mDuo13

First off, a bit of context: this post comes to you from all the way on the island of O'ahu in the great island state of Hawai'i. Well, actually, I'm not all that fond of Hawaii, but for the sake of my cousin's wedding and related business, I find myself sitting in a sweltering room in a rented beach house, pattering away at my Eee's miniscule keyboard, with no internet at the moment of this writing (though if you're reading this it seems safe to assume I've found a wireless point for long enough to upload it). Completely by coincidence, my good friend Spiritsnare is also in Hawaii at this moment, though he's a few klicks west on the map, visiting the island of Kaua'i. Judging from the little compass attached to my bag, this means he's somewhat forward and to the left of my current sitting position.

Currently it escapes me what I last blogged about, and without access here to remind me, I feel a bit lost. I guess that's part of our current wired lifestyle. If you take away the convenient information technology we take for granted these days, things feel almost the same, except that when you think to yourself, "I'll just look that up on Wikipedia," another little voice reminds you that you can't actually do that at the moment. So far it's not a big inconvenience, but until I manage to get myself a Linux version of Dropbox and sync it up, I'm going to have a harder time working on ReVamped. I suppose the amount of time I spend on that will be inversely proportional to the amount of time I spend on the beach.

On the way over, I finally finished reading Philip K. Dick's Drx Bloodmoney, which started out being unexcitingly similar to the last book I read, also Philip K. Dick, The Simalacrum. However, Bloodmoney turned itself around and became a distinct and worthwhile book, albeit dealing with many similar themes. In some ways it was a believable study of life after an apocalyptic nuclear war, albeit a bit on the fantastic side; and in some ways it was a much more personal story, about the frailty, ambition, and delusion that come both with being almost human. Granted, the book (printed in 1965) was dated: not just in ways like it used terms like "Negro" and invented acronyms such as "LOL" (Little Old Lady) but in the way it approaches the concept of science fiction. It had a strange sense of reality, treating psychic powers with the same seriousness with which it views schizophrenia and nuclear war. And, like all Philip K. Dick books, it was full of peculiar yet poignantly tragic symbols: for example, in this case, the stranded astronaut whose radio broadcasts are the only thing keeping the post-war world unified. I think it is for these symbols that I read Dick: there's something unique about them, as if I am somehow communing with his inscrutable psyche by reading them. I guess another way to think of it is, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a magical book, whereas these books are merely good, but they contain a touch of that same genius, that same magic.

On an unrelated note, I've recently picked up the card game Weiß Schwarz ("Vice Shvartz"), which is an anime crossover game with several properties that interest me including Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, Fate/stay night, CLANNAD, and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. It seems like a pretty fun and straightforward game, with a fair bit of room for different deckbuilding strategies, though until I acquire some boosters and start experimenting for myself, I can't be sure. The cards are mostly in Japanese (Apparently there's an English version of the Disgaea trial deck? I personally have the JP one.) but they're relatively simple text and there's a fan-site doing translations of the cards - I'll probably be sending them some corrections in that regard when I get back next week and have more time to pore over my cards in detail. At the very least I've added a couple of card-game-related words to my Japanese vocabulary, and that's not bad.

I'm still jobless, though that's not too surprising considering the economy even if you don't realize I haven't been looking hard just yet. (I was anticipating being in Hawaii for a week, from which place it's kinda hard to return calls and attend job interviews.) On one hand, I know I need to earn money and stay in the job market just to stay afloat, but there are so many things to do with my time that cost little or no money (at least, not more than I've already invested) that I'm finding it hard to be motivated. I guess I can look to good old Hobby Search as a motivating factor: those Weiß Schwarz cards aren't cheap, after all, and I wouldn't mind waking up to an alarm of Ranka Lee's voice, either.

So I guess thus far, my vacation from my everyday relaxing life has been the opposite: I've spent most of my time thus far reading things from my to-do list and writing, rather than partaking of sociable nothing. Well, I guess the hours I spent on Disgaea and Metroid (the NES version courtesy a Zero Mission GBA cartridge) are comparable. But hey, some people come to Hawaii to relax; me? I come to... well, I don't know if I'd call it work, but it's not as lazy as usual. I suppose that's good enough... for now.