October 31 2008
All is splendid in the land of the rising sun. Angie & I hooked up with our jet-setting friend Zach
when we got here, had some drinks, some gyoza and soup, and passed
out…then woke up at 5am and hit the Tsukiji fish market (might as
well when we were jet-lagged anyway). It was everything you can hope
it can be. We ate fish that might have been still breathing. Oh man.
A little market-going, scampered around electric town (memory cards
are dirt cheap) said goodbye to zach, lunched at this crazy delicious
tempura bar, and trained to the outskirts to visit the ghibli museum
which is a wacked out animated fantasy wonderland. the we passed the
fuck out. way early. oh yeah. also, the subway map that looks like a
ball of yarn…best subway in the world.
now to some tea…
also, as you can see, i havent found the apostrophe on this
newfangled japanese keyboard.
who needs an apostrophe when you have squiggles everywhere anyway.
tomorrow we:re off to the
monastery…
shitsureishimasu,
s
Comment / Tags: japan / Trackback
October 24 2008
And, for an easily related story, a man who makes sculptures out of bundles of chopsticks. A tale of love between him and a patron-less broom shop owner? Hell yeah.
Comment / Tags: inspiration, art, japan / Trackback
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According to the Tokyo Times, this Tokyo broom store hasn’t had a customer since 9/2/72, and even that customer wanted a hand broom which they could not provide. Sad, in an awesome sort of way. What a great character/setting to frame a story…who owns this shop?
Comment / Tags: inspiration, setting, character, retail, japan, brooms / Trackback
October 23 2008
What a great source of paranoia and fear for a character.
Comment / Tags: inspiration, science, fear / Trackback
October 3 2008
This was generated on Wordle.net, using the Book of CLAV text as input. Aside from being neat-looking, this would actually be an interesting visualizer for looking at your own writing habits and vocabulary crutches, or to specifically hone some subliminal messages into your text through subconscious repetition. From their site:
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Comment / Tags: inspiration, words, tools, visualizer / Trackback
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This is really cool. Reminds me a bit of a Ted talk I saw with The Jansen who made these giant (wooden? plastic?) mechanical beach-walkers, which already is an interesting setup for a story. I can’t help but also think of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics here and wonder what type of story he would either tell of these creatures, or of their genesis. Or, of course, their impending war! Thank you BoingBoing.
Comment / Tags: inspiration, science / Trackback
October 2 2008
Cute, but I think it could be done better. As in, tied more directly with actual science. And then applied to a character who is given these "implants" and put in a taxing situation beyond his wherewithall to adapt to. Imagine if you had a new sense all of a sudden, that ilicited strong emotional reactions, yet you didn’t know yet what it was sensing. Interesting. Click the pic for more.
Comment / Tags: inspiration, science, mind / Trackback
October 1 2008
Super-rough mind-dump for a two-page statement of plans that will accompany my application to the Wallace Stegner Fellowship this year.
Comment / Tags: in-progress, education, stegner
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This is starting to take shape. This “draft” is filled with notes, but the structure and voice is there. It will soon be a presentable draft.
Comment / Tags: fiction, writing, draft, in-progress, molasses
