Sons of Loki

It’s getting near midnight, which means the dorm network is slowing to a halt thanks to relentless torrenters downloading the latest episodes of Miracle Train and cutting us off from the internet like it’s Apollo and we’re passing over the Pacific Ocean.

Reader, I bought it. A PlayStation 3, plus a Japanese copy of Metal Gear Solid 4. I was just going to get a PS2 and grab anything that took my fancy, but Sofmap had a secondhand PS3 for 20,000, and I looked at my budget, and my budget said “well I guess this will work”, and I got it in the end. It is for learning Japanese, you see.

No, seriously, hear me out. I have plonked serious money (a month’s worth of food shopping) on this and I don’t intend to have wasted it. Metal Gear Solid 4 is possibly the most complex game I could have purchased, and I am determined to understand it. Which means I am determined to improve my Japanese to the level where I understand it. A game of this magnitude deserves it. (In the first two minutes it did one of those classic MGS fourth-wall breaking mindfuck things with the TV channels (you’ll know if you’ve play it). I have to respect a game that can do that to me.)

Anyway, new year, new term, new start. And not one of those phony new year resolution starts where I put up post-it notes and spend an hour designing an elaborate timetable in Excel and then fall into the same old habits. No, this is a radical restructuring of my entire life. I have quite simply decided to drop all the stuff in my life I don’t need to do. Writing, for one. There will definitely be a place in my life in a few years where I will dedicate myself to writing, but right now it is not where I need to be. Working for magazines, too. It’s good for a future career, but it’s stuff I shouldn’t be worrying about now. Doing stuff that doesn’t really connect itself to learning Japanese. All these must stop.

This is the year where I learn Japanese.

And now for some late-night, soothing video; the Yurikamome monorail, only … mirrored. It took me a while to work out what was going on in this, but doesn’t it just sum up the Gibsonean neo-noir coolness of Tokyo?