Hey, this is in a novel! I was just reading it and, bam, totally caught me off guard. I’m going to have to start telling people that I got my nick from here.

Deobfuscation: It’s from Villa Incognito, a novel by Tom Robbins. The book starts with a tanuki named Tanuki falling to earth to drink sake and seduce young, rural Japanese women. I found reference to the novel while researching tanuki, and thanks to Amazon’s dirt-cheap used book vendors, I’m able to read it. It’s almost like a library, but not free and I have to wait for shipping.

Robbins really nails the tanuki of myth. Impressive for a western writer who tries to make himself look like a badass on the ‘about the author’ page.

The rest of the book lets Japanese legend bleed into the modern world, involving Tanuki’s human decendant, Kazu, and various people (drug dealers, American MIAs, circus performers and their, uh, admirers) involved in her life. It also reads oddly. Lots of intrusive narration and overly metaphorical statements, but they seem to work well. If the parts about the rest of Asia are as accurate as the part about Tanuki, then the author has exceptional knowledge of Asian culture. But, never having been to Thailand or Laos or Vietnam, I can’t say whether this is the case.

It’s been a while since I’ve read anything modern that’s not a textbook. I’m glad to be reading this.

I made the best batch of curry yesterday that I have ever made. It started out as the worst batch of curry I’ve ever made.

But… let’s start at the beginning. I have been nursing an intense curry addiction ever since I tried the stuff with an Indian friend. Living in the ethnic side of town, I have equally easy access to pad thai pushers, pho joints, sushi and teriyaki restaurants, Chinese places that scare away most white folk and taquerias. It’s mostly asian around here, or at least the good stuff is. The Tex-Mex isn’t bad either.

Every one of those establishments, besides the taqueria, sells curry in one form or another. In fact, the taqueria probably has mole, which is pretty close to curry. I’ve tried it everywhere, and curry’s always good. Unbelievably good. I decided to try my hand at making a curry dish a while back, using a packet of curry paste. It was okay, but not that good. I needed to experiment.

I started by buying a bottle of curry powder. Curry powder is a mixture of a bunch of spices that I can’t quite name offhand. Tumeric, cumin, mustard seed, stuff like that. Everyone has a different mixture, which makes everyone’s curry unique. I bought the expensive bottled stuff, thinking it would be better.

It wasn’t. It was overly cuminy, not very spicy and kind of bitter.
(more…)

With rhythm, anything is possible.

Getting cheese, shooting ghosts, even understanding Japanese.

I don’t know if Rhythm Tengoku will be translated, but it should be. Everyone here deserves to play it. It’s like an extended Wario Ware minigame, but it’s the best one you’ve ever played. But the thing is, it dosen’t even need to be translated. You use your intuition, and things turn out right. It’s how the whole game is set up. If you trust your own sense of rhythm, you will succeed. If you trust your own sense of how a video game should work, you will understand the Japanese.

Case in point: there’s this one game where you’re a white mouse, in between two brown mice. You’ve got your eyes on some cheese. A cat has its eyes on you. There’s some cartoony chase music. During the tutorial, the lead mouse will hold up a traffic light that will tell you when to hold A. Holding A makes you stop, and you stop just behind a stack of dishes so that the cat can’t see you. This is great. Easy, right? Just watch the sign.

Then you get into the game and there is no sign. The warning you get is the cat’s paws appearing on the table. Right paw. Left paw. HIDE. I hit A instinctively the first time it happened. The music then changes to cartoony sneaking music, but the four-beat bass intro to the main theme creeps in. Like a cartoon. I released A instictively and the mice ran. B.F. Skinner himself would have been proud.

I was so amused by this that I bungled it the next few times.

Another one: there’s this one where you’re on in a line of four women in kimonos. A redheaded, bespectacled gaijiny kind of woman. Traditional-sounding Japanese music plays. During the tutorial, they start clapping on certain beats. You push A and learn that you can clap too. But when? How? A moment of panic. Am I supposed to know this song?

If you pay attention, the lyrics are displayed karaoke-style on the screen. The lyrics that require you to clap are yellow. Push A when it gets to them. You expect to get it eventually.

Knowing what little I know about kana, I could keep up with the rhythm and clap when I needed to, passing on my first try. By the second time, I was singing along “Don don pan pan, don dodon pan pan.” I think I learned a little hiragana too. Unless I’m hearing that wrong, but whatever.

Speaking of sound, this game has some of the best sounds to come out of the GBA. I know that the GBA doesn’t have a sound chip and all sound is handled by the processor. This results in a lot of primitive-chiptune-type music in a lot of games. I’ve also been playing Summon Night: Swordcraft Story, which seems to have only chiptuney music. It sounds good for what it is.

But Rhythm Tengoku has drums, claps, singing and baseball bats. All rendered in perfect rhythm with clear enough sound to enjoy it while blasting it on a stereo. (that’s how i’ve been playing it)

I’ve downloaded the ROM, but I would gladly pay the cost to import this. Playing it on an emulator doesn’t do it justice unless you’re sure that it’s going to run at full speed the entire time. My copy of VirtualBoy Advance hovers around 97~99%, and I couldn’t get anything right. When I switched to my flash cart, it seemed like the button press was registering before I hit it. The “rhythm test” at the beginning of the game helped me get my beats down to the right level.

So don’t play it emulated.

And hook it up to a big stereo or at least some external speakers if you can.

And make sure you have room to dance. You’ll need to.