One Day in September

Given the fact that we get a public holiday for the AFL grand final, and I am trying to be more Australian this year, I thought it would be fitting to watch the grand final match for the first time. I mentioned it to  some people from work, and they suggested I go to a pub to get an authentic experience (since getting tickets at such short notice would be practically impossible). I was a bit hesitant to go to a pub alone and watch the game, and I'm not a huge fan of loud noises, so I opted to watch the game at home instead.

To try and make it a bit more authentic, I was going to get a meat pie and some VB, but D said Four 'n' Twenty pies have really gone downhill lately, and I prefer sausage rolls, so I ended up having a mix of party pies and mini sausage rolls. Of course, this has to be with copious amounts of tomato sauce, and Smiths tomato sauce flavoured chips. I decided to pass on the VB, and did think about getting some craft beer from Richmond, but race day is in just over 2 weeks and I don't want to mess up my training with alcohol at the moment. (Not that eating pastries and loads of salt is really helping much either.)

I did think about buying a pack of these to be more Australian, but even IP said that it sounds gross, so I gave it a miss.

There was also this, but I didn't think it would make for a very good lunch.

I won't post any spoilers, in case anybody hasn't seen the game yet. I didn't get to see much of the boundary umpires running around, since I was watching it on TV, but it was much nicer watching it on TV since you could actually see the players, and the commentators told you what was going on.

I have to say, the person at OPSM (optometrist chain) who suggested they sponsor the umpires has a wicked sense of humour.

I don't really know what else I can say about the game without spoiling anything. I noticed that more Richmond players had giant beards compared to the Adelaide players. It might be because Richmond is becoming a hub for hipsters. MrFodder said we should cheer for Richmond, because at least they're a Victorian team, and we shouldn't support the interstate baddies. I wanted to support Adelaide because when my siblings and I were asked to pick a team, my sister picked Adelaide (I picked Sydney, my brother picked West Coast. I didn't even watch the grand final last year even though it was my team playing....).

Sausage rolls are better than party pies. Much easier to eat, and less burning your tongue with magma hot levels of meat. And less meat going all over your face. I need to learn how to eat meat pies properly before I can call myself Australian.

Oh, side note! A and I have a lot of differences in regards to how to eat food. We were talking about sauce technique for eating meat pies (the bigger ones, not party pies). I said I put the sauce on top and just eat the pie from the side, trying not to let the gooey goodness fall out. Actually, that's not always true. If I'm eating a pie on a plate, I'll put sauce on the top, and then cut a hole in the lid and also squeeze some sauce inside the pie and mix it around so you get this tomato sauce / beef mix inside. Then I'll eat the lid, then the inside, and put more tomato sauce on the pastry before finishing that. MrFodder often asks me if I want some food to go with my tomato sauce.

On the other hand, A is an advocate of slowly applying tomato sauce as you eat the pie. So you take a bite off the side, then tilt the pie on its side and squeeze some sauce over where you bit into it. As you eat the pie, you keep squeezing more sauce on the part where you're about to take a bite. While it does allow for even distribution of the sauce, I think it detracts too much from the eating part.

We are bitter rivals when it comes to tomato sauce. He is a dipper, and I'm a drencher.

This is my ideal method for eating with tomato sauce:

This is his ideal method:

Actually, he'd prefer it if they served the sauce in those stupid thimbles that barely have enough sauce to cover a single chip.

Anyway, I feel like I've written a lot more about my tomato sauce war with A than I have about the football, so I think I'll end it there, as I have nothing else to say about today's match.

Samsung Galaxy Studio - Federation Square

Similar to the one in Sydney, Samsung has opened a Galaxy Studio at Federation Square, and I think it'll be around until mid-October.

If you want to play with some of Samsung's latest gadgets, then it's a pretty good way to do it. I went during my lunch break, and some of the booths were pretty busy - in particular the VR and Samsung Fitness booths, but the phone, 360 camera, dex and wearable booths were all free.

If you are into getting free stuff, you can get a Samsung bag drawstring or tote bag with a bottle of water and A5 notebook if you visit one booth in each of the three areas. Oh, and there's a Kiis booth (the radio station) on one of the higher levels of Fed Square, and they have a competition running as well, but I didn't go there as I had to get back to work.

Oh, and there was also free coffee, if you're into that, and into waiting in a line (I'm not sure what time the coffee cart closes). The line seemed pretty short, I can't speak to the quality of the coffee as I didn't bother.

My only reason for going was to see an explosion of a Samsung Note 8. Firstly, that thing is massive. Here it is compared to my Kindle.

It was actually pretty hot when I picked it up, so I was kinda worried. I asked one of the staff members about it, and he had a pre-canned response about how the issues with the Note 7 have caused Samsung to be a lot more careful about the quality of their phones and they now go through a much more rigorous testing process. Even though I'm sure he has been asked the question hundreds of times by now, he was really nice about it and we chatted for a bit about quality assurance. He actually has a Note 8 himself - the only person working there that I talked to who owned a Samsung product.

I did like the post-processing background blur feature of the phone.

Which might be really hard to tell from those two photos, and it seems to only really work well when the foreground image is of a person / people. But I think you can do that in  Photoshop anyway, if you really wanted to, so it's not really worth buying a whole new phone over.

I thought the Gear Fit 2 was nice, it's a lot fancier than my Mi Band 2 - although it is a lot bigger and the battery life isn't as good (more than a month for the Mi Band 2, and 4 days for the Gear Fit 2).

I asked the guy at the booth whether it synched with Google Fit, and he wasn't sure. A quick Google search says that you need an app to sync between Google Fit and the Samsung Fitness app, but it is possible. Not that annoying, but the 4 day battery life was the real dealbreaker for me. I have enough trouble remembering to charge my phone, I like how low-maintenance the Mi Band 2 is.

The fitness section was used to show off their watches (both of them are wearing the Samsung Gear Sport).

I didn't see the appeal of a 360 camera.

They had some snowglobe thing that you could go inside, and it'd spin some plastic white rose petals around with black light for you to film yourself with a 360 degree camera.

(That is not me - the selfie life isn't really for me. Mini-side rant: I'm not opposed to the idea of a selfie. Since not everyone carries a tripod around with them, and if nobody else is there, then it's the only way to take a decent photo of yourself and something else. I just don't like the weird angle that most selfies are taken at,  resulting in the photos looking a bit off. As my own personal attempt to reduce the number of bad-angle photos in the world, whenever I see people taking selfies, I offer to take a photo for them. I have about a 50% acceptance rate. I wonder how many of those people are worried that I'll steal their phone.)

The booth wasn't too crowded when I went (~11:30am), but one of my co-workers went after work, and said it was quite hot in there, so it sounds like it was a lot more crowded. Try to be strategic about when you go.

Selling Ice to an Eskimo

There's an interesting new company called Pymetrics that aims to bypass the conventional hiring process and try and find character traits that high skilled employees display in order to help employers narrow down potential candidates. The idea is that you can play a series of mini games that don't have win / loss metrics, but the way that you play those games will show what kind of traits you have. The company will have the stats of their current employees' results, and the company will be presented with potential candidates who have traits that match their current high-performing employees.

They claim that the process should reduce personal biases based on things like race, pedigree (i.e. which university you studied at, if you have a degree at all). The algorithm isn't just a perfect match based on similarities, but they say there's some machine learning behind it all, so as I discussed in earlier posts on AI, sometimes it's hard to work out why one candidate was preferred over another.

I thought I'd give it a shot. I couldn't play the games on my phone without downloading their app, so I had to wait until I got home - because not only is playing games on your work computer frowned upon at the office, it's probably even worse if you're playing a game designed to help you find a job!

After each game you play, you get a result screen telling you what trait you displayed while playing that game.

I won't go into all the games, in case you want to play it for yourself - since knowledge of how the game measures things may bias your result. I found my results interesting though. I have always considered myself incredibly risk averse. Yet according to this game, I have a risk preference for high-risks. It's probably because of that that my recommended jobs were sales, consulting and hedge funds.

My top traits seem to be preference for ambiguous risks, staying focused on one strategy, and putting in effort for low reward.

I spoke about this with Michael, who was the one who told me about this test. He did it as well, and I find it fascinating how different our results were. He got the results I wish I had gotten. :(

I feel like we are quite similar in a lot of ways, we both tend to have the same moral beliefs, and similar interests, but I think we are a case of convergent evolution - we both have quite different backgrounds, but have converged on similar values. We talked about our approaches to the various games, and one thing that struck me was that while I was playing them, I had a definition of "winning". There were some tasks where the "win condition" seemed obvious, and so I set about trying to achieve that. When looking at the results I got, I looked at some of the traits and figured the reason I got that trait was because I didn't do very well on a particular task.

Hearing Michael explain his thought process when he was doing those same tasks made me realise that my win conditions weren't the only ones. So it's likely that it doesn't just measure traits directly, but perhaps it tries to guess at the motivation for why someone may play the way that they do.

At first, I wanted to completely write off the results. I mean, come on, I'm one of the most risk averse people that I know. However, the more I think about it, the more I'm starting to wonder how much merit there is in the results. I'm not the world's greatest salesperson, and I don't think any amount of training will ever get me there, but I am pretty good at customer service, having worked in retail and hospitality for a long time. I always thought that I would be a good diplomat, since I'm a natural peacekeeper.

Plus, if I've managed to convince you to give it a shot, then maybe I'm not the worst sales person. Note: I didn't have to tell them my age, gender or ethnicity (and if they live by their words, those things shouldn't matter anyway). I will admit that I did lie and say that I'm unemployed, as I wasn't comfortable telling them where I worked, so I won't judge you if you choose to do that, too. Though I do feel a bit bad, as I'm worried I may bias their AI.

Today

(Morbidity warning! If you want to go into the long weekend (assuming you have Friday off) with a cheerful attitude, might want to give this one a miss.)

I have this irrational feeling that whenever I go to a hospital, someone will die. Although, if you think about it, it's rational in the sense that people are dying all the time, and they will be dying when I go to a hospital, so I'm not wrong. For the most part though, the person I'm visiting doesn't die.

A lot of people seem have an aversion to hospitals, despite the fact that without them a lot of sick and injured people would be worse off. However, for people who don't work in hospitals or the medical field, the only time you tend to go to a hospital is to visit someone who is sick, or if you are sick yourself. So it makes sense that people would develop an aversion to hospitals.

But the other thing hospitals provide is a place to rest, peacefully.

It makes me think of that episode of Scrubs, My Old Lady, where JD is trying to convince one of his patience, a 74-year-old woman named Mrs. Tanner, to start dialysis in order to prolong her life. He sits with her, reading items off a list he wrote of things that she still has left to do with her life. She goes through it with him, saying that she has done all of them.

J.D.: "Go to the top of the Eiffel Tower."
Mrs. Tanner: Done.
J.D.: Fine. "Go to the top of the Meiffel Tower."
He looks up at her.
Mrs. Tanner: Oh, now you're making stuff up.
J.D.: No, I'm not; it's right here, you can look at it!
He turns the notepad in her direction.
Mrs. Tanner: Listen, Dr. Dorian, there's not one thing I regret as I lay here right now. I'm ready. I really am.
J.D.: [flipping through the pad] You have had an amazing life.
Mrs. Tanner: Good, then we agree. Now, aren't there other patients you need to be seeing?
J.D.: Me? No, no, I've--I've been off for two hours.
Mrs. Tanner: So, with your precious free time, you've been sitting in a hospital room talking to an old lady. What about your list? How many of those things have you done? For that matter, how many times have you sat in the grass and done nothing, hm?
J.D. looks at her, unable to answer.
Mrs. Tanner: You need to start taking some time for yourself, young man. Promise me you'll do that.
J.D.: I will.

The episode makes you value your life, and it really makes you wonder if you were on your deathbed right now, would you feel like you were ready to die? As stupid as this sounds, I was feeling really down at one point, and one of the things that kept me going was that I wanted to live long enough to see the rest of the Star Wars movies (The Phantom Menace came out around that time). My life has since turned around, and there are even more Star Wars movies to live for now! Not to mention all the other things I want to do.

I also feel like this year has been pretty big for me, in terms of doing things that I'll regret not doing later. Sure, some of the things I've done have been a bit of a dud, and some things didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked (*cough* Fiji *cough*), but I'm slowly expanding my world, and I've done things and met people along the way which have changed the way I see the world. It's odd that being on a site like reddit, where opposing opinions will often be downvoted to oblivion made me realise that I also live in an echo chamber. As funny as it is to laugh at politicians for being out of touch, I live under a rock myself, but I'm slowly climbing out, and as I do, I find so many more things that I want to do.

Today is a celebration. A celebration of someone who has done so much with his life that I'm in awe. He's not the youngest _________, nor would his life story be some Oscar-bait movie, but it's inspiring nonetheless. Here's to hoping I can do the same!

Nostalgia - Universal Restaurant

One of the benefits of going to uni at The University of Melbourne is being so close to Lygon Street - Melbourne's "Little Italy" (although it is becoming more diversified). One of the university student staples of Lygon St is Universal Restaurant - a fairly large Italian restaurant with some cheap decent meals.

I'm not kidding, this is what we ordered, and no, that's not a miniature knife and fork set - the plates are really big. The parma was only $14! The ribs and wings were $23.90, but honestly, we could probably have split one of those plates between us. TH and I really struggled to finish our food, and this was one of those moments where my eyes were bigger than my entire digestive system.

I remember some of the people from the anime group saying that they introduced spiders (ice-cream in a soft drink) to the restaurant, and I don't know if it was on the menu before, but it seems like they have it now! We were there on a Saturday afternoon, so we didn't have to wait, but I've been there in the past for dinner, and every time there was a long line out the door. The food came out pretty quickly. Faster than I had expected, and for once, I wasn't even hungry, having lost some of my appetite back at the blood exhibition.  But the food smelled so good, it came back pretty quickly.

The layout of the restaurant has changed, it's a lot more open now, with more long tables. I guess they know that uni students like to dine in large groups.

It was nice to re-live uni life again, even if it was only briefly. Definitely recommend going there if you're in the area and after a cheap meal!

Blood: Attract and Repel

If you have a weak stomach, this might be a post to skip.

I get queasy at the sight of blood. My mum dreamed of me becoming a doctor, but I think I've known
for a long time that a career in medicine wasn't for me, unless it was psychiatry or something. When I first saw the poster for this exhibit, I banished the thought from my mind pretty much instantly as something I wasn't interested in. Given the theme of the year, and how I've been trying new things, my instant distaste indicated that this was something I should try. I convinced TH to join me.

The point of the exhibition was to discuss blood, and talk about some of the reactions people tend to have around blood - mostly disgust. It was part art, part science. The first thing you see when you walk in is a metal grate over a container. One of the people running it explained that you smell the container (which has a mix of chemicals meant to simulate the smell of blood), then look up at the screen (it had a Kinect hooked up to it) and it'll register your expression.

The colour that flashes on the screen indicates your reaction. Both TH and I got orange, indicating that we were happy. I did not feel happy at all, it smelled really gross!

Some art showing what I think is period blood?

It made me think of Dexter.

There was a vinyl record made out of pig's blood as well as some plates made from the blood of people with HIV / Hepatitis C. I didn't really want to touch them. There was a video that was playing, featuring a HIV positive person, and someone with Hep C, and they spoke about how being diagnosed changed the way that people see them. There's a register for people with Hep C, and they spoke about how isolating it can be sometimes, once people find out that they're positive.

This was a pretty cool piece of art. The reddish-brown liquid is blood, like our blood, that contains haemoglobin. The blue liquid is blood that contains haemoncyanin, like what crabs have. The clear liquid is synthetic blood, which is ten times more efficient than normal human blood. However, it tends to break down, so for now, it can't be used to replace real blood. Someone raised the question of it being used for enhancing athletes, and the exhibitor responded that it is an issue, and the rules about it are currently unclear.

The real test for me was upstairs.

That is the placenta from a pair of twins.

If that wasn't gross enough, someone decided they were going to harvest the iron from 69 (yes, I'm not just picking that number because lol, 69, that is how many they chose) placentas, and make a compass needle.

(My hand is there to give some perspective of how small it was.)

Why would someone decide to make a compass needle from placenta iron? For the sake of art, probably.

That wasn't the weirdest.

The weirdest was the horse lady. In 2011, bioartist Marion Laval-Jeantet decided to inject herself with horse blood in a piece of performance art called May the Horse Live in Me! She took some blood from a horse, and mixed it with some of her own blood, and over a series of weeks, slowly injected the mixture into her bloodstream to accustomise herself to it. On the day of the performance, she injected herself with about 3ml of horse blood, strapped herself into a pair of stilts with horse hooves at the end, and walked around with the horse.

At the end, they extracted some of her blood and dried it.

She claims she has an affinity for animals, and that injecting herself with horse blood made her feel like there was another presence inside her. I remain dubious.

Unfortunately, we went on the last day of the exhibition (ignore what the poster says, the website says it closed on the 23rd of September), so if you missed it, you'll have to check it out somewhere other than Melbourne. It was an interesting exhibit, but I did feel pretty uncomfortable the entire time we were there.

Pop Up Globe - As You Like It

A bunch of people from Auckland decided to build a replica of the Globe theatre that Shakespeare and his company built in 1614. It's currently in Melbourne, from the 21st of September to the 12th of November, 2017. They're doing As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Henry V, and Around the Globe in 60 minutes (a brief history of Shakespeare). I kinda wanted to see Much Ado About Nothing, based solely on the title, but for some reason, I ended up buying a ticket for As You Like It. Was this a repeat of the croissant class where I accidentally booked a misc French desserts class instead? Was this fate? I will never know.

I didn't know it at the time, but this play is the source of this famous quote:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;

The Globe is set up outside the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. That's right, it's outside. So don't make the same mistake I did and bring a picnic blanket hoping to be sprawled out on the grass sipping champagne while watching this (there was to be no champagne sipping, but I did have a box of chips from Lord of the Fries).

My ticket was only $20.33, but it was a ground ticket, so standing room only. I really went all out this month, and I've nearly hit my $400 limit already. Go me!

I actually thought it would be fun to stand, as it would be like experiencing a Shakespearean play the way that regular people would back in the day. There was room for about 200 people to stand. I managed to secure a place towards the back, so I could lean on the railing, which turned out to be a good thing. Standing up for 3 hours is tiring!

Yeah... if you're going to go to this, I recommend wearing comfortable shoes and swaying so that you move your weight from one foot to the other, allowing them to rest a bit.

In the tradition of ye olde Shakespearean plays, the female characters were played by male actors. I thought it was a great touch.

I had neither seen nor read As You Like It before watching this. Some of the play was faithful to the original script, but some of it was also modernised. I thought I would try and explain what I understood of the plot first, and then look it up on Wikipedia to see how close I was.

The story starts with some Irish dude telling people to make sure their phones are on silent / flight mode, lest they risk losing limbs. Pretty sure that wasn't Shakespeare.

Then two groups of people pull swords out at each other for some reason.

We switch to a conversation where Orlando is telling Adam something about how he wants to prove himself. Orlando's older brother, whose name I never catch, so I'll just refer to him as Orlando's brother, comes in and Orlando asks why he was never given the chance to be educated, like a man of his status should be. Orlando's brother says something about how Orlando is useless, and Orlando says he'll prove himself with a wrestling match.

Rosalind (who is referred to as a princess???) and her cousin Celia are talking with a jester about wrestling and how exciting it'll be to watch it. (I was actually confused at this point, as I couldn't tell if Rosalind and Celia were supposed to be men or women, but I figured it wouldn't matter).

Orlando's brother is talking to this really buff dude called Charles, and laughing about something. Charles is doing push-ups and pull-ups and all the things that really buff dudes do to show that they're really buff. And he has no shirt on. It turns out that this is the guy that Orlando, who is a scrawny-looking guy, will be fighting.

The fight starts, with Orlando's brother and a bunch of nobles cheering Charles on, and Rosalind, Cecelia and the jester (Touchstone?) cheering Orlando on.

Charles manages to win the early game, but Orlando manages to take advantage of the comeback mechanics and wins in the end. The duke asks his name, and he says he's the youngest son of Roland something, and it turns out that the duke hates Roland, so Orlando is banished, but not until Rosalind gives him her necklace. Rosalind tries to defend him, but she gets banished, too, for some reason, and Celia says if Rosalind gets banished, she'll get banished, too.

For some reason, Rosalind has to disguise herself as man during her banishment, so she calls herself Ganymede. Celia changes her name to Aliena and pretends to be Ganymede's sister. They go in search of Rosalind's dad, who had been banished some time earlier, and now lives in the forest. Oh, and he's also the duke's brother, and the duke staged a coup and stole the dukedom from him.

Suddenly, everyone is in the forest, and Orlando is completely lovestruck and is sticking poems to trees, writing about Rosalind.

Baby, you light up my world like nobody else
The way that you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed
But when you smile at the ground it ain't hard to tell
You don't know you're beautiful

Oh, wait... someone else already did that.

Because this was a troupe from New Zealand, there are sheep doing some very NSFW things.

Orlando and Rosalind meet, but of course, he doesn't know that it's Rosalind. Ganymede asks him if he's the one who has been putting up all those poems, and he says that it was him. Side note: I really liked all the scenes with Rosalind as Ganymede - it was a guy playing a girl pretending to be a guy. So funny. Anyway, Ganymede / Rosalind doesn't believe that Orlando truly loves Rosalind. I got really confused here, but at the end, Ganymede tells Orlando that the best way to get over Rosalind is to pretend that he, Ganymede, is Rosalind, and direct all of his affections towards him instead. For some reason, Orlando, who was supposedly head over heels in love with Rosalind, agrees to this plan and says he will meet Ganymede at his home tomorrow.

In the meantime, Orlando has met some other noble, who agrees to feed him and Adam. I never worked out why. The duke threatens Orlando's brother, telling him that he has to find Orlando and bring him back, dead or living.

The agreed meeting time between Ganymede and Orlando comes and goes, without Orlando showing up. Ganymede thinks he doesn't love her. Orlando's brother shows up instead (how does he know where the exiled Rosalind is?????) and tells her that Orlando was killed in a battle with a lion.

Nope, Orlando just has a sling. I didn't understand this either.

Oh, and Ganymede meets a couple of other guys in the forest. There's a shepherd who is in love with his master, but the master is in love with Ganymede. But Orlando is in love with Ganymede pretending to be Rosalind. Ganymede tells the shepherd's master to love the shepherd instead, but he won't listen. Oh, and Rosalind's father appears.

Ganymede comes up with a plan. She tells the shepherd's master that if she's a man, she'll marry him. Then she tells Orlando that Rosalind will marry him. Lastly, she tells the shepherd that he will marry his master. Since they're all there for this conversation, I don't know how it doesn't occur to any of them that the maths doesn't add up, but they all seem content with the plan, because they think they're getting what they want.

The day of the wedding arrives, and Ganymede says that if the shepherd's master doesn't get to marry Ganymede today, he should marry his shepherd instead. He agrees. Then Ganymede gets changed and ta-da! Rosalind has re-appeared. Celia has changed back, and wants to marry Orlando's brother, despite the fact that he seems like a cowardly asshole. But I guess having the My Heart Will Go On playing in the background when you meet someone is enough to make you fall in love.

Side note: Celia was the best part of this play. The guy playing her was hilarious.

This all seems like it won't work, but then God drops from the sky and says it will work, so it does.

Celia marries Orlando's brother, Rosalind marries Orlando, the shepherd marries his master, and everyone is happy except the duke, who ends up un-banishing Rosalind's father and reinstating him as duke.

Lots of great dancing at the end. And Rosalind strips, and I was so shocked to see the guy playing her.

He was really fantastic.

I thought the show was a bit slow to start, but that's to be expected as you have to learn the characters. After the intermission, it really took off, and I don't think I stopped laughing.

I wasn't too far off with the story... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_You_Like_It#Synopsis

I really enjoyed how the cast interacted with the audience - another one of the benefits of being on the "ground". You really had to be careful standing too close to the front, as one of the character spits his "teeth" into the audience... twice. Another character drinks too much alcohol and "vomits" into the audience. Yet another character spills his skin of beer into the audience. So yeah... if you're going to stand in the first few rows, I'd suggest a raincoat. Plus, the Globe doesn't have a roof, and it's Melbourne, so a raincoat might be safe anyway.

A couple of people from the audience were picked to make some sheep sounds. The guy standing next to me yelled out, "Can you speak faster, it's raining?!" and the cast rolled with it. The audience were asked whether certain characters were telling the truth (though it seems like you're supposed to lie when a "good" character is being questioned, and tell the truth when a "bad" character is being questioned). A couple of other audience members were worked into the story.

Aside from the sore legs, I really enjoyed the performance. There was a brief intermission about an hour and a half into the show, so it was good to stretch my legs. Seated tickets seem to be around $80-$170, but if you think you can handle the standing, I thought being on the ground was great.

Hokusai at the NGV

I got an email from my alma mater saying there was a reunion for the former Japanese students at the Hokusai exhibit that's currently at the National Gallery of Victoria. redbeanpork said he wanted to see it, and the tickets were free, so why not? The form that they had allowed anyone to register - non-former Japanese students, non-arts students, and even non-University of Melbourne students. Of course, redbeanpork, Pharmacist and I took them up on their generous offer.

It was a bit awkward at the start. One of the professors came up to talk to us, and I didn't remember him at all (though it might just be because I only did the beginner's subjects). He then went on to question redbeanpork and Pharmacist, the former hadn't even studied at Melbourne uni, and the later was an arts student, but didn't do Japanese at uni. We thought we were busted, but fortunately, some other people he knew started talking to him, so he moved on. We took that time to sneak into the exhibit while everyone else was mingling, and had the whole place to ourselves!

As pictured on the photo for the day, Hokusai's most famous print is probably The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖浪裏 Kanagawa-oki nami ura), from his series Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji (富嶽三十六景 Fugaku Sanjūrokkei). I don't know if they

I don't know if it's just my crappy photography, but the exhibit had two copies of this print on display: one from the NGV's own collection, and one from Japan Ukiyo-e Museum in Matsumoto (JUM). The display said that the NGV copy (first image) is an earlier version than the JUM copy (second image), but the second one seems so blurry that I think it's just my bad photography.

I only know this picture because it was on the first JR pass that we got in 2011, which was a funky metallic version.

We also saw the 2013 JR pass picture, which is actually called South Wind, Clear Sky / Red Fuji (凱風快晴 Gaifū kaisei).

I don't think the 2017 JR pass featured an image from the collection. It does still feature Fiji-san though.

The prints were created by a technique called woodblock printing, which sounds really laborious. An image is drawn, and then the paper is glued to a wood block, ink-side down, to transfer the ink to the block. The block is then carved so that the drawn part is raised, and paint is applied to the block. A piece of paper is pressed down to transfer the ink to the page. The block can be re-used multiple times to make many prints. The real magic is watching the an image with multiple colours come together - see this YouTube video (just under 9 minutes, but I recommend watching it on 2x speed).

My favourite image was Sketch of Tago near Ejiri on the Tōkaidō (東海道江尻田子の浦略図
Tōkaidō Ejiri tago-no-uraryakuzu).

I just like how something so mundane (fishing and salt harvesting) can be made to look so majestic. And the gradient in the sky is so pretty.

Now that I have some idea of what is involved in producing one of these, it really boggles the mind how he managed to achieve such detail in his images.

The clean lines, the tiny spots of colour. If I had to carve a wooden block for every single colour, I'd probably just make something that looked incredibly pixelated.

This exhibit is on until the 15th of October, 2017.