Found this article on Hacker News and thought it was fascinating.
Apparently, bumbling Indians are tied with movie bad-guy / tragic figure Blacks for the worst position, with fellow movie villains Arabs bringing up 3rd place. Go get them boys, it’s a post-racial world. (It reminds me of when I did A-B Testing on japan-guide with a “White Face” and a “Brown Face”; white won every time)
Undoubtedly, this was the best part of my last vacation. Hachinohe is a dump, but it has a great beach.
I have walked past this house a million times. Splattered across the side is “Dentist: Aoki”, yet I’ve never seen anyone going in or out. What gives?
Tokyo Hackerspace is still in its infancy, but it was a lot of fun to go yesterday. It really differs from some of the other events in the Tokyo area, many of which seem to be marketing events that are garbed in more benign trappings. Having the chance to listen to some of the cool stuff that is going on in Tokyo (and being able to actually heckle) makes a huge difference. It feels “real”; and I’m looking forward to contributing more. (I’m already a key-carrying member, having paid my dues for a full year).
Being “real” has its drawbacks, especially in the depressingly honest stories that can be shared (and that usually stay buried otherwise). I had a conversation I had with a fellow who was there. He is currently unemployed, and with good reason. His previous company is known as a “black company“; it is a company that engages in quasi-legal (and unquestionably immoral) practices to improve profitability. According to him, they posted a series of anonymous complaints about him on the Japanese anonymous message board “2 channel”. A paid search of his name turns up results from 2ch, and Japanese employers seem to take the anonymous grumblings into consideration before offering employment. As he put it, “I can’t even get a job offering 750 yen an hour”
True story? Grumblings from a bitter ex-employee? I don’t know. I do know that the market for employment for Japanese employees is not good, and I don’t envy them in the least; throw in some seemingly official condemnations on a board dedicated to “the inside story”, and their situation would become hopeless.
Enabling cowardice isn’t a Japanese-exclusive trait. I wonder if employers are already doing this in Canada and the US..?  I don’t mean scouring Facebook and Myspace pages, but rather trading backdoor information and actively sabotaging the careers of their employees. It seems counter productive, but who knows..?
uch:
– Edit — I made some changes to the text above. Also, it turns out that you can purchase search tokens on 2ch if you want to research a specific website or a person.
I rented a batch of four movies that I hadn’t seen so far; Apocalypto, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Full Metal Jacket and Die Hard.
Cuckoo was clearly the best, but I was very surprised at the incredible quality of Apocalypto. For a movie that was supposedly awful, it was far better than Die Hard and I personally found it better than Full Metal Jacket. It is absolutely a terrifying end if you know any history – they had already destroyed themselves, and now someone was coming to wipe them off the face of the Earth. Really, the scene with the Europeans arriving was incredible; it is possible to derive so much meaning from it. Even if one was to ignore history, Apocalypto was the perfect chase movie. The scene where the chase turned into guerrilla warfare (after he challenged them near the waterfall) still resonates in my head today. Apocalypto is a more human “Predator”, with better acting and better story telling. Highly recommended.
Full Metal Jacket has a lot of quotable lines, but it doesn’t really feel that important to me. This is probably because I watched it 2 weeks after I saw “The Deer Hunter” (which is by far its superior).
Die Hard is crippled by having Reginald VelJohnson. Everytime I saw him, I couldn’t help but think of Family Matters. (In particular, I always have this one scene in my head where he is infodumping about how the police don’t have “ticket quotas”, a complete falsehood). His performance was bad; sadly, it wasn’t bad enough to be enjoyed.
Cuckoo was great because you know it is a dark movie going in, but you still fall hard for how McMurphy is trying to help the people around him. Seeing Billy at the end getting past his stuttering, only to be destroyed by the head nurse is excellent cinema.
