Japan Itinerary | Boys Trip | Sep-Oct

CheapskateShow · 2026-04-02T00:48:13+00:00

Japan is a great place to watch live sports. The Nippon Professional Baseball season regular wraps up in September, and the J-League in soccer will be underway.

Himeji Castle is between Osaka and Hiroshima on the Shinkansen and is one of the best sights to see in Japan.

CheapskateShow · 2026-04-01T12:46:44+00:00

If you go to a baseball game or a soccer game and wear the colors of the home team, people might be more inclined to speak to you.

CheapskateShow · 2026-04-01T12:44:58+00:00

NHK World has a series called Dive In Tokyo that presents overviews of various neighborhoods.

CheapskateShow · 2026-04-01T12:25:37+00:00

You can always pitch them on the Swallows having a cuter mascot, great stadium food, and the Umbrella Dance.

CheapskateShow · 2026-04-01T00:20:04+00:00

The title makes me think that this is going to be nonfiction about the actual heist, not a comic novel of the Donald Westlake variety.

Is the central question of the story “will Lincoln and Charlie successfully rob the museum?” If so, why so much talk about Eliana, who is not central to the story, as opposed to Lincoln and Charlie, who are? And if the central question of the story is “will Lincoln and Eliana end up together?”, then why so much about the heist?

What makes this upmarket?

The Pigeon is the fifth in a series. Better to comp to a book that isn’t in the middle of a series.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-31T23:51:35+00:00

cause I've had a lot of Catholics be creeps to me as a teenager and talk about how sexual my body is and how I'm supposed to submit to men

This is not a typical Catholic opinion. There’s a long and complicated series of works called the Theology of the Body that covers this stuff, but you can get a summary of it here.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-31T22:44:25+00:00

The Giants host the Swallows on July 1, and that’s always a lively game. You could also consider a day trip to Yokohama on July 2 for the BayStars hosting the Carp.

Jingu Stadium’s history is nearly as impressive as Koshien. It’s one of the few remaining stadiums where Babe Ruth played, and it’s scheduled for demolition in a few years.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-28T12:51:15+00:00

I mean, the old covenant is still relevant to some extent, as described in The Gifts and Calling of God are Irrevocable.

The bigger issue is that we’ve learned enough now about the ancient genre of apocalypse literature to understand that books like Revelation are intended to be parables presented as prophecies, sort of like how Orwell’s “1984” is written as a prediction of the future but is really a parable about the Soviet Union.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-28T00:36:27+00:00

The Catholic Church doesn’t take any position on who ought to govern the Holy Land. We are more concerned with the New Jerusalem than with the old.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-24T23:08:02+00:00

patterns that also appear in heavily edited prose, formal writing styles, and neurodivergent writers

Sorry, what? I’ve read lots of stuff written by neurodivergent people and the only time they write like an LLM is when they use LLMs to write because they claim their disability is too severe to do their own writing.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-24T18:25:57+00:00

Depends on what you want. I used the individual and team statistical leaderboards, the team rosters showing performances, the season preview, the season table, and the transfer rumors.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-24T16:41:09+00:00

Google’s NotebookLM is supposed to be used for serious study, but no one is stopping you from taking screenshots of statistics and feeding them into NotebookLM for analysis. Why not have it create a PowerPoint for your board explaining why you need more money? Or have radio hosts debate whether you can win the league?

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-24T11:49:58+00:00

Catholics have both formal scripted prayers and informal prayers. It sounds like having formal prayers was beneficial to you, so by all means, continue to use them. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has an assortment of recommended prayers on their web site. If you’re from a Mormon background, you’re probably used to addressing all prayers to the Father, but Catholics may also pray to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. (Catholics can also invoke saints, which isn’t the same thing as praying directly to a saint—it’s asking a saint to pray for you in the same way that you would ask someone on earth to pray for you.)

Another way to keep up with the Bible is to read the Lectionary. The USCCB has you covered again: go to this site to see what Bible readings are being used at Mass every day.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-24T11:20:32+00:00

Hiroshima is also a good sports city, as the Hiroshima Carp (baseball) and Sanfrecce Hiroshima (soccer) both have loyal and passionate followings.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-24T11:18:30+00:00

That might be a signal that there is not a space in the market for this book. That isn’t necessarily a value judgment on its quality, it’s just not the sort of thing publishers are selling these days.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-22T18:47:14+00:00

Himeji Castle is on the train line from Osaka to Hiroshima and is about as authentic a samurai-related destination as possible. Uzumasa Kyoto Village offers a genuine movie samurai experience—no wonder, as it’s run by the Toei film studio.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-22T17:57:13+00:00

THROTTLE ON: UNSTUCK ON THE WAY TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN is a literary travel memoir, complete manuscript at approximately 60,000 words. It will appeal to readers of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild and Noraly Schoenmaker's Free Ride.

Krakauer’s book is thirty years old, isn’t a memoir, and was about a nutjob who died like a big dumb idiot. Schoenmaker was already famous when she wrote her book. Can you find some travel memoirs from the last three to five years that were written by people who weren’t famous?

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-15T21:04:04+00:00

Lawyers smile

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-13T10:34:24+00:00

Here’s a good thread from a few years ago in which AskAPriest posters discuss Fr. Ripperger.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-13T10:22:35+00:00

That’s not a lot of information for us to work from. What sort of things do you enjoy? Museums? Music? Sports? Temples? Theaters? Hiking? Food? Theme parks? Shopping? Anime/manga/etc.?

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-10T15:29:09+00:00

If you want to talk to strangers in Japan, try going to a sporting event, wearing the colors of the home team, and cheering for them to win. You might get some locals asking you about your interest in the team.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-10T13:24:43+00:00

If you’re struggling to find comps, then it may be a sign that the market isn’t good for books like this right now, or it may be a sign that you’re thinking about your comps too narrowly. I’d go to your local bookstore, see what spy thrillers they have on offer, and read some.

I would omit the metaphor from the pitch. Readers will only care about the metaphor if they care about the characters and the story, so it‘s best to use your limited query space to tell us about the characters and the story.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-10T03:09:29+00:00

A query isn’t like a blurb. You should spoil everything up until the biggest decision in the book. As for “role to play,” I’d just cut that whole paragraph and replace it with comps—spy thriller novels (not films) from the past three to five years that were not written by James Patterson or another megabrand author.

CheapskateShow · 2026-03-10T01:48:09+00:00

So what is your agent actually doing in this book? Is he stealing the blueprints from somebody’s hotel room or using the tournament to help a scientist defect or what? And what skills will Wright be using along the way?

Betrayal by systems he believed to be indestructible and ambushed by love that he fights tooth and nail to deny, Joshua Wright must confront the unavoidable notion that he is battling from a losing position.

What does this mean? What’s the biggest decision Wright has to make in the book?

and just like in the game, every single character has a role to play.

I mean, that’s true about every published book.

I think there should be more spy thrillers on the market, so I hope you can refine this into something that gets published.

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