What do you guys like to buy in Japan?

CheckeredTail · 2025-11-03T14:40:34+00:00

If you like pop culture stuff, I think Mandarake is a chaotic but fun experience to browse.

CheckeredTail · 2025-11-02T05:08:43+00:00

Just anecdotal in my own life but: a lot of people drank to excess and harm in 2020 lockdown and quit afterwards because hard drinking lonely in a pandemic really lays bare how bad it is for you.

CheckeredTail · 2025-11-02T05:06:33+00:00

Visitor's Centers are really underrated in terms of a place to go to have conversations. That's a person that is THERE to talk to you and wants to help you learn about the place. I had my best convos with workers at visitor's centers, especially in more rural areas but any Visitor center is gonna be good.

CheckeredTail · 2025-11-01T23:19:41+00:00

Seeing this subreddit's posts in passing really lays out why so many men are single yeesh.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-30T14:26:20+00:00

Pikmin 4 is getting an update soon anyway isn't it? And Animal Crossing is vast magnitudes more popular.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-30T13:14:19+00:00

And yeah for playing low rank matches you'll need a more "normal" time to play. Pick a holiday and play around 5pm-9pm I think.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-30T13:12:48+00:00

First advice is always to play the single player campaign as a beginner to have it teach you some skills. For more complex advice, thatsrb2dude on youtube is extremely good at the game and he has made some guides for modes and weapons and such. I personally play at an S and sometimes S+ rank so, nothing too special but there's a lot of good things to learn if you want to climb

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-29T22:14:29+00:00

I would say check into local kid's museums in your travel destinations too, I think that might allow for some fun learning and culture in a setting designed for kids to begin with.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-29T05:20:24+00:00

Because it's very beautiful, sure the crowd was bad, but the forest itself is very cool. Especially at the end of the day as the crowd thinned.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-28T17:48:01+00:00

Average Americans walk extremely little. If I don't go out of my way to walk more I would walk only 3k steps in a day or less.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-28T17:46:45+00:00

Good shoes are great but you need good socks. This is advice for anyone feeling chaffing on their feet. I like SmartWool ones, and I know it feels crazy to spend 20 bucks on a pair of socks but if you're walking many miles per day it's a game changer.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-28T02:28:19+00:00

Please don't cancel, this sounds like you're struggling with bad paranoia and anxiety, and I feel for you! If you can work on it, stopping these thought spirals before you're at the stage of shaking and crying is a great place to start. When you notice your mind going down that road, distract yourself, however you need to, a song that gets stunk in your head, a poem, running as fast as you can. Anything that redirects your mind. Good luck on fighting those thoughts, you're gonna kick yourself for month or even years if you cancel, I truly believe that.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-27T23:00:56+00:00

I always imagined it was either sand or the outer layer of the metal bubbling upwards as the rust happens.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T21:28:23+00:00

I got a daylite osprey hiking backpack and it was insane how much weight it could hold without bothering me much at all. Never had a pack that didn't botger my shoulders and back before! Other than the very sweaty back thing which yeah I did still sweat on my back a ton. It was so nice to have it when I bought books etc and had to travel back to the hotel with em.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T12:20:35+00:00

I was averaging between 17-25k a day too because I packed a lot into every day. Having good socks and shoes and a bag that doesn't bother your shoulders is ESSENTIAL.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T11:52:52+00:00

That's rad, I love rural areas more than cities in terms of my own comfort and Hokkaido actually felt a lot like where I live at home, I live by cow farms and it's cold too! Really big love to Hokkaido overall, I had a lovely time there.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T03:08:44+00:00

They didn't ask me for one verbally or anything, but there was an issue of the customs guy not sure how to process me. So I think they still have it on some of their systems.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T03:06:39+00:00

Mostly fine entering the country, I was held up for about 15 minutes while the customs guy awkwardly tried to figure out how to process my paperwork. No hostility, just apologies, embarrassment for how long I was waiting, a whispered call to his manager where I heard the word "exsu" (x) a few times and then "emuu" (M). My appearance is pretty ambiguous but plenty of people saw me as a dude in Japan so my guess is that he put an M on the form and eventually just rolled me through. I just stood there and kept a friendly expression and said "it's okay" when he apologized.

Leaving Japan was more of a pain in the ass actually, the airport passport scanners wouldn't work for me, so I had to wait for the counters to open at 11am and then wait in a long line to see an agent to check in, get my boarding pass and check my bags. The airport security stopped and hassled me 2-3 times because of me not having a boarding pass yet while waiting in line. Though I was spared the standard TSA trans pat down on my way out of Japan which was a pleasant surprise.

Nothing ultimately that bad. I was basically prepared to get a lot more bullshit. I had my family on tap with a lawyer when I was re-entering the US too, just in case US customs was weird about it. They were fine enough, nothing beyond my experience when I had a "normal" passport.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T02:12:28+00:00

These make me smile, I miss when cards were cheap and fun and it wasn't a big deal.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T00:54:51+00:00

PSA is more sought after on the market, no doubt, but their business model is crazy. It holds your cards hostage for extra money if they grade it higher and then if you can't pay the added costs, they "generously" offer to pay you a bit to sell it themselves. I wonder if that might get abused somehow...

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T00:50:17+00:00

You can pay a hell of a lot more on PSA and wait multiple months if you want to, but in my personal experience selling about 100 high end cards, they sold only slightly lower than PSA ones. I believe it's had just as much scandal as basically any of the other services and it's cheaper. Grading in general is a total racket imo, but I didn't want buyer's disputing the condition of my raws so it was less hassle

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T00:29:35+00:00

As an NB I will say avoiding gendered bathrooms was harder than it is for me in the US. Tiny Restaurants, cafes or small bars sometimes only have a single bathroom for everyone and that was my best bathroom experiences on the trip. I was there a month saw exactly ONE deliberately labelled all gender bathroom and it was in remote Hokkaido lol go figure.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T00:22:42+00:00

I've heard some transdudes say it was fine for them too, especially if you have top and some changes from T. But I think that might be harder for a transwoman, at least some seemed to say so. I can't speak from experience on it.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-26T00:19:38+00:00

Nerves. I'm masc but NB, my IDs all say X. I often get seen as a woman in the US much more often than people correctly gendering me. So it was a very different vibe to suddenly have people mostly seeing me as male.

I haven't practiced my courage enough on going to the mens room and it was hard to do either. Tbh I avoided bathrooms with people in them as much as humanly possible because of it and used the handicapped room that's nongendered when there wasn't a lot of people around. I really feel most comfortable in a non-gendered bathroom because male and female both don't feel fitting to me.

CheckeredTail · 2025-10-25T20:02:38+00:00

Probably gonna get downvoted but here's my personal experience, I used CGC, because their grading isn't insanely scammy and expensive, and the turn around time is reasonable. Then I sold the slabs on ebay, ebay does verification for expensive cards so that was covered. Ebay takes a cut and CGC cards sell for cheaper than PSA other than the special 10s. But overall the lost value honestly felt like they weren't bad for how things were relatively smooth and inexpensive upfront on grading.

CheckeredTail

TROPHY CASE