To celebrate Christmas I’ve decided to give Knowing Nothing a festive theme! I had a lot of fun experimenting in Photoshop with wreaths and creating snow effects.

For anyone who is interested, I used the tutorial from DavroDigital to create the snowing effect at the top and basically played around with various images to create the wreath. The little susuwatari shivering away at the top was drawn from scratch, based on an image from Hayao Miyazaki’s Ghibli film ‘Spirited Away’ ^_^. Apologies if it takes a little bit longer than usual to load – all those extra colours made the file rather big!

I’ve been listening to a lot of Japanese music recently. Jpopsuki.com operates a forum and torrent service which has a lot of contributors. One particular torrent uploaded is called ‘Oricon’, named after the music rankings on the Japanese Oricon website. For those with an interest in Japanese music but aren’t in Japan or can’t listen to a Japanese radio station, make an account on Jpopsuki and search for the ‘Oricon’ torrent to download and hear the latest in the Japanese music charts!

Here is one of the songs I’ve had flowing in the background many nights recently. I’m not a fan of R&B music, but I quite like this song. The lyrics are interesting too. It’s about a couple who are physically apart sending each other letters, each singing in turn, trying to express their feelings.

Download SoulJa – Koko ni Iru yo (feat. Aoyama Thelma)

That’s all for today. I have my Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level 2 on Sunday so a few more practice tests are in order! Good luck to all those taking it!