Oh, Summer...

That time of the year when the heat is just hot enough to make you drench your shirt in sweat while sitting still in your desk, but not hot enough to kill you. When the air is filled with the sound of large bugs rubbing their legs together. Bugs so large that if they were to fly up and land on my face, the sheer shock alone probably would kill me. The time of the year when the children are gone from school, but for some reason I apparently need to remain behind; to hold down the fort and guard the English room or whatever.

This time of the year in Japan is known as Natsu Yasumi. It’s basically Summer Vacation. My Japanese could be better, so I’m not sure the exact literal translation here. I know Yasumi means Rest, or Time Off, and therefore Natsu apparently means “Drive Whitey Fucking Crazy From All The”.

I sit in my desk for the last week of July and entire month of August, 8 hours a day, in sweltering heat, with officially Fuck All to Do.

I’m not alone. Every teacher does this, but they seem to follow a discreet schedule that I’m not privy to. They drift in around 10 or 12, and a few of them maybe leave at 1 or 2. Are they taking those other hours off using vacation time? Is there a system in place to log these hours? I have no idea. I come in everyday from 8:15 to 5, and usually find myself stuck in the teacher’s room with the vice principal and one or two random teachers, and we all avoid eye contact and pretend to look terribly busy for 4 hours at a time.

Look busy.

Eat lunch.

Look busy.

Go home.

I can’t even escape to the solitude of the English room, because really… what would I be doing up there when there are no classes to teach? Each of us knows that the other 3 people aren’t accomplishing anything, but we need to endure in silence and never ‘let on’, lest the illusion be shattered, and the entire Japanese work ethic be brought into question. If eye contact is made (heaven forbid!) the go-to phrase is just a default “Otsukaresamadeshittaaaa---“ (‘Thank you for your continued hard work!’) with the last A dragging out and trailing off into oblivion.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a second believe that Japanese people are lazy; far from it. They work very hard when there’s work to be done. It’s just that… when there isn’t shit to do, they have a hard time mustering up the gusto to stand up and say “Hey! There isn’t shit to do, let’s lock up the school and go get a fucking beer! It’s Miller time! Fuck, the kids are at home playing Pokemon, what the fuck are WE doing HERE?! It’s hot as hell, I say we make like nine months pregnant and head out! WHO’S WITH ME?”

Maybe if I was an honest to god teacher, with a class full of kids all year round, I would seize the chance to get a bunch of stuff done before second semester started. I mean, I am a teacher, but I don’t have a dedicated team of children under my command. I teach all the children of the school… 1st thru 6th grade, once a week for 45 minutes. All my lessons are pretty basic, we do a lot of singing and games, and they don’t do anything in English class involving a pencil or book until junior high. All my materials and cards are already made, it’s just a matter of executing the plan in front of the children at this point. If I was the 4th grade homeroom teacher or whatever it might be different. Probably not, though, as I can look out in the playground now and see the 2nd grade teacher, Ms. Yokoyama, out there on her knees picking weeds out of the dirt underneath the slide, using a solitary disposable chopstick as a makeshift spade. Ugh.

	It's not Solitaire, but it's as close as I'm getting today!

To add to my situation, the internet is out today, I’m sitting at my desk, typing this up in Word to be pasted to NA later tonight when I get home. I was futzing around, reading the Warrior forums, when all of the sudden it just crapped out. Awesome. What do you do with a computer with no ‘net connection? Not so fast! Don’t forget The Rule: It can’t be Command and Conquer’s single player campaign, and needs to look like some semblance of work. Typing in Word fits the bill here. I used to have a computer way back before the internet. I was young, and did the whole 8086 to 286 to 386 to 486DX thing. What the hell I did back then, before my computer went anywhere, is best left in the past. I taught myself DOS, and would edit my AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files over and over, trying to squeeze every byte of extended memory out of the system to make Wing Commander run faster. Load DOS high! Tweak Qualcomm’s EMM386.SYS! Then run “mem” and see how much I had free! Good times! Not really!

I get two weeks of paid vacation days each year, but to waste them when I really have no intention of doing anything but going home to raid Karazhan seems pretty sad. The other option is to take the time off unpaid, which is what I usually end up doing. One teacher recently went to the Board of Education (against my recommendations to the contrary, of course) and brought up the subject of having fuck all to do for a month. Kirsty (from Adelaide! Go Australia!) went in asking for the whole month off, paid (!), and ended up getting summarily rejected, and landing us summer classes to ‘keep us busy’. Now I can’t even take the time off unpaid, because I’m expected to be here every Friday to teach the junior high school kids (something I have no experience doing) in these marathon 5 hour classes where both the teachers and kids both have no interest in attending. Ah, the miracle of education!

I’m bitter. I’ll be better when regular classes start up again in September. Until then, though, it’s Cranky Pants McIsobelle all the way, baby. Fuck, I need a beer.

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IDOL, IDOL, IDOLM@STER, HOOO!

If I don’t get “The IDOLM@STER” in my Xbox 360 soon, I may just up and die. Nobody wants that to happen. I know I don’t want it to happen. The simple fact of the matter is that The IDOLM@STER is the only game that has ever been produced in Japan for the Xbox 360, and I need to have it now. In my hands. This instant. Don’t lie and try to tell me there are other Japanese Xbox games. There just aren’t. Okay?

I recently wrote about how much I hate the console systems, and how I own every single one of them anyway. I tried to sell my 360 when I made my mind up to purchase the PS3, but they didn’t want it. Now it’s back in my living room, but I don’t own any games for it. This wasn’t so bad when I could still go on Xbox Live and just download demos of crap I never wanted to buy. Apparently, Microsoft recently decided to punish anyone not living in America that bought an Xbox, and they cut the rest of us off from being able to download just about fucking ANYTHING. All the crap is still in the “hey download this” list, but it’s a lie. I hit the A button, and it takes me to the “confirm download” page. I hit the A button again, and the little progress bar pops up for a split second, then it’s like the Xbox remembers “Oh yeah… Pearl Harbor”, and suddenly another window pops up saying that the download isn’t available from your current location. You can go down the list trying this with every title, or you can just give up and hate Microsoft a little bit more.

Feel like watching a movie trailer? Sorry. That’s apparently top secret classified Hollywood trade secrets. That’s right folks; I can’t even voluntarily watch a fucking commercial.

This was all until I discovered one game in the list that let me view it. And oh boy there’s content as far as the eye could see. Enter “The IDOLM@STER”. This is apparently a game where you guide a small group of pre-teen girls through the climb to pop stardom greatness. I’m not sure if they’ve included the obligatory “defiling of your nubile nether regions by some old horny man with corn kernels for teeth” mini-game, but they could always patch it in later if not.

I honestly have no idea what the fuck even happens in this game, every trailer I watched for it (there are like 15) just shows three of the girls on stage dancing in perfect timing while smoke and lights swirl around. Do you control them by pushing buttons rhythmically? Do you choreograph their routine, and then just pleasure yourself backstage while they flawlessly execute it?

Bewildered, I left the ‘Video’ blade of my 360’s UI, and was confronted by an ad for some virtual shoes or something. The little advertisement areas of Xbox live usually feature upcoming crap for the service. I’m pretty sure in America they’re probably plastered with pictures of large KY-Jelly tubs so you can be sure to stock up for “HALO 3: ZOMG”. In Japan, we only have one game over here, though, so the UI for us is IDOLM@STER all the way, baby. But what the fuck is up with the shoes? They’re awfully cute, with little pink bows and sparkly frilly frills that twinkle in the spotlights. But why would you…. Oh… wait.

I GET IT.

A quick trip to the Microsoft Marketplace confirmed my fears. I never really go the marketplace, because anyone spending actual dollars on an avatar or wallpaper for their UI always just seemed a little odd to me. But sure enough, the marketplace was packed to overflowing with all kind of cute little outfits and accessories for the girls as far as the eye could see. Boots, hats, skirts, chokers; you could even buy them a watch! I jumped on Google, searching for IDOLM@STER, and immediately came across the developer’s own marketplace. There you can browse all the various stuff that has been released, with the latest update (what... Tier 5?) having just been released last week.

Let me step back for a second, and take another look at this from another angle. Japan is a culture that loves “teh cute”. I can dig it. I’m kind of into it myself. You can’t go overboard with it, but in small doses it’s… I don’t kow… refreshing? In America, no male would be caught dead admitting anything is cute for fear of being called a fag. Females want to be taken seriously, so they either go for “I’m sexy, dammit, and I’m in charge, too”, or just downplay their sexuality altogether. Those are bad examples. This isn’t coming out right, so let’s just move on to point #2.

Japan loves to collect shit. They collect Zippos, SNES cartridges, Yugioh cards, business cards… they love to collect shit, and they love to organize it. They sell special binders that you can keep your associates’ business cards in. They have those in America, too, but they also just have Rolodexes that you staple the card to. Stapling a business card wouldn’t fly over here. It’d be taken as an insult. You can’t say they’re alone in this phenomenon; just look at how popular Pokemon is over in America as well. Gotta catch em all! It’s just that in Japan, collecting things in binary format is the most convenient way to do it, because none of that shit is actually taking up space in your little apartment. It’s just stored in the RAM of your GBA cart or whatever.

The thing that gets weird is when you’re collecting little outfits for your virtual pop group. I mean, okay… the point could be made that even that isn’t that weird. I used to play “Need for Speed: Gangster Thug o Whatever Version” with my roommates, and we’d spend more time in the garage applying decals to our cars that actually racing them. It got to the point where we seriously just began calling it Barbie Cars. We’d play with the little outfits of our cars, and give it a bigger spoiler or new fancy rims, then just drive around the town, not really doing the quests. When you look at all the people enamored with Forza 2 right now, you’re seeing the same thing… people love to “play dolls”, but boys need to feel like IT’S A CAR, SO I’M NOT GAY, OKAY?

In Pokemon, though, you run around and find little monsters in the shrubs or something. I really don’t know how it works. In IDOLM@STER, you go shopping with your credit card. It’s similar to the new ‘free’ MMOs that are becoming so popular in Korea. You can play for free, but if you want that sword, you buy it for 8 dollars. Need new shoulders? That’s another 4.

Looking at the website I mentioned forever ago, I can see things like a swimsuit for 500 Microsoft Points. A watch is 250. They do the exact same thing as Barbie Cars… raise your “cute rating” or whatever, so that you can climb the charts and do bigger shows (in Barbie Cars, you’d need to reach “Fucking Coolguy level 2” before you could unlock new rims. The cooler your car was, the more ‘the next guy’ wanted to challenge you… hence, progression).

It gets weird when you can buy one of the girl’s “keitai (mobile phone) email addresses” for 100 points. Umm… what?

The Babelfish translation of the description there is “It reaches the point where by the fact that it procures the mail from Chihaya (the girl’s name) reaches in the portable telephone inside the game.” So, I guess you can send them in game mails? Be like:

Dearest Chihaya,

I've never had a chance to tell you this, but you’re totally my favorite one. That blond bitch is such a slut! You’re so much more mature than the other girls! I bought you a new swimsuit, I think it will show off your perfect thighs and calves. OMG ur so beautfifusstgfgfg






...

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A/S/L?

The Internet has a special gift it bestows upon everyone who visits its fabled shores. I won’t call it Internet Anoniminimityty because I don’t know how to spell that word, and it makes me think of Sea Anemones. Instead I shall refer to it as “The Ability to Remain Anonymous on the Internet”. Yes, it’s more letters, but that’s what copy and paste are for. Plus, “Anonymous” makes me think of either mice or moose, and those are regular mammals; not deformed underwater porcupine things. And I can spell it!

This gift has a strange side effect, though, and one should be careful to not fall victim to its siren call. Just because you have The Ability to Remain Anonymous on the Internet, doesn’t mean you Have To Remain Anonymous on the Internet. All kinds of creepy people got worked up when Intel decided to put identification numbers in their processors a while back. Here’s the scenario: Bob at Intel realizes that a lot of people are beginning to purchase things online, and comes up with a pretty cool idea that can attach a signature of your machine’s hardware ID to a transaction as well, just as another failsafe. If a fraudulent transaction occurs, you can prove the transaction didn’t originate from your machine. Nifty, huh? Uh, no… apparently not. The Pedophiles of the World suddenly joined forces to shoot this idea down so fiercely that Intel must have been a little confused. It’d be like if a car company got boycotted for adding another airbag in the trunk. HOW DARE YOU!? Uhh… huh?

This was the first time I can really put my finger on the whole "internet privacy" thing coming up. The Pedophiles feel like they should be able to download child porn without fear of ever being personally identified, because, well… child porn is illegal, and they are somehow entitled to the right to seek it out without anyone knowing who they are, just because they're looking on the internet. I wonder what would happen if undercover police set up a big card table at a garage sale with piles on child porn on it. They could put a big day-glo green poster saying COME GET YOUR CHILD PORN HERE! 1 DOLLAR! When people came to browse, and were thereby arrested, what would they do? They would be caught red handed! Oh wait... nevermind. I know what they'd do. They'd get a lawyer, and cop an entrapment plea. God bless the Judicial System.

Anyway. The real situation is a bit more complicated than that, and it just seems a little silly to me. The fact is that the general populace is terrified of the internet, and doesn’t feel comfortable using it. Maybe it’s silly to me because I myself am so comfortable with it, but I tend to forget that some people just have no idea how computers work at all. I recently visited with my grandmother in America, and actually laughed out loud at her when the subject of the internet came up and her face turned into an honest to god scowl and she decried the internet as the “worst thing ever invented”. I gently prodded, and her justification was because of “the people stealing money, and prowlers out there capturing little girls using the internet. Those people are sick, and they can do it because of the internet”. I wondered aloud if crime or sexual predators existed before the internet, but she obviously wasn’t having this discussion. She’s like 80-something, and her mind was made up. She’s old, but not ‘doddering’. She’s still sharp as a tack, but the internet is a cesspool of thieves and rapists in her mind.

I know when I do a Google image search for “kittens” or “marshmallows” that invariably a picture of a huge penis poking into a vagina will pop up with the results. It doesn’t really faze me, but I can see how it might be traumatizing for an elderly woman, or the entire state of Utah.

	Sometimes I even got all sneaky, and would put a cup of Mountain Dew INSIDE the "money cup", with a straw going thru both lids. It added to the realism of "drinking it".

The thing that doesn’t make sense to me is that for some reason, these people feel much more comfortable giving their credit card number out loud over the phone, or just handing it to some schmuck at Jiffy-Lube to swipe. When I was 16, I used to steal money from Taco Bell when I worked the drive thru. I’d put it in a large cup, and at the end of my shift I’d stick a straw in the lid and walk out the front door pretending to “drink” it. I have a friend that used to work in retail, and from time to time he would print out the receipts from the registers at the end of the day. He had access to an entire ribbon chock full of credit card numbers, AND the exact signature to go with it; anytime he felt like printing out a second copy. No HaXoRiNg required! People just gave it to him, as though HE was the living embodiment of honesty and virtue; working retail at minimum wage. He was later arrested for trying to shoplift one of the first retail CD-ROM burners available, back when they cost like 500 dollars. He took it out of the box, and had the unit like stuffed down his pants or something. An IDE CD-ROM drive. I love that guy. Granted, we were the scum of the earth, but we weren’t using the internet to perform our nefarious deeds. By doing it “IRL” we were somehow exempt from my grandmother’s disapproval.

I’m getting a little sidetracked here. The point I was trying to make earlier is that the internet offers this chance to be anything or anyone you want to be, but people seem to forget that it’s optional. You don’t HAVE to pretend to be someone else, and you CAN give out your honest to god name online. Unless you’re 15/f/florida, I wouldn’t really be too worried about it. Let me illustrate a real life example:

I used to live in a house in Oakland, CA with 7 other people. It was a big house, and we split rent 8 ways. It was a mess, but we always had warm bodies on the couch for console gaming. We scored a copy of Xbox ESPN NFL2k5 (I think it was 2k5?), and used to play it online. We weren’t very good, and would invariably start losing. HOWEVER! The instant someone got shitty about it, and called us a loser faggots or whatever, we had the ability to instantly win by default. Our record wasn’t flawless, because if they were good sports about it we’d actually play the game. But if they were arrogant shits about it, we had an ace in the hole! We would let the other team score, just so we could get our hands on the ball, and then we’d basically drag every single down out for 3 minutes. Pausing the game bought us like 2 minutes, then we’d unpause at the last second only to repause again, or let the play timer count down and snap the ball at the last instant. We wouldn’t even try to make plays, we’d just take a knee, and repeat the process. On fourth down, we’d run into our own endzone, let the other team score a safety, and get the ball again. I really don’t remember the whole dynamic, it was a long time ago… maybe after the safety, we had to kick off to them or something? I honestly have no idea how sports work. But I distinctly remember that the trump card was when we were kicking off. There was no longer any play timer counting down. We could just sit there and howl with glee as these young white suburban kids called us “fucking nigger faggots” over and over again. My friend Jacob’s XBL account name is “Whiteguy” but this never seemed to register with their Inner Thug.

Some of them would try and wait us out, but we were in that young, crazy, “hey let’s just get out the bong” phase, and we had infinitely more patience. We also had like every console on the planet, and a TV with 800 inputs on the back. We could just switch the TV over to the PS2 input and play that while we waited for our win. We’d invariably keep the xbox earphones on to hear the fun, though. This was before you could listen to the earphone sound on your TV speakers, so I went to RadioShack and "pioneered" a way to split the sound from one controller to multiple people, since we didn't all have earpieces (check the date on this link, lol...! 2002!). They’d swear to god they would hunt us down and kill us in our sleep, and so (here’s the tie in!) we gladly gave them our address and told them to come on over. 1019 62nd street, Oakland, CA. Come up San Pablo Ave, and take a right on 59th, we’re right by Martin Luther King Elementary. Be sure and keep yelling about shit eating niggers on the way over here. Our neighbors would love to meet you.

Much to our amazement, though, no one actually showed up and killed us. It was pretty disappointing.

The football game was eventually patched to remove our ‘sploits, and we moved onto bigger and better things. But the realization that no one was going to actually fly from Texas to Oakland to hunt us down over an Xbox game was empowering.

I’ve since taken the stance that none of that shit really matters, and now have my XBL gamertag as Ericksen. Here’s a hint if you can’t figure out the meaning: it’s my last name. I certainly could have gone with “BlaZzZin FurEY 420 Smokolot” or something, but felt like my last name was a better representation of who I am. There are no Xs in it, I know… it’s pretty mundane.

While my characters in WoW are all named some variation on Isobelle, I make no excuses about broken microphones or missing sound codecs online. I’ll jump in vent with a PUG (OMGURADOOD?), and actually am usually the first one to offer up my guild’s server IP just so I don’t have to type. I even go gentle on the fragile ones and tell them that I don’t care if they never say a word. It’s just easier for me personally if you can listen to what I tell you, without ME having to type. You can type all day if you want to, knock yourself out. I personally prefer saying “focus fire on the skull icon” than typing it during a botched pull.

On the flip side, while I have no issues with anyone knowing who I “really am”, I”ve grown so used to being called Iso on vent that if anyone calls me by my real name (Richard), it usually doesn’t even register. I'm more apt to respond to a hundred variations on Isobelle... Eye-So, Ee-So, Izzo, Isso, whatever. Then I joined up in a guild where everyone already knew each other, and called Skeith “Jason” and Similak “Matt”, etc. At the beginning it was a bit frustrating, because “Chrissy would have aggro” in a 40 person raid, and I didn’t know who needed the taunt.

Am I alone in this? This lack of fear? Is it because I live in Japan (1411-1 Agasaki, Tamashima-sho, Kurashiki-shi, Okayama-ken, 713-8121) instead of the Terror Capitol of the Free World? Is it because I’m older now (32 years old, since last June 7th)? Is it because I’m a white male? I really don’t know. Would my position be different as a 19 year old trans-gender Mexican bisexual living in Dayton, Ohio? Who knows. As it stands though, I find it all a bit silly.

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