As always when I really need to study I come up with something more interesting to do instead... with the Japanese midterm on Wednesday I really don't have time to be doing this. No masterpiece, but I smiled almost the entire time while I drew it ^_^

Listening to: Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie - Jesus Was a Cowboy
Feeling: Guilty

The following is a kind of long and probably not all that interesting account of the trip to the castle town of Shiroishi. I'll get some pictures in there later.

9:26
On a local train headed for some castle that I haven't actually picked up the name of yet. I'v heard it, but as with all Japanese it takes a concious effort to actually *hear* it. "...people hearing withot listening..."
In any case I'm sitting here with a largish group of friends. A minute ago Tim passed a bag of pocky around (thanks Tim), so we were a big group of gaijin on a local train all munching pocky. That must have been a sight.
A typical Japanese cell phone ornament is dangling from my pda, it's a small blue cat with a big pile of pancakes on a green plate. Got it yesterday when I bought a bottle of tea.

10:44
Name is shiroishi (white rock). We just saw the residence of a minor samurai. Seemed like a very cold place to live in winter. We're now walking towards the castle. Just passed a big concrete toori.
Ah, here we are. This place looks nice. Jeff and Tim are considering scaling the wall like ninjas.

10:57
Entering castle. The inner gate is larger than the outer one, lots of little windows for arrowing people stuck in between the gates. Inside the gates is a nice park where the castle buildings once stood. Wouldn't mind laying down for a nap on the lawn right now.
In the middle there is a tall thin stone monument in memory of... something.

11:09
So apparently the walls are made from bamboo, clay straw rope and plaster. Clay blocks are tied to a bamboo frame and covered by plaster. Thickness: 24 cm.

11:17
Top floor, nice cool breeze. Pretty views in all directions. We just got the chance to take pictures of Haesung with samurai helmet and sword. Ok, going down again. Leaving. Battery just ran out in my camera, will have to dig the extra out of my backpack.

11:37
So somebody just found 3000 yen in a trash can and, instead of just taking it, just pointed out that there's a bunch of money in the garbage. By now Angelo's got it, after reporting it to the museum attendant who said to keep it.

11:58
Waiting for a movie "The Demon Lord Kojuro" about some feudal lord. Everybody's wearing these cool looking 3d glasses like proper nerds.

12:50
The movie reminded of a typical Japanese samurai drama except for two things: 1) a guy in a suit was explaining the historical background and 2) 3d. Yay, bad acting that really gets in your face. In one scene the lord was sitting on a horse talking to some soldier, this was funny since he obviously didn't have much experience with riding.
Right now people are having lunch (I've just enough cash on me to get back to Sendai and don't like borrowing when I don't have to, so I'm having a cup of tea.) and afterwards we're walking over to some swordmaker's place. That'll be interesting. Hopefully I can get some good reference pictures for modelling swords in Blender. Time for another cup of tea.

17:47
Finally back in my room again, sweaty and tired, but in general happy with the day. Seeing the swordmaking was nice, kind of long though (we didn't see the entire process since that takes about ten days) and it was very hot and humid today. This explain the sweaty part. The tired comes from simple lack of sleep (since yesterday was Ghibli night and we got started on the movie kind of late). Sitting here working my way through a liter of milk, after which I hopefully will have awoken enough to go shower.

Just some random notes today.

Firstly, if you've tried to mail me today I didn't get it because my hotmail account was exceeding the size limit. I've emptied it, so there should be no more problem there. What pushed me over was some stuff lying about in the sent folder, I always forget that what I send will actually stay there for awhile.

I really need to wind down and sleep more. Only slept for about five hours last night and now it's already past midnight again. I didn't really make anything better by going to Steven's good bye party tonight, not that I didn't have fun, I did. It's just that it's got me feeling twice as useless as I did before. The only way I'll be able to relax is if I study enough that I feel confident about the midterm next week, and I seriously doubt that there's enough time before the exam for that to happen.

It's already a little past midnight and I feel wound up and not at all tired. But I need to get up for the geophysics lecture tomorrow morning, the first one in four or five weeks. At least after I get past cell biology and send part of my little brother's graduation present home I'll have some time to work on vocabulary before the seminar in my lab... and if I get bored enough I'll probably sit and study discreetly during the seminar too. It somehow seems like I've reached equilibrium though, the only way I'll be able to raise the level of my Japanese is to get a higher input to balance the increasing rate at which I'm forgetting stuff. So, more studying is required.

Writing posts to your blog while brushing your teeth is not a very good idea.

Listening to: Bo Kaspers Orkester - Undantag
Feeling: the effects of too high sugar levels

If your hyakuen bike lock starts getting hard to open, oil it before this happens:


Luckily it happened at the kaikan and the lock wasn't even on the bike, so I could simply take it up to my room and pry the broken key out. After oiling it I'm now using the lock with the spare key. Wouldn't have been fun if it had happened while my bike was locked over at Katahira though.

The midterm in Japanese 2 next week came as a bit of a shock, I didn't think we were that far into the semester yet and to be perfectly honest I've been lousy at studying. So I'll just have to collect my wits from wherever they've gone off (Does like Osaka: Shikari shikari shikari shikari...) I've started working seriously on reviewing the vocab which should be a third of the exam, it's scary how little I remember from the earlier chapters.
Naturally this comes right around the time when I've started to feel a renewed interest in drawing, reading and modelling. That's probably where my wits are hiding instead of doing what they should... like being witty. See what I mean? I need them back with me, now.
I've gotten a small project in lab so that I'll have something to present at the end of the semester. I've already done a couple of experiments on DNA denaturation from heating with the UV spectroscopy equipment, those were just done to have a reference when trying the same thing with Miyamoto-san's silicon substrate IR spectroscopy set up (I don't recall what he really calls it). In any case, the point is that the worry that I'll have nothing to make a presentation about is gone.

Listening to: Franz Schubert - Impromtu in F minor, allegro scherzando
Feeling: calm and centered

For some reason the .blogspot.com addresses don't work with www in front today. Like www.pofo.blogspot.com won't get you here but will only show blogger's "page cannot be found" screen. So if you can't read this, that's why ;)
Just remove the www and it should work fine, at least it has for me. I've already fixed the links in the sideburn.

Blogger just ate a longish post about baseball so I will try to rewrite a compressed version.
So, baseball... I hadn't played it before today, unless you believe a vague memory from third grade or so that says otherwise. Since I know nothing of the rules I will assume that people reading this don't either. I will also assume that, like me, you don't have anybody around who can explain the game in an understandable language. Therefore I will now explain how it's played, based on my impressions from today.

Ok, for simplicity's sake you will start at point A. A good place to start. You will be holding a big aluminum stick* that fits comfortably in your hands, making you feel powerful and capable of unspeakable destruction. It is designed to make you feel this way. There will be mysterious people wearing masks behind you making you feel nervous. But not for long since you have worse things to worry about. Namely The Pitcher (P, as in pedagogic). The Pitcher is the wielder of a fistsized hard ball which he will throw at you with all his might. Your job is to defend yourself with the stick* and send the ball back at the pitcher or any of the other living targets in front of you. These targets aren't as lucky as you, they only have a cross between hockey goal and glove to protect themselves with. Once you've hit the ball you throw the stick (there goes your defence) and run for your life towards first base (point B) while the people you've just angered by shooting a ball at them will try to hit you with that same ball. However, if you reach B before the ball ancient custom will keep you safe from violence. Unless of course you try to reach C, which will upset people even more. Once you stop running the process will be repeated with the next person in your team, only this time you both will be running (he from A and you from whatever letter you stopped at) giving more targets for the glove people. The goal of the entire excercise (at least for you) is to go past the first four letters of the alphabet and then to return to A. Thusly this game is like many others in that you go through many perils and hardships in order to get back to where you started. After a seemingly random amount of time has passed the teams will trade places and you will get to wear one of the big gloves. At this point you can A: trust your pitcher to keep you safe by throwing the ball so that the A-person can't hit it or B: stand so far away that no reasonable stick wielder will aim for you.

Remains only to say that I had lots of confused fun, hit the ball twice, got hit by the ball once (in my back) and fell in muddy water once. My lab won! Yatta!

*: The stick is called "bat", this has nothing to do with small flying mammals though. The American Heritage Dictionary says:
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, perhaps partly of Celtic origin and partly from Old French batte, pounding implement, flail (from batre, to beat).
Note that you're not allowed to harm your opponents directly with the bat.

listening to: Blue Öyster Cult - This Ain't the Summer of Love
feeling: wet and dirty

I keep writing replies to other peoples blogs and then deleting them before posting because they're stupid. I can be stupid, silly and obnoxious in my own blog, that's my business. But I'll try to contain it here. So, to all you people whose blogs I don't comment on, be glad.
So, sample stupidity: I was doodling yesterday and after filling a paper with an improbable view from a window I promptly wrote "Roughly Yoghurt" beneath it... I have no idea why I did so, but those words just seem to go so well together I shall have to use them for something. It's been stuck in my head for almost 24 hours now, roughly yoghurt. Waaaah! What does it mean? It's almost a description of sourmilk, but somehow that doesn't seem right. I've been through Japanese class with it. "Perapera peraperaperapera roughly yoghurt perapera?" "Huh?"
It's time for lunch and then I'm playing baseball with my lab. I don't think I've played baseball since third grade or so. Rules? Hit ball, run... or catch ball, throw. That should be enough.

listening to: Thoughts about yoghurt
feeling: improbable

The mint tea has left a light brown ring at the bottom of my tea cup. Last night's camomille didn't do that, assuming that this is because it didn't contain any actual tea. Further observations are required to prove this hypothesis.
The 500g bag of cheese from Sanmari is superior to the one from Seiyu, more flavour to the morning sandwich (which also included ham, aspargus and oregano).

And since everybody else does it:
listening to: Duke Ellington - Serenade to Sweden
feeling: monday morning, duh

But I didn't break it, I wan't even awake yet. Mornings break early in Japan and the only time I've actually seen them do so is when I haven't gone to sleep yet at around 4.30 or 5 o'clock in the morning. Not so today though, went to bed at a perfectly sane hour (2.30 or so, sorry about the last post, late night and too much sugar).
I want to do laundry, but am prevented from doing so by PEOPLE WHO LEAVE THEIR LAUNDRY IN THE MACHINE FOR THE WHOLE BLOOMING DAY. I'm sure some of them put it in there yesterday. Nothing for it except going up again later to see if the situation has improved. Until then I will have to refrain from paying 150 yen to not get my laundry clean and then another hundred or two hundred to not get it dry. There are things about this place that I will miss not at all when I go home. Like the shower that will only be hot for another ten minutes... should I? nah, I'll wait until this afternoon instead.
Other things to do today... I should go to a Book Off and get the rest of the Berserk manga and send it home to my little brother tomorrow. I don't think it will reach him in time for his graduation anyway, but I'll send a card to tell him it's on the way.
I've started on another couple of random models in Blender that may or, more likely, may not ever get finished.
Finished colouring the Zombie sketch that Sayaka sent me a couple of days ago. I've no idea why she decided to call her that, maybe it's another example of the strange Japanese view of what's kawaii. I should upload it and show the world... the very limited part of it that will ever see this post.
Just a moment. Well actually, it'll take me a moment, you on the other hand don't really have to wait at all. Unless you're reading these lines before clicking on the link below.
So here's the "finished" picture: Zombie shrinking and compressing haven't been kind to her, but I freely admit that the main problem is my laziness when applying shadows. I really should add another layer of shadows to most of it. Right now only the hair is properly shaded, and I didn't do all that well even with that. It's been so long since I've done anything like this. Here's Sayaka's sketch. I just can't draw something like that, so thanks Sayaka for letting me mess with it.
Just to have mentioned it, I used Pixia to draw the lines and Photoshop for colouring. Pixia is freeware and has some really nice features, especially for drawing smooth lines. It's originally a japanese program, but is available in a whole bunch of languages at this point. Go get it!

So, it's a bit after one at night and I've just finished playing UNO with Jason, Haesung, Joey and Nick. The last game got very drawn out and we were all praying for it to end by the time it finally did. Joey won the last game. I only won once during the night, but that was my first win in UNO for thirteen years, so I'm glad. Glad that I managed to avoid the game for 13 years. Not that it's all that bad.
Right now I'm on the toilet, so I'll keep this short. Why I'm posting from the toilet? Because I can and since I can I wanted to do it at least once, just to really feel the freedom of unlimited wireless internet access.
Seems to end up being a pretty dull weekend otherwise.
I almost wish the paper was out just so I could write in real time about the horrors of being on a toilet with no paper in the middle of a Saturday night. But at the same time I'm grateful that there is in fact paper left.
There's a little sign here asking me to remember to flush... I think. "after use... ... water drain/float please"

So cell　biology is cancelled after all. Nick, I thought I told you to tell me if you found out it was. Got out of bed at five past ten, got dressed and hobbled down from the fifth floor, hobbled because my legs ache after the basket ball game yesterday. I'm so out of shape. Got down to my bike, only to notice that I'd forgotten my bike key in my room. Backhobbled to my room and got it. Got down, onto my bike and off I went. Until I was about half way between the 7-eleven and the big intersection where my chain decided it didn't really care for the spokes anymore and hopped off. So I got here five minutes late with oily hands to find there was nobody in the class room. But that's life.
Typhoon seems to have missed or run late. It was raining all night, but not all that heavily and there wasn't any really strong wind so I wouldn't call that a typhoon. I'm sitting here writing this and it'll probably blow me off my feet as soon as I walk out the door.
I don't want to go to lab, I think I'll just go get a light lunch and then head back home.
But before that, here's some pictures from home. I found them on the local newspaper's website, they're from the last of April: Carolinabacken, Forsränningen (that's the homemade raft event thingy).

Insane choices/Udon and eggs
So the ramen was the only sane choice? I can't remember tha last time I claimed to be sane though. And there was the two eggs that I had forgotten.

Take a portion pack of udon, open it and put it in a bowl. Put on some water. Microwave for about a minute. Crack two smallish eggs on top and microwave again until the eggs are not quite as raw any more. Decorate with seaweed and two crossed aspargus stalks (from a jar I dug out from the back of a cupboard while looking for seaweed). You get this, which looks kind of like somthing I wouldn't mind eating if I was hungry enough.
Oh, and I forgot to mention to add salt and pepper.

Typhoon coming
It should get here tonight or tomorrow. I've [edit]some words are more important than others, the "never" that somehow fell out of this sentence was one of those at least compated with the "rather" that's coming up [/edit] been in one before so it'll be rather interesting. But not as interesting as dinner. Or rather the eternal question "what's for dinner?". Living alone involves the problem of not having somebody else to ask, forcing you to mull over it in silence. Not much mulling to be done when your options are plain udon, instant ramen, peanut butter (without bread) or to go grocery shopping in the rain... yes, you're right, ramen is the only sane choice, I'll probably eat the udon later tonight anyway. Aha! I can also fry an egg, almost forgot about those.
After playing basket ball with people from my lab today (and against people from another lab) I went biking to kanji class in the rain. It was one of those sneaky rains that don't really seem all that bad until you're soaked. We lost the basket game, but had fun anyway. On Monday it'll be baseball.
I'm working on a new blog design and am right now trying it on my testblog Experimental Archetypes. It's not finished and has got a few bugs that I need to sort out, but do tell me what you think.

Ah! It feels good to be back in the jumpsuit!
The reason I've got it on is naturally the "Study Abroad Fair" this afternoon. Since I have it here I may as well show a bit of genuine Swedish student culture. It'll be interesting to wear it to kanji class though, I hope the teacher won't ask questions in Japanese that I won't be able to answer.
I really have no idea what the fair thing is supposed to be like, so I'll just bring some broshures from my home university as well as my computer with all my pictures from home.

Another bit of pure gold has turned up on Nekomusume. Careful, you may go blind... or wish you had.

I need to sleep more. It's just that it always seems like such a good idea to just stay up a little longer.
To those who may have noticed that I resembled a walking corpse on Monday, lack of sleep coupled with a worried stomach was the reason. Stomach being at least partially responsible for the lack of sleep.
Weather is beautiful again today, a bit less humid than yesterday I think. I'm in lab, not doing all that much. Reading about the importance of ion channels through cell membranes. Interesting, but I'm le tired and will probably leave in an hour or so. Not many other people here today. Wonder where they've gone off to. There's some kind of annoying alarm that goes off every other minute, but now that there are at least a couple of other people in here I'm not so worried.

Earlier I was complaining about the weather, but lying out on a lawn in the sun instead of arriving sweaty in a seminar room makes all the difference.
The grass is still damp from yesterday's rain, but in this weather I'll be slightly damp no matter what I do. Half an hour to kyuudou.

I wasn't meant to function in this kind of weather, label says "keep in a dry cool place, out of the reach of children".
I sure hope Japanese buildings are better at keeping heat out than in or this summer will be a foretaste of Hell. At least I suppose that I can soon start ignoring the hours when there's hot water for the shower.

I was walking down a back street in Sendai Japan, on my way home from seeing Casshern. It was a very typical Japanese back street, it had the vending machines, the seemingly chaotic network of cables in the air, the maps on corners to help you find adresses that would otherwise be impossible to find, the houses with single glass windows. In all, it had an abundance what I now recognize as Japaneseness. It was not late, but it was getting dark, Sunday evening. It was warm. It was raining. Rain comes in an infinite number of variations though. This was the kind that will get you damp but not wet, the kind where the air is so humid that water seems to condense out of the air around you and settle in a thin film over everything. My newly aquired waffle iron was in a box dangling in my right hand.
I was walking down this street when the very obvious hit me; I'm walking down a back street in Japan in the rain on a Sunday evening. And less obvious; this is what I came here for. Not the street in particular, nor the rain. But the fact that everything felt so very right about that street, it felt like home. Not home like my room is home, but home like the path behind Uppsala Castle with the view of downtown below is home. A feeling you can never get as a tourist.
You most likely wouldn't carry a newly aquired waffle iron as a tourist.

Casshern is worth seeing.

My computer probably hates me right now... or maybe it's happy to stretch its processor for once, it must be frustrating to have the power without being allowed to use it much. In any case, In the last 20 or so hours it's been rendering animation for a solid ten. It's not a long animation, just 530 frames, but it's got a few spotlights with high resolution shadows so the frames take on average about 35-40 seconds each. I set it to render it last night, but stupidly did some last minute tweaking of a spotlight without making test renders of all parts of the animation. So when I woke up this morning I didn't like the result and did it all over again. It was probably a good thing though, because I changed most of the light setup before starting another render. The render time was about as long though.
Why did I make this animation and what is it? The why is easy; I was bored and feeling uncreative after giving up on trying to finish my F1 in time. The problem is that to get out of an uncreative mood I kind of have to make something, which isn't all that easy when you're feeling uncreative and that brings you back to the problem again. So you make something simple. The what: I decided to see if I could make something interesting out of the design Norm drew around the "e" in plaristocrates for the 3.0 version of his site. It's got mostly circular shapes, so it shouldn't be too hard. It got a little out of hand and ended up being a 21 second animation. Nothing great, but I'm feeling better because I know I can do better if I try harder.
So why don't I show it to you? you think. Well, look down a few posts and you'll see that I managed to lose the password for my webspace. I suppose I'll write my brother to try to find it and send it to me.

Oh, and I'm reading Salmon of Doubt. It's a compilation of unpublished text by Douglas Adams. I just started on it, but already came across a quote I really like: You can't ignore someone who isn't there, because that's not what "ignore" means.
I've also learned that Adams once worked as a body guard for the ruling family of Quatar.

Been a few days.
Whenever life gets interesting it seems more important to live it than write about it ;)
Sayaka came up and stayed here for about four days, I had a great time but it seems like it went by so quickly. Now golden week is already over and Sayaka has gone back south, actually she left last night.
Today I've just been wasting my time playing Warcraft III and reading, only left my room to go to the toilet and shower. I realized a few days ago that I wouldn't have much time to get my entry for the F1 competition done. Now the deadline is in just a day and a half or so and I've decided not to enter anything this year either, I'll try to dust it off and enter it next year. Would be nice to win a Blender manual, but I can't seem to find the enthusiamsm to sit up modelling all night like I used to. And that's what it'd take to get it done in time. And I haven't even thought about textures yet. Just last week I seemed to have so much time left ;)
So instead I'll get some sleep and spend the morning learning the kanji for the afternoon class.