Well, I took the effort of taking these pictures, so I might as well post them here. Most of you have probably already seen pictures of this enormous statue, though. If you haven’t, well, you can see them after the jump.

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and translating, apparently… Or any real work … Yay for the ultra-time-consuming Europa Universalis III…

I was going to post pictures I took of the Gundam statue, but I figure that you guys have already seen pictures of that on other websites, probably taken with a better camera. Perhaps I should post pictures of the shrines and temples in Kamakura and Enoshima, instead.

I actually didn’t enjoy Shibuya that much. For me, there wasn’t much that appealed to me. Almost everything was clothing, which is what I guess Shibuya is known for anyway. For someone who likes clothes and styles, Shibuya has lots of it. The most famous department store (right word?), 109, has lots of different clothes from different… clothes makers? (boutiques? I know nothing.)

Oh, there are some Shinjuku pics after the Shibuya pics in there. I actually don’t quite remember the difference between the two places, so I don’t know when one ends and the other begins. Oh well.

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Wow, I’m about two months overdue for this post. I know that I promised to upload pics as seen as I got in, but I was kind of busy. I actually have a backlog of posts I went to publish, but I’ll hold back a little. I’ve been in Yokohama since June 1st. I’m staying about a 10-minute walk away from Aobadai-eki in Shofu Dormitory.

The reason I am here is to do research at Tokyo Institute of Technlolgy 『東京工業大学』. I’m working with an RF related lab. I haven’t really done much besides using some Agilent machines to take measurements of some transistors.

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Whoa, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here. Sorry about that all, I’ve been see busy with end of term projects (which started around the beginning of April ish?.) Since my last post, I’ve: beaten DQV and wrote my mini-review for it (which I forgot to post,) gotten TWEWY and beaten it, gotten addicted to Europa Universalis III, started some manga series and finished others, and rewatched the ending of the Gundam Trilogy a billion times I also got the Samsung N120, a nice little subnotebook.

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Just really busy lately. For some reason, even though I don’t have a money source right now, I’ve been buying a lot of douijn and games lately. Oh boy, have I gotten a lot of games. I ended up double dipping and picked up Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI for PC. I enjoy playing on my computer much more than using my PS3 to play it. The interface feels a lot better/quicker. I also ended up creating my own force for once. Maybe I could start those gameplay diaries again.

I also got Valkyria Chronicles and Little Big Planet.. I haven’t played the latter as much as I’ve played the former, even though I’ve only had Valkyria since yesterday. I think I’m already on the 10 hour mark. I’m at chapter 9 right now. It’s a pretty good game. It’s one of the few recent SRPGs that requires ACTUAL strategy (unlike a certain grindfest *cough-cough*.) Having troops fire on you while you move your own units really does add another element to strategy. Hopefully I can beat it by the next weekend so I can do a little writeup on it.

Joking aside, the real reason I’ve been busy is the sheer amount of work I’ve been given as of late. I haven’t even been able ot play most of the games I’ve gotten… One of my classes has a lot of projects. If you’re really interested (for whatever reason,) you can look at the processor we had to ‘make’ that was due Thursday. Anyway, you can expect more posts in the future (like, one or two days.)

Top picture source: Minoharu

So a lot of things have been happening since my last post (part of which has contributed to my lack posting.) I’ll just put some of the more important things in this post.

The most important thing is that classes have started (ok, technically they started a bit before the last post, but I forgot to tell you guys about it >_<) Of note: I'm taking Beginning Japanese I this semester (and sucking horribly at it, so far.) It's kind of odd learning a language where you hear bits of it everyday (ie, anime) and can pick up odd words here and there. It's kind of annoying, actually, haha. I keep on hearing stuff like "wakarimasu" or "asita" (or ashita. My book uses a romanization system that I'm not used to, haha.)

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It’s been an interesting weekend. The very first thing I wake up to is the sound of my OS dying on my spare laptop (ok, it didn’t make a sound, it just reported that the boot file was corrupted.) Unfortunately, I didn’t have my Vista DVD on me (just a DVD-RW, which this laptop can’t read.) So, no more Windows for this laptop.

I decided to get Ubuntu. I thought getting it would be easy, but I was very, very wrong. Of course, since I didn’t have a computer of my own, I had to rely on a friend to burn me a copy. It was just my luck when the first turned out to be a dud. Of course, it was able to go into Live CD mode before anything wrong happened, which left my laptop to be the suspect for any errors. It wasn’t until trying the 3rd Ubuntu CD (and one Kubuntu DVD,) that I was able to install Ubuntu. Three hours after the initial installation, I was (partially) able to get it working like I wanted it to.

/rant

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Move over, Wiimote, there’s a new controller in town. A graduate student at NYU has made a controller that helps couples become more … intimate, The controller is a bunch of sensors that fits inside of a bra for women or on the back of underwear for men. The partners touch eachother’s sensors in order to play games. Yes, I’m not making this up.

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It’s my birthday. I just turned 19. I didn’t really do much, just went out for dinner. Didn’t even get a cake. It was relaxing, though, since I slept in till about 3 pm.

I’m ashamed to say this, but I’ve basically watched none of the “new” Spring 2007 anime, besides Gurren Lagann, that is. Since Spring started, I’ve watched 12 episodes of Gurren Lagann, one episode of Hitohira and one episode of Murder Princess. Yea, pretty pathetic. I do sort of plan on fixing it. I’m really looking at Lucky Star right now.

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Yup, finals are done and I’m back at home (for the moment anyway.) Better yet, my laptop finall arrived. Unfortunately, those jerks forgot to replace the graphics card. Even thought that’s the reason why I sent it to the warehouse, they ended up fixing a whole bunch of issues (motherboard, sound card, etc.)

My graphics card has the unfortunate trait of overheating… quite often. I can run Vista just fine and other non-gaming apps, but once I fire up a game of Medieval II: Total War or some Battlefield 2, it starts to overheat. I can play for about 10 minutes before the computer just shuts down. *sigh* What a waste for a Mobility x1800 to not be able to play any games.

Anyway, since I obviously won’t be playing any PC games, I’ll be playing a lot of my games for the PS2. This will mostly include Dragon Quest VIII, Ar Tonelico, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI. I’m on the last boss for DQ, so I should be able to finish that up next week (or tomorrow.) I was thinking about starting some kind of gaming diary for strategy games like RotTK and posting it here (kind of like what appears on the “Tom vs Bruce” column in Games for Windows.) Once I have some free time to dedicate to RotTK, I think I’ll start writing about it. Hopefully it will be interesting -_-;;