When opportunity knocks, you either answer the door, or you light up your internet connection and spank away your sorrows.

 This is from 30 Sleeps, which has some really good writing and inspirational stuff. Even talks about meeting girls, contrasting the pick-up artist methodology with a "get a life first" mode that makes a whole lot of sense.

Great articles on language learning over at Fluent in 3 Months, one very breathtaking post on comfort and tips that I need to apply to my everyday (actually resonates with the social skydiving post mentioned on 30 Sleeps), and another one that I will need to muse on, "Stop being shy!" Reminds me of all the people who introduce themselves as 人見知り over there. Entertaining thoughts of doing my first serious E->J translation since that translation class at Waseda with this.

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Why We Procrastinate

1. Fear of success.
 Success comes with its own strings attached. Landing your dream job might involve relocating to a new city. Your promotion might alienate some of your co-workers. And dedicating yourself to the pursuit of happiness might require letting go of the people in your life that drag you down.

Definitely felt this one when it comes to job searching... and house searching... and email replying...

Procrastination is the Governor of the State of Boredom. It wants to rule you, hold you down, and keep you from reaching your potential. It feeds on your fears and encourages you to keep talking in tomorrows. But by accepting that now is never the right time, you’ll start leveraging your present circumstances for future gains. By acknowledging that you might make mistakes, even making failure a requirement, you’ll experience the benefits of imperfection. And by using action to clarify your goals, rather than ready-aim-aim-aiming, you’ll have taken the most crucial step towards living your ideal life.

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Reading an article from here before I go to bed.
Creating a "currently reading" list on Wordpress
Go through this blog for particle physics in Japanese
Hilarious commercial on Shuukatsu -- gotta prepare for interview in both English and Japanese though!
A couple more Japanese blogs that I wanna keep an eye on.
Collection of Japanese folk tales with interactivity! -- still gotta listen to those kids stories and pick out good ones to tell the kids! This is actually really baller!!!
Start a lang-8 account and rack up some points to trade for corrections.
Livestation apparently has around 15 Japanese tv channels!

This post from Tofugu has some interesting ideas about role-playing in language learning situations -- kind of ironic that there was just a colloquium series about this type of thing. :)

I always meant to watch this "English Teacher" series  but never got around to it. That and catching up with Wong Fu (dunno if it's worth it anymore...)

全日本コール選手権. Look this up on youtube for some interesting calls hahaha. 


Going to have to keep a better eye on the Japan Subculture Research Center and Jake Adelstein (as well as Polaris Project Japan...) 


Interesting article on development of cute writing in Japan in the 70's, and a throwback to learning to read squiggles in Classical Japanese class.... wonder what came in between and now, after them! Wonder if there's anything interesting going on at Neojaponisme...