So, probably the biggest news for this week is I went to the doctor about my insomnia. I used a local service being run by a grad student to help with the translation on what I needed to do, which was really helpful. I’m really glad that was there to help, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own. Some of the questions on the surveys (because it was my first time going) were just bizarre. Anyway, medicine here is different – they don’t have any GPs like we do in NZ. The closest they have would be an internal medicine doctor, which is what I saw. Anyway, after a few preliminary questions, I got a prescription for sleeping pills, which I am now taking. So far they seem to work, despite taking more than twice as long as I was told to kick in. I was told at least six times by four different people not to mix it with alcohol, so if I forget and have a drink with dinner, I’ll have to do without the meds. I’m going to try my best to remember, though… I really want to get this fixed. Anyway, while I was there I also made an appointment to go see the psychologist next week, see if they can help me any.

Other interesting things from this week! The first is kind of hilarious, actually. I was walking on my way to get groceries and this little kid that’s playing in one of the side-streets I take stops and exclaims about my being a foreigner. I say yes, I’m a foreigner, smiling at the kid. He then asks me if I’m Korean! Trying not to bust a gut laughing I tell him I’m from New Zealand and continue on my merry way.

Ascaron, the company behind the Sacred games, went under this week. Not exactly great news for me since I was looking forward to getting Sacred 2 at some point and then the continuation when that rocked around. Chances of any continuation is looking pretty slim right now. For those of you that haven’t played Sacred, it’s an action-RPG very much like the Diablo games from Blizzard, but with a completely bent sense of humour. Despite the title, as far jokes go nothing is sacred, which very much appealed to me. If given the opportunity, it’s certainly a title I would enjoy working on. Although hopefully if it was a game I was involved with, it wouldn’t be plagued with the horrific amount of bugs that Sacred is somewhat notorious for.

While on the game front, I watch the latest Starcraft II Battle Report this week. It was really refreshing to watch the game as a spectator and it reminded me how much fun watching (and discussing) games can be even when you’re not directly playing. In a very real sense, games will become the next “sport” from a spectator point of view. For me it also raises some interesting questions about what would make for the most optimal user interfaces, and the kinds of interaction that “players” would have as spectators to eSports… there’s a whole lot of research to be done in there, but I don’t know if that’s something that I can do from a university environment. Not without creating my own (popular) game as a viable eSport title, or getting access to a company that has one already (I’m looking at you, Blizzard!).

While I’m talking about entertainment, did you know there’s a new Robin Hood movie coming up? That story just never stops being re-made, huh.

This week was more classes, which was both good and bad. I did not understand a word of my Human Interface class, so that’s going to be a bit of a challenge. The professor is also apparently “very Japanese” in that he doesn’t speak English, and his handwriting (in kanji) on the blackboard is hard to read even for the Japanese students, let alone people who can’t read kanji to begin with. So, that’ll be interesting.

Computer Vision was a bit easier to understand – the slides are in English. While the lecture was in Japanese, I could get at least half of the material by following along with what he was saying on the slides and the diagrams and so on, which is pretty neat. Enough to know that I’ll enjoy learning more in that class – the lecturer is really cool as well, seems to have a great sense of humour and interacts with the class really well. If I decide to take up vision for some reason, I’ll know which professor I want to work with!

My last class taught in Japanese is Socio-Information and Communication. I’m not sure if that’s actually what the title is, only what the translation is from the Japanese… anyway, I understood maybe a third of the material. Slides in Japanese (apart from the numbers, luckily), lecture in Japanese, discussion in Japanese… I’m going to have a tough time. The irritating thing was, I understood enough to know that the material that was being covered would be really interesting to me if I understood more of it. They were talking about the independent media creation industry in Japan (music, comics, games, etc), trends in media consumption (television vs online) and a bunch of other things I didn’t understand but would have liked to. I’m going to have to try and get my hands on the slides and translate them myself so I can keep following along. All good stuff!

This week I added some more bits and pieces to my banking system, which felt fairly rewarding. Doesn’t help my research in the slightest, but lets me do some (relatively) mindless coding and feel productive. I did talk to Honda-san about another research idea I had to do with animation, I’ll be talking to Todo-san about that next week I think. I still want to continue and finish my current research idea, but having a back-burner idea is apparently quite a good plan (according to my supervisor).

On the fun front, I played some basketball, watched more anime, read some manga (not in Japanese yet, I’m afraid), chatted to various friends online (including Anastasia and her friend Caitlyn while they were having fun on the Wii over in Florida), saw Watchmen with Kyoko (really enjoyed that)… oh, and lastly (but not leastly) while I was making a few smaller updates to my own site, I added a writing section, as per request. I only have one piece in there for now, but I’ll add more next week and you can let me know what you think. Be aware of the disclaimer on that page.

Before I start ranting, a big Happy Birthday to my friend Jenn over in the US! This year I believe I’ve known her for… 10 years? Crazy stuff. I hope she has a great time this year as well.

This week was a complete mess. Just a giant jumbled blur of classes and insomnia, mostly. My insomnia has persisted from last week to the point where I only seem to have a few hours of solid functioning brain-power each day, now. Where before I might have been able to put in a good day’s work, now I’d be lucky if I’m productive for a couple of hours, and semi-productive doing busy-work for maybe another couple of hours.

This coming week I’m going to go into the doctor and see if I can’t get some sleeping pills or something. I try to avoid sleeping medication when I can because I know about the inherent risks in becoming addicted to them. While I don’t consider myself as having a particularly addictive personality type, I guess I just have an irrational avoidance mechanism when it comes to sleeping pills. Which is particularly odd since every now and then when I have taken them, they have usually been very effective for me.

I don’t know that I can emphasize how much this derails me when it happens for prolonged periods. It’s been happening for so long that I don’t even remember when it started, now. Just every now and again, I have these bouts of insomnia and I need to deal. Sometimes it only lasts for a week or so and I can just kind of gun through it. Other times, it lasts for weeks and I can’t seem to shake it, which leaves me feeling very, very drained. Insomnia is a funny thing. It’s not just a night of bad sleep, or not being able to get to sleep because you have too much energy, or whatever. I get people who look at me and give me all kinds of advice on how they put themselves to sleep… and most of it is good advice, if it’s just me not being able to unwind. But insomnia is more than that. Sometimes you just won’t sleep, all night. Sometimes you can’t get to sleep for a very long time, then crash for a couple of hours before your alarm goes off and you need to start the new day anyway. Sometimes you sleep through your alarm in a semi-comatose state after being up almost all night. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how physically or mentally exhausted you are – I’ve had basketball practice for hours and exhausted myself thoroughly and still not been able to sleep. If anything those are some of the most frustrating ones, because you are so beyond “tired” that it’s depressing. There are all kinds of things that people tell you – not eating a certain time or certain thing before bed, not watching tv, exercise, drink tea, don’t drink tea or coffee, meditation, various relaxation techniques… it just doesn’t end, really. Some things work for some people, on others it has the opposite effect. Insurance sales ladies showing up at your door in the morning when you’ve had two hours sleep? Not so good for me.

Ok, enough ranting about insomnia. Suffice to say, it sucks and right now I’m having a bad run of it that I wish would end.

This week I managed to get to some classes, which was good. I didn’t really understand all that much, but it was good to go and I know I’ll have some interesting stuff to study next week. I had the new graduate student ceremony (also understood nothing), talked to more people about what classes I should be taking and so on, enrolled in the next level of Japanese classes… and from what I can tell, did a lot of busy-work. Things that would keep me going and keep me occupied without taxing my brain too much since I’ve been in a semi-zombie state for pretty much all this week. Friday was particularly bad, I could barely function – you know it’s bad when you have trouble feeding yourself. ^^;

I did have a few moments this week where I made some adjustments to a couple of personal projects – some minor stuff to LeithComics and some stuff for Ian that he’s working on. I also got to see Kyoko this week, we had a wander around the area where I live, walking over to the larger river in the area and having Indian at a little place about seven minutes walk from my house, which was quite good.

A little while ago I received an email from Simon, a guy I was really good friends with in high school. After a series of bad things, the friendship did not end well. The end of the friendship was particularly weird for me in that it pissed me off for a very long time. I don’t get angry easily, and generally I process my resentment pretty quickly so I can move on with my life, but for some reason… my anger and resentment for him stayed with me for a long time. I’m over it now and just left with a sadness at how it all turned out, really. Still, such is living and learning, I suppose. Anyway, after thinking for quite a while, I finally replied to his contact yesterday, which was really hard. There was a million things I wanted to say and couldn’t, and I don’t know if I even really conveyed all that I wanted to, or how I wanted to say it. But I did reply, even though I don’t want him in my life as a friend any more. I figured that if I didn’t, I would regret later that I didn’t take the opportunity to properly process it.

I don’t really have a lot of experience dealing with friends that I no longer want to see, or that no longer want to see me. It seems like such a… disjoint experience, like something in the world isn’t quite right. Hey, I know you can’t please everybody all the time, and particularly ex-girlfriends seem to be the traditional candidate for not speaking to you again… but still, it would be nice to think that I could, in fact, be friends with everyone. Too idealistic?

Well, this week marks the longest I’ve had insomnia for a little while. Usually it’s gone after a week. Hopefully it will clear up this coming week so I can get to all my classes since I think they start in earnest now instead of just being organisational stuff. In any case, it has sideswiped me a fair bit, making me miss a couple of morning things and generally just leaving me very tired and more than a little brain-dead. Makes it very hard to work effectively. I tend to watch tv shows or read or something when I can’t sleep… I know that if I work, it’ll keep me up, but if I’m up anyway, maybe I should work? But that would keep me up… well this gets me nowhere. Clearly.

I also didn’t go to basketball this week. Wasn’t feeling up to it in the slightest, but I probably should have just forced myself, I know it would have made me feel better. Even if it was just for a bit. One day this week I managed to get all the way to the station before realising I had left my wallet and phone at home. Back I trudged. Sigh. I didn’t see Kyoko this weekend either, she was busy.

This week I did a bunch more organisational busy-work. Paying bills, planning things, going to organisational classes, translating course names to see about which classes I should take to fill up my credit requirements… actually, the first class for the technical writing (in English) course was pretty ridiculous, they weren’t very organised at all (I got the Japanese edition of the textbook, although they assure me I’ll get the English one soon). Should pick up next week, though. I also did some domestic stuff, groceries, dishes, cleaned the couch, laundry and shifting things around, that kind of thing.

In an effort to avoid my post title, here are some good things that happened this week! I had a catch-up dinner with Paul at a chinese place in Sendagi (his favourite monja place was closed) and since we’ve been dancing around trying to meet up for a while, it was good to finally connect. I also talked to Ian a bunch this week, passing back and forth some gaming ideas and helping him bounce some work stuff off of me. I did a little work on my banking system, adding in a few little features… it’s gradually getting more and more useable, which is a nice feeling. At some point I should be able to do away with my spreadsheets entirely, although that’s quite a ways off yet. I also managed to talk to Anastasia a little bit this week, although she’s pretty busy. Getting to talk to her always helps. I spent a bit of time making my website more standards-compliant and copied it over to my personal server instead of my Dad’s one… now I just need to get the databases and so on and I should be set. I wrote the basics for my lab profile page (that link will work next week). I got caught up reading Sinfest (which is an awesome webcomic) since I haven’t read it in a little while. I highly recommend… pretty much all of the strips, actually. Start from the start and go mad. I played a couple of missions of Heroes V that I’d been meaning to do for a couple of months. I found a new anime that combines basketball with robots. Awesome. I watched the pilot for Bones and thoroughly enjoyed that – I know, I know, behind the times more than a tad. Sadly in the same breath, I found out that Boston Legal had finished, which is a shame. I’m only up to season… two? I think?

Also on an un-mopey note, I did some work on my LeithComics system for my Dad for his birthday. Happy Birthday Dad! ^^

This week has been an odd mixture of things I have enjoyed and continuing to be in a weird funk. The funk has been kind of pervasive, a refusal of my brain to cooperate with the work I should be doing for my research… I only really made the barest progress, which is frustrating since I want to be further ahead. At the very least I made a rough timeline and put some more questions in my survey system, although part of that I know is that I’m not confident that the question set I’m putting together will be in any way valid for research purposes – I’m not quite sure which papers or whatnot I should be reading to get some guidelines on this.

In any case, my being in a funk has been a bit of a challenge to deal with. This coming week I’m going to try and motivate myself to do… well, anything, really. I don’t know that I can directly motivate myself on my research as well as I might like to be able to, but I can at least motivate myself to work on some of my personal projects. Hopefully some of the buoyancy from working on my personal projects will spill over into my research and I will be in less of a funk. Better to be motivated and working on the things I want to work on than not really working on anything in particular, right? This week also sees the start of classes, so I’m sure that’s going to be its own fun challenge to deal with as well.

That being said, some good things happened this week as well. Firstly I had another basketball practice, which always makes me feel better… I also didn’t lose once in the games we played, which was awesome. After that, I had my first hanami, or flower-watching party! It was during the week with my basketball circle, we went to Inokashira Park for a while and sat around drinking under the cherry blossoms, playing some silly games and just chatting away. I got to see a bunch of people from the circle that I hadn’t seen for a while as well, which was good fun. After we were done in the park, everyone then went off to a restaurant for more drinking and some food, which was a whole bunch of fun as well. Unfortunately after that I had to head home to make sure I didn’t miss the last train or anything, and a bunch of others went home then as well, but a good number from the circle went off to do some karaoke, which I’m sad to have missed out on, particularly since I’d had plenty to drink and would have been beyond my threshold of self-consciousness about singing ridiculously in front of people I don’ t know very well. Maybe next time, I guess!

Another good thing to happen this week was my game development textbook arrived from Amazon Japan, which is very neat. Only problem is I haven’t opened it yet… I know it’ll probably suck away a lot of my time, so I have to figure a way to ration the book into manageable parcels so I still get other things done. Still, I’m looking forward to getting stuck into reading that and hopefully putting some of the principles to work in managing/developing my own pet game projects! ^^

An awesome thing to happen this week – Jenny came to Japan! Hurrah! I got a call from her mid-week saying she was in Japan and arriving in Tokyo the next day. We managed to catch up a couple of times, which was great. First time just grabbed some lunch and did some wandering around Shinjuku, then second time out for dinner at a pizza place in Ikebukuro with their friend Tom. Incidentally, apparently having Tom and I meet made the whole trip worth it in and of itself… we’re just that entertaining, huh? ^^; It was lovely to see her again, and to finally meet her husband, whom I’ve been hearing about for a while and have seen a bunch of photos of but never actually met until this week. Hello, Chris! Also, thanks again for the nut spread from Seattle, it was awesome for you two to think of me like that.

I watched some anime, read some manga and went along to the introduction to the courses for academic writing and presenting in English. I’ll be taking the academic writing one, so I can learn a bit more about the whole paper-writing thing… although I suspect it might be an exercise in learning more Japanese so I can understand their textbook. The courses are compulsory for my degree as far as I can tell, so better to get them out of the way sooner rather than later, I think.

Today I had the distinct pleasure of going around on a semi-hanami with Kyoko. We didn’t manage to join up with everyone for a proper hanami like we thought we would last weekend, but it was still good fun. We had lunch, then walked around Ueno park and saw a whole lot of stuff (including eating some water-candy), then went to the Ueno children’s library for a while (I read Where’s Wally in Japanese! The Japanese version is called “Search for Wally”… I think), then back through the park and off to Asakusa. When we got there we wandered along the river looking at the sakura as the sun slowly set. Watching the sky turn pink from a bridge with the white sakura lining the banks was very cool. It’s a pity I couldn’t really get any decent pictures with that kind of lighting actually… once more proving to myself that eyeballs are more awesome than cameras. ^^ Anyway, after that we sat along a wall on the bank on one side and had a couple of drinks and some food from the food stands. We got treated to listening to some random foreigners playing music a bit further down from us, which was very amusing.

In addition to all this fun stuff, I also had a few sleep problems, did some cleaning, postponed with Eri until next week again, had to deal with paying more bills and calling up people about getting applications for automatic payments and so on as well… I have to say, automatic phone systems in Japanese when you don’t know Japanese? Tricky.

Today is my friend Richard’s birthday. I haven’t heard from him in a couple of years now, and I never found out what happened to him. One day he was doign some work with me and we were talking about what was going on, the next he wasn’t answering my emails and I couldn’t get a hold of him no matter what I did. He had been talking about his family moving over to Melbourne for a little while, so I sort of assumed that he moved with them and would resurface when he got settled.

He never did.

I tried looking for him (and his relations that I know the names of) online, and all I ended up finding were the odd profile pages for sites he had joined up on, but no mention of where he went. Given that he was one of my best friends during high school and we went through a lot together, I had just kind of assumed that he’d always be around, one way or another.

Today is one of those days where I cast my mind’s eye around the world and wonder what became of my friend. I wonder if he can hear me calling out to him. I wonder if one day he’ll call back, or just pop into my life. I miss him, and I hope that I can see him again one day.

So, wherever you are Richard – somewhere, somehow, I hope you can hear me wish you a Happy Birthday.