Month: November 2004

Categories
Meta

The Commenting System

Aaaarghhh… The WP honeymoon, regarding comment spamming, is now officially over. I’ve been getting so much of it during the past couple of week that I’m at a point where I’m seriously considering turning commenting completely off — a drastic and horrible measure, I know. I do have WP-Blacklist setup, but it doesn’t stop it or seem to want to take care of it automatically. It just helps with the cleaning, but doesn’t stop the massive amounts of notificiation messages I get in my mailbox. Anyone have some good ideas?

Update: Spam Karma seems to have done the job. Thank you, Dr. Dave!

Categories
Design

Observing Design

Momus is to become a participant on the great (it’s a favorite read of mine) Design Observer site! More on this at Click Opera.

Categories
Events Music

Kegawazoku

This sounds like it could get me interested in musicals.

Another explosion of Kegawa leader Emoto Junko’s charisma! The unique blend of gorgeous show elements and excessive expressions of eros and violence has won Kegawazoku a huge number of fans ranging from would-be actresses to lecherous daddies. Their fourth year of activity marks the troupe’s advance to the class of large-scale theatres, with a piece that is subtitled “Fantastic Nightmare Before Christmas”. Sounds like a gathering of Freddy, Jason, Damian and other dreadfully bloodstained characters for song, dance and slaughter on stage… If you appreciate vulgar and pitchblack types of musicals, you’ll probably like this. (REALTOKYO)

Check this site for some more images of the girls in action. Their next show, KILL! KILL!: OBAKE GA DERUZO!!, will take place at Shinjuku’s Space Zero on December 1-8.

Categories
Music

Kathy

ozaki101-2

I’d never heard of Kathy before, but they sure do sound interesting. Here’s a bit from Ozaki Tetsuya’s latest OUT OF TOKYO column, where he talks about the Kathy performance at the recent Arto Lindsay show.

For those unfamiliar with Kathy I’ll introduce them briefly. The three girls that make up the performance group all have a dance background, and reportedly don’t like it when people categorize their art as “contemporary dance”. They usually wear wide and fluffy, girlish dresses, blonde or brunette ’60s-style wigs, and black stockings over their faces. Sometimes they appear as a trio, and sometimes in collaborations with other performers such as artist Taro Chiezo, fashion designer Tsumura Kosuke, fashion/theatre (?) unit Theatre Products, and others from a variety of different genres.

I wish that Lindsay show hadn’t been so expensive.

Categories
Books

Densha Otoko

Yuko was telling me about this book a while back. Seems like it’s really the big hit.

The hero is no Tom Hanks and the movie has yet to be made but like the 1998 hit film You’ve Got Mail, a new Japanese bestseller is an old-style romance for the internet age – though with a distinctly Japanese twist.

Ostensibly a true story, “Densha Otoko” – literally, “Train Man” – began as a series of postings on Japan’s most popular internet bulletin board after the protagonist, a young Japanese man, rescued a woman from a pushy drunk on the train.

[…]

The format of the book, which strings together emails peppered with slang and emoticons over 364 pages, could well give a headache to readers accustomed to literature as flowing prose.

But the look is familiar to the many young Japanese who spend an increasing number of hours each day chatting via brief text messages on cell phones and computers.

Read the rest of the article here. I saw the book the other day and it’s entirely written like a 2-Channel thread, including all the wacky ASCII art. Really wish I could read it.

Categories
Games

Dragon Quest 8

Today marks the release of the very long-awaited DRAGON QUEST 8. As every poster advertising the game announced, the game went on sale at 7 this morning. This of course meant lines galore.

About 300 people had lined up outside the main Yodobashi Camera store outside Shinjuku Station’s west exit by 7 a.m. on Saturday, the time that the game went on sale.

Read the entire MDN article here.

Categories
Tokyo Q

The Tokyo Q Design Column

My new design column for the Tokyo Q site will start next week (Friday), and will then continue to appear on the first Friday of every month. The anime column is still scheduled for the second Friday of every month.

Categories
Cafes Design

New Plusminuszero

Excite Japan features some of the new Fukasawa Naoto designs for the Plusminuszero brand. Also, I’m not sure if this is new, but the recently opened Aoyama shop — I still haven’t made it there — has a nice-looking cafe on the premises. The Excite link is via Dezain.net.

Categories
Web

Octopus Dropkick!

Octopus Dropkick! is a fun group blog covering Japanese pop culture. They put up a lot of video from Japanese TV, so well worth checking out for that alone.

Categories
Fashion Stores

Felicity Tees

The Felicity label is selling a a pack of 6 Trattoria t-shirts for 6800 yen. Link via Patrick.