Report from Japan, Part 2, plus Douglas Adams

Whoo. My weekend of work is over, and I generated a little over 7,000 words about a Magic tournament. It seems like if I kept up that pace for a week and a half, I'd have written a whole novel.

Okay, so Japan, right? Yes.

I spent the first part of today with people from work, going to model stores and wishing I liked Final Fantasy VIII enough to buy the cool limited-edition Zippo lighters with Squall's Gunblade. And then I saw Lupin stuff, but I was able to restrain myself on the theory that I couldn't bring back more than two or three things, and if I did that, I'd spend all my time obsessing on the models that were missing. The Zenagata figure was way cool, though. Covet, covet.

After awhile, I struck out on my own. I'm sure the people I was with are perfectly nice, but I didn't want to spend my two days off hanging around with work people. I wanted to booze up and riot! Er, that's just an expression; there was no boozing and no rioting. My point is that I enjoy roaming around a city where I don't speak or read the dominant language and I'm two or three trains away from the hotel.

The trains. It was fun, because I was here two years ago, at almost the same spot. So I knew how to take the one train one stop from here (Sakuragicho Station) to Yokohama (Yokohama Station). This time around, I've gone to Tokyo, a 45-minute ride with dangers galore. I don't know exactly what dangers, but I'm sure there are some.

Lucky for me, I seem to be good at trains. We don't have any in Seattle, but I guess my extensive bus-riding experience has prepared me well. When I went to London, I was able to operate the Underground acceptably well. Except for being creeped out on account of having read Neverwhere on the flight, which imbued all the stations with a feeling that there was something going on I couldn't quite see.

Of course, here in Japan, there really is something going on I can't catch. I've lucked out so far with my travels and with trying to keep in mind what direction the train station is, but if that doesn't continue, I could get in real trouble. Which I approve of, because so far, Japan isn't being foreign enough. I've eaten mostly Wendy's Spicy Chicken Sandwiches, just like at home.

Okay, it seems to me that what's needed right now is a clever "Japan" anecdote to keep things interesting. While I was bouncing through Tokyo this afternoon, I found a videogame that I named "KodoMania". I'll explain. One of the big genres of arcade videogames here is the "-mania" games, which work like Dance Dance Revolution or Parappa the Rapper: things show up on screen and tell you what to do. There's DrumMania, where you sit at a little electronic drum kit and have to hit the right drums at the right time to make beautiful music. Well, really you make cheap J-Pop, but the important part is that this is a game where you play by doing the thing you're imitating. BeatMania, where you pretend to be a club dj, has actual turntables for you to scratch. There's a guitar version, and so on like that.

The one I found had big Kodo Drums, with two sticks to hit them with, and you got to play along with a Japanese cover band's version of Living La Vida Loca. It was weird and cool, which is what you want in a Japanese video game.

I have a picture, and even a 3-second MPEG of me playing it (badly), but I don't think I'll upload it yet. BTW, the pictures on my work site that are of the Ferris Wheel and the big hotel shaped like a shark fin were taken from my hotel window, so I've got a pretty cool view.

All I've got left is random observations ("There really are a lot of Japanese Schoolgirls around here. Of course, here, they're just called "schoolgirls"), and I don't think I can hammer them into anything cohesive.

Douglas Adams died.

Strega got it right, but I still feel like I have to say something about the death of Douglas Adams. Something more substantive than my first response (which was "Fuck!").

I first became aware of Douglas Adams in an airport bookstore when I found a paperback copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which had a blurb on it something like "If Kurt Vonnegut and (someone I can't remember) had a son, this is the book he would write. But he'd get sued down to his skivvies, because Douglas Adams has already written it." I read the book, loved it, and from then on, every time I went into a bookstore, I checked the science fiction section and the humor section to see if the promised Restaurant at the End of the Universe was out yet.

Eventually it came out, and I devoured it. The Hitchiker's series was an important touchstone for, let's just say geeks. In some ways, Hitchhiker quotes were more appreciated than Monty Python; I remember having Hitchhiker trivia contests in High School (the winning question: What color sash does the Emperor of the Galaxy traditionally wear?).

A few months ago, I went back to the Hitchhiker's series, and they're still good, although I'm really too familiar with the first couple (having also heard the radio series and watched the tv series and played the Infocom game, all of which have different plots for the same series of events), and the later few tend to deviate from the basic concept. And I have to admit I still don't understand "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe"; what exactly happened at the end, and what was the point?

The Dirk Gently books, on the other hand, I have grown to love. There's a spot where Dirk claims that he navigates by Zen, finding a car that looks like it knows where it's going, and following it to its destination. I've tried that. It works. Those are two great books. Last Chance to See is also good, although it came out too close to Michael Palin's globetrotting adventures to get the proper attention.

So Douglas Adams died and I'm sad about it.

I've got an anecdote that I was going to use some other time, but it's sort of Adams-related. Infocom text adventures (Zork, Enchanter, Starcross, etc.) were a big hobby of mine back when they existed. Adams did an Infocom version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it was properly convoluted, to the point where the babel fish puzzle is still a touchstone for hard-to-solve game situations. And there are still people who really enjoy the last line of the newly-added verse of Vogon poetry ("Why not then? Moose."). People like me, for one.

Adams did a second game, "Bureaucracy", where you had to get your bank to acknowledge your change-of-address form and things got confusing after that. Now, Infocom used to do this thing called the "Marathon of the Minds" where for a new game, they'd go to a city and all the high schools in the region would send three-person teams to try to solve the game. Bureaucracy's Marathon of the Minds was in San Diego, and I was on my school's team. There were, I think, around twenty-five teams scattered around the Science Center in Balboa Park, and everyone buckled down to the game.

It took awhile. After twenty-four hours playing a single game, attention wanders. The Science Center had the usual diversions (a pair of parabolas showing how a whisper couldbe heard across a room, a cloud chamber, a big gyroscope you could ride), and that was a nice way to keep everyone awake. Plus the free pizza and Coke.

I still remember getting the individual puzzles solved, and which ones I was responsible for. After 37 hours, my team won. Whoo. In your faces, other schools. We got some big prize, which I think involved all the Infocom games, which we mostly already had anyway. Anyway, we were delighted. Yay us. I still have my shirt, although it looks pretty much like you'd expect a 15-year-old shirt to look like.

I should have gone directly home. I was terribly sleep-deprived and running on caffeine, a combination which I have come to know well. It makes you vague, tired, and twitchy. And you can feel your eyeballs changing shape when you have to focus on things. And that's how I was when I went to a role-playing game that I realized had started.

When I got there, the game had broken up, because one of the players had gotten some naughty anime (isn't this a great geek story?), but they'd left me a present. One of us had recently been to Arizona, where they had this new miracle drink called "Jolt". Aw yeah.

So I grabbed the Jolt and went home. And on the way, I had sleep-deprivation-induced hallucinations. Big ones. Like this: I was driving along the highway, there's the steering wheel, there's the other cars, and I'm in a big field with pretty green grass and a yellow sun and it's so nice and WHOA! My car is going into the other lane! That was close. I'd better concentrate. It's not very far to home, and then it'll be okay to lie down in this patch of flowers that smell so nice. Maybe if I just WHOA! The other lane again!

It's a good thing California has those bumps between lanes.

That's the anecdote. It's only tangentially related to Douglas Adams, but I wanted to share something that you wouldn't see everywhere, and I think the important part is this: Even though Douglas Adams hadn't written a book in a year, I was still a big fan, and I was made sad by his death.

Fuck.