Afraid of the dark?

Warning: This post contains graphic makeup. And bugs.

Photography buff blog Sooth Brush posted some time last year about the delightfully chilling work of a certain Joshua Hoffine, a man obsessed (possessed) with childhood fear art photography. The brilliant composition and art that goes into the pics is just as impressive as the fact that they aren't photoshop edits, but straight shots with only colour adjustments and tweaking done by computer. The rest is all family & friends, a bunch of free time and an artful eye, resulting in vivid images that shock in their contrast of stark gore with symbols of purity & innocence.

Check out Joshua's site to buy signed prints - or even a brooch version of the beasty below. Or just give him blog love.


Props to Rodney for the linkage.

Incommunicado

Disclaimer: We now interrupt this long period without posting to give you uninterrupted China.

And I was on such a good roll. Regular posting on my blog, 10 hits or more a day (albeit many of the non-regular viewers are finding my blog off Google searches for "how to fire a machine gun"). But then what had to happen? I had to come to China. Of all the places.
China is not Google's friend. Blogger is inaccessible without a proxy server, and good random ones are hard to come by (I tend to find the most success with pretending to be from Argentina). Plus uploading vids in China is near impossible, with virginal bandwidth (is that a bit coarse?). Finally to make matters completely dire, China recently banned youtube for a considerable time, not-so-discreetly in time with the Tibetan protests. Hmmm. Even a proxy wouldn't get through that mess. I refuse to comment. Well, maybe later.

Even had I time to post, we've been absolutely consumed by Pikachu and his cute friends. Again, that's a post for another time, but let me just say that Nintendo, though a very interesting company to work with, can be awfully bureaucratic at times.

Firstly, after such a long time off, I must say gracias and salut to mi amigo David, who unwittingly doubled the hits on my blog over the course of a weekend. As I mentioned in a previous post, David has something of a following in the Spanish blogging world for his insightful and educational comments about life in Japan and the Kansai region. Even if you don't speak Espanol, his blog is good for pics from Japan, and occasionally some videos to boot. No out-of-focus neglected bicycles, however. Don't get your hopes up.
Anyway, David gave me a blogging high-five when he linked me the other day, on a post that was about none of than...my girlfriend. "Eh?" you may well think, and when I say it was a post on White Day, Japan's second half of a two part Valentines they do, that "eh?" may well repeat itself. You're probably making the same face that Americans did when I told them I was staying in Las Vegas with someone who I met "on the internet" (ie. couch-surfing).
It is indeed funny. But I don't mind - he's a good bloke (well, as far as I can tell). Mio modelled for him last year, and he got some pretty good shots actually. You can check them out here (or if that doesn't work, just click his name above and scroll down to 14th Marzo).

David's brief mention that his cute model happened to be my object of affection caused hundreds of Latinos and Spanish to pop over here and check me out. Not many stayed (fair enough, I don't write in Espanol, nor much about Japon), but it was enough to make Spain the country with the most viewers of Machine Gun Salaryman. Ironic huh? Kinda like when somethingawful.com posted a link to a voraphilia site. That many people viewed something they didn't necessarily want to since Meg Ryan's boobs in In The Cut.

In case you were wondering, the top 5 countries viewing my blog are:
1. Spain (by almost double)
2. Japan
3. New Zealand (Kia Ora!)
4. United States
5. Mexico (thanks again, David...)
(there is also someone from Mauritius who stumbled on here. Neat!)

I was going to put up pics of China, but instead I'll wait til another post, seeing as this one is getting lengthy. I'll leave you with the top 10 most played tracks on my iPod, for general pulp interest.

1. Sexual Sportswear (SebastiAn Remix) - Sebastian Tellier
2. Beautiful Burnout - Underworld
3. The Boy Who Ran Away (Riton Extended Dub) - The Mystery Jets
4. I Choose Noise - Hybrid
5. What's Your Damage? (Digitalism Remix) - Test Icicles
6. 14h54 - Danger
7. The Fallen (ruined by Jus†ice) - Franz Ferdinand
8. H.A.L. - SebastiAn
9. 1967 Aww Shit - Steve Aoki & Junkie XL
10. My People - The Presets
...huh. Don't think I could have picked any of those. Would have said this was in there.

How to use your blog to your advantage

David & I melt the camera. (Photo March 07)
DISCLAIMER: This is a blatant plug.

Last night I went out for okonomiyaki with my Spanish mate David. David's gig is a PhD in Nara, but he's more well-known for his blog. And I don't mean like, World Famous In New Zealand kind of famous. I mean like, Borderline Political Influence famous. There are people who read his blog besides the people he's already met. His blog pays a percentage of his mortgage on his house in Madrid. Even more exciting is the term connections. Especially when accompanied by the term business.

So, naturally, the first thing I did was tactically grill him for his fame-inducing techniques. Lord knows my middle name is I-want-to-be-famous-in-Japan. After an hour of conversation over garlic chips, beef&konjac okonomiyaki and beer, I had learned next-to-nothing. No get-rich-quick schemes, no secret password, not even a phone number for blogging consultants.
However, like I said, I learned "next-to-nothing". David got his blog famous by accident. OK, that might be stretching the concept, but he didn't go out of his way to get there. The two things he did do were:

1. Post every day.
2. Comment on everyone else's blogs.

And lets not forget

3. Write in Spanish.

If you're clever, it only takes 20 mins a day to do the first, and around 20 mins a day for the second too (NB: I'm not clever. It takes me hours to post. I'm the equivalent of a writer who balls up the paper he's writing on and three-points it in the trashcan every 5 mins). But number three? Damn, got me there.

These days everything imaginable has been blogged, at least in English. The Spanish advantage comes in that the ratio of English to Spanish blogs has got to be more than 3:1 (Wikipedia will tell you that English, as a first or second language, is used by around 1.8 billion people). Add in the fact that Japan is having a vogue phase in Spain (both in culture and business), and suddenly people want to know what you have to say. Loads of his followers are Japanese language students in Spain & South America, hoping to lift a bit of information about the country they're studying.

All this made me feel fairly inferior, but mostly confused. What does his blog offer that my blog doesn't? I can read enough Spanish to know I'm a more creative writer than he is - isn't that all people want in literature? Something that's interesting to read?
I think I've sussed it out though. Firstly it was the information he supplied in his blog: telling you stuff you might be able to learn in books, but as more of an "eye witness", confirming that yes, Japan has temples and tanuki and silent trains. Now it's got to the point that the following is the self-sustaining point about it. It's almost like a BBS with a forced topic each day. He sets up posts to go off daily, sometimes weeks in advance, and plans out topics for up to a month's worth of blogging. Talk about turning it into an industry.
99% of money he gets in the blog is from banner ads requested by companies (eg. La Liga betting), but occasionally he gets a mail from some company who want a bit more in the way of "product placement". "We'll pay you 200EUR to mention that you used our flights website to get the cheapest flights back to Spain." That's perfectly good business, but does anyone else feel a bit dirty when they read that? As far as I know, David doesn't write anything he doesn't believe in, so rest assured, you can trust his word. (Having said that, he's a convoluted bloke when it comes to relationships, something I both envy and think is a bit wrong. But then again, it seems to be the status quo for any guy in Europe to have a few on the take)

For those of you who read Español, check out David's blog (Flapy). For those, like me, who just want to look at the pretty pictures, check out his Flickr (Destebani). He's not too shabby with a camera.