first of all let me say – the weather is kind of getting to be lately. highish humidity and temperatures . let me use that as my excuse for not updating in quite a few days :p.

soo with two tests in a row on wed and thurs, as well as an essay and a speech to complete, it was a busy week. hell, its not even over yet, but friday is friiiday right?

i somehow managed to fit a trip to himeji castle and the gardens too. that was pretty tiring. i was at first thinking how stupid the osaka castle was for having an elevator to get to the top, but i seriously wouldn’t have cared if i could catch one rather than walking countless flights of stairs with not enough head room for even the shortest japanese person ^^;.

i guess they build the castle with the intention of tiring out the enemy though. ill upload pictures later on.. camera is somewhere upstairs. stairs BAD. instead ill just rant about games i’ve used to procrastinate in those periods while collecting enough motivation to study.

i made a trip back to jRO a couple of weekends ago thanks to tencho kindly giving dodd and myself a 1day pass to use. this was quite awesome fun – we visited juperos and attempted to complete the quest to get to 3f, but couldn’t find the last item required and never made it there :s.

i really would like to play ro – if it wasn’t for the lack of time in my semi-normal lifestyle. i was considering joining everyone on iro but this would involve a gradual decrease in sleep hours at night, and inversely proportional sleep during uni classes. not going to happen in short. and besides – playing ro in english just isnt the same. nor is the community anywhere near as competent ^^; (although that’s sometimes for the best).

hitman blood money! awesome. i can’t stop playing – despite my real dislike of single player FPS games. the ability to have total freedom over how you go about completing a mission is really really fun, and makes for interesting gameplay no matter how many times you play the same level. since i haven’t had that much time to plan my hits, my rating is in the mediocre levels, highest so far being Hitman rating on the madigras election thingy level. i spent extra long on that level though :s.

bf2 with broken textures :d. quite fun for a change, albeit very hard to play with a ping of 450ms.

てるてる明日へ～

so yeah, i have only charged my camera twice since i got to japan. considering how much i use it, this is quite amazing performance. the major downside is since it hardly ever needs charging, i forget to do it when it IS about to run out. last night at fireworks it stopped turning on (actually cut out halfway through a good video ), and i kind of forgot to charge it when i got home.

thus i missed a few interesting photos today when i went to aeon shopping centre with my family for dinner / to buy printer ink. the best part was seeing two young children (a boy and a girl) with their family at the restaurant. they both had DS (not lites though..) and just bought NSMB! and they were fighting over the instruction booklet, then they finally found out that you could play multiplayer with only 1 cart, and began to play in a more civilised manner. there were some other kids crowding around them watching and acting quite excited :d. i really want to get mario now. even my host sister was saying how interesting it looked when the CM came on tv earlier tonight.

buffet style food and drink was very satisfying especially at only 1600yen. must go back sometime.

i added a new video section using youtube just for fun. it seems to compress a lot better than google video. i’m waiting to see how long it takes for daniel to tell me to take down at least 1 of the videos that i put up there ^^;.

text only is boring so here’s my desktop at the end of this month! in a very usable state at the moment :d.

today we planned a trip 相生 (aioi) which is the next stop west of himeji on the shinkansen line. the aim of it was to see the ’superior’ fireworks display by the country that founded them originally. even with the weather forecast leaving is in doubt of whether they would happen or not, and a bit of rain falling during our 40 minute trip there, i still went with high hopes of seeing some nice explosions :d.

luckily enough it wasn’t cancelled, and all went quite smoothly. the 25 minute walk from the car was mostly along the main shopping road of aioi – which was littered with small stalls selling every kind of traditional japanese food you could possibly want. there were also lottery places selling what LOOKED to be ds lites… but for all i know they could’ve just been empty boxes.

as we arrived at the edge of the lake/river, we saw that the areas of pavement (yeah, no grass – its japan after all) had been reserved by people using large sheets that were taken to with masking tape. we managed to find quite a nice area to sit and unpacked all our food and alcohol.

the fireworks started at 1930, and continued for one and a half hours. quite a long display really – and it was filled with things you can’t see at even the biggest displays in perth (lol). at first our host family members present were worried the fireworks had been wet by the rain, as they fired off some test ones which seemed to fail badly. they were oh so relieved when an announcement came over the speakers about 5 minutes later saying they would start soon ^^;.

i took quiiite a few pictures so if you’re interested go visit the gallery :d. also took a few videos, and tried google video to see how it would retain quality. unfortunately it didn’t work that nicely. oh well :p.

so being the average uni week, it goes by with not that much interesting occurring (well not interesting to those that weren’t there at the time usually).  time to cover a few of the more minor details of my life over here?

the two kids you see above live over the road from my family.  taka-kun and tomo-kun.  it was tomo-kun’s birthday yesterday, so they were still playing with their new presents.  yes – both of them got presents, because there would be quite a lot of screaming and crying if only one did.  boy can they scream :/.

anyways the toys they got were boukensha figurines – basically the original power rangers which are somehow still popular in japan.

we went out to a family restaurant called Saizeria for dinner last night.  this is one of the places with drink bars – which means you can drink all the melon soda you want, but the amount you drink is very proportional to the suffering experienced as you make many visits to the toilet during the night ^^;.  this particular restaurant has a nice selection of pizzas, pasta dishes and some very mouth-watering desserts.  unfortunately even though i didn’t eat lunch, i couldn’t manage a dessert after a single main course..

i had a macaroni cheese with crab dish, as well as garlic bread and a lot of drinks.  it cost around 800yen (just under AU$10) – quite good value really.

speaking of family restaurants, i was watching a news talkback show this morning and they were talking about this incident that occurred last week at one.  a family went to eat, and at first they were told that quite a large selection of the dishes weren’t available, and to choose from specific salad and meat dishes.  when they did just that, and waited over 30 minutes for their meals to come out, the meat was hard and basically not consumable.  along the way the staff fobbed them with excuses and said to wait just a bit longer.  it was only when they got to the counter to pay that they were told rather impolitely that there was no chef there that could cook the food..  just a whole bunch of part-timers trying to cook the food.  no apology or anything.  quite bad really :/

soo i’m hoping that doesn’t happen to us.