Shack Attack

The Dawn of Shiretoko: Firefox 3.5 is Live!

I've been playing with alphas and betas of Firefox 3.5 for a while, and it's been a joy seeing it turn from a crashy, slow memory hog with an awesomely fast Javascript engine to a less-crashy memory hog with an awesomely fast Javascript engine to a nicer and nicer browser. Anyway, the revisions are over, the browser is out of the gates, and it's wonderful. Why?

Extensions: these are cool, free plugins that:

• translate Japanese for me on the fly
• eliminate stupid quizzes from my stupid facebook news feed
• let me download music straight from Blip.fm (yarr!)
• let me customize any page on the WHOLE INTERNETS with custom css and javascript
• sync all my bookmarks across all my computers

The Awesome Bar: Instead of an address bar, you get an Awesome Bar, which reads your brain and brings up the place you wanted to go (kind of like Quicksilver, but for the whole web). It searches titles and URLS of pages in your history and bookmarks, looks at which pages you've visited frequently or recently, and uses that to predict your likely destinations. Or something. Point is, telepathy!

Ubiquity: This little plugin with the power to change everything.

Why Firefox and not Chrome or Safari or Opera? It's a pretty valid question. I haven't played with Opera much, but Safari and Chrome are blazing-quick, seem to eat less memory than Firefox, and look prettier on smaller screens. What sells me on Firefox, though, is the extensions. You may not have the same feature needs I do, but I guarantee that once you've browsed through the add-ons out there, there's going to be something that will change your internet world for the better.

Write With Your Arm, Not With Your Hand?

My handwriting has sucked eternally- I still remember neatness coming up as the single issue at my parent-teacher conferences in elementary school. I never ran into legibility problems, but had a tough time keeping vertical lines vertical, horizontal lines horizontal, and everything landing on the baseline. I made some improvements with the long-letters-long approach (make tall letters as tall as you can, and shrink the shorter ones), but I've always envied people with neat writing.

I once googled a few variations of "improve your handwriting," and found absolutely nothing of worth: "sit up straight, practice individual letters, just write slower until you get better." Today, though, I stumbled across this article:

People who inevitably have trouble with handwriting and calligraphy write with their fingers. They "draw" the letters. A finger-writer puts the full weight of his/her hand on the paper, his fingers form the letters, and he picks his hand up repeatedly to move it across the paper as he writes.

If you use the right muscle groups, your writing will have a smooth, easy flow and not look tortured. People for whom writing comes more easily may rest their hands fairly heavily on the paper, but their forearms and shoulders move as they write. Their writing has a cadence that shows they’re using at least some of the right muscle groups. They don’t draw the letters with their fingers; the fingers serve more as guides.

This exercise may help you determine which category is yours: Sit down and write a paragraph. Doesn’t matter what. Pay attention to the muscles you use to form your letters. Do you draw each letter with your fingers? Pick your hand up repeatedly to move it? Have an unrecognizable scrawl? Does your forearm move? Chances are, if you learned to write after 1955-60 (depending on where you went to grade school), you write with your fingers.

(full article here)

Blew me away; I'm a complete finger-writer. Finger-writing makes intuitive sense to me- writing means small movements, and small movements seem like they'd be best facilitated by small muscles close to where the motion is happening. When I thought about it a little more, though, I realized that I write a lot better on a whiteboard than I do on a paper, and a vertical surface is the one place finger-writing is impossible (I've surprised myself in the English class I teach with how regular my writing looks).

I've started practicing the techniques the article talks about: writing lines at various angles, circles, and loops, keeping the fingers and wrist as still as possible and writing with your arm and shoulder. It feels weird, and gets a little tiring, but when I concentrate my rhythm and regularity improve a pretty good amount. One thing that gets me, though, is my Japanese writing is horrible when I write like this. At first I thought that the more multi-directional, jilted nature of kanji languages means that you use your fingers to write instead of your hand, but then calligraphy came to mind- those guys definitely use their whole arms.

What kind of a writer are you? Do you switch muscle groups between western and asian languages?

Quality = Time * Effort

Girl Talk's Feed the Animals is one of the greatest albums I've heard in a long time. How did it come about? Gregg Gillis put in the fucking work.

Mr. Gillis, who said he saw “Feed the Animals” as an album of his own work rather than a D.J. mix, spent several months testing out ideas during live performances, then several more matching beats and polishing transitions. He estimates that each minute of “Feed the Animals” took him about a day to create.

(NY Times)

This is after he worked his way up as a DJ and mix artist, mind you. Divide the album over years of practice, and you get a time investment quite a bit higher than a day a minute. Music is like writing, math, speaking another language, or any other skill- put in the time and effort, and you get recognized for it (it needs to be smart effort, though). I think there are far fewer talentless creatives out there than plain lazy ones.

If you haven't heard Feed the Animals, you need to go get it right now. Girl Talk has released it under a Creative Commons license, available to download for whatever price you care to pay. Don't trust my taste in music? Pay nothing at first, then come back and sling the guy his money once you're won over by the album's awesomeness. He's supposedly self-distributing because of copyright litigation fears, but I wouldn't be surprised if he brings in more money this way than by going with a label.

There are also plenty of YouTube videos to give you an idea of what this is all about:

Could Japan Abolish Cash?

I love the idea of a negative interest rate to fight deflation, and if there's a country that has enough e-cash penetration and economic centralization to effect a change this huge, it's probably Japan.

...a nominal rate of zero — as Japan has now lived with for much of the past decade — may be too high. In Japan’s case, the theory would suggest that nominal rates of -4 per cent might be closer to what is required to rescue the economy from another deflationary spiral. Having agreed that this might be necessary, the next question is how it could be imposed.

Several MPs in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party believe the abolition of cash, though politically radioactive, might be technically feasible. Richard Jerram, a senior economist with Macquarie bank, told investors that “the proposal has become practical with the broad penetration of electronic money and credit cards in Japan”.

He said that all the proposals were radical but worth consideration for Japan. Without physical cash, a central bank can set rates exactly where it likes, runs the argument. Mr Jerram said: “At the heart of the problem of achieving negative nominal interest rates is the idea that physical currency is an anonymous bearer bond with a nominal interest rate of zero.” While a central bank can impose positive or negative rates on non-physical assets, transmitting those rates to physical currency is a huge challenge. By permanently removing cash from a system, he added, policymakers are robbed of the excuse that zero is the lowest that nominal rates can go as a deflation-fighting tool.

(full article at The Times Online

The idea has a certain logic, but I'm not sold. Besides unleashing an untested idea on one of the world's biggest economies, I find that outside big department stores and train stations, I still see a whole lot of cash changing hands (I've never once been to a dinner with friends and had someone pull out a card). The article says that about 16% of money in circulation is cash, but I'd bet that the percentage of physical transactions that happen in cash is a good deal higher.

Hosts: The Modern Male Geisha of Japan?

What is a host? He's a charismatic guy who gets paid by the hour to talk to and drink with women. I find their whole getup pretty funny- skinny suits with lots of jewelry, hair that must take hours to tease up, and a lot of them have faces that strike me as much more young and effeminate than you'd want in a pick-up artist. They're a fact of life, though, and if they weren't bringing in the bills, you wouldn't see so damn many of them around Kabukicho.

I'm sure there's a better term out there for hosts, but "male geisha" fits them better than "man-whore." After all, these men aren't paid for sex as much as they are for image and company. Obvious a host's life is far removed from that of an actual Geisha, but the idea of an entertainer with a well-honed set of particular skills who entertains guests-one-on-one for an evening is similar, no? (someone's going to rip me a new one for this analogy, I'm sure)

(The sign on the storefront says "Women-Only Club," or "Club for the Exclusive Use of Women")

It appears that this guy is the "Top Dandy."

Host clubs advertise all the men inside on big billboards; once they enter, women choose their companion from a menu.

A few hosts I met in Osaka. Talking to them, they don't have much of an air at all- it's a job to them, and I'm just a guy unrelated to their work. When they actually go into action, though, they're intense- they'll walk up to any girl that looks like she has a few bucks, and motormouth her with questions, trying to find some commonality or emotional connection. These particular ones weren't too good, at least from what I saw- they didn't manage to bring a single girl back to their club.

The worst hosts barely pull in minimum wage; the best are paid like CEO's. It may sound like a dream job, but it's a dusk-to-dawn marathon of binge drinking and emotional manipulation, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of the clubs out there have ties to less-than-savory characters. If this culture is at all interesting, I really recommend watching The Great Happiness Space: Tales of an Osaka Love Thief. If you have Netflix, you can instant-watch it, but otherwise, it's available at most video stores or part-by-part, for free, on YouTube. It starts out by drawing you into a magical world where men get paid silly amounts of money to flirt with cute girls, and then brings reality crashing down on the whole thing. It's nothing but well-cut, well-shot interviews with hosts and their clients, and the world-exclusive look at a fairly underground subculture has gotten it quite a few awards.