I have (finally!) had occasion to read The Tale of Genji with the sort of attention that the work deserves.
And because I apparently can’t help making these sorts of cross-media connections, It occurred to me that Apple Blossom from The White Stripes’ “De Stijl” album makes an eerily good Genji/Murasaki song.
What do you, the viewers at home, think?
We had an earthquake, but the only casualty was productivity, and the only consequence boredom.
Also, a short review of Gunbuster 2. To summarize: Stupendous. A++ would watch again.
See, it’s stuff like this that makes me feel like Ruby would be a neat language to use in a MUSH-like context. If only social/roleplay MU*ing weren’t a dying art…
Got this from Hunter, and have been meaning to link it ever since.
You get a separate Idol Card for each idol you start; it’s got her stage name on there, along with a little grayscale picture of her. The surface of the cards is completely re-writable; after each game, the machine refreshes the card with your current data, so that you can show your proudly show off your idol’s picture to your friends, family, and co-workers.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w
# This tells me in no uncertain terms how many pages I need to
# get through in a given day in order to meet a deadline, and
# offers a Valentino Rossi-like GO!!!!!! by way of encouragement.
# Require the fancy-pants linguistics library
require 'rubygems'
require 'linguistics'
Linguistics::use( :en )
# Init constants
SecondsInWeek = 60 * 60 * 24 * 7
SecondsInDay = 60 * 60 * 24
Deadline = Time.gm(2006, "Dec", 15, 12, 00, 1)
Today = Time.now
TimeLeft = Deadline - Today
TimeLeftAdj = TimeLeft - SecondsInWeek
TotalPages = 403
unless ARGV[ 0 ]
puts 'What page are you on?'
current_page = gets.to_i
else
current_page = ARGV[ 0 ].to_i
end
pages_left = TotalPages - current_page
puts 'PAGES LEFT: ' + pages_left.en.numwords
# Could just print the results of evaluation, but
# that would be harder to write I mean read.
ppday = pages_left / (TimeLeft / SecondsInDay)
ppweek = pages_left / (TimeLeft / SecondsInWeek)
ppweekadj = pages_left / (TimeLeftAdj / SecondsInWeek)
puts 'AVERAGE PAGES PER DAY: at least ' + ppday.to_i.en.numwords
puts 'AVERAGE PAGES PER WEEK: at least ' + ppweek.to_i.en.numwords
puts 'ADJUSTED PAGES PER WEEK: ideally, ' + ppweekadj.to_i.en.numwords
puts '-------> G O ! ! ! ! ! ! ! <--------'
I’m painfully aware that this is incredibly trivial, but it’s a big deal for me, so you hacker types can keep your derision to yourselves.
It’s hot. Avatar and arrogance errata, followed by tabletop role-playing games I’d like to play, but maddeningly, can’t.
Talking about Shena Ringo and now, Tokyo Jihen, is something I find very difficult, and even the reasons for its difficulty are themselves hard to articulate1. For one thing, although my love, yes, love for the Jihen is a constant companion, my enthusiasm comes and goes.
This waxing and waning is a kind of coping strategy. I don’t live in Japan anymore, don’t have easy access to fan club swag and concerts, and lack of these things gnaws at me. So during those times between albums and concert DVDs, I have to suppress my irrational fanboy desire, lest my mind be consumed.
But when a new album comes out, the fanboy is back. And when a new concert DVD comes out, well. My entire musical existence is realigned. This has happened before. So when Brad writes about the new Tokyo Jihen concert DVD in a favorable manner, I pay attention. And I dig out the credit card, and I remit to CDJapan one (1) soul. I wasn’t using it for anything, anyway.
And now I have the “Just Can’t Help It” concert DVD, and it was worth it.
I don’t even know where to start. Brad’s coverage of the concert footage is comprehensive; I encourage interested parties to check out the rest of his blog as well; the man is an articulate correspondent, and Jihen fans are fortunate indeed for his textual largesse. I will not be doing a song-by-song breakdown; his is very good.
Shena Ringo is a goddess of rock. She is a mad Virgin Mary or a Guan Yin, and her music enriches us all simply by existing in the world. It is tempting to imagine that her manic ardor had somehow cooled since ending her solo career, but that simply isn’t the case. Her art has become less self-indulgent since the epochal Kuri no Hana album, yes, but the goddess is still there, and she has some pipes. Her voice on Just Can’t Help It is the best it’s ever been, and she ranges from shy, coy twittering to bluesy growling and expansive fermata with effortless aplomb. She is at the top of her technical game.
Yet it often happens that technical excellence comes at the expense of raw emotion; even I am guilty of characterizing the Jihen’s work in those terms, when compared to the solo years. This DVD lays such comparisons to rest. Tegami alone dispenses with the idea that there is somehow less raw feeling here. There is simply so much musical talent and so much emotion on stage that it’s nearly impossible to focus on both.
I just don’t know how else to put it, but when she sings the enigmatic Genjitsu wo Warau, the ardent Juusui Negai, and the maudlin, inspiring Superstar, I puzzle, quail, and soar—respectively, and it’s a function of the musician in me appreciating the performance, while the human part glories in raw feeling.
This sounds like scandalous overstatement. Perhaps to some it is. But despite the fact that I may come off as an ironic, disaffected hipster at times, the truth, when it comes to Jihen, is that I have no time for irony or detachment. I love this music artlessly; my heart loves this music, and to see it performed makes my life measurably better.
But I don’t know if other people will feel this way about Shena Ringo and now, her band. I’ve had to resort to sappy sentimentality to attempt to get my point across, and even then it is imperfectly conveyed. Perhaps this is why I have such a difficult time discussing music with people who don’t at least understand why I would love her work so much. It’s as magical and ineffable as an irrational number, and no matter how many times I listen I always find something more.
I just can’t help it.
1 Yes, ha ha, I know I said I was a good writer in the very last entry. Shut up. I am trying.
This guy is out of his mind. Writing is harder than programming? Maybe that’s because you’re a better programmer than writer.
I’m an okay writer. If confronted with a situation in which I need to convey a complex or abstract idea using written language, I can (presupposing a working knowledge of the topic) explain it effectively—even, perhaps, with a modest amount of flair. With time to revise, I can do even better.
Programming? Forget about it. I am terrible programmer, and not just because I haven’t spent very much time at it. I remember taking CS 257 (Nonimperative Programming with Scheme) at UNM. I got a C in that class—the only C of my academic career. It was absurdly, unreasonably difficult for me. Even implementing the simple, easy stuff took me hours of interpreting and reinterpreting permutations of code, and frequently I arrived at the solution via trial and error rather than with insight.
I haven’t done much programming since then, but even my forays into Perl, PHP and Applescript (at various points for various reasons) have been characterized by similar bumbling. The code won’t work. I won’t understand why it won’t work. I’ll change an arbitrary detail. It works. I won’t understand why it now works. Or more likely, it never works and I simply give up.
Learning a bit of Ruby has started to change this very slightly, but even so, I will never be a even a moderately competent writer of scripts, to say nothing of being a “programmer.”
Programming is easier than writing? Maybe for you, pal, maybe for you.
EDIT: What concerns me is that if writing is harder than programming, and I am a terrible programmer, then what does that say about my writing?
Don’t answer that.
In this episode I pontificate about the Nickelodeon TV program Avatar: The Last Airbender. Oh, do I pontificate. I’m a pontificator. It’s what I do.
But not for long. Just a hair over two minutes. Surely you can spare two minutes.
Hijinks Ensue is now available via the iTunes Music Store.
My 28th birthday was yesterday. I turned eighteen a decade ago.
… which doesn’t really bother me. The fact that I’m looking a bit older than I looked even a few years ago is fine, too—it gave me pause for a second, but only a second. I still look smashing in a fedora, so continuity is preserved.
Oh, things? Things, they are going extremely well. This year, I have:
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