This reminds me of my Japanese friend telling me about JAXA's Hayabusa burning up in the atmosphere on reentry, and how emotionally stirring he made it sound. A lot of Japanese anthropomorphize the hell out of their robots (there were moe Hayabusa drawings, for example) for various cultural reasons. Kind of unusual…

This is not Evangelion-flavored. It's salt, but not The Mexican Salt.

The harder version is the MAN version, according to the kanji. (Pocky also has a Men's version which is just a darker chocolate, IIRC.)

Seconding this. I remember stopping my car (along with a lot of other drivers) for geese who were crossing the road, and my Chinese friend goes "This would never happen in China." I assumed he meant that the geese would be run over but he clarified that people would be jumping out of their cars to grab them for…

Reminds me of this:

Not helpdesk tickets, but related: I used to work tech support for a major phone company. Every now and then I'd get some random customer who would complain about being on 'infinite hold' if they called from their personal phone number, even if there were plenty of tech agents sitting around waiting on calls.

Hmm! As someone who used to spend long, long hours doing text-based roleplay online with my friends, this looks interesting. Of course this has a multiple-choice format rather than requiring the players to type everything out, but conceptually it seems very similar. Like a cross between Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story…

I prefer paperback books above all, but that's purely from my nostalgia for cheaply-printed 60's/70's sci-fi paperbacks. (It's the way they smell.)

I don't know why, but I have trouble talking to people. I can communicate fine, and I'm told I come off as funny and laid-back, but in reality I'm constantly on edge during social situations. Something about people looking at me and thinking about me gets under my skin; most of the time I'd much rather be invisible.

In Japan not a lot of people have the space for pets (why else would things like kitty cafes exist?) so people that do keep cats kind of spoil them. Of course this guy's in New York and not Japan, but the mentality seems to be the same.

I always wondered why the Taiwanese brands of T-shirts on YesAsia would show a girl AND a guy wearing the same shirt, side by side. I assumed it had to do with proving the shirts were unisex or something, but this makes more sense to me now.

I once worked with a woman(!) who didn't understand that pee and menstrual blood weren't coming from the same orifice. I was like "...so do you just not pee while you're wearing tampons, or how do you suppose they work?"

My Taiwanese friend says the marching band at your funeral is nothing new (though not widespread). She says the strangers you can hire to cry at your funeral (yes, professional mourners) are much more obnoxious than the marching band.

Taiwan was named the Republic of China by Chiang Kai-shek. It's more like saying "this island over here is the REAL China now."

Am I the only one who was never scared of Slenderman? I find some of the mythos stuff really entertaining but never exactly scary.

My Chinese friend calls some of her female friends "sister", and before I realized that it was just an endearment I was so terribly puzzled (mainly because she'd slept with one of these so-called "sisters".) The word for "miss/ma'am" translates to "little older sister" also.

Meditation — specifically mindfulness meditation — was a great help for my anxiety. Regular breath-focus/mantra meditation I found useful for intense stress (and pain management too!) but mindfulness can be done at practically any moment. After a week's practice I realized that the world around me looked noticeably…

Women visit the temple to pray for easy child births and problem-free nursing. And yes, some ask for larger breasts and even pink nipples. (Pink nipples are considered attractive, apparently!)

LOL, "tabenaika." This is a parody of a famously terribad gay manga called Yaranaika, which makes the presence of the hot dogs even more disturbing.

I love writing. And I never thought I'd say that, because I always wanted to be a writer (not necessarily a "published" or "famous" one, just a person who writes entertaining stories) but I could rarely motivate myself to actually WRITE. It was tiring, writer's block stumped me on every other paragraph, and I almost…