kurineko

Something stuck me as weird as I talked to all my coworkers this week.

There’s this universal perception that the weather is both hot and humid. Almost excruciatingly so. And there’s this similarly universal opinion that heat makes people extremely tired- enough to make them pass out at their desks right after working.

So, as a foreiger hearing the constant complaints and seeing the pained expressions of teachers furiously waving a fan in their faces, I have a hard time understanding why they’re not turning on the air conditioner units positioned directly above our heads.

Everyone’s wearing the thinnest of materials and still sporting a layer of sweat that makes them look like they just finished a triathalon. They may have only been sitting at their desks, but damn if they don’t look like it.

The ones who aren’t sweating and awake are sweating and sleeping. They’re passed out face down on their desks, or closing their eyes with their head in their hands. Sleep seems like the only peaceful respite from the 32 degree celsius weather, even if it’s during work hours. If they’re not asleep, they’re complaining about the insane, relentless heat.

And still, there’s air conditioners mere feet away.

So the solution to the heat? Our school purchased about 40 fans to strategically place around the school, plugging them into every socket our school had installed since its construction in the 1970’s, and they let them oscillate. Of course, this is one tiny room fan trying to cool a room the size of a garage, so you can imagine the effectiveness. So they also slide open the windows and classroom doors. Now papers on the blackboard, kids’ papers, book pages, and anything not stapled down gets blown around like a tornado. The little fan installed in the room blows its petty gust through the room, being easily overpowered by the opened windows.

One begins to ask, if there’s open windows, why they even spent the $40-ish per fan (plus installation, plus power, etc.).

Sadly, the classrooms cannot boast having an air conditioner conveniently positioned above the desks. But the kids, smaller and younger they may be, are coated in their own layer of sweat. Their hair sticks together in bunches at the ends from the sweat oil they amassed trying to walk up 3 flights of stairs from their computer science class in the lab, and they’ll sweat even more as they walk around doing classroom activities. Some kids give in and just pass out. Some sit there and tough it out. Nobody looks happy. Everyone looks like they’re ready to die. Everyone complains about the heat.

This is the first week of actual heat. It will only go up from here, getting warmer and dryer, until we eventually reach 34-36 degrees celsius mid-summer. And by then you’d better believe half the school will be passed out and visiting the hospital. Especially the poor teachers and students forced to continue sports outside for hours in said blazing heat.

All the while, the constantly-off air conditioner taunts us, sitting there in its lazy, unused, sloth-like state. Almost taunting everyone in the room looking like they’re three inches from heat-related death.

I sometimes wonder what the Japanese are thinking when they decide to tough out the heat. There’s some businesses and schools that’ve made the seemingly unthinkable first-world jump from open windows and fans to air conditioners and smartly-constructed buildings insulated to contain coolness, but they’re about as prevalent as Rolls Royces in third-world countries. For the rest of the country, they’re putting up with heat issues America eliminated in the early 80’s.

They argue that they’re being “eco” with keeping the air conditioning off. They’re conserving energy (an especially popular topic post-Tohoku earthquake/tsunami)! They’re cutting down on energy bills! They’re protecting the age-old Japanese cultural aspect of stoicness and withstanding the unbearable.

Then you look around and see everyone investing in commercial solutions to the problem. It’s almost silly. You’d think there’s lobbyists for towel-makers, drink vendors, paper fan factories, and Uniqlo in Parliament. Everyone’s got 3 sweat towels, everyone peddles O~i Ocha and Aquarius to their kids to combat the heat exhaustion, there’s more fans per square meter than people, and everyone’s got their quick-dry Cool Biz on.

There’s even more oddness. You can see teachers sleeping in every corner of the office. Instead of paying bills to keep the school air-conditioned and high-energy, they’re paying teachers to sleep for hours at a time at their desks. It’s like down periods are government-sanctioned naptime, as these teachers are snoring away or face-first on their desk as high-level elderly officials walk in observing the school and office. Of course these teachers will be around the office until 7PM regardless, but that’s beside the point. They’re living in misery, then working late. A pretty crappy situation if you ask me.

The only reliable defense left is they’re trying to maintain the stoic, put-up-with-horrendous-shit tenet of Japanese culture. But we’re a modern world, and there are modern solutions. Much like how they continue to install in-ground toilets when the rest of Asia (S. Korea particularly) is quickly abolishing them due to the strain on elderly peoples’ knees and difficulty of use, or stamping 10,000 printouts by hand (and realizing on the 9,999th sheet they picked the wrong date, then going over each paper with white-out strips and re-stamping it all again) when there’s a 5,000Y machine in a teachers’ catalog who could do the job in 20 minutes, there’s a bit of insanity in the system here. There’s easy, efficient, life-improving solutions within grasp. But because of some strange logic or pride, they forego the best solution and stick with a horribly inefficient, painful, and ultimately dangerous solution.

This wouldn’t really deserve an article if it was just people QQing (complaining) about some heat. Yeah, it might deserve a little quip on Twitter, but this is just the beginning of a long string of bad events to come. Now begins the 4-month period where kids will be passing out daily, getting rushed to the hospital. Now begins the dehydration emergencies, as kids forget their water and end up passing out. Now begins the drop in classroom motivation and attitudes, as the heat sucks out every last ounce of “giving a crap” these kids have when it comes to exerting themselves. This pretty much mirrors itself in the adult teachers, but they’re at least able to escape school to buy liquids and call it quits when they’re uncomfy.

I write this article with Japanese people saying “It’s so hot!” around me in almost a strange sort of chorus. The chorus comes every 10 words I type. And there’s a big, tempting air conditioning unit not 10 feet away.

I don’t get it. And the worst part? I’m afraid that if I do get an explanation, it’ll send me plunging into Phase 2. So I’ll just sit here in my blissful gaijin ignorance. It’s probably for the best.

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I know this isn’t “cognitive dissonance” in the strictest sense, but living in Japan right now has me feeling like the country’s living a split reality. What I’m seeing might be pure conjecture and totally off-mark, but as an outsider looking in I’m observing some interesting things about how the nation’s coping with this latest natural crisis.

Last Friday at work, I was sitting at my desk thinking I was either sick or passing out. Turns out I was just sitting in my very first earthquake. But a few hundred miles north of me there were folks getting nailed with a (relatively deep) 9.0-magnitude earthquake that would originate a massive tsunami rolling at coastal cities across Japan’s northeast coasts.

To put this weekend’s events in perspective:

• The only other recent earthquake in Japan comparable to this was The Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe, Japan, and that was a 7.3-magnitude earthquake. This was 9.0.
• Those affected by the earthquake in northern Tohoku were 81 miles from the epicenter, which was out at sea. The tsunami was traveling inland at 500mi/hr. That means they had a little over 9 minutes to react and get to safety amidst aftershocks.
• The soonest any civilian got notice of the impending earthquake was 80 seconds prior. Even so, it’s still the most advance notice recorded in history, despite it being slightly over a minute.
• Of Japan’s 84 nuclear plants, around 1/10 of them were damaged in the quakes. All of them are located in areas of major seismic activity, but are architecturally engineered to anticipate these exact scenario. 3-4 were considered to be in meltdown despite the good construction. Besides tarnishing the environment around it, it’s put a giant black mark on nuclear plants in general.
• The last nuclear disaster of this magnitude was Three Mile Island back in 1979. Japan’s situation has not exceeded the severity of it yet.

So with all this chaos and wreckage, and the general size of Japan (being about 3/4 the size of California), you’d expect the entire nation to be in panic mode. But aside from TV news stations, the entire country’s been extraordinarily calm.

On Friday evening, despite everything, I still went to an izakaya and found the place to be lively and full of laughter, drinking, smiling faces, and general happiness. People weren’t sitting in their homes glued to the TVs. They weren’t all bringing up the terms “tsunami”, “jishin”, “tsurai”, and other terms you’d be expecting. It was just like any other night in Notogawa. For a developing national crisis, it seemed like half of Japan didn’t get the memo.

Saturday rolled around and we got an early start for some ice skating in Seta. Getting on the train, I was expecting half the train to have their phones whipped out with TV antennas extended. The situation grew more dire in the past 12 hours with new worries about massive aftershocks and radiation fallout. Yet the entire train was silent and, on its face, no different than any other train I’ve ridden. People were texting quietly. Sports teams were passed out in their seats. People had shopping bags in their hands. I felt like I was the only one to have CNN open tracking the status of the quakes.

Then Sunday came with Sagicho, the massive festival of drinking, ramming giant floats together, and setting them on fire. I spent most of the afternoon inside doing my own thing while keeping up on events, but eventually meandered towards Omihachiman at night to see stuff ablaze. What I found wasn’t a somber, pacified group of people keeping their attitudes in check in leiu of recent events, but massive crowds of smiling, drunk, extremely festive people. There was laughing, dancing, drunken running in circles, and everything you’d expect from any other festival. You’d never guess 500 miles north there were thousands of people being pulled out of rubble and fished out of sea currents.

It all struck me as very weird. Like everything from Nagoya on down was unaware or blissfully ignorant of the goings-on up north.

I wondered how America would be reacting in a similar situation. Thinking back to 9/11, Katrina, and all other sudden disasters, I distinctly remember events being cancelled (or very much scaled back) in the wake of the crises. Everywhere you went there were mumblings of the event. People were trying to fill their friends in or voiced their concerns of follow-up events. People posited their hypotheses about the causes and preventions. Schools had assemblies and moments of silence. But not here.

In a way, I can respect how the Japanese are dealing with this. It’s likely they’re silently coping with the issue and their feelings towards it, and during their private time learning about events. They’re not taking their feelings, suspicions, and worries out with them in public. But at the same time it shines a very strange light on the nation from the perspective of an American. Maybe our media’s just too sensationalist. Maybe we’re subconsciously trained to bring these things up in public to make it appear we’re interested and concerned. Maybe our way of coping with disasters is communication and information-gathering.

In any case, there’s some cultural divide. And it’s a bit unsettling.

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You might have noticed my Twitter updates touting different blog URLs today. Well, some reorganization’s afoot!

I decided that I finally had enough to discuss about World of Warcraft to make a dedicated blog (while sharing the load with my cohort and ladyfriend CJ). Prayer of Knives will host things Warcraft-related, keeping this blog free of MMO-related clutter.

My Posterous will be centered on everything else (or what I prefer to call “Whatever’s on my mind at the time that I have the desire to type out”).

If an entry’s relevant to both blogs, expect cross-posts. But the rule of thumb moving forward is: WoW Wordpress; Personal Posterous.

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ミクパ? Don’t break out your dictionaries. It’s not in there. “Mikupa” refers to Hatsune Miku’s Live Party that went on last night in Tokyo. SEGA rented a giant expo hall, hired a band, coded some dance moves, and had Miku go to work on her special day.

First, a little background about this event. The full name of “Mikupa” is “ミクの日感謝祭 39’s Giving Day”. If you translate it directly, it’s “Miku’s Thanksgiving Day Thank You’s Giving Day”. 39 reads san-kyuu, or thank you. A bit redundant for a title, but whatever. It’s easy to remember- every year on 3/9, SEGA and its affiliates put on a giant Hatsune Miku concert in Tokyo and also stream it to movie theaters and computer screens across Japan live. For $20-80, you too can watch it unfold live in physical or digital form.

I learned about 39’s Giving Day long, long ago through this video and was determined to get tickets at any cost. However, as my time in Japan passed Miku slipped my mind. It took a trip to a Book Off here in Yokaichi to remind me (thanks random window TV!). After that I searched around for tickets immediately, and to my horror, the live performance was sold out. D E P R E S S I O N. But then CJ found posters for live broadcast tickets at Family Mart. Hope had returned!

Flash-forward to last night at the event. We arrived in Kyoto’s MOVIX 20 minutes before the event and scrambled to navigate the confusing map layouts to find the correct theater (a topic in and of itself…). Lo and behold, there were groups of otaku-looking guys and girls to follow straight to the honeypot. Bingo.

As we filed in, we were passed Mikupa burlap bags and a (surprisingly luminous) green glowstick. Pity they didn’t give us the 3-piece connectors to make them glow-negis like they do for the Tokyo performance. We took our seats, and it began. 2.5 hours later, it ended. I sat there in my seat, still pretty overwhelmed. I was finally there for it, man! Then my brain started picking the event apart.

I was scanning 2chan for the set list late last night and came upon 3 1000-comment threads about the lead-up and post-analysis of the event. Here were the recurring comments:

• Hatsune Miku’s outfit was totally off compared to next year. Where was her skirt strap? Why was her skirt glitching?
• Why, for the love of god, did they put her in a black box instead of a holographic screen?
• The image quality this year was terrible. TERRIBLE. I could feel the jagged edges cutting me through my screen.
• Did anyone even know these songs? I got like 5. Anyone else?
• Someone should apologize to foreigners for this. (Follow-up comment: “They should apologize to more than just foreigners!”)
• The band last year was transcended human abilities. This year’s was pretty uninspired.
• They sure branded this event. They had Hatsune Miku bags, Miku Melon Soda… hell, even the straws had logos on them. …But of course I bought the melon soda, lol.
• They gave Miku too many power-ups.
• I got to sit next to some very hot cosplay chicks. Oh god they were hot. I took some pictures with my phone. I am in heaven.

I actually indentified with all the above points. While this year’s Mikupa was great, I have to wonder how much of it was my fanboyism being let loose and overlooking the shortcomings of this year’s performance relative to last year’s.

Their decision to put Miku in a big black box turned it from an crisp digital performance to a blurry 3D TV show. Yes, they might want to insinuate she “lives” in that box, but the hologram worked much better (even if reflections marred the image).

The songs were pretty unknown unless you followed the Hatsune Miku scene fanatically. You know when people on 2chan don’t know the songs you’ve waded too deep. I could pick out a good 8 or so of the 30+ songs played. Looking back on it, I was really disappointed they sped through a lot of the crowd favorites. Luka got the shaft last night in that regard- all of her good songs played for about 20 seconds.

There were a lot of things that, once the wax sheen washed away, left me yearning for a Mikupa more like last year’s. Last year they played popular trademark Miku songs almost every other song. The holographic image was beautiful, and the image quality was lightyears ahead of this year’s black box. If it wasn’t for the fact Miku has so many great songs and the crowd was extremely into the performance (despite watching from a movie theater), I think I would’ve walked out this year feeling quite differently.

This was still a great event, but I’m looking to next year with hopes they’ll tweak what needs tweaking. Let’s hope SEGA reads 2chan and changes are made so Miku’s appeal can spread. God knows she can use royalty money for more costumes.

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Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh.

Recently I’ve been refining my “goblin skills” to fund raiding. With materials costing upwards of 500 gold per night (it was significantly more a few weeks ago), the only way to keep from going into the poorhouse was to either spam 25 daily quests or become adept at auctioneering. I chose the latter because I’m lazy and like feeling like I’m taking advantage of people.

So I came upon a laundry list of resources to help me learn auctioneering all over again. I used to goblin it up in The Burning Crusade with nothing but the Auctioneer addon. (Good God that was a pain to maintain and check.) I now rely on columns & addons like Auctionator + Trade Skill Master, Gold Capped, The Consortium, JMTC, TUJ, and Alto’s Gold”ish” Advice Blog to get more insight and efficiency out of my time spent posting.

But all the tools, resources, and expertise in the world won’t save you from something that’s immediately-reacting and lifeless. No, I’m not talking about Paragon. I’m referring to auction house bots.

I started posting a few weeks back with respectable frequency. If you look at my posting history (below), you’ll notice a consistent level of activity with a big spike in the past week. This is me experimenting in new markets beyond Living Elements spam. Ooh, I’m getting so sophisticated!

But lately I’ve noticed a particularly annoying trend. My usual niche markets (meaning there’s few sellers, so-so demand, and bigger-than-average margins) turned ridiculously competitive overnight. All my moneymakers were being spammed by some level 1s who would relentlessly undercut my prices at all times of the day.

Thanks to the wonders of TUJ, it’s super easy to see just what was up. My normal strategy for dealing with competitors is to see when they post and what markets they’re in and work around them. To start, let’s look at my own posting patterns.

You can see I post in a scattered way throughout the day. White blocks mean no activity. Dark blue means heavy activity. I obviously have a day job, since if I do post, it’s piddly compared to what I do towards the evening. There’s blocks of inactivity I have posting patterns due to me going out, raiding, or what have you. Point being: there’s reasonable gaps.

Now let’s look at some of my competition. Names withheld, of course.

Okay, now this is weird. We’re seeing people just popping into existence out of nowhere with massive amounts of auctions. 0 auctions to 300+ overnight. Might it be someone’s newly-created level 1 bank alt posting tons of backlogged auctions? It’s possible.

But then look at their posting hours. You’ll notice the long, uninterrupted, almost-daily strings of blue boxes. If these scans are accurate (and basing its accuracy on my own profile, it is), these people are spending 8+ hours a day every day posting and undercutting auctions en-masse. With no break. This screams to me one thing: Gold Farmer Bots.

Who reasonably has the ability to spend all day, save for sleeping hours, sitting AFK in front of the auction house scanning and making near-instant undercuts to auctions? A human could… but even the most serious players couldn’t keep 8 hours of persistent attention on the AH undercutting things the instant they’re reposted. They couldn’t have gapless activity from start till finish. Even professional goblins have needs & obligations (going to the bathroom, tending to kids, work, doing errands).

So what to do? I reported them! I reported one of the above “bots” to a GM, and the next day they told me it was indeed a bot and actions were taken to shut them down. If I hadn’t reported them, who knows how long they’d be harassing my auctions and destroying markets?

It’s important to realize this is not implying every hardcore auctioneer is a bot in disguise. It’s in fact extremely easy to cancel, relist, and undercut auctions en-masse on a reasonable schedule. Trade Skill Master helps tons with that. But normal people don’t respond instantly and balance their auctioning around other in-game activities and real life. When you see unreasonable amounts of activity, it’s time to hit that big red “?” in your system bar and drag a GM into the situation.

I like to think that this will result in me gaining bagfuls of gold and slightly disassembling the gold-selling economy (at least on my home server). But who knows? At least my markets are back on their way to recovery.

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