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Osaka 4: ‘Operation Three-Wheeler’

Tuesday, January 14th, 2020

I woke tired with the dawn but since my first goal didn’t open until ten I took the chance to slow down a bit and watch a movie. It was sublime albeit the movie not so much. Then I took two trains to the docklands to ride this:

It’s called Tempozan and for many years was the tallest Ferris Wheel in the world. KLS and I were out here back in 2017 but didn’t ride it since she gets scared of heights and I always wanted to return. The ride takes about 15 lazy minutes and provides great views for miles. Here’s me at the top:

My next destination was the Dotonbori canal district but – as if often do – I took the long way and walked after one train rather than catch both back. This led me to discover a lengthy covered shopping street in which I found a used game shop and bought an old Game Boy game! Which once again proves that you should always walk if you can 🙂

After a gourmet lunch…

I arrived at my second destination of the day:

That’s the Ebisu Tower, so named since the guy shown on the front is the god of fortune Ebisu (who is hanging out with the penguin mascot of the Don Quixote discount store).

This unusual Ferris Wheel sits riders in a car facing outwards (it spins 180 while loading) and also takes about 15 minutes to make a circuit. While the views weren’t great the wheel had a surprise for me: it’s a little bit scary! The carriages don’t hang, and mechanically rotate as they go around the curves. The led to judders and creaks that more than once reminded me it’s only been open 6 of its 15 years, being closed for mechanical reasons the rest of the time.

Here’s the view from the top:

I was laughing out loud like a fool most of this ride. I think it’s exhaustion catching up with me!

After a quick stop at the hotel my third goal for the day was only a short walk away:

That’s the Hep-5 Wheel, on the top of a shopping mall right in downtown Osaka. KLS and I rode this at night back in 2017, immediately before a memorable thunder storm, but today I got to ride it during the day. It’s taller than Ebisu but shorter than Tempozan (which speaks a lot for Tempozan’s height since this guy is built on top of the 7th floor!) and – surprise surprise – takes about 15 relaxing minutes to go around.

Here’s me at the top:

I very much enjoyed this one since I’ve been buzzing around the local streets every day and could plot my paths from above. It also afforded fantastic views of the nearby train station. However unlike the other two it had no commentary at all! Still worth a ride.

So three wheels in one day! They were all cheap (¥800, ¥500 and ¥600) and worth the trip. I’m now proud to say I’ve ridden three different wheels in the same day. I wonder how many others can claim that?

Tonight I pack for the train to Tokyo tomorrow, where the trip enters a new phase: otaku madness. Stay tuned…

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Osaka 2: USJ

Sunday, January 12th, 2020

Today I went to Universal Studios Japan! Apparently I had picked a good day to go since all of Osaka – perhaps even all of Japan – seemed to be there today as well 🙂

I had a very early start this morning (due to slight jetlag) but even though I got to the park 45 minutes before the gates opened the throng of humanity stretched as far as the eye could see. Once I was inside I made a beeline for the Harry Potter section and quickly joined the longest line for a ride I’d ever joined:

Yes the ride is in the castle, and the line is not supposed to stretch out this far. But this morning it did, and the employees scrambled to open up extra line space to accommodate us all. In actuality it wasn’t that long a wait (maybe 20 minutes) and when I rode the ride itself it was just as good as I remembered from Florida last year.

I then methodically went around going on the other available rides (skipping the log flume and the ones that would make me sick) – that’s my wearing the 3D glasses for Spider-Man above – which didn’t take long since there’s not that many and three were closed today! Eventually I joined the line for this:

It’s called The Flying Dinosaur and is apparently an amazing roller coaster. Unfortunately the very strong warnings of motion sickness scared me away and when I mustered courage and returned later I was confronted by this:

By this point the park was inundated with people and almost all the lines were excessive. So in quick succession, I watched the three special effects shows 🙂

Since they are all based on old films – Waterworld, Backdraft and Terminator 2 – each is showing it’s age. And yet I very much enjoyed all three. The vision of the future in Terminator is laughable now but the show mixes video and live action skillfully and the 3D is very good. Backdraft was two very long ‘making of’ movies (narrated entirely in Japanese) followed by an astonishing demonstration of (real) flame effects in movies.

But the real star was Waterworld. It was beyond good: it was amazing.

The arena as you can see was enormous, and the show was basically live action Mad Max with boats. The explosions and effects were ridiculously over the top and I loved it. Probably the highlight of my day!

I would have liked to ride the big coaster and stay for the light show, but early afternoon I was ruined and left the park to return to the hotel for a break. While those that know me are thinking “He rested?!?” I can assure you that a bit later I went back out and did some shopping!

That’s an original Ultraman suit used in a TV series, on display at an official store. I had my Ultraman shirt on and the employee saluted me 🙂

Now – it’s just after 7 – I’m so tired I can barely type, so an early night it will be. I’ll need lots of rest for tomorrow, since I’ve planned an equally full itinerary…

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Last Night In Oz

Friday, January 10th, 2020

I’ve mostly finished packing on this last night of my Australia vacation. I’m absolutely exhausted from endless active days but my mind is full of many happy memories from these past three weeks.

Thanks to my parents for putting up with me for so long. Thanks to all my friends – AW, SMC, KB and MMC – for giving me their time. And thanks to Australia for – as always – welcoming back its emigrant son.

But my vacation is not over, since tomorrow I fly to Japan where I will stay for the next ten days. If you’re wondering what I’ll get up to… so am I! You can bet the otaku madness will be unfettered though, so look forward to lots of weird and wonderful on this blog (hopefully) every day starting tomorrow…

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The Stuff That Had Anakin Panicking

Monday, December 30th, 2019

I went for a big long walk today along the beaches, and I thought many things. One of those things – and it’s something I’ve thought before – was just how many sand grains are actually on this beach?

Let’s work it out.

That’s Newcastle beach. It’s gently curved, 650 meters long and as best I can estimate using satellite photos, has about 140 feet (~42.7 metres) of sand width. Estimating the depth of the sand is difficult, so I’ll go with a likely conservative average of 2 metres.

Doing the math gives a volume of sand of approximately 55,500 cubic metres. However all this volume isn’t occupied with sand, since there’s gaps between the grains. To work out the actual volume of sand the packing constant (ie what percent of the volume is the media of interest) is needed.

This is difficult to calculate. In fact it’s very difficult since the grains are of varying size and shape. So as an estimate I’ll assume they are spheres (they’re not) and that the sand is mostly settled which gives a value of about 74%

So that gives us about 41,000 cubic metres of sand grains.

Now to calculate how many discrete grains. Once again approximations are needed. The sand on Newcastle beach is very fine but not silt-like, so we’ll use the industrial classification of ‘fine sand’ and treat each grain as a cube with sides 0.25 millimetres.

Diving the total volume by the volume of a single grain gives us a final answer: I estimate there are at least 2.624 quadrillion grains of sand in Newcastle Beach.

To put that into perspective, that’s about 340,000 grains for everyone on Earth, which would fill a volume about as big as a golf ball. So yes, everyone on earth could easily take a handful of sand from just Newcastle Beach without it running out. In fact there’d likely be a lot left over since I probably overestimated sand grain and underestimated depth.

And that’s just one beach. Australia has over 10,000 of them 🙂

(Thanks AW for the title pun…)

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2019 in Games

Saturday, December 7th, 2019

Another year, another ‘Year in Games’ blog post. It’s still my #1 hobby, and in some ways I’m more invested in it than ever. But it’s interesting to see how my spending (and playing) has changed over the years, moving ever-so-slowly more toward replaying old stuff than buying new.

In 2019 the numbers dipped upwards slightly this year, with 57 games bought for 10 systems at an average cost of about $25. The PS4 led in terms of games purchased and total dollars spent, but much like last year a decent amount of my spending was for retired (and in some cases distinctly retro) systems. Here are the charts, in another new format to please my critics:

The above is a proportional plot of games purchased by system. Yes your eyes don’t deceive you: I bought one game each for the Commodore 64 and PC-Engine in 2019. I can’t play either since I don’t own either system, but both were Wizardry games and I collect them so how could I pass them up? In fact more than a third of all my game purchases this year were for retired systems, and even more if you include the 3DS which is very much on the borderline these days.

And that is the breakdown of dollars spent. The 3DS has a large block since I bought an actual new 3DS system this year (which was my sixth…), and you’ll note that even though I bought more GBA games I spent more on the C64 and PCE games. This is because one of the GBA games was a mere ¥65, which is about US$0.60! The average game price remains low since I very rarely buy any new releases these days, instead waiting 6+ months until they inevitably drop in price. On Black Friday I bought nine PS4 games – all released within the last year – at an average cost of $18!

Despite the retro gaming (I’m not mentioning here the hours spent with the NES, SNES, C64 and Genesis Mini) I sunk a massive amount of hours into some extremely high quality new games as well. The following three were amongst my favorites of the year:

Monster Hunter World: Iceborne (PS4)

What can I say? Will there ever be a year a new Monster Hunter game doesn’t make this list? Iceborne – the expansion to world – added a higher difficulty, oodles of new monsters and lots and lots of fun. It was even better than World, and given they’re still adding content I doubt I’m done with it yet!

Nioh (PS4)

Imagine a hybrid of Dark Souls and Monster Hunter and this is what you get. An absolutely fantastic mission-based fuedal Japanese monster hunt, that has incredible amounts of content and oozes flavour. A wonderful, wonderful game and I look very much forward to the upcoming sequel.

Hollow Knight (PS4)

A ‘metroidvania’ set in a world of bugs. At times very difficult, but with a gigantic map and lots to see and do. I got lost in this one for weeks, which wasn’t bad for a digital game that cost me only $5!

I can’t end the year without a final farewell to the 150+ games and consoles that I parted with back in June. I ‘ve not regretted it and don’t miss them, and I very much hope they’ve gone on to new owners and are now featured on someone else’s “2019 in Games” list :

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