Gen Kanai sent me this article about a young Spanish guy who has managed to become a professional car racer having trained almost exclusively playing with the video game series Gran Turismo for Playstation. This demonstrates once again how “serious” video-games can be, it brings to my mind the novel Ender’s Game. Another case also related with Gran Turismo is how the control panels from the video game are starting to be used in cars in the real world.
From virtual to real!
Last week the first cases of swine flu were confirmed in Kobe and days later in Tokyo. Japanese people are taking many precautions against it and have started buying tons of surgical masks. In the area of Kobe and Osaka more than 4.000 schools have closed and kids are supposed to be studying at home. During the last days I can see much more people than usual wearing surgical masks and it looks like it is very difficult to be able to buy new surgical masks since they are sold out everywhere. Some people have thought of it as an opportunity and during the last days there are tons of surgical masks at Yahoo Auctions being sold at high prices.
Some are trying to make money, and some others are trying to create new fashion trends 🙂 But I thinkmexicans are better at this 😉
I while ago I was in a barbecue somewhere around east Tokyo and the most impressive thing were the “super nice romantic views” we could enjoy eating and drinking:
It fascinates me how Japanese are able to elevate highways everywhere, sometimes it helps a lot to ease traffic in Tokyo and Osaka. But there are some extremes that I don’t really like, some exaggerations, like when they put highways on top of rivers to save space! This is what happened for example at Nihonbashi, where they build a highway on top of a beautiful river with a beautiful bridge and now it looks like…. after many years it seems they want to get rid of the highway and put it underground, we will see. These are some more pictures I took during the barbecue:
Did you notice the Dragon Ball girl in the video at the beginning of this post?