Regina Glei's Blog, page 26

Movie Reviews July 2015 part 2

I’ve sat on planes a lot and watched a bunch of movies. Here is the second round of reviews:

Focus

A yawn for that one: Will Smith plays a con man. That’s it. Some things he pulls off were cleverly thought out and the whole movie is a web of lies. It would have been more interesting if something in between had been “for real” for a change, since everything being constructed and a bunch of lies degraded into a pattern. You were just waiting for the next lie to be identified. Overall the movie lacked a purpose and the one-dimensional characters lacked goals. Since it was doubtful whether getting the girl was a goal or not that didn’t work as a goal either. The story and the characters got lost in the web of con extravaganzas. It was interesting because of those con extravaganzas but at the same time boring because the movie had flat characters that pursued nothing but constructing the next con trick. It’s another movie that in my humble opinion will soon be forgotten.

Into the Woods

What the heck was that? Whilst I have my issues with musicals anyway and usually find breaking occasionally out into song awkward at best, this thing did not only break out into song without reason, the story was one big disaster. They threw four or something fairy tales into one pot and Rapunzel was shaking hands with Cinderella. Uh? Half-way through the movie all fairy tales are told, but they do not live happily ever after, since suddenly Cinderella‘s pretty prince becomes unfaithful (eh? What? Where did that come from?) and the giants from the „Jack and the Beanstalk“ part of the story descend upon the land of the pretty to trample on a rampage. In total – what a crap! No clue what merit anyone saw in throwing several fairy tales together. No clue why so many big names (Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Chris Pine etc.) played in that movie. And by the way, Johnny Depp as the „wolf“ from the Red Riding Hood part was outright ridiculous.

The whole thing is bizarre, the music mediocre, the story one giant jumble mumble that does not work. Why, oh why, was this movie made? Sorry, but the answer escapes me.

The Butler

This is a start-studded historic/character piece about the more or less true story of one of the White House’s butlers. Forest Whitaker plays the butler, and Oprah Winfrey his wife (I’ve never seen Oprah in a movie before, it was kinda weird to see her in that role, but she was actually pretty good). It’s more a recent history crash course than a movie with Presidents from Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan, (Alan Rickman played him, wow! I only realized it was him when the credits rolled), and at the same time telling the tale of the suppression of black people with the help of the Butler’s at times radicalized son. The character of the butler held the history crash course quite nicely together. It’s not an overwhelming movie that won’t go into the DVD collection but it was entertaining to see it. John Cusak as Nixon was an interesting choice and I guess Eisenhower was one of Robin Williams last roles.

In general I find movies like that a bit tiring, since they are so „serious“. Biographies like that also have the tendency to lack a „decent“ story-ark. They are big in terms of the ground they cover but small as far as drama is concerned. Nevertheless, way more watchable than „Into the Woods“

Phantom

Those were the days when there was the cold war going on… U-boat movies are difficult to make, since they suffer from the two big u-boat movies „Das Boot“ (the excellent German WW2 movie) and „Hunt for Red October“. That said, Ed Harris plays the captain of a stone-age old Russian u-boat where a wonderfully nasty David Duchovny takes over, to almost trigger WW3 in 1968. It’s also based on somewhat true events, at least it says so in the beginning. The Russians have developed a cloaking device for their u-boats and test it on Harris‘ boat without his knowledge. They launch a missile even, but Harris saw to it that its detonator was disabled before it launched and thus maybe prevented WW3. Except for the first officer of the boat, everyone dies and Harris sends him on his way to „tell the people that it was only a few madmen who tried to trigger WW3 and not the regular Russian soldier“.

Harris and Duchovny did nice jobs and made the movie watchable, but apart from that the story wasn’t overly original, the closeness to „the truth“ questionable, and all in all it could have been more dramatic.

So, from all the eight movies I’ve seen on these plane rides to and from Europe last week most were crap, some OK, and only one gem = Whiplash. Actually, one gem in a puddle of eight isn’t that bad, right?

I’ll be flying to Europe again in two weeks, let’s see what I’ll watch then

Movie Reviews July 2015 part 1

I’ve been sitting on a lot of planes again, which gave me the opportunity to watch a bunch of movies, here is part one of the reviews:

Jupiter Ascending

Whilst the idea was remotely of interesting, (time being the most precious thing in the universe, rich people buying themselves time by “harvesting” the humans of “lower” planets and creating some sort of fountain of youth from their skin etc.) the idea was not new… It starts with “Logan’s Run”, where people have an expiring clock, various other flicks like “In Time” etc., etc. Aristocracy in space reminds of “Dune”, etc. etc. etc. Whilst with the first matrix movie the Wachowski brothers managed to create something interesting out of common SciFi themes, they did not manage to do this again with Jupiter Ascending. It just all bore the stamp of “seen it before” and that the damn passive lead-girl had to be rescued all the time was not a plus point either. The passive protagonist syndrome was huge in that movie, things happened to her all the time and she was reacting, not acting. The lavish design didn’t help one bit either. Yet again proof for the fact that special effects do not compensate for a sucky story. All in all the movie is a lessons learned in how not to do it. I’m glad I saw it on a plane (during a business trip) and didn’t have to pay money for seeing this movie.

Whiplash

Awesome. A must watch. A music teacher tries to push his students to excellence and maybe goes a bit too far. The brilliant acting of J.K. Simmons and also his young student Miles Teller made an already good story outstanding. As a hobby drummer I could also appreciate the drumming, which was bloody amazing and there was a lot of food for thought. Just how far, as a teacher, do you or can you go to push your students to excellence? Where is that fine line between tickling out the best in someone and making him or her excel and exceed or breaking that talent irreversibly. What does it take to be excellent in something? What drives people to perfection? This movie is a great character piece that leaves those questions for every movie goer to answer for him or herself. The finale was also highly impressive with the teacher trying to destroy the drummer but the drummer fights back. Great movie that deserves to become a permanent part of the private movie collection.

Grand Piano

Yawn. Nothing much else to say. Elijah Wood plays a grand pianist who performs on stage for the first time in five years after a burnout and he plays on the special piano of a fictitious maestro, composer and music teacher who built in a secrete key into his piano that the piano only spills out when a certain combination of notes are hit. A thief knows that and wants the pianist to play those notes to get the key. A rather complicated idea that might have had some potential, but the execution? The thief talks via phone to the pianist while he is on stage performing to a large audience and he texts and talks while playing horrendously difficult music. Hmmmmm…. I am learning piano at the moment and find that quite ridiculous. You do not have time to text and operate a phone while playing complicated sheet music… The acting was also not the best. Elijah just always makes that invariable distressed Frodo face. His wife was, sorry, unnecessary for the story. Another movie one does not need to see.

Premium Rush

This is a cool story about bicycle couriers in the chaotic and dangerous traffic of New York City, virtually risking their lives to bring important or not so important letters across town. The story revolves around a message that needs to get to Chinatown and has in its consequence that a Chinese immigrant lady can get her young son out of China. The letter involves a lot of money that a dirty cop wants to have and he pursues the biker in charge of delivery, a cool Joseph Gordon-Levitt whom I like more in the more movies I see him. Most of the movie is a chase, but it’s bicycle vs. cars and not your usual car chase plus it has some nice quirky biker characters, which are portrayed as a liberal subculture community. Towards the end it gets a bit longish and the movie could have been ten minutes shorter, but all in all a refreshingly different piece that you don’t see every day.

Expats Who Should Stay Home

I’ve been living in a foreign country for some 15 years now, which means I apparently like it. Usually, when you live and work or study in a foreign country, you become more tolerant, more open, more relaxed about things and realize soon how much easier it makes your life to be tolerant, open and more relaxed. Some people however are foreign-experience-resistant, despite having the privilege of that experience.

During my job, I am often confronted with one or the other of those foreign-experience-resistant persons. Although living aborad for several years, they prove change-averse with neglegible to zero consideration for their surroundings, their own behavior and the subtle or not so subtle signs of the behavior of others.

They import all their values and habits. It does not matter to them where they live, they just plant themselves into this other society and cause heaps of horror.

I am German, so I naturally know a lot of German expats, but the same is true for some candidates from other countries.

The foreign-experience-resistant Germans are super direct, super rude, annoyingly loud and impatient, always talk, always complain, are notoriously unhappy and no matter what you do, they stay that way. They are completely oblivious to the fact that Japan is a high context culture and they themselves come from a low context culture, despite attending such seminars.

They just don’t get it that many things in Japan are done indirectly, that politeness is an inherent part of the culture, that patience is a virtue, that there are times when you should shut up, and that complaining is not considered „cool“.

I am just amazed at how blind these foreign-experience-resistant Germans are. They just don’t get it. They don’t see the slight or not so slight frowns of their Japanese colleagues, they cannot „read the air“. (reading the air, kuuki wo yomu, is an essential thing in Japan. You walk into a room and read the air = the mood everyone is in etc.)

I am also loud, I talk a lot and I’m direct etc. but if I wasn’t able to read the air, I would have left Japan in frustration a long time ago. I cannot help wondering how those elephants (or bulls) in a china shop, to use a German expression, manage to survive even three years on a foreign assingment here or anywhere else. Of course those people leave in frustration, because they didn’t manage to export their values to the foreign country, were not accepted here, and everybody is happy when they’re finally going home, oh what a surprise.

What do they do? Just a few examples: talking endlessly in meetings, unable to wait for ten seconds to give their Japanese colleages the opportunity to speak. Complaining about EVERYTHING, e.g. their (usually very favorable) working conditions, that they cannot get product XY instead of enjoying the ludicrous variety of products available here, the high prices (they earn more than any local), that people don’t respond to them the way they expect them to… the list is endless.

Of course living in Japan has ist downsides as everywhere else and sometimes some Japanese traits drive me nuts too, but I am driven way more nuts and up the wall by those change/learning/foreign-resistant blockheads and I have one big message for them: Stay at home and don’t bother us here with your unwanted presence….

Time Travel to the Japanese Hinterland

On one of my various domestic business trips I recently had to go to the northern end of Saitama prefecture and frankly, I was shocked. Here is why: It felt like time traveling back to the 1970ties. I shall not name the town, since it’s not very nice what I have to say about it, but the name of the town does not matter, since there are many such towns in the Japanese hinterland.

The general impression when arriving at its lonely station via a local train (nothing else stops there) is run-down, past glory, old and also super-conservative. I started to fear for Japan when I saw this place. It’s a town where no tourist, especially no foreign tourist, ever gets lost. Two silver Toyota Comfort taxis, that looked like models from 20 years ago, waited at the forlorn station. My driver: a guy in his 70ties. He drove through the „center of town“: old shops in shabby, half rotten buildings.

Whilst old houses in Europe have a certain charm and are often well taken care of, the wood-based houses in Japan are made to serve for some 30 or 40 years and that’s it. They rot away in high humidity, their facades gray and blacken and after a while they look poor.

The town I went to is only a hundred km from Tokyo, but what a difference. Gone is the glitzy facade, the modern high-rises, the latest technology shops, the store fronts with iPhones. This is rural, backwater Japan where time has stopped. The taxi driver still has to drive because his retirement payments are too meager and yet guys like him vote LDP = for Abe, because they have done that the past 50 years too. I found no charm in this backwater town like in other more rural areas, where, for example there are hot springs, or the ocean, or some historic site and thus some tourism. All I saw in that place was stagnation, decay, shabbiness and the sadness of prosperity past its prime.

Usually, despite living in Japan for 15 years, also I don’t see places like this, because there is not one reason to go there. But oh my, there must be so many places like this – too many. I wonder how long it will take until this „past its prime“ situation will bring down the rest of the country. The bubble of economic growth burst more than twenty years ago, you don’t see that in Tokyo, but in the hinterland you do.

Another problem is the aging society. Most younger people are moving to the economic centers where there are universities, companies and jobs. What is left behind is a sad town like this one where rapidly aging people are trying to hold on to what they once had. They have a tendency to be super-conservative, since their current frustration is fueled by the success they had in the bubble economy when they were in their thirties. In the past it was all better and now all the new ideas and evil foreign influences make things bad. This is the breeding ground for opposition against any form of very necessary change.

I am thrilled to see where the Japanese boat is steering – my gut feeling tells me that it’s heading for choppy waters…

Why I am Bothering to Write Fiction in this Day and Age

Author Kameron Hurley is writing for Locus once in a while and I really liked her latest article, but I feel the urge to write a „response“ from the other end of the spectrum.

Yes, I do have hundreds of rejections slips at home, yes, I have workshopped my work in peer groups extensively in the Tokyo Writers Workshop in the past and also Odyssey Online for five years. Yes, I have leveled up extensively over the past years and my novels now are a lot better than five years ago. Yes, I do believe in continuous learning, refining the craft, etc., and I am sure my novels will be better in five years than my novels are right now. But… I still haven’t „made it“. (let me define having „made it“ as having a major publishing house churning out your stuff and being repped by a reputable agent)

It’s pointless to speculate on the issue of why. Although I can throw a few attempts at reasons into the room:

1) I don’t live in the US or UK

2) I am not a US or UK citizen

3) I am not a native speaker of the beautiful English language

4) I am not good at schmoozing with editors and agents at the few conventions I used to go to

5) I don’t really like short fiction and despite having sold some short stories, I didn’t manage to place them in the two/three big magazines out there, and instead focus(ed) on long-fiction, my real passion.

6) I am not of the kind who loves writing the perfect query letter and the perfect synopsis.

Despite that, I have managed to be published by two small presses in Canada and the US. However, the response times of both publishers are a joke, to put it mildly. I haven’t heard from the publisher in the US in nine months or so, despite emailing him every other week. Their, sorry to say, unprofessional working style drives me nuts.

So, yes, I have resorted to self-publishing – why? To get rid of the stuff! To have it off my desk, out of my mind, done with it, gone, bye, sayonara, to free up space for the next project.

So far all the first books in a series I have self-published went through the submission gauntlet and the workshopping gauntlet. Actually it’s only three – Dome Child, She Should Have Called Him Siegfried and now a space opera published under a pseudonym. I cannot really „count“ To Mix and To Stir and Give Substance to a Thought, because they are parts two and three of the Hagen Patterson trilogy that started with She Should Have Called Him Siegfried.

A fourth start of a series (that I will put out this autumn under that pseudonym) is the most extensively workshopped and edited thing I have written so far. It is good, damn it, a very emotional story in my opinion that suffers only from being fuzzy genre-wise. I call it a second-world historical-fantasy, its second part will be SciFi since it happens 1000 years after the first one. Rejection slip after rejection slip, several almosts and I’m just fxxing tired of them!

Ironically, the books I self-published so far are actually far better edited, workshopped and cared for than the three novellas I managed to publish with small publishers.

I am frustrated with the publishing world, yes, and I strongly believe that the publishing world, as the whole rest of the world, are grossly unfair. On top of that I have geographical and other disadvantages.

I have another book in the pipeline (a stand alone, could be the start of a series though) that I shall send into the submission gauntlet again, whilst pushing out all the other stuff and here is finally why I am in the „game“:

I want to tell stories. I don’t have the ambition to be a master writer like Kameron, I just want to tell all the stories that I have in my head and entertain myself as well as a few other (the dream is many) people with them.

I can’t sit forever on a novel and refine it to death. All novels are abandoned. Maybe I abandon them too early, but there is too much stuff I want to tell to forever linger on the previous book. I’m in it for the fun of writing down a story, I’m in it because it’s awesome to construct entire worlds. I’m in it because I love my characters. For me Jove, Shavendra, Hagen, Al, Juliana, Floyd, Darnar, Talip, Lofgar, Marusar, Jaiah, Sina, Jyrus, Marlan, Hriff and Flin and and and are like people I know and they are asking me to tell their stories. Of course I want people to read them, but I’m doing this to entertain myself, because I laugh, love, and cry together with my characters and I’d like to thank them from the bottom of my heart for their existence, for urging me to write about them and for inspiring me.

The Pains and Pleasures of Japanese Service

Japan is famous for its incredible service and usually that all happens in the background and you get used to it when you live here, but this week I had three remarkable cases of false, excellent and painful service happening that put the topic into the foreground:

Case 1 – False Service

I had to go to the bank counter instead of the ATM for a transaction involving a money transfer to Germany and the bank lady in charge of me drove me up the wall with her behavior.

Japanese banks are probably the most conservative, inflexible, stiff and bureaucratic institutions in the entire country and the act of transferring money to Germany seems to be too much to ask. I had to fill out complicated forms and the bank girl attending to me was very hard to bear.

She bowed her forehead down to the table whilst insisting on ridiculous formalities, her high voice, whilst using the most polite, empty language, insisting on those mentioned ridiculous formalities, shattered my eardrums. Her behavior was completely artificial and by buckling and being submissive she sought to avoid my righteous anger. Her face was frozen into an apologetic smile. I wonder how she manages not to get a cramp in her facial muscles. However, her behavior triggered the opposite. The more she buckled, smiled and bowed, the angrier I got. No matter how much I’d complain, she wouldn’t be willing or able to alter those rules for me. Her entire demeanor was false, not heartfelt but her tactics, and left me leaving the bank angry and disgusted at her buckling.

Case 2 – Excellent Service:

One day after the bank experience I had to go to a high class resort, where I was to moderate a big two-day management workshop of the company I work for. Jeez, what service. We had a gentleman in an impeccable suit attending to us exclusively full time and he fulfilled the guests every whim and need within the blink of an eye. What kind of working hours does the poor guy have? He was with us from 8:00 in the morning and led the workshop participants to the bar at 23:00 the same day! Service to its extreme, always hovering in the background, nearly invisible (and treated as if he didn’t exist by many), jumping at every sign from us for when we might need more water or coffee or have the projector removed, the seats rearranged, etc.

Also the rest of the hotel and restaurant staff – perfection of Japanese service, always there for you and looking out for every opportunity when they might be able to help you. But all that in a non-obtrusive way. Sure, this is their job too, but it felt much more natural and way better than the submissive bank woman.

I don’t know how much it costs if you go there as a private person, but for those of you in Japan – it’s worth checking out – http://risonare.com/en/

This is a picture from the “shopping street” and we held our workshop inside the tower.

Case 3 – Painful Service

Just returned from the high class resort, I went to my local supermarket today to refill my fridge. It was rather busy in the supermarket and I stood at the register with a mid thirties guy in line behind me paying for my groceries, when one of the “guardmen” of the supermarket caused a “happening”. These guardmen are mostly grandpas who look like 70 or older and who have to keep on working because their retirement payments are not enough to survive. Their job is to direct cars around the parking lot and to take care of the shopping baskets.

Don’t ask me why they are doing that, but at the entrance of the supermarket you have gray baskets and at the cashier they transfer your bought stuff into a yellow basket. (maybe to indicate who’s finished shopping and who’s not, what’s paid for already?). The guardmen have to provide the cashiers with yellow baskets and relieve them of gray ones to return them to the entrance. I didn’t even notice the guardman trying to relieve the cashier lady at the register next to me of gray baskets but he must have bumped into the guy waiting behind me.

I doubt it was a hard bump, since I didn’t even hear anything or notice anything, until the 30 something guy started ranting at the guardman in bad language – how he could dare to hit him and stuff. He called the old man the Japanese equivalent of “fxxing idiot” and he and the cashier ladies started bowing and apologizing. Despite that, the 30 something idiot ranted on and insisted on the manager being called. Holy crap. I felt very sorry for the guardman. The 30 something guy was clearly the asshole around and yet, as the employee of that supermarket you have to be polite to this dude and bow and apologize.

I just hope the incident has no negative consequences for the guardman. I found it very sad to have to see the old man bowing 45 degrees repeatedly. I don’t get how that 30 something dude reacted. Unfortunately there are idiots in every country…

The Marketingverse

After some marketing abstinence due to – simply said – frustration, I have returned to the book marketing game and am relearning and first-time learning a few things.

One re-learning is that there is always someone who is leagues better at the marketing (and the writing too) than you are. There are people out there who have magnificent, perfect graphic design web-pages for one single novel. There are others who must be hanging out in twitter 24/7 replying to every new follower they get with a direct message. Surely some of that is automated, but I had a short chat with one of those super marketers and I surely did not talk to an app.

There are also a million people out there who are trying to make money from the hopefuls – you gotta be aware of scammers and darker elements at every corner. Humans can get quite creative when they want something.

Engagement is the magic word of the hour. How do you get people engaged and interested in you? – Tough, since:

My restarted steps into the marketing verse confirm my blog entry from last week, there are simply too many people on the planet who produce too many possibilities and choices. Too many people want to find some self-satisfaction with the art they produce. It does not matter which form of art you are aiming for, all the few spots are taken – I read somewhere during this marketing week that e.g. the BBC uses only 30 actors…

One reason for why the marketing verse is so „loud“ is that you of course see way more producers than consumers. Sure, all the producers advertise more or less noisily for their products, whilst most consumers are rather passive and silent. The producers though, feeling the seeming or real absence of the consumers, shout ever louder and louder, falling victim to various degrees of panic.

Oh gosh! I must have thousands of twitter followers, otherwise I won’t be successful!

It is very easy to fall into that trap and to neglect what’s important, your art.

Like never before I believe that high self-discipline is absolutely critical.

As an artist „who wants to be noticed“ you have to be able to switch off all that noise and to return back to your art. Especially difficult for any artist who works with a computer, since the distractions of your social media accounts are only a few mouse-clicks away.

We have a saying in German – von nichts kommt nichts – literally: nothing comes from nothing. I do believe that the modern day author needs some sort of web presence, but how far do you go? How much time do you invest in all that tweeting, facebooking, networking, pretty homepage building (let alone submitting to the BBC begging for one of their 30 spots together with 3 million other people)? Where is the balance? Many people who „made it“ or who think they made it say that you have to focus on your art and I believe that is true. But if, as a newcomer, you do nothing at all in the marketing department and you don’t happen to be friends or neighbors with famous agent X or editor Y, your reach will be limited to family and friends.

So, I shall balance again, day by day, between what I love most – writing, and what I don’t love – the marketing and learn a bit more now and then.

Don’t laugh, but for me a recent new learning is to put hashtags onto one or the other word (in moderation of course! Irony intended) in your tweets and to do the same with your profile description so that people (= consumers = readers) can find you – maybe.

And I refuse to check now whether I wrote something similar in this blog here already four or five years ago, since that would be just too frustrating…… yes, this blog started in October 2010 and I shall „celebrate“ when the time comes.

The “Out of the Box” Myth

In my day-job I am again and again confronted with the wish for „out of the box“ thinking. Oh, how all those managers wish and starve for their subordinates to „think out of the box“ and produce fresh and new ideas.

But!

1) If you do think out of the box and it goes wrong – oh how big and bad is the blame! As a result, the person who dared to think out of the box, will never do so again, since he or she does not want to hear the blame and accusations again.

For an „out of the box“ culture you need a framework of: mistakes are allowed and OK. A framework that exists in the fewest of places, I dare say.

2) Much deeper than the „mistakes are OK culture“ goes the problem that you cannot demand of a „monoculture“ or of people who have done the same stuff for many years, to suddenly think „out of the box“ – they don’t know how to do it. They will only come up with the same ideas that they are familiar with and that they have used for years. They simply don’t know how to think out of the box and how to transcend what they know.

That’s not their fault, how the hell are they supposed to think out of the box if they never learned it, and if it is not really, truly allowed.

The other aspect, monoculture, does the same thing: It limits you. A homogenous group of e.g. Japanese men over fifty will only generate what a homogenous group of Japanese men over fifty can think of. If there is no stimulus of whatever sort, different gender, generation gap, different nationality, etc., there will be no new ideas but again only all those ideas the Japanese men over fifty have produced over the past twenty years already.

There are of course failed diverse teams. That failure generates mostly from being unable to accept each other as equal partners after all. The older person might still think the younger person is „stupid“ because he/she has no experience yet, even if the older person does not say so aloud and is friendly to the younger person. Diverse teams only function and bring a task forward if they truly embrace each others diversity and accept each other as equal human beings – and hell, that’s difficult.

I am amazed as to the stubbornness with which the cry for „out of the box thinking” remains without ensuring the per-requisits: a “failure is OK” culture, enough time and space to generate new ideas, and functioning diverse teams.

But – where does the cry for „out of the box thinking” come from? Pressure from business and society to gain market share, to „stand out“ in order to be noticed in the „sea of choice“ that we face these days.

This goes back to writing or rather to trying to market your books. Everybody wants to stand out from the crowd and be noticed… in doing so, we are all the same = a monoculture.

I don’t know what the solution to this is and, for example, how I shall manage to make my books stand out from the crowd and be noticed…

But there is another (frustrating) aspect that I realized just last week.

Were you/are you aware of the fact that in 1960 there were only 3 billion people on the planet? And now, only 55 years later, there are over 7 billion? See Wikipedia – world population

No wonder the individual doesn’t manage to be heard anymore and does not manage to stand out from the crowd without a ridiculous amount of luck. No wonder everything’s been invented already and every book has already been written…

Well, but that shall not stop me from keeping on writing, since I get huge personal satisfaction out of it! I just started reviewing my second Dome of Souls novel (part 1: Dome Child) yesterday after letting it be for half a year and damn! It’s good! I’ll publish it this autumn or so.

Pebble vs. iWatch

So, I couldn’t resist and bought an iWatch, of course the cheapest model, which is still way too expensive in my humble opinion. It replaces my Pebble that I had for a year and that worked for about 8 months or so.

Comparing prices – I think I paid about 13,000 Yen (~ 95 Euro) for the Pebble, now a juicy 46,000 Yen (~ 340 Euro) including taxes for the iWatch.

Of course the iWatch is much prettier in design and it has a color touch display. Pebble was black and white and navigation was only possible via buttons. Pebble is a Hong Kong based product (I think, though the website’s “contact us” address is the US) and I bought it on a Cathay Pacific flight from Japan to Taiwan last year. I am not sure whether it’s available in Japan or Europe over the counter.

Unfortunately, my Pebble developed a display malfunction after some 8 months of use resulting in a sometimes working and sometimes not working display.

Basically, the Pebble had everything that the iWatch has too, apps for counting your steps, showing the weather, maps, tweets, alerts, mails, messages, etc. Navigation was more difficult/inconvenient due to button only on the Pebble, but the Pebble had one distinct advantage over the iWatch – one battery charge lasted for some four or five days, depending on how heavily you used it, in contrast to the iWatch, that you basically have to recharge once a day.

I heard some people complained about the iWatch draining the iPhone battery, but I have not had this problem yet.

Another iWatch advantage so far is that its connection to the iPhone is rather stable, while Pebble demanded frequent re-pairing and updates.

All in all I was happy with the Pebble, though of course not with the fact that it lasted for merely eight months.

Overall I am happy with the iWatch too, but not with its price. A price of around 25,000 Yen (~ 185 Euro) seems like a reasonable price for an iWatch to me considering what it can do and how it looks like, not double that. I wonder whether Apple’s marketing strategy and pricing strategy for the thing will work. I kinda doubt it. Let’s see how soon the price will drop.

Would I buy a Pebble again? No – it’s too „inelegant“ and it also broke after eight months. Would I buy an iWatch again? No, not for this juicy price.

But now the iWatch is telling me to get up again, in order to fulfill my calory-burn goal for the day, so I better stop writing

Miyakojima Travel Report – Part 3

Weather still didn’t look great in the morning of the 30th of April. Cloudy again, but at least it wasn’t raining, so I set out to the last bridge and the last island to the north of Miyako, called Ikema. Really lonely there – nice! One ring road circles the island, and the ride by car takes maybe 15 min. On the northern edge is a small, inaccessible lighthouse. Inside the island is a wetland with apparently a lot of birds, but surely also a lot of mosquitoes. I got stung already once around my hotel and my foot was half swollen, so no thanks to wetlands.



Before the bridge back to the main island was a small resting area with a few booths for food and souvenirs. You could get onto the roof of one of the shops which serves as a viewing platform.

Having too much time at my hands, I rode again to the wind turbine area for a lunch break. Then – what to do? I had seen all there is to see around the islands and it was only noon. For a moment I thought to go back down to the big lighthouse yet again, but then I saw some sign with “marine park” that I had so far missed, made a u-turn and headed there. The road did not look promising at all, super small and between fields, was this gonna lead anywhere? But then, to my surprise, I arrived at a stately building that housed quite an attraction. For a 1000 yen you can walk down stairs into a cliff and at the bottom of the stairs you are below sea level and can see into the water through some 20 windows.



Underwater ocean viewing. Very cool. You don’t have an aquarium beyond the glass but real ocean and who’s watching who? The fish watch the weird humans or we watch them? Lol. Next to the ocean viewing building was a nice cafe where I had a giant mango parfait Thus the trip through the back roads turned out to be quite rewarding.

On my last full day at Miyako and having seen “everything” I decided to go back to my favorite spot pn the island of Shimoji and the second trip there turned out to be only partly a repetition, I discovered three other places I had not been to at the first round. One of them another lovely beach. Next, a giant boulder that a tsunami from around 1770 (I forgot the exact year) has left on the island. The more or less inaccessible beach behind it is maybe another ten meters deep and thus the tsunami must have measured at least ten meters, probably more. gulp.



I went once more to the sink holes too and in one of them divers appeared. Wow.

I guess you must be pretty experienced to dive through those underwater caves and rock in presumably total darkness to emerge in that lake.



On I went around the airport once more, bolder this time, parking the car more often and getting out more often. The rock bay was also a surprise, the tide was low and left the rocks more exposed. It was still beautiful but it actually looked prettier with more water in the bay. I spent some time wandering around on the rock bay beach looking for critters but found astonishingly few.

Then I rode to a viewing spot from atop Irabu island (the neighbor of Shimoji). I had missed that one too at the first trip and am glad I went there after all, since it is rather high and offers a fantastic view of Miyako, the bridge between Irabu and Miyako and also the island of Irabu itself. In total I rode over that big bridge 4 times and 302 km around the five islands of Miyako, Ikema, Irabu, Shimoji and Kurima. If I need to pick a favorite it’s Shimoji and Irabu (after all they are more or less one).



It was a wonderful trip and next on the menu will probably be Ishigaki island, some 140 km further west from Miyako.