where have I been all this time?

It's been a long while and I'm sorry.

i wrote the previous blog on my visit to china at the start of my time in japan. i stayed there for > 5 months after that and have now been in living back in the uk for > 2 months. i tried writing something while a typhoon hit the hotel that we were staying when i visited okinawa; but the conditions weren't right.

i feel like the chance has gone for me to recount and review my time away. in particular, i really don't want to write a list of recommendations as there is so much stuff to do in tokyo, and the stuff that we found was basically via internet searches and some word-of-mouth. i guess ultimately i have a couple of things that I miss. the food there is magnifico, i miss it a lot. also the experience of eating out with friends and drinking in local bars or whatever is pretty great, far more pleasurable than i've found in the uk anyway. also learning a bit of the language (esp. the written stuff) makes everything a little more pleasurable.

where did i live?

• Higashimurayama-shi: a city in west tokyo where with the other alex from start of feb-end of march. we stayed in an artist's studio and streamed football matches onto the white wall opposite our beds
• Tokorozawa-shi: lived in a desolate little rural suburb called sayamagaoka where NTT sends people to live in dorms. i bought a rice cooker and fried a lot of tofu to the soundtrack of screaming cicadas. watched akira and grave of the fireflies for the first time and was also rendered desolate for a while.
• Shinjuku-ku: lived on the outskirts of the biggest smoke (i've made that up) and whittled away my time on the thesis that ends my phd research.

favourite thing?

my favourite thing was the noise of the alarm when train crossings are warning of an impending train. we had one outside the first place that we lived, it's a slightly muted fuzzy noise that makes you feel a bit warm inside. i felt far away from home, but in the clutches of an animal that has no intention of hurting you.

worst thing?

the football team tokyo verdy are an atrocity to the sport. they play in the second tier of the j league and have fashioned a style of play based on radical appropriation of the ball. their defensive line is rather deep and they lack any ingenuity in central midfield. they would usually end a 1 minute-long sequence of possession by launching a long ball into the corner flag. they had a spanish striker who could only play for 45 mins maximum, but he scored once so that was pleasing to an extent.

best visit?

hiroshima

worst visit?

difficult, because i enjoyed everything with it being the first time that i was trying it. i think when we moved out of shinjuku-ku and stayed in an area near haneda airport, that was probably the saddest place that i visited on a personal-level. when it was was hot in the air but dark so soon. and when i realised that the whole of my time in japan was being rendered as a distant memory right in front of me.

work?

i worked at ntt on some research topics related to lattice-based constructions of pseudorandom functions. a paper will appear on eprint soon~~!~!~! i would like to thank yilei chen and ran cannetti for their paper at eurocrypt 2017 on constrained prfs, i've come to respect their constructon as a wonderful thing of beauty.

ntt was for the first three, for the last 2.7ish i came to an agreement with my supervisor to start writing my thesis. i decided to go from scratch with this one, in the hope of constructing a self-contained document. if you're interested in reading any part of it, and telling me where to improve it, then i would appreciate all the help that i can get. dm me.

good book?

i read "The Emissary" by Yoko Tawada, i loved it.

bad book?

my thesis

miss anything?

i'm gonna answer this in retrospect and say: no. but that is not necessarily a true account of how i felt at the time.

where do we go from here?

i guess i'll be starting a job after my thesis is all done, which should be pretty soon. i'm not sure what that means for me in general. i hope it mans nothing, but it definitely means something. i'm a little worried about stuff at the moment and i'm not sure why. i feel like nothing is certain (even though it pretty much is) and anyway, whatever.

the end for now

i might keep updating this. i have some pictures and stuff that i might also share.