都心でのハーフのイメージ

友達のマーシャが行った街頭インタビューがようつべにアップされてます。確かに２０年前とは結構違う。今の田舎だとどんな感じなんだろ？

 

 

http://ameblo.jp/marcialise/

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Familymart entrance melody remixed!

This should be familiar to those living in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.

ドラクエ９攻略

本編ではあっさりボス倒せちゃうし、ストーリーも一本道でダンジョンは仕掛け無し。駄作かと思われたドラクエ９、ところがどっこいクリア後の世界は広くて、やり込み要素が宝の地図、クエスト、練金、旧作のボス倒しと多く、しかも発売から１年間はアイテムやクエストがオンライン配信される。

という事で本編ではあまり使わなかったけど、クリア後の世界では役に立ってくれてる充実してる攻略サイト、フィールド上で拾えるアイテム付の世界地図、そしてとても重宝してる宝の地図サイトです。

この画像、おもろいけどフェイクね

Robot Baseball Players Can Pitch and Bat

Out of Japan, there’s a baseball player who has an edge like no other: a fastball-pitching, homer-hitting robot.

The pitching robot fires into the strike zone 90% of the time. It currently throws a plastic foam ball at 25 miles per hour, with hopes to later improve its speed to 93 mph. The team that designed the robot are planning to move the bot’s range of motion beyond fastballs into curveballs and spitballs.

The batting robot hits pitches in the strike zone almost 100% of the time, and does not swing at pitches outside the strike zone. The robots resemble cars with arms rather than human forms.

“The demand level of the robotics technology of each robot is very high,” University of Tokyo professor Masatoshi Ishikawa said. “What was difficult was to create a mechanism to satisfy such a high level of demand.”

http://www.weirdasianews.com/2009/08/01/baseball-robot-throws-hits-fastballs/

Ai Kago + Public Enemy + Anime

Former Morning Musume Ai Kago is singing a couple of classic anime songs on a compilation and they’re gonna be produced by none other than Public Enemy. What is this world coming to?!  😛

Ai Kago back in her Morning Musume days.

Anime songs she is covering are “Himitsu no Akko-chan”:

and “Lum no Love Song” (Lum’s Love Song) from Urusei Yatsura:

Admittedly I’m curious about what the songs will sound like in the end, but there’s no way Public Enemy (or most likely just Terminator X?) knows who Kago or Morning Musume are, or the anime songs in question at all, haha.

It’s about time

Japan’s PM ‘to call August vote’

Japan’s embattled Prime Minister, Taro Aso, is to call an election for 30 August, officials from his party said.

His office said he had agreed the date with his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and coalition partner, if bills already before parliament were passed first.

The Kyodo news agency reported that Mr Aso had told party lawmakers parliament would be dissolved on 21 July.

The move comes after Mr Aso’s ruling coalition suffered a crucial defeat in local elections in the capital, Tokyo.

The opposition Democratic Party (DPJ) won 54 seats to 38 for LDP, ending four decades of dominance in the assembly.

Finally, Japanese people stood up for change, the LDP’s been in power for so long that just cleansing the eternal corruption will be a welcome change, and this result should be an indicator for a DPJ takeover of the Diet (though, DPJ is a mess of its own and they may not gain majority and force the government to form an unwieldy coalition.)

Hotto Peppa

Initially annoying, but now catchy ads for Hot Pepper, a free coupon magazine, by Kaela Kimura and the Peanuts gang.

ついったー

自分も最近使い始めたTwitter （とTumblr）だけど、こんな研究がされてました。

After examining some 300,000 Twitter accounts, a Harvard Business School professor reported last week that 10 percent of the service’s users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. The study dovetails with recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen asserting that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Both findings suggest that, thus far, Twitter has been considerably better at signing up users than keeping them.

ハーバード・ビジネス・スクールの教授によるTwitter ３０万アカウント分の研究によると、１割のつぶやきユーザがコンテンツの９割を作成しているそうです。これは８０：２０の法則とかあるから、それほど驚く事ではないかな。で、ニールセン社の研究によると６割のユーザが次の月には、もうつぶやいてないそうです。まあ、他の無料ウェブサービスと比べるとどういう感じなのかは分からないけど。

ラヴドライブ

ハーフお笑いコンビのラヴドライブの映像です。ハーフじゃないと面白さが半減…じゃなければいいんだけど、ハーフだと面白さ倍増なような気がするｗ

Utada’s US foray, part 2

Hikaru Utada (Wiki, the number of languages is impressive) is the most popular singer in Japan, and has sold over 50 million records worldwide (though most of that is in Japan and some in East Asia).

After a long and successful career in the Japanese and East Asian markets, she has tried to penetrate the biggest pop music market in the world, the US (she’s born and partially raised in NYC so she is a native English speaker).

Her US debut album EXODUS in 2004 was a dud, topping the Billboard charts at 160. She has just released her second all English album aimed at the US market, This Is The One. And she has earned a network TV appearance on CBS’s 2nd Cup.

I gave the album a listen at my local HMV, and unfortunately her second all English offering is very similar in flavour to her debut effort. Her voice is extremely well suited for J-Pop but not the US Top 40. And her naturally bilingual wordplay makes her (especially early) Japanese albums great, but she can’t unleash this aspect in a monolingual album.

This Is The One has entered the Billboard Album charts at #69, which is an improvement from her debut album, we’ll see if this is the peak or she can gain word of mouth cred and air play to move up the charts. She also violates my sampling rules by heavily sampling Ryuichi Sakamoto’s classic tune Merry Christmas Mr.Lawrence. I’m all for sampling, but not when the new song basically freerides on the coattails of the original (even though this is sort of like a tribute/remix). Unfortunately, for me, her recent Japanese album was rather soppy and lame as well, so she hasn’t produced anything that I really like in a while. Maybe she needs to marry another guy who could be her father?  😛