Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts

I woke up today at 9.30 am. My classes start at 9 am. I blame Windows for this because I use my laptop set at full volume as an alarm clock, and it normally works well but sometimes they like to do Windows updates by themselves, and then proceed to reboot. This was what happened and my alarm got turned off, naturally, making me real late.

Fuck you Bill "retired" Gates!

Anyway, today’s 2 lectures were interesting enough. The first was by a Japanese professor, who talked about the effects of a dam on human health, specifically pointing out the issues of malaria and schistosomiasis. He showed a 30 minute video on malaria in Africa, and it’s pretty tragic. Poor Africans, it’s amazing how resource rich they are, and yet also cursed with a fuckton of diseases and cultural baggage that makes that continent the worst place on live on Earth.

The 2nd lecture was by a chemist from Yale, named Victor Batista. Cool name, it reminds me of the Batista tecnique used for heart surgery in the manga Iryuu. Anyway, he started off awesomely, giving us a really indepth technical look into hydrogen fuel cells and biomemetic systems of hydrogen production, where only sunlight and water are required to make hydrogen. Hydrogen is of course, hard to carry around and bulky, but we have techniques where hydrogen is bonded to a inert substance and discharged when desired, which would greatly facilitate the storage and transport of hydrogen. I thought of a sci-fi application, andI gave the analogy of blood - imagine a car, powered by hydrogen like how we are powered by glucose. Imagine driving your car to the gas station and having it undergo dialysis, but instead of removing the waste, you just add hydrogen to the bloodstream of your car. Sounds good.

The 2nd part of his lecture was shit though, he got into really deep PhD level stuff about energy levels and the mechanisms of hydrogen production as modeled by different people. Bear in mind that even I, who has taken at least 5 chemistry modules in university, could barely follow, much less the liberal arts people and even non-scientific English speaking people. The last hour was a borefest with nobody actually listening!

After class, one of the Americans had a birthday so a cake was bought and we did the usual birthday stuff. Except a cake in Japans costs a shit load of money, something like 30 US dollars for a tiny round cake. NO WONDER the girls in Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 didn’t get any round cake!

We promised our Christian friends we would attend their house party and this time, it wasn’t all just youths like the last curry party at Yoyogi, which I mentioned on the Day 1 post. There were plenty of old dudes, and it was a bit different from the last time.

There was this rather annoying Chinese immigrant who went to America, lived in Dallas, claimed to have 3 restaurants, a 1400 CC Harley, waist length hair, 100 guns of all types, loads of money etc etc. He was touring Japan, and being a great evangelical pain in the ass. He was invited to the gathering to give a testimonial (or something like that, don’t know what these Christian terms mean) and proceeded to show off his large financial assets. He ended off with something about how he didn’t feel satisfied and gave it all up to look like a homeless Chinaman with Jesus in his heart. OK I paraphrased a little but that’s probably the gist of it. I find that the older Christians, especially the born-again Christians, tend to be more annoying. The Japanese are fine, but it’s generally the Chinese Christians who try to apply pressure on non-believers like us. I had to lie and say I was going to look up the sister church in Singapore, to get out of some sticky situations.

It’s fine though, because there were nice people to counteract those evil forces. The gathering was hosted by this Japanese family, with 2 daughters, one was in middle school year 2 and the younger one was in elementary school year 4. The younger one is really cute, and did weird shit like lie under coffee tables and rolling around like a worm. No fapping please, I hate lolicons. I’ll give you some bloody hilarious pictures.

She behaves like a woodlouse, permanently seeking shade and shelter.

THIS IS NOT A GIANT BONER. OR IS IT?