I finally had some time to sift through the thousands of unread entries in my RSS reader today, and came across some fairly interesting stuff. One of the things that really put me in an apprehensive mood was a post by Joi Ito (which in turn was posted by several other people) about 3 weeks ago, which can be found here. The post contains an image of a recently published book with the text (in Japanese) “Oi Nigger! Don’t be touching a Japanese girl’s ass!”, which was apparently about “foreigners committing crimes” in Japan. In fact, from what I can tell (I haven’t read the book or seen anything from it myself, except that one screen), the book is talking about the problem of foreigners committing crimes in Japan, with images and such.

The thing got a huge amount of attention, and the author of the book made a response to the international audience in Japan Today, here.

I’m not sure what to think of this all. I knew racism existed in Japan (against everyone not Japanese), and I do not have any illusions (like so many other people who are planning on moving there) on ever being seen as “Japanese”. No, I would rather be seen as “Kalle”, and I would rather see people as who they are as individuals, and to hell with belonging and becoming.

But this is just… wow. It smells and looks and feels like the racism of half a century ago. Where am I headed again? And why? I hate having to ask myself those questions when I’ve been set on this plan for over a year already.

Sysadmining has its downsides. But I’m back, and I’m bigger than a breadbox.

Two even.

http://xkcd.com/c224.html

LOL! This guy is hilarious..

It struck me earlier today that the word Asia comes from the Japanese word “Ajia” (亜細亜). I had no cluuuuuuuuuue!

Edited: Then I properly looked into it and was completely wrong. But somehow, the word for the asian region is the same in both Japanese (ajia) and in Europe (from latin/greek). [wikipedia article]

“34,000 commuters inconvenienced after man run over by train on JR Chuo Line.”

That’s the title of a news article on Mainichi News (link which is broken cause MNN delete articles over 1 month old… stupidly).

The title speaks for itself, but does not convey the message they had in mind, no doubt. The commuters were inconvenienced because a guy was fucking hit by a god damn train. Where the fucking hell are your priorities, people? I’m talking about the article authors, here. Jesus fucking christ.

In my english class I have a bunch of wonderful fellows, among them two chinese girls who I tend to talk to a lot, for various reasons - one being that I know one of them from last semester (we took Society together), and the other because she is the one’s friend, and because she and I share a common interest, namely Buddhism.

But that has sort of almost nothing to do with what I wanted to say.

A few days ago we were walking to the subway station together and on the way I said “I know ‘ni-hao’ is ‘hi’ in Chinese .. but what is ‘good bye’?”, and one of them asked “In cantonese or mandarin?” and I said both, and in one of them it was simply “Bye bye”, but in the other it was some “Tza… ” thing. Point being that she told me, I repeated it accurately, and then promptly forgot the word.

But dude, that NEVER happens anymore, I thought. I hear some word in Japanese 2 or 3 times (3-4 if it’s a boring word) and then it sort of sticks. At least in the “……….. OH RIGHT. Yes.” kind of sense. I can dig out the meaning of the word if I try. But here.. man. Gone with the wind! So I ask her again as we are parting, and she tells me again, and I repeat it again, and … bam. Gone. No chance of me remembering.

It reminded me of the very, very early stages of my learning Japanese. I had written up this silly bash script (iirc) which pinged me with words randomly from a list of words in japanese or english, and I was supposed to write the translation of the word. I spent hours on groups of 10-15 words. Hours. I would run through the words in a variety of ways — “tell me the correct answer and re-ask me again later, until I give the right answer” to “give me the summary + corrections at the end, and do not let me re-answer” and so on. I’d finally short-term memorize all the words in 30 mins or so, then a day would pass and I’d retry and it’d take another 20 mins before I had them down again. And then the next day it took me 50 minutes to do the same words. It drove me bonkers. I was able to provide myself with some really nice tools for learning, but despite that I had a damn hard time doing it.

But that was only the first 30-40 words I ever ever ever learned. I quickly came up with ideas for how to learn. Like “tamago” means “egg”. We all know about the tamagochi, right? So that word was easy-peasy. Some words were just killer-hard to learn, because their spelling was especially “unseen” in English/Swedish. Try to learn how to spell this word, to get a feeling of what I mean: uvghewraiufrauibvkuaeb. You can’t. You fucking can’t. And that’s how it felt sometimes.

But then I learned - long-term-memory-learned - a dozen words, and a dozen more, and for every word, the next came easier. It’s a muscle in the brain, but I’m afraid it’s a “The Japanese Language” muscle, not a “All Languages Muscle” (well, to be fair, it’s probably sort of both).

Our brain’s a wonderful invention, but it’s not entirely obvious sometimes how to make use of it. When I learn my fourth language, I’m definitely gonna remember this and take comfort.

Evolution got into a funny habit of crashing several times a day. Personally, I think it’s because I have like 500 mbs of email stocked up in there, but whatever the reason, I’ve had enough.

Which is sad, because as I said, I have 500 mbs worth of email in there. I’ve used Evolution for… almost 10 damn years. 10 years on the same app is impressive, to say the least. (I started using Evolution in the end of er.. last millennia, but due to a reinstall/crash I only have emails dating back to 2000 in Evolution).
Bye Evolution, Hi Thunderbird. Gotta love choice.

But this of course makes me curious about the longest time you guys have used the same application, excluding operating systems? (And they say you’re supposed to finish your blog posts with a question to your readers, so I guess I’ll do that. :P)

I went to a museum yesterday. It was sort of a surprise-paid thing by my school, and I saw some pretty amusing things.

The first thing I’m only linking to, as it’s not safe for work: a man.
Giggling and bouncing around that image were a bunch of school children (probably ages 8-9 or so), and it amused me to no end. I saw the headlines had this been America. (Oh and yes, there were female “versions” too — and one with both.)
Another thing, that was actually pretty cool, was this little iron meteorite:

That thing, they claim, is older than earth! 4,600,000,000 years old. And you could touch it! I did. I’ve touched something that’s older than earth. Have you?

And the final thing I wanna show you is this - can you guess what this is? Admittedly, my cell phone camera sucks beyond belief, but still — this looks like something out of a computer game, or a warzone:

If you can’t guess it, then I guess I’ll tell you. That’s a rock that naturally glows when exposed to UV light. I can’t recall why, but it was a pretty damn cool rock. I want one in my living room.