月別アーカイブ：2018年5月

If your family is like mine, you didn’t grow up owning fun pets. Sure, we had cats, fish, and hamsters, but not any pets that you could actually do anything with. Much like cats, fish, and hamsters, neopets are also quite boring. 

If you are unfamiliar with Neopets.com, I’m not surprised. Developed in the late 90’s, Neopets quickly gained popularity in a time when flash animation was incredibly popular. Visiting Neopets.com today is like entering a portal into early 2000’s internet. It was a simpler time; eBaum’s World is where we got all our viral videos and MySpace was still relevant. Neopets gave kids with social anxiety a nice quiet place to play games, own and decorate a virtual home, and, strangely, buy and sell stocks in the Neopian stock market.

Most importantly, you could create your own neopet, strange creatures that didn’t quite do anything. You can customize your pet by painting it or buying it clothes…and that’s it. They’re fun to look at, I guess? The strange thing is; despite Neopets.com’s frozen-in-time setting, it still has a thriving community of active players, myself included. I think it’s precisely the nostalgia for a simpler time that keeps people coming back for more, and, if it’s not broken, why fix it?

Make and Do

Use make:

• when we create something : I just made a cake. 
• when something causes a reaction: This film makes me happy.

Use do:

• when we talk about activities: I’m not doing anything. What do you want to do?
• when we talk about activities in general: What does he do? He’s a lawyer.

私は今、このブログを東京行きの飛行機の中で書いています。次の日曜日に横浜で開催されるトライアスロン大会に出場するためです(^^)v

During Golden Week, I made my first trip to Osaka. I always regarded Matsuyama as a big city (any place with over 500,000 people is considered large in America), but visiting Osaka and the surrounding area really put things into perspective and made Matsuyama feel like the small town that my students insist it is!

While there, I did all the usual Kansai tourist activities such as visiting the castle, shopping at Dotonbori, taking a day trip to Nara, going to the top of the Tsutenkaku Tower, and of course eating plenty of okonomiyaki, takoyaki, and kushikatsu. 

However the highlight of my trip was  ̶e̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶T̶a̶c̶o̶ ̶B̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶i̶m̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶t̶h̶s̶  going to the small (by comparison) town of Ikeda to tour the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum. Not only do you learn about the interesting history of Cup Noodles there, you also get to create your own noodle recipe to take home and enjoy. 

Overall, I feel about Osaka the way I do New York: a fantastic city to visit and be entertained by for hours just by walking in any random direction, but a little too hectic of a place for me to live.

–Andrew

I’m very fortunate and excited to be able to attend M.E.S.H.’s (aka James Whipple) audio visual set in Kyoto this coming Sunday. He’s been one of my favorite experimental electronic producers over the past few years but he is also a highly capable DJ that will conjure your catharsis whether you expect it or not, after the ambient washes give way to monstrous drums. Here’s one of his more upbeat compositions called “Search. Reveal.”. Enjoy! 😉

– Joe