chidade.net

Kudos to Circus Girl. I’m going to steal your blogging style for a moment ;)

Thursday:
Wake up late, sticky, hate tsuyu, oh my gods I need to change hostels, pack bags, pack more bags, what the hell kind of packing is that? Chidade, you’re a Rover, for shame! Empty everything, pack again, actually learn room mates’ names, then leave, heh, backpack, laptop bag, two bags worth of shopping, HEEAAAAVVVEEEEEEEE! holy crap my fingers are dead, should I get a taxi? urk, taxi expensive, how do I get them to go to Gojo? “Gojo House onegaishimasu“, “Wakkanai“, stuff it, I’ll walk, half way there, totally regretting that, fingers now blue, brainwave! bag in bag and now one less bag! still weighs the same /swt, are we there yet? who are you talking to? you! no, you! ok, definitely need food, but baaaaaaaaaggggsss! hey it’s Gojo! omg I made it, stumble in, collapse, “hey”, “hey”, “how are you?”, *gasp* “‘k. I’d like to check in, please!”, “check in isn’t until 3pm”, $%&##!@#^ need shower! “Ok, but I’m leaving my bags here until then”, huunnnngggrrryyyyyy, crap! I left my breakfast in the fridge at K’s House! waaaaaaah, ok, walking back now /sob, so much easier without bags, must be losing weight with all this walking, back at K’s, salmon sushi onigiri breakfast, eat on the steps, numnumnum, so what am I going to do until 3pm? At least the late check-in forces me to do something, CRAP! camera is in bags at Gojo, feck it, I’m NOT walking back there again, what can I do today that doesn’t require camera? Head to Kyoto station to get inspiration, watch fashion show, should I write about this for 3yen? Get bus map, needs camera, needs a camera, needs camera, maybe I’ll just go shopping? Really want somewhere with an air conditioner, OOOOH! International Manga Museum! Sold, buy bus ticket, …..no bus route nearby, MORE WALKING?! This place better have an awesome air conditioner >.< need ramune icypole to survive the trip. gari gari kun is teh awesome, is this it? is this it? are we there yet? It looks like a school, it IS a school! “Konnichiwa!”, that’s like the first time I’ve heard that on this holiday, 500 yen, Great Wall Of Manga, this collection must be James’ wet dream, there’s not actually that much here, any English manga? Just give me some English manga, a seat and a vending machine in air conditioned goodness, wait, a figure exhibition? 500 yen, hahaha Fist of the North Star, wow! Who’s she? KAWAII! bingbingbing 2.40pm blog time. Feet achy. Nearly time to check in but want to revive feet first. English manga!! Read last volume of Battle Royale, so that’s how it ended, time to go back, bus back the long way round, “ok now you can check in”, make bed, collapse, wake up 11pm, combini dinner, collapse again.

Friday:
Wake up, unpack everything AGAIN! repack properly, now only have three bags, taxi to Kyoto Station because I’m not going to be walking again and in the rain, book shinkansen, bakery breakfast, get on Hikari, I think I’ve been in this seat before, Kyo-kun gets a workout, pillows playlist, so many gaijin, too much rain to see Mt Fuji, pass through Shin-Yokohama, TADAIMA!! Arrive at Tokyo, TADAIMA!!! Change train, change train, wow, K’s House Tokyo is really close to the station, check in, SHOWER, I feel human again, laundry, run back to train station and go to AKIHABARA!! TADAAAAIIIMMMAAAA!!!!! Nearly everything is closed though /sob Hang on, what happened to Aso Bit City?! Stress! Oh wait, there it is. Any Ragnarok? Ragnarok, Ragnarok, Ragna- damn, only volume 1 and 3…c’mon Akiba, don’t let me down! None of the shops have Volume 2 /sob but oooh, I found Gorgeous Mysterious Katana-Wielding Woman from the Manga Museum….and for cheaper too! Glad I didn’t buy her in Kyoto *yoink* shops closed, must go collect laundry, hooray for wireless internet in K’s House! Make plans with M & T for tomorrow, watch Naruto and BLEACH on YouTube, eek! 2am! Collapse.

Saturday in Kamakura and with old friends: much fun an alcohol - next.
Sunday in Harajuku: tale of heartbreak and love - after that.
Monday in Akiba and Nakano: victory and defeat - after that again.

Tomorrow I have a date with the Emperor. Hopefully I’ll actually post about everything eventually.

1am, time to collapse.

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Wanna see something utterly terrifying? Have a look at this:

That, dear readers, is my timetable *cries*

I’m expected to study 12.5 hours per subject, per week this semester, including the actual class time.

Five subjects, each of them have been assigned a colour, which you can see when I have an actual class or lecture for the subject. The empty blocks that are a lighter version of the subject colour are the times where I sit and study it, either at home or at uni.

The empty blocks with darker versions of the subject colours are also study times, but while I’m commuting to uni. Those hours will probably be complete write-offs, because I tend to get distracted by the street art along the train tracks, or I can’t find a seat so I can’t pull out my huge textbooks. I’m hoping that the podcasts of lectures that the university records will be useful during the commute though, because if I can’t study while I’m on the train then I’ll have to use up the little free time I have left.

Red boxes are ongoing social/extra curricular engaements. The coloured bars at the top and bottom just represent things like sleeping, getting up and ready, etc.

The white boxes dotted throughout are meal times and extra commuting where I can’t study, eg: bike or car.

The two chunks of white space on Fridays and Saturdays are all the free time I have. Which would probably disappear if there’s an assignment due or exams coming up. Even in quiet times, it’ll probably be spent doing things like laundry and cleaning and catching up on sleep >.<

Can you hear that? It’s the sound of my social life, blogging time and Ragnarok levelling ability grinding to a halt.

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I’ve been accepted into university. I’ll be attending Swinburne University of Technology’s Hawthorn campus for another three years of I.T. training. I’m relieved in a way, because I’ve technically been on holiday for the last two years now and my brain has been dribbling out my ears. I need to have a regular schedule again. 4 hours of evening classes 5 days a week in an eikaiwa didn’t count. They were complete no-brainers.

So, I have two weeks left before orientation. Surrounded by 17 and 18 year olds who are going to go batshit insane over the free alcohol. Vodka lost it’s novelty for me a while ago. I wonder how I’ll cope surrounded by kids?

Anyway, I digress. What I was going to say is that I have 2 weeks left to get myself organised for school and my tight budget that begins February 19th. So, while this list is probably quite boring for you, dear readers, deal with it. What follows are the system requirements to be able to install the upgrade to Chidade: version 3.1.

• Purchase replacement Razr V3x and mod it so that it has all necessary ringtones, images and the Final Fantasy victory fanfare as the SMS alert.
• Install the calendar syncronisation program that’ll keep my Google Calendar and keitai in sync, via Outlook.
  Note: this will require installing Office 2003 at last.
• Deauthorise the iTunes on Akiba and convert AAC files to MP3 then backup on PC.
• Backup Akiba and reformat, see if you can get an English OS instead. Learn how to actually operate the tablet features since that’s why you bought the bloody thing.
• Try and get Joomla installed and running for the Aug. website eventually so they don’t hassle you for free web design work during the semester, the tightwads.
• See if you can get a good chunk of the planning done and some psuedo-coding for the fundraising website.
• See if any of the textbooks you spent thousands of dollars on during the first degree can be recycled for this second one.
• Upgrade the blog to Wordpress 2.1 Ella, which looks very spiffy.
• Get Chidade to job level 50 and bloody job change into a Blacksmith already!

Two weeks should be enough to get all of the above done, except for the fact that this weekends seems to want to rip me apart with social engagements. Good grief. I don’t think I’ve ever been so over-booked.

• St. Kilda Festival
• The inaugural Discworld convention and gala dinner Nullus Anxietas - the first outside the UK. Yay! I finally get to do what everyone else already seems to have done - meet Terry Pratchett!
• Snark’s 25th birthday and party
• Madman’s free open-air cinema again on Saturday night. This time, it’s the awesome Read or Die
• R’s Shindig and catching up with Mi
• An old high school friend’s birthday party
• K’s Singstar party

The Gala Dinner, K’s party and the school friend’s birthday party have already become victims. Most of this weekend is going to be taken up by Nullus Anxietas, I guess. Hopefully St. Kilda Fest and Madman get a look in. Ross Irwin and the Soul Special are playing at the festival.

Gah! Busy!

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Some background:

My sister is a closet emo goth with a Ragnarok Online account rather than a MySpace. Her taste in music goes along what I call the “wailing man” vein. For the last few years I’ve been subjected to the likes of Radiohead, Muse and Jeff Buckley being played through the bedroom wall, quite loudly at all hours. Sometimes, it’s the same song again and again and again.

Because of the wonders of physics, the Bedroom Wall Speaker wouldn’t actually let me enjoy the songs’ melodies, but would instead distort and muffle the music so that all I could hear was perhaps a dischord being banged out non-stop for 4 minutes, or the sound of someone moaning like a cat that hadn’t been killed when the car hit it.

In other words, I grew to hate it. My sister completely ruined any enjoyment I may have gotten out of this music. Now, Muse and Radiohead I could probably live without, but Jeff Buckley! JEFF BUCKLEY! That’s a crime against humanity. I can’t listen to any of that music now even if I had a state-of-the-art digital surround sound system to listen with!

Then, today, on Triple J, I heard a track by Mark Ronson. He covered Radiohead’s Just but did it in a funk style! Trumpets and sax where the guitars once where! It was Radiohead you could DANCE to!

I’m really liking the funk music that seems to be sneaking back into the music scene. In fact, I’m really liking just about all the music on JJJ at the moment. This Mark Ronson track has been around for about a year apparently. I’m really not up-to-date with new music, I admit. I’ve been tuning out of the emo bullshit that’s been overplayed on JJJ and tuning in to ABC News instead. But now that the ratings season is over, and the summer DJs are on, the music has magically improved. It seems that they’re more interested now in playing what they enjoy, not playing what they think would be good for them commercially.

Which means that songs over the day have included:

• Mark Ronson’s cover of Just
• Cornelius (yay! Japanese music is back on the radio!)
• Arctic Monkeys
• Jamie T
• …and what appears to be some old school Sex Pistols

Yep. Am enjoying music muchly. I’ll actually be listening in to the J’s more often, I think. Especially since Jackson Jackson have now released their first single for radio airplay. Album is due out in March. I’m hanging out for some Flicker and the Spark action, personally.

Anyway. Time for me to put some headphones on and enjoy my music without disturbing anyone else.

EDIT: I take it all back. Dools just played original Radiohead and some emo bastard band back to back. AFI, I think? Yech. I’m changing to PBS.

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Graduating high school? Nah, not important. Just humour the mother while she gushes and takes photos.

18th birthday? No thanks, not interested. Costs too much and I don’t like alcohol anyway.

21st birthday? Bugger off, people suck, I don’t need embarrassing speeches from friends, let alone friends in the first place.

Finally hitting level 99 in Ragnarok Online after three years, several character resets, multiple internet disconnections and 2 laptop breakdowns?

Yes. That’s a good reason to actually have a party!

Eilix, you’re weird.

But, you know, happy 99 and stuff.

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Went to Harajuku today, with H, L and her sister. L finally got dressed up in her GothLoli gear, and she said she felt incredibly uncomfortable afterwards. Heh. I guess she’s not really GothLoli material. Not enough exhibitionism in her.

She got a few people asking her to pose, including - as expected - some perverted old oyaji making kissy faces at her. Poor girl. But still, she looked good and it was a highly successful day. I took lots of photos and the weather was great. We also went to Akiba later where I finally found volume two of the Ragnarok Online figurines.

The kids on Omotesando were really friendly today. Very willing to have photos taken, unlike a few times in the past when I was just ignored or told ‘no’. Which is fair enough, I’d be annoyed at people wanting to take my photo all day too. But it was a relief to have them willing and ready to pose. I think it was the good weather. Everyone was genki. Takeshita-dori was absolutely packed. L bought another pair of shoes in another Lolita shop that we found.

H, the native, had no idea that this was the kinda thing that happened every Sunday in Harajuku. I think she had fun there. She was probably more bored in Akihabara, when L, her sister and I went into otaku mode.

Akihabara on a Sunday was interesting too. The main street was shut off to cars, so there were a few maids posing for photos and handing out flyers with HUGE crowds around them. One of them was practically in her underwear, so I’m not surprised in the least.

Then, to Shibuya for dinner. Mexican, numnumnum. Expensive but hella satisfying.

A purikura session to record the day together, then home to Yokohama.

“Oh wait, we need to get the shinkansen tickets for Kyoto tomorrow”
“Ah, yeah”
*gets a quote for tickets……jaw drops….*
“Um…maybe we’ll go to Nikko instead?”

Ha, that ¥50,000 I had L hold onto for Kyoto wasn’t needed after all. Excellent, more spending money! To Tower Records!

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