The standard Wordpress so-called “razz” emoticon (colon and P), that in any other program ends up looking like a smiley sticking it’s tongue out, looks weird to me.
So being the geek that I am, I changed it:

If anyone out there on the wild world interweb is interested, the emoticons are stored in the subfolder “wp-includes/images/smilies/” and you can easily change them to anything you like just by uploading different files (just remember to use the same file names).

Refer to this wordpress.org post to see what each smiley’s corresponding text is, plus some info on changing the code for the file names (which you can also use to add more emoticons), css styling and general smiley troubleshooting etc.

This post on Mohan’s Blog explains how to disable wordpress smileys completely if they generally bug you.

Happy continued blogging to us all

Quick post of some cherry blossom photos
I know the last two are very similar, but I love the rays of sunlight.

I signed up for a twitter account, for micro-blogging fun.

But what actually lets my true geek colours shine through is the time I spent and fun I had integrating a feed box into the right column on my blog.
Hehe. ^_^

A new special exhibition starts soon, and i’ve been translating a lot of panel text etc, for it.
Including this for the English version of the webpage.

I looks like a good exhibition, but man the panel text has been hard. …written by the museum’s resident historian, so imagine the kind of language a historian would use. Heh.

I walked from Tokugawa Art Museum to Nagoya Castle, and later back to Nagoya station.
It turns out neither of those three places are actually very close to each other, but I got to enjoy the weather and have a nice long walk through the city.

I’ve been to a few castles here now, and to be honest I was only planning to go to this one if I had heaps of time left after the museum, but i’m really glad I did because the castle grounds were nice, I got to see some early spring flowers …and …they had a heaps of nice stone walls to look at. ^_^

They’re doing construction next to the castle where apparently they’re going to start reconstructing some of the surrounding buildings using photographs and other historical records. I arrived as they were attaching massive stickers to the top and base of the construction zone wall to help it blend in with the local architecture. haha!

Inside was a mini-museum about the castle. One floor was even set up to look like the Edo Period, with an old ‘book store’ and other building facades. Which was kind of cute I guess. That was the kitschy tourist floor and they had a copy of the roof ornaments you could sit on, someone asked me to take a photo of them and their friends, so I figured why not? and got them to take my photo for me too. hehe.

The Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya houses an incredible collection of stuff owned by a branch of the Tokugawa clan.

Their prize possession, which draws in most of their visitors in the Genji Monogatari Emaki (Tale of Genji Picture Scroll) which is one of the picture scrolls that the art book I translated for my honours thesis was about, and is why I knew about the place and thought to go there.

Of course, it’s a really fragile 12th Century scroll of paper, so they don’t have the original on display very often. I knew I wouldn’t get to see it, but I knew they have exhibition displays about it, and mainly I figured if they own that, they probably own other things that are equally worth going to see.

And indeed. …Wow!

Initially I had heaps of fun just wandering around in amazement, looking at the standard stuff you find in museums here; like samurai and tea ceremony artifacts, Noh and Kyogen masks, beauty cabinets and cosmetics, and some elaborate go and shogi game boards (they were very cool).

The Genji room was pretty good too. Although i’ve seen the replica before during a special exhibition in the MM, so I passed by quicker than I might have otherwise.

Then I hit the library!!!
I don’t know if it’s a permanent exhibition and they rotate the books, or I just came at a good time, but they had an exhibition of historical books and a couple of minor picture scrolls. Some of the art work in the books was amazing, and all of the calligraphy was. I love looking at old books and I love being this much of a geek that I do.

And then to make it a truly amazing experience it turned out they had a special Hina Matsuri (Dolls Festival) exhibition on. Which was a massive room filled with exquisite displays of the personal Hina Matsuri doll collections that belonged to some of the Tokugawa clans richest women (some princesses).

I couldn’t take photos, and I was too involved with looking at it all even if I could have, but I bought some postcards in the shop. So i’m uploading some small versions of those.

Basically, anything a princess thought she could need was reproduced in miniature for the dolls. I wish I could show you of one of the collections in whole, but a photo probably wouldn’t do it justice anyway. The detail was amazing.

One of the things I thought was especially cool were the miniature Kai Awase (shell matching game) sets. They also had a large normal sized set, but the small ones were made from real shells as well. The game is like “memory” usually played with a set of snap cards (All the shells are turned picture side down so they look the same, then you turn over two, if they’re the same you keep them, if they’re not you turn them both back over… game continues until they’re all gone and the person with the most wins)

The pictures on the shells are all hand painted and usually feature scenes of nature or Heian period court life. And because these sets were commissioned and owned by nobles the shells had really really finely detailed paintings on them.

Some of the sets were laid out in front of the dolls almost as if they were playing, except of course they were picture side up so we could see the paintings. You can’t actually see that the shells in the postcard below have pictures on them but the ones in the exhibition were so tiny and so detailed it was astounding.

Neb rocks.

He stocked me up with Game Boy Advance games for me to play on my DS.
My favourite so far is the SEGA Astro Boy game. …admittedly I’m biased towards liking it just because it’s Astro Boy themed, but it is also a very fun game.

It’s a reasonably standard format platform based game where you (as Astro) fight bad guys, save good guys, and fight a “boss” at the end of each level. But there are still certainly good and bad efforts within that format. Happily, this is a good one.

Every time I load it up again it takes me a second to remember how to make Astro move in all his different ways, but it’s still kept simple enough so as not to hinder a noob like me from actual gameplay. Also it has enough of a story to make it interesting but so too many talk and cut scenes to make it drag.

They’ve gone with the new re-translated version of the characters names, which is taking me time to get used to. Perhaps they find Dr.Elefun and Daddy Walrus too un-PC these days. But, I’m getting the hang of the new names, so soon i’ll know three for each character, heh.

Yeehee!
*hugs to Neb*

These are all belated random thoughts.
Firstly, The trip home was awesome but it was sad leaving again.
I miss everyone already!!! ^^;

…

I ran a translation workshop at the manga library while I was there, and it went really well. Even though the second day a whole bunch of random Japanese people turned up and I had to do the presentation in Japanese as well as English.

That was sort of scary, but very awesome that I managed to pull it off. I never could have done that a year ago. So yay! My Japanese is definitely getting measurably better.

…

The plane flight home was as good as it could have been. I had a window seat, and the aisle seat next to me was empty. Thus a view, plenty of room and ease of getting up and going for walks.

Then, my train trip home from the airport was very sardine-like, just to remind me of where I’m living. Also some old guy pissed on the floor next to me then ran off the train. I managed to get away from the puddle, but a lot of hapless new passengers walked right through it. ewww.

I really wanted to give the guy the benefit of doubt and assume he had a leaking drink bottle or something, but it started smelling. Luckily the train got less crowded and I had space to move away down the carriage and get a seat.

…

My mini-apartment seems really big to me now.
I think it’s cause Kat’s not here with me.

…

First day back at the museum was cool. Everyone was really happy to see me and I even got a hug off one of the office girls ^_^ aww, I feel loved.

…

That is all for now.

Kat and I have come down to James’ place for the xmas holidays. We went on a trip further north and it was heaps of fun.

On xmas day, we had a mini-tree and normal sized presents (Kat and James’ families both do presents for xmas, so we did presents), and we made pancakes. I got James a makurokurosuke! haha

After pancakes and presents we took a train up north and got there just in time to check into our youth hostel, then the next morning woke up to find out it was snowing!!! So we had a white boxing day! ^_^yay!

Then we had a day in Matsushima, walking around the snowy temple grounds and took a boat cruise to see the famous island views. The next day we went to a manga museum in a place called Ishinomaki.

My friend Kat is visiting. *squee*

We’ve been doing random touristy things and a couple of academic-ish type things also.
Because she’s the current Monash Manga Library manager, I introduced her to the staff at the Museum, who loved her and thought she was cute.
We also met up with our lecturer from Monash, Tokita-sensei, who is here in Japan this year. She was my supervisor for half of honours year, and is super high up in the Japanese Studies Centre at Monash, so is therefore technically one of Kat’s bosses.

As tourists, we’ve been walking round Kyoto, viewing the autumn leaves and temples, and going on touristy daytrips.

We went to the town of Takarazuka and saw Takarazuka, the super shiny theatre of sparkles.
It was fantastic, and no one had a epileptic fit afterwards, so it was a good day for all.
We also bought Takarazuka gatchapon (capsule toys from a vending machine) because we are geeks.

Yesterday we went to Toei Eigamura the movie theme park I did cash in hand work for a couple of months back (they’d given us free tickets as well), it’s very kitschy, so it gets a bad review in the Kyoto Lonely Planet guide because the guy who wrote it seems to hate kitschy stuff, but it’s very funny and we had a great time.
It kind of reminded me of Sovereign Hill in Ballarat, only Japanese and much set further back historically. ha.
The haunted house costs 500yen extra to get into so I think a lot of people don’t bother because there’s no way you can know before hand if it’s lame or not.
I thought it was the best bit of the park.
I don’t actually enjoy being scared normally, but i’d assumed it wasn’t going to really be scary. It sort of was, but in a fun way. We screamed like little girls, as did the groups before and after us (we could hear them), and some of them weren’t even girls. But we all came out with massive grins on our faces.

hehehe.