I am a few days into my first week of research now. I have completed basic orientation and still have some international student orientation to do tomorrow. I am waiting on my driver’s licence translation, class schedule, student card, health check-up, and first scholarship payment to come through, but otherwise everything is in order. As all readers have probably already heard directly or indirectly, everything is going really well here and I’m really loving the lab, and least because of the amazing library of books or the Aibo robot sitting behind me.
I re-wrote the Twitter widget that goes on the sidebar of the blog yesterday. The one I was using (“Twitter for WordPress”) wasn’t ignoring irrelevant tweets, was slowing down page loads, and was mucking up text encoding. The one I wrote uses AJAX to query my server for recent tweets, and the server caches tweets to improve speed and make sure I don’t get throttled by Twitter for overusing their API. It also correctly handles non-English text and does not display user-to-user tweets.
I read a really great article on Kotaku today by Brian Ashcraft about why he lives in Japan. It’s really long, but he makes some really great points and it’s a very entertaining read. I recommend scanning through the headings and reading the ones that sound interesting if it’s just too long to read straight through. I recommend the sections “Japan is Visually Dense” and “In Japan, You Don’t Wear Shoes At Home”.
I found the article appalling! The guy doesn’t get anything and sees everything though the lens of a recklessly individualist gaijin. Every observation he makes has to be filtered through and distorted by his own ego.
He seems to want to hate Japan for not conforming to his individualist law of the jungle upbringing, but at the same time cant bring himself to leave as he knows at the back of his head that he’ll have to face into all the tragedies of the commons and uncivilised behavior that combine to make the standard of living in the West so much lower.
There’s a sort of chronic depression, cynicism and inconsistency about this guy that in some regards makes him even worse than Debito. He doesn’t know what he wants and is paranoid about his life wasting away, yet blames the world for these things.
In short, he can’t see anything. He is one of the unfortunate majority of Westerners that have been so polluted and clogged with selfish individualism from a young age that no amount of exposure to civilised society and elegant, deep culture can unblind him.
That aside, glad to see that you don’t suffer from the same ailments and are enjoying the utopia!