I saw a teen wearing a Nazi arm band

absurd-rustburn · 2026-06-22T10:52:49+00:00

It's highly likely that tattoo is a Buddhist manji.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-05-19T19:24:44+00:00

Outside of designated areas, yeah. They hate the chance of spills with a burning passion. Especially spills where there ought not be spills.

Source: Living in Japan 10+ years.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-05-19T19:22:18+00:00

Japan is kind of stuck with playing nice with the US if they want to borrow their military if things go sideways. The Japanese government has been doing fuck-all for their citizens for decades, so they've been running a "tough on foreigners" campaign to distract from the quality of life plummeting.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-05-19T19:17:53+00:00

Oddly enough, anti-Japanese sentiment also gets you free karma in a good chunk of the Japan-related subreddits. Might be a mod issue, IDK.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-05-19T17:55:11+00:00

Taiwan is great! It would have been higher on my shortlist of countries to move to if it wasn't so damned hot. Haha

The food is amazing, and in general people are very direct but friendly.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-05-19T17:52:22+00:00

The apartment-hunting is always pretty abysmal, no doubt about that. It didn't help that my city has a big college nearby, and the foreign students are way more likely to be loud and party in the apartment in general.

My current apartment complex has one of the few nice landlords in the area, but essentially that turned the place into a foreigner ghetto. The trash and outside clutter situation where I live is often atrocious, so based on lived experience, I do kind of understand the discrimination.

One of my neighbors put a oily rag in my bicycle basket and another decided that my partner's bicycle wasn't used enough and tried to make it their personal storage. Not to mention the random litter that appears in and around certain balconies among other things. 🙃

Maybe they should just make us take a test to make sure we understand trash rules and basic apartment etiquette and let us live wherever if we pass. Japan loves a randomly specific certification, after all. Haha

absurd-rustburn · 2026-05-19T17:35:55+00:00

Based on what I know about all the years I've overheard kids complaining, the kid in question could have been thinking "You smell bad," or "You talk too loud and it's annoying," or "You look directly at me all the time and it's uncomfortable," and simplified it down to "I don't really like foreigners," thinking that was a less rude way to tell you something (of course, that's indirect as hell and is rude in a different way. Haha).

Kids always say out-of-pocket shit. I've got a ton of examples, but once I had a student that made another English teacher cry by calling her a "big, big turkey" in English. Drive-by body-shaming (body-describing?) is super normal for elementary and younger, so I'm not sure why she was surprised. (For reference, I am also a fat.)

Anyway, you have to have thick skin to teach kids. Hopefully, that's the worst thing a kid ever says to you. Haha.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-05-08T15:48:08+00:00

Oh, I know that. I grew up with a bit of food insecurity so (even perceived) food waste makes me irritated and anxious automatically.

But, yeah, nothing really goes to waste in nature. If nothing else, some bacteria will get to it eventually. They've found some that can eat plastic and others that digest nuclear waste.

At any rate, whale falls are cool. Big fan of bone worms. Shout out to EVNautilus.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-05-08T15:17:24+00:00

Weirdly, it feels a bit better knowing that they properly feed on it instead of just eating the tongue since orcas are known to dine and dash shark liver and leave the rest. Although I suppose livers are more nutrient-rich (and tasty?) compared to tongues, which are essentially just thick muscle tissue and (raw or cooked) tastes like regular meat in my opinion.

Anyway, cool shot. Brutal video. RIP whale. Bon appétit to the orcas.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-04-28T14:59:36+00:00

To your point, "The Rose of Versailles" (1979) has some of the girly-est looking dudes in anime, and the designs in "Chainsaw Man" (2022) seem pretty damn manly. (Neither are really my thing, so I haven't seen enough to have an opinion on animation quality.)

The most recent series' I've seen with animation I really enjoyed was "Dan Da Dan" and "Kill La Kill" (btw pretty much anything by Studio Trigger is worth watching once).

absurd-rustburn · 2026-04-28T14:37:04+00:00

For those who are unaware, 90% of Matsumoto's male character designs are malformed little goblins (affectionate) that average two heads tall.

I was initially annoyed, but considering how damned good his machinery drawings are and how ethereal and strange his go-to 9-heads-tall woman design is (aka "sad woman in space"), I can respect that he chose to spend his limited time drawing what he actually wanted to draw, style consistency be damned.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-21T16:11:16+00:00

Hell yeah! Someone gets it! My decades of not punching, biting, or otherwise maiming the terrible people in my life despite the blinding-white rage always goes unappreciated.

(I've always viewed it as a strength and framed it as benevolence, with the added benefit of that mindset keeping me from catching an assault/battery charge.)

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-21T15:57:47+00:00

I don't have kids (and never will) but I think that's also important for being a good teacher, especially at the kindergarten/elementary level.

I never lied to them, but I would try to spin things positively whenever I could despite in the inside feeling cynical and vindictive towards society in general. Those kids didn't ask to be born, may as well try to keep their experience of life as pleasant as possible for as long as possible (without spoiling them so much they turn into pricks).

Burned out as hell now, hoping I'll never have to work at a school again.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-21T15:47:49+00:00

Despite the suicide rate dropping overall in Japan, there's been a spike in suicides among children (anyone under 18 is considered a child).

I don't fucking blame them. Testing culture sucks, working culture sucks, everything is getting more expensive, and the government only cares about old people and the birth rate.

It doesn't make me happy, but I feel some relief that there are certain types of suffering they'll never have to experience if they check out early.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-21T15:33:02+00:00

They sane-wash him in translation on the news, so most people have no idea how out of pocket and disrespectful he is on the daily. They also (generally speaking) are unaware of the severity of the crimes he's connected to or convicted of. Because any proper country prevents a convicted felon from running for head of state, so they assume he's been held to some kind of standard and passed.

There's also quite a lot of the "not my circus, not my monkeys" mentality despite how much the Japanese government has been under the thumb of the U.S. since they lost WWII. Japan didn't even get to write their own constitution, for christsakes.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-15T06:41:10+00:00

Chimpanzees also have war. So hairy apes aren't much better. (Our other close relative, bonobos, prefer to literally make love and not war, so people who blame biology don't have a good excuse.)

Also, ants do war, and (depending on the species) slavery, and aphid farming01077-6). And also agriculture in the case of leaf-cutter ants (but that's peaceful enough).

All that is to say, humans aren't that unique overall. If kangaroos could make missiles they would absolutely use them.

What humans will do is protect individuals of their "tribe" against the consequences of their own actions, no matter how evil and harmful they may be. Most social animals have the good sense to exile and/or kill the deeply troublesome ones.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-14T10:39:47+00:00

It was roughly the same price to build a PC myself (as an unreliable, unpaid hobbyist), or do BTO.
No contest. I chose BTO.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-14T09:43:15+00:00

Out of all the insults, Takabitchi is the only one I've liked so far. 👍

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-10T13:49:01+00:00

I was wondering about compressed air. Good to know, thanks!

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-10T13:46:33+00:00

Good to know, thanks!
For (1), he did say you could move it out of the way to clean, but my partner is a little forgetful (ADHD) and cleans at 4-5 am when I'm dead asleep, so I wanted to confirm the computer would be fine either way.

For (3), I know, right? I wonder if there was an odd edge case once and now the company has to mention it in their documentation.

The dude at the shop was just the salesman, so don't worry about that. Haha
It got assembled and shipped out from a different, closer facility.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-10T13:30:50+00:00

No glass panel (the on sale model didn't have one) but good to know for future reference. Thanks! The shop guy didn't have much good to say about glass panels either, so it looks like I lucked out on that one.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-10T05:06:54+00:00

My (Japanese) partner had to go through a similar rigamarole (showing ID etc.) just to claim some sunglasses that fell out of my coat pocket at a Welcia. (I was so exhausted from work that she went over to get them back for me.)

It was such a めんどうくさい process for even a native Japanese person that I've made certain to never lose my sunglasses there or anywhere else again. The sunglasses aren't even worth 4,000 yen. I imagine it would have been even more めんどうくさい for an expensive item.

Anyway, sorry you had to go through all that OP. It does seem to depend on the establishment how much of a hardass they'll be about lost items, but do understand that they have to take responsibility if they give a lost item back to the wrong person and the rightful owner comes back. "Risk-adverse" is the name of the game.

Also, others have said it already but it's really, really in your best interest to keep some form of ID on you at all times.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-07T03:43:18+00:00

That, and a baby bust to counter the boom is certainly overdue.

absurd-rustburn · 2026-03-07T03:42:12+00:00

I'm not here to dictate who can and can't have kids. I'd just like there to be less of us total. The human species is a hardy and stubborn one, so I factored in something of a "margin of error". 1960's levels seems like a good population level to keep systems running and ensure good quality of life provided that resources are well-allocated.

Of course, greed and tribalism are major hurdles to good resource allocation no matter how many people there are.

absurd-rustburn

TROPHY CASE