Opening credits

I had a dream last night that someone important (I forget who) was visiting my house, and I was hopelessly unprepared. This isn't unusual, in dreams or reality.
What was unusual was that a kind person of my acquaintance (again, I forget who) had taken a moment to clear away the pile of unopened or unregarded mail behind my front door. I say pile; a more accurate term might be "drift". Again, this isn't unusual.
So I only realised this had been a dream upon leaving the house the next morning, passing that very same avalanche of junk on the way out.

Mail is a headache. While any piece of mail was a package of excitement and anticipation in my youth, once I hit 18 and started getting bills and regular bank-statements, I quickly lost interest. You start to become part of the real world, where paper communication serves a utilitarian function rather than - as most things do when you're a teenager - some form of entertaining or social purpose.

These days my mail is roughly composed of:

• 50% local freesheets of varying purpose and quality
• 30% advertising junk
• 13% bills/statements, which I can recognise within one glance and therefore needn't open
• 5% "No longer at this address" (going back 3 generations, I believe)
• 2% "Ooh, I wonder what that is...?"

That 13% chunk still needs opening and checking periodically, of course, but it's an annoying chore that can be avoided until you have the gumption to sort it out - like vacuuming, or updating your blog.
So only the 2% is of any real interest, and that means every morning I can happily trample over the strata of the last couple of weeks without giving a second thought to the fact that I May Already Be A Winner, I Have Already Been Approved For [something], or the front-page news that invariably includes a picture of pre-pubescent kids in hi-viz tabards holding brooms or binbags and looking very pleased with themselves.

This week was different.

This week, I received two things in the mail that made me happy.

First was the DS cartridge: Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten - my stylus-enabled Japanese Kanji dictionary. This thing is, as I had hoped, excellent. Hiromi was impressed, and I use it constantly along with my two-way Japanese dictionary whenever I'm doing homework. It's all in Japanese so I'm still finding my way around, but it's got pretty much all the functionality you could hope for in something like this, and most of the entries have an English definition against them.

I would heartily recommend this software only if your Japanese is at a sufficient level. If you're somewhere around JLPT level 4 or 3 then you'll be able to use this to great effect, but otherwise you're wasting your time. Don't try to run before you can crawl, especially if you have ragged stumps instead of legs.

Second, and probably more significant, was the arrival of... *drum roll*... my Diploma in Higher Education - Civil Engineering With Management!
Whee!
This is something I've been meaning to collect for some time (7 years), but never got around to somehow. It represents the two years of study I did attend at the University of Birmingham, and in truth I did rather well during those two years. It's still my greatest regret that I never completed a degree course, and something I burn to rectify sometime in the not-too-distant future.
Maybe I'll get a mail-order degree. The University of Mountebank sounds quite reputable.

Anyway, at least I got something out of it. The credits from this can be put towards another course of study, naturally, but I can't really make any practical use of the qualification itself - it's been too long since I did any real Civil Engineering to consider myself suitably qualified, although a Diploma could still get me a decent wage standing by the roadside in high-viz gear waving a stripy pole back and forth while some career-voyeur looks at me through a theodolite...
Yeah, I think I'll stick with my current situation. I'd rather be ambling along a road to the future than standing on the hard-shoulder dodging traffic.

So, many thanks go to Dr Lawrence Coates, my old tutor and confidant, for so swiftly and kindly sorting this all out for me (and arranging the waiver of my outstanding library fees), and to Mr Kamel Hawwash for agreeing that I may as well have a with Management tacked on there, which will probably do more for my present career than the Civil Engineering part ("Critical path? Sir, I am the critical path!!")

My tacky, mauve, faux-vinyl National Record of Achievement folder already feels heftier with the gravity of it.

Next, the JLPT?

Dirty Secret (Lite)

I have a confession to make. I did something recently that I shouldn't have done, for various reasons, and I've avoided telling people where possible because of the shame.
It's addictive, expensive and endlessly distracting, and I've come up with all sorts of rationalisations, but the fact is I shouldn't have done it, and now I can't stop.

I bought a Nintendo DS Lite.

So far I don't have many games for it, but I can see that it's going to be an effort not to start pampering it like a spinster would a beloved pet. I've already found myself "brain-training" during my lunch break - and no, I can't claim the time back as "training and personal development". That's the excuse I use for trolling Slashdot.

My inherited puritanical guilt is being subsumed, however, by the relentless onslaught of sheer childish delight. I've not been attracted by the power of its graphics or the range and intensity of its games (Mario can go felch Yoshi for all I care), nor even by its shiny black case (and just how did we ever phone people before the iPhone...?).

So if it's neither the love of hardcore gaming nor posing techno-lust, what (I hear you ask) has wooed me so?
It's just so much fun!
Not in the blam blam zoom k'pow way - and I'm someone who once lived for the seated adrenalin-rush of blasting the legs off an attacking swarm of ant-lions from a speeding dune-buggy in the resplendent immersion of Half-Life 2. If I want to relish in that kind of pornographically-violent thrill, I have a whole hulk of a PC purpose-built for the task.

No, the thrill of my newest toy is something much simpler: it really is a toy. Its very design-principle seems to have been "Don't try to impress - just make it fun," and everything seems to have flowed from that.

I'll give you a nice pure example of the sort of thing I'm talking about here: Electroplankton. This fantastically intuitive bit of kit isn't a game - there is no goal, no reward system, nothing of the sort. In essence you are interacting with a whole host of little semi-autonomous fellas, who in turn interact with their environment and one another, and create sounds as they go, resulting in some occasionally breathtaking symphonic chain-reactions.
This goes beyond bashing out drum rhythms. You influence things by poking them, moving them, directing them with your stylus; by altering tempo, frequency and even fluid current direction with various buttons; even by talking, singing and clapping into the microphone! This isn't a game, but it's undeniably fun. The obvious word is toy.

Even something as straight-forward as the cute platformer wholesomeness of Lego Indiana Jones is infected with this sense of intuitive fun. You want to blow out torches in the Temple of Doom? Blow into the microphone! Need to swing across the rooftops of Cairo? Drag across the screen in the direction you want to "whip"! Such simple elements, but they all add up to offer a cornucopia of immersive delight and discovery from a device with a couple of screens the size of business cards.

The classic Brain Training titles, to give another example, are the adult's equivalent of those interactive play-mat things that parents get for their babies so they can develop normally in a sterile lab: in a similar but more direct way, the point is to learn and to enhance your brain's natural abilities by interacting with something rewarding, and by working things out yourself. No adrenalin, no tension, no steep learning curve, just get stuck in and enjoy yourself.

A final mention goes to the imminent arrival through my letter-box of one of the most valuable bits of kit for the DS I could hope to obtain: a Kanji dictionary. You can use the stylus to actually write a Kanji, and it'll recognise your atrocious scrawl and present you with a definition! No more hunting through the dictionary by Stroke-Count or Radical, just write the damned thing in. If I were to buy an electronic kanji dictionary even approaching that level of functionality, I'd be looking at a few hundred quid for a start.

All this speaks well of the DS, but there also seems to be a universal appreciation of the Nintendo Wii - the DS's big brother - that has overcome the traditional barriers and boundaries of gaming culture and the usual hardcore market demographic by having much the same philosophy. Presumably as a result of this, the DS and Wii are exalted leaders in their respective markets. How is it that Nintendo got it so right where others seemed to be churning out the same old thing, harder and faster than ever before?

I'm tempted to think that it says something about Japanese culture. I've always felt that, as a society, Japan seems to be fairly unashamed to pursue its own interests on an individual level (such are the observations one makes when wasting teenaged Friday evenings watching Eurotrash). Maybe it's down to the fact that people are unlikely to say anything if you act a little differently over there (however strongly they might feel), or maybe I'm just demonstrating my as-yet juvenile understanding of the culture.
It seems to make sense though. In all matters of personal taste and expression, Japan seems to shamelessly pursue an unfettered purity. From fashion to film to fun to - let's face it - porn, if you want to know how far it can go, look to Japan. Maybe that's unhealthy when applied to some of our less-savoury appetites, but I can't think of a better philosophy when it comes to just having fun.

Of course, that whole idea falls down when you remember that one of their direct competitors - Sony - is principally Japanese also, and hasn't managed to generate half the market-trouncing furore of Nintendo. Still, if you want multimedia excellence right along the chain from artists through production to electronic reproduction, you could do worse...


Okay, I admit it. I'm doing some intense high-brow rationalising here. £100 is £100, but I really am enjoying myself. Brain Training repeatedly tells me I have a Brain Age of about 20, and this gives me a bit of glee every time. At least it did until someone told me it doesn't go below 20, and Dr Kawashima is probably trying to imply that my Brain Age is somewhere nearer 8.

I don't care. I'm having fun, and I don't have to blow the legs of anything to do so.
If you don't mind, I'm going to go trade games with my Japanese teacher's 8 year old son...