Yeah ok

The Capcom store in Shibuya is where I got this, and they have an entire wall full of these tsum tsum-clones from a *lot* of Capcom games. I got myself a Missile from Ghost Trick one.

Got to the airport hotel my company booked around 0:30, fell asleep, woke up before 5am.
The company somehow found me a place on a flight tomorrow, so now I get to figure out what to do with a free day in the US when I just want to go home.
(3/3)

After an hour sitting in the plane, they annoucen flight is canceled. Mechanical problems.
People are upset and scramble for agents. This is a business trip so I let my company deal with it.
No one can tell us when we can get our luggage. It ended up arriving at baggage claim around midnight.
(2/3)

Yesterday's fun:
Got to the airport at 10am for a 1pm flight back to Japan
Cleared security, got a message saying the flight is delayed 6 hours (later changed to closer to 7)
Evening: boarding also had problems, but we're finally on the plane
(1/3)

5 hour delay on my trip back to Japan, announced immediately after I cleared security, a full 3 hours before scheduled departure. So I get to spend 7 hours at the airport (assuming no further delays) and then 14 hours in the air. At least I got approved a lounge pass as a business expense.

One of the coffee shops I regularly go to added a full-length version of the Sesame Street theme to their bg music rotation, and I am puzzled. (FWIW, SS isn’t *completely* unknown in Japan, but it’s very much not a household franchise)

I couldn’t resist Missile at the Capcom store.

If you're planning beyond the Death-centered books, I'd do Small Gods next - it's a standalone and perhaps the best book in the entire series in my opinion.

Well, it's not *entirely* American -- pretty much everything here is next day, and I've occassionally had "you're ordering before noon so you're going to get this today if you live close enough to the warehouse" too.

Looking at an "Easy Cooking" Japanese mook. The spaghetti section has recipes for:
- Salmon flakes and corn spaghetti
- Nori and cheese spaghetti
- Tuna and cucumber spaghetti
- Kimchi natto spaghetti

The one English article I've read embellishes what the guy says a lot, though. It's not wrong per-se, but they took the short quote he gives and turned it into 4 paragraphs of embellishment, sometimes misreading the implicatures.

The original source for this reads as legit to me - I read the entire article and it's well researched and written. The game company part is a small anecdote in the middle - the article itself deals with the larger problem of people passing AI work as their own for competitions etc.

I lost my AirPods at airport security. Took them out of my pocket and missed them in the bin when I retrieved my stuff. Noticed an hour later, 20 minutes before boarding.
…I have them back. Sometimes Japanese customer service is amazing, even at airports where you wouldn’t expect it.

Going on a 13 hour international flight in a couple of hours.
Not looking forward to it.

This isn't technically correct - writing tools are enabled by default on standard macOS text controls, but there is a one-line API to disable them on any given one. Scrivener can absolutely disable them (and, AFAIK, all other Apple Intelligence features) in their own apps if they wanted to.

KQV is a classic case of spectacle winning. It was the most *impressive* game of that year. I remember it well - the graphics *were* astounding, and it introduced a point-and-click system that everyone (including Lucasarts) ended up adopting. Being the worst design of the bunch didn't matter.

Your best bet outside of ordering online is probably a Gyomu Super, which is a chain of supermarkets specializing in bulk and food-industry products. They are few and far between inside Tokyo (much more common in the suburbs), but there seems to be one in Ueno.

I know it's a 20 minute vertical video, but if you have even the vaguest interest in the subject matter, please watch this.

I don't have songs to suggest, but if there's a chance to do more karaoke with you before you leave, I'd gladly take it!

Japanese Donald is Koichi Yamadera, who's also Japanese Genie (because he's the official VA for Robin Williams). And also Cowboy Bebop's Spike Spiegel and Yakuza's Akiyama and a million other iconic roles.

In case no one else mentioned it yet, point your translator app to the cardboard box. It has instructions for opening the case.

My discovery today is that while I've heard of Pink Lady (and know some of their more famous songs) because they were a big act here, I didn't realize they were also briefly famous in the US in the early '80s!

...Just for accuracy sake, this is actually a '70s song!

[Internet detective mode spoling the fun] These are the aging '80s pop duo Pink Lady singing one of their '80s hits. The photo is Shunichi Tokura (when he was much younger), who composed the song and many other pop hits, who is now the commissioner of a cultural agency and doesn't seem to be dead.

This is a Japanese product. The box is written in English because English is cool, but the names are supposed to be meaningful to Japanese players, not western ones.

Pretty much all narcotics of any kind are taboo here. It's also why there's a tiny amount of legal anti-depressant medicine compared to most other countries.

For standard ice cream bars, I pretty much exclusively eat the Parm brand - anything else pales in comparison.

I am nowhere good enough for interpretation! I have so much respect for people who can do it - going back and forth in real time in two languages would be a nightmare to my brain...

The amount of rain forecasted for this afternoon seems a little extreme.