09.13.04
I obviously never got around to "an update before the end of the week." Apologies to all who checked back in the hopeful belief that I was not a complete incompetent. There's nothing I can say to make that un-bad so let's just move along, shall we? Gonna do a lot of catching up today.
A few random items for your consumption.
Part of the reason of the delay was my attendance at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. If you don't know what this was, there's probably little point in regaling you with the gory details, suffice it to say, my good friend Robert successfully pulled off a video game industry first by organizing a consumer-level E3 that didn't suck*.
Of particular interest to Flap readers, since I like to bring your attention to good music from time to time, is the musical guests that rocked the event.
The Minibosses add a rockin' punk flare to (are you ready for this?) covers of theme music from old NES games. That's all they do. Until you've heard a Zelda, Castlevania or Super Mario Brothers medley done with three thrashing guitars and some pounding drums, you just haven't relived your 80's childhood as well as you could have done.
Optimus Rhyme has, without a doubt, the coolest band name ever. They do the laying of nerdy rhymes over kickass guitar backings and all, but dammit... their name. It's so cool!! I also met them on site the day before PAX and they were really nice guys. Just check em out, they're good.
And if you don't already listen to MC Frontalot, who was also there, and who I also hung out with, and who was also very nice, I don't know if there's hope for you. You have the link, start downloading now.
So moving on to the Japan/Fukuma-retrospectives, I've found it's been kind of difficult to get around to writing these things up. It's only been a month since I've been back, but Japan seems so long ago already. I've been so preoccupied with getting a car, getting organized and ready to move back east that I haven't taken enough time to properly reflect on where I am and where I've just come from, life-directionally speaking. Then I start to get even more self-conscious when I consider that if things are fading that fast for me, how fast must interest be fading for the readers who don't even know me outside of this site. How dedicated can one really be to the blog of a stranger?
Then all that changed when I just got the bill for the domain-renewal last week and I thought, "If I'm paying for this goddamn site to be on the that thar interweb, I'd damn-well better update the motherfucker!" Especially being that this weekend was the 3-year anniversary of the very first Hair Flap entry.
So I'm back again to try and ride this sucker out to the bitter end.
Okay, so I think I promised someone some of the last Engrish that I had rounded up and never got around to posting. Better late than never, baby. Eight instances of where grabbing a native English speaker off the street and paying him or her $20 to be an 'English Consultant' would have saved a company some embarrassment and robbed the rest of us of some snickering. Enjoy em cause they're the last I've got. :(
Last up for today is a bit of photo-retrospective thang. When you buy a Canon digital camera, it comes bundled with a handy little program called Photostitch, which justifies the disk space it takes up by joining multiple photos into a seamless panorama. If you're thinking about buying a Canon camera, or are crafty enough to find this app elsewhere, and are wondering if it's worth all the money/effort, I offer this plethora of examples from my own catalog of panoramic photos.
I've been taking multi-photo panos ever since I got a digital camera 3 years back, but have never got around to assembling half of them because it's such a pain in the @$$ to do it by hand in Photoshop. Now that Photostitch turns it into a 30-second proposition I've been going back and redoing all the panos from my past three years in Japan that I had hoped would, but never have, made it to the Flap.
I think we can all agree that I've already talked too much. On with the photos. I've put them on a seperate page out of consideration for those on dialup.
*i.e. it fucking rocked
Review Fukuma Hair Flap at Japanreference.com
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