MJG's Feed - Page 1 of 3

Recently I was chatting to a few other haikyoists about re-featuring some of their explores on this site. The first to agree with it was Brian McDuckston, of Japan Bash and Ramen Adventures. On Japan Bash Brian explores Japan on his motorcycle, and o...

I commissioned this sketch of Dawn from an artist I found online. Dawn is the lead character in the book I’m working on now- Dawn Rising, set in my Jabbler’s Mons fantasy universe. The artist took a few passes at rendering Dawn and his scars, but in...

Across the road from Jungle Park was this smashed-up restaurant/souvenir shop. I`ll guess it wasn`t actually connected to the theme park, though it probably survived on the tourists who came there. Inside it felt inhabited, with clothes hanging on ra...

Jungle Park was easily the biggest green-house I’ve ever been in, and boy was it hot inside. H-O-T. And very humid. Within minutes I was soaked to the skin, and any time I had to climb something I was panting with the exertion. You can probably see t...

I watched the first part of Stieg Larsson’s Milennium trilogy; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in movie form last week, and was seriously impressed. The next day I went out to buy the two sequels, The Girl who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicke...

I just saw the movie Kickass, and loved it. Of all the superhero movies out there, it was the one that most made me actually get up on the edge of my seat as the main guy goes into battle. He seems real, and it seems like he could get hurt. He of cou...

Izu’s Jungle Park is an immense abandoned green house, an indoor botanical garden sheltering nearly 10,000 square meters worth of sweltering tropical habitat. It was built in 1969, and its peak of operation came in 1973 when it received 750,000 visit...

These books are the future. I loved them and really hope Daniel Suarez writes more set in this awesomely utopian/dystopian thriller tech world. Damn, they resonated with my world view and my ideas of human tubes and human plus so much. All kinds of s...

The White Root mine is old, so old that only the faintest outlines of its bones remain. Squint hard and you might see fragments of its ribcage scattered over the hillside, parts of a cracked skull just visible through the topsoil. Once it must have b...

I really wanted to like this book. Ever since Michael Marshall Smith wrote his sci-fi trilogy of One of Us, Spares, and Only Forwards, I thought he`d be one of my favorite authors. My first novel (as yet unpublished ) was influenced by his breezy f...

Last week I talked about character motivation- filling in the gaps between what characters want and why. It`s a fundamental part of story architecture- that the good guy wants something and will fight to get it. But probably more important than what...

During Japan`s real estate Bubble in the 1980`s, theme parks were the investment to make. They couldn`t fail. Sink millions into expensive construction, land, and man-power, and ride the surging economy to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A...

Takahashi Minekichi was a rural Japanese strawberry farmer with a vision. For 21 years he carved the beginnings of a grand hotel into the solid rock wall of a cliff face on his land, digging out the contours only he could see. He did it all alone, us...

What has the DM`s screen got to do with writing? Well- I`m still working on my Dawn* books. I`ve sent them out to agents and got a lot of no`s in reply, with zero personal correspondence. So I`m trying to make them better. Here`s some of the feedback...

I`ve started iSquinting movies and TV shows onto my iPod, so now I can get through a heck lot more stuff in one week. With my job- being a part time freelance English teacher who works at typically peak times of morning and night, there`s both a lot...

The old curiosity shop in Takadanobaba has been a mystery to me for a long time. I first spotted it passively years ago, before I lived near here, most likely on a trip to the Blue Parrot second-hand book store. It’s built in red-brick, or at least t...

Out of Ruins needs your input! This site is constantly evolving- as anyone who`s been reading for a while knows. It began as a blog about Japan, entitled Big Red Dot, after the big red dot in the middle of the Japanese flag. It then moved through inc...

It turns out they knew about Global Warming back in 1989. They knew about the problems of pollution, the reliance of any one country on any one fuel source, and to boot they knew about religious terrorism. Howard Weinstein wrote ‘Power Hungry‘ with a...

Jeju island at the southern tip of South Korea is (apparently) famous for three things- wind, rocks, and beautiful women. I didn’t see many of the latter, but can attest to both of the former, plus a fourth- haikyo resort hotels. Without really going...

Even the seasoned haikyoist is wary of haikyo phones- they are one of the myriad unseen dangers of haikyo. Alongside other well-known hazards such as poisonous mushrooms (don`t eat them!), yakuza packing hand-guns (don`t antagonize them!), and saprop...

In the Texas desert near the little town of Marfa, on a stretch of Highway known as the loneliest road in America, sits the Prada store that got left behind. No attendants bustle behind its chic white counters, though it`s fully stocked with veblen b...

If you`re into haikyo, you`ll probably already know about Haikyo Deflation Spiral. If you don`t, let me introduce you. It`s one of the top sites on the web for Japanese ruins. Compared to all the other Japan ruins sites (twodogs, ruins-site, etc..) i...

The Ruins on Tama Lake changed little since the last time I came to visit. Perhaps the wooden huts of the Red Blossom restaurant have canted a little further towards collapse, and the walls of the Akasaka love hotel were holed and splintered a little...

And so we come to the first of the Peter David books. Peter David is something of a legend in Trek fandom; for his prolific output and incredibly entertaining render of the Trek universe and crews. His book `Imzadi` about the origins of the Riker-Tro...