(no subject)
Since my parents couldn't come to Japan, I ended up taking all of the vacation time that I had saved up and combining it with Golden Week and some other national holiday to make the ultimate 16-day vacation. I went to Tokyo for 9 days and caught up with Tim, Drew, and Krispy. Today was the first day back at work, and even though I have three weeks left it pretty much feels like my internship is over. Especially now that I took care of school stuff and plane tickets, all I have to do is show up for work. It's kind of a strange feeling.
I did a presentation on my internship today, which just added to the feeling that everything will be over soon. Even though I didn't practice much and I should have organized my slides a bit more, I think that I did alright. I was pretty nervous and thought that I would freeze up a bit, but I only managed to fuck up some really easy grammar and kanji stuff. I know better but I think I was just a bit nervous. All in all it went alright, which is fine by me.
Probably the biggest mistake that I made was using the word 忠告 (warning / advice, in the context of 'correcting someone's mistakes or flaws' instead of アドバイス (advice, with no special implications) when talking about suggestions to the employees to make the next internship go smoothly. So it ended up sounding quite a bit harsher than I intended. I seem to make a lot of these mistakes, but I think that there isn't much more you can do besides using words to get a better sense of their implications. I don't want to sound like it's OK to be ignorant, but mistakes like these don't bug me since I can learn from them.
I went to Den Den Town for the first time in a while last weekend. Seeing the collection of old games and systems owned collectively by Drew, Nick, Tim, and Kevin sort of got me thinking about old games more. I thought that I sort of gave up on old stuff a while ago, but I forgot how fun it can be to actually get an old system set up and get some stuff for it. You can feel more of a connection to the past in Japan, and especially with old video games. The graveyard of old game consoles in Super Potato connects with me somehow, even if I haven't seen half of them before.
When you think of it, the oldest stuff in these stores is maybe around twenty-five years old or so. A lot of these games are maybe ten or fifteen years old. That's a bit of time, but from the perspective of a human lifetime or history that's really nothing. I can't help but feeling that this constant influx of media that we feed ourselves has sped up our perceptions of time. If we just look at the game machines, the very medium that we use, the passage of time seems abnormally fast. I suppose most things are transient, especially in entertainment, but videogames seem abnormally so.
Since I wasn't looking for older games or systems I just filtered this part of Den Den Town out when I went earlier. Once I looked there was plenty of this stuff in the same places where I always went. There aren't as many good deals as in Akihabara, but if you look around you can find a few. I'm thinking about maybe getting a PC Engine Duo since Drew's was so cool and it seems like there are some decent games for it.
I did a presentation on my internship today, which just added to the feeling that everything will be over soon. Even though I didn't practice much and I should have organized my slides a bit more, I think that I did alright. I was pretty nervous and thought that I would freeze up a bit, but I only managed to fuck up some really easy grammar and kanji stuff. I know better but I think I was just a bit nervous. All in all it went alright, which is fine by me.
Probably the biggest mistake that I made was using the word 忠告 (warning / advice, in the context of 'correcting someone's mistakes or flaws' instead of アドバイス (advice, with no special implications) when talking about suggestions to the employees to make the next internship go smoothly. So it ended up sounding quite a bit harsher than I intended. I seem to make a lot of these mistakes, but I think that there isn't much more you can do besides using words to get a better sense of their implications. I don't want to sound like it's OK to be ignorant, but mistakes like these don't bug me since I can learn from them.
I went to Den Den Town for the first time in a while last weekend. Seeing the collection of old games and systems owned collectively by Drew, Nick, Tim, and Kevin sort of got me thinking about old games more. I thought that I sort of gave up on old stuff a while ago, but I forgot how fun it can be to actually get an old system set up and get some stuff for it. You can feel more of a connection to the past in Japan, and especially with old video games. The graveyard of old game consoles in Super Potato connects with me somehow, even if I haven't seen half of them before.
When you think of it, the oldest stuff in these stores is maybe around twenty-five years old or so. A lot of these games are maybe ten or fifteen years old. That's a bit of time, but from the perspective of a human lifetime or history that's really nothing. I can't help but feeling that this constant influx of media that we feed ourselves has sped up our perceptions of time. If we just look at the game machines, the very medium that we use, the passage of time seems abnormally fast. I suppose most things are transient, especially in entertainment, but videogames seem abnormally so.
Since I wasn't looking for older games or systems I just filtered this part of Den Den Town out when I went earlier. Once I looked there was plenty of this stuff in the same places where I always went. There aren't as many good deals as in Akihabara, but if you look around you can find a few. I'm thinking about maybe getting a PC Engine Duo since Drew's was so cool and it seems like there are some decent games for it.