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Okay, I lied a little… this nabemono (Japanese hot pot) was made on Girl’s Day (Hina-matsuri), but that’s really the only thing about it that makes it a “Girl’s Day nabemono”. It was still very delicious!

I used chicken thighs, maitake (hen-of-the-woods mushroom), egg dumplings, pollack dumplings, taro, konnyaku (devil’s tongue jelly), gobo (burdock root), negi (Welsh onion) and hakusai (Napa cabbage). For the broth, I used 3/4c mirin, 3/4c of shoyu and an unmeasured amount of sake

This made a ton of food and only took about 45 minutes from start to finish. いただきます！

Today I purchased five books in paper format. The books had been used previously by other people and discarded in a discount used book store. If a book has been read, it is considered used. If a photograph has been seen, is it considered used as well? Anyway, contrary to my belief that used media resellers are doing the artist more a disservice than media pirates, I bought them at Half Price Books because my current e-reader is my phone. As soon as I remedy this, I will remedy that, but I digress. Here’s what I got:

Three “Slice Of Life” manga; Marmalade Boy #7, Marmalade Boy #8 and Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days…

… and two “cyberpunk”(I think) novels:  Heavy Weather, by Bruce Sterling, and Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

As many times as I have seen the film Blade Runner , this is my first time reading Do Androids Dream…, the classic it was built on. I am about a chapter into it and I’m surprised at the startling differences between the two stories already.  I am also trying to read more of Bruce Sterling’s stuff because the man can seriously write some cyberpunk.  (He is @bruces on twitter if you wish to follow him).

I will prolly be reviewing these as I finish reading them :3.

Nintendo is advertising Super Monkey Ball for the Wii, on my fruit. Is this honestly a lucrative marketing angle?  Two out of three stickers on my bunch of bananas say yes!

Click on bananas for a close-up, I double-dog dare you.

Also, here is a link to the Chiquita website… apparently there is a contest.

What a fascinating world we live in. What can be more cyberpunk then a corporate marketing tie-in with fruit?

So, I’m always on the lookout for new (あたらしい) and interesting（おもしろい）ways to study Japanese, and I found one I want to share with you guys. I’ve seen this advertised on dannychoo.com and I must say; I’m an instant fan. It’s called iKnow, and it’s a componant within smart.fm. I’m not really sure how they are related, but I created a profile, chose a lesson to study (Japanese Core 2000 series) and clicked on the iKnow button. This launched a built in Flash application that acts pretty much like a free Rosetta Stone clone.The application tracks your study progress, shows usage of characters in a sentence, translations in kana and English, stroke order and spelling tests (in Romaji).

I started researching Japanese IDM/glitch artists and I’ve stumbled on two that I really like. If you’re into Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Autechre etc. you’ll like Ryoji Ikeda and Aoki Takamasa as well! Glitch is seriously my new drug.

This first video is made by a fan, and I love it. This is “Data.Microhelix” from the album “Dataplex” by Ryoji Ikeda.

Buy Ryoji Ikeda’s music here!

This is Aoki Takamasa’s “Mirabeau”, off his album “Parabolica”.  The audiovisual display is by Ryoichi Kurokawa.

Buy Aoki Takamasa’s music here!