6 months down...

...and 6 months to go.

It's unfortunate that I'm counting down my time until the end of my contract, but I'm finding this particular part of rural Japan a bit short on the culture, fellowship, and all the wonderful things that are usually associated with the JET Program experience.

Such things happen; nobody's really at fault. It's just the place where I live.

So I occupy lots of time by thinking about what I'll do at the end of my time. Stuff I'm tossing around in my head right now:

1. Work at Google. I applied to two positions at Google, one in Tokyo and one in Santa Monica. I'd love either, but I'm partial to Tokyo. I still find myself very comfortable in Tokyo and I'm really pretty sure I want to live there. The things that I'd miss, if I left Japan, can all be found in Tokyo, and it's lots of small things like the stuff you see waiting for a train, or going to really obscure, hidden restaurants with your friends after work.

2. Teach English in Tokyo. I've got a connection for this, so I could do the same work I do now but, say, inside an hour of central Tokyo. I'd get to live in Tokyo like I want, but I'd take a massive pay cut to get there. I'd say it's worth it, but it'd be a pain.

3. Go back to Texas and start a business playing video games for a living. Basically it'd be gaming events outsourcing - the kind of stuff I did as prez of the Texas Gaming Association, but this time for a living. And I'd have a warehouse full of gaming hardware :D

What do you amigos think?

I miss people, and sometimes I think about how nice it'd be to come home and get a new car and an iPhone and be with my friends again. But I just feel like I'd constantly miss the buzz of being in Japan, and especially in Tokyo. I want to look for a serious girlfriend, and my odds are better when I'm in a country of fluent English speakers (it's hard, and tiring, to have serious relationship discussions in a foreign language). But I'd get to play games with Americans, which means I could play PC games again and I could play online games with my friends instead of people who are all up all night in the States and thus awake when I play. This back-and-forth could go on forever.

Next stop: Kawamoto, Shimane, Japan (or, my JET placement)

I'm going to be in the middle of nowhere. More specifically, Shimane Prefecture, the second-least-populated prefecture in all of Japan.

prefecture (n.) - a province that's small in size, roughly the size of a larger Texan county.

Within that prefecture I'll live and teach in the city of Kawamoto, with a humble, cheerful population of 4,500. Amazingly, the prefecture and the city have Wikipedia pages, so if you're curious there's more to read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimane_Prefecture

There's plenty of good news about living in a small place. First and foremost, it'll be great Japanese practice - they chose to send me out there because I speak Japanese well enough to survive. Also, being one of the very few foreigners that's ever been in this part of Japan, I'll likely be a curious thing to the townspeople. This equates to me being popular by default, which I'm OK with. This particular small place is also good because it's near the beach and the mountains, so I get beach weather in summer and skiing in winter.

I'm far from Tokyo (the single greatest city on Earth - all the excitement of NYC without the dirt, crime or rudeness) - probably over 6 hours by bullet train - but roughly 3 to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are probably the biggest real cities nearby. It's remote enough that the highway infrastructure isn't exactly finished yet - and yet, many foreigners in my area buy cars. Expect to see pictures of me with a cute, tiny, box-shaped Japanese car and driving on the right in just a few months.

I just took a break from writing this to look up my city in my Lonely Planet guidebook. It's not there.

Fortunately, I've found over the last few days that my prefecture has an active Internet community for JET teachers. I signed up and was about to introduce myself in the 'new JETs' subforum when I saw this gem of a post:

'Michael Blake Errison / Emmison, are u out there?'
So through some sneaky investigations of a certain German ALT in Kawamoto we have found out that Michael Blake Errison or Emmison is coming to Kawamoto BOE or might be coming not totally sure. So Michael you out there?

After a couple days of digging around, I came into contact with Lena, an English teacher from Ireland who wrote that post. Apparently the 'certain German ALT' is the person I'm replacing, and while I'm trying to get in contact with her personally, Lena was able to fill me in on a lot about my town. I'm just over an hour from Hiroshima, there will be 3 JETs in my town including myself and Lena, there *is* broadband Internet access, and here's the real kicker:

Kawamoto BOE (Board of Education, the guys who actually employ me) are very good to their JETs. Assuming I inherit everything that the German is leaving behind, I'll be coming into a nice big house in the center of town and a car! Supposedly the BOE owns most all the possessions in the house, which means I can't abuse them (for instance, can't take the car on road trips), but it does mean I have very little initial expenses, which is very good news.

As for my teaching, it's not set in stone, but the German currently teaches junior high, so I'll probably do the same. Should be a whole lot of fun.

Running with the Bull

Wow. What a weekend.

Background: I'm the president of the Texas Gaming Association, UT's legendary campus gaming group that got UT rated the #1 gaming school in the USA. We do tournaments.

We got approached by Red Bull back at the start of the year; they wanted to "support" us as part of their guerrilla marketing scheme.

It started out small. Red Bull's campus rep brought some drinks to a Guitar Hero tournament to give away.

Then it got big. Real big, real fast. I wound up meeting with local marketing peeps - the guys who invent the guerrilla marketing schemes. Fast-forward to March: TGA ran two Halo 2 tournaments on campus, using 16 TV's and 16 Xboxes all on RB's dime, and sent the winners to an event called the Final Exam.

The jist here: UT's two winners play against seven more collegiate champion teams in a statewide tournament, all for the chance to play against Final Boss. Set the tournament in a schmancy restaurant and it becomes an unforgettable experience: exactly what the RB guerrillas want. Since I knew tournaments like the back of my hand, I wound up adminning the tournament, and got all the rights and privileges thereof.

Friday: An invite to The Warehouse. A nondescript warehouse in South Austin houses all of RB's gear and just enough indoorsy stuff (carpet, ceiling, bathroom, etc.) to pass city code. The original plan was to hang with the Boss and throw down a few scrimmage games, grab some dinner, and generally chill. Then that got shelved when a Dallas gaming center that's RB-friendly wanted to send down a team to play the Boss. We expected a team of 4 to show up and play a couple rounds, then go off and do whatever.

That didn't happen. For fear of garnering bad press for multiple people, I'll just say that a huge, huge van full of rather young gamers showed up, got slaughtered for a couple hours, and then had the fortune to get their controllers signed by the players themselves - mind you, these kids are growing up in a generation where Saturday Morning Cartoons are replaced by Saturday Morning MLG. Still, one kid had the stupidity and the nerve to yell out, in front of everyone, "eBay, here I come!" - and mean it without joking.

The team took it well though. Well, sort of. They laughed off the whole incident, so it's good that they're laid back enough to find comedy in the times when things don't go quite right. But of course, some of that comedy came at the expense of the kids and their chaperones - and while it was hilarious, and probably well-deserved given the circumstances - it goes to show just how young these guys are. The youngest player is 19, the oldest 22. I come from a slightly older school in pro gaming where your rep lies entirely in your perceived maturity. It left me feeling a little out of place, but it's totally to be expected - the gaps between PC gamers (where the older pros came from) and console guys, combined with the age differences, explain away whatever actual differences in maturity there are. Still, Final Boss largely act like pros, in-game and in-person, so I was happy to see that the old-school importance upon maturity among the best players had carried over somewhat.

Once the meet and greet was done, a celebration dinner was in order, so it was time for some BBQ - and also the first of many times I'd get to eat on RB's expense account that weekend. There, I saw the first hint of FB's brush with fame. Their favorite game, you see, isn't Halo. It's a little game they like to call "$50 Coin Toss." It's exactly as it sounds. And it never stops at one coin toss - there's multiple tosses, multiple coins, multiple coin tossers, and lots of double-or-nothings. It's the only sign I saw all weekend that these guys have money, and lots of it.

Saturday: SXSW Day 1. That meant it was time for the Final Exam. I showed up at 10:00am, and by 10:30am was elected the day's tournament admin in exchange for a pair of badass headphones. There was a tournament, and it was largely too boring to read about - on-time, no hitches, and the 'better' UT team took second place to UNT's team, who repeated their win last year. Throughout the day, though, I came to know and be known by the RB guys who were there, and that part of it was rewarding.

The afterparty was where that part really shined. If you haven't had the chance to stop by Hi-Lo, check it out - I recommend it as a swanky place. Two rooms, some good electronic DJs up front, and a chill atmosphere in back with Atari 2600s and Xbox 360s all playable. Oh, and the decor? Guitar Hero guitars, but designed by famous artists. (Bonus points if you can find the one done up by Tenacious D.) There, I met the "RB Family," as they're known, and it included everyone from marketeers to pro gamers to legendary breakdancers to hackers - and they were all thoroughly interesting people. I had never before realized, though, that I had actual potential as a networker. With the help of one of RB's marketeers, I was introduced to most of the important people at the scene, but by night's end I realized that most of them remembered my name and treated me kindly. If this - organizing gaming festivals, tournaments, and parties - is what Red Bull calls marketing, then by god I'm ready to sign up for a traveling salesman gig. Needless to say, I'm trying to find my way into the family, and start my actual career by hitting the ground running with the Bull.