Not only one of the first stops on the trip, but also the only time I’ve ever seen a combo bakery/yarn shop.

The yarn-shop-bakery-cafe.

Wherever I go, they have Baklava.

Bacon, cheese, hash browns, eggs stacked.  Yeahhhh.

Dear Icepack: you are my only true friend.

One of the perks of working for Jet Set Zero is that I get to make my own hours and, more importantly, my own office. From a very young age I’ve suffered from pretty severe lower back pain. It was actually one of the reasons I had to leave my job animating in New York: I just couldn’t handle sitting in an office chair anymore.

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I actually won a heart shaped box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day, at a bar, in a raffle that I didn’t enter, and there was not ONE SINGLE LADY AT ANY OF THE BARS I WENT TO UPON WHICH TO USE THE LINE “I guess I got lucky tonight; want a chocolate?”

Also, screw you, Molly Daniell. You’re an idiot. And, screw you, attractive, happy couples.

Actually, that last bit was a cheap shot. I’m just jealous of you, couples. You rock on with your bad selves. Instead of cutting my losses and going to bed, I will now have myself another 3 beers and make some nachos while playing Beyonce’s Single Ladies at full volume ad infinitum. God I wish the bars stayed open later here.

Our Health CONdition levels are measurements of our overall bodily health security, a function of what we eat, drink, and do during our time in Tokyo.  HCON is an assessment of our health risk.  Simply put, we’re already at war.  Weeks of rice, eggs, rice, instant coffee, eggs, bread, instant coffee, etc. have sunk our nutrition levels so low.  Both Rob and I have googled “scurvy”…

I’ll have some posts coming up which explain in more detail what our diet situation is and what we’ve been eating, but here I’d like to show you what we haven’t been eating – and why.

Seriously, why is it so hard to buy healthy things?

100 Y is about $1.10, so 1 normal pear costs about $2.20.  To get vitamin C from fresh fruit, we would pay almost  75 cents per Mandarin orange.  At these prices, I would eat the pear stem and savor the orange rind, perhaps even chewing on the seeds until they either went safely into my stomach or became a choking hazard.  All fruit is similarly priced, so needless to say, fruit is not a part of our diet.

Vegetables are definitely cheaper, but only ones that are a staple part of the Japanese diet, usually meaning they are not part of the American vegetable diet.  We’re not really sure what to do with most of these cheap vegetables other than rip them to shreds and eat them (and actually I’m the only one that will do that).  Online recipes work well in some situations, but they’re not very helpful for cooking with ingredients you didn’t even know existed.

So the occasional leaves of Chinese cabbage are one of our main sources of nutrition in Tokyo, and most of the time we get by wistfully wandering around the produce section and wishing that a banana bunch didn’t cost over twice what a corndog does…

Rob experiences the bitter delight of America for the first time in almost 4 months.  Meanwhile, it’s Christmas eve in Tokyo…

At long last, the episode in question.  Sorry about the delay on this one!  With any luck we’ll have some quicker releases for the next two episodes.

Season 2 kicks off with a bang, and from what’s happened so far in Tokyo I can imagine the story getting pretty interesting over the next few months.  Personally I’m dreading Episode 2 of this season.  I’m in it!  Time to get real comfortable with watching and listening to myself.

Special thanks again to Space Captain for the use of their song “But darling…” in this episode.  Go buy a CD!

The other day we woke up early and headed out to Tsukiji fish market at around 5 AM.  As it was the first day that the market had reopened to foreigners (they were barred due to bad behavior a month ago) there were a number of Japanese film crews there.  In addition, one from CNN.  They explained that they were from Anderson Cooper 360 and were shooting Americans from around the world reading Martin Luther King’s famous speech.  We were happy to help them out in the shot that it would really make it, and sure enough – it did.

You can find footage of the speech here with our team starting at around 1:13 in.

I have a dream...

Unless you’re reading this from the handful of places that experienced new year’s at the same time or before we did – then let us wish you a happy new year, in advance.  Tonight we headed out to a large and ancient forest in the middle of Tokyo, which contained one of its most famous shrines visited by over 1 million people during the course of new years.  There we spent the hilariously low key countdown in line, and then paid our respects at the temple center before purchasing this year’s charms (for victory, fortune, and happiness) and dining on food from festival street vendors.  It was, as Christmas was, nothing like the holiday equivalent in America, but incredibly memorable and unique.  Good friends, ancient forests, shrines, charms, tasty noodles, and a brave start to an amazing new year. 

Happy new year everyone, from Jet Set Zero.

Having finally received my electric bill for November I can tell you how things stand financially after my third month in this bizarre experience.  Again, I’m not tracking my money in quite the same way as the field team, but this should paint a pretty good picture of what the difference in living expenses are like.

Housing: $500/mo. still.  This isn’t likely to change any time soon.

Utilities: $66/mo.  Since last month this number has literally doubled.  I’m expecting it to double again next month when the temperature drops even further (daily averages are in the 20s here).

Food: $58/mo.  Oh dear.  That’s less than one third of what I was spending on average as of last month.  It also works out to roughly $2/day.  The real secret is that I happened to buy a bunch of bulk items right at the end of October and then ate nothing but turkey for a solid week after thanksgiving, so my grocery bill was largely negated.  The only increase was in eating out: I have decided to start liking coffee, which I foresee becoming a financial burden in the long run.

Drinks: $188/mo.  Of course, what I gave up in my stomach I reclaimed in my liver.  It should also be noted that I lost 10 lbs in November (and for those of you who know me the pertinent question should be “from where?”).

Transportation: $0.  I still ride a bike.  It’s still a piece of shit.

Other: $13/mo.  I didn’t buy any more clothes this month (though I’m still on the lookout for a decent pea coat), or any luxury items/entertainment at all.  Some hardware to help insulate the house was about all I purchased in this category.

JS0 Expenses: $167/mo. (average of Sept. – Nov.)   I feel like it might be interesting to also track how much editing for JS0 costs me.  Since I’m all the way on the other side of the world it doesn’t make much sense for the field team to be handling procurement for my office.  I buy the hard drives, the networking gear, the cabling, and whatever else is necessary to keep my office afloat.  It doesn’t cost all that much (discounting the camera I use to capture tapes with and my laptop) but it might be nice to see where this number goes.

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So, all told, I’m looking at roughly $1072/mo., now including JS0 business expenses (but still excluding my taxes).  Sustainable?  Maybe!

But apparently there is.  FedEx has managed to take 8 full days to get us our tape shipment sent via 3 day shipping.  Which, when speaking geologically, is actually very similar to 3 days.

As a result of this Epic Fail, there won’t be an episode today.  Or tomorrow.  My bet is that we’ll be live again Wednesday morning.  In the mean time I’ll have a couple more posts from the American East as well as my November financial update.

To tide you over until then, check out these babies:

Damn, son.

That’s my new remote storage.  Having filled up 750Gb with material for only the first 6 episodes of this season I decided to upgrade to this pair of monstrous 1.5Tb drives to carry the load from now on.  Those are the new Seagate ST31500341AS drives that are making as many headlines for their failures as for their insane capacity.  Apparently I’m a gambler.

Also, I bought them on Black Friday at a discount that left me paying the simply unthinkable price of $0.08/Gb.  Even 4 months ago the best deal you could get on 3.5″ storage was $0.15/Gb.  I’m paying more per month for $0.60/can beer than I am HD video storage.

I’ll post another entry later this week detailing just how one transfers 750Gb off of a RAID array and onto a long-term storage drive with only two functioning SATA ports between four computers (hint: you don’t).