Spring is in the air. Well, not really. It kind of came and went, and there was only a few sunny days. I guess it's retribution for having such a mild winter. I guess since June is usually pretty hot I should be thankful it was cloudy almost ever day. Rainy season will start here in a week or so, and that can really suck. I remember some years when it only rained twice a week, but of course the polar opposite holds true as well. I've gotten into the whole bicycle mode, and I'd hate to downgrade to the trains. It's quite good excercise (especially when I get off my ass and ride in the morning), cheap, and this is quite a fun city to go riding in.

I've not exactly been getting my game on. The 360 release of Death Smiles was better than expected, and I feel I gave a nice ass-ripping in arrange mode with an 8-billion score. I'll get it out again, but am on to less nerve-racking games at the moment. I pop into the arcades from time to time but there's nothing released in the recent months that has caught my attention. Death Smiles II is, as expected, awful on just about all fronts. The loli shit was forgiveable the first time around as the game was so well put together. This time, it's a lost cause. Hopefully Cave will pull their act together and realize that their fanbase doesn't want half-assed 3D based games which are easily ported. I would most likely not even buy a port of this turd.

For those of you dedicated viewers that are wondering what the hell is up with the site, there are updates coming. I throw some shit up in the omake area from time to time, which I hope isn't unnoticed. Those posters take ages to scan, and in a lot of cases doctor up. There is more stuff coming, but it's been a project going on for a very long time. It will be nice to see it finally out in the open. I'll have more on that in the coming weeks.

It's that time of year again where we get drunk, look at Sakura, and absolutely wreck Yoyogi park. Unlike last year, the sakura didn't hit ye old 'mankai' (full bloom) on the weekend, thus resulting in some rather lack luster scenery. That didn't stop half of the city from raiding the local combini for loads of booze and heading to the nearest park - in my case, Yoyogi. As someone who's trying to trick everyone to thinking he's a more respectable man, I can't go running around to techno parties acting like a jackass like I used to. The kid would get trampled anyway. The music, I guess, doesn't bother me. However, this year, it didn't even have the chance. The police for a change were actually enforcing a rule: the "don't play your fucking music w/ an amp out here" rule. There are signs all over the park that forbid amps from being used. However, there's no less than 20 groups each weekend playing their music (quite often poorly) at full blast. In some parts of the park, two different performers will be mere meters apart. Remember, this is a city that accepts such weird things, and even extremes like some dickhead screaming through a megaphone in your ear about saving 10 yen, but scouls at loudness on the train.

I've actually been really busy the last... uh... 6 months or so. I still get time to play games from time to time, but it's generally at the end of the day, and for a short while. While most of my hectic schedule stems from real work, I have spent quite a bit of effort in getting all my technologies to play nice. I think I'm finally there, I just need to clean up the wires now. I've got my gigantic A3 scanner running on my main Linux machine, Mame and my Arcade VGA running off my one and only cube PC (which can also output 1920x1200 if I want to play real games), and my Macbook Pro will be where all the Photoshop love occurs. Yes, it's a bit much, but the machines themselves are really small. This damn scanner is a damn joke though. In addition to my hardware woes, I am doing updates here... they're just very thin on the content side these days. I'm making some changes on my end that will make the post-scanning process much more streamlined, and a few changes server side as well. I'm hoping that in a month or so this can be in full swing, and more content will find it's way here.

It's been a pretty wild Fall over here. Work and real life both took over and I really didn't get to do much else. With the little free time I had, I was went out and drank most of the time, which meant during the day I just wanted to relax and watch the tube. I picked up Little Big Planet, and other than that, didn't really play much of anything. I guess it's a natural transgression for guys my age.

I did decide that I had far too much crap that got basically zero attention, so out it had to go. This included pretty much 90% of my books, flyers, and posters. They've been scanned and added to the site, so they've pretty much served their purpose as I don't decorate my room with any of that. It has also given me a little more space, which is always nice.

After getting rid of a lot of stuff, the next thing was to get everything clean and organized. I was mucking about with my arcade monitor the other day, when it did a face plant into the floor, taking with it the Dreamcast, PS2, XRGB, and landed on a controller. Miraculously, everything was fine. So glad the thing didn't shatter. They sure don't make them like that any more. Any LCD would've been rendered useless. My son was no where around, thankfully,

As I'm really busy, I'll just end it here. I would like to bullshit more on this page in 2009 than I was able to this last part of the year, but who knows. Writing everything in two languages definitely slows it down some, but is good excercise. Keep you fingers crossed.

I've had about the longest ends of summer I can possibly imagine. August is generally supposed to be about getting in those last summer parties, but it was quite a bit of work for me. I had a 2 week trip to Honolulu, and within that a 2-day, company trip to Las Vegas. Vegas was a blast of course. Shockingly enough, I didn't play a single hand of poker, and only an hour or so of Black Jack. The rest of the time was spent boozing it up by the pool all day, then dinner, then out clubbing at night. For the most part, I did pretty good at making a jack ass out of myself. Having to work Sunday afternoon (Honolulu time) we took the 10:30AM flight out of Vegas, which runs about five and a half hours. Of course, I was quite hungover, so I had been pounding water all morning. About an hour into the flight I start throwing it all up. Seems that dehydration caught up with me. Not sleeping a wink, and simply staring into space for the remaining four hours, I eventually went to the hospital for a drip which took about 2 hours from check-in until they finally administered it. I went back to the hotel, crashed, flew home the next day and got on with life. I've learned later though that someone else in our party got food poisoning, so perhaps that was it.

I've really been too busy with work and real life to enjoy any of the heaps of expensive gaming shit I have in my house. In all honesty, I've played nothing for any type of duration since the first of the summer. I did buy Eden from the Japanese PSN which is pretty fun. As luck would have it, it's about all I can commit to these days. I'll bust out MAME or a PCB every now and again, but honestly, I spend like 30 minutes each day having fun. The rest is all the boring shit.

The style of night life has always been one of those things changes from year to year, but the overall theme of going out and getting hammered has stayed the same. What I've always found somewhat facinating (and sad at the same time) is the lack of longevity of clubs. Back in Austin, there was only one night club that was open for basically ever, which was Ohms (right across from the police station). Here in Tokyo, a couple outlasted most party peoples partying lifestyles. The laws put in place by the Occupational Forces state that discos (that is, any institution whose main focus is dancing, and not drinking) is illegal to be open between midnight and 5AM. Like most laws in Japan though, it is only selectively enforced. As such, a lot of places with bad luck are shut down, sometimes on their opening night. Others, for some reason or another, thrive. The most surprising of them was Maniac Love [Japanese Article on it's last party], a tiny hole in the wall that many friends and myself called home every Sunday morning from 5AM to 10:30AM. It's tenure was from 1993 to 2005, supporting the after hours party for it's entire length, and the high level of drug consumption supporting it's customer base. It shut down because the owners refused to renew the lease to another club. Whether this was due to outside pressure or not remains unseen. And now, as if history is repeating itself 2 and a half years later, for apparently the same reasons, Space Lab Yellow shut its doors after 17 years of parties that have seen some of the most famous people in the industry.

Now I don't have any particular personal ties to Yellow other than it was the first club I went to in Tokyo, which was back in a little year I like to call 1996. I wasn't even living in Tokyo at the time, but was studying abroad in Shizuoka. Louie Vega from New York happened to be playing that night, I quite vivdly remember. As stated, I had no other attachment to the place. It never had a monthly event that I cared for, and the after hours parties there were a little too spaced out for me. The club is very maze-like as well and doesn't have a nice concentration of energy like Maniac Love had. Anyways, to go out with a bang, they lined up some pretty high profile people for the final month. Friday June the 20th was the second to the last party featuring Laurent Garnier and DJ Toby. Saturday the 21st was the final final, featured Francois K., and will run a whopping 10,000 yen to get in the door. Despite being quite tired, a friend dragged me out to the Friday gig. Getting there around 12:00, the music was pretty nostalgic. As luck would have it, some of the tunes of when I first moved to Tokyo (1998) were played. Niji by Denki Groove, Marmion by Schonenberg, and He Never Lost his Hardcore by someone whose name I forgot, just to name a few. In fact, I still have a lot of them on vinyl. The only problem was, the place was balls packed. Dancing was impossible, there were about 3 bartenders to each bar, a queue of some 30 people in each line, and of course, that Japanese custom of placing flowers from other companies (even competitors) when you open or close all over the place. You could say they had way too many flowers, and not enough bartenders. All in all it was fun, but I only recognized one single person (the photographer) who I knew from the good old days. I felt a bit old, and out of place. When I was running around, even at gaijin-friendly places, I was still somewhat of a token gaijin. Now there's a healthy population of western women that aren't dorks, and aren't strippers. The men have always been here, but there's even more now as Japan has become "a cool place to live". I wound up leaving the place around 2AM and going to a less crowded bar across the street to meet some friends of friends. For me to stand a crowd like that I need to see some amazing DJing. Laurent Garnier isn't bad by a stretch, but he's a bit overground for my taste. Indeed, a bit of a weird combination to play with Toby. So, another club goes down. Who knows how many will pop up in it's place.

As most people know, Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu was counter stopped on stage 1-5 by some top level players. As this was an obvious oversight, Cave is issuing a PCB revision that will add more digits to the score, change play mechanics, and add ships. It has truly torn this country apart. Personally I don't mind so much, but it is a bit irksome, especially if the tweaks affecting any patterns that have been made. I've not really put too much time into DFK though. What they do that pisses me off more than anything has to do with the limited number of goods they have for sale. This weekend, Cave had their Online Matsuri. Assuming Hey couldn't handle the huge number of people (not hard to believe), they decided to hock their gear online this time. It started at noon, and I had my browser ready. Before I could check out, I got a warning that the limited edition Ketsui 3D Cyrstal was sold out. This is a matter of like 5 minutes, mind you. So, of course, there will be bid wars out the ass on Yahoo Japan, then they'll make more for the next event and piss off everyone that paid too much for it.