KODA

日本語を勉強します。OMG! 名前は片仮名で書きました！

(I am studying Japanese. OMG! The name was written in Katakana!)

Yeah, I know it’s been a lot of fluff posts lately… I’m sorry, but I haven’t found the time to do (or write about) anything particularly interesting on the technical side. However, there are (and always will be) lots of interesting ramblings to share… so here’s some more.

Today I got to see the first video in my Japanese Culture class. It’s a neat little course, and so every other Friday I will be able to enjoy a bit more of this fascinating culture. The movie we watched today was pretty awesome… a samurai story exploring gender and social power and the ethics around them (in historic Japan). So anyway, it’s a real drawn out story about a Samurai’s son who is ordered to marry the lord’s mistress (who bore the lord a child), and they fall in love only to find that due to circumstances the lord wishes that he have her back. So of course, the father and son can’t let that happen. But long story short, we sit through 1:30 of pretty cerebral (and completely fight-free) tension, only to run out of time right before the real samurai style ass-kicking begins. You can look at the IMDB page… and yes, that movie poster seems to be showing the fight scene that will surely be bugging me all week.

Google: Morbidly Lazy

Go to any computer running Firefox, click on the url bar, and type in “morbidly lazy”…

I have nothing else to say about this.

To be contemporary, one must mount an opposition to the old-fashioned.
To be old-fashioned, one must mount an opposition to the contemporary.

The joke is that what was once old-fashioned will soon become contemporary again, and the cycle will repeat itself.

To be modern, one must develop an appreciation of both the old-fashioned and the contemporary.

But while contemporaneity is brief and transitory; Modernity however, lasts.

Hmm, apologies for the lack of updates over the last week. It’s funny, while just a few weeks ago I felt I had to much to say, lately I simply haven’t had much to talk about. Been doing lots of art, design, and other things… but for some reason a lot of my usual desire to write about it hasn’t been there. So the blog’s been on the backburner for the last week or so.

Did some quick design work this evening for a friend over at HackersEntity… it was fun to just throw some ideas together quickly for a change. HackersEntity is an (ethical) source for hacking information and knowledge. We were shooting for a bit of an unconventional layout, with the navigational content at the bottom right, and nothing (for now) but a symbol at the usual top left. My idea behind this was to use the “newline symbol” as a logo/motif for the layout, as the newline could be considered as the classic character utilized by computer hackers. So, the newline up at the top left is supposed to uphold this design and point the reader down to where the real information lies. There’s not a lot of content up yet, though I’m sure there will be in the next couple of days. It’s a fun little unique layout, and I certainly had fun working on it.

Today I had my first Aikido class for at least 10 months. It was fantastic… just being back in a familiar dojo with my old sensei. Boy, it’s such a wonderful feeling to just be thrown around for a while and rolling – it’s about the closest feeling you can get to flying in my opinion. I was embarrasingly rusty, but after a little while (and some prodding by sensei) it was pretty easy to get flowing again. It’s so great to be back!

It’s also made me very tired, so this will be it for now. Good night!