Depressing blog entry

Life is tough at the moment. This second year at uni has been a killer. I can't wait to get to Japan, where uni is much more laid-back apparently.

I spent all day yesterday writing an essay on Minamata Disease, and I'll be doing the same today. And it's the same every weekend - non-stop work.

The language side of things is OK, but I'm getting kinda sick of learning about Japanese history and society - it's just not what I'm interested in. At least there's only a few more weeks now before the summer holidays.

Housekeeping

The more observant of you may have noticed a few changes to the sidebar on the right recently. There's now a link to ジョーのブルーシート, which is a blog I've made for my Japanese language classes at uni. It's just a place to upload my weekly homeworks for others to read, and the teacher encourages everyone in our class to do it. If you don't read Japanese it's probably not that interesting, but if you do you might wanna take a look.

Also, I removed the Spottt thing that used to be there. It didn't really bring much traffic to the blog at all, and some of the images that were appearing didn't look too nice, so I took it down. But my hits have been increasing quite a lot recently - not quite sure why. I've found that every site I've created tends to constantly grow though, and last month's hits reached a record high. I think a lot of people come here through obscure Google searches, and it's quite interesting to look through my stats at the keyphrases. For example, if you search "sonic duvet cover" I'm currently second in the whole of Google, and third for "sumo wrestling cymbals"!

The Goonies

During a rare period of free time yesterday I managed to catch The Goonies, as it was showing on Five. And although of course I'd seen it before, I realised how much of a masterpiece in nearly every way this film is.

And how badass is this song? We need more music like this.

Spheres of Chaos' first music video

One of my band's songs was recently used in a video on the Sheffield Wednesday website! I know it's kinda weird, but my dad works at the club and he gave our demo to the media team, who decided to use one of our tracks (Twilight To Midnight) in their Vote For Your Goal Of The Season video. It doesn't have our name or anything on there, but it's still cool to see our music set to football; I especially like the part at the beginning where the goals are in time with the music. So check out the video and vote for your favourite!

The Best of Isaac Asimov

I've recently finished reading The Best of Isaac Asimov, which is a book containing a good cross-section of Asimov's work up until the time when it was published in 1973. I'd never read any of his stuff before, so I thought this would be a good place to start. I picked the book up in quite good condition from Amazon Marketplace for a penny, and it has a cool front cover, although I'm not sure which story the picture refers to, if any.

There are twelve short stories, and each one is enjoyable in its own way. I like Nightfall for its dramatic ending, The Martian Way for its adventure and creativity, The Deep for its view of Earth through the eyes of aliens, The Dead Past for its grippingly dark plot and The Last Question for its thought provoking look into the far-future.

The fact that these are short stories means that without investing too much time in each one you can still see an interesting progression, and Asimov's background as a professor of biochemistry helps add a certain realism to everything. In fact, he actually made some fairly accurate predictions in these works of fiction, describing, for example, the feeling of euphoria experienced when walking in space before anyone had actually done so. Really good stuff.

Crowded Japanese Train

I hope the trains aren't this busy when I go to Japan.

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Tuesday

It was my second day back at uni today. Already I have to start writing an essay, which sucks. Also, I'm trying to get my application for Kobe University sorted at the moment. Fortunately, the deadline for that is the end of May, which is later than for all the rest of my classmates.

It's the second Steel City derby of the season tonight between Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United. I was reading today that Wednesday haven't beaten United twice in the same season for over 90 years now, so it'd be nice if we could pull that off, especially as the three points might help us stay up!

I haven't mentioned on here yet, but I got tickets last week to go and see Rage Against The Machine at Leeds Festival! I knew they were rumoured to be playing at Leeds/Reading, although I thought tickets always went really quickly, so I didn't plan on going. But then we discovered that they were playing for definite and that day tickets aren't too hard to get hold of, so me and my friends bought some. RATM - live! Can't wait!

Also, had the first practice for a new band I'm in last night. I'm playing drums again, and we're going for a hardcore sound, with a bit of metal thrown in there. We need some more members, and a bigger practice space though. Also, one of the neighbours came round and complained. Not a good start. Or is it?

Two films I wanna see

There are two new films that I really wanna see. The first is Drillbit Taylor and the second is Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and the main reason is that they are both connected to my favourite TV series of all time: Freaks and Geeks.

If you've never seen Freaks and Geeks, do yourself a serious favour and check it out. It's a really funny and engrossing high school comedy set in 80s America, and if you're anything like me I'm quite sure you'll love it. There were only 18 episodes made before it was mysteriously cancelled, but the whole series is TV gold - everything about it is awesome.

In fact, I love this show so much that I try to check out anything that's made by the same people, and both Drillbit Taylor and Forgetting Sarah Marshall are produced by Judd Apatow, the guy who produced Freaks and Geeks, as well as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad. And Forgetting Sarah Marshall was written by and stars Jason Segel, who played my favourite character in Freaks and Geeks - it was actually quite weird to see his face on an advert on the side of a tram as I was walking through town the other day.

Freaks and Geeks was a starting point for Segel, as well as Seth Rogen, both of whom are now writing their own films and seem to be doing quite well.

And I really like the stuff made by all these guys because it tends to be about the freaks and the geeks - those who might not be typically popular or socially respected, - making it easy for a lot of people to really relate to. And I know it's not like they're the only people doing that, but they often do it an extremely entertaining way.

I'll probably post up some kind of review or something when I get to see these.

Check out a cool teaser blog here, "written by Peter Bretter", the star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and an interesting article on Judd Apatow by The New York Times.