Daniel Rourke is a brit on the JET program in Japan. His blog sports a background with the rising sun motif that has inevitably come to be affiliated with his country of current residence. Daniel’s indentification of his gaijin status immediately draws comparison to other weblogs of foreigners stuck in Japan, many of which are really pretty damn good. Being a bit of a japanophile myself, I actually read a fair number of these blogs. Thus, when I first started reading the huge entity, I found myself thinking that Mr. Rourke had a pretty huge task ahead of him – he had to go above and beyond the ‘Japanese people are kooky’ type of blog, and add something new to the genre.
Naturally, ‘danieru-san’ makes the occasional obligatory ‘only in Japan’ type posts that you would expect of an expatriate in the far east. However, to be fair to him, the scope of his blog by no means stops there. Other topics Daniel enjoys discussing range from sino-japanese relations to the papacy. All in all, Daniel manages to give his readers a fairly entertaining collection of eclectic links, as well as the occasional amusing one frame gnomz comic, mainly based on political figures.
Daniel’s blog isn’t exclusively about link farming, either. Most original material in the site can be found in Mr. Rourke’s huge rants; these, like the site, are incredibly eclectic, and fairly entertaining. I particularly like his story, Thor, the Mighty Thunder Hamster, a childrens’ story about a boy and his hamster’s quest for the perfect hammer. He’s currently looking for an illustrator for this particular project, but based on the comments on his site, it doesn’t seem like one is forthcoming.
The Huge Entity has a layout I would describe as fairly good; it doesn’t have too many extraneous annoying links, and everything is pretty easy to find. Examining Daniel’s 2004 and early 2005 blogs, though, it’s fairly obvious that his blog has come a long way. The earlier entries look kind of tentative, and don’t appear nearly as sharp as his latest efforts.
All in all, therefore, I figure the Huge Entity does just enough to set itself apart from other gaijin blogs, and thus is worthy of a visit or two.The Huge Entity