A rather emotional, yet quite true take on web browsers and search engines as girls using the Japanese anime style. Complete with Japanese voice acting and English subtitles on screen.
I tore up so many times. Highly recommended.
731 karma · joined September 30, 2019
I tore up so many times. Highly recommended.
I highly recommend reading it even if you don't watch anime; it's a treasure trove of daily Japanese life references that don't usually turn up on mainstream media. It's also due to Kobayashi's Maid Dragon being set in modern day Japan with several slice-of-life elements, and Kyoto Animation tends to do an extremely good job of portraying those small moments of happiness.
Thanks for sharing this, didn't know it existed. :)
(R.I.P Mr. Takemoto, Director of Season 1. We lost so many great minds...)
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Seems accurate. :)
The thing is, before the COVID-19, the world had barely heard of mRNA vaccines and suddenly there are billions of people vaccinated across the world in 2 years. I have no intention of denying that these vaccines have saved millions, if not billions of lives by preventing hospitalization, death and further overloading of medical systems worldwide.
But still, a skeptic part of my brain can't seem to 100% accept the fact, even though it might be a medical miracle. It's that scratch on your back you can barely not reach, and it stays itchy for days and months.
On the other hand, vaccines that use inactivated or dead viruses to incite an immune response has been known for more than two centuries, whereas this feels... different.
Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, none of the other answers to this question in this thread have been proper responses that directly answer the question, except the one about "changing priorities from do no harm to optimize for least harm" that seems to make most sense.
So, I'd love to have a direct answer, no analogies, no "imagine how worse it could have been without vaccines", no "disease X kills more people than Covid and mortality for mRNA vaccine for Covid is negligible compared to that", no shifting goalposts, no guilt-tripping for being skeptic, just a straight, direct answer to this question of the OP.
1. For the money aspect, I did not spend a single cent in the game (nor do I plan to). Yet the experience has been wonderful so far. Yes, if you spend thousands of dollars every month on this, you'll be able to get the latest and greatest characters. But for a free-to-play player like me, I need to plan out the way I spend the gacha currency called "primogems" very wisely. The game gives you quite some primogems when a new area and new quests are released and you play through that content (we've had 3 areas so far in 1 year including the one at the beginning), and after that you get a limited amount regularly by doing daily quests and so on. Usually a free-to-play player can save up enough to get 90 pulls in a couple of months or so? Therefore, advance planning is needed. I enjoy planning like that so I like it.
2. About progression: I feel it doesn't matter whether you're F2P or a paying player. Because, the whole grinding system is gated behind a system called the "resin", which is a thing that replenishes to full in about 24 hours, and it's the same regardless of how far you are into the game. And if I'm not wrong, EDIT: as someone below pointed out, you can buy resin with money, but the exchange rate of the amount spent becomes awful very very quickly. That means, as you go to end game, either you'll run out of things to do, or you won't have enough resin to accomplish all you want to do. At that point, it'll be more like: log in, do the dailies that take 20 minutes, kill some bosses using raisin for another 20, and some other stuff and you're done. That is, once you've cleared ALL the story and world quests, and that'll take atleast a few hundred hours in my honest opinion.
3. For pay2win: I don't think it's a pay2win game. There are some units that the game gives you for free, and once you reach a certain level called Adventure Rank, you get to participate in events that give free 4*s. Some of the units are really really strong even in end-game (Xiangling comes to mind). Besides, even if you don't have the "best" team for a given character, there are characters you can substitute in. It just depends on how brain-dead you want to be when choosing your team builds and actually attacking the monsters (my favorite example for this is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTrRZEZ0wO4 where the guy literally takes the free characters the game gives out, and uses the game system, skills, and so on to beat abyss 3, which is quite hard for a beginner. I was able to clear this stage at the early game thanks to this person's proof that it's possible to actually clear content even with starting characters.)
That out of the way, here's what I love about the game:
1. The story. I am a sucker for great stories, and Genshin is done quite well. I actually decided to start with a new account after sinking dozens of hours into an old one because I went through the story too fast (one chapter in a week). This time, I've decided to take my time and enjoy the story like fine-aged wine.
2. The graphics. The graphics in this game are of an extremely high quality when it comes to non-physical rendering (NPR). If you're somewhat acquainted with anime-style toon shading, this game does it very well. No, it doesn't look like a cinematic Hollywood movie, and it's not meant to look like one. But its art style might be the best I've seen so far when it comes to NPR.
3. Maybe a bit niche, but the Japanese voice acting is top-notch. MiHoYo have good taste when it comes to choice of voice actors/actresses. Note I don't know anything about the English/Korean/Chinese ones.
Lastly, I'll just rant a bit about how I feel when I hear people say "there's nothing to do in this game". Sorry for sounding rude, but no game has infinite content for anyone to consume; this isn't Netflix binge-watching. To me, the best way to consume this game is slowly and steadily. Think of it as dining a full-course meal at a nice restaurant with a nice atmosphere. Of course it's different from gobbling down a Big Mac at McD's and washing it down with Cola. You slowly take bites of each food that is served, a sip of the drinks that are served, and relish the taste. I feel that's the best way to get maximum enjoyment out of this game. Come back home after a long day and unwind with it for an hour or two, and then put it away for the next day. It'll easily last a few months, and the game's updated every 6 weeks with new content with small events in-between.
TL;DR: This is a fantastic hybrid of single-player open-world RPG and a gacha game with fantastic graphics and story that I feel would be best enjoyed slowly. If you have the chance to, I highly recommend to try it.
But what we did carry were penlights/cyalium lights. And each song has a set of calls people do at specific parts of the song. And for the rest of it? We set our penlights to the color matching the artist on stage, and we wave them, and sing along and make the screaming calls when it's appropriate. I would feel this crazy emptiness in my hands with one penlight so I'd bring two for both hands. The making of magic moment happens when few thousand fans scream "Encore" at the end, and when we do this penlight waving and all the stuff together. Phones don't even come to the picture. They are in vibrate mode. Can't have it ringing when the MC is speaking and everyone else is quiet, that'd be rude as hell.
I guess it's totally different elsewhere, but I'd be in for a culture shock if I saw that many people trying to "capture the moment" on a device screen, instead of in their hearts and minds. For me, those are memories I treasure.
I do understand that I cannot share the experience with my family/friends, but I get to share the experience with the guy sitting/standing next to me, and maybe the guy I exchanged Twitter details with so we could talk about it afterwards. Met quite a few great people during those concerts, and some I talk with time to time on Twitter even now. :)
For sure, do come over for a long term stay (with your partner!) and enjoy Japan. Like all countries, Japan has its own set of problems, but beyond that, it's a wonderful country. :)
I sometimes run into that kind of behavior, especially when my first impression is my looks rather than my voice. But then I think of it like this: they probably have to deal with many foreign customers, "most" of whom cannot speak Japanese. Or they might not have been exposed to many foreigners that they know there are foreigners who can speak Japanese.
At the same time, Japanese society puts consideration for others at one of the higher priorities when interacting with people, and is seen everywhere and highly evaluated by many.
So it feels natural for the person to assume that I, as another one of those foreign people, most likely cannot speak Japanese. Also, they could try speaking to me in Japanese, but it'd be inconsiderate of them if I didn't know Japanese. So many a time the default, and very likely considerate route out is broken English to the best of their abilities.
I know this makes people like us who do know the language a bit bad, but then again, we're still a minority so I wouldn't read too much into it. :)
Of course, if the person in question knows you know Japanese, yet keeps talking to you in English, then it might be better to assume something is not right. :)
Actually, I realized this after writing out the whole thing but that sorry for the long rant is kind of like a good manners thing in Japanese internets. If you look up "長文失礼しました。", which literally means "Excuse me for the long writeup", it's usually appended to say a comment in a blog, or sometimes at the end of a Tweet when the speaker felt what they said is a bit on the longer side.
I somehow ended up picking up that habit somewhere down the line it seems. :)
The biggest thing I've felt since moving here: whether or not you can speak and interact in Japanese makes a world of difference. Seriously. I have interacted with expats who have not studied any inkling of Japanese, nor have tried any kind of interactions apart from other expats, and it felt their life was so bland. For example, they'd struggle to order anything except at big chain restaurants that have English menus, so that small alleyway restaurant that serves super nice ramen? Or that washoku (Japanese food) restaurant that's famous for its signature dish in Japanese? Very hard.
And that's without all the intricacies of interacting with Japanese people (beyond asking for directions where people are very helpful). Boy, that's a rollercoaster ride. Sometimes you strike up conversations with people so easily because you can speak the language. Sometimes you get hurt because of differences in ways of thinking. Sometimes you try to put yourself in a Japanese person's shoes and try to understand what they're thinking. To me, it's been one of the most fun parts so far.
And I feel much more welcome. For example, the bento (packed lunch) shop run by a family where I buy a takeout from once a week? They know my name and can tell my voice when I call to order a bento. I ask them how's life and they do as well as we chitchat while visiting their shop. I leave the shop with both of us saying "Thanks as always!". These small things do make a difference when you're living thousands of miles away from your home country.
I'm not complaining that there should be more English stuff in general; I feel people are trying to improve the situation. Nor that I'm saying not knowing Japanese will make your life hell; it won't. But, it will be bland. Especially if you happen to end up at a local town in rural Japan. That has its own charm points but you'd miss out most of them.
TLDR: Speaking from experience, if you ever plan to stay long-term in Japan, learn Japanese. I'm sure you won't regret it.
(Sorry for the long rant.)
Perhaps a hands-on approach such as solving the exercises while working through this book will prove beneficial and is complimentary to watching, say, KA or 3B1B.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Prove-Structured-Daniel-Velleman/...
My requirements for notes, alongwith the issues I face in Onenote are:
- I should be able to organize them in some way. Sure, Onenote works okayish. I like the Notebook->Section->Pages structure. However, God forbid if I try to rename a notebook... I need to open Onedrive in my browser, rename from there, wait a day for the changes to sync (no I'm not joking, some notebooks I could only open the next day), open each of the 60 or so notebooks inside Onenote 2016 (NOT Onenote UWP since it couldn't find those new notebooks, or errored out trying to open them with old names), and then open those 60 notebooks again on my two desktops and a laptop. Was an awful experience and I almost quit Onenote.
- It has to be cross-platform. I do have an iPad but my main workstations are Windows and Ubuntu, and I take notes on all of these platforms, so that basically kills almost all the Apple-only apps, which is a shame since many of them seem good.
- It should either support handwriting recognition, or LaTeX in notes. The reason is I need to write down equations and/or diagrams quite often, so if I just type I'd need LaTeX, and if I jotted derivations using Apple Pencil, I should be able to bring those up later. For Onenote, this is a hit or miss. Apple pencil + Onenote works superb for jotting down, especially with the Paperlike screen protector, BUT the delay after which it becomes searchable is totally dependent on Microsoft's servers, since the server-side OCR needs to run on my notes and I have no control on the process...
Sometimes I just give up and use my trusty pencil and paper. But if I do that, I sometimes forget which notebook I had written some random derivation in September last year. Also, there's no way to search and to archive the data unless I manually scan or take photos, and even then the archival would be super clunky in the form of pictures...
All in all, this is a pretty half-assed solution I have right now. I wish there were atleast some app which was cross-platform and supported LaTeX, or some app which magically solved my problems outlined above...
IANAL, much less in Japan, so take it with a pinch of salt.
EDIT: Seeing the other replies, I guess it can be interpreted both ways: people "listening to the advice of the government", or "government asking people listen to them". Again, IANAL.
True. Reading more papers seems to be more and more important.
>So it's really hard. The best bet is really learning to discover what the limits of he fields are, who are real experts in the field, then read what they write etc. It's never simple. But if you're just watching a TV where something is presented as a "debate" learn to recognize what's "behind" the two only people who are shown as two "sides": behind a real scientists could be the whole scientific community, effectively all the experts in their field, and behind the guy who "sounds" better in the show can be simply... money from some specific interest group which finances an "actor" who looks good.
I see. So basically try to look beyond the curtains even if it's a different field.
And thanks for the recommendations! Both War of Science and Merchants of Doubt look interesting!
>In short, there are definitely enough people who earn money by "selling" falsehoods. It was never an accident.
So people selling falsehoods is not limited to present era eh. I see!
Honestly, there will always be people who write stuff they have no idea about, or write stuff that are factually wrong.
But where does that leave me, and perhaps many other layman readers? I, as a layman in psychology/neuroscience/<insert field>, do not have the academic qualifications or the time to go through and understand the latest/greatest scientific literature of the respective fields, nor am I equipped with the necessary "instincts" to tell the doubtful or suspicious claims apart. Most of the time, all I want is condensed information which is well, from the scientific literature, yet put in one place in a way that laymen in the fields have access to the subject. And to me atleast, books are the best way. But then I find the books I thought were right and did not doubt, had factual errors, or were written by someone who has a possibility of not knowing what they are saying... This is sad.
So let me ask the community: what heuristics do you employ when trying to decide whether you can trust a book on what it says or not? Especially if it's not your field of expertise?