snarp’s blog

Because Silver Rose Designs, which I already liked due to its very nice free clothes, has Kraehe’s dress from Princess Tutu. And this is important information about which, at present, no one but me cares.

The designer also has outfits from that one show with, like, the alchemists, though she has sneakily called them something else. They’re not quite as impressive, though.

Six people from my class plus one of our teachers went to the Nagoya Castle Saturday, as well as to a number of other important Nagoya sites, like this store that had a bunch of pot-leaf air-fresheners. These two important scenes occurred:

-1-

Z-san: Sensei, what’s the charm on your cell phone?

Doom-sensei: It’s a piece of melon bread.

Z-san: But it’s a person!

Doom-sensei: Yes, it’s a melon bread person. (menacingly) Isn’t it cute, Z-san?

Z-san: - yes, of course.

Me: Is it from that comic strip “Kogepan“?

Doom-sensei: Yes, it’s the Melon Bread from Kogepan! …I have no idea why you know that.

-2-

*I pick up a water-bottle-looking object with a seal I’m pretty sure I should recognize on it. I frown at it very seriously.*

Sleep-san: Are you going to buy that?

Me: No, I just can’t remember what it is.

*Sleep-san takes it, looks at it, then points it at me in an intimidating fashion.*

Sleep-san: Zah!

*He gives it back.*

Sleep-san: That’s what it is.

Me: I don’t really think it’s magic… Sensei, what’s this?

Doom-sensei: Uhhh…

*Doom-sensei is clearly considering how to explain this given my vocabulary. Then, giving up, she takes it from me and makes the same gesture Sleep-san did, but without the “Zah!”)

Doom-sensei: It’s from this really famous TV show.

Me: Oh…

*I stand near the Hello Kitty-themed plastic toy food pondering this, rubbing my chin thoughtfully. Doom-sensei goes over to look at little fake gold dolphins. Suddenly, I have a revelation relating to Japanese historical dramas from the 70’s - the best kind of revelation.*

Me: Sensei! Is it Mito Koumon’s thingie? The old guy who, uhhh -

*I cannot remember how to say “rights wrongs and triumphs over evil.”*

Doom-sensei: - Yes! Mito Koumon, right! You know, I think maybe your method of studying Japanese has been kind of weird.

Me: …maybe.

-

I note that she did not accuse Sleep-san of being weird, despite the fact that he was obviously also familiar with the source material.

I got Mom and thegeekgene attractive souvenirs from the castle. The one I got elongated_tito is very nice and respectable-looking to a foreigner, but would be immediately recognized by a Japanese person as the tackiest item one could ever possibly own.

Also, I took a bunch of pictures. But I cannot upload them. I cannot upload them because my brand new computer came with Windows Vista. Which, from what I can tell from looking at about a million tech support forums last night, means I cannot upload anything ever again, because there is no fix for this particular bug yet.

Since I’ve decided to wait until I’m at home to set Ubuntu up, I’m probably going to have to borrow someone else’s computer, or else behave badly in the lab. I Am Very Upset.

Seen at the Horai Senmaida a couple weeks ago: a Kakashi scarecrow:

(I’ve also got some other, non-Naruto-related pictures, but Flickr won’t let me upload stuff right now - it keeps kind of stalling out at 99% on the first photo in the batch. Seeing as this coincides with a bunch of weird Windows Explorer glitches, I’m guessing that this might possibly be Vista’s fault.)

Am I going to write about Japan? No! I’m going to write about Second Life again!

(There are a lot of images, a couple of them NWS, under the fold, so don’t click if you’re on a slow connection/in a designated sultry-Cheetah-temptress-free space.)

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Anyone using Vista having problems with certain domains refusing to show up? I’ve only had this computer for a week or two, and the past few days I’ve been getting “server not found” errors for a bunch of pages pretty much all the time, and I’ve heard vaguely unpleasant things about Vista’s firewall and wonder if that might have something to do with it. It obviously isn’t actually a problem with the servers, because some of them are just people’s LiveJournal subdomains - for instance, snarp.livejournal.com has only been loading about half the time the past couple of days, while www.livejournal.com and some other people’s pages are working normally.

(To show how random this is, some of the other stuff that’s had issues includes Achewood, Scary Go Round, Diesel Sweeties, Vampirates, The Comics Journal homepage, and The Angry Black Woman. (This list probably gives a fairly good idea of how I spend my time…))

Of course, it could be the school’s firewall, not mine. Or just a network administrator grumpy at me because of all the downloads I’ve been making, though that only amounts to about 1.5 gigs over the past week, and I’ve been spacing them out. Is bandwidth way more restricted in Japan?

HEY

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Wow, that was fast. I wonder how the mangakas get through all these fight scenes they don’t care about? I guess that’s why they have assistants. (Some of the pages were out of order in my downloads, and I didn’t notice. I’m very serious about this.)

If you read my last post on this subject, there are spoilers below. If not, there aren’t.

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Because I clearly didn’t bring enough books with me, I’ve started reading non-CLAMP-related scanlations again. I’ve just finished volume 15 of Bleach.

Apparently one of my narrative fetishes is tiny cute people doing paperwork in a crotchety, hyper-masculine way. (Who knew?) Hence, my favorite part of the arc thus far is the scene with the little shinigami boy sitting behind a desk with some tea and complaining that he is “dead tired,” while furthering a plotline I don’t really care about.

My disinterest notwithstanding, I’ve got some predictions:

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And now, a story about buying baking soda in Japan, recorded in detail,

1) for the benefit of others who might need to do this, and

2) in the hope that someone will someday explain to me why the vocabulary necessary to buy baking soda in Japan makes no damn sense.

For lo, though I have achieved my goal of buying a box of frigging baking soda, I am linguistically even more bewildered than I was when I first initiated the project.

Today, feeling for the first time mostly recovered from my jet lag, injured back, and hurt feet (self-inflicted wounds assisted by Tuesday and some hilariously perforated insoles), I went out in search of baking soda again, this time determined not to give up. I have been in at least one grocery store every day since I got here, but always ended up just getting whatever more immediately necessary thing I’d gone in for, and then, after a few minutes of vain searching for the baking soda, leaving in exhaustion.

So this morning, I consulted the internet, and went out armed with some notes on the identification of baking soda in Japanese stores. “Baking soda” can be either “juusou” (重曹) or “tansan” (タンサン), with the term “juusou” apparently (going by the respective Google image search results) being used more for baking soda that’s sold as a cleaning product, and “tansan” being used for baking soda being sold to cook with.

(Though the kanji for “tansan” is apparently 炭酸, which my dictionary defines as “carbonic acid,” and which, indeed, appears to be an ingredient in all those lovely beverages in which one expects to find carbonic acid. Unless I have been grievously deceived by my middle school science classes, baking soda is a base, and is definitely not carbonic acid, so apparently there’s a problem here. But, then again, judging by those Google image search results, “tansan”-as-baking-soda is always rendered in katakana, so maybe that carries some kind of obscure change in meaning with it. I don’t know the etymology, all right? I’m just looking for some baking soda for my filthy pagan rituals.)

I wrote all this down very carefully in my little notebook. Thus familiarized with the whole concept, I set out, prepared.

After examining every single non-refrigerator aisle in the store, I gave up and asked an employee.

I had to show her my written notes before she understood what I was looking for (I’m not sure whether this was my pronunciation, or whether the words just aren’t used much), and then she said, “baking powder?,” looked about wildly, and ran to ask someone else. Suspecting that baking soda would probably be in the same place as baking powder - even if this wasn’t just another exciting new name for the substance - I just followed them. The chain of consultation acquired a third link when a man who had been shelving in the appropriate aisle, hearing the exclamation of “baking powder” several aisles over, carefully removed a box from the bottom shelf it had been on and set it prominently on a higher shelf.

This is what my baking soda looks like:

“Home made CAKE” consists of two little packets, each containing maybe a tablespoon-and-a-half of baking soda. I could probably complain about this, except that it was 68 yen, which is not exactly exhorbitant.

The kanji on the front says “juusou.” The furigana, however, says “tansan.” So does the receipt.

So, except that I am definitely not supposed to call it “baking soda,” I still have no idea how to say “baking soda” in Japanese.

Yesterday there was a long orientation, in which we were told:

1) If you jaywalk, you will definitely be hit by cars. This is Japan. The Japanese are in a hurry.

2) One person got murdered nearby three years ago, so you need to always be careful about “suspicious characters.”

(There are also little signs around the city with warnings to this effect, depicting the suspicious characters doing suspicious things like standing near women while wearing hats and coats.)

3) Male students must not bring Japanese girls back to the dorm. Given the number of extremely fashion-conscious high school boys around, the low motivations and untrusty nature of the average student of the Japanese language, and the somewhat higher than average instance of non-standard sexual orientation in said group, I suspect that the gendered nature of this advice may be slightly myopic.

4) If you do not sort your recycling properly we will make several strategic cuts in your stomach and leave you staked out for the delectation of the local wildlife. For demonstration purposes, here is a crow. Observe its cruel curved beak, its razor-sharp talons.

5) It is extremely illegal to bartend in the dark, even if you do have the kind of visa that allows you to seek employment. Also possibly illegal is wearing an amusing animal suit for any reason that is not purely personal in nature.

(Some of the limitations regarding where foreigners can work seem to be aimed very specifically at sex workers, though it’s never actually phrased that way - foreigners can’t work in any establishment where the light is kept below a certain level, and can’t do any job classified as “entertainment.”)

6) Do not be loud at night. This is Japan. The Japanese have to be up at fucking five tomorrow, goddamn you.

Because I’m frivolous, I’m just going to talk about Japanese vending machines instead of all that other stuff.

I can’t get pictures off my camera right now due to my idiotic failure to bring my USB card reader, so here’s someone else’s Flickr photo:

This thing is particularly hilarious when you see it sitting alongside all the other canned coffees in the vending machine. Coffees with no overt foreign affiliations have sedate little pictures of beans and cups, South American coffees have misty blue-green mountains, Europe-related coffees have heavily-stylized little drawings of crowns done in an undersaturated palette, and American coffee has a blonde with a plunging neckline sitting on the hood of a driverless car that’s coming straight at you. With a flag.

What I want to know is how they failed to work a gun in there someplace. Someone really dropped the ball on that one.

Also, all the other cans are smaller than the American Coffee.

And I just realized I left my hat on the van the guy drove us in on last night. I’m going to walk over to the office and ask what I can do about that.