Finally, at long last! I made it to the green island of Yakushima, tucked snugly away below Kyushu in the South of Japan. It’s a chunk of land covered mostly in sugi (cedar) trees, and awesomely huge ones at that, with sage-old weathered limbs gnarled and warped bearing thickets of leaves, all the way up to the highest point on the island - one massive climb at 1935m! Now designated a World Heritage site, it is said to rain 35 days a month, and as such is pretty much a fantasy land for moss-lovers like myself. The wet greenery sparkles and twinkles; it glistens and glows around you, even along the well-trodden tourist routes. This is one heck of a forest, and if I may be cliché about it, really did contain something magical that captured me. It was every bit as beautiful as I pictured it. But enough fantastical waffle. You want pictures! And stories! Right? Read on…
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Unbelievable! There is nothing related at all?!
Filed under: English, Japan, Japan-eng, Photography on October 5th, 2008 | No Comments » | Trackback |
Protecting images (or at least attempting to). That’s been my most recent mission in dabblings with digital media. I umm-ed and ahh-ed about doing it for a while, but decided to go ahead with it as I seem to be using more and more of my own photography and images lately. Hopefully I’ve done it correctly and it’s not too distracting!
I experimented with various fonts and ways to incorporate my logo into the watermark without too much trouble. (Actually, I was up all night fiddling with it, but that’s besides the point…) I ended up combining my luminescent jellyfish favicon with a smooth font to stick in the corner of my images.
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Filed under: English, Website on September 19th, 2008 | No Comments » | Trackback |
Underwear! In vending machines! I’d heard the stories for years, at how select dodgy locations in Akihabara and other districts are home to the peculiarity of vending machines that dispense underwear. Particularly infamous are the tales of the machines that dispense *used* underwear… Thankfully this was just your ’standard’ machine, throwing out fresh panties and all manner of sex-related products. Still, it checked yet another box on my mental list of vending machine variations. I’ve now seen machines that dispense hot food, rice, flowers, canned ramen and oden, books as well as the ubiquitous cigarette and drinks machines.
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Unbelievable! There is nothing related at all?!
Filed under: English, Japan, Japan-eng, Photography on September 12th, 2008 | 2 Comments » | Trackback |
Not quite the next post I had in mind, but it took me by such surprise that I just had to write about it. Most people probably know and accept that copying rented media is illegal in the same way downloading music and films is. In fact, the music and film industry even seems to be suffering from the sheer amount of downloading going on, judging from what I’ve heard several times in the past. I’ve also heard several smaller stores in the U.K have gone bankrupt through the declining sales, though I have yet to confirm it. So it seems highly laudable that stores would start *renting* media. But in Japan, that’s just the case…
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Filed under: English, Japan, Japan-eng, Website on August 21st, 2008 | 2 Comments » | Trackback |
I should probably just explain my prolonged absence recently - I’ve been back in Japan! I’m here until early September and have been going to all manner of places, including up to Akita International University (AIU) and hitch-hiking back down to Kumamoto where I’m staying with a host family. The weather is horribly hot at times (but sprinkled with awesome thunderstorms), and I’m enjoying making the most of my time practising Japanese. I’ll be off to Yakushima soon too, so hopefully I will have some good experiences to write about that as well! Expect some nice posts in the coming month or two ^_^.
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Filed under: English, Japan, Japan-eng on August 19th, 2008 | 3 Comments » | Trackback |
Finally, at long last! I made it to the green island of Yakushima, tucked snugly away below Kyushu in the South of Japan. It’s a chunk of land covered mostly in sugi (cedar) trees, and awesomely huge ones at that, with sage-old weathered limbs gnarled and warped bearing thickets of leaves, all the way up to the highest point on the island - one massive climb at 1935m! Now designated a World Heritage site, it is said to rain 35 days a month, and as such is pretty much a fantasy land for moss-lovers like myself. The wet greenery sparkles and twinkles; it glistens and glows around you, even along the well-trodden tourist routes. This is one heck of a forest, and if I may be cliché about it, really did contain something magical that captured me. It was every bit as beautiful as I pictured it. But enough fantastical waffle. You want pictures! And stories! Right? Read on…
