06.28.08/xx:xx  five years of peachycomics!             

Has it really been that long?  I can remember when I embarked upon this quest of digital drudgery, hoping something cool would happen, something amazing.  Was I successful?  Sometimes it's hard to tell.  We've had our low points: the bad short stories, the terrible poetry, the low-quality mp3s that only played in one speaker, the random e-mails from imbalanced stalkers...

We've had our high points as well:  the sex FAQ, pictures of hot girls, not to mention a teeny-tiny bit of internet notoriety.

But what's the next step?  Indeed, what IS the next step?  The only clue I can give you is that while the 'music' and 'translation' links on the left don't lead to anything right now, my efforts toward remedying that haven't flagged in the least.

July, which starts in a few days, will bring with it the archiving of the past few months, and hopefully a few of the articles that have been kicking around inside my head.  Not to mention a few projects that I've actually finished, but haven't perfected enough to post here.  Noses, pinball, classical Japanese...these are the things that consume my thoughts when I'm not thinking about cigarettes or video games.

06.22.08/20:38  let's play dress-up                     

Yep.  Here are some of the pictures Marc sent me last week.  The first one is me wearing my glorious yuukata, holding a wooden sword he bought somewhere.  The third one is us hanging out, and the second one is another picture of our sweet Halloween costumes.

The last few weeks have been a blur, a whirlwind of visiting people and shopping and sleeping late and reading a ridiculous number of crazy novels.  If you'd like to give me books to feed my literary addiction, I'd appreciate it.  Just novels, please.  I don't want to read history books, new-age spiritual nonsense, or self-help books.  I can already help myself...

In between all of that other stuff, I've been working.  There's a new picture on the 'graphic design' page, if you're interested.  I've been working on the next article, setting up a web site for my mother, and trying to decipher classical Japanese in my spare moments.  Still not enough time for music, but I'm aching to do some recording.  I never gave up on Nocturne Digitalis, I just haven't had access to my recording equipment.

I want to make some videos for the reincarnation of the music section.  How well that will work out remains to be seen, but I'm excited.  The videos will likely be simple one-takes of me playing acoustic guitar.  I don't know which songs I'm going to do, but if you've got suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

06.7.08/22:55  what's that?  an article?                

Indeed it is.  After talking with Nick about our Tokyo experiences, he gave me the idea to make a list of cool places.  So I did this.  You can read all about it by clicking on the graphic below.  Or not.  Do your own thing.  It's your life, man.

06.7.08/20:28  humpty dumpty                            

With jet lag, that's how I feel.  All my horses and men are trying to put me together again.  I read four novels this week, smoked five packs of cigarettes, played through a little bit of Wind Waker.  I'm trying to get my sleep patterns back to what I consider to be normal, trying to get my digestive tract back up to snuff.  Trying NOT to bow at everybody I see.

It's not so easy, sometimes, to fit in.

The plane ride?  Miserable.  Stuck between a giant, angry marine and a three year-old girl who kept kicking me for the entire 14 hour flight.  Her mixed-race parents singing to her in Japanese, in German, in English.  I did, however, have a chance to read the rest of Hear the Wind Sing in its original Japanese.  The first non-English novel I've ever been able to read.  It wasn't a total waste.

I could complain about almost being charged six hundred bucks for overweight luggage and having to shove a PS2 into my already-bursting backpack, then being hassled by airport security for having a PS2 in my backpack.  I could complain about having to wait an extra THREE HOURS at O'Hare.  I could complain about these things, but I won't.  Traveling is a process, and traveling internationally has its own inherent challenges you've just got to put up with.

Seeing my family waiting for me at the gate was awesome.  I love you guys.

And now, the wife and I have relocated to a new apartment.  Living together has presented its own small set of challenges.  It's much easier, I think, to live on your own.  But there are upsides to it as well.  Can't rain all the time, right?

05.26.08/00:28  party at the izakaya                    

From my sixty or so students, I hand-picked the strongest drinkers for a night of debauchery at the izakaya.  There were thirteen of us in all, and we went to Wara-Wara on a mission, a mission to drink.  And drink we did.  Most of them drank beer, but Marc-sensei and I had Nihonshu.  Nihonshu is a kind of Japanese sake.  But that's not the best part.

The best part is PRESENTS.  They gave me some awesome presents: a bottle of sake, some nice wooden-box cups to drink it with, two furoshiki that look like goldfish, a folding fan, and another, larger furoshiki (handkerchief for wrapping things.)  They even picked up the tab, which was considerable.

And then, we went to do some karaoke.  We were in kind of a Beatles mood, so we did a lot of Beatles songs.  I had a great time, and I suspect that they did, too. 

05.26.08/00:16  beer pretz: a monumental disappointment 

Walking through the convenience store, something catches my eye, it's a box.  On it are written two words I've come to associate with unadulterated awesomeness: 'beer' and 'Pretz.'  The first word, beer, you are already familiar with.  You might not know what Pretz are, though.  Pronounced 'pu-ri-tsu,' these are a snack that I suspect are simply Pocky that haven't been dipped in chocolate.  They're kind of like a salty cracker formed into a stick.

So, imagine my surprise to see a new flavor made to be a complement to beer.  There was no way I couldn't buy them.  So I bought them.  And minutes later, my neighbor and I were drinking Magnum Golden Dry beer, and we decided to give the Beer Pretz a try, and...

They were shit.  The flavor is called 'spicy chicken,' but it's not the kind of spicy chicken you're familiar with.  It's Japan-style spicy chicken, meaning it uses some kind of horrible spice that I can't quite define.  A nauseating flavor akin to a shiso leaf.  Hell, maybe it IS a shiso leaf.

Shiso leaf is a flavor that has always made me feel like vomiting.  It's one of the four things I simply cannot eat.  I'm not allergic to it; it just makes me want to puke my lunch all over someone's face.  So, to have my hopes and dreams shattered by a tiny stick was a tragedy of biblical proportions.

It was a waste of my 158 yen, and my neighbor also didn't like them.  We ended up pitching them.  Live and learn. 

05.16.08/22:54  another peachycomics exclusive          

What's that noise?  Is it a rabid giraffe fighting a horde of gophers? No!  It's another featured article coming at you with sloth-like speed across the plains.  If that's not enough for you, I put some stuff on the resume page and the graphic design page as well.

05.16.08/22:17  earthquakes and such                    

Is it just me, or is the earth going crazy?  Myanmar devastated by a cyclone, and then these earthquakes.  Earthquakes in the Midwest, China, and here in Japan.  I blame Al Gore and global warming.  According to Al Gore, the heat in the atmosphere is absorbed into the ground, making it spongier and more prone to earthquakes.  If he'd just shut his mouth, we wouldn't have global warming, earthquakes, or terrible hurricanes.

How's THAT for an inconvenient truth?

To try and hit home my point about just how freaking crazy it's been here, I pilfered these graphics from earthquake.usgs.gov and re-sized and colored them to fit this page.  To give some perspective to what the picture above is showing, I have a chart:

You'll notice that we had THREE earthquakes with a magnitude of 6+, and some 5's and 4's for good measure.  And those people in the Midwest are crying because they had ONE 5.2--what a bunch of crybabies.  We have MANLY quakes.

The first two big ones were scary, but the 6.8 was enough to make me toss on sandals and run outside to escape what felt like the imminent collapse of my apartment building.  I jumped the stairs, landed hard and cut my foot, and rolled into the parking lot, the building swaying in front of my eyes.

I was the only one.

Why nobody else would run outside to escape is beyond me.  Probably they were all too busy turning on their televisions to see where the epicenter was and to await advice from the Voice of Authority.

05.13.08/17:19  a peachycomics exclusive                

Below is the first article of a series of articles I plan to write, articles covering a wide range of topics.  The topic of this one is a Japanese snack called 'Don Tacos.'  We explore the sordid history of a salty snack available across Japan.

05.11.08/10:38  and the world is turned upside-down     

You might have noticed that things look a little different on the peachycomics.com today.  I noticed it, too.  It's a difficult situation for all of us, so a short Q & A session might be illuminating.

What the hell happened?

The buttons, fonts, logo bar, and page background have all been painstakingly re-done, in an effort to retrofit a five year-old page for the world of 2008.  By the way, its birthday is 6/28.

Why would you do such a thing?

When I first created peachycomics, blogging wasn't as popular as it is today.  The old style was cutting-edge and awesome.  Most people didn't have cell-phones or computers, and many of us were struggling just to program VCRs.  Recently, the old style started to feel dusty, and I wanted to prove to myself that after five years, my graphic design skills have improved a little.

What about nine-point Lucida Console?

I loved her, and we made some sweet, sweet music together.  But she was emblematic of the old style, and not changing her would be the equivalent of changing nothing at all.  After spending 23 hours making new graphics, I wanted it to look completely different, but still retain the same elements as before.

What about the archives?

I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with all the old stuff.  For the time being, you can still access it the same way as before, and get your fix of peachycomics nostalgia.  Do that by clicking here for January through April, and here for everything before that.  However, all the pages that link from here will be in the new style.  Some of the older stuff is, frankly, embarrassing.  If I someday wanted to do something like this for a living, some of the old pages might not be a good representation of my full potential.

What's going to be in the new sections?

The graphic design section is going to be a kind of showcase of some of the better stuff I've done so far using the ol' computer to make pictures.  The translation section is going to be where I display the progress I've made on a little project I've been working on for the last four months.  The featured articles section is going to be where I put some of the articles I'm planning on writing.  Most of my riffing has traditionally been about myself, but I'm planning on writing a few things that aren't about me.