i've started playing the .hack// games again (first four original ones), it's a simulated MMORPG where your friend goes into a coma in your first day of playing, and you see the in-game event that makes that happen so you spend the rest of the game trying to figure out how to get his consciousness back. meanwhile the game slowly gets more corrupted and impossible to play. i think it's really fun in part because to me it's almost a perfect RPG — you have a fake forum, fake other players, most things are voice-acted, the fighting pauses when you have your menu screen open, the PS2 controls are really good (when my controller works, anyway) etc. if you wanna play it, it's in japanese, english, german and some other languages. as for the japanese version, to some extent the different characters talk differently, but i don't think anyone uses dialect until you beat the game and unlock parody mode (which doesn't exist in other-language versions).

anyway when i last played this 2 years ago i understood basically nothing. i didn't even know kanji like "speed" so i couldn't tell my speed scrolls from my billions of other items for example. now i'm understanding.... 90-95% (so far anyway). since i'm using an emulator i can just screencap words i don't know and look them up later, along with not having to worry about "game overs" because i can just save constantly, it's great.

in other news: i got the info for the student apartment i'll be staying at while in japan. it'll be $400-600 USD a month in rent depending on how much electricity, internet and water cost. that means i'll probably have $400 a month for everything else for two people (food, transportation, general activities etc). we're going to try and reduce costs as much as we can there: coats/blankets instead of the heater, lights off during the day, eat leftovers cold (or by candle-power) and so on. my friend warned me that cheaper apartments are normally traditional ones and thus really drafty and often broken; we don't have any choice but it's good to know in general.

i did a quick job search by just googling "sendai foreigner part-time job" and found a job-search site where you can specifically click that you're a foreigner/exchange student, and there were a lot of jobs (even lots of "no experience required at all!! even if you've never held a cooking knife before!!" kinds of jobs), at the bottom of one i looked at they even said "just say exactly this on the phone and we'll understand you're looking for the job, don't worry!" as if they were used to people scared of phones etc, so things seem preeeeetty nice in japan...

i still have these tasks to do:
— call bank, activate my debit card
— clean room, scan books, toss basically everything. have to stop holding on to "but this will be useful someday" (ex. icelandic books i haven't read even once since buying them 5 years ago) and just toss it. since the majority of the problem is books, if i just scan/upload them for safekeeping i'll be fine with tossing them.
— clean out all my files and bookmarks from all the computers i use; upload and make backups of whatever i keep. again i have to just throw away old projects instead of thinking i'll "finish them someday"; whenever i DO go back to a project i completely restart it from scratch so most of my stuff is basically useless anyway
— see if we can't fix that old comp i have to take it with me to japan instead of my newer one (it's far less likely to break than the modern one i'm using, because 10+ years ago comps were actually sturdy)
— translate the entries on my exchange blog