This was such a long day.... it started of with me reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I have actually read it before, but after watching my mother see the movie like every fucking day the last month I just got angry with all the differences from the book and then I didn't remember all the differences so I decided to read it again. After all, it's a book that you can't help yourself from enjoying it, I love how she talks about attitudes and examines human nature.
But after that I was reading my daily manga updates when this manga called my attention, it's called Chihayafuru and it's a sports manga about this strange japanese game named Karuta. Karuta it's a game like memory but HARDER. You got cards like this with japanese characters.
The japanes charactes in a card are actually the last part of a japanese poem. So you line this cards up in the floor (they are like fifty in the actual game but there are actually 100 cards with a poem each that you should memorize to win) between you and your opponent and the half closest to you is the one with cards you should grab and the other is your oppenent's. Then someone starts reciting the first half on a poem and you should grab the card with the last part of the poem before your oppenent. The tricky part is that you should remember where each card is, and japanese characters are even hard for japanese people so they are hard to identify sometimes. The way to win is recognize the card by just hearing the first phonem of the poem, but it takes a lot of practice! Of course the actual game is more complicated and it has some other rules and strategies. A game of kurata looks something like this:
But after I read this I looked for a similar manga and ended up reading Hikaru no Go from the same author of Death Note (I didn't know that at first). This manga is surprisingly addicting and made me learn the names and strategies of a lot of things regarding Go.
In most western countries this game is probably weird, but there's actually a world championship. I happened to learn it when I was little and going to advanced math classes in the university. The Go club there apparently thought that smart kids were good for playing this and my math teachers probably thought that it was good practice for the brain... The game is about how one player has one color each and puts the rocks in such a way that gains them more territory. In the picture look how the black rocks are somehow surrounding the enemy, by doing this they gain territory. It's kind of hard to explain, you have to watch an actual game! But although it looks simple, it actually requires a lot of strategy. The old geezer that taught me was freaking good and beat me everytime while playing other people. But I remember that out of everyone he said he liked my strategy because I used unexpected moves.. hehe The thing is that it's really fun and you should try it sometime, online even, now I have to go to sleep because I want to change my habit of waking up at noon.... haha : P
