nickdrewe

It seems traveling to Tokyo is all the rage at the moment, and with cheap airfares on offer a trip to the Land of the Rising Sun seems all the more tempting. Having just returned from a week long trip to Tokyo I have decided to impart some of the knowledge I gained to anyone who is thinking of making the trip. One of my major concerns about traveling to Tokyo was the common myth that traveling to Japan is extremely expensive, however despite being the most expensive city in Asia it is still possible to travel to Tokyo on very modest budget.

One of the best resources for anyone traveling in Tokyo on a budget will be the humble convenience store.  While western style supermarkets are few and far between, well stocked convenience stores are literally everywhere and contain almost everything you will need on your journey. Compared to what I have become accustomed to Australia, food found in conveniences stores in Tokyo seems to be of a fairly high quality and they offer a large selection of both snacks as well as more substancial meals including sushi and delicious bento boxes.

Another way to eat cheaply in Tokyo is to do as the locals do. Take a detour up the backstreets in most neighborhoods and wou will find yourself surrounded by any number of small local eateries serving wholesome food for a good price. While the language barrier can be a bit wider in these resturants with menus in Japanese only, most places feature photos of the food on offer as well as plastic displays of food in the front window. Realisticly, you can eat well for less than 1500-2000 yen a day, just dont expect to be eating vast quantities of fresh fruit or thick chunks of beef.

Suntory Strong Zero - 8% alc

You don’t have to spend a fortune to have a few drinks either. Once again the convenience store is the one of the cheapest sources of alcohol around. A pint of Japanese beer will run you around 200 yen, or if you’re feeling like having a big night why not try an Asahi or Suntory STRONG variety. These deadly brews contain 8% alcohol and a pint will set you back around 250 yen (~$3). For a cheap night out, rather than hitting the clubs in Shubuya or Ripongi, round up some friends for a few convenience store brews, or make some new friends at a friendly hostel.

Khaosan Tokyo Ninja Hostel

As a young, unemployed student a hostel seems like the best option for accommodation as well as a great place to meet other travelers and share travel tips, experiences and good times. We stayed at the Khaosan Tokyo Ninja Hostel which has a great theme and proudly proclaims to be the cheapest hostel in central Tokyo. Room choices ranged from shared bunk rooms to ninja style cubicles and will set you back 2200-3000 yen ($28-38) which I found quite reasonable based on my extremely limited hostel experience. If you’re running low on cash, you can always spend a night in one of Tokyo’s many manga/internet cafes in your own private booth for around 1500 yen. Just try to forget about what the guy in the booth next to you might be up to.

A booth at an Internet/Manga cafe

As for entertainment, you don’t have to spend big to go to DIsneyworld there is plenty of sightseeing to be done for free around Tokyo. Renting a bike for a day will cost you just 200 yen and ended up being the most fun I had in Tokyo. The city streets are extremely bike friendly, and it’s a great way to cover a lot of ground in a short time, and see some of the sights would would have missed on the train or subway.

While you’re on your bike, take a ride around Ueno park (the park with no grass) to see some free street performances along with a vast, yet friendly homeless congregation.Head towards the Imperial Palace and surrounding gardens for a more relaxing park experience, and some grass. Harijuku and Yoyogi park on a Sunday will also provide you with a day of free entertainment and people watching and Akihabara A.K.A. Electronics City is a sure bet to stimulate your senses.

In fact there is plenty to do and see in almost every Tokyo neighborhood for free or next to nothing, getting lost in this massive city can be its own adventure.

Got your own tips to travel Tokyo on a shoestring? Post them in the comments below.

This morning I came across a cleverly disguised marketing campaign for Sprite in the form of a web video titled You Can Get In Anywhere If You Say You’re the DJ. The video is in the style of the short how-to clips that have been springing up all over the internet lately, and features only a small sprite logo on the title screen (so small I didn’t even notice at first) and a post-roll screen directing viewers to the campaign’s website. I’m sure most viewers wouldn’t even know they are watching an advertisement until the video is over, and this is what makes this campaign a great example of new media marketing done right. It turns out the video is just one in a series of truth hunting missions by the Sprite Truth Hunters AJ and Nickos.

The stunts themselves are the kind of pranks you would expect to see pulled by the Chaser or Vive Cool City crew I’ve mentioned previously, and is exactly the type of entertainment sought by tech savvy, short attention spanned, Gen Y-ers, who also happen to by Sprite’s target audience.

By producing the content that they know target audience wants to watch, Sprite has done an extremely good job at targeting and engaging the consumers they want to reach. This results in a much higher engagement and quality of marketing than can be achieved through traditional media such as television and radio.

Campaigns like Thirst For Truth are revolutionary in that they turn some of the ideas held by traditional media advertisers upside-down. Instead of finding content like radio or television programs that attract some of the consumers they want to reach and then buy advertising time within the program’s commercial breaks, sprite has chosen the demographic they want to reach and produced content to specifically target them. Success of reach in a campaign in a traditional media environment is based on how well viewers can recall the advertisers they have seen during a particular program, so advertisements are attachments to traditional media content. New media advertiser-produced content flips this around with the content being an integral part of the campaign.

Although I haven’t seen any, im sure there accompanying television ads to help draw initial viewers to the Thirst For Truth website, but the campaign has likely gained the most attention through viral distribution and word of mouth online. This is an obvious advantage of this type of marketing, if the content is of a high quality and is more importantly interesting, funny or shocking, the distribution will handle itself as people share the videos through social networks and blogs and show their friends. I only stumbled upon the campaign through a post on Boing Boing. As well as the Thirst For Truth website, the videos are available on a number of video sharing websites like YouTube and 5min.com to increase exposure.

I read a number of comments on the videos on YouTube and other places of viewers doubting weather the videos were ‘real’ or not because the clips are sponsored. But I personally don’t think this matters, as long as they look real they are fulfilling their purpose of attracting and entertaining the Gen Y audience.

My trusty iPod earphones died a couple of weeks ago after developing a tinny rattling sound, like there was a piece of supermarket shopping bag between the speaker and my ear, before eventually falling to pieces. No problem, I thought, I’ll just buy a new pair. Maybe… It turns out that a new pair of official trendy white iPod earphones goes for $48 on Apple.com and in the local apple reseller, a little out of my price range for a pair of earphones. They are significantly cheaper on eBay, but there is no way to tell if they are “officially” official, or if I will ever see my earphones at all after sending my money off to Hong Kong.

I decided to wait until my new iPhone arrived that I had ordered a few weeks earlier with a shiny new pair of trendy white earphones. In the meantime I used a pair of airline earphones I had lying around. The sound wasn’t terrific but they did the job of getting me to class and back each day on the bus. Until I lost them.

I hadn’t realised how boring the bus was without any form of aural entertainment. Staring out the window is hardly the same without music, and what’s worse is actually noticing the noises made by other passengers. The lady across form you with a horrible loose smokers cough. The guy behind you constantly sniffing. The fat guy shamelessly farting. The homeless dude up the back rambling on about whatever it is homeless guys up the back of the bus ramble on about. It was awful, I even tried reading a book on my daily bus trips. It just wasn’t the same, it didn’t block everything out.

I finally caved this morning and bought a new pair of headphones on my way to class, and when I got back on the bus, with earphones still on my mind I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. Everyone on the bus was wearing them. Out of about 30 passengers, I counted only 2 people without little cords dangling from their ears.

And rightfully so. At first I began to think, are we so scared of social interaction that we have to block out as many of our senses as possible with earphones and big sunglasses to avoid any possible contact with other people. Are we so dependent on the media that we can’t stand to spend a second without it. But then I remembered my own week without earphones and it all made sense. It just took me a week without earphones to realise it.

Google has just launched their Google Maps Street View feature for Australian maps, giving users the ability to view a 360 degree snapshot of virtually any address, as it appears from the street. The launch of the service opens up whole new opportunities for thieves, stalkers and creepiness in general. I guess it could be quite handy too…

The service has been running in the US and a number of European countries for a while now, but there is something quite eerie about being able to view my own city without having to get up off the computer and actually go outside.

I’m also pretty surprised at the sheer number of streets covered across Australia. I was expecting the service to launch with only a moderate coverage of the capital cities and major towns, but Google seem to have thoroughly covered the whole east coast as well as many outback towns and highways.

The image above, of my own house, appears to be at least 8 months old, before we moved into the house. I know this simply because the lawn has been mowed, the hedges are neatly trimmed, and the gate is shut, certainly not characteristics of the house lately.

Go check it out.

When we first moved into our house at the start of the year, we threw a party with all of our friends to celebrate. There was a distinct disagreement between house mates as to what the theme of the party should be. I wanted a Mexican theme with tequila and the Mexican hat dance, and the other guys wanted a robots theme with electro music and lots of flashy lights. We ended up compromising, with the theme of the party being a battle between which theme got the most people. “Robots Vs. Mexicans,” it worked perfectly.

A lot has happened since then, and there are birthdays and lease renewals to celebrate, and a whole mid-year break to do it in, so we are throwing another party. The only problem this time is that we couldn’t come up with a fun theme. So we have decided to leave it to the guests, and throw an ‘open source’ party.

We decided to go about this by setting up an event on Facebook a few weeks before the party, taking everyones suggestions, and hopefully ending up with something completely awesome at the other end.

We have no ideas how this is going to turn out.

The facebook event page reads something like this at the moment:

Basically we are just shit at coming up with our own party ideas and smart enough to realise it. So we have decided to ‘open source’ our next party. That is- we want you, the people who will be attending, to tell us what you think is needed to make an awesome night.

So leave comments with your suggestions of what songs/music you are digging at the moment, what videos we should put up on the TV, what food and drinks we should serve (keeping in mind we have a budget) or anything else that you think of that would make for an awesome party. Maybe you have a ‘choice’ idea for an overall theme for the party that you want to see put into action, or some sweet ideas for how we could go about decking out the space underneath our house, or maybe you want more glow sticks this time. Let us know.

We’re putting out the invitation early, firstly so we can claim the date, and also so we can get everyone’s ideas together and let everyone know before the party.

The search for quality, regular, well produced video content online is tough enough as it is, with all of the junk (as well as some good stuff) out there on video sharing websites like YouTube, it can be hard to find something both interesting and entertaining that’s worth watching. Even harder, is finding quality content that is produced locally.

Recently I was linked to a clip on Vive Cool City, a collaborative project of producers of short, documentary style videos covering just about everything that you won’t see on TV. The site launched with a bang last year by accidentally filming a drive-by shooting during the taping of the first episode, and the site has been going strong ever since, just recently passing 100 episodes.

VIVE COOL CITY is an on-line TV site that streams 2-3min original episodes 3 days a week, Monday, Wednesday & Friday. Based out of Australia, we cover stories we wanna see but can’t find anywhere else, from music-fashion-party to getting smashed off Listerine, kidnapping in Mexico or incest in Tasmania.

Head on over to Vive Cool City and check out their Who Are We? video.

Last week we went along to the Lifeline bookfair at the Brisbane Convention Centre. This is where all of the books that get thrown into those charity donation bins each year end up. We perused the books in the unpriced section for a while, where you pay based on the size of the book, not the content, but nothing really caught our eye. We then moved over to the VHS tape tables, and discovered a treasure trove of the best and worst 90’s entertainment, at only 25 cents a tape! We came home with more than a boxful, about 34 tapes in total, and have been working our way through them ever since, suffering through the horrors of rewinding and bad quality sound.

Here are some of the tapes watched so far.

1. Crazy Japanese Tape

I picked this tape up solely for the reason that there was no English to be found on the box at all. The front cover features 2 men, both sitting down, one eating something, the other playing an odd Japanese guitar-like instrument. The only other information I can gather from the front of the box is the number 9 in a big yellow diamond (maybe this is the 9th tape in a series) and that someone once paid $3.50 for this tape. Not really a bargain when you compare it to the 25 cents I spent. The box cover turned out to be far more interesting than the contents ever could be. The tape turned out to be a karaoke video for a a band that played what I can only describe with limited knowledge of Asian music styles as Japanese folk music. The video features a couple singing and dancing at various locations around a Japanese city, riding bikes, and for some reason, in the bath as the lyrics scrolled across the bottom of the screen in big blue Japanese characters. The tape features a brief glimpse of nipple in one of the bath shots, but apart from that, this tape was pretty disappointing. I had gotten my hopes up that for a crazy Japanese game show, and was rightfully shot down. Perhaps Japan isn’t as interesting as I had once thought.

My VHS Rating: 1/5

2. Basics of Skateboarding: The First Step

I picked up this tape because Henry and I have been trying, to some degree of success, to learn how to skateboard. Between waking up the neighbours from skating in the backyard at night and looking like idiots when we try and skate out on the street, we probably need some helpful instruction and a few hints. This tape offered us hints and tips from skateboarding’s pros, and at only 25 cents I couldn’t turn it down. If nothing else it would provide us with an entertaining look into 90s skate culture.

This tape was neither helpful, nor entertaining. In fact I think this tape was made as a scam to sell to young children when they buy their first skateboard. Nothing really gets explained in this video, and the pro’s presenting obviously have no desire to go into any detail when ‘teaching’ you how to skate.

An average segment starts with the the presenter instructing, “This is how you perform a (trick name),” then they perform the trick as a demonstration, and follow up with, “And that’s how you do a (trick name)”. No additional information is given. The rest of each segment is then made up of the skater that just explained the trick performing it in a hundred ways that would be impossible for a beginner to even attempt.

My VHS Rating: 1.5/5

3. Fortress (1993)

Finally something worth my time. A 90s action blockbuster. You don’t have to look past the huge arm-gun, cheap looking robot and flames on the cover to know that this movie is going to be very bad, in a very good way.

Set in America in the not too distant future, in a time of population control, where couples are only allowed to have one child, our hero John Brennick and his wife find themselves being arrested by the military run government for being pregnant with their 2nd baby. The couple is sentenced to do 31 years hard time in the high-tech, underground prison run by the evil Men-tel corporation, who are secretly stealing prisoners babies and turning them into half robot half human cyborgs for some reason I am yet to figure out. The over the top plot proceeds with Brennick and his wife attempting to escape, with the help of a gang of their fellow inmates, of course, with plenty of action, blood and violence along the way.

On a separate note, this movie was filmed in my home state of Queensland of all places, most likely at Movie World Henry tells me, and much to my disappointment, the lead character never wears the shiny pants and studded belt outfit seen on the cover in the actual movie.

My VHS Rating: 4/5

4. A Blank Tape

When I came across a blank tape at the book fair, I couldn’t help myself. I had to buy it. You can’t buy much for less than a dollar these days, and for 25 cents I could have a voyeuristic look at what people were recording on their VCRs in the 90s. The possibilities of what this tape contained were endless. Could it be an old taping of Hey Hey it’s Saturday! Or someone’s home videos?

The only clue the box gave was a taped on post it note that read something like “nasit” or “dash”, either way it didn’t give much insight into what the tape contained. We popped the tape in and pressed play, only to discover it was a tape full of Mash episodes. Never mind, we thought, the tape might at least give us a nostalgic look at the ads that were being played at the time it was recorded, which the older style channel 7 logo in the corner told me was sometime between 2001 and 2003. But whoever recorded this tape was one of those people that cuts out the ads, which means they were watching the episodes of Mash while they taped it to watch later, rather than taping it because they were going to miss it that night. I’m not actually sure about which I think is worse.

Stay tuned for more VHS adventures, including killer snowmen, badly dubbed ninja movies, and terrible 90s porn.

Eyebeam, the organisation behind the Graffiti Research Lab has released a project that will replace those annoying online ads with a constantly updating collection art pieces. The Add-art Firefox plugin works with another popular plugin, Adblock plus. The project is open source, and anyone can submit a collection of ‘arts’ to be displayed.

via iTnews

For as long as I can remember coming to Brisbane, I have always looked over at the south side of the river to see an obscure narrow tower poking its head up above West End and wondering “What the fuck is that?”. The story I made up for the tower is that it donned the roof of the meeting place of an almost-cult religious group. It didn’t seem that farfetched, so I believed my little story for what would have been the better part of 5 years.

After my most recent sighting of the tower, after a Saturday morning breakfast at West End I decided to put my speculation to rest. I wish I hadn’t. The real story behind the Brisbane Sky Needle is far more boring than a crazy cult story ever could be.

The tower was originally built at Southbank for Expo ‘88, and was planned to be moved to Tokyo Disneyworld at the end of the show. Japan would have been a perfectly acceptable resting place for the sky needle, they love crazy shit like that over there, what actually happened is just about the most boring outcome for such an intriguing structure.

The tower was instead purchased by Stefan Ackerie, the owner of those Stefan’s hair salons that you used to see in shopping centres (not sure what happened to them, bankrupt?), and moved up the road to the Stefan’s HQ at South Brisbane, where it would later catch on fire in 2006. A dissapointing end to a dissapointing story. Are there any interesting landmarks in Brisbane?

My friend Henry just got an interesting email from the YouTube Content Identification Team about one of his videos that shamelessly uses a copyright song (in this case Ramstein - Teir), as do countless other videos uploaded to YouTube every single day. The interesting and perhaps unexpected thing was that the email was not a notification that the video has been removed, but rather a message informing that the owner of the copyright of the song Teir, Universal Music Group (UMG) was claiming ownership of the audio in that video.

The email stated that ” Your video is still live because UMG has authorized the use of this content on YouTube” and because they have made a claim on the copyright of the audio, they now reserve the right to “receive public statistics about your video, such as number of view” and “Place advertisements on this video’s watch page”.

There have been reports for some time about YouTube incorporating automated anti-piracy technology into the service, but I never expected this. Allowing artists and record companies to claim copyrighted music and place advertisements next to the video will likely serve as a huge source of revenue for both artists, record companies and YouTube, who are still lacking a viable business model. Well done YouTube, and congratulations to Universal to adopting a progressive attitude towards music “piracy”.

Full text of the email:

YouTube | Broadcast Yourself™

Dear YouTube Member:
UMG has claimed some or all audio content in your video tier video. This claim was made as part of the YouTube Content Identification program.
Your video is still live because UMG has authorized the use of this content on YouTube. As long as UMG has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video’s page.
Claim Details:

Copyright owner:	UMG
Content claimed:	Some or all of the audio content
Policy:	Allow this content to remain on YouTube. Place advertisements on this video’s watch page. Applies to these locations: Everywhere

UMG claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.
Sincerely,
The YouTube Content Identification Team