I was a new JET Programme participant located in rural Japan. The CIR variety, so I knew a good bit of Japanese and was there to teach and write about US culture, history, food, etc.

The local dialect was pretty difficult to understand however, and I was constantly asking what words meant. One day my coworker used an expression beginning with “o”, which is a common honorific prefix, and wanting to basically say “o - what?” I clearly proclaimed “onani?” in the middle of the board of education office. More than one person stifled a laugh and my coworker almost did a spit take.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned “onani” is masturbation in Japanese, based on the English term onanism, which I also didn’t know at the time. So I basically failed hard in both languages that day.

Flashbacks to reading the Guinness Book of World Records in elementary school.

I think kaomoji have been a thing in Japan even before unicode was invented. The Japanese encodings and IME (input method esitors) allowed them to type a wide variety of characters, punctuation and symbols that aren’t available in most western encodings, so I feel like the Japanese folks had a head start on creative use of typography.

For example, if you want an eyeball you can just type “do” (degrees), and the IME will pull up °, and “omega” gives you ω, so it’s pretty easy to make (°ω°).

I don’t know what technically constitutes the most troublesome username, but surely some of the kaomoji Japanese folks have come up with are up there. Good luck trying to type these.

ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭ ੈ♡‧₊˚

I think the first person to use an obfuscated name like lIiḷ|ḷiIl was pretty clever.

Thank you for introducing me to Your Name. I just finished watching it. Absolutely wonderful film.

They should have sent a poet.

Dragostea Din Tei by O-Zone, though I think I heard it on NicoNico Douga before it became known as the NumaNuma Song.

Came here to say this. If you haven’t heard this remix yet do check it out!

https://youtu.be/oJhayhBh5JM

As an origami fan I would be very interested to see how they managed to fold this thing up.

First I just want to say, that is a damn beautiful website. No ads, no popups, just pure information.

And second, as a former back end developer who has spent a huge amount of time working on input sanitization and building database schemas, that list gave me mild PTSD for a job I have never even had.

One time while reading on my phone in bed with the lights turned off a single solitary firefly-like point of light appeared and drifted across my field of vision. It had depth, so I know it wasn’t a phenomenon originating just in one eye, and wasn’t constrained to the screen. There is also a zero percent chance it was an actual firefly. My only explanation is that it might have been a hypnagogic hallucination, but I’ve never seen one as bright and clear as this was. Like an ember from a bonfire.

It’s not round, but it’s not flat either!

The Sony Mavica FD91 was the first digital camera I ever owned! I used it the last couple years of high school and during a short homestay in Japan. You could pick up a giant box of 3.5" floppies for cheap, and as long as you fed it a stead supply of batteries it worked pretty well.

Here are some photos I took that are at, I believe, the highest quality setting (1024 x 768 and about 170kb each). Though I think Lemmy shows them shrunk down in the feed, if you open the image in a new tab you can see the full resolution.

Zoomed in.

And a closeup.

The 14x optical zoom was pretty amazing back then.

Can they add a little speaker and have it play some smooth jazz when unzipping?

I just got back from visiting my parents who were struggling to fix an unreliable dishwasher that keeps clogging, fails to dry, stinks, etc. This is PERFECT timing for that video!

A similar machine also plays a role in the 1997 movie Contact.

Hewn

That headline got me really excited before I realized they meant “in an app”.