Update, Late April: Writing, Drawing, Painting, Studying.

I got back from the United States yesterday afternoon. It took just over twenty-four hours for us to get from the hotel in Tampa, FL to our home in Nagano. After a good night's sleep (the first in over a week), I got up today and got right to work on wrapping up little projects that have been nearly finished for far too long.

What have I been doing lately? Fair question. I haven't posted much about what has been going on over here so I wanted to update and talk about it.

Starting with writing, I have been putting together short stories since the beginning of the year. The one I just finished a third draft for is a rather long (11k words) horror/fantasy story that fits into a world I have been working on.  If this draft goes over well with my beta readers I'll be submitting it to Tor and while it is being processed I'll work on the other stories that fit into the setting. I also have an odd speculative fiction story, a flash short, and a story set in Tokyo that I'll be submitting to other markets. I've been bouncing between drafting new stories and redrafting whatever I finished last. I'm finding that's a process that works nicely for me.

I'll be getting back to drawing sometime soon, but that will depend on how some things go on the translation front. I have been in contact with a friend about a promising opportunity, but there isn't much to say right now except that I have been a little extra busy with it. Right now my goat story is scanned in pencils and inked with Sakura manga pens. I need to rescan the inks and clean them up in GIMP. I have used Android apps to draw on my Cintiq, but this will be the first time I really get around to working with it on a PC app. With inks finished, I can color it while simultaneously prepping it to be an interactive iOS application. That, I think, is the ideal way for me to release my work because I want to make it as useful as possible to language education. I'm imagining something similar to the Oceanhouse Dr. Seuss apps: read-to-me features and touch controls prompting audio with pop-up pictures.

I have some new 40k models I've been painting as well and I will hopefully get them finished before next weekend. There is an event in Nagoya I'll be attending and I need my figures ready for transport before then. Time to crack down on painting and get these guys done. There is a post about one of them on my other blog, and I'll be posting about the others as well a little later on.

And lastly, I've been studying like a madman. I have the Japanese Language Proficiency Test coming up this July. I'm taking the highest level they offer and the material covered on it is the kind of stuff you never see in most documents or even technical/business discussions. Even having worked in a Japanese environment for almost three years, I'm not convinced I would pass without studying hard. I don't particularly want to take this test more than once, so I'm going to do my best to do it right the first time. I've been doing practice tests, reading a lot of grammar discussions online, watching YouTube lessons, reading Murakami Haruki and now that I am back home, I'll be setting up my vocab flashcards on Anki (which is an amazing SRS tool).

The other studying I have been doing has been for writing. I read some of the Writer's Digest books on specific elements of fiction. Some were great (Plot; Beginnings, Middles, Ends; Characters and Viewpoint) and some were awful (Dialogue; Action and Suspense). I also read Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, by Umberto Eco and have twenty other books on topics from that period lined up for when I finish this Murakami novel. I posted a picture of those on the Facebook page if you didn't see it.

 

Suffice to say that I have much more to do than I have time for. If I'm quiet on this blog, consider that a great thing. It means I am getting work done and playing with my daughter. I'll be sure to post about it when I have some things to show you though.

Thoughts on the 2014 UNSCEAR Report Regarding Fukushima Radiation Health Risks

I want to post something irresponsibly ill-informed. Please bear with me. I just saw an article (full disclosure: that site is paid for by the World Nuclear Association which obviously colors how I view their perception of the report) that says UNSCEAR's study shows data against rising cancer levels around the Fukushima plant and against increased radiation exposure excepting areas within the 20km evacuation area. Here is their very poorly made power point presentation. I want to get more informed so I can understand what kind of background the report arises from, but I'm finding that more difficult than I originally expected.

It may be just be that I'm incredibly skeptical of anything authorities say about Fukushima. And I think that's reasonable given how much TEPCO and the Japanese government lied, especially directly following the earthquake when they said there was no meltdown whatsoever. So naturally I have to wonder what affiliations UNSCEAR might have. It's not like it is uncommon in the US to appoint regulatory officials who have been CEOs of the corporations they are regulating. Their conflicts of interest ought to exclude them from taking such appointments, but sadly that is not the case. I googled briefly to see what I could find, but the articles that came up inspired little confidence in their journalistic integrity. One of the better ones can be found here.

That's a big part of the problem I have in trying to find the answers I want. It's easiest to find links to sensationalist articles that are in many cases even less credible to me than the news I consider propaganda. One of them claimed that UNSCEAR is "subservient to IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency)" who must approve all its reports. And that the chairman, Wolfgang Weiss, was "a boss" (how incredibly vague) for Euratom, an international organisation founded to create a specialist market for nuclear power in Europe.

Given common sense developed through years of rolling my eyes at committee appointments, it seems any of that could be accurate. But there's a serious lack of trustworthy information.

I'm not saying it's entirely outside the realm of possibility that UNSCEAR is actually an unbiased and independent committee. I'm also not saying that it is impossible that the observed thyroid cancer spikes were an isolated incident linked with the initial meltdown. It could very well be that the protective measures are working outside of the 20km evacuation zone.

What I am saying is that at the end of the day you have to be able to trust the information you're being given if it is to have any value. Neither side of this argument inspires trust, in my opinion. Data collection is a potentially dangerous task, so it takes a dedicated organisation to do it (assuming they really collect the data and don't just estimate it, a practice that has been employed before and that I wouldn't blame them for because getting close enough to collect useful data would be scary). But who supports that organisation? If their findings aren't transparent and their affiliations utterly independent, I wouldn't be willing to stake human lives on them.

The bloggers writing about this stuff, on the other hand, aren't conducting investigations that can override my skepticism with facts. Linking to Wikipedia and copy/pasting supposed affiliations (however much sense they might seem to make) doesn't argue the case. Neither does jumping to conclusions based on observing other unrelated events and circumstances. Good investigative journalism about the Fukushima plant itself could have been reassuring, but the new secrecy act the Japanese government passed last December made matters of nuclear energy a state secret. Reporting on them can earn both journalists and informants years of prison time.

I think it's hard to come out on either side of this issue without being judged either gullible or paranoid. I suppose I'm a little of both and that may be while it's hard for me to buy into the information I'm finding. But without transparency and without investigative journalism what should a reasonable person think? The best I can come up with is that I'm not moving near the Fukushima plant any time soon, and that I doubt any chairpersons of the IAEA will either.