I'm most befuddled by the people who insist that I should breed even after I explain I'd be a horrible abusive parent (and I'm sterile so it's a moot point anyway.). Does a wizard cast a spell on you at the moment of conception that makes you magically love kids? if so, he's skipped a lot of people. Unless the message…

I'm with you on this. I also think I've read somewhere that they believe there's a genetic advantage to having non-reproductive adults in a family group (which would include both gays and people who just elect not to breed) — it benefits the survival of the children if there's extra adults to watch them.

As a kid I ate all manner of bizarre stuff and still wouldn't have touched this. Looks nauseating. Below is what comes to mind when I think of "cereal tea":

Man, I wish I could play Real Life like I play The Sims. Without getting arrested, that is. (Using cheats to get tons of money, building elaborate villains' lairs and imprisoning people in basement dungeons is generally frowned upon in the real world, I gather.)

I never, ever dream about relationship issues. I also can't recall the last time I had a legit nightmare either, unless dreaming about being late for work or trying to pee in a filthy bathroom could be considered nightmares.

I guess I'm the other way around; my first Mandarin teacher was from Beijing and the second was from Taiwan, and the Beijing accent sounded harsher to me. In fact a lot of Chinese speakers seem to think the Taiwanese accent is feminine or softer in some way.

Many of these do look like some kind of weird shrine offering, especially with the food being there.

Relevant to this post.

A rhinoceros beetle!

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.