tangentbot

New format for tangentbot dot com

tangentbot — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:29:00 +0000

Good evening party people. I realize I haven’t updated here in a long time, but I’ve been trying to get all of my priorities straight. You see, I feel like maintaining a general “blog” type blog is too cumbersome, and frankly I’m bored with it. I’ve decided to focus my attention in two separate areas; music and Japanese food. As such, I’m putting together a Japanese food blog which will go live this week. The current “tangentbot dot com” site will then be re-tooled into a tangentbot-music-only place where I can stick my new songs, link to my albums (Cyclops’ Lament & You Are Used To This Kind Of Advertising) and not have it cluttered with recipes and rambling. I may create a general blog on down the road, but that is tentative at best. I really wanted to showcase two of my passions and past-times with two, well thought out sites.

Stay tuned for more info on this!

girl’s day nabemono (hot pot) 雛祭りの鍋物

tangentbot — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:12:13 +0000

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！

cyberpunk books and slice of life manga acquired

tangentbot — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:00:04 +0000

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.

super monkey ball + bananas = subversive marketing?

tangentbot — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 04:57:55 +0000

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?

japanese language tutorial on smart.fm and iKnow

tangentbot — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:00:18 +0000

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).

It’s fun and it really forces me to learn this stuff. It’s really good for Kanji recognition and vocabulary study so far. There are also JLPT grammar study courses, verb conjugation and sentence structure and more in-depth Kanji study available that are a part of smart.fm, but I’m not sure if there is an iKnow component for them – have to dig a bit deeper and see what I can find. I’m really excited to have another tool to work with, as I have already learned quite a bit from it so far.