Even if they may seem feckless, it’s still better to have as many judges officially rule against them because it literally legitimizes what we’ve been saying.

A magical barrier in the brain, as dense as lead. Maybe from all the leaded gasoline.

To be fair, they might’ve been expecting the trash, but probably weren’t expecting all of the renegade pooping. Even at Ueno Park in Tōkyō, which is probably one of the most crowded places during sakura season, you’ll see extra trash bins, but not porta-poddies.

I also didn’t go to Arakurayama during the festival. I went in February, and if it was already crowded with literring tourists then, it must be awful during sakura season. Japan has been receiving record overtourism for the past few years (ever since re-opening in late 2022). I saw it mentioned on NHK News like almost every day. Yeah, they might be a little tired of the extra tourists now.

There are public bathrooms at the park. It was packed with tourists and their litter when I went in 2024 though.

As for the streets where people actually live, they shouldn’t need to have a bunch of ugly porta-potties occupying the streets in front of their home. It’s a place where people have always lived, not a place that exists solely to be a tourist attraction.

I guess I wrongly assumed all tourists would have the common sense to not defacate in someone else’s yard.

Aye, that’s it.

You can hear it in some words like 日本, as ‘nippon’ and ‘Japan’ both feel closer to the Middle Chinese pronunciation than they are to modern Mandarin’s ‘rìběn’.

Also, I hear Chinese students unintentionally (or half-intentionally) slip in Mandarin pronunciations all the time when they forget the Japanese pronunciation that is very close.

Japanese speaking and listening is still harder than reading and writing for me, and I’m guessing it’s the same for you, since you already know 漢字?

Yes.

When talking with the average American back home, there are lots of things you can sense they don’t notice and don’t seem to think about, especially if they’ve never even travelled.

From small things like always being cognizant of time zone differences and phone number country codes you use, to bigger things like seeing how crappy American restrictive zoning laws, suburban hellscapes, and car-centric society are.

Also, from the weeb perspective, going from needing anime subtitles to almost not needing them is pretty interesting.

I live in Japan, and of course there are formal ways to say everything, but in formal and polite situations, people actually try to avoid saying ‘you’ (anata, 貴方) as much as possible. Because even that can feel too personal. I only see it in writing that addresses the reader indirectly, like in surveys.

If you do address or refer to them, you typically use their title/position (e.g., ‘sensei’ for doctors and teachers, ‘Mr. President’), or name and appropriate honorific (e.g., Tanaka-san).

P.S., a lot of what might’ve been archaically formal and polite ways to say ‘you’ have become ironically rude and/or condescending. Like, ‘KISAMA!’ (貴様), kimi (君) (sovereign/lord), onushi (お主) (lord).

If you drive the same roads every day, you can start to pick up on the pattern and timings. It’s when it turns yellow in those times you feel almost too close to stop comfortably but too far to feel you’ll make it that people will “squeeze the lemon” and accelerate through that yellow light, not that I recommend it.

Also glad I don’t have to drive anymore.

They don’t just mean ‘who’ individually. They’re in that group chat together because they don’t know who or how many of them feel similarly enough that they can reasonably challenge their command.

Right now, the orders are deliberately vague enough, technically legal, and not blatantly unethical so that they can’t refuse it. They can’t disobey orders to guard federal property and go pick up trash from the streets because that’s not something you’ll likely win against in a UCMJ case, even if you know the real purpose of the orders is for Trump to make a show of force.

Also, a lot is up to their officers, who are obligated to disobey illegal and unethical orders. They have to set the climate for the soldiers. It’s really hard for soldiers to speak up if they don’t feel like their leaders have their back.

The name’s Bond, J

As border tensions intensified, the sight of soldiers and journalists carrying heavy field gear underscored the harsh terrain and long deployments at the frontier. For those in such unpredictable conditions, reliable equipment becomes essential.

Like the 5.11 Tactical Backpack, Rush 72 2.0, designed for military and field operations with multiple compartments for carrying essentials.

The sudden shift to advertising gear in the middle of article caught me off guard, lmao

In a post on social media on Friday, Lt Gen Ben Hodges of the army compared Tuesday’s gathering to a 1935 “surprise assembly in Berlin” where German generals were “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer”, Adolf Hitler, in the lead-up to the Holocaust and the second world war.

Everything he touches turns to 💩

I know. But unfortunately, the president is also the commander in chief of the executive branch, so he has the power to approve their operations.

From what I understand, the military will suggest potential courses of action, but not all of them are good, which is where the president is supposed to use his wise judgment, if only he had it.

I don’t think he’s right. Personally, his comments rub me the wrong way. They remind me of the annoying, confidently incorrect comments I’ve see on Reddit so many times.

Granted, I’m also fairly biased because I used to be in the army, and don’t appreciate the kind of assumptions/generalizations people make about people in the US military. I bash the military all the time personally in my private life, but it’s different when I see people who clearly don’t know shit do it.

I respect you for admitting there are things you might not know though.

I feel like many of the commenters below are missing the point, or didn’t even read the article. It’s not about incompetence by the SEALs (they weren’t), it’s Trump’s incompetence. He basically ignored the restrictions his predecessors had put in place because they knew that using special operations for extremely high-risk operations (because they’re likely to fail or be disastrous in the first place) was not something to be done lightly, but Trump, being Trump, just approved crazy operations without any clear thought.

Hey you kids, get off my WLAN!

I went to New York City a lot a decade ago, but going back there recently after getting used to living in Tokyo actually gave me reverse culture shock. Why the goddamn does it smell like piss everywhere in the subway. Like, I know why, but WHY people, WHY.

What I mean by adding something of our own is how art, in Cory Doctorow’s words, contain many acts of communicative intent. There are thousands of microdecisions a human makes when creating art. Whereas imagery generated only by the few words of a prompt to an LLM only contain that much communicative intent.

I feel like that’s why AI art always has that AI look and feel to it. I can only sense a tiny fraction of the person’s intent, and maybe it’s because I know the rest is filled in by the AI, but that is the part that feels really hollow or soulless to me.

Even in corporate art, I can at least sense what the artist was going for, based on corporate decisions to use clean, inoffensive designs for their branding and image. There’s a lot of communicative intent behind those designs.

I recommend checking the blog post I referenced, because Cory Doctorow expresses these thoughts far more eloquently than I do.

As for the latter argument, I wanted to highlight the fact that AI needs that level of resources and training data in order to produce art, whereas a human doesn’t, which shows you the power of creativity, human creativity. That’s why I think what AI does cannot be called ‘creativity.’ It cannot create. It does what we tell it to, without its own intent.