Monthly Archives: December 2008

There She Is!!! Final

Published December 29, 2008
After several years, the charming little Korean series created by SamBakZa involving a Cat and Rabbit has come to a close. It’s a series of animated shorts with little-to-no dialogue that paints a thoughtful social and cultural message. What happens when two people from different races fall in love?
Posted in Other | 8 Comments

Luminescent Mushrooms

Published December 24, 2008
Known as ‘Heavenly light mushrooms’, these bioluminescent fungi are not our usual shade of sapphire blue found often found in the deep sea, but an eerie emerald green colour. Just in time for Christmas then. They are Japan’s Mycena lux-coeli mushrooms, found in the Southern Wakayama prefecture.
Posted in Bioluminescence | 15 Comments

Christmas Dating in Japan

Published December 20, 2008
Illuminations, fashionable restaurants, Christmas cake, KFC, omnipresent Santa Claus avatars, Disneyland and the infamous love hotels. For many people in Japan, Christmas Day in Japan is Valentine’s Day, take two.
Posted in Japan | 40 Comments

Website v3

Published December 14, 2008
Finally! After a week of tinkering and tweaking (and tweeting, for that matter), my website (formerly Knowing Nothing) is re-born! This is the third incarnation of the site, codenamed ‘Kurage’ (just because codenames sound cool!). The site has been completely overhauled structurally! Read on for explanation of everything (including a secret feature!) and how I […]
Posted in Design & Web | 33 Comments

JLPT1 2008 – The Aftermath

Published December 10, 2008
After several months of preparation, the 2008 JLPT level 1 finally went down on Sunday. Even after my serious bouts of cramming, creating numerous Anki decks, audio files and learning over 1200 words in just two short months, I feel that I have fallen short of the 70% pass mark.
Posted in Journal | 20 Comments

QR Codes

Published December 6, 2008
Have you heard of QR (Quick Response) codes? I came across them in Japan but didn’t realise it was possible to create your own! You can store things like URLs, email addresses or phone numbers in these little barcode blocks, but reading them yourself is a bit of a challenge.
Posted in Other | 24 Comments

CSS image rollovers

Published December 3, 2008
You may have noticed in the past few weeks some small changes on the website. The main update was in giving my header links rollover images, but this was not quite as simple as in the old days of HTML and Javascript. Now there are all sorts of usability issues and web standards to conform […]
Posted in Design & Web | 10 Comments