littleforeigner

Mar 14

Freesound

waveform

Perhaps because I have very little original talent of my own, I’m a big supporter of the Free Culture movement and associated organisation Creative Commons. I just came across the excellent Freesound project via the Creative Commons blog. It’s kind of like Flickr for sounds - not songs and music - and once you start pottering around on the site it can be just as dagerous a time sink as the photo sharing site can be.

There are currently over 50,000 sound samples that have been contributed by users under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The quality of sound recordings vary greatly, but some of them are quite amazing. This 3.5 minute recording of a thunderstorm pointed to in this interview with Freesound’s founder is just beautiful and I’m very tempted to put it on loop while I take a well earned nap.

They also have some dapper T-shirts.

Mar 12

in tax hell

Engrich

Tired of the well ploughed Engrish vein MetaのTame has started a new, more positive, quest for “examples of brilliant cross-linguistic creation”. They start with Shibuya store “Frank Zakka”.

Click the title of this post to check out the original post.

Pink Tentacle has grabbed a bunch of Edo era representations of disease bearing critters from the Kyushu National Museum site and kindly annotated them in English.

Link: Mythical 16th-century disease critters ::: Pink Tentacle

Mar 11

is jetlagged

Nordstrom mania and Japan T-shirts

I was in Honolulu for the opening of a new Nordstrom store at the Ala Moana shopping mall last week. There was a huge build up in the local media the couple of weeks prior to the opening, and, on opening day, the place was packed.

While I picked up a couple of snazzy hats - psyched that for once they had my size and didn’t have to buy in the kids’ section - I notice some of the T-shirts on sale. This one was on sale for 32 bucks.

I liked the mixed images in the one below, but decided it probably wasn’t the most appropriate shirt to wear in Hiroshima.

Canadians will most likely yawn, but my favorite of the 30+ new stores was my new fave lululemon. Although it calls its clothes components they are bloody good and it seems like it’s a very cool company.

Mar 10

Back in Japan

Mar 6

Recovering from the biggest ice cream sundae I’ve ever seen.
http://littleforeigner.tumblr.com/post/28093412

Joy's Birthday

The biggest ice cream I’ve ever seen and the kind of birthday song you could only really get in the US.

Mar 5

Bad news day in Japan

Screen shot from The Japan Today posts in my RSS reader rigt now.

bad news day