Here are some photos from James’ camera ^_^
Left: Me at a temple.
Centre: With a statue of Kamen Rider. …I have boots, so I must be a super hero too, right?
Right: In the snow with a broken umbrella. It broke when I was trying to shake off the snow that had collected on it, luckily it still worked.
Left: Me and Kat with a robot statue.
Centre: Me and Kat in the SNOW!!!
Right: at a SNOWY temple!!!
The snow was cold. But heaps of fun. ^_^;
Kat and I have come down to James’ place for the xmas holidays. We went on a trip further north and it was lots of fun, I’ve uploaded photos ^_^yay!
I took a lot though, so I’ve made galleries for xmas day, boxing day, and the day after. On xmas day, we had a mini-tree and normal sized presents (Kat and James’ families both do presents for xmas, so we did presents), and we made pancakes.
After pancakes and presents we took a train up north and got there just in time to check into our youth hostel, then the next morning woke up to find out it was snowing!!! So we had a white boxing day! ^_^yay!
Then we had a day in Matsushima, walking around the snowy temple grounds and took a boat cruise to see the famous island views. The next day we went to a manga museum in a place called Ishinomaki.
My friend Kat is visiting. *squee*
We’ve been doing random touristy things and a couple of academic-ish type things also.
Because she’s the current Monash Manga Library manager, I introduced her to the staff at the Museum, who loved her and thought she was cute.
We also met up with our lecturer from Monash, Tokita-sensei, who is here in Japan this year. She was my supervisor for half of honours year, and is super high up in the Japanese Studies Centre at Monash, so is therefore technically one of Kat’s bosses.
As tourists, we’ve been walking round Kyoto, viewing the autumn leaves and temples, and going on touristy daytrips.
We went to the town of Takarazuka and saw Takarazuka, the super shiny theatre of sparkles.
It was fantastic, and no one had a epileptic fit afterwards, so it was a good day for all.
We also bought Takarazuka gatchapon (capsule toys from a vending machine) because we are geeks.
Yesterday we went to Toei Eigamura the movie theme park I did cash in hand work for a couple of months back (they’d given us free tickets as well), it’s very kitschy, so it gets a bad review in the Kyoto Lonely Planet guide because the guy who wrote it seems to hate kitschy stuff, but it’s very funny and we had a great time.
It kind of reminded me of Sovereign Hill in Ballarat, only Japanese and much set further back historically. ha.
The haunted house costs 500yen extra to get into so I think a lot of people don’t bother because there’s no way you can know before hand if it’s lame or not.
I thought it was the best bit of the park.
I don’t actually enjoy being scared normally, but i’d assumed it wasn’t going to really be scary. It sort of was, but in a fun way. We screamed like little girls, as did the groups before and after us (we could hear them), and some of them weren’t even girls. But we all came out with massive grins on our faces.
hehehe.
I haven’t had the pc time to update in ages so this is a belated post.
Lingua Comica totally rocked of course.
How could it do anything less?
The artists were all awesome people, and in between interpreting service announcements and random conversations, I got to hang about, watch them work magic, and read the comics they’d all brought to show people.
During the residency period, a few of us from the museum went with the artists up to the university’s research centre on Mt.Hiei. Which is basically just a massive building with accommodation rooms, a kitchen and a big workshop room they could use for the ‘artlab’ (ie: comic drawing room).
The artlab had two walls that were basically windows and overlooked the mountain. It was an amazing view.
There was also a Japanese style bath we could go relax in after each heavy day of productivity.
I totally fried my brain with interpreting. But luckily I didn’t have to do the really hardcore stuff when the artists were getting advice from a visiting manga-ka because they brought someone in whose been living in Japan and studying manga for years for that bit. *whew*
I miss the artists.
There are all wonderful people, and it was heaps of fun hanging out with them.
My brain is still a little fried, but that could be on account of lack of sleep just lately. heh.
The Asia-Europe Foundation’s Lingua Comica is a project that gathers emerging international comic artist in pairs for 2 months of online artistic collaboration, followed by a residency week of group workshops, panels and exhibitions.
This year it’s a joint project with the Kyoto International Manga Museum (MM), which is helping organise the residency week in Kyoto, and will be exhibiting the resulting artworks.
They have a weblog for the artists where we can watch their progression, …and read their messages to each other incidentally, which seems a bit voyeuristic, but oh well.
The MM’s resident participating artist is Ogawa Tsuyoshi.
Ito-sensei has asked me to do some as yet undefined language related volunteering. So hopefully i’ll get to meet all the other artists too. Sounds like fun! And from the stuff on their blog already, it looks like it’s going to be a great exhibition.
In my continuing quest to A.) deal with my lack of stove hotplate, and B.) get as much use as possible out of the couple of appliances I do actually own, I made pumpkin soup in my rice cooker today. So i’ve used it for rice, porridge, pasta and soup now.
I cheated by using tinned pumpkin. Because real pumpkin is hard to find and beyond my budget in this country. Besides I don’t own a blender or food processor anyway, which seems to be needed otherwise …but then I wouldn’t really know for sure because I’ve never made it the non-cheat way. This was my first ever attempt at making pumpkin soup. Normally in Oz, I buy it or hassle a certain family member into making it for me (I only did that after my jaw surgery though). *walks away whistling innocently*
I was out of bread, so I made damper while I was keeping an eye on the soup, by squishing the dough into a flat disk and cooking it on my mini-grill. I should’ve made more though cause it was so nice I dipped and ate most of it before taking a photo even occurred to me. hehe.
1/4 cup margarine
2 teaspoons sugar
1 cup water
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 can pumpkin
1 can milk
Melt margarine and dissolve in sugar.
Add water, salt and pepper. Stir in canned pumpkin, and milk.
Cook with the rice cooker lid open, stirring occasionally, until desired consistency is reached.
Serve. ^_^
I now have two meals worth in the fridge and another two in the freezer, plus the bowl that I ate. Even though, I think I normally eat less than other people, each container I stacked away would easily fill a good sized mug or smallish bowl.
mmm… soup.
Recently the 9th International Comic Artist Conference took place in Kyoto, which gathers together comic artists from around the world for forums and lectures. The actual conference is closed to the public, but this year in celebration of the conference they had events at the Manga Museum and the event hall of the conference centre and called the public open section the Manga Summit Festa. The event hall was mainly corporate booths, but there were a bunch of manga artists who cut the ceremonial ribbon (above), and sketched their characters on some walls while the crowd watched on and applauded ^_^
I managed to get a photo of Monkey Punch drawing, but it was too crowded to get a clear shot of anyone else with my camera phone (curses for forgetting my real camera), I got a good shot of Chiba Tetsuya’s sketch afterwards though, and he’s on the very left of the top right photo above where they’ve cut the ribbon.
… 
It was good fun, and even the corporate booths were interesting (which isn’t always the case at these kind of things). The wacom tablet booth is always fun for everyone to play around in, and as well as the stand tablets to be used with an otherwise normal pc setup, they also had the super tablet screen versions available for people to mess around with.
They also had a mobile phone manga booth with phones setup so people could read manga on them, and one giant not-so-mobile-phone which worked for the same purpose.
The peeps at SpicySoft also had a booth setup where people could draw manga that would then be scanned and uploaded to the net for everyone to view using their mobile phones, and for people who were feeling technologically capable, they were showcasing a software that was almost just like photoshop, but specifically for creating manga …In that it seemed a little more restrictive than the normal photoshop, but had a lot of panel templates, and a function for splitting up the panels into viewing order for upload.
Stevie, one of the newly arrived research students this semester, came along with me, and he drew a short manga with the program which they uploaded but then we realised neither of us can access it, because he didn’t have a phone (he might by now though) and mine is prepaid and doesn’t have internet access. Websites designed for mobile phone access are generally not accessible at all using normal pc browsers.
Then today, I remembered about the Opera Mini Simulator which simulates a mobile phone with the Opera Mini browser on it, so you can check to see what a mobile phone page will look like without needing the actual hardware. …Unfortunately, the museum computers don’t seem to have Java2 installed, and I shy away from updating things that doesn’t belong to me, so I can’t check it out there, but i’ll check it out from home and see if I can find the direct link to Stevie’s comic.
So, as Dad can attest, I don’t have very much stuff in my room, and one of the things I still haven’t gotten around to buying but plan to one day is a little table to put my laptop on.
In the meantime I got the box my microwave came in and some tools of the cardboard manipulation trade:
And did this to it:
And now I have a table. yay!
I originally made it just for the fun of it, but it really does support the weight of my laptop. I was surprised.
And look, there’s even just enough room for the mouse pad:
hehehe.
I went to the dentist today because I thought I was getting a hole in one of my teeth, although it didn’t hurt I was sure the tooth was getting darker, and was scared.
As it turns out I was being completely paranoid, and I have no cavities. wow! That’s the first time in my life i’ve ever had that news from a dentist (although I generally try to avoid them, so that could be the problem. If I went more often, i’d probably hear that more often. ^_^heh)
They cleaned my teeth super-dentist-style to make the visit worth while, gave me a free inter-dental tooth brush, said I don’t have to come back and sent me off like a good little girl.
The survey at the start was funny. It started off with normal stuff, like questions about allergies, health conditions and eating/drinking/smoking habits. Then asked about how often I clean my teeth and if I floss etc.
After that, they had a sliding scale where they asked me to pick how scared of dental treatment I am. From terribly scared to not scared at all.
I picked smack bang in the middle, but I really wonder what they do if you pick terribly scared.
On the weekend I got a one off day of work at a beach wedding.
It paid 12,000yen all up and was a lot of fun.
The groom, Justin, was in charge of everything and every time I saw him he’d risen to a slightly higher level of panic. I really don’t know why people would want to organise something like that themselves, but he was still a really cool guy to work for despite the panic.
Actually the first thing that happened when we got there was that he told us to chill out and go swimming for a couple of hours, then fed us with Japanese bento (packed lunches).
It was a stone beach rather than sand. Just a million tiny little pebbles, on the side of Lake Biwa, the largest freshwater lake in Japan. It was sooo nice to go swimming in. Like a massive freshwater swimming pool, except it could have been an ocean because you can’t see the other side.
Then we cut up vegetables for 3 or 4 hours. I was put in charge of making the salad. Mmm… salad.
I spent most of the actual reception collecting empties and rubbish, then joined Raja on the bar later in the night, supplying already ridiculously drunk people with more free wine and champagne.
We ate the same food that the guests did for dinner, got to have some of the 60,000yen cake (like wtf? I mean it was nice cake, but there’s no way it was worth 60,000yen!), and from around 10pm Justin started coming round to make sure we were all drinking and taking it easy.
We kept serving drinks though, and Raja and I started drinking with the guests, it was really nice (and no doubt hideously expensive) wine, and Raja had stashed the last bottle of champagne away for the staff which we opened about then too.
Most of the English speaking staff were from the Philippines, and they decided to sleep on the beach rather than take the train home. We suggested the pebbles might not be so comfy (although one random person had already passed out there) and in the end they agreed and slept/hungout in one of the pagodas, surfing the internet on their laptop all night, thanks to somebody’s unprotected wireless. They’re all software programmers working for the same agency. Albin is a Java programmer and all the others work in C++. They said they came mainly for the fun and adventure rather than the money though, so hopefully they’re not too underpaid. eep.
Another of the specially hired staff, Kevin, tried to pick up the lady in charge of the bar, a Japanese woman who later turned out to be 10 years older than him.
Kevin, Raja, Albin and I started hanging out with the remaining conscious guests, who all had amazingly drunk and entertaining stories to tell us, and although Albin went to sleep at some point, I’m not even sure if Kevin or Raja crashed in the morning.
I slept roughly an hour to pass the time, back in the house, then caught the train home with Joe, the Korean guy who’d had to deal with the guests thinking he was Japanese all night, as soon as we found out who to get our pay off (we hadn’t forgotten the previous night, but just didn’t get around to organising it until the morning).
Then I went directly to the manga museum, although I realised I was still ever so slightly drunk. I was clean, following the right dress code and didn’t smell, so it didn’t create problems, but it was funny (in fact, they had no idea so no worries.)
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