Look, a journal!

Right, I've been meaning to post about various things for a while and haven't gotten around to it. So I could probably write a whole entry on any of these things, but I'm going to try to be brief.

- Went to see the new (well, new-ish) Harry Potter movie last weekend. I thought it was an improvement, actually. Or rather, I should say I enjoyed it more than I remember enjoying the book. I don't actually remember DH well enough to know what was changed -- besides the dance scene, since people made such a fuss over that. Personally, I have to say I don't really care whether the movies are pushing Harry/Hermione or not. I did think Nick Cave was kind of an odd choice of slow-dance music, but I like that song, I'm not complaining.

The Japanese subtitles were pretty cool -- the translators actually made up their own words for the spells and other invented language instead of just putting it all in katakana, which kind of surprised me. I can't remember any of it now, though.

- ... so I bought myself a PS3, finally. I waited until there were a bunch of games for it that I wanted, and I saved up for it and shopped around to find the lowest price, so it's not like it was some stupid impulse buy, but I'm still going "aaah I spent money oh god I hate spending money" about it. It's just kind of sitting there because I don't have any games for it, though at least now I can play my Japanese games without using SwapMagic.

- I bought the first volume of this old, obscureish manga called Leviathan (mostly because Sound Horizon did an album based on it) and, despite its... problems ("Evil foreign immigrants will destroy Japan!") I enjoyed it enough to want to keep reading. I couldn't find it at bookstores, so I Googled it hoping to find raws. Instead I found a scanslation, and now I'm wondering if this one is exceptionally bad or if I'd just forgotten how terrible scanslations usually are. Actual verbatim line:

"He was first and had a normal of pro-wrestling debut, then he was became stronger! I'm happy it was cool."

I kind of doubt this translator speaks either Japanese or English. I did find raws eventually and am kind of tempted to translate the thing myself, but this is a bad idea because (a) no one cares and (b) I like to start ambitious projects with great enthusiasm and then abandon them a couple of weeks later. This is why I'll never be a professional writer or translator. Well, that and a lack of skill and an inability to self-promote. Is it stupid that I still find that disappointing? I mean, naturally most people who want to do some kind of creative thing professionally don't succeed, so it's just a function of my white middle-class "you can be anything you want to when you grow up!" upbringing that I ever thought I could. Oops, tangent. Moving on to more positive things:

- My trip to the US is less than two weeks away! Exciting, though there are still several things that need to be sorted out. I'm going to be in New Jersey and then Washington DC and then New Jersey again, so if you're going to be in either of those areas and not horribly busy, let me know. Maybe we can hang out.

So I watched the first seven episodes of Angel Beats yesterday. I've been meaning to for ages, since I was at one point a big Key fan, but I seem to have a hard time really getting interested in anime these days. I am enjoying it, though, in a guilty pleasure kind of way! The Wacky School Antics (with added comedic violence and death) annoy me, though; I'm totally in it for the horrible angst and drama. Come to think of it, my enjoyment of any Key series/game is inversely proportional to how much (many?) Wacky School Antics I have to sit through before reaching the horrible angst. This is why Planetarian is my favorite.

( I have lots more thoughts, some of which are spoilers )

Man that was a lot of rambling. Could it be that I actually care about an anime again? When was the last time that happened?

I also saw the Ōoku movie today! It was really good, I thought; pretty sets, pretty costumes, good acting, minimal cheesiness. I especially liked Shibasaki Kou as the shogun. The exterior shots of the castle looked really familiar but I can't tell if it's somewhere I've been or if it's just that Japanese castles tend to look similar. They made some changes, but nothing detrimental, I thought. Though there's one scene where another character tries to kill the protagonist and then kills himself, which I don't remember being in the original and which seemed... kind of odd. I mean, it didn't seem to have any impact on anything that happened after, so it seemed like a cheap way to add drama. Man, why am I going on about this, has anyone else on my flist even read the manga?

(Incidentally, the Sad Piano Theme that played when Dramatic Things were happening sounded a lot like Mimi no Aru Robotto no Uta. I was amused.)

Anyway, that music meme:

( Day 11: a song from your favorite band )
( Day 12: a song from a band you hate )
( Day 13: a song that is a guilty pleasure )

I have really got to stop spending so much money every time I go into the city just because I'm so excited that there are things to spend it on. All things considered, I'm pretty happy with what I accomplished on my latest trip, though. I am now allowed to leave the country -- well, technically, I always could, I just couldn't come back once I did. Now I've got my re-entry permit, which was really quick and painless by Japan standards -- it required only two pieces of documentation (my passport and foreign resident's card, both of which I carry around at all times anyway) and was done in fifteen minutes, tops.

I also have an actual bed now! Well, really it's more of a folding cot, but proper beds are both expensive and hard to find in Japan. Point is, it's a vast improvement over (a very thin mattress on) the floor. Fitting it into my tiny car was an adventure. Then when I was trying to pull out of the parking lot of the furniture store, I found that when pressing the brake, I couldn't extend my leg/foot as far as I was used to doing. The brake (I thought) wouldn't go all the way down. So I was sitting there in the parking lot with a line of cars forming behind me, freaking out -- oh god, something's wrong with the brakes! Brake problems are really dangerous, but what am I going to do? It's not like I can call AAA, and I have no idea where a car repair place is here! And how am I going to get home? I mean, I can take the train, but what about my stuff? And oh, god, repairs weren't in my budget for this month! How am I going to afford this?

And then I realized that there was nothing wrong with the brakes, it just felt weird because I'd had to move the front seats up to fit the bed in.

Anyway, I'm hoping that now I will be able to sleep for more than a few hours at a time for a maximum of six hours total. I mean, I'm hoping that that was because I wasn't comfortable and not because my occasional bouts of insomnia have become an all-the-time thing.

I have also found my true love, Book-Off. I would marry Book-Off if I could. I would be like that lady who married the Berlin Wall, but with a bookstore chain. Shelves upon shelves of books for 100 yen each! CDs for 250! Video games for... well, a range of prices, but a lot of them are under 1000 yen! So I have a bunch of old manga and two PS2 games -- Maken Shao, because I'm gay for Kazuma Kaneko, and Nebula: Echo Night, which I know nothing about except that it seems to involve space ghosts (that is, regular ghosts IN SPACE!) and it cost 210 yen. It was in the rock-bottom discount bin with a bunch of sports games, so it's probably terrible, but it looked interesting and I figured I didn't have much to lose.

I also found this tiny movie theatre that plays mostly weird artsy and/or foreign films; they weren't showing anything I was interested in at the moment, but apparently they're showing the live-action adaptation of Ooku, which comes out on the first of next month, so I'm definitely going to go see that. (They're also showing The Cove, which sort of surprises me.

I stayed the night in the most ridiculous internet café. For about $20 a night, you get a little booth with a bed, a computer, a TV, and a PS2, along with access to a large library of manga, magazines, video games, and DVDs (not just anime: Supernatural, the recent Sherlock Holmes movie, and blue-furries Avatar were prominently displayed). There's a room with pool tables and dartboards if you like your entertainment a little less hi-tech. You also get unlimited free beverages -- there are three Coke machines each stocked with a different assortment of drinks, two slushie machines, and then a machine for tea/coffee/cocoa. Then there's the free ice cream. If you're looking for something a little more substantial, there are a bunch of different kinds of instant soup. The bathrooms have showers and provide basic toiletries for free. There is a laundry room. There are tanning beds (which puzzles me because tans are considered hideously unattractive here, but I guess if you spend a lot of time in places like that, you might need to use a tanning bed to avoid blinding voips). And that's just the things that are included in the price -- I haven't even touched the extras. This place has more amenities than some hotels, is what I'm saying. One could probably live there. It was all a little surreal, and it felt strange to re-enter the real world afterward.

And then there's this charming creature, who spent most of the afternoon wedged behind my washing machine and has only recently graduated to wedging herself between the side of the washing machine and the wall. I can't blame her; she's had a stressful day what with some stranger poking at her for some twenty minutes and then throwing her in a box and taking her away to a strange house. I just hope she comes out of there to use the litterbox. Anyway, she has no name as yet; I keep trying to think of something clever or at least not incredibly dumb and drawing a blank. I am so bad at naming. Maybe I can just claim that her lack of name is a literary reference.

So that was my second trip into the (comparatively) big city. And then I came home and there was internet! In my house! No more getting mosquito bites on park benches; no more loitering in store parking lots running my car battery down! I was pretty nervous about setting it up since the instructions for configuration were all in Japanese, but I did all right, obviously. So I am feeling pretty good about life right now!

... although my first day of teaching is tomorrow and for all I know that could be an unmitigated disaster. So I shouldn't get too excited.

And I probably won't even watch the movie, since movies based on books I've read tend to fill me with rage. But here, have some shiny quiz results!