sdrothrock

Edit: And here it is for 800 yen cheaper, but no free shipping through prime so you pay 700 yen for shipping: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B0735584RM

Not really, for a couple of reasons.

The "r" in "char" is a rising tone, which is distinct and different from the "tsa" in "tsa sui" (Mandarin) or "tsap" in "tsap seui" (Cantonese).

> How am I pronouncing the 'tsa'?

The "tsa" and "tsap" are (and I can't confirm this 100% since I only speak rudimentary Mandarin) most likely sharp falling tones, like when you say "Shit!" If you say "cha" with that tone, odds are that it'll sound like "chop" with the p not being very strong. The closest approximation is probably saying something like "it's a" but without the "i" and in the tone/falling pitch of a curse, like "Fuck!"

They're very distinctly different in most Chinese dialects, and Cantonese and Mandarin are distinctly different dialects themselves.

The other reason you couldn't say "char sui tsa sui" is that "char sui" (correctly, "char siu") is from Cantonese, but "tsa sui" is from Mandarin, so you can't really use them together.

Another issue is that foods don't always work like that -- imagine trying to go to the pub and ask for "salmon and chips" someone unfamiliar with pub culture and English might imagine that it's just fish and chips with salmon being the type of fried fish specified (not knowing that you can't specify the fish), or someone else might expect grilled salmon with chips on the side, but odds are you might not get anything at all because it's not something anyone usually serves. :)

I mentioned this in another comment, but on macOS, there's a utility called SteerMouse (http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/index.html) that apparently supports chording for scrolling with the ball and is compatible with a number of different trackballs.

Sadly, I've found that that particular feature isn't working properly on Catalina with my Huge, but I contacted the dev and he said he's looking into it. So fingers crossed...

The only down sides I've run into so far are:

1. It's a bit clicky

2. The wheel being thumb-driven is a bit awkward for me

The utility I'm using (SteerMouse) sadly doesn't seem to properly support chording for using the trackball for scrolling, but I've contacted the dev about that and if he can get it working, then I'll be 100% happy with this.

If you can find a Huge at a decent price (they're ~$37 USD here in Japan), I'd highly recommend giving it a shot. The Ploopy seems like a far worse deal in comparison to me (though I don't have the nostalgia connection) at $200 CAD.

Just to be clear, that's not related to chop suey.

I ended up getting the Huge (since I live in Japan and it's easy to get here) and I'm liking it a lot. I'm wondering if it hits the same buttons that you like with the Microsoft one.

I dug around a bit and I can't find anything outside of some articles with people wondering if those apartments are still worthwhile with the number of public baths going down.

I know I've seen train ads for new ones as recently as last year -- it might be worth mentioning that all of these apartments are inside the Yamanote, which explains why they don't have baths... cut everything possible to keep the rent down to something someone could normally hope to afford.

That's one of the major differences with Japan too -- a lot of housing is not meant to be multigenerational; it's built with the knowledge that the next person to buy the lot will be tearing it down and building a new house.

A lot of the cheaper stuff in Tokyo is older wooden housing that either survived the firebombing or was tossed up cheaply in the post-war years, so it's very no-frills. My current apartment, for example, is raised about 30 cm off the ground with nothing around the actual building -- you can actually peer under the building and see the light from my kitchen going through the floorboards. There's storage built into the floor and if you pick it up, it just exposes a giant hole to the ground. No insulation, single-pane glass, a bathing room with rotting concrete and tile.

I'm not saying all old housing in the US is better, but I definitely feel like building codes and/or initial quality was much higher in the US, so you have more buildings that were able to last longer (or through survivorship bias, the ones that lasted this long are just better) -- but in Japan, for whatever reason, you have a lot of these (almost literal) shacks with uninsulated walls and corrugated plastic panels on the roofs or across the windows.

There are plenty of giant residential towers and more going up all the time.

The difference there is that there are laws that protect rights to sunlight, so it's difficult to build taller buildings in an established neighborhood: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/08/24/how-tos/ne...

> Why does this happen in Japan but not NYC or SF?

I don't think zoning is the complete answer here -- there's a lot of stuff going on in Japan, and in Tokyo in particular, that's very different from the US.

For example, a lot of cheaper places are tiny and have no shower or a shared shower. I don't think a lot of Americans would be willing to deal with that, but Japan has a public bath culture/history.

In Tokyo in particular, there's a huge amount of public transportation options, which allow people to live farther out and commute easily (with the commute costs being covered by work) -- that's not as simple in NYC. Imagine living in White Plains and commuting to the heart of Tokyo every day in a reliable, timely fashion.

Another thing is that a lot of cheaper housing in Tokyo is just old (post-war wood construction with a veneer of modernity) or in just plain bad areas (low-lying areas near rivers, below the water table, on reclaimed land, far from hospitals/fire departments, etc.)

On top of all that, housing here just isn't an investment like it is in America. Nobody's house or apartment appreciates with age.

It's not as simple as pointing at the average rent and zoning.

Edit: I've linked this to a few friends and all of them thought of the slang! Go figure. :)

My first thought was that with something like this (https://www.stavros.io/posts/behold-ledonardo/wings-small.jp...), it would be cool to walk around the subject and have the "wings" actually furl AROUND them rather than simply in front of them, though that might take some choreography to make sure that your own shadow doesn't affect the image too much.

Another thing that I thought was that if you can also selectively turn on only portions of the bar, you could effectively create "windows" in the portrait as you did with the other set of wings (https://www.stavros.io/posts/behold-ledonardo/alexandra-smal...), which could work really well with something 3D-ish, where you can see through one part of the lights to a different background also generated by the lights.

Have you considered adding some kind of depth support that would allow you to make "3D" images by moving not only left and right, but also back and forth?

I have a few artist friends who said the same thing about the iPad and Apple Pencil, but then they started buying paper-like non-glossy protective sheets and said it improved the experience immeasurably. I don't know how appropriate that would be for you, but they're apparently relatively cheap, so maybe you could give that a shot if you still have an iPad sitting around?

Sure. I'm picking up what the writer is putting down; he puts down numbers and linguistic claims, so I pick those up and say "hmm, this looks like a scholarly article" -- that's the tone I perceive and I can't say for sure whether that's what the author intended.

> In particular 9nGQluzmnq3M's comments about the Japanese language don't line up with my own experience, having used it as the primary language in my personal and professional life for several years. Someone with only a beginning grasp of Japanese flaying someone else with a tad less Japanese; that just strikes me as... harmful.

I'm not sure where this comes from at all -- now it seems like your judgment of our opinions is stemming from your judgment of our Japanese ability, but I'm not sure how you're even doing that.

To me, I'm judging the article based on what it's claiming to be.

He starts it with a faux linguistic analysis including numbers, faux cultural comparisons, and an analysis of the Japanese language -- which he professes not to know.

> I read the original article as an attempt to share some similar kind of feeling.

The way he opened his article and continued trying to pick at linguistics is what kept me from feeling that kind of thing. His own credentials and the location of the article also contributed to that.

If it were a personal blog and he were talking about subjective feelings, that's one thing -- but when he is writing an article on lithub and starting with numbers and apparently scholarly linguistic analysis, that's a completely different thing to me.

Edit to add: And one other point is that this is all to publicize a book of his called "A Beginner's Guide to Japan," which sounds very authoritative.

Is it acceptable because "being an outsider" gives him a more "objective" viewpoint? So, his ignorance gives birth to wisdom?

Or is it acceptable because Japan has a history of being labeled "ineffable" and "exotic," meaning that nobody not Japanese can ever understand Japanese culture, so anyone can say whatever they want?

Anyone who starts claiming that there's a connection between "numbers of meanings [e.g. ways to translate a word into ANOTHER language]" and culture immediately starts setting off alarms in my head, but the Language Log sums that up much better than I ever could: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1088

So I was saying (mostly tongue-in-cheek) that it probably wouldn't be appropriate.

Sorry for the confusion, and I appreciate the clarification here too. :)

That seems very judgmental to me.

I don't plan to have kids due to genetic conditions and other reasons, but by your reckoning, I don't deserve a job once I age because there are other people "more deserving."

If they had other teeth (from the same specimen or different ones of the same species), would they be able to just combine them to fill in the gaps?

To follow your metaphor, to me this sounds like finding different copies of the same printing, same edition, same book and combining them all to make a complete book. Does the metaphor fall apart?

I agree! I got into MUDs when I was 13-14 and they introduced me to good programming practices early on with things like CVS, checking patches in a group, and running dev environments for testing with various playtest groups.

The dev cycle was great too, with to-do lists based on long-term goals and player input, with coders/admins breaking up tasks for planning to get things done.

It's really hard to overstate how important that was in instilling good practices and a feel of "this is how things should be" in me as a kid, and it's definitely carried over to my professional life now, some 20 years later. I even wrote about it in my college entrance essays (something my mother mocked me for), but it was such a good experience that I don't regret it at all.

I actually found a split-off branch of a MUD I used to frequent/code for and after logging in and asking about people I remembered for a while, someone started a global in-MUD game -- one that /I'D/ made over a decade ago. That was an incredibly gratifying experience, knowing that some of my oldest, most amateur code was still out there and people were still getting some fun out of it. :)

Edit: If anyone out there was on some Wheel of Time MUDs, I was on The Weave/The True Source and As The Wheel Weaves.

I thought it was just spitballing an alternative name.

Maybe gocc?