The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought by Japan and China between 1937 and 1945, around the same time as (but starting before) World War II. There is a collection of civil defence posters from 1938 on the National Archives of Japan website. They’re available in ultra high resolution but at large sizes you can only view small sections of them at a time. I found this frustrating, because I liked these posters (I like most government/propaganda posters). They’re haunting, unsettlingly elegant and beautiful depictions of the horrors of war in a country which had suddenly come into the modern age.
I liked these posters enough to want high-quality offline versions. So, I made them, by downloading the images piece by piece and then reconstituting them. I figured I’d put this convenient collection back up onto the internet for anyone who’s interested. There are 55 images in total, divided into four categories. Each ZIP file is around 60 MB. Each image is around 2000×3000 pixels—this is only a quarter of the maximum size available on the original website, but it was going to be way too time-consuming to get them at full size. The image filenames include the posters’ titles from the original website, whose English I cannot be held responsible for, but they do provide some clue as to the meaning of the poster.
If you are at least casually interested and have a reasonable internet connection, you might as well download these. If you are casually interested but only have a poor internet connection, I’d recommend at least having a look at the original website.
Examples
Download:
A few months ago I set it up so I could run all the programs I commonly use from the Run command in Windows XP. Let me tell you, it’s awesome. It was something I’d been meaning to do for a while and now I could hardly live without it. Best of all, it’s very simple to do. Here’s my process:
- Make a directory somewhere; I used “C:\run\”.
- Fill the directory with shortcuts for evey program you want quick access to.
- You now have to make Windows look in that directory when you try to Run something. Go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables. In the ‘System variables’ section, find the PATH variable and click Edit. Scroll to the end of the ‘Variable value’ list (using Ctrl + right arrow, for example) and append a semicolon and the directory you filled with shortcuts; for example, “;C:\run\”.
And that’s it. You should now be able to run anything you’ve put in that directory with the Run command.
It’s this colour-coded table of every cheese mentioned in the Monty Python sketch and the reason it was not available.
Also.
From a spectrogram of the end of Computer Love by Kraftwerk, which sounds like rockets shooting off into space and looks like it too.
Get the 1600×1200.
While most of the music I’ve been composing has been for one project or another that in the end may or may not get released, this little (39 seconds) piece came about by sheer happenstance. So, I’m throwing it up on the blog.
Russian Caravan (920 KB)
No sequencing or trackers involved. The acoustic percussion is based on a couple of ~5 second bits that I cut from a recording I made, edited and stuck together in Audacity. The bass and accordion parts are MIDI but were recorded ‘live’ on the computer keyboard (with Virtual Piano).
You too can play along at home with the chords F# minor, E major, A major, G# diminished, and C# minor. Funky percussion not notated.
I was watching clips of old Japanese commercials, news reports, and station idents on Youtube, as one does, and I saw a slide that caught my eye during a weather report:
It’s minimalist, I like it. The left side says it’s cold and dry and the right side says something about Russia. Or dew.
So, I decided to copy it and come up with a Photoshop version or two. Clean:
‘79 style:
Unfortunately my version is typographically lacking—I tried to find a nice round Japanese typeface but had no luck. I’ve put together some desktop wallpaper versions, to suit various aspect ratios:
Clean: 1600×1200 / 1280×1024 / 1680×1050
‘79 style: 1600×1200 / 1280×1024 / 1680×1050
One last post about footy tipping, and it’s for the 1897 VFL season. The average percentage of correct guesses is 76%, better than average and better than this system’s average for 2007 or 2008.
Rounds 2 to 14 and the finals of the 1897 season on the X axis, correct guesses from 0/4 to 4/4 on the Y axis.
Full tally:
Rd 2: xxxx 4/4
Rd 3: -xxx 3/4
Rd 4: x--- 1/4
Rd 5: -xxx 3/4
Rd 6: -xxx 3/4
Rd 7: /-xx 2/3
Rd 8: --xx 2/4
Rd 9: -xxx 3/4
Rd 10: xxxx 4/4
Rd 11: xxxx 4/4
Rd 12: xxxx 4/4
Rd 13: xx-x 3/4
Rd 14: xx-x 3/4
Finals: --xxxx 4/6
