also (e.g. technological musings)

I'm currently totally into this band, MONGOL 800 (in Japanese it's ﾓﾝｺﾞﾙ８００ which gets shortened to ﾓﾝﾊﾟﾁ--cause let's face it, the Japanese can never resist shortening a long name).
They're kind of...I guess you'd call it indie rock-style music? Guitars, drums, but very upbeat songs. The closest comparison I can think of, is that they kind of remind me of the Plain White T's. In particular, I fell in love with the song 小さな恋の歌 (translated as something like "Little Love Song"? Whatever, it sounds better in Japanese) off their album MESSAGE. It's actually an album from several years ago--I'm not even sure if the band's really active anymore. But I first heard the song cause it featured in an episode of Propose Daisakusen (LOL).
Anyway, combination of it being kind of an older album, and not super popular anymore, I wasn't able to find a good download of it (don't give me that look) so I actually went out and bought the CD (I know, right!). But I was able to find it at Book-Off (in case you're not aware, a used book-manga-CD-DVD chain and the most incredible place known to man) for about 1000￥, or a little under $10. It was a really weird feeling, tho--I was realizing, it's literally been *years* since I've bought an actual CD (rather than an iTunes download).
So at any rate, that CDs been playing on repeat on my computer since yesterday :-)


P.S. On the related music note--there've been some edits to the blog. Due to various 面倒 like videos mysteriously disappearing from my playlist, &c, I've decided to replace the large video player that I had up before, with more of a "Video of the Week" system. Whether I'll actually update it *every week* remains to be seen (I'll try tho!) but I promise I will change the videos on a somewhat regular basis. I'm envisioning a combination of new-release videos and (if there's nothing interesting that week) older vids that piqued my interest.
And to keep track of it all, I'll be keeping a list of the archived videos from past weeks. Format is Date: Artist / Track. 見 links to the video on youtube (I take no responsibility if old links go dead--you've got a computer, you can look it up yourself).

So, enjoy! (and comments always welcome)

~sarah