花と苺がいちばん可愛い

Here are a couple of pictures from the book 花と苺がいちばん可愛い (Flowers and strawberrries are the cutest). There are so many cuuuute books filled with different themes of clipart, they have popped up all over the bookstores in Japan, especially over the two past years. There is at least 5 other books I want to get just because they are beautiful, but I hardly use these kinds of books. One will have to do for now, so I chose the ones that had birds, cakes and deers. It is just 100 pages of super cute clipart, and the CD that comes with the book, everything is in good resolution in both JPG and PNG. 本当に可愛いでしょうね?

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Category: inspiration, text EN, text 日本語

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Make something beautiful every day 16/365

// Drunk on twitter – I usually think that having one more glass is a damn good idea, I come up with extremely embarrassing cuddly names for my peers before I want to sing karaoke and dance the macarena.

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Make something beautiful every day 15/365

This can barely be considered making anything at all, because all I did was toss together some random images from the new book I got (picture post of said amazing book to follow shortly!). Yet, I have to remind myself that all this 365 thing is about is sketches and having fun. So I am posting this anyway. Total time spent on this: 2 minutes.

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Sommerlektyre 2;

Another book post, with some more books I am planning to read this summer.

花と苺はいちばん可愛い: This is not really a book to read, it is just filled with wonderful clipart! I prefer to take my own photos when I make collages, but sometimes I just have to buy a small book or two filled with inspiration and just put things together and doodle. It seems like digital clipart is really popular in Japan these days, there tons of beautiful books filled with ready-to-go clipart in the bookstores these days. I will make a seperate post showing some of the pages from this book (coming right up!).

Read Real Japanese: I have been wanting to read more Japanese, and this book has English translation on one side, and the original Japanese text on the other.

Talk less, say more: I have no idea what this book is about, and I simply bought it because the title seemed appealing. If anyone has read it, please let me know if it was decent or not.

Wednsday is indigo blue: This is a book about synesthesia – mixing of the senses. Some people have various part of the brain connected in different ways then the rest of us, and that can lead to some really interesting result. For instance, this German guy could recite the numbers in pi for about 5 hours, and he explained it because he saw each letter as a figure and a color, so when he recited all the letters of pi, it was like walking through a beautiful landscape. There are different kinds of synesthesia, people can taste colors, see letters or numbers in colors, hear shapes and so on. I have been really interested in synesthesia for a long time, but I have not found that many books about it. Looking forward to read it!

Bad Science: I have been wanting to get my hands on this book for quite a while – it is basically a big collection of alternative treatments and why they do not work, Ben Goldachre uncovers alternative flawed treatments one by one, everything from homeopathy to food supplements. I am not one of those people who hate alternative health care, quite the contrary (I’ve had alternative health experiences myself that I can not explain, but which did work for me) , but I do think it is nice to know what is fact and what is simply placebo effects.

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Two new dresses

Two new dresses that I got last weekend. (+ a couple of books with more book reviews coming right up in a separate post.) I love the whole sailor themed thing these days, I can not wait to wear the blue dress out. The top part of it is completely see-through, so that i good considering the hot summer here atm.

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Orchids

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Super awesome yakitori!

We went to this cute yakitori-shop in Shimokitazawa, and the food was really good quality, so I wanted to post a couple of pictures.

Shitake & piman! Perfectly grilled.

Everything was super-juicy and really nice. Even the quail-eggs were perfect and not to dry.

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もも、本、Lazy days

Good tuesday to you! Today the sun is shining in Tokyo, and I will go and pick up my new foreigners card at the city office.

I am finally getting into holiday mode. Just have to make sure it is not to holidayish just yet, I have my JLPT coming up. Yesterday I managed to spend several hours in a coffeeshop just reading and drawing for the first time in 2011! Hope you are all enjoying your day.

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Sommerlektyre 1

I have been wanting to make a book post for a little while now, here are some of the books I am planning to plow through this summer. Binka wrote a good entry (Norwegian) a little while ago, admitting to not be the most avid reader, and I definitely fall into the same category, at least when it comes to fiction. I simply can.not.read.fiction anymore. I used to read a lot of it. I am not sure what happened. It is not that I do not want to, but there is just nothing that holds my interest long enough for me to finish a fiction book. I have been in this state for about 2 years, and it does not seem to change any time soon. I have solved the problem by reading non-fiction, for some reason I have absolutely no problem getting through books as long as I feel like I learn something concrete. (I am not implying that you do not learn things from fiction, I am merely saying that I do not have the patience for them these days.) So here are some non-fiction books I will be reading this summer:

Dale Carnegie – How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: I definitely belong to the group of the population that worries too much, but I am working on it, and I have made an active choice and change it. As Mark Twain said; “I’ve had thousands of problems in my life, most of which never actually happened”. Now I am trying to find books and solutions to the whole cycle of worrying. This Dale Carnegie book seems pretty straightforward and useful, with concrete examples and good structure.

Dan Ariely – Predictably Irrational: Dan Ariely is my absolute favorite speaker I have heard from TED conferences, and he actually makes behavioral economics fun. He explains why we behave irrational and make bad choices for ourself – again and again – in a highly predictable pattern. All of his work is based on experiments, and the way he describes them makes it fun and easy to read. I read the first 91 pages today while drinking coffee, and I can not wait to read the rest of the book. Highly recommended if you are interested in human behavior and choice!

Jonah Lehrer – How We Decide: I do not know much about this book yet, but the beginning of it seems promising. Jonah Lehrer explains why we in fact need our emotional side in order to make choices at all. This is an excerpt from amazon.com: “Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason and the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, it’s best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when we’re picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to use the different parts of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.”

Steven Pinker – How the Mind Works: I have to be honest, I don’t particularly like the way Steven Pinker writes – he uses a lot of words to get to his points. However, when he gets to his points, and he does, it is a really great read. From amazon.com: “MIT’s Pinker, who received considerable acclaim for The Language Instinct, turns his attention to how the mind functions and how and why it evolved as it did. The author relies primarily on the computational theory of mind and the theory of the natural selection of replicators to explain how the mind perceives, reasons, interacts socially, experiences varied emotions, creates, and philosophizes. Drawing upon theory and research from a variety of disciplines (most notably cognitive science and evolutionary biology) and using the principle of “reverse-engineering,” Pinker speculates on what the mind was designed to do and how it has evolved into a system of “psychological faculties or mental modules.””

Stephen Hawking – The Grand Design: I am so looking forward to reading this book! Since i haven’t read it myself yet, here is a clip from amazon.com: “In The Grand Design we explain why, according to quantum theory, the cosmos does not have just a single existence, or history, but rather that every possible history of the universe exists simultaneously. We question the conventional concept of reality, posing instead a “model-dependent” theory of reality. We discuss how the laws of our particular universe are extraordinarily finely tuned so as to allow for our existence, and show why quantum theory predicts the multiverse–the idea that ours is just one of many universes that appeared spontaneously out of nothing, each with different laws of nature.”

If any of you have any good recommendations for non-fiction books, I would love to hear them! I am interested in everything from math and science to psychology and emotions, but I have a particular soft spot for anything that has to do with the human mind.

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Odds and ends;

A little drawing I am working on, I am not very good drawing with pencil and color pencils, so we will see how it goes. Will scan later!

And oh joy! 3 memory cards for under 2000 yen! (About 140 NOK /  25 USD for all three of them together. )

Bangs or no bangs? I can never decide.

& this is Oppie. He lives in our plant and is about the same size as the memory cards.

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Category: ❤❤❤, exterior qualities, illustration & sketches, text EN

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