Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

So every day I take the train to work, right? I go to a station named Tochiomae, which is about a fifteen minute walk from my office. The walk is pretty cool - it takes me by Shinjuku Chuo Park, which is one of the larger parks in the Tokyo area, and it usually has a pretty decent fresh-air aura surrounding it. Makes you not want to die so much in the early morning or something.

Anyways. I walk by this park. But this park is home to many, many homeless. They’re called homeless, but there’s a catch; these guys (and they’re all male) build their own homes. All along the sidewalk, for about the kilometer walk I take next to the park, are all these crude houses that they’ve built for themselves. The basic design is usually a standard camping tent, or more rarely two joined together. Every one of these “homes” is covered by the same blue tarpaulins. The houses all have little makeshift doors and a small wooden plank external to the dwelling for taking your shoes off. Most of the have a little chimney hole built into them so on colder days you can see the smoke coming out from the top and smell their food cooking.

Oh yeah, cooking. They cook. Decently too, they probably have much more nutritional content in their diet than me. They usually sit together in groups for breakfast, supper (and probably lunch though I don’t walk by at that time) and cook together over either a grill or an open fire. This is all taking place on a 1.5 meter wide sidewalk.

So these guys never bother anyone. They never ask anyone for food, water, money or anything - they never even glance at the people walking by. They’re like the total opposite of the homeless in Toronto.

One thing that freaked me out though, is that on days when it rains, they obviously don’t want to run into the park to go to the bathroom. So on a miserable day, there are bags next to the doors of all these houses filled with yellow liquid. But excepting that minor point, I cannot believe how well these guys manage to create their own places there. I don’t envy them, but I definitely respect them.

Yet another essay link, this time to “Nevermind the Bollocks: Here’s the Wonder Chicken“. Awesome title aside, this is one of the best blog-centric papers I’ve ever read. Go read this. If I didn’t have a blog, this would motivate me to start one.

I posted this to Metafilter, but it’s worthy of being cross-posted. Author Charles Stross wrote an excellent essay titled “The Panopticon Singularity“, about our society moving towards an information-driven police state. It’s an excellent read.

I never made this connection until today. Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing is the same science fiction author that I’ve been into for quite some time - since I started buying annual collections by Gardner Dozois. I just never noticed it was the same guy.

On his site Cory has the majority of his short stories available for download under a Creative Commons license. Very, very cool.

You know, sometimes, when presented with the following meal, and learning that one should eat the entire fish including the belly full of eggs, I ask myself what the fuck am I doing here.

A bunch of photos taken in Ginza on the weekend. The main street there is usually closed to traffic on Sundays, which makes for cool photos I guess.

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This article is the funniest take on learning Japanese I’ve seen. Go read it. Laugh maybe.

I haven’t posted anything due to the fact that I’ve been lying in bed since like Friday. Missed work today. I’m going to do my best to make it in tomorrow - 90% chance I’d guess.

OK, I’ve done slightly more than just lying in bed. Chie took me out on the weekend to a part with a bunch of her old coworkers in Kawasaki. It was totally fun even if I couldn’t really partake in the food aspect of the evening. I mainly limited myself to anything that didn’t have a central nervous system to play it safe. I was really worried that I would have to wimp out and go home early sick but like the true powerhouse that I am, I perservered until the end. All 2.5 hours :-)

Other than that I have been lying around. I watched Chie kick the crap out of Ico on the PS2. Oh yeah, that reminds me of the fact that Ico is like the original Prince of Persia. Very similiar puzzles, a girl that runs around and helps the main character, similiar environments (both taking place in a large castle), and even the shared limit of four monsters on the screen at once. So yeah, if you enjoyed Prince of Persia grab Ico - we were able to get it as a greatest hit for like twenty bucks.

The other game she bought - note that she bought the games, not I - was Project Zero. I think it’s called Fatal Frame II in America. It’s a fucked up survival horror game. I’ve played a few other horror games, such as Clocktower 3 and some of the Resident Evil games and none of them hold a candle to how crazy this game is. It’s about fear, not gore. And the story is creepy as all hell - it revolves around identical twins getting sucked into a satanic ritual where one has to kill the other. Yeah, messed up.

Unfortunately our crappy little television here (which came with the apartment) has really dim guns, so the dark areas of the game are absolute black. It both adds to the atmosphere and makes it frustrating. Don’t know what to do about that.

I was actually looking at getting a USB capture card to get around the problem. My grand plan was that I’d plug the PS2 video output into a magic USB device and she/we could play it on the laptop screen. But - there’s always a but - none of the pieces of capture hardware are realtime. There’s apparently up to a second long delay between the input and the output. Which for normal purposes like television and movies is no problem, but for gaming it’s a dealbreaker.

Anyway, I’ll stop. I’ve already gone off on three tangents.

On the way from work to the subway station tonight there were about 300 people lined up next to Shinjuku Chuo Park, all men. And I have absolutely no idea why.

On a different, Chie and I both have a cold. Fun stuff for the weekend.

It seems like My Yahoo might be back from the dead. The new revision of the site, according to Jeremy Zawodny, allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds. You can even upload your current OPML file. Very, very cool stuff.

Right now I use Feeds on Feeds for server-side aggregation, but I’m going to give the new My Yahoo a whirl and see which one wins.

Update: Nevermind. It sorts by blog name and lists each entry under that instead of sorting by date. It seems to have no concept of items you’ve read either. And it supports only 25 RSS entries per page. I take back what I said about “cool stuff”. It’s nice to see syndication turning mainstream, but this has a ways to go.