Category: Site News

To William Gibson, who I have never met but who may find this post while vanity googling for, say, “mnemonic osaka blackice bbs standover tokyo burningchrome nagoya underground fleshpuppet keiretsu pattern blackmarket translation monalisa oyabun”: I’m back.
Last week was a milestone of sorts for this weblog, the product of several weeks of consistent posting and increasing traffic from other sites, so I would like to thank all of you for reading. I wish I could keep up what other bloggers consider to be a normal pace – posting at least once every weekday – but I just don’t have the time, and I will not post for the sake of posting. That would make it seem like work, and believe me – I already have enough of that.
Speaking of which, every day this week I have come to work in the morning and ended up feeling like wilted produce – harvested by migrant farm workers and then left in the back of a truck for hours under the glaring midday sun as the driver impatiently chews a toothpick and waits for clearance at the border. That is to say, it is hot enough for crotchpot cooking, with no relief in sight. The building managers haven’t turned on the air conditioners yet, and I can’t help but wonder if they receive some type of bonus for every day they put off flipping the switch. Or maybe they just don’t get out much from their offices in the basement, where it’s ten degrees cooler. I might collapse with heat stroke if I keep ranting much longer, so I’ll switch gears and tell you another reason why it took so long for me to post again.

Cruftety, cruftety, cruft. Anybody who comes here now can see how cruftily I have crufted together this site. I spent so much time on the css with no clue of what controlled what, I have ended up with a hodgepodge design. Still, I kind of like it but my inability to tweak the little places that need it is driving me insane. Of course, it might help if I spent more than ten minutes on it at a time, but then again maybe not.

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