Did I say...

I bought a new old camera?



Well I did, and there's more here.

Study break

I went to the zoo with Princess Prettygood on Friday. You can't study the finer points of Japanese grammar 24/7 can you?




I like animals. Just not mosquitoes or cockroaches.

I think I'm learning Japanese, I really think so

Sorry for the lack of posts. Due to study for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test N2 Exam that I will be taking in July I have been trying to study Japanese hardcore every day. I've been writing a diary almost every day, speaking Japanese every day, trying to make sure I do a bit of grammar study every day, and doing bits of reading every day.

Alright, not all of my reading is JLPT related. When Princess Prettygood loaned me >Tokyo Girls Bravo I was pretty much, "Yeah, it might be good." It is however, freaking amazing. It's like Tank Girl to an extent, that is it aims for a female view of the world (but obviously I would say that Kyoko Okazaki is a much more authentic writer of the feminine point of view seeing as she is a woman, whereas Alan Martin is not). It's less of an adolescent fantasy than Tank Girl and more of a representation of what comprehensive school was like for me (albeit gender switched, country moved and substitute the New Wave for fraggle indie and grunge). But at least I am making the effort to get stuff learned.

Hopefully there'll be a post once a week. Sometimes apart from working overtime and studying I do actually get around to doing interesting things. I went to an underground hiphop show in Nakano and understood approximately 0.000000011% of the lyrics, but did dance to drum and bass for the first time in ages and ages.

Anyway, for now, that is all. Or should I say, "Toriaizu..."?

Flickr Etiquette

I was just thinking about etiquette on Flickr. I'm in a few groups on there and there's one thing that drives me mental about a few people on there.

Why do you have to flood the group with a ton of shots at a time? I think it's cool to share one's photos but I think it's another thing entirely to submit twenty photographs at a time to a group. I even think that if there's a limit of say, five photos a day, you shouldn't submit any more photographs until somebody else has done so. There are a couple of groups I'm in where somebody seems to have submitted all the shots from a roll of film they shot all at the same time.

Rant over. For now.

You give me a huge election

The UK has possibly its most interesting general election in my lifetime coming up. We have the possibility of a hung parliament and major Liberal Democrat gains mean that the two-party system that previously went before is coming to an end.

I'm not registered for postal voting because I don't see why I should vote in the UK election. I'm not planning to live there any time soon so it seems a bit unfair. But if I were going to vote, I'd vote either LibDem or Labour just to keep the Conservatives out. The LibDems have policies I agree with whereas Labour have grossly disappointed me with their erosion of civil liberties since the turn of the millennium. However, Labour are still preferable to the Conservatives and if I were living somewhere that the Lib Dems couldn't possibly win a seat I'd be forced to vote for the nearest competitor to the Tories, so potentially Labour, no matter how much it sticks in my throat.

Rant over. I'll be watching the election results on the internet with bated breath on Friday in Japanese time.

The power of the sun

This Golden Week has been smashing, so far. The sun has been out, I've been to numerous restaurants and cafes, including one marvellous French restaurant for Princess Prettygood's birthday. There was also the Koenji Daidogei, which was rather fun indeed.



I won't be getting around to The Brothers Karamazov very often because I have bigger fish to fry, what with three Japanese grammar textbooks, a reading practice book, kanji to practice writing just for learning's sake for the test, and... what am I doing blogging?