Side Notes and Thoughts

Oranges
I love orange soda in the USA. Ask my parents. Everytime we go the the pizza buffet, I always get orange fanta. So one day I bought myself two hotdogs and an orange fanta, brought them home, and I took a good hearty sip from the fanta. Hmmm...This doesn't have the kick American Fanta has... I thought. So I decided not to drink Japanese Fanta anymore because it tasted like waterdowned regular orange fanta.

Later, when I went to school, I ate some weirdo orange/grapefruit and told Yukiko. "That's a Japanese orange." She said. So there you have it. Japanese oranges taste like oranges crossbred with grapefruits. And thats why I don't like Japanese orange Fanta. But grape is fine.

Soda
While on the topic of soda, Japan doesn't have rootbeer...like ever. Coke can also mean Pepsi or Coke. And there is no Diet Coke. There is only Coke Zero. But Japan does have tasty Melon soda and wonderful Grape soda (tastes like American grape soda). I even had a Melon Float (like a rootbeer float).

Corey and I were perusing (oh ho ho, big words here) a "recycle shop" (aka antique/junk shop) and found Casey's family an awesome wall scroll and some mythical rootbeer. Its only 40yen a can (so...41cents) so we bought two and were like "SCORE!" because Americans love their rootbeer. Later that day we had rootbeer floats and traded manly stories while watching football after killing a bison with only a butterknife.

Team Fortress 2 (non gamers, skip this)
So there have been some massive updates to TF2 and I was like "I dont really even play TF2 but I gotta get in on this!" so I downloaded the 6gig game in a 1/2hour and turned the graphics to vector. Turns out even in vector graphics (thats a joke), TF2 is unplayable on this laptop. Sooooo...so sad, too bad, life goes on. I'll live without playing a game I've never gotten into.

The Listener
LOOK AT THIS! LOOK AT IT! Fox climbed up to the #1 TV station in Japan. So now they are rewarding Japan with a new American show premier (as in its English but dubbed over in Japanese, but I can turn it to English so hahaha) "The Listener". This show is great. I loved it. I've been watching "House" and "Joey" and (god forbid) "American Idol" (turns out the Japanese can vote) and never felt suspense. But this show is different...somehow. For one thing, I like the main character (for different reasons than I like House) even if Tobi Logan is bad at making believable lies. I could come up with some better ones.

"How'd you know about the fire?"
"I smelled it."
"From 3 blocks?"
"Yes."

This is actual dialog. I would have said, "Turns out your friend is really the arsonist (spoiler) and spilled his guts to me before jumping off a building."

You see, Tobi can read minds. He can't remember his past but aparently his mother had the power and went insane by the voices. Tobi is worried this will happen to him but with special training from some doctor (the only guy who knows his secret), he manages okay.

This is World of Darkness gold! Supernatural powers mix with raw human nature and police breathe down Tobi's neck left and right. He busts into houses using a skeleton key and has a buddy who can hack computers. A main/side character knows a pawnshop dude who knows a guy who sells illegal firearms. Its pure WoD and I love it. I can imagine campaigns like this going on and what rolls the characters make and if the actions are realistic or not.

The Listener will come to America...after Japan...but you better watch it >:O
HOLY CRAP, I'm missing Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire! ;-;

Infomercials
So I flip on the TV at a perfectly reasonable time and a commercial is on. Suddenly I realize 10 minutes have passed and its still the same commercial. You've just walked into The Twilight Zone. Who puts infomercials on at 3pm? And how long do they last? I'm a patient guy. It usually goes "Hmmm this is taking a while" around 5-10 minutes then "Holy crap this is long" where I choose to bail or keep going for another 10 minutes. Repeat repeat repeat until I bail. I can wait hours for stupid stuff. I'm a computer dude, I wait hours on stupid stuff regularly. Not only that, but I wait hours on stupid stuff I could have avoided easily but chose to mess with knowing I'd wait hours.

The point is, I'm tired of seeing American commercials with horrible Japanese dubs in the middle of my unknown anime shows I cant understand.