Midaregami

There was a Penny Arcade recently wherein Tycho berated Electronic Arts for leaving good multiplayer support out of the XBox version of their (apparently) excellent new snowboarding game, SSX 3. You may be wondering why I care about this, and that’s a good question, because I don’t care, not really. I don’t care about the game, the platform, or the decision not to support XBox Live. (XBox Live is apparently the Right Way to do this sort of thing.)

But it got me thinking about online multiplayer games, and I realized something. I don’t like them. My saturnine, reclusive disposition is completely unsuited to online play.

Happy Thanksgiving, my 8 or so readers. This week I’ve been having my students write paragraphs on what they’re thankful for, and it seems only fair that I do the same thing.

Although mine won’t be particularly short—Allah willing, I will never be diagnosed with the dread afflictions brevity or concision.

In no particular order, and doubtless leaving whole swaths of critical things-due-thanks out…

Julia

This one’s so obvious it sort of has to come first. I’ll forego the normal raucous singing-of-praises that would normally go here, and simply say thanks, love.

Collage

By which I mean the musical project that Gregory, Grayson and I are doing. It’s kept me busy and challanged, while remaining fun. It’s going to be a shame to leave it behind when I pass from this world. (Japan, I mean.) While admittedly I’m deeply outclassed by Gregory, he’s a great bandleader inasmuch as he doesn’t lord his talent over people, but rather shares it with them. I’ve never seen that kind of ability-ego ratio before. Wait, no, I have; my old drum teacher, Ken Battat. It’s rare.

Final Fantasy X

I’m having so much fun with it that despite being busier than I’ve been in weeks or months, I’ve managed to log about 20 hours of gameplay. I think I may have already missed out on getting the most powerful spell in the game, though, which really angers me.

My family

I got a letter from my youngest brother, Jeff, recently. It was unreasonably fun to read. My dad has sent me a letter a week like clockwork since I first came to Japan—at times, it’s been one of the few joys in my life. More recently, my parents have been nothing but supportive of The Great (damnfool) Enterprise, and all in all, I’m really looking forward to visiting home in the spring.

My job

Savings equal to the college debt of many people my age.

Home internet access

Because the net is down at school again, and the last time that happened it didn’t come back up for six weeks.

Movable Type

I recently had a brush with LiveJournal drama, despite having abandoned active participation in it several months ago, and it reminded me why I left. I love my weblog. It’s my domain, my paid server space, my bandwidth, my playground, my rules, and there’s not a verdammt “friends list” in sight. Sweet merciful webmaster, I love this place.

Julia came and went. These long weekends with her are a blessing, but they feel so busy I can never decide whether or not I’ve had an actual break. Friday evening saw Jake and I driving down to Himeji to pick her up, and after arriving home in Yoka we had a delicious dinner at Casetta.

The next day was the Big Party at the Nakatas. I warned Julia she’d be put on the spot, and I was right. Thankfully, she’s even cuter when she’s blushing and shy.

I knew I’d only be able to hold out so long against the sweet call of the RPG. A couple of days ago, I bought Final Fantasy X International, and subsequently put about 12 hours into it. I’ve got a strategy guide and am cultivating a sense of leisurely play—that is, I’m going out of my way to fight lots of random battles so that when the times comes for me to lay down the law to some pissant tyrant or aspiring dictator, I can call upon eldritch forces so awful in countenance they must be expressed in clumsy polygons else they drive men mad.

They do, like, 8000 hit points of damage. I’m serious.

On the way out of the shop, I found a gorgeous poster of the original Macross cast, done in watercolor by Haruhiko Mikimoto. It doesn’t even have any ad copy, and was in the “please take one” bin of old posters in the game story. Needless to say, it’s mine. The idiot collector in me lives on, but at least I don’t need to frame it to enjoy it, now. Nowadays I’m fine with putting it up with scotch tape.

With my recent revelation, I’m unveiling a new category for Midaregami.net—”Damnfoolery.” Although doubtless it’s been coined previously, I coined this word last November while writing a (ha!) novel, and it seems appropriate for this damnfool business of going back to school and studying music. Henceforth all subsequent posts pertaining to me personally doing music will have their own appropriately-named category.

Damnfoolery. Just rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? Yup, right off the tongue, then flops, destitute, into the gutter.

I am Jack’s crossed fingers.

Friday night, after acquiring the coat of legend and browsing Animate, we (Maeva and I) walked happily back to Sannomiya station to on our way to meet up with Suzette, who was providing us a ride back to our countryside villas in the mountains of the north. Well, Maeva has a villa. My own estate could be better described as an eyrie.

Setting that semantic question aside for a moment, let us return to Kobe. From the square across the Flower Road from Sannomiya, the sweet tones of a jazz trumpet reached our ears. We immediately investigated, and found a kickin’ funk band playing a set. The drummer and bassist were particularly brilliant. I was dazzled.

Then, something special happened. I saw an old salaryman in a suit, probably coming home from work given the hour (9 PM). Perhaps he’d had a post-work beer or two. He was grooving along in that awkward way that many Japanese do, unaccustomed as they are to any sort of public display of anything. As the band finished a tune he pressed 3000 yen into the guitarist’s hand, despite the fact that there was no hat or open instrument case for donations. He had a peculiar gleam in his eye.

As we continued to watch the band (they were so good) this sort of thing happened several times more, and I realized, that strange gleam in the half-drunken eyes of the salarymen was regret. They were allowing themselves to wonder what might have been.

In that moment, I realized I couldn’t let that happen to me. If I don’t pursue music, I’ll always wonder what I might have missed, and what I could have done.

I have no illusions about the reality of the career or the risk I am taking, but when I come home, I am coming home to be a musician. I have to try.

This past Thursday and Friday in Kobe, a quasi-weekend for the Prefectural Midyear Conference, were two of the best days I’ve had in a long while.

No, that’s not entirely correct. The evenings were perfect. The days were merely good. Your burning desire to hear of perfect nights in my favorite city consumes you. Do not pretend to hide it. I can see the flush in your cheeks, your breathlessness. Go ahead. Read more. It won’t hurt. It’ll feel good.

Regarding the season:

The leaves are of scarlet and gold
But outside it’s rainy and cold
Fall used to be
My favorite sea-
son, now it is just getting old.

The news:

So who’s a political bore?
I can shout louder, and more
“Bush is a foo’!”
How dreadfully new
I haven’t heard that one before.

And my trip in a couple of days:

And so off to Kobe I head
(I’d much rather be home in bed)
To suffer the fools
From Japanese schools
(However, they might wind up dead.)

That is all.

Ainori took a turn for the worse last night. Asa-chan got Dengue Fever in Myanmar and has to retire. He’s been on the show since before I started watching over a year ago, and his progression has been wonderful to watch. He went from a nerd who couldn’t make eye contact to a confident and centered (if goofy) kind of guy. Waiting for him to hook up was a big reason I kept watching the show, when nobody else interested me.

But now, he has to retire. I’ve finally gotten interested in the new characters, so it’s not as though I’ll stop watching. But I’m really going to miss Asa-chan. He, more than many of the Ainori crew, deserved to go home with a nice girl. Hopefully he’ll be awash in a sea of action upon his return to Japan.

(Maybe Biank can stalk him in his Kyoto fish shop now. Mwa ha ha.)

I was trying to come up with a good codename for my next project. Computer companies give their projects codenames like “Panther” or “Ambrose” or “Sagan” or “Bhutanese Phallus Pendant” or what have you, but I couldn’t think of anything that had the proper Skunk Works-like air of sneakiness to it, so I’ve settled on “Untitled.” Occasionally, though, it gets called “I’m writing a bad fantasy novel, this must be some kind of perverse cry for help.” Help.

I’m just over 2000 words into it, which means NaNoWriMo is just not happening this year. But I’m okay with that, as progress has been steady, if slow. I feel that my narrative voice has strengthened with 50,000 words and the intervening 11 months since this time last year, and despite my misgivings about writing a fantasy novel (the potential for abject, egregious badness is so devastatingly high, you see) I’m enjoying what I’ve written, even if nobody else will.

Here are the opening two paragraphs, which tell you nothing at all about the story, yet give away the ending.