CAKE! And it's not a lie!

Up day the 2 special needs groups at my school for some culinary chaos. They made Christmas cakes. Some students cut paper stencils to decorate their cakes. One student who loves the Touhou Project wanted her drawing of Rumia to be on hers.

Incidentally. the blogger app for iOS works... just not very well.

Japanese Money [Japan, How It Is 03]

Fukui Pref. S14 Dress up ~5 hit combo~

Live Hangout about the M7.3 quake off the coast of Iwate pref.

pic from tenki.jp (Click pic for source)

There was an M7.3  today at 17:13 in the same fault as the big one on in March 2011. Where I live it was Shindo 4 which is a measurement of percieved intensity. 4 is not common in these parts. There was a Tsunami warning in effect on the coast. The sirens rang out and people were evacuated. Thankfully the larest tsunami was only 1 meter and it struck an area where the land was not at 0m. A 1 meter wave in parts of Iwate would have been dangerous. because the tsunami barriers were all destroyed in 2011. 

Ofunato City only had a 20cm wave so everything there is OK. I called one of my mates who was cold because he was on his way up a hill but other than that, he was fine.

Below is a google hangout recording that I took earlier on. It is 30 minutes long and it was live so my thoughts come out of my mouth as they arrive and I am often distracted by the TV news. But hey. If you have time to kill. Check it out.

Don't forget to subscribe ;)

Japan, How It Is - 02 Drifting. Ebisu Circuit.

Sugru

I don’t usually do the whole product promo thing but this stuff is legend.

check the sugru website: http://sugru.com/

“sugru is the new self-setting rubber for fixing, modifying and improving your stuff. Over 155,000 people in 119 countries are using it make their stuff work better.”

I got a pack shipped over and have used it to mod a bunch of stuff.
Here is a link to my latest fix:

http://sugru.com/gurus/categories/sugru-hacks/topics/repaired-klipsch-s4i-weak-cable-attachments-and-adapted-the-plugs-to-take-standard-eartips

k. promo done. though check this shit out… and give it a try. You won’t regret it.

Loud Park 2012 (Saitama Super Arena) LIVE REPORT

"The heaviest metal festival in Japan". Or so the slogan goes. Usually one would attribute the use of superlatives to marketing and be done with it, but this time… The slogan was quite accurate...

This is a long, brutal report… so get comfy before you hit the Jump.

Bushed.

Since the trackday at Ebisu Circuit, I had gained a good deal of suspension trouble from my riding the side of the track too hard. The alignment was so far off centre that it could only be called chaotic evil and the rear toe and camber arms needed replacement. After sorting all that, i gained a mysterious clunking from the rear of the car when the weight shifted or I went over bumps. after 3 looks at the struts and pillow balls (it sounded like pillow balls) we wiggled the subframe a bit when it was jacked up and found that the bushes were, in a word… F*CKED.

Replacing bushes is crazy difficult but you do get aluminium spacer collars that solve the problem. I ordered a set from my buddy Yoshi (Ring's) and to keep costs down, with Yoshi telling me what to do, I did the hard work myself. It was surprisingly not that difficult, though having someone who knew exactly what to do giving me instructions made the task much easier. I probably would have dis assembled half the rear subframe if I followed the tutorials on the various Silvia and 240sx forums that are out there.



All in all. Job done for the price of cheap parts and a delicious Hamburg steak. AND MY CAR FINALLY DRIVES PROPERLY AGAIN…
Well almost... The transmission is still on death's door and could give out at anytime.

Japan, How it Is.

Inspired by serpentza's succesful "China, How It Is" series of vlogs I decided to do the same... In Japan of course. Here is a short intro followed by the first quick episode [Halloween in Roppongi]. Take a look! Subscribe! comment! If nothing else, enjoy the eyecandy.

Shots #90 Akagi HDR

 

It seems like all my posts of late are about live shows(It's all Ive been doing really) and there are more to come...

So here is an HDR of Mt. Akagi to break things up a bit ;) 

 

 

UNDIVIDE One-Man Live Tour "SAME SIDE (BOYS ONLY)" live report

pic from the interwebs.

Undivide is Leda's (ex.DELUHI) new project. I heard the announcement at Sujk's live and have been waiting to see them since then.

I was planning to go to their tour final on the 26th and group it in with Loud Park 12 but when i checked their live schedule and noticed that they were having a boys only lave the week before.

Buck Tick ON PARADE 2012 <LIVE REPORT> PART 2

continued from here.

I spent the evening in a hotel on on Dougenzaka hill with my cat and the next day she joined me at the festival. It was raining out so we hit up the Shibuya Don Quijote to get some clothes and got on the train to Tokyo, then Chiba. I got a rain coat from a guy selling them on the walk to the venue but I only used it to walk there. 

Once we got in I realised that whether I sweat under the plastic or get rained on I was going to be soaked anyway so I gave the coat to the cat and went Woodstock. The weather however DID mean that I didn't have my phone on me and so no guerrilla photography was done.

report after the jump ;)

Buck Tick ON PARADE 2012 <LIVE REPORT> PART 1

On a rapidly warming Saturday morning I took the train bound for Chiba. There were the usual disney tourists in their mickey mouse shirts. There were the gamers and otaku on their way to the Tokyo Game show. Then there were the band shirts, the black clothes, the big hair and the clashing colours. 

As we passed the mass market distractions and their consumers had dis-embarked they were all that was left.

They… We were heading to Chiba Port Park for Buck Tick's 25th anniversary. The Buck Tick Fest. On Parade 2012. and what a spectacular festival it was!

じゃじゃ麺 JaJaMen! (old post that I forgot to post)

It’s not an army of Rastas, nor is it the long lost cousin of Jar Jar binks. JaJaMen is a noodle dish that Iwate Prefecture got from china and (apparently) made better.

The 宇チューJins Live in Takasaki ~5 hit combo~

One of the better smalltime bands from Gunma. The 宇チューJins (pr. The Uchuujins) tore up the stage at Club Fleez in Takasaki a while back. Here are 5 shots I took at the live.

If you want to know how they sound? Check out their album “Makla 'Tosh” for yourself:

Incidentally I also shot the photo on their album cover ;)

Shot!

I have been to Asakusa many times. It is something tourists love. It is easy to see and it is one of those ‘must do ONCE’ things if you are visiting Tokyo. It gets boring after a while. so the last time I took my visiting friends there, I decided that instead of taking photos of things I already have photos of, It would be more fun to take photos taking photos.

Yamagata City.

A while back the cat had to go do some singing at a obscure little town in Yamagata (the name of which I have since forgotten. While she did that, I went for a little drive to the capital of that prefecture to see what there was to see.

Shots #89 If a taxi crashes in the woods…

do you care?

Tokyo Tower.

The thing about friends visiting is that they always want to do touristy stuff which I tend not to do. Its not a bad thing though, that way I also get to experience the OOOH AAAAAAH side of things from time to time too. I must say though… going up the Tokyo Tower at night was pretty damn cool!

平成24渋川山車祭り(2012 Shibukawa Dashi Matsuri)

Every two years there is a little bit of awesome at the end of obon in my Japanese home town. Once again it was the Shibukawa Dashi Matsuri and like the last time, I joined Shimogo for an epic 2 days of heat, sweat, pain and adrenaline...

Photo: S.Nakamura Copyright: bakadaruku.blogspot.com

Ebisu Circuit ~5 hit combo~

Ebisu Circuit.

I have been sliding around in my car for a while now and have been saying that this year would be the day I took it to the next level and get my track cherry popped. In July I did.
It was no competition or anything. Just a track day with some mates. For me however it was a rather big deal. I saw it as a watershed in my sports car life. If the track turned out to be as fun as people said, I would continue to upgrade my Silvia and track it as much as possible with the intention to eventually participate in a low level competition sometime in the next year or so. If the drift bug didn’t bite me any harder than it had up till now, I would move on from the Silvia and head into big power and speed territory with a Supra or GT-R….

Shots #88 …I know it’s been some time…

If there is one thing that the mac just can’t do, it’s blog well. All the blog editing software that is halfway decent costs a fortune and still can’t do shit compared to windows live writer for free. But being my mobile machine it tends to be the thing that gets photos off the camera and thus I need to trasfer the pics from the mac lappie to the windows deskie. Since the SSD and reinstall on the deskie.. I have been to lazy to make my network work again… till now. Expect a bunch of backlog over the next month or 2.

Oh and we went to the beach too !

Pit ORC ~5 hit combo~ Round 2

Because 5 pics is not enough awesome!

 

Pit ORC ~5 hit combo~

Took the bitch to get aligned at Pit ORC in Isesaki.

 

For car lovers, this place is basically The Grand.