Month: July 2012

The Moncton Boys will soon be together again. I first came to Asia (to China) in 1997, and then in 1998 I moved to Tokyo. That year, I started what would now be called a group mailing list with friends from back home (my hometown of Moncton in Canada). It was simplified in the sense…

I sure like Facebook these days. That’s not a very popular stance, I know. Most people seem to refer to the site in the past tense these days, keeping an account there just to be able to see the occasional non-public update posted by friends or to be able to log into sites through Facebook…

I just had a super-hero weekend. With this being a massive super-hero movie summer — The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises — I got in the mood to do a mini super-hero filmfest at home over the weekend, made easier since it was a long weekend (thank you, Marine Day, for your…

I get to be a DJ at the office every day. I need to listen to music constantly, throughout the day. That’s how I work, that’s what feeds me, that’s what energizes me. When I worked from home it wasn’t a problem, of course. Then, as I started spending more time at the office —…

Game, why are you blocking my fun? I was recently playing an old point-and-click adventure game called Broken Sword — a remake rather, the Director’s Cut — and although I was quite enjoying it for the first 1-2 hours of gameplay, I then hit a wall: a lame-ass puzzle that has nothing to do with…

PauseTalk is now an .org, officially. I don’t know why I waited so long to do this, but I finally went and got the domain pausetalk.org for PauseTalk, and that’s where the site now resides (instead of as folder on this site). It doesn’t really change things much, but there’s something satisfying about having it…

E.T. phone home. A couple of months ago I found myself back in 1982. I managed this feat through the easiest form of time travel available to us: film. After reading a piece in a recent issue of Wired on the Alamo Drafthouse — the movie theatre of my dreams — and its 1982 summer…

Wind and rain did not stop me from climbing that mountain. With plans to go trekking up in Yatsugatake this past weekend, I got worried when my wife popped up on chat Friday night — we had reserved tickets for a night bus that would leave later that evening — with a link to Yahoo!…

How do you spell relief during summer in Tokyo? J-I-N-B-E-I. The jinbei is the sort of short, light yukata that men wear in the summer, at home for the most part, but it’s also something you’ll see being worn at summer festivals (where I women will sometimes wear them too). I’ve always had an aversion…

I don’t go back home for a visit very often, but when I do, I need music. Next month I’ll be going back to my hometown for the first time in four years, and the visits I’ve done before that have always been at intervals of 2-3 years. One of the things I look forward…