• 1 Post
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle




  • Long distance walking. I usually pick a direction, put on a podcast or some music, and just vibe as I walk and listen.

    I do it because it’s not overly complicated, allows me to relax and enjoy something to listen to as I walk, gets me out of the house and maybe towards another activity I’d like to do, and it helps me sleep better at night.

    On a light day, I might do it for 30 minutes. I might go for 2 hours if I’m in good condition. I think my record was over 5 hours.






  • If I can help it, I try to support local businesses over Walmart, Target, Amazon, or any other near monopolistic retail chain.

    Chick-fil-A, and Hobby Lobby. Owners have been vehemently antiqueer and antichoice, and have funded such organizations and politicians through their business.

    Activision/Blizzard and Ubisoft. Both have been accused of large scale sexual misconduct, and neither company has completely dealt with the issue.

    Twitter and Reddit. It’s not just that I hate the direction both sites are heading, but I want to fully back and support the open source alternatives that have grown during the migrations of both sites. Besides, Musk has made it to where I can’t even lurk on Twitter if I wanted to.

    JonTron. He’s living proof that as long as you’re funny, people will forgive and forget anything. (Look up his history with racism and antivax for those in the latter camp, cause I’m tired of answering the “what he do” question)

    The Harry Potter franchise. This one hurt the most because I had just starting to get into the Harry Potter series as the pandemic hit, and I was halfway through Prisoner of Azkaban when Rowling started her campaign against trans people. I Also used respect Rowling a lot because she’s a master at world building, and I had gotten into reading Harry Potter cause I wanted to take inspiration from it for my own work.

    Ruroni Kenshin, and Nobuhiro Watsuki’s other works. I can get why people would forgive JonTron and Rowling to an extent, but defending Nobuhiro’s pedophilia is a bridge way tf too far for me.



  • I play Mahjong. If I try talking to most Americans about it, they’ll think I’m talking about Shanghai, or Mahjong Solitaire.

    I actually play 3 forms of it:

    Riichi: Standard Japanese rules. This is what you typically see in anime and mahjong games from Japan.

    CSM: Competition rules for Chinese Mahjong. This what you’ll typically see played in tournaments outside of Japan

    American Mah-jongg: A ruleset with a lot of unique features. An AMJ set contains jokers that can act as any tile in the set. The game is played without being able to call “chow”(taking a sequence of 3 pieces), You “Charleston” for the pieces you need before the round begins (pass pieces to the right, left, and across from you), and the standard hands you can make change on a yearly basis. This is the version you often see played by the American Jewish community.

    I love playing all three, but it’s hard to play them in person, because you need to find at least 4 people who can play by the same rule set.

    Riichi is easy enough in Japan, but it’s seen as kinda a sketchy game here, and most places you can play it are at expensive and seedy mahjong parlors. Luckily there are a flood of video games based around it that make it more accessible.

    Chinese Mahjong is very regional, and each area can have its own variation on the rules, scoring, accepted hands etc. When playing with Chinese friends, I just kinda roll with whatever variation they’re playing.

    For American Mah-jongg, because the standard hands change year to year, you have to buy a new card from the National Mah Jongg League yearly in order to keep up with it, so it’s the only mahjong game with a subscription cost built in. Also as mentioned, the game is very community specific, but also the majority of players are often senior aged women, usually making me the youngest at the table by far.

    I love playing all three, but it’s hard enough finding someone else who also likes Mahjong, let alone find someone who doesn’t confuse it for the solitaire game. I’m not saying Mahjong solitaire ruined my life, but if I could Thanos snap a game out of existence…






  • For Japan, you could encourage growth in the economy again, and encourage population growth by simply requiring companies to give ample vacation time, and require people to use said vacation time.

    It’s fucking ridiculous how much time Japanese people are forced to work. They basically spend the entire day at the office, sometimes the entire night with staff because companies force staff into not mandatory but totally mandatory afterwork drinking parties, and by the time people get back to their tiny homes and apartments, they might get a Sunday off to sleep off the exhaustion, then it’s back into the office.

    Many Japanese youth never even see their father, meanwhile they themselves are relentlessly robbed of their time by schools, after school clubs, cram schools, English Schools, test prep, and stupid amounts of homework they’re expected to finish on top of that. Many of my students are on summer holiday, but are just as busy as school time thanks to all the homework they’re saddled with and the clubs and jukus certainly don’t let up for summer.

    Nobody respects other people’s free time here, thus people don’t have the energy to do anything outside of their daily cycle, let alone fuck. Why buy a game console, TV, or a nice car when you never have time to enjoy it. Why go to Okinawa, or Fukuoka or Hokkaido when you’re only going to have 3 days tops to enjoy it, and if you do somehow get a week to blow, why not take the dream trip to Hawaii, and spend your money out of the country.

    Japanese population and economic troubles ultimately cycle back to the end of free time that the miracle period encouraged, and the bubble economy drove into overdrive. They have tried everything but taken this issue seriously, and the only thing they’ve come close to resembling addressing this is creating more national holidays, which are always way off from any vacation period, and many companies try to get out of giving time off, ands those that can’t expect workers to make all the time up the day after.

    They are literally working themselves to death here.