Last week as I was browsing Wikipedia, I came upon an article on nensha (念写). It is the ability to psychically imprint an image from one’s mind onto surfaces or the mind of others.
In 1910, an assistant professor from Tokyo University named Fukurai Tomokichi conducted a well-known research regarding ESP. His first subject was [...]

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A Eulogy for Geocities…

Earlier this week, GeoCities became officially unavailable, a few months since YaHoo! announced its closure. GeoCities began in the mid 1990’s providing free web hosting and later on, paid premium service. GeoCities was initially organized into “cities” or neighborhoods, such as Tokyo for anime and other Asian topics, or SiliconValley for tech topics. When Yahoo! acquired GeoCities in 1999, they switched from the neighborhood based URLs to a customized ones.

I first learned of GeoCities in high school, around a couple of years after the city was introduced to the World Wide Web. I was fascinated with Yu Yu Hakusho then and I would research about the anime in the Net. Information regarding Yu Yu Hakusho, however, was limited and so I thought of creating my own YYH website. After deliberating which web host to use, I settled for GeoCities. I learned HTML and came up with a crude lay-out filled with marquees and Java applets (they were all the rage then). I couldn’t exactly remember that site’s URL but I think it was www.geocities.com/yyh_profiles.

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The Black Butler was all over Akiba, sorta.

So last month I had the once in a lifetime (though hopefully not) opportunity to go to Tokyo, and luckily enough, despite the super-short 4-day business trip, still had time to roam around the city, especially on the first and last day of our trip. If you�ve read my blog post more than a month ago about this short Tokyo business trip, then you�d already know my adventures and mis-adventures on the first day. What I�m about to tell you, is what happened on the last day.

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�NOT!

I didn�t pass JLPT1, 39 points short, and it�s not just because of my big booboo — Writing/Vocabulary section was BAD – 53/100, Listening was even WORSE – 40/100, Reading/Grammar was ok – 148/200 — BUT that�s not any reason to feel sad or anything. No way can this put my spirits down! Or something. In fact, I�m even brimming with optimism, knowing that my light novel reading (no matter how little) and grammar self-study efforts actually paid off! Need to focus on enhancing Listening skills, though, BADLY.

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“is becoming good at Nihongo”, says one of the contestants in the recently concluded Nihongo Speech Contest – Open Division category during the Q&A portion, whose speech was entitled “Welcome to the Otaku World”. No offense, but I found this answer to be a sellout, since well, the reason why someone could be part of the Nihongo Speech Contest finalists and could have a greater chance of winning is because he/she is good at Nihongo, amirite?! Ok, enough sarcasm, and the contestant I’m stabbing behind her back even won 1st place so who am I to argue.

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Last last Friday was the memorable �Tokyo Tower Day� for me and my officemates. We spent much of our free time after work in the Main observatory (we no longer went to the top floor because we had to pay extra bucks, and it won�t really be worth it unless we had more time in our hands), together with our lucky birthday-celebrant ex-officemate who�s staying in Japan for her post-graduate studies. She�s one lucky dawg because she gets a free pass and a free cake c/o Tokyo Tower, so yay! Anyways, so there we were, five young ladies, kids at heart, decided to go silly and do things people don�t normally do in there.

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It’s been a few days since I went to Tokyo for a very short business trip (I’m already back!), and the very first thing my officemates and I did after checking in our hotel: Find a place with lotsa gashapons, because I’ll totally FAIL AT LIFE if I never get to buy even one of ‘em throughout my stay here. I wasn’t sure if we’ll have time to go out and buy stuff on the weekdays after work so we made the most out of our free time. Luckily enough, there was a Yodobashi near our place, which had zomg soo many gashapons! It’s the most gashapons I’ve seen in all my life, though I know very well that other Yodobashi stores has TONS MORE, like the one in Akihabara which I failed to visit because of lack of time (caused by my ’sleeping beauty’ blues), something I’m both regretful and thankful for.

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Sigh, I�m missing Japan, particularly the foodies. It�s been more than a year since my business trip, summer of 2007, and double�s recent post made me reminisce the time I spent in the wonderful place that is Fukuoka. I still wasn�t attached to the blog / blogging community / readers when my lucky trip happened, so I didn�t get to share about it in public. Only to Seleria and other close friends IRL ^^;

I already talked about the loot I bought during my trip, so I won�t talk about that clich� topic anymore. Instead, I�ll show you some of the foods I fell in love with during my 3-week business trip.

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This blogging endeavor brought me many of those really special blessings, more than just improving my English (lolz), how I communicate and express my thoughts and opinions, and organize my usually jumbled-up thoughts… it made me part of this whole anime blogosphere, and brought me closer to a diverse group of people who share the same interests as I do (or otherwise ), far more than I ever imagined. And for that, from the bottom of my heart, ????????

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Many of you might not be familiar with ???? (ikemen), unless you had the luxury of watching the JDrama Hanakimi which I believe made this term mainstream. I’m not a Japanese expert like bangin-sensei, but I’ll try my best to explain this.

From what I gather, ???? is derived from the root words ????(iketeru), which roughly translates to “hawt”, or “cool” (yeah, what a strange irony), an alternative for the more familiar term kakkoi, and ??(?), meaning “face” or looks. Whether this ‘men’ comes from the literal English word “men” would also be a point of contention, but in the end it still retains the essence of this lingo. Now put these two together and you get, ????, which refers to “hawt guys”.

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