False Positives

as we hit another Lunar New Year, in this case Year of the Rat/Mouse. (where’s my cheese?  Probably somewhere under this 30 cm of snow!)

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I’ve gone and collected another set of Japan links once again, cause its the future, or at least one piece of it….

Via TokyoMango : Takeshi Kitano ( sometimes credited as ‘Beat’ Takeshi and best known in the West 1995 for his role is the 1996 “Johnny Mnemonic” film adapted from the William Gibson short of the same name), actor/director/TV show host, writes children’s book! His new collection of short stories ‘Boy‘ came out this August.

NeoMarxisme is a Blog with lots of interesting jpop gossip. Marxy is a writer and musician living in Tokyo, Japan.

from Boing Boing very strange “butt biting bug” video

StartDrawing.org a portal for Asia’s artists and drawings. This site was started with the aim of showcasing and sharing drawings from talented artists in Asia, and in the process, promote the joys of drawing.

X-SEED 4000: A Proposed Arcology in Tokyo is 3,123 feet tall with a 6 square- kilometre footprint, and could accommodate five hundred thousand to one million inhabitants.

Lisa Katayama of Tokyomango: is Geeky Girl We Love.

Ghost Hound. To Quote Jean Snow “Why are you going to want to keep an eye out for the upcoming anime series Ghost Hound? It’s from Production I.G and Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell), and to be directed by Ryutaro Nakamura (Serial Experiments Lain).” Out October 18 2007.

List of English words of Japanese origin. You may already be speaking Japanese (badly). (I know I am. In addition to my awful Cantonese, and borderline English. Gibberish is my mother tongue, with apologies to my Mother.)

Trends in Japan for all your trends in Japan, because it’s the future, or at least one piece of it.

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ToykoMango: Superflat Panda Swallows Cell Phone, Then Girl, a great little animated short mostly made up of Takashi Murakami’s graphic work for Louis Vuitton. It’s like the crazy, postmodern, luxury, Japanese version of Alice in Wonderland.

Jean Snow: How to Wrap with a Furoshiki, a Japanese traditional wrapping cloth which is used repeatedly in a stylish way. links to a graphic from the (Japanese) Ministry of the Environment that shows how to wrap something with a traditional furoshiki cloth. The “Mottainai Furoshiki” as a symbol of Japanese culture to reduce waste.

ToykoMango: “Earthquake Sets Japan Back to 2147″ links to piece from the Onion :

“Teleportation of food and water remains at a standstill as technicians in Kobe continue to fix the extensive damage to the eight-million-yottabyte mainframe computer, a four-by-three-inch quantum femtoprocessor responsible for accessing and fulfilling the thoughts and desires of all Japanese.”

Jean Snow: My Private Tokyo: Pocket Parks of Higashi-Ikebukuro. Canadian Jean Snow and his “genki” demeanor.

Boing Boing: Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: illustrated history of Tokyo’s lightspeed subculture: a riotously illustrated history of schoolgirl fashion in Japan, starting with the thousand-strong, razor-wielding biker gangs, all the way up to the cuddly, explosion -in- a- crafter- factory world of decora girls, who cover their fuzzy one-piece character pyjamas with stuffed animals and cute crafted whatsises.

Jean Snow: Kanye West Is Akira, This video for Kanye West’s new single, “Stronger” — the one that samples Daft Punk quite liberally — takes inspiration from Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic AKIRA film.

Kiiiiiii a 2 girl band from Tokyo formed Kiiiiiii in 2002 by Utako and Reiko. They’ve yet to tour Japan but they sure have made the rounds in the States.

Boing Boing: Yo Yo Girl Cop, Dasepo Naughty girls, NY Asian Film Fest, the june NY Asian Film Fest had links to trailers for most of their films.

Wired: Tokyo, Living Lab of Possible Futures : coming to Tokyo, to work, to live and to catch glimpses of the future

Update ToykoMango: Kanye West’s new album, Graduation, cover features a Takashi Murakami flying teddy bear spewing out of a giant mouth. People are psyched because the teddy bear is wearing those patented Nike’s worn by Marty McFly in Back to the Future II.

pop culture has become so multidirectional that you can now combine American hip hop with Japanese retro cute art with kicks from an 80s movie.

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• A prototype-checklist : doing common things the prototype way (or taking advantage of those extra 100 KB in your page) - A great set of code examples of doing things the Prototype way. - Javascript
• TOKYOMANGO: Superflat Panda Swallows Cell Phone, Then Girl - Great little animated short mostly made up of Takashi Murakami’s graphic work for Louis Vuitton. It’s like the crazy, postmodern, luxury, Japanese version of Alice in Wonderland. Very Kawaii
• via boingboing - the noted Serbian feminist writer and activist Jasmina Tesanovic (and married to Bruce Sterling), has just released her latest novella, “Nefertiti,” as a free, Creative Commons -licensed download.

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• A vision of cheap space launches using lighter-than-air vehicles essentially balloons built specifically to carry light payloads to the stratosphere, from which a larger space-going vehicle could be launched.- first stage would use a lighter-than-air ascent vehicle to reach a stationary craft hovering above the earth at about 140,000 feet.

Remember : “slow is cheap, fast is expensive”
- space

• How to Wrap with a Furoshiki, a Japanese traditional wrapping cloth which is used repeatedly in a stylish way. - graphic from the (Japanese) Ministry of the Environment that shows how to wrap something with a traditional furoshiki cloth. The “Mottainai Furoshiki” as a symbol of Japanese culture to reduce waste.

- Japan

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Flikr 1 Flikr2 Flikr3

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Amazon :

• Introduction to AWS (Amazon Web Services ) for Ruby Developers
• New Alexa Web Search API and Pricing Plan Annoucement : Bunch-o new functionality and at least some new code samples

Railing :

• Ruby on Rails For Linux - LinRails : a binary package that includes Ruby-1.8.6, Rubygems-0.9.4, Rails 1.2.3, Mongrel 1.0.1, MySQL-5.0.41, ncurses-5.6, OpenSSL-0.9.8e, and zlib-1.2.3. making it easy to get a Ruby on Rails development environment running in no time.

• really DRY (don’t repeat yourself) : generating models, migrations and tests off of one meta-model.

Web Stuff

• Kijiji (local and free classified) eBays answer to Craigslist (eBay also owns 20% of Craigslist). Huh?
• All the News That’s Fit to Wiki : The New York Times on the Wikipedia, a neutral point of view article about the Wikipedia, how a page evolves and the people behind it.
• How to spot the dreaded non-coding architect - Not IT strategists but does apply to project leads and third party consultants. Scarier then Cthulhi.
• Ajax Rain, a collection of Javascript, DHTML, Ajax Inspiration - about 200 scripts! Use the tag cloud to search/filter for particular libraries.

Culture

• Hormiga Canyon - a SciFi short story by Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling
• Maelstrom II: an independent film of an Arthur C. Clarke SciFi short story - “Cliff Leyland, a down-on-his-luck worker who hitches a ride on a freight capsule from the moon to earth in order to save money. As the protagonist is catapulted homeward, power to the electromagnetic launcher fails — sending him into an unstable orbit around the moon. Thus begins a race against time to save him before he crashes into the lunar surface.” from “The Wind from the Sun” collection published in 1972.
• Kanye West Is Akira - The video for Kanye West’s new single takes major inspiration from Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic AKIRA film.
• Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s is doing Virtual Tokyo in Second Life - I thought Tokyo WAS a virtual world inside Second Life!
• The Misadventures of Hello Cthulhu - Cthulhu meets Hello Kitty : a HP Kawaii Horror?

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Tales of the BunnyFish is a new exhibition for Kozyndan at West Queen West’s Magic Pony from June 28 till July 29 2007.

So What’s a BunnyFish?

The bunnyfish is a unique being from a highly sentient race that has lived in the seas for many thousands of years unbeknownst to man. We have been following the exploits of one particular bunnyfish who was fished from the sea not long ago and who decided to stay topside and learn, explore, and LOVE!

In the past Magic Pony has hosted exhibits for Fligh Club and Japanese kimono designer Mamechiyo

update : see kozyndan flickr set and Magic Pony’s flickr set

From the Torontosit : Rabbit Of The Sea

my own BunnyFish Cookies picture (to eat or to cuddle?) :

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Restaurants and Cafes devoted to “costume play,” or cosplay as the Japanese call it, first appeared in Akihabara, Tokyo’s discount electronics store district, in the late 90’s.

Well during the summer, iMaid Cafe opened in Toronto’s east end at 1883 McNicoll Ave. (at Kennedy Rd close to Pacific Mall.), to provide the french maid variation of CosPlay Cafe. (There is at least one famous “Butler Cafe” in Tokyo called Swallowtail, where the staff are very well-dressed males in a waiter’s uniform or an elegant butler suit severing the female clients.)

The Star did a food review : French maids, Asian food and the Globe and Mail noticed : In a Scarborough café, it’s maid to order.

This trend has spread to South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but is the first in Canada (amusing comment on MegaToyo site :Maid Cafe In The Great White North? Yes!). (are there any in the US?) Once again proving we are a suburb of Hong Kong.

If you can’t visit anytime soon, checkout this YouTube CosPlay Cafe video, to get an idea. (Welcome Boing Boing & Sea Slug readers!)

Update : The National Post now has also a story: Scarborough cafe takes customers ‘inside the cartoon’, as of Tuesday December 05.

Cory’s away and this story got re-posted to Cosplay restaurant in Toronto on BoingBoing, leading to SlashFood which looks to have been sparked a Reuters story : via New Zealand, and China .

See also a video visit to Singapore’s Maid Cafe on Zer0’s blog

Update Feb 1st 2007 : CBC’s TV The Hour did a piece on Imaid Cafe on January 15th, and has a video clip up :

It’s not your ordinary cafe, it’s kinda like Hooters. Except instead of tank tops and shorts, the staff dress up in French maid outfits.It’s a weird phenomenon in Japan, now, they’ve set up shop in Toronto.

The Hour takes a look at this new genre of cafe.

and today, Metro Morning (CBC Radio) just covered it in it’s food column Beyond Burgers, where Catherine Jheon (CJ) gave the thumbs up for the food, even if Andy couldn’t quite get over the imagery. CJ’s comments are on her FoodTV.ca blog as well as the Beyond Burgers site (with a Mp3 of segment).

Update : Scott Frye’s AnimeLife blog has moved and his iMaid posting is now at Toronto Maid Cafe

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Magic Pony is pleased to announce Flight Club : Solo Show with Moira Hahn. A stylized menagerie of classic Japanese deities and demons blended with contemporary anime culture. The exhibit will run from Oct 5 - Nov 5, 2006. The opening reception will be held Thursday Oct 5th, 2006 from 6-10pm.

Last Feburary, Magic Pony had a very successful showing of Japanese Kimono designer Mamechiyo.

As as extra credit note : surfers in Edo era Japan wore Namitatsu brand tees.

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