Category: Web

Since you asked… (Japan Blogs)

If you are interested in finding more blogs with Japan-related content, be sure to stop by the JapanBloggers Webring and browse the members list. You’re more than welcome to join us if you maintain a blog that suits the application criteria. After joining (or even if you aren’t into the “webring” thing), you’ll probably want to join the JapanBloggers Mailing List (Yahoo.com account required – Register today! It’s free! Non-fattening! And all that other good shit!).
A complete list of members in the webring:
Aberrations on a Picture Book
Achikochi
AdamGraunke.com
Adrift in Japan
Adventurasia :: The Lounge
alive in kyoto
andrea’s photo blog
Antipixel
Aranami
art and japanese culture
Art Brain
asagao’s Blog
asbCreative
Band Man in Japan
Big in Japan
Blender
Blog From Another Dimension
Blogging it in Japan
Blogging Nippon
Bondi Books Blogspot
C@LLing Kevin
C. Buddha’s Hasty Musings
Cerebral Soup
CFKOZAK
Chariotaku
chipple.net
Confessions of a Grade School Role Model
consumptive.org
cultured out
deepermotive
detlog
dottocomu
ELVTR {elevator}
EOFM.net
esthet.org
Fareast
frangipani
Fred
Freyburg.com
Fukuma Hair Flap
Funk’n Blog___Japanese Underground Culture Blog
Gary’s Boring Blog
Gen Kanai weblog
genfab.com – creative and good quality and crazy
gme.jp
gmtPlus9
Harubaru * Far and Wide
heatshimmer sea of echo
Henrik
Hmmn
HOBO-SAN JOURNAL
IASnet Journal – The Beauty of Rocks
I don’t mind if you forget me
IN-duce.net
i-sako
Japan
Jap|andrew
Japandy
Japan Blogger’s WebMap
Japan Takes the Queen
Japanish
Japan. Life. Tanishi
j-dreaming
jjcha.net
Jm’s myTaste music & movie
Kakyou’s World Domination Diary
Ken Loo’s World
Kitakyushu Views
Kristen’s Japan (aka mediatinker)
Laughing~Knees
Life on the Tokyo Circuit
Live from Yokohama : Stuart Woodward
Lost In Translation
M@Blog
M@ck.:Blog.
Made In Tokyo
Marc’s Japan Adventure
Marcela’s Musings on Japan
Mayumix
ME AND OPHELIA
Mes deux neurones
metalbaby
Mikan Moblog
Mike Media
Mint Dandy
Moscow-Tokyo Nonstop
nipponDAZE
Nippon Goro Goro
Noriko’s Yapping
Obscurity
Okite
On Gaien Higashi Dori
On my mind
opinios
Order of Randomness
Ore No Buloggu
Partido Vegetal Nacional
Photokyo
Pinku!
Pure Land Mountain
Rose Tinted Glasses

Mulder, is that you?

This one’s for Michiko, who works at a patent office in Osaka:
Lawyers Unearth Early Patents
(registration required; get login and password at BugMeNot)
Two patent history nerds found the holy grail of the patent world, get ready for this now, the X-patents (forgive me for clowning you; I’m tired of always being the only geek in the room). One of them is for the internal combustion engine! Possibly signed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson! Hilarity ensues!

Weblog Tools

For some time now I’ve received questions from a few of you about blogging software/platforms. I tried my best to reply semi-coherently, but… Unfortunately, I am almost always busy or catching up on sleep (please contact me if you need a better excuse), so I know I’ve not been much help. I did point out helpful links where I could and I stumbled upon a very good one today:
An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market
It’s a good place to start exploring from as the author has included pertinent links and presents a clear assessment of the weblogging tools market.
Update: If you were intimidated by the link above, check out this one first before going back:
What is Blogging?

Your Evil Masters Make You Drink Pee, GI

You think C-rations and MREs are bad news? Welcome to better dining through osmosis.
When I was growing up, I had an uncle who was in the National Guard. He lived in Connecticut with his lovely wife on a wide spread where they had horses (horses!) and an electrified wire that ran under the corral’s top railing to prevent said horses from brushing up against it. This is where I learned, at an early age, that a long stalk of wild grass will indeed conduct electricity and make you pee your pants. Anyway, my uncle would sometimes bring back C-rats for us kids to munch on and gave us little treats like camo face paint compacts, Army Ranger booby trap manuals (use the plastic spoons from the C-rats combined with everyday, ordinary clothespins to create a trigger for trip wires), and one time he even showed me a “clacker” used to detonate claymore mines (although he didn’t let me keep this – now that was one wise judgment call). Before anybody asks, I will admit up front that I did use the booby trap manuals on our avocado farm in Camarillo to [A] lure my cousin Robert and my little sister Mika into a tiger pit (read: 2-foot hole in the ground covered with leaves and filled with water instead of pungee sticks) and [B] purposefully start a fire on our property with gopher gas bombs and diesel fuel siphoned from my dad’s car (I thought I had fully extinguished the blaze but it later started up again and would have burned down our house if we hadn’t seen the smoke when we were driving by that part of the property to go to the store. Sorry! My bad.).
The best C-rats, hands down, were the freeze dried ice cream packs, which came in one flavor, Neapolitan, and were eaten as is and did not need reconstitution. We tried some of the entrees like spaghetti w/meatballs and some questionable chicken concoctions, but these were really quite nasty, almost inedible, which is saying a lot since we were kids and ate almost anything (for instance, my favorite drink growing up was milk mixed with Dr. Pepper, and my little bro was famous for eating pillbugs). I felt really sorry for my uncle when we saw what he had to eat while out on the field (I seem to recall him mentioning that Cadillac made the C-rats for some reason. Yes, Cadillac the boat maker.). But he seemed to be having a good time overall and would regale us with tales of firing a .50 cal M2 machine gun from an APC and setting hills ablaze with tracers, playing “army laser tag” with the newly issued MILES gear, and the merits of using a Lansky sharpening kit in contrast to a common whetstone for sharpening blades. Damn, I love him for that.
He also introduced me to the Civil Air Patrol when he moved out west, and I participated for a while with the hopes of one day being able to bomb submarines off the California coast like the heroes of old. You have to remember that these were the days of Top Gun, when Take My Breath Away seemed like a good song to fantasize making out with a girl to and my buddy Dustin’s dad, a fighter pilot, was involved with actually firing a missile in the movie (he was like the coolest guy in school for a while, obviously).
But where was I? Ah, yes, osmosis. Does anybody remember that Garfield strip where he has a bunch of books strapped to his head and he’s saying “I’m learning by osmosis?” Well, I really fucking hate that strip (Whoa. Who opened the hate valve, Bodhi?). Digressions aside, might I volunteer the opinion that between the choices of eating food dry or eating food reconstituted with urine, the average soldier might just lean toward eating it dry. Like, every time. Is bacteria-less urine any less urine tasting? Or perhaps they simply don’t season the food since it would make everything taste too salty (maybe the JSDF can use this tactic for their soldiers from Nagoya).
The article mentions the damage that urea does to your kidneys, which is important I think. There is some debate whether drinking your own urine when you are dying of thirst is more harmful than good or not, mostly because its a diuretic, I think. It makes your cells shrink; it is the anti-Pocari Sweat of the beverage world. Then again, I often read about millions of people in China that swear by daily doses of urine for good health. Then again, some of the Chinese herbal shops I’ve seen sell tiger dick and toad anus for increased male potency, so I’ll perhaps keep my opinion that drinking your own pee (or eating it, even sans-bacteria) might not be in your best interest, health-wise.
Besides, it gives you peepee breath.
Update: Before Dave Barry steals it, yes Indestructible Sandwich is a good name for a rock band.

Lost in Translation

All hail the Chinese butt book pirates:

Clinton is the latest victim of Chinese publishing pirates, who counterfeit entire books and rewrite the contents. Acting on the orders of their employers, translators regularly add invented content to make foreign books more appealing, such as Clinton’s memories of his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.
“She was very fat. I can never trust my own judgment,” the Mandarin version said.
In the knock-off version, Clinton quotes Chairman Mao frequently.

MWAHAHAHA!
Go read the whole column here:
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040721-073739-2407r.htm

Cabin food for thought

I read this article this morning and can’t stop thinking about it:
Terror in the Skies, Again?
If you were the author, would you have gotten up and done something? If there really were air marshals on that flight, what the fuck were they waiting for? Perhaps they didn’t have “probable cause,” i.e., one of the “musicians” to emerge from the lav and ask another if they had more matches, “cuz the fuse is damp with ketchup.” I have this sinking feeling there were no air marshals on that flight, and the crew was simply going by the handbook to placate the passengers. If so, that’s just a horrible mindfuck. But I certainly wouldn’t put it over the airline companies at this point.

I am guessing that it is a toilet?

19. Is it round? Yes.
18. Is it made of metal? No.
17. Is it multicolored? No.
16. Is it straight? No.
15. Do you clean it regularly? Yes.
14. Does it use electricity? Sometimes.
13. Can you use it at school? Yes.
12. Does it get really hot? No.
11. Does it have writing on it? Sometimes.
10. Is it a common household object? Yes.
9. Does it move? No.
8. Can it be used for recreation? No.
7. Do you open and close it? Yes.
6. Does it come in different colors? Yes.
5. Can you lift it? No.
4. Can you control it? Yes.
3. Is it outside? Sometimes.
2. Is it smaller than a loaf of bread? No.
1. It is classified as Other.
Go get owned by an AI.
I even threw it some loops, switching between an American and Japanese POV (regarding electricity, coloration, etc.) and it still guessed correctly. Wow.
I know that some of you will contest my answer for #8 but I was truly doubting it would guess correctly, so decided to give it a break. Underestimated my future electronic masters, yes I did.

Korea Blocks Blog Access

Hot from the inbox:

Fellow blogger,
I am sending this message to the bloggers on my blogroll (and a few other folks) in the hopes that some of you will print this, or at least find it interesting enough for comment. I’m not usually the type to distribute such messages, but I felt this was important enough to risk disturbing you.
As some of you may already know, a wing of the South Korean government, the Ministry of Information and Culture (MIC), is currently clamping down on a variety of blogging service providers and other websites. The government is attempting to control access to video of the recent Kim Sun-il beheading, ostensibly because the video will have a destabilizing influence. (I haven’t seen the video.)
Many Western expat bloggers in Korea are in an uproar; others, myself included, are largely unsurprised: South Korea has not come far out of the shadow of its military dictatorship past. My own response to this censorship is not so much anger as amusement, because the situation represents an intellectual challenge as well as a chance to fight for freedom of expression. Perhaps even to fight for freedom, period.
South Korea is a rapidly evolving country, but in many ways it remains the Hermit Kingdom. Like a turtle retreating into its shell, the people are on occasion unable to deal with the harsh realities of the world around them. This country is, for example, in massive denial about the atrocities perpetrated in North Korea, and, as with many Americans, is in denial about the realities of Islamic terrorism, whose roots extend chronologically backward far beyond the lifetime of the Bush Administration. This cultural tendency toward denial (and overreaction) at least partially explains the Korean government’s move to censor so many sites.
The fact that the current administration, led by President Noh Mu-hyon, is supposedly “liberal”-leaning makes this censorship more ironic. It also fuels propagandistic conservative arguments that liberals are, at heart, closet totalitarians. I find this to be a specious caricature of the liberal position (I consider myself neither liberal nor conservative), but to the extent that Koreans are concerned about what image they project to the world, it is legitimate for them to worry over whether they are currently playing into stereotype: South Korea is going to be associated with other violators of human rights, such as China.
Of the many hypocrisies associated with the decision to censor, the central one is that no strong governmental measures were taken to suppress the distribution of the previous beheading videos (Nick Berg et al.). This, too, fuels the suspicion that Koreans are selfish or, to use their own proverbial image, “a frog in a well”– radically blinkered in perspective, collectively unable to empathize with the sufferings of non-Koreans, but overly sensitive to their own suffering.
I am writing this letter not primarily to criticize all Koreans (I’m ethnically half-Korean, and an American citizen), nor to express a generalized condemnation of Korean culture. As is true anywhere else, this culture has its merits and demerits, and overall, I’m enjoying my time here. No, my purpose is more specific: to cause the South Korean government as much embarrassment as possible, and perhaps to motivate Korean citizens to engage in some much-needed introspection.
To this end, I need the blogosphere’s help, and this letter needs wide distribution (you may receive other letters from different bloggers, so be prepared!). I hope you’ll see fit to publish this letter on your site, and/or to distribute it to concerned parties: censorship in a supposedly democratic society simply cannot stand. The best and quickest way to persuade the South Korean government to back down from its current position is to make it lose face in the eyes of the world. This can only happen through a determined (and civilized!) campaign to expose the government’s hypocrisy and to cause Korean citizens to rethink their own narrow-mindedness.
We can debate all we want about “root causes” with regard to Islamic terrorism, Muslim rage, and all the rest, but for me, it’s much more constructive to proceed empirically and with an eye to the future. Like it or not, what we see today is that Korea is inextricably linked with Iraq issues, and with issues of Islamic fundamentalism. Koreans, however, may need some persuading that this is in fact the case– that we all need to stand together as allies against a common enemy.
If you are interested in giving the South Korean Ministry of Information and Culture a piece of your mind (or if you’re a reporter who would like to contact them for further information), please email the MIC at:
webmaster@mic.go.kr
Thank you,
Kevin Kim
bighominid@gmail.com
http://bighominid.blogspot.com
(Blogspot is currently blocked in Korea, along with other providers; please go to Unipeak.com and type my URL into the search window to view my blog.)
PS: To send me an email, please type “hairy chasms” in the subject line to avoid being trashed by my custom-made spam filter.
PPS: Much better blogs than mine have been covering this issue, offering news updates and heartfelt commentary. To start you off, visit:
http://marmot.blogs.com/korea/
http://jeffinkorea.blogs.com/
http://aboutjoel.com/
http://oranckay.net/blog/
http://kimcheegi.blogs.com/
http://gopkorea.blogs.com/flyingyangban
http://rathbonepress.tblog.com/
http://blog.woojay.net/
Here as well, Unipeak is the way to go if you’re in Korea and unable to view the above blogs. People in the States should, in theory, have no problems accessing these sites, which all continue to be updated.
PPPS: This email is being cc’ed to the South Korean Ministry of Information and Culture. Please note that other bloggers are writing about the Korean government’s creation of a task force that will presumably fight internet terror. I and others have an idea that this task force will serve a different purpose. If this is what South Korea’s new “aligning with the PRC” is all about, then there’s reason to worry for the future.
PPPS: This email is being cc’ed to the South Korean Ministry of Information and Culture. Please note that other bloggers are writing about the Korean government’s creation of a task force that will presumably fight internet terror. I and others have an idea that this task force will serve a different purpose. If this is what South Korea’s new “aligning with the PRC” is all about, then there’s reason to worry for the future.

Note: I’ll be happy to post letters for any other bloggers who ask, or help out in any other way possible. Drop me a line in the comments or at:
j@DELETETHESECAPScosmicbuddha.com
I am an avid reader of many Korea-based blogs and wrote a post about it with many excellent links here:
http://www.cosmicbuddha.com/blog/archives/000257.html
Fight the power, brothas!