That said, I ought to get one big rambly post out of the way and then get on with what people really want to read about if my referral links are to be believed, which is mostly Pokemon characters in compromising positions.

That is tarring my readers with a rather wide brush, so I will relent a bit.  You may be perverts, but you have a much wider range of interests than simply Pokemon.

But I digress.

Anyway, the first week of our trip was spent in London and I’m very glad for that.  It’s probably the city that I’ve been in with the greatest sense of History-with-a-capital-H; Kyoto is just as old but doesn’t go in quite as much for slapping dates on everything.  There’s something about wandering through Westminster Abbey, for example, and looking down to see that the memorial slab you’re standing on has a barely-visible date in the 1500s, and for a guy who went to college to study languages, there’s a particular impact to walking into the British Museum and coming face-to-face with the freakin’ Rosetta Stone.

Then too, if you happened to be a member of the idle rich and wanted to spend every night of your life attending operas or plays or concerts or what have you, London would be an excellent city to do it in.  The buses and subways are lined with posters for upcoming events and performances, and even if some of them are in questionable taste there’s something to be said for quantity.

…OK, perhaps there are SOME lines humanity was not meant to cross…

But, putting aside the history and the culture, the great thing about London is that it’s full of all the things that you really want to see when you visit the UK.  You’ve got your red double-decker buses, your black cabs, your Changing Of The Guard, takeaway fish and chips, a Big Damned Clocktower, a Biggest Damned Ferris Wheel, Piccadilly Circus lit up in neon, Harrods covered in lights, the Tube, Forbidden Planet, congestion fees, economical Vauxhall saloons, the occasional Reliant Robin still running about in the wild, the rare thrill of seeing an Aston Martin gliding by…

…It is possible that I have watched too much Top Gear.

But I did see a Reliant Robin, though it wasn’t in the process of being shot into space by three guys with more explosives than common sense:

On the other hand, it is a staggeringly expensive city to be a tourist in, there’s no two ways about it.  I have spent a fair bit of time in Tokyo, which people call an expensive place to visit, and there is no comparing the two.  It is unfortunately very easy to look at a price tag, think “well, that’s not too expensive”, and order, say, a 2.50 diet coke before you do the mental math and realize you’re paying 4 dollars for 8 ounces of cola, and a taxi ride you pay for with a single 20 pound note likewise seems quite reasonable until you do the maths.

It is also tremendously inconvenient if you are out for a day’s shopping and have no place to put your parcels, as there seem to be no coin lockers anywhere.  To be fair, coin lockers have largely disappeared from the American landscape as well; the usual excuse given is “terrorism” but I couldn’t help but notice the plethora of “left luggage” services who would be happy to hold your items at 7 pounds per bag per day.

That, and the city shuts down almost entirely at 7 o’clock at night.  That’s not an exaggeration; the shops and attractions close their doors and bring down the metal shutters at just about the time where things are getting going in, say, Los Angeles.

This is probably a boon if you happen to live in London and want to get off work at 5 and go down the pub by 6 and stay there the rest of the night, but if you are a tourist visiting London you should be aware that you will not get a full day’s worth of London out of any given day.

Also, the Tube, while very cool, tended to have a bad history of having stations out of order or down for construction or possibly on fire over the week we were trying to make use of it.

So there were some bits that were less fun than others, but I’m still going to give the city as a whole a B+.  Do something about the shop hours and the general reliability of public transport and that’s looking more like an A- which is a pretty good place to be in my book.

Part of that is that I am quite recovered from the days when I was a raving comic book fanboy with a three-or-four hundred dollar a month habit, spread between following 20 or so series, buying graphic novels and toys, and occasionally scouring bins of lower-grade Silver age comics for damaged, but still deeply desirable, treasures.

Part of it is also that I have seen the glory that is Comic Market – and, after that, nothing else seems to compare.  Seven football fields – and, understand for a moment, I am entirely unsure of the dimensions of a “football field”, but it is a description I have heard and one which I believe expresses the scale of the event even if one is, like me, not sure exactly how big that is – of nothing but fan-produced comics and assorted goods tends to dwarf any other event, even the venerable San Diego Comic Convention, an event which my wife and I attended for six years running, and an event which itself dwarfs the one which we wound up at this weekend.

To get back, then, to the point, an animal which has thus far eluded me, but which will now be brought, bloodily, to ground, a primitive stone implement lodged deeply within its vital organs, this last weekend was spent, with my wife and a pair of friends, in Seattle, specifically at the Emerald City Comic Con.

I think that, paradoxically, I enjoyed it more than previous events solely because I have largely freed myself from the days of worrying about the monthly trials and tribulations of spandex-clad avengers of justice.  Put simply; whenever I try to catch up on the current status of the DC universe, I either buy a few graphic novels or download the latest Big Damned Event, read through them, and am cured of the urge for some while.

That isn’t to say that it wasn’t fun watching the enthusiasm that is still present among comic fans.  It’s plain to see, from the number and quality of costumes present and the masses of fans crowding the aisles, that there are a lot of people still reading and appreciating the offerings of the comic book companies, and I am not about to discount their fandom.

But, for me, I’m pretty much done.

The occasional – and when I say occasional, they have actually been far more frequent then I have any right to expect – trip to Japan has also cured me of my need to buy anything and everything I see that is in any way related to favorite anime or video games.  I found myself looking at toys, artbooks, and the like, comparing the prices on display to the prices I would expect to pay at Mandarake or K-books in Tokyo, and putting them back on the shelves.

So when I say I had fun, and this may be odd because a comics convention is, in very large part, about Buying Stuff, it comes even though – or perhaps even partially because – I didn’t buy a lot of stuff.  I wound up buying the most recent Penny Arcade book and a shirt from their booth,  a “Jenova’s Witness” shirt from a booth that may, or may not, have been a vgcats booth, but which certainly featured ample vgcats merchandise, and a T-shirt with the odd-but-appropriate description of “Cosmonaughty” which I will probably never find an excuse to wear but which sucked me in with the combination of WW2-Bomber-art-style-cheesecake and Soviet-Propaganda-Stylings.

Images of my new fashion statements follow:

And that was, basically, it.

Oh, I bought a small die-cast metal Cylon Raider, classic version of course.

It was a far cry from the glory days of going to Comic Con, but at the same time it meant that I wound up with a few things that will be read, worn, or enjoyed, not lost in a sea of Stuff I Bought At The Con.

I also found the Pink Godzilla booth.  Now, Pink Godzilla is one of those halfway-legendary retro-import-general-good-stuff shops, and the booth attendees certainly seemed to know their stuff, but I couldn’t think of anything I’d been particularly needing until one of them tried to recommend me a PSP game, at which point I remembered that I had actually wanted to get one of the PC Engine Collections – the one with Sapphire, because I like shooters but I don’t like spending $400 on original PC Engine games – the last time I’d been in Japan but I had been unable to find it, and after you’re done digesting this particular run-on sentence, you may assume that I enquired after it.

The Pink Godzilla employee, to his credit, knew just what I was looking for, but was unable to locate me a copy.  He did, however, provide me with their business card and thus their street address.

I don’t know Seattle, really, so I didn’t know how far it was from the con to the shop, but after leaving the con and stopping for refreshments, we enquired of a somewhat-surly barista and were assured that it was a mere 15 minutes walk away.

Now, my wife is familiar with the sort of death marches I tend to inflict upon people, but the friends who had suggested the whole thing and done most of the heavy lifting in getting us to the con were not as familiar and therefore offered no resistance when I asked them if we could all saunter over to this shop, a mere 15 minutes walk away.

It turned out that 15 minutes in barista-walking-speed was well over a half hour in human walking speed, but we eventually found the shop and it was quite a nice little affair – very obviously modeled after your typical Akihabara shop, and featuring an excellent selection of older titles – and the one I’d actually come for as well.

So, after scouring the best shops Akihabara and Den Den Town had to offer, I found the game I’d been looking for, a mere 200 miles from home, and for a mere 30 bucks + tax.  Incidentally, it’s quite hard but was well worth the purchase price.

And now my friends are familiar not only with conventions, inasmuch as this was their first experience with such, but also with the kind of death marches I inflict on quite innocent souls.  In this case, at least, it wasn’t my fault.

We celebrated with some Asian-inspired food at an eatery by the promising name of Wild Ginger, an experience which resulted in a general thumbs-up from all present, and then I retired to the hotel room for some down time while everyone else went off and had fun involving alcohol.

The evening ended – after I got some down time in and the party reassembled – with a well-spent couple of hours at the local Gameworks, which incidentally featured a truly godawful Saturn-era-Sega-Inspired mural, reproduced below for your pleasure.

I would go on at length about the events of the next day, because they were quite enjoyable and included ferry riding and crumpet munching, but honestly, there have to be limits to how long I can go on about myself and my doings.

Sorry that it’s a little fuzzy. I think the text is still readable – and really, the image is pretty self-explanatory.

These weren’t that hard to find, so I picked him up two packs of trading cards and passed them to him through my wife. I heard back that he’d liked them a lot.

This year, I was sitting in the hotel on a Sunday morning watching morning TV programs and getting ready to head out to Comiket.

“Pokemon Sunday” came on. This seems to be a live action variety show featuring bouncy, energetic hosts and the voices of assorted Pokemon. I really can’t tell you more than that – I am not familiar with the series. Let me put it this way – I can, 9 times out of 10, accurately identify Pikachu.

However, it was kind of fun to watch in a “I have no idea what’s going on, but man, those Japanese are good at getting their merchandising hooks into kids” way.

The first half of it seemed to be a presentation about the Tokyo Pokemon Center and all the stuff you could buy there. Oh, and also you could trade Pokemon with people. But mostly it was “Hey, look at all the cool stuff you can buy and how it ties into the new movie.”

At the end of the sales pitch program, they gave directions to the place, and I was a bit shocked to realize that it was apparently a 2 minute walk from the same train station I was taking to go everywhere else in Tokyo. With it being that close, I decided that I would check it out and – here’s the justification – I’d get my wife’s coworker’s kid some new Pokemon stuff, since I’d just watched a presentation on what the new hot stuff was and in theory I’d be helping him trump American first graders by having that stuff before they did.

So: Plan of attack. I stopped preparing for Comiket and walked over to the station. Then I picked the first small child I saw:

And I followed him and his father. I figured this was the easiest way to actually find the place.

They led me right to it, just before the doors opened. The line wasn’t too bad – I was maybe the 50th person in line. The rest of the line was entirely made up of small children and their parents. I felt a bit, I don’t know, conspicuous.

Inside was, um, a bit mad. I didn’t want to look too creepy, so I didn’t take photos, but it was a sea of kids dragging their parents from display to display.

I picked up about 3000 yen worth of trinkets – a couple of packs of the latest trading card series, a “Monster Ball” pokeball full of, I am sure, yummy candy, and a couple of pins. I figured, well, I’m here, I’ll get a pin for myself and one for this kid.

Then I fought my way to the cash registers – they put everything in a nice green Pokemon Center bag with a turtle-looking thing on it and added some free stickers – paid, and ran, not quite screaming. I found it kind of interesting that the Pokemon Center accepts Suica as a payment method. This is basically like being able to use your bus pass to buy stuff. If Japanese kids didn’t ride the train for free, I suspect that a lot of them would be blowing the month’s bus money at this place.

I got back to this fine country, took my pin out of the bag, and handed the rest to my wife with instructions to deliver it.

A few days later, I got this back. Apparently, while he had to ask his mom for help with spelling, the idea to write it and all the words were his own. I’m a bitter, cynical guy a lot of the time, but I found it cute enough to share with you all.

So – side benefit to my latest crazy trip to Japan: I made a kid’s day. I like that.

This lovely thing is the Himiko, designed by Leiji Matsumoto, and probably the coolest looking vehicle of any type I have ever enjoyed a ride in.

It’s a limited express boat, so it only stops at Asakusa, Daiba, and Toyosu. This is it approaching the Asakusa pier.

Apparently at night it’s all illuminated and glowey, which is possibly the only thing that could make it look cooler.

Once you’re onboard, the actual cruising down the river is pretty normal. There’s a running commentary track to tell you which of Tokyo’s bridges you’re passing under, point out interesting sights, that sort of thing. Mind you, it’s narrated by the crew of the Galaxy Express 999:

Lots of folks having their friends take pictures of them with the cardboard standees. Note that the captain of the boat, who you can see from behind at the top of the photo, not only gets to pilot the coolest boat on the river – he also gets to wear a cowboy hat while so doing.

I don’t know how many jobs rank higher than that, really.

Here’s a good view of the boat from the front, pulled into Daiba. It stops right under the “Decks” shopping mall before continuing to Toyosu, and this is as far as I went.

Ticket: About 1500 yen

Super-deformed toy version souvenir: 900 yen

Grinning like a maniac for most of an hour: Priceless.

Which I did, by the way, although I didn’t know it was 40 degrees out until I got back to the hotel and people were talking about it.

Stuff:

1) A small shoulder bag. You can put stuff in this. When you’re at the convention, someone will hand you a promotional bag with handles that you can use to shop with, or you can buy a bag with handles from the Comic Market supplies booth for 300 yen, but you will want something to bring your supplies with you.

I didn’t bring one with me from the US. Somehow, when I was packing, I forgot it. It’s all right, because I picked this one up at a bookstore in Shinjuku for 1000 yen and it’s actually a pretty decent bag. Several different zippered pockets and it can be made expandable by opening one long zipper that runs the length of the bag.

2) Lots of fluids. At least 1500ml of stuff to drink. 500ml of that should be water, because in addition to drinking it, you can pour it on:

3) A towel. This is not a cheesy Douglas Adams “know where your towel is” inside joke / rip off. This is deathly serious. Examine the following picture:

Do you see the happy Japanese people standing outside in 40 degree weather with wet towels on their heads? Do you want to be like the happy Japanese people and have a wet towel on your head? You NEED a towel. A combini will sell you a towel for like 200 yen. Buy one, and be happy with a wet towel on your head.

4) Painkiller. Bring some, buy some, you will need it.

5) Do you wear glasses? Do you want to be able to see through them after you’ve been outside sweating like a pig? You will want something to clean them with, and your shirt will be soaked wet and sweaty. Do not, by the way, be ashamed of being wet and sweaty, because the tiny little 40kg Japanese woman standing next to you in line will also be wet and sweaty even though she’s half your size and a native.

6) Chapstick.

7) Sunglasses.

8 ) A fan. You will not need to buy a fan. In the summer, go to any shopping center, and soon someone will hand you a promotional fan. Once you get into Comic Market, go to the “commercial” section (West halls, upstairs), put your fan in your bag, and someone will hand you a promotional fan advertising something anime related. If you want a bunch of fans, put that one in your bag, walk around a little bit, and someone else will notice your lack of fan and hand you another one. Repeat as much as you can stand, depending on how many fans you want.

9) A change purse, because you are going to wind up with a boatload of change during your time in Japan. Remember – no $1 or $5 equivalent bills. Buy something 1050 yen and pay for it in bills? You’ll get back 950 yen in change. That’s a 500, 4 100s, and a 50, and that assumes you didn’t buy something 1051 yen and wind up with some 1, 5, and 10 yen coins. Your change purse will bulk up fast.

I strongly recommend getting some 1000 yen bills and 500 and 100 yen coins before you go shopping at Comic Market. This isn’t necessary - I have bought something with a 10000 yen bill at Comiket and they’ve given me change – but it just seems polite to have some smaller stuff with you.

10) Some tissues. This is a weird thing about every general-tourist guidebook I’ve seen on Japan – they all say you’ll need tissues because public toilets don’t provide toilet paper. They also say that this isn’t a problem because if you walk around Shibuya for a few minutes, people will hand you lots of little packets of tissues.

These are both lies. At least, well, they are in my experience. I never went in to a public toilet that didn’t have toilet paper, and the people on the street handing out little packets of tissues will look at you, see that you’re not from around here and can’t read the advertising slogan on the packet, and not give you one. I’ve even gone up to a person who’s been trying and failing to distribute tissues and tried asking for a packet, and been rebuffed.

On the other hand, every once in a very great while, one of the people with the packets of tissue WILL be desperate enough to unload them that they WILL hand one to a foreigner. And the sheer horror-value of the thought of being in a toilet and finding out that they don’t supply paper is enough to make me say, it’s probably a good idea to keep trying until you actually have some tissues in your bag, just in case. Or you could buy some.

11) Last, and most important: A Suica. This little card puts Tokyo into EASY MODE. Instead of having to get different tickets for different transit systems or figuring out exactly what it will cost to get from point A to point C by way of transferring at point B, you just buy one of these things from a ticket vending machine for 2000 yen, which comes with a 1500 yen credit, and from then on you just swipe it past a sensor when entering a train station or getting on a bus, and then you swipe it again when you get off and it calculates how much you owe and deducts it. You can also put it back in to the same machine you bought it from and add money to it in 1000 yen increments, which is a GREAT way to get rid of all the change you pick up.

In addition, you can use it to buy stuff from train station vending machines and some shops. Even the Tokyo Pokemon Center takes Suica. I don’t know how much self control Japanese kids have, but I know that if I was 10 and I could buy toys and trading cards with MY bus pass, I would probably wind up having to walk a lot.

To sum up: Tokyo, easy mode, get a Suica and a towel and be happy.

At the time I was fairly dubious about this, but I figured I should try it out and see what happened.

Short version: note the ever-so-important “NTT DoCoMo” operator ID:

A couple of problems:

1) YES! It worked. To a point. That point being, I couldn’t make any international calls. Whenever I tried, I got a polite message, in English, from NTT DoCoMo, telling me that I could not make this call from this phone. I was able to receive calls from the US, however, using my US phone number, which meant that my very patient and forgiving wife WAS able to get in touch with me when I forgot to call her at a reasonable time. Being able to make LOCAL phone calls wasn’t much help, because in any case where I would have wanted to make a local phone call, it would have been considerably cheaper simply to use a pay phone.

2) For 4 incoming phone calls, total talk time approximately 32 minutes, I paid 77.13 in roaming charges.

So, yeah, it worked, and to be honest, it was worth it to me just to be reachable, but I thought I’d warn people.

We had planned to have my gamerspouse and his wife over to our place today to look at vacation photos, since we racked up about 4GB of photos on our recent trip to Alaska and, well, you need to show them to people to prove you went somewhere and didn’t just sit around the house watching TV all week.

Plan A: We’ll load all the photos on to the Mac mini we have hooked up to the HDTV in the front room, then display them using iPhoto. Great plan. We’ve never used iPhoto before, but it’s a Mac, right? It actually turned out to be pretty easy to deal with, just took a while to import the photos.

Complication: We get a call. It turns out they can’t come over because a family member had to be in the hospital the night before, so they want to stick close to home in case there are any problems.

This throws a wrench in my plans, because they don’t have a handy Mac mini hooked to their TV.

This calls for:

Plan B: We’ll burn them to a DVD-video. iPhoto even has a burn to DVD option. This renders for about two hours and makes a DVD. Unfortunately, it’s really not very useful since all the photos are displayed for 5 seconds and then fade to the next photo – there’s no way to quickly flip through photos. Also, it means that all the nice high res photos are now downsized to DVD resolutions.

This calls for:

Plan C: We’ll put them on the Acer laptop, grab an S-video cable, and hook it in to their TV. I try this at home. It doesn’t go well, but it works… if we don’t mind having the Windows Fax & Picture viewer UI on the screen all the time. If I try to go to full-screen slideshow mode, it forces all the pictures to the laptop display. Also, over S-video, the picture is even worse than playing them off a DVD-video. Not good. But: time is short and it’s taken over an hour just to get this far, so we deal with it and I pack the laptop over and we get on the road.

We get to their house and I start setting up for the photo display session.

Complication: Their HDTV has front composite and component inputs, no S-video inputs on the front. He goes to get a flashlight so we can fiddle around behind the thing and get the laptop hooked up, and I notice the big white box staring us in the face.

Naturally enough, he has an Xbox 360.

…wait… that’s a Media Center Extender…

…I have a Media Center laptop right here…

15 minutes later, I’ve downloaded the necessary Media Center Extensions, the laptop is talking to the 360, and we’re looking at our vacation photos in 1080-lines-of-resolution-glory.

If I’d thought about it, I could have just taken over a DVD-ROM of photos, since the 360 would have happily displayed the photos right off a DVD-ROM… or even a USB flash drive.

Moral of the story: Don’t casually dismiss the extra multimedia functions of the Xbox 360, because they can save you a lot of hassle if you actually remember them.

That’s not much of a moral, I admit. You can probably adapt it to your own circumstances.

In 1994 or thereabouts, Beaverton got a Japanese bookstore, and I would make periodic pilgrimages up to shop there, so it got a little less unique, and then in 1995 I moved to Los Angeles largely to be closer to Little Tokyo. In retrospect, you shouldn’t move 2000 miles to be closer to shopping when you have self control issues…

But, asides aside, things were pretty rough for the internationally-minded fanboy back then.

By way of contrast:

My father just got back from a month in China, including some time at a panda preserve and breeding center. He bought me a t-shirt from the panda preserve, and it is an awesome t-shirt. It has pandas doing tai-chi on it. It is super cool, and I would put up a picture, but it is unnecessary, because googling “panda tai chi” results in multiple hits from people who are offering to sell the same t-shirt, in child’s or adult sizes, world-wide from China.

This is not to say that I don’t appreciate his hand-carrying this super cool T-shirt back, or that I think it’s any less cool because I could have mail-ordered one, it’s just that, wow, the world seems a much smaller place noawadays.

Also: Let’s Learn Japanese Progress: 9/52