I just received my tickets for the 1/4 Versailles/Kaya/Opera concert at O-East.
This is going to sound terrible and I'm sorry, but...
...who did I buy tickets for? ^^;;;;;;;

I've got 4 tickets and can only think of 3 people who are supposed to get them. @_@
Looked through my phone/PC mail and can't find a 4th person.
Was there even a 4th person at all? Or did I just get 1 extra "just in case"?
(It's totally possible that I might have gotten 1 extra ticket, because I often do that when Versailles plays a good-looking Tokyo concert. For concerts like this, there's always someone who asks me to get them a ticket after FC sales have ended so it's useful to have one already on hand.)

omgwtf Heisig. I'm just getting to the end of lesson 10, I did a whole bunch of kanji today and my head is spinning, especially after the last few which are all ghoulish imagery of graveyards and ghosts and sailors meeting watery deaths, and I come to "seedling." 苗 And when I saw it, my first thought was, "Oh, how nice, flowers sprouting in rice fields! It's like Heisig decided to throw in a much-needed picture of a kitten as relief from the grotesque scenes."

But then I read the story he gave, and he's got the flowers sprouting out of people's zombie brains. wtf. Let's have kittens and puppies, dude, kittens and puppies! Argh!

EDIT: never mind the kitten picture, here's Maru.
http://sisinmaru.blog17.fc2.com/

Since I got the ipod touch, I've been unexpectedly motivated to try studying Japanese again. There's 2 main things I want to work on:
1. Speech. Particularly speed and flow for common everyday situations.
2. Vocabulary. Generally speaking, when I don't understand something, it's not because of the grammar, it's because I have no idea what the key nouns and verbs in a sentence mean.

I came across the AJATT blog after deciding to focus on these things, and what he said made a lot of sense so I decided to try that approach for a while.

( Read more... )

Finally got home from V-rock at 10:45 PM. I left around 7:30 or 8 AM so this has been a long day, and 4 hours of it was spent traveling.

( Read more... )

Yesterday I got an ipod touch, which I've been wanting for a while. It looked like a great handheld device to use for reference, study, and games. After having it for a day, I'm now even more glad I decided to go for the touch instead of an iphone, because using it for flashcards/study is apparently a huge drain on the battery. I think if this stuff was on my phone, I might feel hesitant about using it a lot for fear of using up the battery or missing calls.

I got this dictionary: http://www.codefromtokyo.com/japanese
There's a good flashcard feature not mentioned on the internet site. It reduces the frequency of the cards you know, gives you the ones you don't know more often, throws in old words once in a while and brings them back into heavy rotation if you don't get them right. And you can create your own vocabulary lists (for example, "Versailles blogs" XD) to be tested with the same progressive card system. I've been playing with the JLPT lists tonight and it looks like a really good study tool. Wish I'd had this years ago!

BTW, I'm going through my music collection and re-rating a bunch of stuff, and I rediscovered Kamijo in an unexpected place. That's him doing the backing vocals in the chorus of Metis Gretel's "Kyuuen no inochi," right? Well, I'm sure it is because his voice is unmistakable, I just don't recall him mentioning it anywhere so I was surprised.

I got a new purse today, and while I was transferring stuff into it, I noticed something strange. The Official XOVER Cigarette Lighter had a mysterious button on the side. Why, it's a penlight! So convenient for finding Kouichi's picks on a dark livehouse floor! XD

By the way, I have a question for anyone who cares to answer. How often do you buy purses/bags? And do you mainly use one at a time, or do you have several to coordinate with your outfits? I'm the type who uses one bag until it starts to become dilapidated and I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't change this habit.

Has anybody used this real estate agency? Or heard anything about it? Their properties look good, but I wonder if it's not too good to be true.
http://tokyodwell.com

Or do you know of another Tokyo real estate agency which will deal with foreigners in English? Someplace which has real apartments, not just studios. I think we need something like a 2-bedroom, in order to have office space for our computers. My S.O. is telecommuting now and we need to make space for him to work.

I came across a girl who does awesome hair tutorials on Youtube. She has long one-length hair (around waist to hip length) which she skillfully arranges into a variety of styles that are very fashionable in Japan, even though many of the styles are normally done with shorter and/or layered hair. I often get frustrated trying to arrange my hair because it's really hard to find cute style ideas and instructions for long hair and I guess my friends might have that feeling too sometimes.

http://www.youtube.com/user/binosusume

Speaking of hair, I think it's time for a trim. Maybe 5 to 8 cm off the bottom. I think I'd like my hair to stay around hip-length for a while as my layers grow out, and it's nice to have a little less hair during summer.

Today's not an important day so I experimented with sponge ball hair curlers last night. I'm trying to cut back on heat styling to avoid further damage. I got these sponge curlers several years ago when my hair was around armpit length and didn't like the results then, but I thought it was worth seeing how it would work with longer hair. Turns out I'm quite happy!

( results under cut )