lists like this are great for discovering books to adorn your bookshelves, but as one comment says this should have been called “100 Favorite Novels of Contemporary Writers”
paborito kong buwan ang mayo. may bakasyon ng ilang araw, banayad ang hangin, hindi gaano kainit at hindi rin gaano kalamig, berde ang paligid at tumutubo ang mga halaman.
panahon din ng pagtatanim ng palay.
sa simula ng lakad kaninang umaga, dumaan muna kami sa jinja para gisingin ang mga diyos. mula sa loob ng bakuran ng jinja matatanaw ang palayan.
sa palayan naman makikita ang mga itik, uwak, tagak at green pheasant na nanghuhuli ng mga palaka at iba’t-ibang insekto para sa almusal.
japan is rethinking its cedar and cypress forests to reduce hay fever
the world of My Neighbor Totoro recreated live-action style in 4K. one of the better uses of AI that i’ve seen
The quiet grief of adult friendship
Bruno BD - Unsplash
We are perhaps the first generation to possess uninterrupted access to each other while simultaneously becoming emotionally inaccessible. We maintain ambient awareness of one another’s existence without participating meaningfully in each other’s lives.
reading enrico’s blog, i just realised i haven’t ridden my bike for quite a while now
Brett Jordan - Unsplash
so i bought a micro USB flash drive and ripped a bunch of CDs into it which was great for listening through the car audio.
what wasn’t great, however, was that my pioneer carrozzeria unit just couldn’t get the song order right. fortunately, i found a nice solution:
FATSort sorts directory structures of FAT file systems. Many MP3 hardware players don’t sort files automatically but play them in the order they were transferred to the device. FATSort can help here.
worked like a charm. easy to use, too.
The Philippines holds the key to Japan’s destiny
I just watched a video from Yomiuri’s channel explaining why the Philippines is a crucial country for Japan that will profoundly affect Japan’s security and economic future, especially in view of its increasingly fraught relations with China.
It’s interesting to hear the how Japan views the Philippines from the Japanese themselves.
I’ve just ran across this great write-up of Rashomon from Criterion:
“In Rashomon, Kurosawa was consciously attempting to recover and re-create the aesthetic glory of silent filmmaking. Thus, the cinematography (by the brilliant Kazuo Miyagawa) and editing are incredibly vital, and many passages are composed as silent sequences of pure film, in which the imagery, ambient sound, and Fumio Hayasaka’s score carry the action. One of the best such sequences is the long series of moving camera shots that follow the woodcutter into the forest, before he finds the evidence of the crime. These shots, in Kurosawa’s words, lead the viewer ‘into a world where the human heart loses its way.’”
The Rashomon Effect
Rashomon is one of my favorite Akira Kurosawa films (the other is Ran). If I were to compare Kurosawa to Hayao Miyazaki, Rashomon would be My Neighbor Totoro and Ran is Spirited Away. All four are great films in their own ways; however, I rewatch Rashomon and Totoro a lot more than Ran and Spirited Away.
I’ve watched Rashomon countless times throughout the years, but maybe because of its characters’ contradictory accounts of a crime with no resolution at the end, I often forget who did what after some time, which is probably why rewatching it never gets boring.
Pwedeng panoorin ang full-length na Rashomon sa Youtube (para kay C, na hindi pa nakakapanood ng lumang (black & white) Japanese film).
