Category: Site News

Dear Ama-chan,
I am sorry that I called you a man. Please forgive me; as a typical male I automatically attribute spears, muddy work, and world creation to other men without thinking that it might be the work of a female.
Please do not pout (it makes your eyes all puffy and swollen) and stay in your cave all year; rice is too expensive as it is.
Love,
Justin
P.S. Here is a link to one of your other fans:
“The rice does not grow without Her.”
Update: I was apologizing for the wrong reason. While Amaterasu IS a female deity, Izanami was the one who did the spear work (yeah I KNEW a girl couldn’t do that!). Timothy Takemoto straightens me out in the comments of the original post. You see, I really am fascinated by this stuff. It’s just my chronic memory loss that gets in the way.

The reference in my new top banner to monster island is not a reference to Godzilla or Mothra, but rather to the cats that insist on crapping in the vicinity of my car. Some friends in Nara insist on calling me, alternatively, “tamanegi-kun” (onion boy, a reference to the famously delicious onions grown here), or “the guy from monster island” (This is a reference to the fact that I live out in the boonies. Alas, ’tis like the pot calling the kettle cookware.)
Also, not to be misleading, but the bridge in the photo is not the Awaji Kaikyo Bridge (the longest suspension bridge in the world connecting my island to Kobe). It’s the Kansai International Airport Access Bridge (click here for details) that links the airport to the mainland. In an ironic twist of fate, however, the airport is a manmade island created by digging away entire mountains on my island and dumping them into the sea. Even today I saw the huge earthmoving machines transporting the dirt onto barges at Sumoto port, preparing them for the next runs to the airport where they are adding to the island to create more runways. For some reason, I think this sucks. Of course, I think everything sucks, but I find this disturbing on a spiritual level.
You see, according to ancient myth the island of Awajishima (uh, what I have been referring to as “my island”) is the origin of the rest of terra firma. Some bad ass named Amaterasu stuck his spear in the ocean floor and when he pulled it out the first drops became Awajishima (actually the very first drop became Nushima). I guess when Amaterasu busted out the shovel to dig the Mariana Trench things got messy and he created the continents, and when he hocked a random loogie it became Tsutenkaku (go read my comment before they delete it).

This is a warning that I will be archiving posts that I liked on my old blog on this one because I want that tingling feeling on my scalp from feeding the monster that is RSS. Don’t worry, I will recycle in a responsible manner so as not to disturb the natural surroundings. I’ll just filter out all the hate and venom from the posts, and then maybe I’ll screw a tree just to show you that I really do care about baby seals.

My site was down for a week due to a corrupted table in the MySQL database that holds the data for my MT installation. But if this entry posts, all is good.

I am dropping the design bomb on this site. Time to go fucking nuts, old school style. And when I say old school, I mean bust out the clay tablets and sharpen some sticks yo. After a few hours of tweaking, I usually begin to wonder if my eyes actually see color the same way everybody elses do because its almost impossible to find satisfying combinations. I always seem to spend at least half of the total time on any design project tweaking the last 1%, you know shit like “should I move this pic 1/14th of a pixel to the left,” or, “shouldn’t I add an extra ‘the’ to that last line in order to make it longer?, or, “Was that last optimization really worth the 1.3 bytes that were trimmed from the code… I thought so, let’s do it again.”
I like to think that all the hours I spend making decisions, then reversing them, then reversing them again and again (ad infinitum) are a kind of karmic investment that will somehow be helpful in a future life, cause if they ain’t good for something, someone up there is laughing his ass off at me.

Just put Haloscan-powered comments on Taro’s blog. I hope he starts using it instead of that ghetto BBS for daily posts.
I’m typing this on my baby U3 Vaio while sipping on a tasty bev. They are calling me an otaku but the soft glow of liquid crystal helps me block out all that. Ether. Buddha like ether.
Post more, T!

Looking over this site’s stats, the most common queries are:
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Now that is pure poetry. It starts out like the first song of the first (and best) STP album and ends with “do me cheap.” Ah, yeah.

For whatever reason you are here (for instance, if I have spammed you), welcome! The entire Cosmic Buddha site is under heavy construction, and work is being done incrementally on the static pages as well as on all weblogs hosted here. I’m working as fast as my schedule allows (read: very slowly), but my isn’t that boring to read about!
The static pages are quite old but still get a lot of hits from people looking for free kimono pics (the joke is on you, I took them all down!). I am working on installing image galleries again, and will let you know when they are up.
In addition to this main blog (weblog) I also update a moblog (mobile weblog) from my cellphone fairly regularly. You can visit it here:
http://www.cosmicbuddha.com/moblog/
Until I installed Movable Type on this hosted site, I did a lot of writing using outside web tools (namely Blogger and Yapeus) here:
http://cosmicbuddha.com/tempblog/
http://yapeus.com/users/cosmicbuddha/
That about covers the scope of my online ego at this point. I used to manage some corporate sites but blahblahblah blahblah blahblahblahblahblah…
Please visit often.
Ah, also – you can email me at:
j(AT)cosmicbuddha.com

I have several good reasons:
1. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (Official Throne Room Book of the Month): I am on the first page. The first two words, if truth be told, but they were tough words to memorize, OK?
2. Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver: I currently have two copies – one I bought at amazon and another my bro sent me from amazon for my birthday. Unfortunately, I do not have two toilets so I cannot put them both to use in the pimpest way imaginable, that is, placing identical reading materials in multiple Throne Rooms. One copy goes to my brother I guess, although I suspect a conspiracy on his part since he knows I love Neal enough to go as far as playing CS for two years as “hiroprotagonist.”
3. William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition: My first Gibson on actual paper media. (Anybody who hasn’t read Neuromancer on-screen is missing the entire point. Although if available, I would buy a boxed set of all his works printed in silver solder on recycled circuit boards to appease my inner Otaku.)
4. Mark Cerasini’s 24 The House Special Subcommitie’s Findings at CTU: A novel that fills plot gaps and background in the first series of the TV show 24 (which leads into the other reasons I am a Lying Liar who Lies; see below)
5. 24, Second Season: Well, Nena was half the reason I liked the first season so much and I didn’t think they could top it overall, but the second season is pretty good too. Although I do have to say that the appearance of a cougar (factoid: In Japanese, cougars are called “American Lions”) was the most pointless bullshit this show has yet produced.
6. ALIAS, First Season: Not as good as 24, but fascinating in that I spent the entire time trying to figure out if Jennifer Garner (who plays the shi-roprotagonist, Sydney) is pretty in real life or not. No, I do not mean in magazines or on TV, but I mean in real life. My woman and I got a kick out of watching her character’s de-facto fight move (reverse jumping spin kick) in the fight scenes. Thug w/Glock? Reverse jumping spin kick. Multiple baddies with kung-fu grip shankin action? Reverse jumping spin kick. Asian torture dude with dental assistant aspirations? Reverse jumping spin kick. Yes, she is a kickboxer made for television. And the hallmark weakness of traditional kickboxing (lack of uppercut) is made very apparent in this series. In fact, barehanded combat is shown as very weak so far – I don’t recall anybody being taken out without some serious combinations being landed. This makes for flashy fight scenes (although Sydney’s partner Dixon knows exactly ONE effective move taken straight from the Green Hornet series) , but what ALIAS really needs right now is the Tiger Uppercut. If I were the producer, I would send the whole cast to training sessions at the CAPCOM/WU-TANG School of Fighting Prowress and Cultural Sensitivity and wouldn’t let them back on the show until they could defeat masters Dhalsim, Blanka, and ODB at the same time. I mean, I would basically like them to be able to show Van Damme what a Razor Kick is all about, ya know?
7. Battlefield 1942 – Secret Weapons of WWII: This is a better expansion pack for BF1942 than the first one, Road to Rome. I mean, the Germans have a (non-functional) UFO for chrissakes! The jetpacks and jet gliders are pretty fun, too, and the Allied flying wing-type jet mounts rockets instead of machine guns. Tight! On some levels, the engineers have really useful alternate weapons. The Allied engineers have (auto?)shotties instead of Springfields and the Axis engineers have rifle-launched grenades instead of potato-mashers. Oh, and knives can be thrown (and used up) now, although it seems like heresy every time I chuck my Fairbank Sykes at an unsuspecting Kraut. The maps for BF1942 are getting really sweet – this is still one of the best-looking FPS titles in the killkillkill/capture the flag category.
8. Counter-strike: Just plain ol’ CS 1.5; Version 1.6 is still down. That is to say, the Steam servers are blocked or down. No more FAMAS (25-round mag sucks but I really like how this gun sounds. Tri-burst setting is representative of real life, I feel – totally unnecessary. It’s all about trigger [button?] control.). No more GALIL (I like this gun but I find it funny that it’s so cheap in this game. Almost half the price of a bread and butter AK? Kewl.) No more Ballistic Shield (and accompanying Shield-fu CT moves). Wah! At least I played a good new map (de_airninja) as well as an old stand-by (starwars) on 1.5.
BTW I am contemplating starting a CS blog because I really like to contemplate doing shit for which I have absolutely no time. Or negative time, even. My projects start out in the red. And spiral down into lighter and lighter shades of pink until…POOF! For instance: I could take the time I’m not spending on my moblog and invest it on starting a CS blog complete with daily screenshots (i 0nZ j00!)… But I would eventually have to split stocks on that as well in order to fund my next project…
9. I am a lazy bastard.
Curiously enough, the reasons I listed above are either listed reversely in order of importance, or are listed completely at random. I finished #6 above, am two hours away from finishing #5, will probably never finish #7 or 8, and will get back to you about thoughts on #1 – 4 when I’m done. After all, I’m thinking of making various reviews my next project…