My good friend and former roommate Jon came to Seattle as part of his world travels; his journey also took him to Costa Rica, Vietnam, China, and Japan. Jon and I share a lot of interests, and we can always find topics on which to converse endlessly. This time he introduced us to a board game called The Settlers of Catan; we played almost every night. Jon also left me with some excellent books; Snow Crash kept me company as I recovered from having all of my wisdom teeth out.

This winter, for one precious day, it snowed. Some went home early, and others stayed. Aye, we stayed, and were treated to Jane’s scratch-built blackberry pie. Aye, it were the best pie I ever did try.

Our good friend Rayme got gotten by Infinity Ward, the guys who make Call of Duty, one of the most successful games of the war-simulation genre. Before he left, Ann and I went over to the place he shared with Shishka to enjoy some grilled cheese sandwiches and video games. Their place is kind of famous for being something of a mess, so when it came time to bring out the sandwiches, there was nowhere to put them except inside Rayme’s dismantled Xbox. Seeing that Shishka works for Bungie, and Rayme works for Infinity Ward, they had the Xbox360 immediately upon launch. I regret to admit that I actually had fun playing it. **But!** The digital down-button didn’t work very well, and we never actually put in any Xbox games! I just set up my own Live account and played the downloadable games Geometry Wars and Mutant Storm the whole time.

This suitcase strikes me as charmingly ugly.

Here’s one of the two cats living with my brother Ed and his family. I quite like all of the swoopy metal furniture limbs around. I have a lot of nice pictures to show you all, but I left my PowerBook with Piroko in Japan. I am trying to get all of my intarweb stuff done at work, which means I don’t have a lot of Mac-time to update this site. Once the [MacBook Pro][1] comes out, I’ll be computing in luxury again. [1]: http://apple.com/macbookpro

I went to see my brother-in-law Thom downtown. When we worked together at YesTrader, our favorite lunch place was Peppers, a tiny, grimy shop run by an elderly asian couple. There was always a line out the door at lunch time, and they rush you through as quickly as possible. It was interesting to take another look at a normal company after having worked at Omni for a while. I’m quite glad I moved out to Seattle and took such a weird job.

I went to Chicago for Thanksgiving, so that I’d still be able to go to Tokyo at the end of the year. I was quite happy to spend the week reading D&D books and sitting with my mom as she recovered from her knee surgery. Here’s some kind of reptile that my nephew is keeping.

Here’s a good encapsulation of a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately. The alarm clock is my conscious effort to try getting better at waking up. I wanted an alarm clock that could play CD-RWs, so that I could experiment with various kinds of sounds and volumes. Lately I’ve been waking up to Japanese talk podcasts, which works rather well. I’ve been trying to find more and more time to read books, and have started keeping a definitive list of what I’ve read and what I should read next. Here you see a novelization of the life of Alexander the Great and a collection of biology essays. The bag you see is a gift from Piroko for my birthday; somehow barbers’ scissors bags became fashionable for men to wear around in Japan. It does make sense now that guys are carrying around cell phones, digicams, iPods, and such. This way my pockets aren’t full of stuff anymore. You can also see my [Hipster PDA][1], which has become central to most of what I do, and my sad, sad Motorola cell phone, which I’ve done my best to dress up by applying a white face plate. [1]: http://hipsterpda.com

Phil Elvrum, also known as The Microphones, also known as Mount Eerie, came to play a little show at a little place in Seattle. Troy invited me to come along, and I brought Ann. The place was the back room of some kind of art studio, with random objects lying about, scribblings on the walls, and artworks in various states of completion. About 100 very tall indie guys and very short indie girls fit into the room, sitting pressed together on the concrete floor. After the very hip and indie opening acts, the unassuming guy who’d been manning the CD table took the stage; he was Phil Elvrum, and he’d been sitting there the whole time. He just stood there, flipping through his notebook and playing any song that caught his eye, sometimes making things up on the spot. I couldn’t describe why he was great; he simply had enough charisma to keep all of us hanging on every goofy word he said. I wanted to take some real pictures, but my camera was out of batteries and I was uncertain how considerate it would be to setting off flashes in such close quarters anyway.

Here I am during the sorting stage of [Getting Things Done][1]. I like that GTD is less of a system and more of a way of thinking attached to a big list of good ideas. I probably have less in my _action item list_ than most GTD nerds, and I may be the only person to implement GTD using folders with Sakura Taisen characters on them, but it works excellently. For my own stuff I use a combination of GTD and a [Hipster PDA][2]; at work I use [kGTD][3]. My mind is a lot more at ease these days. From left to right: trash pile, recycle pile, filing, fresh folders (with important folders behind), inbox, items needing attention (with my new Hipster PDA in front), and the GTD book itself. [1]: http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-done/ [2]: http://www.hipsterpda.com [3]: http://www.kinkless.com/kgtd

Ann and I went wandering up to a local barbecue place for dinner one night. It’s easy to disparage the country you come from, but when I think about a big, messy BBQ pork sandwich, homemade macaroni & cheese, cole slaw, and a root beer, at a place with live blues music every week, I am pretty happy to be in the USA.

One nice thing about working for a small company of nerds is that when a major science fiction movie comes out, the entire company sets down its work and goes to the theater. On my birthday, we all went to see Firefly. Afterward, we convened at my boss’s house for a barbecue. She’s got a fine garden, including these guys who exhibit the radial symmetry I love. Posting photos of flowers is pretty standard, but somehow this photo turned out looking computer-generated.

My reading habit has been pretty healthy in Seattle. It’s not like grade school, when I could read a book every week, but I’ve read about 16 books since arriving here. The commonality of used book stores, including the labyrinthine Half Price Books, makes book-buying and reading pretty rewarding hobbies to have. Here’s the resident kitty of Twice Sold Tales, napping right in the middle of an aisle; apparently she is pretty used to having strangers around.

One night I was driving home from work, when the car in front of mine started pouring out smoke. I watched for a while, alarmed, until there was _fire_ shooting out the bottom of the car. As the car pulled to the side of the road, I came up next to it, rolled down my window, and said, _your car is on fire_.

The oldest living Van Hecke is my great aunt Peggy, who lives just a short drive across a bridge in Bellevue. I had no idea that any of my relatives lived near Seattle until I moved here. They welcomed Piroko and me into their home for last year’s Thanksgiving, and we felt right at home. This September there was a Van Hecke reunion; my aunt Debbie from California and I represented our branch of the Van Hecke tree. Ann came along, and we got to play “how long will people assume we’re dating”. At the reunion picnic, we were standing out on this pier when some college kids appeared and asked whether we would mind if they jumped in the lake. We said no, so they did. After, they felt dumb.

Soon after Piroko left, I bought myself an [iSight][1] and ordered one sent to her. Now every Friday and Saturday night, we meet up for a video date. Now that I don’t live alone anymore, I set up in the ballroom at Omni; it’s easier to relax and concentrate on Piroko if I have the whole place to myself, plus there’s coffee, tea, and snax. :D I have a tendency to get prematurely nostalgic about things. I can already tell that I’ll be looking back fondly on late nights at Omni. Nearly any life-situation I get myself into, I feel as if things have always been that way. For the first time, now, I feel like I wouldn’t mind if things always _continue_ to be this way. With some incremental improvements, I can imagine myself living like this for quite a long time. One night as I came outside, I found this stream flowing from some unknown location to disappear underneath my car. [1]: http://apple.com/isight

We drove up Aurora to take Ann’s car to emissions testing, or to get our Washington driver’s licenses or some such. After making a wrong turn, we discovered a lot surrounded by this fence made out of wheels.

Now that Anny’s my roommate, we spend a lot of time together shopping, eating, talking, playing video games, or watching Twin Peaks. One evening we drove up to the Northgate mall for some item or another, and encountered this dual rainbow. Rainbows became extra fascinating once I found out [what they really are][1]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow

On my May trip to Tokyo, I discovered the [ANA Uniform Collection][1]. Someone at All Nippon Airways recognizes the buying power of figure-geeks, and knows how to exploit it. They hired a respected figure sculptor to create this set of stewardess models, the finest set of blind-box trading figures I’ve ever seen. The figures were released as a limited set, available only on the web (with exorbitant shipping) or at ANA’s shop in Narita International Airport. They happened to be released during my trip; I did not intend to ignore the opportunity for cute, high-quality, limited-edition figures. On my way out of Japan, I spent about two hours trying to find the shop in the airport, finally finding it, and being told that the figures were sold out. That was the main disappointment of my otherwise lovely trip. I casually checked eBay over the next couple of months, watching the silly prices people were asking for individual figures from the set, and the absurd prices they were asking for full sets. Finally, though, one seller was offering them for a reasonable price, and I bid. Some days later, this attractively postmarked box arrived. It was full of knockoffs. I’d been fooled by a fake garage kit, but I never conceived that someone would bootleg 400-yen trading figures. The quality of the figures was deplorable, but these curs went to great lengths to print and glue accurate reproductions of the original _blind boxes_. The seller claimed not to know they were fake, and reimbursed most of my money. I then found a legitimate-seeming hobby shop online, called them to confirm that they actually went into the ANA shop in the airport to buy their figures, and bought a box and a half. Now my desk is populated by tiny stewardesses, which is all that really matters. [1]: http://acedia.web.infoseek.co.jp/toy/ana01.html

Ann always called this man-over-bike type of sign an “extreme stunt” sign, which makes sense if you consider them part of the same picture. Our trip to Canada, only the fourth country I’ve ever visited, was commemorated by a 12-pack of Canadian Dr. Pepper, a fine beverage indeed. I wish the United States could recognize the value of using actual sugar in a drink we invented, right here in our country, to contain sugar. Corn syrup is a vile thing, and I’m rather tired of being considered ignorant of its difference from real sugar. I suppose it doesn’t matter, though, now that I’ve reduced my intake to one casual pop per week. :D

Canada was full of fascinating signage. We were rather disappointed to realize that this guy was not a real guy, kind of like the cardboard security guards at the windows of the self-storage place in Green Bay.

After everyone else left, Chris stayed on as our guest for another week or so. He’s planning to come out to British Columbia for college, and he’s particularly aiming for Simon Fraser University near Vancouver. We drove up there to check it out. The school seems to be kind of a geeky hippie Shangri-La. Tucked into this wrinkly terrain miles from anything, at a legendary elevation, is this cluster of pleasant modern architecture, complete with an Authorized Apple Reseller and a boba tea cafe. While we sat in there, sucking the tapioca or jelly ballast from our drinks, girls in goth-loli and cosplay outfits wandered into the place. At first we thought the school must be even more unrealistically cool than we expected, but as it turned out there was some kind of convention going on, which is still pretty commendable.

The idea to move Northwest originally came from a conversation between my friend Ann and me. When I came out here, she knew she wanted to come join me. At the beginning of August, she finally made it. She moved in, and now the apartment isn’t so lonely anymore. Soon after Ann moved in, our friends Nathaniel from Ohio, Chris from Ontario, and Rushi from Oregon all came to visit us. Teamed with Shishka and Rayme who already live in Seattle, we comprised one of the largest gatherings ever of folks from our IRC channel. Some of Nathaniel’s friends own a very fancy restaurant in Capitol Hill, and they treated us to dinner for Nathaniel’s birthday. It was one of the finest meals I’ve ever eaten.

I guess that’s probably the best place to have biplane rides…

The Blue Angels came out for Seafair. Andrew invited me to watch them take off and land at Boeing Field. Seeing the F-18s up close gave me some nice inspiration for Crystal Bell, the main ship in Soft Landing.

One Saturday afternoon I rolled out of bed rather hungry. I shambled down to Market Street, thinking I’d stop in to Subway or something, and what should I bump into but a festival, right there where my neighborhood was supposed to be. I wandered about, gawked at the various food stands, and settled on a piroshky and a 20-ounce bottle of Pepsi. Sometimes it’s nice to live in a town where things happen.

I try to ride my bicycle to work whenever I can, but it’s not nearly as often as I’d like. I usually wake up too late, or come up with some excuse to drive instead. That’s a shame, because the ride is a good way to see the city, feel like I live in it, and feel like I’m alive at all. It also gives my brain a good amount of time to do nothing but think. Here’s a striking scene I encountered on the way home one evening.

I don’t know anything about this piece of paper. I found it in my basement. It speaks for itself, really.

These are my nephews. At their parents’ weddings, many years ago, my cousins and I would hold [Shirley Temple drinking contests][1]. The tradition has passed on to the next generation. Joe’s wedding, I think, is part of a new between-generations mini-era, in which Pete, Timothy, Stephen, and I will get married; and in which Matthew, Daniel, and Nicholas have already gotten married. The part of the mischievous young males will now be played by the children of those of the half-generation previous. Yeah? Sister Clare says that her son Aaron, second from the left here, has taken up my old hobby of filling spiral notebooks with stories, drawings, and games. I need to introduce him to programming and to the right kinds of fantasy stories, to round out his geekish education program. [1]: /index.pl?955

[Cousin Tim][1] has always been particular about high-quality products. For as long as I can remember, he’s insisted on Apple computers, Oakley sunglasses, BMW automobiles, Swatch watches, and so on. While in Chicago he wanted to be sure to check out the Swatch store on Michigan Avenue. They had some nice, simple, high-quality watches; I was even tempted to replace my aging Timex digital, only the second watch I’ve needed in about 13 years (and I only needed a second one because I broke the first while screwing around with its innards). They also had some fancy data-watches that connect to a satellite and download news items. I found the juxtaposition of fancy, relatively frivolous Western consumer technology with headlines of strife and death to be exactly the kind of thing I started this photo-journal for. [1]: http://timothygrimes.com/

Here’s the view from our hotel room. Chicago is a fine city. I got unused to the hustle and the bustle; these days I am rather uncomfortable in crowds. Even walking around the University District of Seattle is stressful; I have to consciously block all of the people out of my perception.

For the weekend of my brother Joe’s wedding, I stayed at the hotel with my parents and other assorted wedding guests. On one hand I would have liked to spend as much time at my old house as possible, but on the other hand I quite like being in hotels, especially with my cousins. It reminds me of scouring the corridors for loose change to use in the hotel’s game room.

I had a very late flight from Seattle to Chicago–And the longer I waited, the later it got. Here’s what a busy international airport looks like at about midnight. I was lucky to have an excellent book with me, because I’m utterly incapable of sleeping anywhere that’s not my designated sleeping place for the night.

When people associate Seattle with espresso and hipsters, this is the kind of place they’re thinking of. My brother Pete sells invisible braces; he went into the dental office of the father of my friend Joe McCartin from high school. Joe’s dad recognized Pete’s last name, and it came out that I’m in Seattle these days, and so is Joe. I got Joe’s phone number and we met up. It was weird to see someone who I haven’t associated with since I was playing punk rock shows. We caught up, ate Ethiopian food, and then visited this cafe. Since then, Joe broke both of his hands defending his girlfriend from an assailant, watched his girlfriend move to New Zealand, and got fired from his job as a union organizer for being injured.

We went back to the beach for another low tide, to wander and meet the sea life; this nice train passed by.

On the last day, we walked up to the base of Yosemite Falls. Here you see the falls flowing much more strongly than they normally do, because of the heavy snowfall.

Near the park is a small town of buildings from pioneer times, kept as original as possible. This door caught my eye; I wish the newfangled lock wasn’t there to mar it. These days you can get a cheap, decent door, with absolutely no character. Right now I’m trying to imagine the pride you would get from putting together your own house, laboring over each detail, to shelter yourself and your family.

I like these trees so much I’m posting a few different pictures of them. This is certainly a place I could enjoy spending some more time. The ancient trees give a sense of security. That’s security in the old meaning of “safeness and comfort”, not security in the new meaning of “being watched suspiciously and having your rights scraped away because someone blew something up somewhere”.

We wandered about a forest containing several giant sequoias. It’s creepy to think that individual trees here are older than Jesus; they’ve just been hanging out here the whole time. There’s probably a lesson of patience and calmness to be learned from these guys.

These people have the right idea. Any time I come across a beautiful, peaceful place, my first thought is “I could just sit down here with my book and read all day.” Bringing Piroko along would be even better.

We took our lunch up on a mountain view, where we met some human-desensitized animals. They rifled through bags when the owners weren’t looking, grabbed leftovers from abandoned meals, and investigated our Grey Poupon.

In the beginning of June, Andrew and I spent two nights in Yosemite National Park. Here’s the view from the top of Half Dome, where I proved it’s possible to hike to the top of a snowy mountain in Doc Martens. An extraordinary amount of snow had fallen, so the paths in the high areas were covered, and the lower areas were flooded. All of the waterfalls were rushing much more strongly than usual.

I welcome you. :D

Still on the way back from Grand Coulee, Andrew wanted to stop by Diablo Dam. I was quite tired and wanted to get back, but I didn’t disagree. It turned out to be the most exciting part of the whole trip. Maybe it was because we were actually allowed to walk out onto it, but it seemed way more impressive than the much larger Grand Coulee Dam. You used to be able to walk out onto the Grand Coulee Dam, but not anymore, because of “security concerns”. I don’t know what’s worse: the possibility of someone blowing up something important, or the loss of the freedom to go see something without being hassled and suspected of being a terrorist. If we can’t visit, touch, and photograph our country’s treasures, won’t they lose all cultural merit and become simple utilities? Anyway, you _can_ still walk out onto the Diablo Dam, and it is vertigous. Looking down its side is like looking across a sizable parking lot, one that is twisted around and vertical. I spent a while just looking straight down it from various spots and trying to fathom just how far I had to fall.

On the way back to Seattle, we took a different route to see more scenery. At this mountain pass we got out and stumbled around; look at all the _majesty_.

This is the largest concrete structure in North America. It’s kind of amusing and kind of disappointing to see the conditionals people put on their superlatives: “tallest freestanding structure with largest functional structure east of the Mississippi” and such sound somewhat lame. Show me the tallest structure EVAR and I’ll be impressed. We came back up here after dinner to see the laser light show, and listened to the banter of the teenagers behind us. They seemed like quite decent kids. It was neat to think about the tiny community that built itself up here, and to be able to get up on this rock and see the whole dam town.

We scouted around for a good viewpoint of the dam, so we could come back at night and enjoy the laser light show. Along the way, we found a park where two groups of kids were playing red rover and hide-and-go-seek. The sky was a lovely light blue with pastel pink and yellow clouds, so I took a bunch of stupid pictures of Andrew and myself. Here he is with his extraordinary zoom lens; my camera has no zoom whatsoever.

Here’s another section of [Grand Coulee][1], which cuts across sixty miles of northeastern Washington. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_coulee

Andrew and I, in anticipation of our Yosemite trip, took a one-night camping journey into northeastern Washington. Andrew’s favorite spot is this, [Dry Falls][1], the ancient site of the largest waterfall ever known to have exist. Of course, it’s all gone now, but you can still see the traces of the huge glaciers and imagine the natural history of the spot. I am looking forward to fully-immersive virtual reality facilities at such places, allowing someone to, say, step into a replica of what this place must have been like when covered in hundreds of feet of ice. [1]: http://www.gonorthwest.com/Washington/northeast/Dry_Falls.htm

On the beach at Golden Gardens, there are these huge rocks which have had their surface saturated with organisms. Barnacles attach the rock, tinier barnacles live on those barnacles, little black shell things live in the shadow of the barnacles, little twisty-shell things live next to the black shell things, and so on. There are hundreds of thingies living just in this tiny world.

Andrew, Cheryl, Ananta, and I went down to Golden Gardens, a beach near my home, to wade around a bit. There I met the largest snail I’ve ever seen. This guy was quite larger than a softball. It’s boggling to me to think of all the different creatures around, mainly because I see such a small sample of them in my daily life: humans, crows, stray cats, and a few types of bugs. Then I fly in a plane or something and look at all the areas we haven’t messed with yet (the word “undeveloped” is evil) and it makes some more sense. If I ever go back to school, I think it might be for biology. :D

Soon after I got back from Japan, I flew down to California to meet up with Shishka and Rayme and some of their friends for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Maybe I was too tired or too frayed by rubbing against advertising and consumerism in Shinjuku and Akihabara, or maybe the games that are getting pushed now just aren’t for me, but the whole thing was kind of disappointing. The advertising strategy for games in the USA seems to be Ugly Guys Yelling. Sports games, first person shooting games, crime games, they all feature an Ugly Guy Yelling, usually in conjunction with uninspired grayish gradienty floaty screen shots or demo videos, which are supposed to look revolutionary or at least state-of-the-art, but invariably leave me totally bored. I’d rather have a game that looks like Guilty Gear XX, a game where you can tell someone sat down and drew a bunch of beautiful two-dimensional pictures, than nearly any three-dee game, all of which seem to have the same dark, fakey, total lack of visual style. The whole thing felt a lot like Hollywood movies, where companies try really, really, _really_ hard to make you think that something is really, really, _really_ great, but if you ask an actual human who actually cares, they’ll admit that the stuff is crap. The most fun of the whole trip was going to the exclusive Bungie party thingo with Shishka and meeting important members of the fan community I never even knew about. I’m no Halo fan, but it sure was neat to mingle with such a group. I also got to meet the AI dude for Timesplitters 3. :D Anyway, Nintendo can always be counted on to have something nice. Here’s the only semi-worthwhile photograph I took on the whole trip.

Even in Japan, the Pacific Northwest is famous for espresso. Here they’ve pasted Mt. Rainier onto a Starbucks (“Fourbucks”) rip-off logo. I bought this because I was really craving coffee; making myself a real latte every day at work got me in the habit. It was a pretty miserable coffee.

Evas of unusual size? I don’t believe they exist…

Sometimes I think about the amount of humanity’s plastic that goes into Japanese figures. I think about what it means that businesses in multi-story buildings can exist on selling these things. I wonder what nomadic savanna people from 200,000 years ago would think if dropped into such a shop. BTW I have that Ayanami you see on the right side of the second shelf from the top. :

Six floors of this stuff. It was surprising to get into the figure shops and then realize that there isn’t really anything out now that I even want. I haven’t watched a new anime in who knows how long. Any of the games I like don’t have figures. Comics I like aren’t even of the right aesthetic to warrant figures. So I just kept an eye out for cheap Eva merchandise and kept going.

I walked around Akihabara all day. Again, it was surreal to be back, and it was surreal how little luster was left for me. It was nice to wander in and out of game, figure, and music shops, but in general I just felt like getting my merchandise and getting out of there. I wanted to go back to the apartment and just hang out with Roko. I wanted to escape the throngs of nerds, the walls of attractive but shallow poster-advertising, the drizzle, the unfriendly cash machines. One of the main attractions of Tokyo is the availability of merchandise. If you want obscure comics, hobby equipment, or entomology samples, Tokyo is the place. It’s distilled consumerism. Once you’ve bought all that crap and you just want to relax, though, the city stops being so appealing. When I got frustrated at the train ticket machines that don’t take the new 1000 yen bills, I had to make change by buying from a random machine. I ended up with Ikinari Happy Bell. :

One of Roko’s regrets about the USA is that you don’t come across desserts like this very often. One of my own regrets is that you don’t come across plastic food displays. I’ve seen approximately one plastic food display stateside.

In the interest of catching up with the present, I’m posting more than one photo in a day!!

I missed the shot of several people taking cell-phone photos of the giraffe, but here’s one person capturing two lazy hippos.

The zoo had a monorail connecting its two main sections. We chose to walk instead.

Here’s a photograph of the polar bear exhibit at the zoo.

Something about this scene struck me. A young couple sitting together, both e-mailing on their cell phones. The little kid walking into the frame was a bonus. I have no idea what he is doing with his hands.

This is just in honor of the newest version of [Mac OS X][1]. [1]: http://apple.com/macosx

The Ueno Zoo is Tokyo’s main zoo, and is somewhat famous for a [beautifully illustrated storybook][1] about sad times there during World War II. Now the zoo is also famous for its pandas. Hundreds of people line up outside the panda exhibit and are hustled past by staff with megaphones, calling “keep moving, don’t stop, keep moving, don’t stop” constantly. The pandas just sit there looking worried or sad. I wonder how many people are there because they are genuinely interested in learning about pandas, and how many are there because pandas are culturally supposed to be “cute”. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0395861373/

By now you know that I love big residential buildings. In Japan they’re particularly fascinating because so much evidence of the humans inside is visible from the outside. People hang their laundry out to dry and put their futons out in the sunlight, making it somewhat more apparent that people’s _lives_ are going on in there.

All varieties of cute, fluffy pillows can be had in Japan. I’ve got a pink rabbit one, myself; it’s a lovely addition to any sleeping arrangement. [Chris][1] from IRC wanted a [kappa][2]-shaped [Marshmallow Pillow][3], so I got him one gift-wrapped. Now it’s waiting in my apartment until he comes to Seattle to visit. [1]: http://feilkin.kuiki.net [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappa_(mythical_creature) [3]: http://www.fricca.com

Here’s the view from the apartment where Hiroko and her grandmother live, on the 7th floor of a brand new building of condominiums in Ôimachi. Walking around Shinjuku and Ikebukuro was kind of fun, but I actually found myself wanting it to be over with so that I could meet up with Roko again. Yeah. I was perusing used game and figure shops, visiting the official Sakura Taisen store and cafe, and other geeky stuffs like that, but it just wasn’t… _awesome_. Somehow, sitting in the Italian restaurant with Roko, her younger sister Eiko, and Eiko’s boyfriend, all racking our brains to remember the name of the crispyish carmelly custardy French dessert thing, was much more fun. (It’s crème brûlée, as Roko eventually remembered.)

One day an e-mail arrived from our travel agency. I don’t know how it got past my spam filters, but I’m glad it did; they were advertising unprecedentedly low fares for Golden Week. That’s the first week of May, when lots of people don’t have work or school, and they leave the major cities to visit their rural origins or relax elsewhere. We hadn’t been planning on meeting up in Japan at all, but a US$350 round-trip deal, during a week that Roko would only be working two days, was difficult to refuse. So, I took off to see Japan for the first time in two years, and Miss Hiroko for the first time in three months. On my first full day there, Monday, she did go to work, so I spent the day wandering on my own. Shinjuku, my old home station and favorite town, was my first stop.

I met my first wild snake.

During World War II, the USA wanted to make sure Japan wasn’t going to come into Puget Sound and start roughing things up, so they built several outposts around the entrance to the sound. None of them were ever involved in any battles, but it was surreal to see these semi-abandoned gun emplacements and pillboxes and such as we walked around the coast.

Sometimes you look over a cliff at just the right moment.

The day after STOMP, we went out to some island at the mouth of Puget Sound. Andrew didn’t read the “please stay behind sign” sign and walked right past it. I warned him to stay behind the sign, but then we both realized he _was_ behind the sign.

Andrew invited me to go see the performance group STOMP. I agreed without thinking, then wondered whether I’d made the right choice, then forgot about it for a couple of weeks. The night came; we collected Cheryl and battled traffic all the way to Tacoma. It was my first time in Tacoma; no one seemed to understand when I called it “pleasantly Portland-like” and “Pacific”. The show was very good. We sat in the second row, right in the center. Now I understand why Andrew is such a STOMP fan; the performance is universally entertaining. There are no words in the act, so it can be enjoyed by humans of any age and any background. As I found out later, even Piroko’s mom could dig it. After the show we saw the performers standing around outside the theater, probably wondering the same thing we were: “Isn’t there anything to eat around here?” This photo is from around where we parked the car.

Okay, I’ve mentioned IRC before but never really explained our weird situation. The short version is that there’s a very close group of friends who met online as far back as 1998, and now that group has a private IRC channel which sees activity pretty much 24 hours a day, all year. Three people I introduced to the channel after knowing them in real life; I’d met up with a total of nine others in real life after knowing them online for years. Shishka here, who you’ve already seen, was the eighth, and we hang out quite regularly now. Rushi, from near Salem, Oregon, is the tenth. He came up to Seattle for an anime convention; such things cause me fear, so I refused his invitation. After the con, though, he came to my place for about four days. Much Guilty Gear XX#Reload, R-Type Final, Evangelions, and Fatal Frame 2 was played. Tacos, katsudon, and curry were eaten. Happy times happened.

Andrew and Brian from Omni, Andrew’s friend Cheryl, Cheryl’s friend Patricia, and Patricia’s boyfriend Mrinal, and I, went to a cabin on the Olympic Peninsula for the weekend. The place was quite rustic, by which I mean we found about five spiders in the shower. It rained the whole time, which suited me just fine. Sitting by the wood stove reading Otsuichi and Five Star Stories by myself, playing Scrabble and Catch Phrase with everyone, or just sitting at the table long after dinner was over and listening to Mrinal describe life in India, I knew plenty of good times were to be had inside. We did discover that Brian, Andrew, and I are not a good shopping team. We are all the kind of guy who stands in front of the shelf puzzling for ten minutes, picks something, puts it back, picks something else, puts it back and retrieves the original thing, takes it to the checkout, then runs back to the shelf and gets something else entirely.

This guy–photographer, writer, butterfly-catcher, malaria carrier, TV reporter–is indirectly responsible for the past 5 years of my life. When I indicated some interest in Japanese language and culture, my roommate assignment for Freshman year at St. Norbert was changed to one Tetsutarou Soe. He turned out to be the most confusingly fascinating person I’d ever met. We lived together that year, and then shared an apartment in Nakano, Tokyo most of 2002. He came to Seattle for two days, and Peter came up from Portland, for some “spanning time”.

Shishka, being the video game art team person that he is, recognized this door as a fine type of thing to base some map textures on.

These days weekends are often spent with Shishka. We have a relaxed kind of camaraderie. We’ve both traveled far from home to work at companies we admired; we both have a kind of detached but bewildered admiration for the city of Seattle; we both desire Japanese-style curry-rice at least once weekly. On any Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, if we see each other in IRC, it’s only a matter of time before I’m on my way over to pick him up. So we tromp around the International District doing geeky things, until we get paranoid at all the humans around and hole up in my apartment for video games or DVDs. Anyway, here’s a bunch of people clamoring for Taiwanese independence. Their most incisive bit of rhetoric was “Taiwan Yes! China No!”.

Someone deserves a promotion.

Here’s one of the many spots Andrew and I have randomly driven to. We also watch a lot of DVDs these days; I’m showing him the new Evangelion discs as they come out, and he’s showing me all of the good movies I’ve missed over the years. Shishka is the other person I hang out with any regularity; recently we finished [THE CHIKYUUBOUEIGUN][1] on INFERNO level. That game is 2000 yens well spent. [1]: http://www.d3p.co.jp/s_20/s20_031.html

All right, Andrew claims that someone told him that some Pearl Jam video was filmed here. I did some Googling and all I found out is that this is indeed PJ’s management company. I’d like to take this chance to complain that I’ve lived in Seattle for over seven months now, and I _still_ haven’t bumped into a single Pearl Jam member at the grocery store! What kind of rip-off is this? :D

I don’t know what this was really for, but it’s safe to say that it’s not [what it seems][1]. Driving semi-aimlessly around the Seattle area with Andrew has become a pretty standard activity. It’s probably better for me than staying in and playing Segasaturn all day. Katy, one of my be-_yuu_-tiful sisters, expressed concern that my recent entries seem rather sad. If you’re worried, don’t worry. I’m doing quite fine. I mean, clammbon and YUKI _both_ releasing a new album _and_ a new DVD within a one-month period? Yes, I am well. (By the way, I went and picked up the new YUKI; it wasn’t even copy-protected. Ha!) [1]: http://www.rush.com

My brother Joe and his buddy Steve came out to Seattle to hang out with some various people, and I was one of them. It was really quite fun to hang out with them. I wish we could have spent more time together. The same night that Joe came, Green Bay friend Peter came up from his new place in Portland with his new roommate Ed. We spent a few days in Seattle together, then I drove him back down to Portland to stay there for one night and accompany him to his Zen service. In the neighborhood of the Zen joint we found yet another Northwest art-car. Just relaxing in Peter’s apartment, laid out on the futon Hiroko’s mom insisted on mailing to me with no warning, listening to my iPod, and reading _20th Century Boys_ volume 17 was one of the most relaxing times I’d had in a really long while.

My friend from when I lived in Tokyo, miss Leah, invoked me to procure her one Twisp and Catsby from the [Penny Arcade][1] gents at our city’s comic convention. I collected one Shishka and we went to stand in the cold on a Saturday morning. We were let in, we made a beeline to the PA table, we got our goods, we wandered around the show floor for about fifteen minutes, we discovered a nice import toys shop that carries _Pinky:ST_ for Pete’s sake, we built up the courage to go talk to the PA guys, we went and did that, we took this picture, and we left, smiling at the baffled dude who tried to stamp our hands but was told we were already done 25 minutes after the convention had started. [1]: http://penny-arcade.com

It’s been over a month since we went to the peninsula, and I’m still posting photos from there. I’d like to catch up with the present, but I’m not sure what kind of photos I’d post; all I’ve been doing lately is working, coding for SL, talking in IRC, playing Sentimental Graffiti on Segasaturn, and watching movies with Andrew. And, of course, talking to Hiroko via iSight. None of these activities offers very compelling photo opportunities. I’m not unwell, though. Things are just very, very quiet.

With Piroko gone, my lifestyle has slipped on a big banana peel. From moment to moment, I still feel like the same guy, but overall something is very strange. I make the same jokes at work, I am still working hard on [SL][1], I go home and play Segasaturn… But this constant presence of motivation and inspiration is missing. [iSights][2] do their part to stave off absolute isolation. [1]: http://softlanding.metalbat.com/ [2]: http://www.apple.com/isight

The next day we came back to the beach to see it in the light.

I think the ocean might be my favorite thing of all time.

For Hiroko’s last weekend in the United States for a very long time, Andrew suggested that we go see the Olympic Peninsula. We packed up, got in my car, and drove out there on Saturday morning. The several hours’ drive (with ferry ride) was passed quite well: we took turns selecting music from our iPods, told stories, cracked wise about one another, and admired the Washington scenery. We got to our bed & breakfast place just before dark, and we had enough time to go visit Rialto Beach. The atmosphere was surreal. The beach seemed enclosed by rocks to either side, stacks of driftwood behind, and a low, gray, rainy sky above, while the ocean stretched out in front of us into the misty distance. It was a feeling of being outdoors but insulated from the rest of the world, not entirely unlike the feeling one gets in very crowded areas of Tokyo. Beneath us were these smooth rocks, still in the millions-of-years process of getting worn down to sand.

This made me more angry than anything has in a while. As the Scrobbler will attest, a huge chunk of my time is spent listening to YUKI. Her music consistently calms me, cheers me, anchors me, encourages me, and does all the other nice fluffy things music is supposed to do for people. I simply don’t get tired of listening to her. This is pretty impressive for a musician who only has two albums out. Well, she’s got a new album coming out. This is a major event for me. The prollem is as follows:

1. I am a YUKI fan. I have bought both of her albums at ridiculously high Japanese prices, and have encouraged others to do so as well.
2. I am not a criminal, or a pirate, or a person with ill intentions toward YUKI or her work.
3. YUKI is not a criminal, or a jerk, or a person who has ill intentions toward me, any of her other fans, or our enjoyment of her work.
4. Imagine I order YUKI’s new album, pay the 30+ ameribux for it, bounce around in my chair while I wait for it to arrive in the mail, and finally receive it.
5. Now imagine I open the jewel case and remove the CD for the first time, like I have hundreds of times before, and insert it into my music device of choice.
6. Guess what? The CD tray pops back out as if it’s disgusted by the vile thing I’ve inserted into it, or perhaps a useless disk full of gibberish files appears on my desktop, or some other result transpires that is not me listening to excellent new YUKI tracks that will permeate my life for years to come.
7. “Double-you tee eff?”, you might ask. What happened to giving someone money and getting a product in return? Well, you see, my music device of choice happens to be a Macintosh computer. I use my Mac for everything. In the year 2005 it’s silly to use an old-fashioned CD player when you could have the much richer and more flexible music-listening experience offered by personal computers, particularly Macs. Yeah, well, it just doesn’t work in a Mac.
8. I rarely feel like giving people the finger. I’m usually vehemently opposed to giving people the finger. I so want to go up to the dorks at Sony Music Entertainment who are responsible for this and flip them two enormous simultaneous birds right about now. “Yes, the Macintosh community thanks you. All 2%-market-share, supposedly-not-big-enough-of-a-profit-generator-to-worry-about disposable income stylish hip music and entertainment loving digital lifestyle living twenty five freakin’ million of us thank you very much.”
9. Okay. So, if at this point I’ve already paid for the nearly useless plastic shard that might actually have some YUKI music digitally smudged on it and that would probably pass for a CD were you to wave it in front of someone’s face, I might as well see what I can do about getting the frickin’ music off it somehow. Maybe I’m feeling masochistic, and I’ll harass some people at work to see if anyone actually has a Windows box sitting around somewhere.
10. Okay, I find a Windows box, I muster up my patience, I sit down in front of it and I insert the disc. I get… MAGIQLIP. What the hell is MAGIQLIP? It’s some piece of crap software Sony threw together to decode and play the thing I just wasted $35 on.
11. Here’s how it works. When you put in the disc, your computer connects to the internet, uploads an identifier unique to your copy of the disc to Sony’s server (assuming the server is up today), and downloads a key to let you decode the (already compressed) music files hiding on the disc. Let me run that by you again. Your computer connects to the internet and exchanges data with a Sony server so that you can listen to a pop song on a physical music album you bought with cash money.
12. You listen to it in a crappy player cobbled together by Sony underling coders without a whit of user interface humanity.
13. Actually, no, wait, you actually don’t listen to it at all, because you don’t live in Japan; you live in some barbarian country where it’s not possible to sign up for the online service that lets you listen to the CD you just bought.
14. Okay, so, say I move back to Japan because, dang, I really like YUKI and I just have to hear this album. Then I can listen to it. Not in iTunes, or Winamp, or XMMS, or any other player of my choice. I don’t hear the CD-quality tracks hidden elsewhere on the disc; I hear versions compressed with settings based on Sony’s whims. I don’t play it on my Mac, or my Linux box, or anything but a Windows box (or a crappy old-fashioned CD player, something I haven’t owned since iTunes was still called SoundJam MP). I can’t put it on my iPod. I can’t do anything but sit back and wonder why Sony hates me.
15. It gets worse. So I copy the songs to the Wintel’s hard drive using my unique identifier and the downloaded decoder key, and for some reason later I want to listen on a different machine, or the hard drive blows up, or whatever. I can copy the songs from the CD again… for 200 yen each. I hope by now you’re as flabbergasted as I am.
16. Think about how I, a paying customer, have been treated by Sony in this hypothetical story. Now, I guarantee you that mere days after the album is released there will be a pirate version available online somewhere. Even if someone has to use an analog recording from an old-fashioned CD player, it’ll get out there. That means anyone could get a decent copy of the music to use as they please, to play in any player they want, to put on their iPod, whatever, for free. As soon as one person has gone through the hassle of finagling the music into a usable format, everyone else gets the benefits for free. Any way you look at it, the pirate wins and the customer loses. My first instinct was to intentionally pirate the album and write YUKI a letter explaining why I’d done so. Since then Sean has informed me that he can probably get me a legitimate Taiwanese pressing, which will be an actual standards-compliant Compact Disc and with which I can do as I please. That would at least give YUKI and her band some of the money they deserve for creating excellent music; I know painfully well that it’s not their fault directly. Maybe in fantasy idealism world it’ll boost sales of the open Taiwanese version versus the locked-down Japanese version enough to convince Sony to stop treating consumers like garbage. Maybe five weeks from now I’ll have new YUKI music on my iPod, I’ll be listening to it blissfully, and I’ll have forgotten about how for a whole day I couldn’t even bear to listen to one of my favorite musicians because of her tenuous association with such nonsense.

Oh, the new album is entitled joy.

My brother Joe has a fiancee. She has a tree frog. She also has a big ol’ diamond.

So, we went to Chicago for Christmas. Chicago is a no-nonsense kind of towne. I go back to my house, to my neighborhood, to my church, and _things have kept going on while I wasn’t around_. No matter where I go, within a few days I adapt and on some level I feel like I’ve been there forever. So it’s terribly surreal to return to a place I used to take for granted, and rediscover it. This time, the main result was re-realizing how cool my whole family is.

Some of the most relaxing moments I’ve had in the last few weeks have been sitting in Andrew’s car and just driving around to see beautiful Northwest scenery.

When we see something really beautiful really far away, Andrew takes a picture of it with his great camera and I take a picture of him with my normal camera.

Someone between 1906 and right now decided that a historical building with beautifully decorated high ceilings and other attractive characteristics was in serious need of some bland plastery walls and a low foamy ceiling. [King Street Station][1] is in the process of regaining some of its original personality. Regardless, it’s still an Amtrak station and therefore it’s still kind of depressing. Andrew and I regretted the presence of garish phone card vending machines and such that will continue to ruin the atmosphere even when the renovations are complete. [1]: http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/rail/transit/kss/default.cfm

Coworker and friend Andrew has been showing us around town, taking us to fascinating sightseeing locations, and introducing us to tasty meals from donuts to crumpets to pastas. He seems to have the same quiet idea of fun that we do, so we get along quite well. Since Andrew is a [photographer][1], he knows all sorts of places with lovely views. This particular photo, which shows off Seattle’s multi-layered structure, was taken from the observation deck of [Smith Tower][2], Seattle’s first skyscraper. [1]: http://people.omnigroup.com/andrew/ [2]: http://www.smithtower.com/History.html

Each year these boats sail through the city, making stops where they blast a choir’s performance of holiday songs. The lights were pleasant, even if the music was painfully loud. Several unexpected elements of the Seattle cityscape are decorated for the holiday season, such as these boats, the tops of some buildings including a tree-like formation on top of the Space Needle, and even the cranes and scaffolding of buildings in progress. This journal is on a several-week lag, which means I don’t get to write about things happening right now in my life for quite a while. On one hand this means I get extra time to think about them before I divulge them to the population of the Earth. On the other hand it means I don’t yet get to tell you all what a great Christmas we’re having. Oh well, in the meantime, I hope yours is going nicely.

Seattle likes posting flyers and such; some advertise shops or rock shows, some don’t seem to advertise anything at all. Either way, those staples really add up, especially in hip areas like this one.

Roko really likes the American breakfast, so pretty much every weekend we go out to one of the greasy-spoon joints in Seattle’s happening Fremont or Wallingford areas. Lately my head has been clouded with a ton of stuff, and it was actually kind of hard to just sit down and enjoy something like a bowl of oatmeal with my girlfriend, without getting distracted about what I wanted to go work on next. I’m getting better at that, though. Jules has explicitly told me to take a break from Soft Landing, and I haven’t touched any other personal projects very much for a while now. Finally deciding to retire from [URD][1] has taken a six-year load off of my shoulders; it was long overdue. That’s another story, I guess. [1]: http://urdrawing.com