The Voice of Jed

jedbob @ 2004-10-12T11:56:00

2004-10-12T19:02:06Z

So in a little less than 36 hours, I will be back in Japan. After four years of not being in Japan, four years of gradual crushing and compacting of the Japan Desire into a Superman-squeezed diamond of longing in my duodenum, I will be back, somewhat jetlagged and feeling like this. But at least I'm flying out of Seatac, so it's only a 10.5 hour flight as opposed to the nightmare gauntlet one must endure when travelling from the East Coast. Plus, one of my friends is a flight attendant and is trying to get me an upgrade to business class, where I will be able to stretch out, plug in my laptop, and watch the rest of season three of Voyager or go all retro and play Diablo 2.

I am planning on getting this camera once I arrive in Japan, primarily because the it it black and the equivalent US model only comes in silver. Tsumaranai. It takes phenomenal video and passable 4 megapixel still shots, so I plan to be updating a multimedia travelogue once I find a place to host all my crap for cheap or free.

OK, I must finish packing.

Chocolate...

2004-08-25T05:16:39Z

I'm, um...on hiatus...from being...um...productive.

*Sigh*

Until then, I will spread the love by attempting to sell you some yummy, yummy chocolate.

http://media.hugi.is/hahradi/fyndnar/bounce.wmv

You Head A Splode

2004-08-10T21:18:49Z

So I'm back from Montana. I met my Dad and his friend Mark there, and we stayed in a kick-ass little cabin 10 thousand feet up the tallest mountain resort in all of Big Sky, Montana. We spent the time driving approximately 900 miles around in Yellowstone National Park (which, I have come to learn, is as big in area as the state of West Virginia). We saw buffalo, elk, bears, eagles, moose, fish, sulfuric geysers, spectacular panoramas, and countless numbers of fly fishing shops. Pictures to follow, as soon as I can find a place to post roughly 50 MB of high-quality images online.

The thin air at 10 thousand feet proved to be troublesome the first night. I fell asleep, only to be awakened every five minutes by my brain as it sent signals to my lungs to gasp for more oxygen. It took a few days to get used to that, and any physical exertion on my behalf was like an evil extradimensional presence sucking all the energy out of me. I guess my swimming 50 laps at the Seattle University pool a few times a week has yet to truly influence my cardiovascular system. I need to build a pool at 10 thousand feet and swim in that.

We travelled with my Dad's friend Mark, a wealthy Texan. If that doesn't speak volumes in and of itself, let me elaborate:

1) Most of the time we were there, he wore a cowboy hat.

2) He looks kinda like what our current President would look like if he were a surfer, and he dresses how I would imagine Jimmy Buffet would if he were to walk into a factory specializing in pastel fabrics, and that factory exploded. Oh, and the factory is in Hawaii.

3) He currently has a machine gun on order, but he's waiting until the ban on assault weapons expires in September to buy it, because the price is going to drop by half then (from, I think, $1200 to $600). However, I think I managed to talk him into getting a nicer digital camera instead.

The brief moment of anti-Japanese hysteria evoked by </a></b></a>thefreak 's posting about "nicotine acid" in Japanese energy drinks here has prompted me to read up on Nature's Forgotten B-12 Vitamin, niacin. As it turns out, niacin has potent anti-cholesterol powers, and trustworthy scientific tests have indicated that niacin taken alone is more effective in reducing cholesterol in the human body than a prescription cholesterol-reducing agent. My dad also told me that he read somewhere that if you take a small amount of cinnamon (maybe a quarter-teaspoon) a day, your cholesterol will be similarly affected. Thanks to my dark genetic legacy, I have elevated cholesterol, so I'm thinking of going all empirical and testing these crackpot theories out for myself.

OK, I have lotsa translation to do. I will be adding a few new paragraphs of the story in a few days, along with the link to the Montana pics.

Oh, and </a></b></a>_beal_ , Age of Mythology is the BEST RTS game out there. Get it. Live it.

Eh, Steve!

2004-08-05T01:56:18Z

It has just occured to me that my laptop is shocking the fuck out of my legs. As it turns out, there are these little metal bolts and discs cleverly concealed on the bottom--the part that is usually IN CONTACT WITH YOUR LAP--which are releasing minute, yet frequently painful voltages into my exposed skin. So until I decide to put some pants on today, this computer is becoming a floortop.

I just pulled the power supply out of my desktop, a procedure that involved carefully unplugging a lot of cables. My tiny small form factor box is now temporarily gutted as it awaits a newer, stronger power supply and a repaired or replaced graphics card. The whole story basically boils down to the fact that I have been running my box (one I built, mind you) with the power supply it came with: a measly 220W. It specifically says in my graphics card's manual that it needs a minimum of 300W to operate properly. The allure of a tiny, portable desktop has this one drawback...the maximum power supply that will actually fit in the case is only 250W. So screw it, I says. I'ma get me one of them cool glowing 450W power supplies that is designed to fit inside a regular tower case, and through the magic of extension cables, I will be able to hook it up to my PCs motherboard. I figured that the extension cable route would be the best, since I can at least still preserve the illusion of portability via a series of wires that snake out the back of the box and into a relatively painless plugging situation with the new power supply. My older, weaker power supply was responsible, I think, for killing my graphics card...it just all of a sudden started to leave behind all this artifacting and skanky-looking horizontal lines whenever I would attempt to scroll. Sigh. I just got back from the FedEx place, where I shipped off my old (yet still under warranty) card, so in 10 to 12 business weeks I should have a shiny new graphics card which I will love and kiss and promise to never ever ever neglect its power needs again. So for now, I'm back to my laptop. It's like having a newer, better girlfriend for a couple of months, but then she has to go in to the shop for a complete overhaul for a while and you have to start spending even more time with that other chick you were dating before her but forgot to tell that you started dating someone new who has shiny breasts and a 21" monitor that you could bounce a quarter off of.

Tomorrow, I will be off to Big Sky, Montana, to meet my Dad for a few days of eating red meat and marvelling at the grandeur of America's largest cattle farm. I will not have Internet access, but I will have my laptop, so I can proceed with the 28 THOUSAND CHARACTERS (approx. 14 thousand English words worth, for the layman) of translation, all due by the 11th. I get back on the 9th, so we'll see what I can achieve while on vacation and separated from my on-line dictionaries.

Abraham Lincoln once said a really perfect quote that would be great to end this post with. Unfortunately, I don't know what it is, so I'll post the first paragraph of my untitled Civil War novel. Enjoy.

It is on a Sunday morning during the eighth year of the War Between the States that Miss Ann Pidgeon first runs afoul of the Stovepipe Jimmies. Their contraptions are rickety, deadly black, cantankerous, and trail effulgent vapors that sicken churchmice in their nests, fell flocks of gulls from the skies, startle (and yet somewhat excite) frail schoolmarms, and lead young toughs who witness their passing into rapturous thoughts of anarchy and recidivism. To a bystander, the procession of Stovepipe Jimmies presents somewhat of the dread inherent in a murder of enormous crows—the slick suits worn by the Jimmies hang about them like so many of the blackbirds, their protracted limbs perch them high at the controls of their velocipedes, and their elongated top hats seem to stretch up into skies made foreboding by their carriage-smoke. And yet the noise and the smoke only serve to underscore the threat of their trappings: chains, brickbats, shivs, well-scored black iron cutlasses, and the inevitable Blackpowder Dandies concealed in no little numbers on their person. It was on this morning of all mornings that she and the Jimmies had their encounter, and it certainly was not to be the last.

So

2004-08-04T06:16:49Z

OK, so this is the first time I've posted blah blah blah on a blog. I supposed I should do this more often, but my life just hasn't been all that interesting for, say, the past two years. Sigh.

I am currently rushing / goofing off in an attempt to get as much translation done for the soulless masters at Nintendo as I possibly can before I leave to meet my Dad in Montana on Thursday morning. I have spent much of the afternoon in a pensive funk, thinking about Japan after seeing thefreak 's recent pictures. As I told him in an earlier chat, I often feel like an Elf longing for the Gray Havens.

The Stuff I've Been Working On Lately (henceforth, TSIBWOL):

Bucketloads of engineering translation (Japanese to English, roughly 80 thousand characters and counting...). Yaay, money!
Two novels I'm writing in my head, both of which are set in an alternate-history world where magic kinda works and supernatural creatures live alongside humanity. One is set 100 years in the future / 400 years in the past of Japan, and the other is set in the US of A and Japan during a prolonged War Between the States. In the former, two characters whose lives strangely mirror each other are separated by a 500-year time span; one in a Japan just becoming dominated by a Buddhist theocracy, and the other in a liberated, back-to-Shinto future Japan where most people are addicted to a substance known as Floating World and Tengu drive ultra-bullet trains from Hokkaido to Okinawa. In the latter, Abraham Lincoln is the American champion bare-knuckle boxer and 16th president of the States, Ralph Waldo Emerson is a missing druid, Henry David Thoreau is a proto-ecoterrorist, Miss Ann Pidgeon is an Hermetic Messenger of the Order of Minerva who faces off against the Stovepipe Jimmies, and some other dude who I haven't named yet is sent to Japan to acquire lots and lots of ninjas. Well, maybe one or two. Maybe one day I will post some chapters for your reading pleasure.
I've been tossing ideas around with my friend Kirk for a film documentary on Dungeons and Dragons and the people who play it. Maybe look at the whole role-playing life in general. We also wanna do a briefer audio version we hope to sell to "This American Life".
A screenplay, which may have to be a short story or a novel first, also set in the modern day of that aforementioned world about a curious possession by a malevolent spirit, a flight to Vancouver, and a fight to the death with Buddhist hunter assassins.
I've also been working on a new superhero campaign (HERO System), to be set in Seattle, where the PCs create themselves as normal humans, then role-play the acquisition of their powers and their subsequent responsibilities as a hero, a-la Spider Man.

So yeah. I guess I should make this a regular thing.