talking, as the name indicates. sucks..
met koalabaerchen on monday, spent all day in university or trains, which turned out to be quite fortunate, for there was quite a big ruckus at our house when i came back. it turned out that this australian guy living there had moved out, to the surprise of a couple of people he borrowed a shirt, a tie and some money from. (just in case you read this, derrick, you suck..) well, all i gave him was four packs of noodles to save him from starvation (and to stop him from stealing stuff from the fridge), and i didn't expect them back anyway... ;)

today's been rather laid-back, coinlaundry before (!) noon, met koalabaerchen, talked to her new tandempartner and my new housemate mona, read 200yen enterpriste novels.

2003-07-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

hurry hurry..
met up with [teru and madoka] today. had dinner, played darts (sort of) and doodled names for their soon-to-be-borne child. i think in the end we all opted for shiori or kotone or so. i of course suggested "meseria", the most beautiful name of all, a couple of times, yet i guess i could not really convince them.. well, shiori has nice kanji, so i could live with that. ;)
watched tv, listened to one-minute clips of wagner's "ritt der walkueren" on amazon.de and generally had a good time. ;)

2003-07-09T10:13:00.000-07:00

boredom.
more work on the german blog, [larvenstadium.de]. does anyone know how i can include random-text on my blog (like, from a file i created) WITHOUT having to dig my way through some pearl-codebooks, and without having to find out if my server has a cgi-bin somewhere, etc. help. //hm, maybe i'll ask ro this sunday, he should know.
will meet koalabaerchen at her university tomorrow (=i'll use the pc while she attends her lectures), more updates then..

2003-07-07T10:12:00.000-07:00

bikkuri!
i didn't suck while playing soccer, rejoice!
met masa and shu at the station, and off to yokohama we drove. one and a half hours, some stops at kombinis and a couple of wrong turns later we were at some vaguely rural (couldn't see much, the only light out there was from the car's headlights) riverside with a tiny bamboo-forest, but not at the futsal-place. twenty minutes of constant phonecalls, sudden line-changes and various traffic-rule violations later we were ordered to park at the next station, and someone came to pick us up. yatta, the futsal-place, at last!
won't bore you too much with futsal details, showed off my stamina to make up for the obvious lack of skill and ran around like crazy. made two goals in four games, and, best of all, no injuries this time. went to a [yakiniku] restaurant afterwards, and i got a little bit blue listening to their conversations, getting maybe a third of it, being able only to contribute basic stuff. but no one noticed, for in japan i am always rather silent at conversation, when they are held in japanese only.

2003-07-06T10:14:00.000-07:00

short entry
sunday night. or monday morning, depends on individual date/time-zone. spent a grrreat weekend with koalabaerchen, feel like i'm jetlagged. didn't play football tonight since the rest of the team had to work late, real late (i guess you can call 1am really late.) at first i thought they were making weak apologies for ditching me, saying that they had to work late while actually being partying somewhere, but the background-noises sounded kinda construction-site-ish.. or the party already hit stages where playing football would've been out of question anyway.. ;)

linkage:
yay. meta-blog [schockwellenreiter] linked me. yatta!
another blog, [japaneze] reviewed saki-otakism inc., "*** Written by a mad German. I like it. So German that it reminds me of all the lovely German's I've met over the years. Now what would have the world been like if the US had decided to speak German instead of English. (At least I wouldn't understand what George W is dribbling on about. Don't you think all Americans abroad should be made to wear the Stars and Stripes so we can laugh at them in the streets? Being a Brit, I make no apologies for the Idiot Blair but at least the masses said loud and clear that the War was wrong.)". well, i got three stars, and that's what counts, ne? yatta ii

2003-07-04T10:18:00.000-07:00

headline?
ahh, poor neglected blog. but rejoice, finished (sort of) working on [larvenstadium.de], and am able to satisfy my blogging needs in either english or german.
scheduled for this weekend is the "[koalabaerchen & me] 18 months" anniversary, so no blogging etc. bought a cute present today, hopefully she'll like it.

thanks to my german background i am once again mistaken for a good soccerplayer and invited to a game in yokohama on monday evening. i'm especially exited about that because we'll go there by car, which means that i'll get to see something else than railway-tracks while traveling.
my strategy is to either score or cause one own-goal in the first five minutes, loose my face, apologize, and then play 85 minutes without worrying that i might fuck up thing, since i already did so bigtime. quite a plan, eh?

2003-07-01T09:42:00.000-07:00

k-1 blues.
one of the benefits of living in japan, next to having no privacy and physical contact with people you don't like, is that you can see a lot more martial arts on tv than back in germany. or so i thought, until i saw k-1 [enter the beast ii 2003] this sunday.
three words. pathetic, showcased, boring.
duh, if i was a k-1 fighter i'd be ashamed to be connected with this evening. if i wouldn't love kickboxing as much as i did i'd honestly never watch a fight again. i won't turn this into a long rant, don't worry, but:
toa vs nakanishi - nakanishi is one of those "shin nihon" wrestler-guys, which was damn obvious. he looked as if i he was throwing punches for the first time in his life. didn't keep his guard up, too. toa, not very skilled himself, took half a round to notice that this wasn't a taunt, but lack of technique, took the invitation and knocked nakanishi out with some big haymakers. great. it got even worse, when the fight was over someone handed him a microphone, so that toa could brable something about not leaving this ring before giant-baby bob sapp wouldn't come in the ring to fight him. sapp came, they pushed each other a little bit (if it would've been real, someone would've punched), toa's stupid maori facial "tattoo" (hi tyson) began to wash off and everybody left the ring.
fujimoto vs butterbean - butterbean, a giant humanoid jell-o thing, waddled into the ring (american flag pants, of course), punched fujimoto once, yelled and tried to make a mean face into the camera, yelled some more, waddled out of the ring. if this is where k-1 is heading, sapp, butterbean.. good night.
if it wasn't for the koyasu vs maksutaj and aerts vs nakasako (ahh, finally, kickboxing) fights i'd never watch k-1 again.
musashi vs silva. great. a 2.25meter monster punching japan's best fighter while he's on the ground, people dashing into the ring, big ruckus. sucks. at least it looked like it wasn't showcased at all, rather real testosterone overkill.

all this bullshit, maori-wardancers in the ring (what the fuck?), wrestling-like microphone sessions, all that takes away the credibility of real kickboxing. or maybe it's just me..

2003-06-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

insert headline here
damn. thanks to stupid university upload-downtime (?) i can't update my german blog [larvenstadium]. the pages can still be accessed, but for some odd reason i can't upload anything to my account, so we'll all have to wait until things get sorted out. sucks...

anyway,
good news:
- nice weekend with koalaberchen
- yet another [biidoro]-live on sunday
- bought a phonecard, talked to steph, damien and, as requested by takashi, with my mum
- my sister ist now officially in love with the pichi-pichi-oshiri's of spanish matadores. hehe (ahh, nicht boese sein, ja? nur spass!)

bad news:
- confirmed my flight for september, sucks big time..
- once again found great shoes, damn cheap (at least for tokyo-style prices), but of course 28.5cm max size. great. i sometimes hate having 29.5-30cm feet.
- just realized that i am totally out of sync with music etc. bands i used to listen to, like [type 0 negative] or [lacuna coil] have new albums out, and i didn't get to listen (=download) them yet. nor will i be able to do so while in japan. (send md's!)
- my [neopets] probably hate me by now. not being online 24/7 sucks..
- miss watching futurama. need.. season.. five..
- steph goes to the gym, all damien does in university is sports, and i.. well, i barely manage to do three chin-ups.
-> i will get my ass kicked when i return to my dojo in germany... knowing that sucks.

2003-06-26T01:18:00.000-07:00

masked politicians?
is it just me or.. i mean.. duh. a masked politician, in neon-gotham. how does he make speeches? drop-kick the opposition to make a point? who will tap him out? can he fly, jump from skyscraper to skyscraper, will there soon be a big batman-like light-signal on the purple skies looming over downtown tokyo? how will the conservatives counter? how will their masked politician look like? captain conservative??

and the worst of it is, he looks damn cool in his mask. the great sasuke. oh yeah, and [i didn't make this up], just in case you were wondering..
but then again, this has circulated through hundreds of japan-based blogs. i'm just warming this up because now "the great sasuke" won the right to keep wearing his mask. sick.

2003-06-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

siebenbuergen?
ahh, it's wednesday morning, 1pm. just woke up about an hour ago 'cause damien called. since then i did nothing productive at all, and now i'm using the upstairs-pc to blog while waiting for damien to arrive.
i've been to frankfurt yesterday, to apply for my 'working holiday visa'. the consulate is on the 23rd floor in building located in what frankfurtians like to call "mainhattan".. :) anyway, i've been there for two hours or so, and after handing in all my papers and some waiting, and some more waiting, i was asked to come inside to get interviewed or something. after being interviewed for about a minute the interviewer had to take a phonecall, and i spent another 15 minutes waiting.. when the guy finally came back we just chatted about my previous trip to japan for like five minutes, until he said something like "ok, i think we can issue the visa, good luck in japan.." so much for the interview..
gotta go there again on monday, to pick it up..
you've read my complaints about germany's unfriendly civil servants / officials.. well, the woman checking all my papers for sure could've kept up with all the german official i had to deal with in the last months. maybe she had a military background, or maybe she's been living in germany too long.. she didn't smile at me at all, nothing but stern unfriendlyness. hehe.. and koalabaerchen always complained about how unfriendly germans were in comparison to japanese. :)

anyway, i'm happy, i've got my visa, nothing to worry about anymore. therefore, from today i'll start the insane goodbye-tour. i'll meet up with damien, beat him to bloody pulp with the cool new 13hit tag combo i learned for doa2, we'll go shopping for shoes and stuff, then somehow spend the evening playing games. tomorrow we'll go to landau, hike the 'seven castles' trail damien discovered, maybe summon the others and play werewolf. i'll sleep over at damien's place and we'll go shopping to mannheim on friday, then back to my place.. (maybe). on saturday i'll take a train to woellstein to meet up with [d'ol g], where i'll spend the weekend. on monday morning i'll take the train to frankfurt, pick up my visa at the japanese consulate, the hike over to the indian embassy to hand in the visa-applications for my mum and my sisters (they'll go visit northern india in some weeks). the paperwork done i'll meet up with kathi, maybe visit the museum of modern art, then take the train home.. phew.. :)

2003-06-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

damn rain.
woke up early, cause it was rainin.. -no, that wasn't even rain anymore, that was something else- so bad that all the exploding drops were squeezed through the mosquito-nets of my windows. rescued my t-shirts, closed the windows and went back to sleep. woke up later, mailed koalabaerchen, and, since it was still raining, turned around to catch another noseful of sleep. (do you say that? noseful? whatever..)
woke up (i guess i was missing the rain-noises), checked my mobile (=read: watch), damn, 3something pm. reconsidered my schedule (coin-laundry, call british airways, get a haircut, shower, withdraw money, breakfast, play gameboy, go to the biidoro concert in shimokitazawa), made a new schedule (shower, breakfast, shimokitazawa)...

the [biidoro]-live was really cool, they also played (two?) new songs that really rocked. chatted with bandmembers and other people, went home, chatted with koalabaerchen on the phone, watched tv.
takashi said i should call my mum every once in a while. i guess he's right. sorry mum!

2003-06-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

tokyo - 101 days
wow. a hundred and one days. time for a short compilation:

five things that rocked so far:
- every single minute with koalabaerchen
- playing (german!) boardgames with cool people
- late-night soccer in the park, making friends
- finally discovering that live music rocks. go biidoro!
- seeing the sun rise at least 25 out of 100 days

five things that sucked:
- no internet-connection
- being to damn lazy to learn japanese, not being able to communicate all the time
- people that bitch about foreign couples, looking at koalabaerchen and me
- chinese dinner manners, or the lack of them..
- gokibuli (cockroaches)

five things i bought:
- color tv
- gameboy advance sp
- a book signed by araki, just for me
- the first orange sneakers of my life
- loads of uniqlo t-shirts

five things i miss the most about germany:
- interne.. no just kidding. my friends
- economy size cereal
- privacy
- all my books
- the t3-flatrate at home

five things i want to do in japan
- celebrate my birthday with koalabaerchen
- climb mount fuji
- go fishing
- see something else than tokyo
- get a pika-pika haircut

2003-06-22T12:01:00.000-07:00

sorry for the crude look of this page at the moment, as it seems the university-server (and with him all my graphics) fscked himself up or something. this also means that the german blog and most of the projects are lost, grrrrreat.
(if you see pictures etc, ignore this entry)

will update tomorrow, today's day 100 (well, now it's already 101 i guess), yatta!

2003-06-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

what a day.
today's been great, for once woke up before noon, went to uniqlo to buy a t-shirt for my sister becky and one for koala-chan, then went to the working holiday bureau in nakano and looked for a job (nada, who needs germans anyway?) and met up with koalabaerchen later.. ate out in ootoya, gave her the cute winnie the puh keychain i got from the vending machines in front marui young in shinjuku and generally had a wonderful day.
since girls get randomly attacked in subways and around stations lately, i always take koalabaerchen home. just when we were about to enter the train the e-mail server finally decided to deliver my mail, so i got two mails from koalabaerchen and one from my penpal rie. she mailed me to tell me that she had changed her e-mail address, so i gave my mobile to koalabaerchen, asking her to press the right buttons to save the new address (i can only create new entries, can't read the edit-things yet). well, unfortunately my stupid stupid stupid penpal changed her mail-addy to natural-[my name].paradise@blabla...
i guess koalabaerchen and i were shocked equally.. she handed me my mobile with a blank stare and started to walk away, followed by me, trying to make sense out of this all. while i was trying to sort out that mess we missed a couple of trains, and some more later on another station, cause i couldn't help crying. well, that surely amused A LOT of salarymen, masters in the art of "staring while pretending not to notice anything".
great. anyway, so in the end koalabaerchen hugged me again...

phew. this was way too unreal.

does anyone living in japan watch the "learn german" program on nhk educational? do not watch that. the guy is creepy, the "german" girl cooking a german meal was probably polish and the whole show in general was rather odd. but then again, maybe it's closer to reality this way...

2003-06-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

i like bats
went to play football (soccer) as usual last midnight. when i came there, the whole court was empty, except for a rather tall and extremly goofy looking guy in red sneakers, short pants, an xxl-sized sweater and a big white towel wrapped around his head.. he was standing in the middle of the soccer-field doing something that looked like someone on hallucinogene drugs was trying to mock one of those "stretch and get slim" videos staring permanent-grinning ex-starlets.
when i walked past him he said:
"are you [name]?"
me: "yes."
"nice to meet you"
me: "oh, nice to meet you."
"where are you from?"
me: "germany."
"the others will come soon"
me: "good."
"you've got a 'kozure okami' tattoo, right?"
me: "yes."
"can i see it?"
me: (shows tattoo..) "does it look stupid?"
"no, it's cool. i'm [incomprehensible]."
me: (says something that sounds vaguely like the word i just heard)
"no, [still uncomprehensible]"
me: "oh.."
(he repeats it a couple of times, i finally get it..)
me: "nice to meet you. how are you?"
"fine, thanks. why are you here?"
me: "because of my girlfriend."
"and for how long?"
me: "for three months. today is day 93"
"you're quite tall."
me: "no." (silence) "i like bats"
"do you like dogs?"
me: no. but i like bats"
"and you like cocoa, right?"
me: "yes. van houten cocoa."
"oh, the others."
me: "yes, i know."

that kinda resembles the conversation we had. for parts i'm pretty proud of it, since it was all in japanese.. but then again.. anyway, i forgot why i typed this down, so i can't really make the point intended, but i still think that this sample-conversation somehow shows how my life here is like. as for socializing, it's kinda akward, yet the ever-present surreality (it's midnight in some dim-litted park, and goofy himself is talking to me) helps a little bit.
so anyway, the goofy-guy was a co-worker of the guys i've been playing with, and apparently they've briefed him a little bit about me. played and chatted (surprisingly more chatting than playing, since i brought my dictionary..) for like two hours, so i missed the k-1 fights from paris, but i guess it was worth missing it.

ok, almost out of time, will meet koalabaerchen tomorrow, yay!

2003-06-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

new blogger.
wow, my blog is ported to the new blogger-system already. without fucking anything up. how un-blogger-ish. anyway.
i suck for not posting the last days, but i was either busy, asleep (slash watching tv) or far away from any online-access.. (shiver).
wednesday was pretty cool, for i met up with kyoko, ro and toshi (can i link your hp here??) and played boardgames!! yatta! we played some card game (as usual, our selective-memory hero remembers the mechanics of the game in every detail, but didn't bother memorizing the name) and then played [new england]. ate out later (yupp, forgot the name of the food, even though i asked koalabaerchen at least five times..)
didn't do too much the other days, met up with koalabaerchen and her friends and went to drink out, did my usual workout-laps and watched some cheesy (but english-spoken) movies on late-night tv.

bought some [gloomy bear] pins and things today.
will meet up with koalabaerchen tomorrow. btw, HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!

2003-06-10T09:34:00.000-07:00

tuesday
went to koalabaerchen's university today, to meet up with her (and to have free internet-access.) just when i was jogging towards the tower (being ten minutes late) koalabaerchen called me on my mobile, saying that she was still back home in bed. so i went to akihabara instead, eyeshopping for comics and games. however, eyeshopping sucks if you know that you aren't going to buy anything anyway, so i got bored real soon and went home.
email-chatted with my sis in spain yesterday, while scooping the local GEO-entertainment store for cheap used gameboy advance games. i guess i'll end up buying either [kirby]'s new game [nigthmare in dreamland] or the [yoshi] adventure..
well well, i'll meet up with one of my co-workers and her husband tomorrow.. happy socializing!

2003-06-07T10:28:00.000-07:00

another low-impact day.
tried to find the "puchin pudding" commercial via the [cm database], but failed. does anyone know where i could find that online? koalabaerchen, help!!
will go to the [araki] exhibition in [ebisu] tomorrow, after checking the [warhol] exhibition in the parco gallery, shibuya.
yupp, it's the rainy season, which means indoor-activities, such as watching tv, or museal enjoyments. thnx to koalabaerchen's mum we're never running short of "free admission" tickets. danke!

ps:
i guess i'll go see [naglfar] next month. all the j-pop around me really made me feel the need for something raw. and what could be better than damien's most fav. swedish metal band? uhm, damien: black, death.. what are they again? black-death metal? ;)

2003-06-06T02:01:00.000-07:00

small update.
i'm having annoyingly creative headlines lately, i know. sorry. anyway, didn't do anything noteworthy, koalabaerchen stayed over, so i didn't blog yesterday night. to be honest, lately i've been spending a lot of time working on [unbemannt. radio aus dem jahr 3030], a german blog i'll run together with damien and stephisto.
well, i'm in koalabaerchen's university now, (=free internet), and will go to [akihabara] to see the biidoro-live at club goodman.

2003-06-03T09:17:00.000-07:00

about japanese tv
ok, all clear. now that i switched from antenna to cable i'm able to recieve all-night tv, on ten channels. but still, i'm disappointed.
anyway, didn't do too much today, watched tv a lot, drew the flyer for the next [biidoro]-live (6/6 akihabara, [club goodman]).
watched a really funny show around midnight, they asked foreigners to recreate japanese dishes from a vast array of ingredients, but of course without showing them the recipe.. hehehe.. i laughed tears when this brazilian girl mixed a weird chocolate-sauce and poured it over the tempura-things she cooked. sad but true, that was today's highlight.
oh, and i emailed the guy from [little gamers], in a rather weak attempt to meet an internet celebrity (sort of. at least to me. ah, whatever..).

2003-06-02T09:29:00.000-07:00

big update..
duh, got a lot to catch up with..
ok, where did i stop last time?
right, the aquarium. boy, the aquarium. as expected, it was ram-jammed with kids, and there was a constant screaming and yelling going on, either out of excitement about some cute multicolored fish or out of fear after seeing a rather big specimen.. didn't see so much of the outside-section (pinguins with skyscrapers in the background) since it was pouring like hell. not that it would've made a big difference, i was already soaked anyway.
met up with koalbaerchen later, ate out at ootoya, went to my place, complained about not having a tv - then koalabaerchen found an add in metropolis (i never really bother to read the classifieds part, all the "handsome caucasian man looking for cute & skinny girlfriend to have fun with" bullshit makes me sick.. anyway, so koalabaerchen found an add about a really cheap tv, and best: within walking distance.. blablabla.. so in the end, I BOUGHT A TV!! finally! yeah!!! by now, i got it wired and all, ready to entertain me. sidenote:
dunno, i always thought of japan as the hyper-tv country, i'd plug in my tv and then it'd almost explode with at least 70 channels, broadcasting at double speed 25hours a day, eight days a week. however, i was really surprised when half of the ten channels went blank/static at 2am, some a little bit later.. funny, eh?
anyway, gotta go on: sunday. koalabaerchen went shopping, i met up with teruyuki and helped him moving his and his wife's stuff from their old apartment in "cosmo heights" to their new place. bugger. just when i was getting used to live in a shoebox i had to see their new, big 3dlk flat.. sucks. hehe.. so yeah, we somehow managed to get it all done, then went shopping for a giant refrigerator, tv, dvd, etc etc.. ate out later, then went to a print-club to take some pics. the first machine somehow wound up and showed an error message, so we complained and went to another one.. kyoko, madoka's friend, turned out to be a real wizzard when i came to operating the machine, she was really damn fast, and it even looked cool.. (i always suck. by the time i've made my decision about which heart to put where the time's already run out..). got our pics, the met the nerdy staff-member who was resetting the error-machine. asked him for the money the machine ate, but he said that wasn't possible. kyoko and teru started arguing with him, and it was finally teru's body language (esp. his clenched fists) that convinced the guy that it was better not to risk his nose and position for 400yen. sucker.
went jogging later that night, met some guys in the park and joined them for two hours of past-midnight soccer. yeah! i'm socializing!!!

2003-05-30T09:07:00.000-07:00

tokyo. day 77 (or maybe 78).
tourist day.
was about time, wasn't it?
dressed up in my cool pants, sky-blue border-shirt donated to me by takashi, unearthed my sunglasses, fed the md with a "mickey finn/aphrodite" mixtape and finallt had a real "tourist-day". went up to the 45th floor of the [tokyo metropolitan government building] and enjoyed the [view]. from both observatories, the north AND the south one.. how daringly touristic, indeed.. then hung around in shinjuku, watched people, went to a park i saw from the tower, took photos in the shrine and in the homeless-town (a real town out of cardboard-boxes and blue plastic planes.. amazing..).

met up with koalabaerchen later, ate out ect..
tomorrow i'll go to the aquarium (i'm dying to see this little fella) in ikebukuro's sunshine city, since it will be closed for good this weekend. then koalabaerchen, then help [teru] moving on sunday, while koalabaerchen goes shopping.

oh, btw.. someone mailed me about a roleplaying game-thing i wrote years ago. god, i wish i had my pc here, or at least a pc at all.. sigh.

2003-05-29T00:49:00.000-07:00

goldfish.attack
hehehe.. check [this] page. i was reading comics on [no 4th wall to break] and somehow ended up there. dunno what i did wrong. even worse, i can't even check my "stupid settings", since the pc (and therefore the menu) is in japanese. great.
but actually, today (and even better, yesterday too) things truly [rocked].
not that i did anything special. in fact, i didn't do anything at all.. which was kinda nice, in it's own particular way. spent hours listening to new records, the best was definitely [the flashbulb - girls.suck.but.YOU.don't]. yay.
spent the last days reading a big book about ancient [german myths]. kinda funny, eh? being in tokyo, surrounded by all that neon, fast trains and such, reading about german history.

and to something completely different. when going to koalabaerchen's university, i usually take the train until ichigaya. today, while walking towards the exit, i saw [this]. gee, my heart hurts when i see that. being used to the lovely & lonely lakes of sweden, hidden in dark forests, surrounded by nothing but stones and trees - being the only one there, merging with nature... and then, in the middle of tokyo, there's a pond, full of goldfish(?), each fished catched and released a dozen times a day.. sigh. that's so sick.
I DEFINITELY NEED TO GO THERE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!! wee! yupp, it's true, i'll go and catch goldfish.. [tomorrow???]

2003-05-26T23:56:00.000-07:00

update?
darn. blogger ate my post. great.
(i know i know i know.. type in the editor or elsewhere, copy & paste.. yada yade yada..)
sorry for the lack of updates.. mum mailed me because the earthquake was covered in the german news. since it was far away from tokyo it didn't shake sooo bad, but still strong enough to make you feel weird. this was the first earthquake i experienced in public, in the tower of koalabaerchen's university. once everybody realized that the earth was shaking all conversations died, and everybody stared at something else that was moving, but normally not supposed to do so. i personally found the swaying / vibrating windows pretty awesome, as well as the fact that you could actually see the tower swaying.. gee. anyway, as soon as the shaking stopped some people packed up and left (no use running away from an earthquake, eh?), while the rest burst into admitting various levels of scaredness.

deutsch? dann kann man jetzt die abenteuer unseres helden auch in deutsch nachlesen, im moment noch mit beta-titel [unbemannt.de // radio aus dem jahr 3030] und mit fehlendem web-design, aber schon etwas text.
brauche dringend html-hilfe.. (*hint hint)

2003-05-25T13:16:00.000-07:00

insert headline here
darn. was this blog blank all weekend? when i checked it, it didn't display any posts.. sucks...
anyway. it's monday, 4.something in the morning and i'm wide awake.

ok, let's try to recap the weekend. met up with koalabaerchen, bought a [nohohon-zoku] t-shirt. (hence the graphic...) sky-blue. poor me, being so poor, the only things affordable at the moment are retail-shirts from uniqlo. great. anyway, went to ebisu with koalabaerchen, but missed the araki-exhibition because i didn't bother to read the whole "opening times" leaflet. got some books from a rather boring german library in aoyama to feed my brain, finished one book already. must.. read.. ..
sunday morning = karaoke.
hey schwesterherz, here's the list of songs i sang:

beatles - for no one
supertramp - breakfast in america
styx - mr. roboto
war - lowrider
roxette - the look
red hot chilli peppers - by the way
genghis khan - dschinghis khan
buggles - video killed the radio star
cranberries - salvation
bangles - manic monday
johnny cash - ring of fire
beatles - lucy in the sky with diamonds

ok.. that's about it...

2003-05-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

thank god it's friday.
mourn, for i am not a gametester anymore. beat the game once more today and raised my highscore in the competition-mode, then spent most of the afternoon talking to my co-workers, pretending to be working. saying goodbye was akward, things like: "it was a blast!" etc were uttered from our bosses, we shook hands etc. too bad about the co-workers though, got along with the surfer-guy and one of the translators quite well.
met up with koalabaerchen in shibuya, ate out in this place (darn, forgot the name..),then went to the parco-museum to see the "girls don't cry" exhibition.
. funny. i didn't know that this chain had it's own museum.. anyway, the exhibition was kinda cool, of course the yoshitomo nara pictures rocked the most (hula hula dancing), other cool artworks were from makoto aida (girls don't cry) and salla tykkae (american dream)..

thoughts:
read more "thorn birds". god. too much emotions. the characters are merely playthings of fate, tossed from the heighest heights to the deepest pits of human desolation, suffering, loving, grieving, hoping. constantly lovers are entvined and people die / move away. gee, my own life is so shallow.. i just love koalabaerchen & moved to japan to be with her, rather plain and simple stuff in comparison to the thorn birds. i know why i love dark science-fiction & fantasy... [otherland]!! once again, incoherent - but no more time left.. i hate not having net-access at home..

instant content. [the friday five...]
1. What brand of toothpaste do you use?
dunno. can't read all of it. the parts i understand say "whitening" and "cleaning". the one i used before that was "pc".. i think. gee, i'm so illitrate in this country i can't even tell what toothpaste i use. great. ;)
2. What brand of toilet paper do you prefer?
who came up with that stupid question? generally, i don't care..
3. What brand(s) of shoes do you wear?
sneakers only. at the moment my beloved adidas, for they are the only shoes i can put on within seconds, instead of blocking the genkan for hours tying my shoes the accurate german way..
4. What brand of soda do you drink?
coca cola. i try to avoid it, so nowadays i mostly drink orange juice or cocoa..
5. What brand of gum do you chew?
i hate chewing gum. makes me feel sick, plus i feel that people could mistake me for being a klischee-american, chewing gum, baseball-cap etc.. noooo, just kidding, chewing gum just makes me feel sick, so i don't chew gum.

darn. lame questions, eh?..

2003-05-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

big in japan?
now even the almighty metropolis mentioned blogging in japan. on the other hand, i'm somehow not involved in the "blogging-scene" around here, so i do not consider blogs getting popular in japan something i contributed something to. however, i guess i more or less inspired two japanese blogs, [the koalabaerchen files] and [ethika.jp].

got up at 6am this morning, so that i could read more [the thorn birds]. not my style at all, but still so cool.. agh. reading..
anyway, gotta go, last day as a gametester today..

2003-05-21T15:57:00.000-07:00

hehe..
two more days of work left.. the surfer-guy i am working with gave me two cds full of [family guy] so now i'm stuck watching movies instead of sending mails or blogging. not that there was much to blog about anyway. met up with koalabaerchen in shibuya, ate out & took her home later. read more "thorn birds" on my way home, while listening to the new "cranberries"-md she made for me.

more [family guy]..
i still like futurama better, though..

2003-05-20T16:02:00.000-07:00

nothing special
just realised that i most probably will not be in sweden this summer, unless something very strange happens. mailed a friend studying there, then worked some more on this german blog i'll run with two friends very soon.. could anyone do me a favour and create a frame-page for me? this internet-cafe doesn't have any programm i could do it with, and i can't write html myself.. asked another friend to do some of the graphics for me. sucks. i want my own pc.
anyway, another day of happy gaming just started...
and thank god it stopped pouring.

2003-05-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

day number 66
waaa.. i want [these] shirts from [uniqlo]!!
work was fun today, time passed really quick, i really rocked in competition mode and i manage to point out a rather nasty bug, one day before the final deadline.. :) ahh.. met up with koalabaerchen in [shinjuku] (great pic, eh?) and took her home later. on my way home, when the train was waiting in a station for the express to take over, i saw a blind man in a suit making his way to the exit. not being able to see anymore is something i can't image, life must be so hard, so different then. it i think one of the worst towns to live in then must be tokyo.
i mean, of course they have like these yellow lines on the floor so that blind people can somehow find their way, but with all the people around? no way.
honestly, every morning i wash through the gates with hundreds of people, but instead of going out straight i turn left and get my ticket for the toyoko-line. the entrance to the toyoko-line however is on the other side of the human river. getting there somehow resembles advanced real-life [frogger].
and now play that game with your eyes closed.

2003-05-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

happy, sad & mad
i just read about this (somewhat stupid) thing on waddledee.net and decided to take part in it too. why the heck anyone would burn a cd with [my name] and those of hundred thousand other idiots on it, glue it to a satellite-thingy and shoot it into deep space so that it smacks into a comet is beyond my imagination, but what the heck... i took the liberty to leave a [message] for the aliens that are supposed to find it.. but then again, should they really be an advanced species they'll know that already. ahh, time to re- the oldest alien joke ever:
what is the most convincing proof for the existence of intelligent aliens somewhere out there? they didn't bother to show up on earth yet..

right. i'm a little bit blue. why is that so?
did today suck? no, i had a wonderfull weekend with koalabaerchen, went to the platon & tsubaki-live in tower-records shibuya on saturday, ate out with koalaberchen, spent five hours in the b-kara karaoke place singing until our throats hurt, went to the biidoro-live in akihabara today, took koalabaerchen home and then came here to check mails. so why am i blue? or, better, why do i feel strange today?
i think it's because sometimes living in japan is so bizarre. check this:
- when we were about to leave for akihabara today i wanted to change my shoes from the ones i've been wearing all weekend to my other blue sneakers. they are, like all the other shoes in our guesthouse, in a shelf in the genkan (entrance area). and guess what: someone stole the shoelaces from my blue puma-sneakers. the shoes were still there, still standing where i put them, but without the laces. what the fuck??? why? just the laces? the shoes were kinda new, why didn't that someone just take the shoes WITH the laces? which leads to the next question: who the fuck steals blue standard nothing-fucking-special shoelaces?? this is even worse since there are, including me, only three people living in the guesthouse at the moment. i don't like both of them too much, but i really couldn't tell who'd do such a thing..
and at last: what for? what the bloody hell do you do need two blue shoelaces for? it's nothing expensive, you can get them in every 100yen shop.. gee, that sucks so bad...
from now on i'll keep my shoes in my room.
-when changing trains in ueno, we saw this one really weird looking guy standing at the platform. he went into the same car as we, and as soon as the train left, he started to piddle the dirt/dust out of this door-things in the cars floor. while he was doing that, kept waving around with this picture of a famous idol. koalabaerchen was kinda scared, and all the other people in the train were either totally annoyed or simply oblivious to the guy on the floor.
-when waiting for koalabaerchen in shibuya on saturday, i stood close to the hachiko-statue. the first strange thing was this homeless woman, that perfomed a half-naked maniac dance to eurobeat out of a little cassette player. then i saw two overly tanned guys bullying and kidnapping (really!) this other, more nerdy looking guy. the nerd-guy really looked damn scared and violently tried to somehow get away from them, but without success. and that happened on a crossing with like ten-thousand people around them, seeing nothing, doing nothing. so why didn't i do something?
1. mostly because i'm unable to speak japanese. got no idea what's going on, got nothing to say, can't even ask bystanders to call the police in the koban 50 meters away. nor could i say anything to somehow de-tense the situation.
2. i'm a foreigner. would push come to shove, police etc, the others would have the advantage to chat with the policemen right away, while i had to wait hours in a police-cell for a translator, while the tanned guys already testified that i tried to steal their stupid louis vuitton(?) bags.. great.
3. none of my business. he most probably borrowed money from them or something else. no need to front the wrong guys for no reason.

great, eh? really, that's somehow hard to cope with. i'm happy with koalabaerchen, and yet i'm sad and somehow ultra-violently mad. that's too much emotions at the same time.
well, that's it for today, gotta develop a personality-disorder...

2003-05-16T15:34:00.000-07:00

full deadline panic
hehe.. was asked to work today, since they try to submit the game by monday, and the last version we tested still was full of tiny errors. so today we'll get to try and crash the master-rom. hooray.
instant content - the friday five.

1. What drinking water do you prefer -- tap, bottle, purifier, etc.?
i generally hate to drink water. love milk. hate water..
the only exception is the water from streams and such in lappland, that really tastes good. or maybe that is because your body is dehydrated from hiking, but the water i drank while hiking definitely was the best ever..
2. What are your favorite flavor of chips?
pringles - hot & spicy.. other peperoni etc flavours. i hate salt & vinegar, cheese etc..
3. Of all the things you can cook, what dish do you like the most?
i don't cook. in all the time i've been living here, i did not make one meal myself. i came up with the "2 button theory". if i have to press more than two buttons to prepare it, i won't eat it. so yupp, i"m happy with ramen and microwaved rice..
4. How do you have your eggs?
not at all. i hate eggs. the white stuff is ok, but the yellow part really sucks. so, no eggs. or ultra-done, so that you can seperate white from yellow...
5. Who was the last person who cooked you a meal? How did it turn out?
koalabaerchen. back in germany. and it was gorgeous. she knows soo much about food & nutrition, vitamins and all that.. i guess that's why i didn't die of malnutrition yet.

ps: yo: hir3z, punk, colin - i need your e-mail adds... please mail me..

2003-05-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

"applicable lows"
sorry about the somewhat incoherent last entry. no big news, had an interview at berlitz, didn't take the job, playtesting is still fun, but after two weeks the game kinda looses its thrill, beaten a hundred times, played all modes / stages variations.. anyway, tomorrow's friday, which means weekend.. yeah. as a student, you kinda forget to appreciate weekends, but once you work again -> thank god it's friday. :)
i'll hang out with koalabaerchen mostly, we'll go to tower records / shibuya on saturday and see the [platon] album-release-live with koalabaerchen's brother as a support-member, then we'll karaoke our brains away until 5am, go home, sleep, and then head for akihabara, to see her brother yet again, this time with his own band, biidoro, performing at the [club goodman]. should you by any chance be in tokyo this sunday, this is the place to go!!

today's headline is stolen from [bvm-tv], a free dvd-magazine i picked up somewhere / sometime last week. the full line reads "unauhtorized duplication is aviolation applicable lows." ;)

2003-05-13T15:56:00.000-07:00

wednesday? maybe.
still beta-testing the alternative shedule for my life, finally slept more than 5 hours in a row. good. been working overtime this week, which is ok, since it means more money. on the other hand, playing the very same game for almost two weeks now gets kinda dull. fortunately we discovered the competition mode and now spend half of the time we're supposed to work trying to beat each others highscores. ;)
two things i'd like to get out of my mind before starting yet another day of videogaming:
- blogged about something about a week and half ago, when koalabaerchen and i met this person whose blog we both read. being some sort of a blogger myself too i naturally blogged about this, with links to the persons blog and all. i thought that we might get mentioned on the persons blog too, since we knew that person only via blog. but instead i got an email saying that he'd like to keep his work and his blog seperate, and that he wished i wouldn't talk so much about it.
i'm ok with that, but it brings the ever-diverse privacy-issue back into my mind. i read about something on someone elses blog, so i link / blog / rant about it as much as i want. if you don't want people to know something, just don't put it online then. but what if you meet people? do you blog about them? i mostly do, but i usually use some sort of alias for them. i think if you happen to my life, you get blogged. somehow.
this time however, i read about the persons job on his blog, so i thought it was ok to blog about it, and then got asked not to blog about it. confusing, eh?

- go read [the big white guy]'s post about this survey they made. that's why i hate most foreigners around here, and that's probably why you get stared at so bad sometimes when walking down the road with your girlfriend. all these idiots around here, thinking of japan as some sort of disneyland for grown-ups, i'm so fucking sick of it.
you talk to a foreigner, say something that implies that you have a japanese girlfriend, and you fscking get congratulated for it. goddamn, it's not an archivement to have a japanese girlfriend, like some trophy or what. agh.. too angry to type, plus running out of time.. more tomorrow!

2003-05-11T15:56:00.000-07:00

earthquake.
just when i was about to FINALLY fall asleep a pretty big earthquake woke me up. this time, unlike the last, i remembered to do something else then watching the things moving on my cupboard. just when i was about to dash to the next safe spot (i doubt that this house has such a safe spot anyway), which most probably would've been the door frame, i guess, i realized that i was just wearing shorts, and that i'd hate to stumble through the ruins of a post-quake apocalyptic tokyo wearing nothing but purple "hello-kitty oasaka" shorts. when i was done grinning at myself for the thought that i'd rather die putting on a more mad-maxian outfit for what comes after the earthquake than to resque myself, the earthquake had stopped.
emailed koalabaerchen, tried to sleep.
now it's 7:49 and i'm testing an alternate shedule for my days, going to bed earlier (haha) and getting up at 6something, treating myself with an hour of online-usage before work.

btw:
i'm trying to set up a german blog with some friends at the moment..
help!
hirez? mail mir mal..

2003-05-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

the friday five..
didn't do them for a long time, didn't i?
1. Would you consider yourself an organized person? Why or why not?
yes. no. i'd consider myself rather organized lately, or at least i'm efficently managing the chaos around me, which kinda leads to the same thing..
2. Do you keep some type of planner, organizer, calendar, etc. with you, and do you use it regularly?
yeah, i've got one now, but since i never used such things before it's rarely updated and rather serves as a printclub-pics / business card holder. i prefer to memorize things, it's easier to remember them directly than to remember to check the organizer regularly.
3. Would you say that your desk is organized right now?
i would say that i do not own a desk at the moment, my room is rather unfurnished, and this tiny table i am sitting at right now belongs to the internet-cafe.
4. Do you alphabetize CDs, books, and DVDs, or does it not matter?
of course it does matter. i first divide cd's and books in categories such as "science fiction", "poems" etc. in these categories the books / cd's / games are ordered alphabetically.
5. What's the hardest thing you've ever had to organize?
my life? no idea.. dumb question.

well, gonna go back home and catch some sleep, it's 5:something already..

2003-05-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

finally. an update.
saw a cool add in the train today, about an exhibition of araki's [hana jinsei] photographs.. another poster i managed to notice was from the [ghibli museum]. (koalabaerchen! let's go there together!!) but i'm mixing things up, let's try to empty my brain at least somewhat chronologically. worked yesterday, then met up with koalabaerchen in shinjuku, ate out and went eyeshopping. took her to the station, went shopping and walked home. slept for half an hour, after having spent half an hour being mad at my mobile for not recieving emails. got woken up by my mobile buzzing like crazy from recieving fifteen mails in a minute, went to the internet cafe and wrote a german resume for an interview i had at the berlitz language school today. when i came back to my place i stood outside for a while, skygazing. the clouds were streaming by damn fast, like the sky moving in time lapse, with neon-bright tokyo underneath it in slow motion. pondered about that for a while, and just when i was about to go inside i noticed a gecko on the wall of the house next door. i managed to catch it, and after some wriggling it finally lost his grip on the wall and was captured. ran upstairs, the gecko twisting violently to escape my grip, and found nothing better that a whisky-glass to put it (him, i guess) into. somehow managed to get him in there and, an even harder task, to keep him in there, until i had finally found something to cover the glass with. he, at that point i was already sure he was male, named floyd and the only reason for him to exist was to be captured by me so that he could be my pet.. hehe. so i emailed like 10 people that i caught a gecko, and instantly was asked by koalabaerchen to chose between her and him.. ;)
well, decided to keep him at least for one night. looked at him sitting at the bottom of that whisky-glass, and since he looked rather sad i decided to get him a better place. at least one of us should have a cool & comfy place to live in. went to family-mart to find something gecko-housing-suitable. ended up buying ice cubes in a plastic box (y100). threw away all the ice, put some ventilation holes in, added some sand from the park and some dry sticks. moving floyd to his new place was rather complicated, with his five fingers he had an amazing grip on the glass and refused to fall down into his new appartement. earthquake-level shaking of glass finally got him down into the ice cube box, where he stayed happily hidden under a stick for the rest of the night.
said goodbye and let him go first thing next morning..
yupp, it's sad but true, floyd turned out to be a one-night pet.

today can be summed up in two little episodes
1. had a briefing with our boss today. we were asked to report whether we had contact to chinese, taiwanese or canadian people lately. we learned that they all potentially have SARS. (for a complete SARS coverage, read [the bwg]) furthermore we were asked to refrain from meeting taiwanese, canadian and especially chinese people. we should, to ensure security & health of all the people working here, avoid them.
2. bought cool shoes. [orange again]. i hate orange, really. dunno why i did that.

2003-05-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

shaved by the king himself
new haircut day. alien-id card pick-up day. work-day. picked up my alien-id card this morning. went there before 8am, just to be sure. in japan, the country of convenience, shops & official buildings do not neccessarily have to have some sort of sign with opening times on it somewhere, even if it's shinjuku's immigration office. so the counter opened at 8.30, didn't have to wait too long..
work was ok, got some new co-workers, no big news besides that.
went to a barber in shin-okubo to get a new 3mm haircut. the guy shaving my head had the name "king" (in katakana) on his jacket, and looked like he was a retired gangster or something. got a funny parade by half of the staff members military-marching through the shop as a comment to their jokes that my haircut was a popular german one. after a lot of "doitsu power" etc i was allowed to pay and leave.. funny shop. ;)

2003-05-05T05:39:00.000-07:00

the wedding.
[teru and madoka] got married in yoyogi today. the marriage itself was beautiful, mainly because they were such a cute couple. teru was terribly hyper, but looked good in his (rented) suit. i had the honor to be made camera-man, so i taped the whole ceremony. this wasn't really neccessary though, since every second someone took a picture. a funny surprise was that koalabaerchen and i knew the guy who conducted the marriage, it was mike from [hunkabutta.com]. this is a funny thing about blogs, you sort of know other people, but they don't know you. so we talked to him after the wedding, and he seemed quite surprised.. hehe..
went upstairs after the ceremony and had a cool dinner, some speeches and, to top it all, a bag-pipe live perfomance by mark, in full quilt. and yupp, i taped it all.. dunno whether their parents really liked the bag-pipe music, but i think it was great.. (hi mark!!)
well, after the whole party was over koalabaerchen and i went to the starbucks on the promenade in shinjuku, making mean comments about the people walking by..;) took her home later, then went back to my place.
went shopping and decided to get a haircut. at the cashier in donki i had to pay like yen703. i had yen800 in y100 and two y1 coins. so i put yen702 on the tray and took one yen out of the one-yen bin. the shopmanager told me quite sternly that i had to purchase for at least yen1000 to be allowed to use the one-yen bin. then he took then one yen i took AND MY two one yen coins and put them back in the one-yen bin. for one tiny second i had to fight the amazingly strong urge to do something stupid and ultra-violent, then smiled, put my eight y100 coins on the counter, got my plastic-bag and 97yen change and left. motherfucker.
the haircut-decision was also stupid, it's not easy finding a barber who's open at 8pm on a national holiday. i eventually found one, but at first the guys working there took five full minutes to notice me, then they wanted yen2000 to machine-cut my 2cm hair down to 3mm. u-turned and left.

gotta work tomorrow, that's why i'm for once blogging before midnight. well then, see you tomorrow, ne?

2003-05-04T09:05:00.000-07:00

attention-whore ziam
woa.. eternal fame! [allan o'mara] is guest-curator for the [mirror project], and he curated this fine gallery, [a tribute to the grandpas], with my picture in it!! yeah yeah yeah!
to all of you who checked the [neighborhood project], thnks, to everybody who didn't do so yet: [go there]!

had a lazy day today, just went to the laundrette & did some eyeshopping in shinjuku. went to [suitdirect] and tried some of the suits, just for fun. the staff almost doubled over with heaping compliments on me.. but then: with japan hosting the shopping-olympia (daily!), the salespersons do their best to motivate the shoppers even more. hehe, but since i had just yen500 in my pockets (but wearing a cool yen50.000 suit) i wasn't really in danger of getting talked into buying it (however, a yen500 offer would have been irresistible..)
been on the phone with koalabaerchen tonight, her dad is somehow displeased with me not learning japanese. while i honestly am displeased with myself for not learning so much, it is also strange to hear something like that. i mean, he's probably right, i'd have better chances for jobs etc could i speak & read japanese real good, but i somehow also feel that what i do here is mostly my buisness, so to speak. i don't need it for my game-tester job, koalabaerchen and i use english or german to communicate, so naturally my japanese doesn't improve so fast.. sigh.

tomorrow koalabaerchen and i will be guests at the [ethika] wedding in the [moto-yoyogi house] check the link for a picture of the chapel the wedding will be conducted in..

2003-05-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

yeah!
blogger is back up and i've still got some minutes left! wohoo!
first if all:
EVERYBODY go to the [neighborhood project] at once and check my submission. there is a counter on the pages, so make sure you really go there, not just add it to your favourites and then forget about them.. no no.
anyway, great day today, koalabaerchen stayed over (= that's why i didn't update..). took her to nippori, where she changes trains, then continued to [shinbashi], where i've been with koalabaerchen yesterday, eating out in [shiodome]. (it's not only a cool and stylish location, it also hosts a cool and stylish zine, [bento]. )
this time however i wanted to get some "sea side", i felt like walking along the ocean, on some sort of pier or promenade. hinode sanbashi sounded just right for that, but i soon found out that all you could do there was to board a stupid cruiser or eat out in a tourist trap, so, without any real aim, i headed towards the rainbow bridge.. i found some signs along the way saying "rainbow promenade" in katakana. "great", i thought, "promenade.. sounds good..". i was a little bit surprised when the "promenade" signs guided you into a buildind at the base of the bridge, and even more surprised when you had to board an elevator, but it took me until the elevator doors opened to understand: "rainbow promenade" means walking along the rainbow bridge.. sometimes i'm so unbelievably stupid ;)
anyway, sounds good, great view, but: you walk like directly next to the cars, sometimes the fume-waves really choke you. but you can wave at cars passing you, which makes up for it a little bit, but gets tiresome after some seconds. well, it's just 1,7km, so you won't suffer too long. on your way, if you take the north route from daiba to tokyo, you'll pass the point where this [panorama] has been shot.

i spent some time in [daiba], which, to my amazement has a (crappy) beach. (why the heck did i never notice that before?). i am used to beaches that are covered with towels and with people rolling in the waves among jellyfish, but here nobody was in the water, and the jellyfish were substituted by plastic bags..
honto, i've never seen a beach so dirty in my whole life before. which of course didn't stop me from wading through it with rolled up pants, then slept for a while on the green island you can see in this [pic].
woke up, felt dizzy and sick, walked to mc-donalds, ordered something, got seated by the staff, later on bullied by some tanned wanna-be gangster in a loose suit. i guess foreigners aren't as bulliable as japanese people, so he had to sit somewhere else in the end. or maybe he was talking about something else, since i didn't understand a word. the staff lead him away anyway..
now i'm dead tired, need to sleep..

2003-05-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

no update today
been out with koalabaerchen all day. tired. phoned damien and steph. hi again!
submitted pics to ultrabob's neighbourhood project. will blog tomorrow. i suck. thanks for checking this blog..

2003-04-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

ahhh. i just love the "ichigo o re" (strawberry au lait) from meiji, just drank like a whole liter in 15 minutes.. fortunately my body finally gets used to such random treats in the middle of the night, so i only feel a little bit sick...
anyway, been to the biidoro-live @ the [basement bar] in [shimokitazawa] yesterday.. they place was ram-jammed with about 120+ people, and biidoro's performance was really cool. i drew the flyer with biidoro's live shedule on it, and on the way out some people even told me that they liked it, wohoo! ;) also went eyeshopping a little bit, found a military shop with a sign saying: "herman goering sucht freiwillige! meldet euch beim...".. woha. but then, this is japan, where cute little [gothic lolitas] wear ss-uniforms with all the forbidden symbols, ties with the ss-skulls and swastikas all over.
ate out at [ohsho]'s, took print-club pics etc.. funny day.
went to karaoke today, didn't do much besides that. bought a calling card, called my parents (for the first time in almost two months), drew an illustration for [fool on the hill] and drank a lot of strawberry milk. another great day.. ;)

2003-04-28T09:30:00.000-07:00

serious
i'm a little bit unhappy with my blog at the moment. due to the internet-cafe related time limit, i feel that my posts do not really contain all the info i want them to contain. would this blog be an interesting blog to me, if it wasn't my blog? is it an interesting blog to YOU, or did you just misspell "saki" while you were actually looking for japanese rice whine, sake?
so, from today on i'll take notes during the day, so that i won't leave forgot half of the bloggable things happening to me in my thrilling, adrenaline soaked life. :)
forced myself to wake up before noon for once, since i fucked up the biidoro-flyer last night, so i spent all morning painting two alternative versions. just when i was done, around 4pm, koalabaerchen came over.. major timing ;)
met up with takashi in shinjuku at 6pm, handed over the new flyers (which he liked, i guess) and went eye-shopping. the midori-kame i was talking about is actually a mishishippi-blabla-kame, which is japanese and means that it comes from the mississippi river, and has red dots around the neck (=blabla..).. koalabaerchen still hates turtles, so i didn't buy it, nor will i do so in the future.
actually, i will be saving money from now on (haha), because i am unfortunately invited to a wedding. now while a wedding is actually something you would look forward too, i am a little bit worried about the presents i'm supposed to make. usually people give like yen30.000, in a nice envelope. i'm ok with the envelope, but what really bothers me that i am simply not able to give that much money, it's fscking half of my monthly rent. this marriage would rip a yen30.000 hole in my already tight financial situation, so i guess i won't pay. it is also to late to cancel and stay at home, since the wedding is next monday. i don't want to give nothing (immediate loss of face), and i also don't want to put just like 10.000 in the envelope (delayed loss of face)... really, what am i going to do????
ahh..

anyway, found some [nice toys], buy buy buy..

2003-04-27T09:42:00.000-07:00

great. once again blogger / internet-explorer died when i searched for url's to spice up my links. six minutes left and a whole hour of blogging lost. wohoo!
so, all in fast forward mode:
nice & lazy day
woke up past noon, corn / cheese baguette for breakfast, instead of the cocoa / bread routine.
koalaberchen didn't come over, so i went to shinjuku with my housemate cyril.
he likes visual, and i like the gothic lolita style which the girls listening to visual favour, so i came along and we checked some stores and listened to cds.
met teru of ethika.jp later and ate out with him and his gf..
took pics for the neighbourhood project..

2003-04-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

great. instead of blogging, writing emails, or just doing anything sensible with the one hour of internet-usage i'm treating myself with at the moment, i'm stuck on [slackerz.org], grinning myself to death. everybody go there at once, after you finished reading this entry.. ^_^

nice, but humid day today.. shot pictures of my neighbourhood, then walked from shin-okubo to harajuku, strolled around yoyogi-koen for a while, visited the meiji-jingu and bought a little scroll prediciting my future. it said i'd get trampled by a horse before dusk, so i guess i was lucky today. (okok, i'm being overdramatic, it didn't say i'd get trampled down by a horse, my japanese sucks way to major to decipher such a thing.. all i could read were some kanji, and one of them was "horse", so i took some liberties interpreting it.. ;) anyway, didn't get attacked by any animals at all, nor did anything else happen to me. to celebrate my unexpected survival from impending doom i went into the nerdy store and bought a cool [anti-earth united government] waistband.

wohoo! just got an email from my sister saying that they returned safely from their trip to india! wohoo!
oh, no more time, see you tomorrow!

2003-04-25T09:43:00.000-07:00

wohey.
after blogging the previous entry koalabaerchen and i met shiggy, whom we accompaigned to this party for german students in japan. it was organized by the daad, badly airconditioned and, to the dismay of my japanese friends, with japanese beer.
quite a culture-shock, you might say. was in a strange mood half of the time, mostly due to seeing all the people with smug expressions on their faces having a cool life in japan, with their gorgeous sholarships. so yeah, i was childishly jealous, annoyed and blue at the same time. i wish i had a sholarship too, or at least a place to study in hosei without having to pay more than a million yen of tuition fee. and most of them spoke perfect (or so) japanese, while i still suck, because i didn't / don't learn at all.
anyway, dumb thoughts.. met a rather nice german guy whose name i forgot, gave him this url.. (hi!)

took koalabaerchen home later, and on the way back watched all the people sleeping in the train. nice night.

2003-04-24T23:28:00.000-07:00

update
for once i am not blogging via the usual internet-cafe, but from koalabaerchen's university. neat :)
no big news, almost bought a really cute midori-kame (some sort of water-turtle) yesterday, but remembered how much koalabaerchen disliked small animals and decided to postpone that project. so, no kame for me...
played pokemon, ate out at bldy's with koalabaerchen.. rather relaxed day.. :)

2003-04-23T09:30:00.000-07:00

stalk me?
not neccessary, since i'm living in the country of convenience and politeness, all the vital informations will be served to you, with a smile. [here]'s(*fsck.. can't link it.. will screenshot-steal the pic tomorrow and upload it.. sigh) where i am living, i guess that's (at the moment) as close as you can get using the internet. when you zoom out of the map a little bit you can even find the [donki hote] where i do most of my shopping.. great, eh?
unfortunately i can't spend more time stalking myself online, just brought money for one hour online..
other searches at less cool pages gave these results, but they aren't as close as the above link.. 35¡Æ 41' 45" , 139¡Æ 46' 46" || 35.6961 , 139.7796 or X:15559400 m Y:4232700 m 35:41:12N, 139:46:20E
i wonder whether you can find a page which shows a live satellite picture of the coordinates entered.. anyone??

spent yesterday and today with koalabaerchen, playing pokemon & hanging around.. ;) yay! will work in one and a half weeks again, on monday all the material i worked on etc. was sent to the REAL nerds, who will now put all the stuff into the game, and then send back the dvd's.. will play more pokemon tonight, then sleep and meet koalabaerchen tomorrow.

2003-04-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

weekend update..
the [biidoro]-live was cool, in a break between the songs the bassist even mentioned my name and said thanks for the flyer i designed for them ;) ahh.. stayed over at koalabaerchen's place to watch biidoro on [viewsic]. it's fun to see people on tv when they are sitting right next to you. went eye-shopping with koalabaerchen, and ended up buying a [wabisabi] t-shirt, a cool bag for my [gameboy advance sp] and some other stuff i don't really need.. if i keep spending money like that i'll be broke in a month.. ;)
went to a museum with koalabaerchen and her mum later, will post the url as soon as i find it.. ;)

2003-04-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

back again.
work was ok today, did do nothing but slaying my way through ancient china for 7 hours, only interrupted by a lunch break and a short stroll to the vending machine for coke. lunch was fun, i tried to order the chicken-things they had, but ended up getting some sort of a prawn-steak, with white rice and cold noodles as a side-menue. to top things i by accident chose the exec's table to sit down, so i had some cold stares extra. i also forgot to bring the free water, so i choked down all the stuff and bailed.
tried to count the playstations in our office today, but since everybody is a little bit edgy when it comes to new (& young) employees and "industrial spionage" i couldn't really walk around there..
and no, the game is NOT [braveknight]. hehe.. ;) you wish..

tomorrow's, or better: today's plan:
sleep, work, eat, [biidoro]-live in shimokitazawa, [cave-be], and i'm on the guest-list. ;)

2003-04-15T07:30:00.000-07:00

style-o-matic
just came to the internet-cafe to blog. ;) i'm shot, even worked overtime on my first day. work is nice, got my own little desk, of which you can see about 15 cm, the rest is burried under a humming assemblage containing a tv, a video, a work-ps2, a pc, a monitor for the pc, a ps2 developer's kit and some other nifty little things. ahh.. while working is great commuting there sucks, took the wrong train this morning (you are washed along with this mass of people pouring out from the trains like tuna out of a fischnet, and in all this chaos, who the fsck can tell whether he just boarded a local train, a commuter express, a limited express or a regular express.. ?)and of course the train didn't stop at my station. made it on time anyway, lucky me.. ;)

poor koalabaerchen is still so stressed / blue due to jobhunting, wish i could do something to cheer her up. now that i've got a job i'll be able to stay here longer than three months, which means i can spend more time with koalabaerchen, but since i'm working fulltime that means i actually have less time, so koalabaerchen isn't really happy about me being employed.. ;(
hm, sick.. anyway, she'll hopefully stay over tomorrow, wohoo!

ok, take care everyone, thnx for reading this entry.. ;)

2003-04-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

yatta!
from today 10am i will be working as a game monitor, playtesting this ps2 game for a rather big japanese company! wohoo!
met up with koalabaerchen in university today, ate out in the mensa and then went to [electric town akihabara], shopping for earphones (koalabaerchen) and videogames (..uhm, that would be me..). ended up buying [pokemon: sapphire], in japanese. played about an hour by now but didn't get very far, due to time-consuming "looking up every second word in the dictionary". great.. but i guess it will somehow improve my japanese, hopefully.
anyway, gotta go to bed real early today, wouldn't want to oversleep.. ;)
ok, take care..
song in my head: "norwegian wood" by the beatles..

2003-04-12T18:23:00.000-07:00

wow.. check [this]. pretty tough, eh?

2003-04-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

shopping frenzy: aftermath
bought a black [game boy advance sp] & [f-zero]. yeah! also bought a monsterism box, but didn't get ken.. great. i hereby declare that i am now officially addicted and will not stop buying these stupid things until i get the "ken" monster in all availiable colours.
went to karaoke with koalabaerchen later, sang stuff from the beatles, 'breakfast in america / supertramp', 'tainted love / marilyn manson', 'spiders / system of a down' and to top it all, 'englishman in new york / sting'
came home, played with my new toy, painted some more sketches for the biidoro-flyer and fell asleep. woke up, internet-cafe..
song in my head: "eleanor rigby / beatles"

2003-04-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

so i've got a bank-account. time for shopping-frenzy!
wanna buy wanna buy wanna buy
- [monsterism]

//fsck!
great. my pc just died and with him almost an hour worth of typing witty things into my blog. this would of course annoy you, but when sitting in a god-damn internet-cafe paying for your online time this really sucks bigtime.. fuck fuck fuck..
haven't got the time to re-type, so i'll just put up the links to the pages & things i talked about.. grrrr.
++bought a [time capsule] today. addicted. need to buy more +++ wanna buy a [gameboy advance sp]. decided to do so. can't decide which colour. sold out anyway +++ [crp] wanna buy. yen15.000.. mhh. but sooooo gorgeous +++ take care, thnx for reading my blog!

2003-04-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

wohoo!
i made it. i somehow made it.. got myself a bankaccount at the [tokyo mitsubishi bank]. after being rejected from ALL banks in shinjuku (for various reasons, like "you need to be in japan longer than six months to open an account here" and other bullshit..) i dressed up in my suit, walked all the way to takadanobaba and tried it there.. ufj didn't want me (..six months..), but surprisingly enough the bank of tokyo-mitsubishi didn't complain at all, they just drew this super-complicated map which led me to the other office 100 meters down the street (but with a map that detailed, i could've walked all the way to hiroshima without getting lost ;).. anyway. the girl behind the counter couldn't speak english, but she somehow could untangle my japanese, and now, half an hour later, i am the proud owner of a nice account, my winnie-the-pooh (pooh-san) card is on it's way..
i'll meet up with koalabaerchen in shinjuku this afternoon, i guess.
the cherry-blossoms are all falling down now, which is, especially at nights, a very beautiful sight. falling petals, illuminated by street-lamps..
ok, online time is running out.. ;)

2003-04-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

blustery day
ok, the big news first. i am not dumped yet. the interview went quite well, -i guess- they'll contact me within a couple of days, should they choose me. .. well, wait and see.. (oh please please please please.. *sigh*)

back home i started [fool on the hill] by [matt ruff]. read it twice before, but i guess this is a book i'll re-read a couple of times.. did some sketches for the [biidoro]-flyers already, but nothing definite yet.
didn't do anything worth mentioning besides that, didn't learn japanese, nor did i study [shodo]. emailed koalabaerchen and went to bed at 10pm. didn't sleep though, but listened to the wind rushing through tokyo.

now it's 2-something am, i guess i'll go back home to get some sleep. koalabaerchen passed her interview and will take another entry-examn tomorrow. we'll meet up afterwards and maybe go sightseeing, depends on the weather. well then, take care..

2003-04-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

blurp
blogging in a hurry today. replied like hundreds of e-mails today, dug up a map for the company i am going to visit tomorrow. i got lost on the way to an interview two times already, wouldn't want that to happen tomorrow. woke up early this morning, after a short and earthquaky night (nothing bad, just enough to stop me from falling asleep) and went to the city office to register myself as an alien. took me about an ninety minutes and i was done.. ;)
now i'm fighting all the obstacles between me and my bank-account, ordered the stupid stamp with my name in katana.. tried to save money today. even though i didn't buy anything big, i spent more money than i'd expected. sucks.. (and there's like so much i definitely need to buy.. *sigh*)
sorry for blogging short and uninformative entries lately, but with my jobhunting most of my online-time is consumed by sending applications and stuff like that. gee, i wish i had an access at my place. (but wait, i don't even have a pc.. *sigh*)
ok then, gotta go, take care

btw:
i'll design the next [biidoro] flyer, wohoo!! ;)

2003-04-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

ziam: hyper-mode!
I just found out that the company i am applying for as a game-tester isn't as small as i thought. actually, it's quite the other way round.. i guess i'll give you a bigger update on that once i've got my interview, once my adrenaline-level stops being way above critical.. woa.. that'd be soooo unreal, so damn cool! ;)
sheduled for tomorrow morning is part two of "foreign resident registration hell, part two". waited for 45 minutes today to get to forms i had to fill out (which was done in a second) but then was asked to join another queue just to hand that paper in again.. koalabaerchen jumped the line and was told that it'd take at least two and a half hours plus x.. that's when we left.. ;) i'll go there again tomorrow morning, when it's hopefully less crowded..
a poor fellow housemate of mine stayed there and tried his luck. now, brace yourselves: it took him neat SIX HOURS to fill out & hand in his four papers. god bless the country of convenience.. ;)

2003-04-06T09:54:00.000-07:00

robodex
thanks to koalabaerchen's reminder i -just in time- remembered that i wanted to go to yokohama to see the [robot dream exposition 2003]. went there today.. boy.. what a crowd. 'twas worth it, though.
my personal favourites where sony's [SDR-4X], the [aibo-football-game] and of course honda's gorgeous [asimo]. i'll blog a bigger report tomorrow, for now i guess i'll just go home and crash.. take care everyone!

2003-04-04T08:53:00.000-08:00

hanami! .part 2
amazing day. overslept (= snoozed for 2 hours, pressing the dumb button every 5 minutes), dressed up and hurried to the station, breakfast @ family mart again, hiked to shinjuku, took the jubo-line to ichigaya to meet koichiro at [hosei]. he wasn't there however, so i talked to some people from his club [j'aimes] (page hasn't been updated since a year..). he showed up & disappeared again, then i went to [doutor] with koalabaerchen. took her to the station (another entry-examn), then went back to the university, met some of my students from last winter, chatted with them in the student hall for about an hour until koichiro came and dragged me away to celebrate hanami.
we joined some friends sitting by the riverside on the very same blue plastic planes as mentioned in my previous post, had some drinks (well, they had some drinks, i choked down some weird tea -the only drink availiable not mixed with alcohol- and sang 'donna donna' from donovan, but with japanese lyrics, so i could only join in the chorus-parts.. ;) more singing and drinking, interupted by complaining about the temperature (samui desu ne) and a trip to am/pm. dusk had long since passed and my fingers were too numb to type mails on my mobile when i noticed that it got real crowded around us. there were like ultra-professional hanami-people, bringing isolated seat-covers, oil-heaters (goooood idea) and tons (and i mean TONS) of food & drinks. mind you, old japanese men, close before their retirement-age, wearing suits with perfectly crips lines (sitting on a plastic plane drinking canned beer), some of them do have such an aura of dignity and force that you can't help but imagining how they'd run around in their samurai-war-armor, decapitating foes with one single strike.. just when i filed that thought in the 'to be blogged' corner of my mind, the relaxed/stern looking old man offered me an isolated seat-cover, 'cause there was some space left on their blue plastic plane. i couldn't enjoy that very long, though, since koichiro wanted to meet this other party in [chidori-ga-fuchi].
the park / riverside was jammed with people (but hey, this is tokyo, i guess everything is jammed with people.. :) admiring the view. and it was indeed breathtakingly beautiful.. each tree would have it's own source of light, illuminating the blossoms, their white-pink petals forming a nice contrast against the milky-grey-beige sky of downtown tokyo (it never really gets like 'pitch-black' or even black around here). flashes from hundreds of built-in mobile phone cameras would flicker around, and.. *sigh*..
anyway. so of course we couldn't find the group, so we got navigated there by mobile (ok. there's like this statue.. oh.. the OTHER right way would've been the.. well, ok..). it turned out that this group was his club from university, so i knew some of the people already. joined in on the (you guessed it..) blue plastic plane and chatted / watched the crowd. i asked everybody what they liked best about tokyo, with some really funny results. i guess i'll compile this list sooner or later, with reasons why tokyotans like their city. had a great time seeing the suited people around us going out of their shell for once (getting drunk in japan: at a certain stage this definitely will include some more or less explicit display of (male) nudity, and people who arrived at that stage will most certainly end up in some sort of fountain / well / river / nearby lake..
we didn't get to see the bitter end in the fountain though, 'cause at ten thirty pm we were already busy trying to revive fellow club-members / cleaning up our place.. now if you'd have this hanami-event in germany, it'd most probably bring havoc over the whole park, leaving a wasteland of garbage and empty cans. here however EVERYBODY cleaned up, heck, they even separated the garbage.. amazing. once the square we had occupied was tidy the group gathered and some ritual goodbye procedure was performed, which included some yelling, bowing & outstretching of hands, resulting in a final collective clap. since i enjoyed this procedere a lot it was repeated a couple of times, and i even got to do some of the yelling. neat. anyway, so we carried the two drunks to the station (and i mean carried, they couldn't walk anymore, one guy was almost unconscious) and dragged them into the train. something very convenient about jammed trains is that the sheer mass of people somehow supported the nonsentient beings, almost to the point where they'd stand upright without anybody holding them.. ;)
left in ikebukuro, said goodbye & thanks to koichiro and took the train home.. boy, what a day.

tomorrow: karaoke with koalabaerchen! wohoo!
btw: finally somebody signed the guestmap!! danke murgl!! ;)

2003-04-03T09:13:00.000-08:00

hanami!
fine day today. put on a suit and my most favourite sneakers, a cool grey tie and my hip shoulder bag, grabbed some food in family mart and drove over to koalabaerchen's university. met up with her and her professor, ate out in the 25th floor staff lounge (cool view, buildings & more buildings 'til the horizon, in every direction) and went to the shrine next to the budokan later. (without the professor, though. ;) hanami (flower-watching) is a nice excuse for suited people to sit on blue plastic planes underneath the trees, getting drunk and playing games they enjoyed during their childhood. koalabaerchen then went to take an entry test for this trading company and passed it (! wohooo!!) while i met koichiro and some other students. i was asked to join about 25 clubs, and proudly showed off my japanese by uttering "i'm not a student, sorry" all the time. went back home, met a friend at starbucks in shinjuku, went back to my place, talked to koalabaerchen on the phone & tried to learn some japanese.. nice day

2003-04-02T08:20:00.000-08:00

ignored the rain and went to [ueno] today to see the cherry blossoms. (more about ueno park [here]). it was really nice, well, except for the rain maybe. :)
eye-shopping later (damn, all this eye-shopping. could've shopped myself to death half a dozen times by now. found a gorgeous long-sleeve shirt, 29fscking000 yen.. wtf?!), then ate out at ootoya again.. i'm finally getting the hang of teriyaki, somewhat at least..
there were at least twenty-thousand other things i certainly wanted to blog about today.. i guess i'll remember them on my way back home... great.

2003-04-01T08:50:00.000-08:00

sucks.. all the thougts about cool & witty things, all the "ready-to-blog" sentences i come up with over the day are gone once i'm in the internet-cafe.
so, what did i do today?
woke up around noon, due to learning japanese & being online half of the night. sent my resume to various language schools in tokyo, but didn't get any real answers by now. walked to [shinjuku] and checked the balance of my bank account, then went eye-shopping. spent more than half an hour in a [bic-camera] (or [sakuraya]?) store battling little kids in [soulcalibur 2].. (i need enemies, not victims..). had a lot of fun talking with some of the kids, who took turns in loosing against me, until a shop-assistant friendly asked me to leave.. i guess there is some sort of time limit for occupying the demo gamecube. ;)
didn't go to [donki-hote] today but went to another supermarket, one of the old-fashioned ones without an url... i was so amazed by the living turtles in the seafood-section that i instantly forgot what i wanted to buy, and when i found myself outside the market i had apparently bought four kiwis, a pack of tempura and 1.5 liter bottle coke. nice for a change, eh?

went back to my place, finished [flowers for algernon] and tried to paint something. i guess i'm having some sort of a graphical writer's block, couldn't get anything done at all. toyed around with my shodo-set (calligraphy) instead, but didn't do more than a few pages.. then joined my housemates in watching "the bourne identity" with thai subtitles. went through my kanji-cards again later, emailed koalabaerchen..

oh, by the way: [rumi] is pregnant & back online! wohoo! also check [norry // life in the bamboo] for more tokyo-based blogging.. ;)

2003-03-31T09:45:00.000-08:00

space monkeys..
woa. sorry for the lack of updates. spent the weekend hanging out with koalabaerchen. met one of her best friends and went to karaoke. they both, koalabaerchen and a. have beautiful voices.. against such competition my miserable interpretations of songs like "on a horse with no name" and "puff the magic dragon" sucked even worse, but i nevertheless enjoyed it. actually i'm quite eager to go and sing again real soon.. "hooked on a feeling..lalala.."
hehe.. that evening i was invited to koalabaerchen's parents' house. her mum cooked a really delicious dinner, and since the whole family sided up with koalabaerchen's opinion about me being to skinny (185-187cm, 64kg), i was forced to eat eat eat.. :)
on sunday we went shopping in shibuya (damn, i could buy like 25 cool t-shirts with astro-boy on 'em every day.. money!) before attending [biidoro]'s performance in the live-house [yaneura]. met her brother before he went on stage, chatted a little bit. he really liked the drawings i did while listening to biidoro-songs (i guess), and i offered to do their next flyer.. wohoo! anyway, their show totally rocked, and from now on i consider myself as their roady. as long as i live in tokyo, i wanna attend all concerts.. ;)
oh yeah, another cool thing was: takashi (biidoro frontman & koalabaerchen's brother) put us on the guestlist, so we got in for free. cool, eh? i went to like my fifth live-performance ever and i already got my name on a list other than "banned for the next month".. wohoo!

koalabaerchen slept over at my place, and i slept half of the night without my blanket.. when i woke up at five something am the muscles in my back were as cold as ice. since my nose started running right away i couldn't fall asleep again (i really ran like hell, almost asphyxiated..). read [flowers for algernon] instead, a damn good book so far.. accompaigned koalabaerchen for a while on her way home. when she left in nippori, i went to the very first car (almost empty) of the train and took the long way back home, watching the cityscape driving by, with the occassional sakura-tree here and there.. and i co-read the newspaper of the suits sitting next to me. it's always nice to see [bob sapps ass getting kicked]. damn sell-out sissy..

2003-03-27T18:56:00.000-08:00

mood-music // cold heart
great. actually i wanted to blog yesterday night, but after having a fine microwave-dinner i fell asleep at ten o'clock and slept 13 hours straight. ;). i moved into another room in my guesthouse on wednesday, and have been busy cleaning ever since. now, various buckets full of midnight-black water later it's almost a clean room. sigh. haven't cleaned that much since ages, and, i've got to admit, most of the time i even enjoyed cleaning up.. i mean, you know that you're doing it for a reason, and you see the results right away.. not like learning kanji for instance.. ;)
the weather got really nice the last days, and that made me aware of something very funny: i brought like 40 md's to japan, with all my favourite music, so that i'd have a big selection for the soundtrack of my live in tokyo. but what i realized now is that the music i brought mostly resembles dark, grey, rainy & windy days in north-western germany, and doesn't really fit for bright neon-lit nights in tokyo.. even the electronic stuff i brought, like [mikron 64] and [add n to (x)], is rather for darker moods.. hm. guess i've gotta convert yo j-pop then, eh? [koda.tv]

just when i tried to look into myself to check whether i missed germany a little bit, i recieved an e-mail from my one of my old house-mates, bitching about the telephone-bill. if a guy would talk to me like that it'd be knuckle-sandwich for dinner.. and the best of all, i paid that bill like days ago, she just didn't check properly. god, stuff like that really makes you enjoy being far away.. ;) i miss some of my friends, though.. hey! kommt mich doch mal besuchen!? :)

ok then, i'll leave you with this funny conversation i got into yesterday night, waiting at a traffic light in shinjuku;
homeless(?) guy: you canada?
me: no.. i'm germany! ;)
he: we speak?
me: yes?
he: i think germany heart very cold.
me: well.. yeah, probably... not everyone, though ;)
he: not you?
me: i guess so.
he: can i have some money then?
me: no!?
he: see? cold heart.

2003-03-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

donkey hotel?
lazy day. met [koichiro] in shinjuku. went to a rather dodgy, but still definitely style-o-matic coffeeshop, called coffee shop L. it was empty when we came there, but soon started to fill with light-grey suit-wearing, overly tanned & styled guys in their mid-forties and -fifties, with hands full of rings and attache-bags chained to their wrists . great. but the decor was dope, red plush sofas & glass tables with built-in poker games. actually it's more like having a tv, with it's screen facing upwards, as a table, with illuminated buttons and print-on instructions at each side.. didn't play, though, but instead clicked right away and talked about live & love in japan.. sounds soapy, i know. anyway, took a tour around [kabukicho] then, the neon city that never sleeps.. walked over to shinokubo then, showed off with my new (and slightly bigger) room in the guesthouse (i changed rooms today..) and did a tour around the city...
went shopping around 11pm (amazing fact: everything is open all the time, but the local mc donald's (makudonaldo) closes at 10pm.. sick country).. anyway, went shopping to my most favourite shop at the moment: donkey hote.. or donki ho-te. it took me ages to figure that this onomapoetic structure is to resemble "don quijote", by miguel cervantes.. (err.. i guess). the first three days i thought the shop was named "donkey hotel", which i thought to be a damn cool name for a.. well, shop that literally has EVERYTHING in stock. be it flour, vegetables, dogfood, brass knuckles, gundam kits, hello kitty refrigerators, shower-curtains, remote controlled vibrators, jewellery.. you name it, they have it. it's just that finding it ain't that easy, the shop is ram-jammed with stuff (& people). 20cm walkways between boxes? luxus..

anyway, gonna go to bed now..
this week's plan:
- clean room tomorrow, maybe meet koalabaerchen
- meet koalabaerchen and ayako on saturday, karaoke & eye-shopping
- [biidoro]-live in shibuya

2003-03-25T08:53:00.000-08:00

big update
i've been to ueno yesterday, shopping with koalabaerchen.. i couldn't resist and bought the flashiest -and definetly the most orange(!)- shoes i ever owned, [nike air rift b]. wohoo! and probably the very best about them was the price, y2980..
today was rather mellow, slept until noon, then tried to memorize some more kanji, since i, in a weak attempt to increase my learning-speed, made about 300 kanji-cards yesterday evening. this is generally a good way to learn i guess, but unfortunately making kanji-cards doesn't equal knowing the kanji on them..
anyway. as i said, didn't do too much today, met up with koalabaerchen in shibuya this afternoon, ate fries in [first kitchen], and went eyeshopping. normally i don't really mind the crowd, but when hundredthousand people squeeze themselves through tiny alleys and fscking EVERYBODY has to have an umbrella things get really annoying... in germany, if it's raining all day, people stay at home ("oh, what the heck, let's go shopping tomorrow"); in tokyo, however, people go like "oh great! let's go poke some eyes out!" to make things equal, there are quadrillions of white/see-through umbrellas availiable for everyone to arm himself.. sigh.
took the train home with koalabaerchen, then went back to ikebukuro to check the secondhand bookstore for english science-fiction stuff. amazing discovery: they still had some of the books i traded two years ago standing in the shelves.. ;) anyway, didn't find anything, went back to shinokubo and joined my housemate jerry for some tv.. watched a show called [the bl@ck mail] (hope that's the right link). damn funny, this girl and the people from the show hooked up the girls boyfriend with three chicks, so he ended up going home with one of the girls (constantly videotaped of course). they had the house rigged, and once he was in his underwear somebody started banging on the door, and she hurried him out on the balcony, where he was freezing to death, clutching all his clothes, hiding away dead scared from what he thought to be the girl's violent boyfriend. to make things worse, the people from the show called him up on his mobile, which he nearly threw down from the balcony to silence it.. and all the time taped on infrared, broadcasted nation-wide.. great.. ;)

2003-03-23T05:08:00.000-08:00

as seen on tv!
almost.. anyway, our hero can now, in all his blurry glory, be seen on [ethica.jp]. the picture was taken in the [excelsior] coffeeshop in ikebukuro.
now: koalabaerchen..

2003-03-22T18:19:00.000-08:00

sunday
it's sunday morning and the korean internet cafe is ramjammed with people playing [ragnarok]. should've know this.. anyway, been to "electric town" akihabara yesterday, browsing shops like [animate].. oh, and i played [virtua fighter 4: evolution] and lasted three rounds! well, it's the little things that make life worthwile.. didn't buy anything though. sigh. (but if, i'd buy a cool gamecube with 5" screen, gameboy add-on and infrared controller..! *dream dream*)
there's no real plan for today, i guess i'll just hang around & wait for koalabaerchen to finish her TOEIC..

oh yeah, and [tsukiji] on tuesday..

ps: teru posted pictures of his baby on [ethica.jp]!