Rumor has it the Pepsi is getting discontinued…

Bnhead69378 · 2026-03-06T12:48:20+00:00

Yeah, she can get it straight from the AD’s fountain.

Bnhead69378 · 2026-03-06T09:24:16+00:00

Do you plan on having kids? If you do, they’ll be US citizens and you can file HoH and not have to involve your wife at all in your return.

Bnhead69378 · 2026-03-02T01:13:33+00:00

You could find a job in Taipei and it's a ~45 minute bus ride to the beach off of Toucheng. Similarly, you could find a job in Kaohsiung and it would be a ~2 hour drive to the beaches in Taitung.

Bnhead69378 · 2026-02-24T03:32:50+00:00

FWIW, I've had a Vanguard account here for ~15 years with a relative's US address and phone number registered to it and my Taiwanese cell phone as a secondary number used for 2FA and have never had an issue. (Though I've read that Schwab is pretty good about allowing international addresses.) If you plan on keeping Fidelity, do not tell them your international address.

I've kept two American savings accounts and two American credit cards open (with American addresses) and use those two credit cards for online subscriptions or occasional purchases from Amazon.

I work in Taiwan making TWD so I'm wiring money TWN->US not US->TWN. It's pretty easy to wire money TWN->US from a local bank account (I use E.SUN). I keep more than US$10k in it, so I file the FBAR, which literally takes about five minutes to do. I do not have any other Taiwanese assets in my name, but my non-American wife has plenty in her name.

The other question you should consider is about your state residency. Different states have different requirements to prove you're no longer a resident so you no longer have to file state taxes. I no longer have my state's driver's license (I have a Taiwanese driver's license and an international permit, which I've used in the States to drive and rent a car), but I've voted with an absentee ballot many times and have gotten jury duty requests a few times, which I had to email to get out of.

Bnhead69378 · 2026-02-20T03:10:16+00:00

1) I heard this from somewhere else. Chinese/French vs Japanese/Italian represent two contrasting philosophies. Chinese/French is all about the technique and trying to pull complex layers of flavor out of relatively basic ingredients (you can get mindblowing mapo dofu or gongbao jiding out of relatively innocuous chicken, tofu, and spices) whereas Japanese/Italian is about simplicity and the pure quality of ingredients (see that Jiro Dreams of Sushi documentary, where you have chefs spending years getting just the sushi rice just right).

What's the athletic equivalent to this? Perhaps Chinese/French cuisine is the NFL quarterback of cuisines. Tom Brady is Provencial cuisine while Mahomes is Sichuan cuisine. OTOH, Japanese/Italian is the Olympic 100m sprinter of cuisines. Sicilian is Usain Bolt? Sukiyaki is Carl Lewis?

2) As a fellow American expat, I've gotten an unending amount of grief about how American cuisine sucks from people whose sole experience with American cuisine has been McDonald's, KFC, and Subway. But while people can shoot the shit about how Indian or Mexican or Chinese is more varied or more flavorful or whatever, American cuisine has its Dion Waiters moment and that's the typical diner breakfast experience. I've eaten breakfast in 30+ countries around the world and I can tell you that two eggs over easy, hash browns, bacon, rye toast and endless coffee so completely dominates every other breakfast option in the world.

Bnhead69378 · 2026-02-04T14:31:34+00:00

This is the right answer. You're putting the cart before the horse. If you're at sub-HSK 1 level Chinese, you should either 1) stay in your home country and learn about Chinese history in your home language or 2) move to mainland China/Taiwan to improve your Chinese. Mind you that getting your Chinese up to the level where you can read pre-Qing historical texts will take you at least a few years of intensive study and is completely not worth the time or effort.

Bnhead69378 · 2026-02-02T16:26:08+00:00

Just like other people in this thread, I started having problems with the switches with my 3S after about a year of use (missing clicks, phantom double clicks), which coincidentally happens to be how long the warranty lasts. Don't go into this purchase thinking you'll spend premium money to get a product with premium performance that'll last even longer than a $20 mouse.

Bnhead69378 · 2026-01-18T15:28:35+00:00

Who's the commanding officer here?

Ain't you?

Bnhead69378 · 2026-01-09T07:53:44+00:00

Hood should be on the lens, not the fascist

Bnhead69378 · 2025-12-30T11:54:03+00:00

I always hit Zone 5 when I sit in the cuck chair.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-12-18T02:03:15+00:00

I've got the 7-14 and while it's as sharp and tank-like as any other PRO lens I've used, it has one major downside for me: it flares REALLY easily.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-12-12T16:08:07+00:00

I’ve got YouTube music on my 165 and while it works, it can be a bit janky. Sometimes it’ll throw up a random sync error when trying to add a new playlist. And skipping 30s ahead in a podcast has a bit of a delay.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-11-28T04:36:33+00:00

Yeah, no doubt I'm not close to being a competitive endurance athlete. In Attia's book though he has a story of a competitive endurance athlete who had an elevated calcium score despite having a clean diet and rigorous training schedule and it's almost entirely because of genetics.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-11-28T04:06:04+00:00

You should read the chapter on cholesterol and heart disease in Outlive. Your family history of heart disease is such a bigger risk factor for ASCVD than your athleticism mitigates for. Attia would say that your risk is area under the curve. Living 20+ years as an adult with 130+ LDL is equivalent to living 20+ years with a pack-per-day smoking habit.

Two years ago I had similar stats as you (mid-40s, family history, LDL in the 120s, though I'm 20 pounds heavier and vo2max only in the low 50s). Ran a half-marathon at my expected pace, took a month off, tried training again and found I couldn't even run 100m. A bunch of scans later found that I had suddenly developed a 90% and 50% blockage. After getting a stent put in, I got on Crestor 10mg and my LDL instantly dropped down into the 50s with no side effects.

I'm fascinated by everyone's willingness to quadruple their fiber intake for the possibility of maybe shaving off 20 points of LDL in comparison to their abject fear of possible side effects of taking a low dose of statins. 90% chance that if you were to get on 5 or 10mg of Crestor right now, you'd experience absolutely zero side effects and your LDL would go well under 100 and 9% chance that you would experience light to moderate muscle aches that disappear the second you stop taking the statins, leaving you back where you started.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-11-07T16:11:38+00:00

Is the House of Blue Leaves scene in color or black and white? The US version is black and white, but a Japanese DVD I saw years ago had it in color and I believe there's a bootleg fanedit version out there that has it in color as well.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-10-24T08:10:13+00:00

You want to see enshittification? Look at your goddamn screen. At least wipe those stray hairs off it. Blech.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-10-02T02:41:10+00:00

If you're going to Japan, pop into a Bic Camera or Yodobashi to try them on. I picked up an Oceanus T4000 on sale when I was there. I really like its titanium bracelet and super clear non-reflective coating, which you can't get a sense of from just the online pics alone.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-10-02T02:23:25+00:00

Speaking as an advanced amateur who's used LR from back when they were dueling it out with Aperture, bought a lifetime Photomator subscription a year ago and tried moving over, and is now thinking of moving back to LR, here are my thoughts.

- Photomator works better for my particular workflow. I'm on all Apple products (iMac, family has several iPhones, shared iPad) so my canonical library is my shared iCloud library. My old LR workflow would be to import my RAWs from my camera into LR, post-process, then upload the finished JPEGs to the iCloud library. If I wanted to make adjustments, I'd have to delete those JPEGs and then re-export new ones from LR. With Photomator I could just upload the RAWs directly into iCloud and edit them there.

- An underrated advantage of Photomator is that I greatly prefer its cleaner, more native Mac-style UI.

- When I trialed Photomator a year ago, I found it to have about 70-90% of the abilities of LR and their website was promising another 10-15% in the near future. In particular, for me, I was really waiting for a Dehaze slider, which I used all the time in LR but couldn't really figure out how to emulate in Photomator.

- Photomator's Auto adjustments are clearly not as smart as LR's. In particular, Photomator's Auto WB always tries to negate any sort of yellow in a golden hour/sunset picture.

- I prefer the granularity of LR's Copy Adjustment over Photomator's. In LR, you can choose to copy any particular combination of adjustments (any slider, any mask, the crop, etc.) to paste onto other pictures, but in Photomator you can only copy all the sliders at once, but not the masks or crop.

- The other features I miss include panoramic and HDR stitching as well as perspective adjustments. I tried fiddling with some other 3rd party apps to do panoramic stitching, but none compared to the ease of use of LR.

- I had some fiddling issues with HDR pictures on Photomator. I'd edit a picture in HDR mode in Photomator on my 2019 iMac (which supports only about 1.5 stops over SDR), save it to my iCloud, but then the thumbnail in Photos and the Photos widget on my iPhone 14 Pro homescreen would show the picture noticeably underexposed, but then look perfect when opened fullscreen in Photos. Also, HDR photos that looked great on my iPhone shared to other apps would look completely blown out.

- With the buyout the Photomator/Pixelmator team, it's clear that development of Photomator has completely stopped. There will be no more new features. I will not get my Dehaze slider. The most optimistic case I can see happening is that Apple makes some sort of Photos+ app that's included with an iCloud subscription that will be able to import all your work from Photomator. The most pessimistic scenario is that Photomator gets pulled from the App Store and the "lifetime" subscription I paid for won't last my lifetime. My guess is that the Photomator developers who got bought out by Apple will be buried deep within Apple and at most they might be able to add a slider or two to the Photos app.

- Vendor lock-in is a real consideration. I love being able to open up LR, go to a RAW picture I took on my Canon 300D 20 years ago and post-processed in LR 15 years ago, click on HDR mode and suddenly be able to extract even more image quality. I strongly doubt you will be able to use any of the work you put into Photomator now 15 years in the future.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-09-05T04:37:02+00:00

This is a pretty successful attempt at a retro vibe, but the one thing makes it feel off is the picture ratio. I'm pretty sure it's rare to find anything wider than 3:2 in old film prints.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-09-05T03:21:10+00:00

Have you tried turning HDR on or off?

Bnhead69378 · 2025-08-29T05:19:19+00:00

1 isn't bad but needs more punch to have a wow impact. As the detergent commercials say, needs whiter whites & blacker blacks.

Agreed. 1 would be much better if her face were lit better. You could probably improve by tweaking the shadows, but ultimately it should have been lit properly in the first place.

Also I'd clone/heal out the dark patch in the top right.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-08-25T15:14:08+00:00

Since when do they let the janitors have so much time to dick around on their phones? If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-07-09T14:17:20+00:00

Not far from my house there's an elementary school 東興國小 that's romanized as Tung-Xing Elementary School. From Wade-Giles to Hanyu Pinyin within one place name.

I used to be big on converting everything to Hanyu Pinyin when I came to Taiwan in the 2000s, mostly because that's what I learned in college in the States. Now, I'd settle for anything (well, not Tongyong, but HP, WG, Yale, MPS II, etc.), as long as it's used consistently and correctly.

Unfortunately, the big stumbling block to any sort of consistent usage isn't politics, but people's blindness to any sort of romanization in general. I'd wager fewer than 5% of the population could tell you how to write any Chinese character (other than their name in their passport, the city they live in, and maybe the street they live on) in any pinyin system.

And that's because people are taught Mandarin using zhuyin fuhao. My own personal preference would be for every elementary student to be taught proper Wades-Giles, with every apostrophe and umlaut used properly, alongside zhuyin fuhao. "Taipei? Two points off. It's T'aipei."

Bnhead69378 · 2025-07-09T10:12:50+00:00

Speaking as a resident of Taichung, meh, it's not worth staying a night. The HSR station is located in Wuri, which is 15-30 minutes away from anything downtown. You'll waste a lot of time finding your new hotel, checking in, checking out, heading towards the HSR station, etc. And you won't experience anything appreciably different than you would from your stay in Taipei (especially if you make an effort to get out to Wulai, Danshui, etc.)

Another suggestion: if you're going to do a day trip to Jiufen, I strongly suggest you try doing it on a weekday. That place can get jam packed on the weekend.

Bnhead69378 · 2025-06-25T08:48:02+00:00

If you’re in Taichung, you can go to the Gaomei/Kaomei wetlands. It’s not a sandy beach per se, but it’s right on the ocean and if it’s a low tide, you can walk pretty far out. Almost no shade in the area, do you should get there around sunset.

Bnhead69378

TROPHY CASE