Registered for Ameba

A friend of mine from Japan, Tatsu, sent me an invitation to a Japanese social networking website called Ameba. I thought this might be a fun opportunity to practice my Japanese. So.. it turns out: it’s fun AND confusing! I guess social networking websites can be confusing at first glance, but throw in the Japaneseniness© and your only guide line are pictures. Well, I’m exaggerating here but imagine the shock I got when I saw this:

ameba user page

If you’re used to using social networking sites, the interface designs are usually quite similar so it’s possible to guess what each link on there says. So yeah so far I’ve entered some personal information a la favourite food, hobbies, etc. and skipped questions like “what is your fetish” and “are you S or M?” (pretty sure fetish in this case means passion, and S/M means strong/mild personality, but you know.. just in case..)

Once you’ve registered with ameba you can make your own little avatar that looks like you (if you desire so, see picture above), and make it run around in a world full of beaches and shit. Of course there are other avatars running around as well, so you get to interact in more ways than just sending messages on a website or blogging. Oh yeah, blogging. My first entry is about a line long and says something along the lines of “Japanese is hard, I won’t blog..”

Organizer

Roaming the intertubes for affordable, feature rich organizer that would do the trick for my stay in Japan, I settled on the $12.99 Moleskine City Notebook Tokyo:

Moleskine Front

Moleskine Map Sample

It features maps with indexes, blank pages, lined pages for “database” entries, and.. well other stuff. It’s purpose is mainly for taking notes while traveling, as there are no calendar pages. Attached to the back of the cover is a little pocket designed to store little loose notes, I guess, which I might use as new house for my iPod Touch. All day-to-day organizational matters will be managed through my iTouch: calendar entries, to do lists, contacts, drinking games.

While the Moleskine is sort of stylish on its own, I wanted to try myself at customizing something for the first time in my life. I’ve seen many friends upgrade their belongings to make it more personal and was always jealous that they.. well.. could be bothered to do it. Seeing as I have lots of spare time over here in the USA, I made a little project out of it this weekend. It was quite easy actually: make a collage of photos, print out samples a couple of times to get the size on the paper right, print the actual thing, put plastic sticker over it for protection, fold paper to make the cover, adjust back cover to allow usage of rubber band.. DONE! (ignore “sleazy” face)

Ignore face..

Only thing left to do is decide what to use lined pages for and make my own labels. \o/