I've applied for a new project "rltiles" at sourceforge. It will be a project for the development of tiles for roguelike games. However, SF's instruction says that most of non-software projects are rejected. I'll recieve an answer from SF …

google:"I have no mouse, and I must click" Yesterday this joke struck me. Well, it seems that some people have already invented this joke :-)

Recently UK film magazine Empire has announced a top 10 list of great monsters (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/3596551.stm). The top 10 is: 1 King Kong 2 Talos 3 The Alien 4 The T-Rex 5 The Thing 6 Shelob 7 The Metaluna Muta…

Yesterday I went to Kaiyodo's 40th anniversaly exposition ( http://www.kaiyodo40th.jp/) at Shinjuku Takashimaya. Kaiyodo started as a plastic model shop. But the originator O. Miyawaki was so enthusiastic and eccentric a person that the hi…

Five-fold symmetry plays a central role in Lovecraft's "Beyond the Mountains of Madness". Because the five-fold symmetry is not so common in nature as three-, four-, and six-fold symmetry, it evokes blasphemous and unnatural images. Any te…

I came across very nice illustration of H.P.Lovecraft's "The Color out of Space" here: http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/loth/i/c/ickessler/coloroutofspace.jpg.htmlWell, how can one reproduce the color which "does not belong to the normal spec…

Boiled poke with Lettuce Rice Soup: Boil Negi(Welsh Onion) and add "味覇" paste and pepper, then add beaten egg.

Grilled Sanma (mackerel pike): I intended to grill them, but dripped fat was burning below them. Rice Soy soup

Soup: Boil two fillets of Akauo (blind goby) and some Negi (Welsh Onion), and add soybean paste. Natto Rice Boiled broccoli

You can read angry messages of Japanese fans of the movie "Master & Commander" at the following url, concerning the fabricated Japanese trailer. http://miyako.cool.ne.jp/cgi-bin/treebbs02/treebbs.cgi?all=324&s=324 I volunteered as a transl…

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail99.html StrongSad says he's going to attend "Clash of the Titans Con", dressed as Calibos. So they are Harryhausen fans! I recently watched the DVD, and thought that Lucas's R2D2 is an homage to the clo…

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An interesting discussion on the discrepancies between the book and the film in the Japanese BBS "2ch": http://book.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/sf/1078558932/l50 An anonymous poster claims that, while Tolkien's english "translation" of LOTR is b…

Although I'm a Tolkien nut, I'm sober enough not to cite LOTR or Hobbit in my paper on physics. But there seems to be some authors who do it.LOTR citation in the epigraph: cond-mat/0012141 hep-ph/0101105 astro-ph/0210061 astro-ph/0402228 A…

Exercise 1: Estimate the critical exponent of percolation in three dimensions using numerical simulations.Solution: Let us denote the number of states which has b connected bonds and c clusters by N(b,c). Through the Fortuin-Kasteleyn tran…

The material properties of The One Ring Department of Metallurgy, University of Eregion Celebrimbor 要約：滅びの亀裂には金とサウロンの血の混合を一つの指輪に変換する反応の触媒が存在すると仮定することで様々な現象を説明できる。It is said that…

Here is a list of book-quotes in the ROTK movie, now complete with the name of the chapter from which the quote is taken: id:ita:00010102 The bracketted lines are the movie's script, followed by the corresponding text of the original. The …

Here is a list of book-quotes in FOTR-EE which I posted to rec.arts.books.tolkien. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=b72f7635.0402232329.b6629d7%40posting.google.com I included not only full quotes but also phrases longer than five word…

The Japanese subtitle to the Aragorn's song after his coronation reads "<そして歌った>", which means "And I sang" with bracket to indicate it is elvish. But the open bracket has the same shape as a Japanese letter "く", so it also reads "…

http://ps-angels.com/notice.htm 300 yen each. Sold at convenience store "Sankus". 職場の近くのサンクスは店長がオタクでザクのジオラマとかと一緒に全種類ディスプレイしてあります。ランスでけー。でも全般的に金属の質感が足りないかも。村正が WIZA…

http://schrodinger.haun.org/ Click the three buttons below the "GIF animation blahblah..." to see the dances. Each button corresponds to dances for "Beginner", "Intermediate", and "Expert" from left to right.This dance was contrived by som…

Recently, a cryptic word "orz" began to appear in Japanese blogs and BBS's. It is used at the end of a line, and seemed to me to express one's despondence, like "What? No Saruman in ROTK!? orz". I thought it was some sort of acronym and di…

"That's as far as you can go, you evil fellowship!" Fellowship: "Who are you!?" "Wrainger 1, Nazgul Black!" "Wrainger 2, Nazgul Black!" "Wrainger 3, Nazgul Black!" "Wrainger 4, Nazgul Black!" "Wrainger 5, Nazgul Black!" "Wrainger 6, Nazgul…

(See http://www.jinjapan.org/kidsweb/cool/03-12/jugemu.html ) Quote of the day: "なんたる失策であることか！" Nantaru sissaku de aru kotoka! What a captial mistake it is!This is a line of the salamander about which I just wrote yesterday!

Japanese Tolkien fans have long been familiar with the illustrations by Ryuichi Terashima in The Hobbit and LOTR. Tolkien himself once had a look at the Japanese translation of "The Hobbit", and said that although he couldn't read Japanese…

From a thread entitled "Let's role-play Middle Earth", in Japanese LOTR BBS http://jbbs.shitaraba.com/bbs/read.cgi/movie/469/1067830177/ Probably the originator meant "Let's role-play the inhabitants of Middle Earth", but every poster is j…

Pachinko is sort of a cross between slot machine and pinball. (see http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2065.html for more detail) Recently a pachinko manufacturer Sankyo released LOTR-themed pachinko machine: http://www.sankyo-fever.co.jp/new/ne…

If you have Japanese font installed in your PC, you could see the Kanji character above: a Kanji for "bundle". What does it look like? Doesn't it look like the JRRT monogram? This is a jargon commonly used among Japanese Tolkien geeks to r…

From http://slashdot.jp/articles/04/02/09/2135212.shtml?topic=70 Hyogo national highway office decided to install "Active Noise Controll" devices at highways in Hyogo. It generates an "antiphase" sound which cancels the noice of the vehicl…

Last night, LOTR:FOTR was broadcasted by FUJI TV. Today I went to a park and heard a kid asking his parent excitedly, "You have my sword, And my bow, and what was the another one?". A very promissing fan he is.