Ocelot. No indication whatsoever that he likes women. And then he kisses Snake during the climactic boss fight at the end of MGS4.

My Taiwanese friend says the fireworks scare away demons and bring good luck for the New Year. The traditional lion dances are meant to have the same effect. And my friend thinks it's no more risky than the running of the bulls, but she says people do die at this thing occasionally.

They think that breasts evolved to advertise sexual maturity. According to this theory (and it's pure speculation of course) quadripedal humans initially looked at butts to determine if someone was fertile (as hormones will change the shape and dimensions), but after we started walking on two legs we needed some kind…

According to my Japanese nerd these girls are moe personifications of WWII Japanese warships. I kid you not. It's a thing going around on 2ch right now apparently.

Uta no Prince-sama actually.

The image was tweeted out by Japanese Twitter user Homomanko, who added a "Shuddup shitty glasses." The image was retweeted over thirty-seven thousand times and spawned a slew of anime art style parodies.

These things! They're to keep the flies off your dinner before you sit down to eat it. Are these a Chinese-only thing (I've only ever seen them in Chinese households) or do other cultures have them?

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…