“…without telling me you just got back from Japan.”

(four suitcases, each, plus an expanded carry-on bag and a conspicuously-large “personal item” disguised with a not-so-token Duty-Free purchase)

Unrelated, but important

Hey, Amazon! Why didn’t you tell me that a new Tim Powers novel came out? In December!

Puchi-puchi desu!

We bought a lot of breakables (not just of the ceramic or liquor-ish varieties), and we wanted to be thorough in our wrapping. We’d brought a lot of packing material, but it wasn’t nearly enough, and we went to Don Quixote, because they had the big rolls of bubble wrap last trip. This is the most common advice on travel forums for finding the stuff in reasonable quantities.

The tiny little flaw in this recommendation is that every Donki store is different, and the one near Teramachi in Kyoto does not stock any packing or shipping supplies. Not even tape.

After fighting with Google for a while, I fished up a winner: Package Plaza Sanko. It’s a commercial packing-supply company that’s open to the public, and they have everything you need, even rolls tall enough to hide the body. Contrary to some reviews, we found the employees quite friendly and helpful.

Why was it difficult to find? Try googling for “package plaza kyoto”, and the GenAI tells you about “Package Plaza Orikuwa” in Tokyo, while the standard search results give you two pages about Kyoto hotels with Plaza in the name, then degenerate into complete nonsense. You have to get really, really lucky for the phonetically-written パッケージプラザ to show up and send you here.

(Puchi-puchi is the original Japanese trademark for the stuff, and has become as generic as kleenex or hotchkiss)

New market record

We hit nine markets. Flea markets, craft markets, antique markets, etc. It could have been ten, but the “1000 market” at Kiyomizu-dera just hasn’t become interesting yet, so we skipped it. That would have left us with only eight, but as we were walking down Karasuma-dori toward our expensive dinner destination (one of three visits to Hanaroku; four if you count the saké tasting), we walked right through one outside of Higashi Hongan-ji. Hadn’t seen it mentioned on any of the calendars, but it turns out to be an irregular event.

Still regular enough that we ran into several familiar dealers, and were recognized by people we’d bought stuff from at earlier shows. We also got the fun of having a dealer start pitching his product, and us pulling out stuff we’d bought from him years ago.

New hotels

We ended up with three different hotels this trip. The first was for a single night in Tokyo after landing at Haneda and shipping our bags to Kyoto, convenient for getting to the shinkansen station at Shinagawa early in the morning. My sister found cheap rooms at an APA Hotel, but the site she used didn’t make it clear that just having “Shinagawa” and “Station” in the name didn’t mean it was at “Shinagawa Station”; it was at Shinagawa Togoshi Station, 10 minutes away by cab. A little extra travel in the morning, but no big deal.

The rooms were clean but tiny. I was actually kind of surprised they hadn’t found a way to combine the bedroom with the shower stall. I’m sure the neighbors heard my elbows banging into the walls every time I moved.

The second room was for the bulk of our stay, and was selected for the following features: convenience to shopping and tourist-y locations, price, kitchenette, in-room washer/dryer, and real freezer compartment in the fridge. On paper, it looked pretty good, with a Familymart across the street, a Fresco grocery store a few blocks away, Kiyomizu-dera and several shopping districts in walking distance, etc. No immediate subway access, but within a reasonable walking distance, and two nearby bus stops for quick trips to shopping and Kyoto Station. I even went around the neighborhood in Google Street View and found a lot of interesting shops, only half of which were kimono-rental joints.

We missed a few tiny flaws. Like the lack of a consistently-staffed front desk. And the police station across the street. And the huge fire station next door. And the motorcyclists showing off their loud pipes at night. And the steep hills on the walk to the subway stations. And the fact that the neighborhood grocery was closed for renovation until the day before we left. And the half-ply tissues and toilet paper they stocked. We used taxis and Ubers a lot, and noise-blocking earplugs or white-noise generators at night. The buses? Packed like sardines with foreign tourists every time we saw one (so much for coming before cherry-blossom season…).

Each room had a Japanese-style genkan, where you were supposed to take off your shoes before proceeding past the entrance. Sadly, their core market seems to be ignorant tourists who don’t bother, and with only one person there during the day and a small service crew refreshing rooms every three days, the carpets were definitely not in a barefoot-friendly state of cleanliness. The climate-control was also under-specced, so it was fighting a losing battle against the humidity, to the point that the curtains on the balcony door were mildewed at the bottom.

The in-room washer worked well, at least, and they supplied laundry pods to run it as much as you wanted. Despite the machine insisting that it had drying functionality, though, that never worked.

Fortunately, the one thing that truly stood out about their rooms was the shower stall. Short-but-deep tub and a full-room shower with room for my elbows, with high-pressure hot water and a multi-purpose heated fan system that you could set to run for hours.

So not only could you preheat the shower stall, you could dry your towels and your laundry in there.

The chain is Stay Sakura, and they cut costs by having a lot of small buildings with minimal staffing. For luggage delivery and pretty much anything else involving human interaction, you have to go to their customer-service center on the south side of Kyoto Station, which would have bothered us more if we hadn’t been headed to Toji for the flea market the day we arrived in Kyoto, and the shinkansen exits let you out on the south side. So we had a short walk to drop off our carryon luggage, confirm that they would deliver that and our other bags that afternoon, and then off to the market.

Our final hotel was actually nice. We (well, I) had three days in Tokyo at the Courtyard By Marriott Tokyo Station, which has great rooms and really comfortable beds, a terrific location, and Pepsi products not only in the restaurants but free for the taking in the lounge. Also little single-serving Häagen-Dazs containers in several flavors. And beer. Pretty much anything you’d want to buy was “just down the street”, either at Tokyo Station or around the corner. Its only flaw that I could discover was the cabbie-confusing signage that led them to consistently drop you off at the wrong door and pick you up around the corner.

That wasn’t just us. Every English-speaking guest we ran into in the elevators commented on it without prompting. Very minor inconvenience compared to the benefits, so this stands as the only one of the three that we’d stay at again, and would actively seek out.

Amusing note: the Courtyard enhances the experience with custom scents for the hallways. Sadly, I am conditioned to associate “strong odor in hotel hallway” with “covering up a stink”, so it was kinda wasted on me. I suppose their target market has never spent a night in a truck-stop HoJo Motel where even the non-smoking rooms reeked so badly from decades of cigarette smoke that I had to bring in towels from my moving van to take a shower in the morning.

(despite being a “Western” chain that supplied nightshirts instead of yukata, the sizing of their loungewear was still Japanese; in other words, if I’d tried to sleep in the nightshirt, even unbuttoned, I’d have torn out the shoulders)

Speaking of sizes…

George, our saké sommelier, lamented how difficult it was to buy clothing in Japan, having to hunt for the rare 3L sizes just to find shirts and sweats that didn’t look like he’d just had a growth spurt. I was sympathetic, having just bought a samue that was the only 3L in the shop. But that was nothing compared to the pajama listing I tripped over on Amazon Japan where the sizing method was so fucked up that I’d have needed to buy a 7L to fit my shoulders into it. “3L” just meant “circumference 2cm larger than LL”; the length, waist, and neck measurements went up more slowly.

Study material

No, not the big pile of Blurays I bought that featured attractive young women wearing little or no clothing. Or the somewhat-smaller pile of DVDs featuring more than one such woman demonstrating some degree of mutual affection (this particular genre is still not widely being produced on Bluray). This trip, we signed up for some short classes. Specifically, kintsugi, incense-making, and gyoza-making.

My sister had already done a kintsugi class in Tokyo with her work team, and wanted to do it again, making an extra piece as a gift for our mother. The class she’d had before used a variant of real urushi lacquer, which produced a smooth surface for the gilded repairs, but required waiting a month before unpacking your results, to be sure it was dry. The place in Kyoto used tinted superglue for the repair and epoxy brushed with gold dust to produce a raised line along the crack, which made the process faster and much less toxic. Also sufficiently different from what she’d done in Tokyo to be novel.

The incense-making turned out to not be what we expected, being more derived from Chinese medicine than the sort you use to make things smell nice. Still a lot of fun, for us as well as the translator that the booking company sent. We’ll have to peruse their catalog for future trips, because they’ve hit on a good formula: book third-party classes that are only offered in Japanese, and add their own translator for a small fee.

The gyoza class ended up just being the two of us, and nobody got to see our failures because we ate them. Samurai Gyoza Factory a.k.a Ramen Factory Kyoto a.k.a Matcha Factory Kyoto a.k.a Wagyu Ramen & Steak MOKUMOKU is classroom by day, restaurant by night, with a limited but tasty menu.

(the gyoza class introduced us to two new dipping sauces: olive oil with salt & pepper, and teriyaki sauce with kewpie mayo; the oil didn’t work for us, but the teriyaki mayo was awesome)

AirDrop failure modes

Apple’s AirDrop functionality to share files/links with someone nearby worked between the two of us without any issues. It never worked with anyone else, even when both sides set the explicit override and bumped our phones together. This would be acceptable if it were a brand-new feature just out of beta, but Apple’s been promoting this shit for years now. It looks like the handshake process is prone to lengthy timeouts.

(it was tricky to persuade the GenAI model that the phones should not be upright and held up facing the camera)

Pushy drug-store employees

My sister was looking for something in a drug store in Kyoto, when a female employee walked up, informed her that her skin looked terrible, and practically dragged her to a product she recommended.

Later, after she’d gone to New York, I was on the drugstore floor of a Tokyo Bic Camera, and a female employee walked up and informed me that they had excellent products for dealing with hair loss.

Neither encounter went over well.

A Wild Last Boss Disappears!

The light-novel version I bought from Amazon, that is. It’s no longer listed on US Amazon at all. The manga’s still there, but the light novels have been delisted, and there’s no product pages for them. The end result looks exactly like the way Amazon Japan censors adult materials for foreign visitors, but with a different root cause.

You can still read the Kindle editions if you bought them, fortunately.

Meanwhile…

My preorder of The Monster Hunter Files, Volume 2 was auto-delivered to me in Japan. Made for a very nice diversion on the flight home.

Nature is healing

Too tired when I got home to restock the fridge or defrost something to cook, so I ordered good pizza via DoorDash. Unlike almost every recent experience I’ve had where the driver was a 30-ish foreign male with near-zero English and a profile name that screamed “six illegals using the same account”, the driver was a pretty young blonde white gal with a terrific figure and a friendly smile.

Spring is growing season…

Coming soon, perhaps more often than in the first season.

Y’know, if Himmel had discovered Methode’s method, things might have turned out differently…

This week, we get only the opening moves of The Big Fight, which is going to be three separate fights (or perhaps four…), so I revise my estimated length to four episodes. That’s not a complaint.

(y’know, Fern may be the least eccentric of the first-rank mages, old and new)

First Ass-Guardian trailer

Here. Not much substance to it, but it looks to be competently done. Fingers still firmly crossed they don’t screw it up.

Also coming soon…

I’ve been busy the past few weeks. At what, you’ll soon see. Assuming people haven’t already figured it out…

Worth the wait, as Frieren is reunited with two of the least annoying characters from the exam arc. I’d have preferred the little hot-pants redhead, but she and her frenemy failed the exam, so they’re not allowed to enter the Northern plateau. Sadly, this means we’ll likely never see them again unless there’s a collection of side stories.

Anyway, this week reminds us that demons are evil-with-a-capital-E, using language only to deceive. This will no doubt trigger another round of how-dare-they reactions from the Left, sigh.

It’s a slow buildup to a confrontation with a new Big Bad, that’s at least a two-parter. With four first-class mages on the scene, plus Stark, the fight is likely to be flashy, so maybe they’ll pull out the stops and give it three.

(unrelated postcard from AI Japan, because AI love you long time)

(Frieren 2 episode 6 was delayed a week…)

Still not outta snow, eh?

At least I’m not getting what NYC is getting. I’ve had enough of real snow shoveling for the year.

Ei-en Flux

I’m taking a sterile laptop with me to Japan, with all my credentials securely stored in 1Password and just enough of my usual environment that I could do things like, y’know, blog if I wanted to. Or sign up for a free trial of Amazon Prime in order to buy things they won’t ship internationally.

Note: Amazon’s adult-goods hider is really annoying: if at any time in a session your VPN drops, visiting a single Amazon Japan URL will detect this and flag you as outside Japan, so you can no longer see any “sensitive” products, and searches will come up empty without explanation, making it look like actresses, models, and entire categories of products simply do not exist. I had to log out and back in to reset it. The reverse is also apparently true, so that briefly opening a VPN while in Japan will flag you as a dirty foreigner and pretend that K-cups are only for coffee…

Anyway, I decided to make some fresh safe-for-airline-security wallpaper for the travel laptop.

I used an LLM to generate a list of scenic locations in Japan, and added a list of artists and styles that someone else generated with an LLM. I ran the combination through my dynamic-prompts randomizer, then fed just the random scenes through another LLM for enhancement (better results than feeding the style and location through in one pass), then fed the completed prompts through an LLM instructed to just perform cleanup and QA.

Then I ran the batches through Flux.2-Dev and did a quick pass to eliminate the terrible and the goofy. That produced about 550 images that were good enough to look at for 5-10 seconds. For blogging purposes, I deathmatched it down to a more sensible list. Size is a modest 1440x900, since Flux2 is almost too big to run on an RTX 4090.

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Went to look at the weather forecasts for Chicago, since I’ll be visiting my sister there soon. Based on the past several weeks, my primary concern was snow and ice on the drive over. Instead, they’re promising warm dry weather with high winds and a chance of firestorms.

Guess I’d better pack a water type…

A village is missing their idiot…

Ilya Somin is perhaps the most reliably wrong commentator in what can laughably be called the “libertarian” gang at Reason, but this one takes it to a new level:

“If, as Musk says, the U.S. was all about English/Scots-Irish culture, there would have been no need for the American Revolution. The British Empire was dominated by those groups.”

Jaw-dropping ignorance from someone who claims the authority to lecture on law and liberty.

Apple, on the other hand, has plenty of them

Years ago, someone at Apple broke the keyboard shortcuts for switching between windows in Terminal.app. My suspicion has been that it had something to do with adding tab support and setting the app to default to using those shortcuts for tab-switching by default.

Someone finally filed a bug with a simple, clear repeat-by: hide the app. That’s it. Hide the windows just once, and they all lose their shortcuts. And I’m sure that the tiny handful of QA testers left for MacOS have never tested non-default behaviors.

In which Frieren does the meme, and then gets sentenced to 300 years hard labor.

I’m guessing there’s an AI behind this…

Dear Apple,

A while back I bought the recently-updated AirPods 3 Pro. They worked fine with my phone, tablet, and laptop, but Apple’s “find my” service couldn’t see them. At the time, the explanation was that I hadn’t yet upgraded my devices to the “Liquid Ass” OS v26. Since I wasn’t traveling much (indeed, I often don’t leave the house for days, especially the way this winter has been going…), I didn’t worry about it.

Now that they have a mostly working 26.3 release, and they’ve added back some of the legibility that was abandoned in the pursuit of random UI restyling, I updated my phone and tablet (not the Mac; that needs to work). To no surprise, the AirPods did not magically start working correctly in “find my”; they were detected, but it insisted that setup was incomplete and they could not be located.

Clicking on the error message took me to a support page, where none of this worked. At all. There’s yet another screen where you have to completely disassociate the device from your Apple account and then reconnect.

(flux2 is a lot slower and more memory-intensive than Z-Image Turbo, but it’s better at text, styles, and prompt following; there’s a lot I can’t do with it because my graphics card only has 24 GB of VRAM, but for simple one-off pics without refining, upscaling, or multi-image editing, it’s great; I’m thinking about setting up SwarmUI on Runpod with a better card, for the times when I want precise prompting)

Amazon Japan gets clean

Unless you have an active VPN connection with Japanese servers, you can no longer view adult books and videos on Amazon Japan. Searches pretend there’s nothing there, and direct links to products throw up an error page as if the page doesn’t exist. Items in wishlists appear normally with their title and picture, but you can’t click on them or move them to your cart.

(the accurately-rendered poster titles come from the collection of dirty-book covers I acquired some years back as part of my collage-wallpaper project)

How to spot the hero in a harem anime…

[Update! Our Wholesome Choirboy doesn't want to go back to Ireland because... he fled the country for dealing drugs and obstructing police].

[Updated update! He also abandoned two small children when he became a fugitive; all we need now is for him to have set fire to a police car, and he'll be a proper Democrat]

Insty links to an idiotic tweet by no-borders-for-you libertarian Nick Gillespie, who seems to have expected that MAGA would repent of its sinful ICE-worship upon seeing a sympathetic Irish, white illegal. To no one’s surprise except perhaps Gillespie’s, only the usual suspects answered the call.

Perhaps because it was quickly pointed out that Our Not-So-Diverse Hero overstayed a tourist visa for over fifteen years before marrying a citizen in 2025 in an attempt to dodge deportation. Gillespie also fails to mention that he’s only being held in detention because he refused cash and a free trip back to Ireland. Also, how was Our Upright Immigrant making money without valid ID all those years?

(from the Cherish The Ladies album of the same name; I like the song, but the message falls apart when you actually think about the lyrics…)

(side note: Cherish The Ladies ended up suing their record label for unpaid royalties…)

If you’re cold, they’re cold…

Saki is politely baffled

Eight years ago, I blogged this picture:

This week, it appeared on xTwitter again in a new context, and she linked to it, asking “WTF?”.

A number of people made an attempt to unpack the layers of bullshit, but I don’t think they were successful. What I found most interesting about wading through it all was that not a single person ever brought up the little joke she was making in the original picture. They were too busy grinding axes for one side or the other.

Perspective, forced

Choose wisely

(pity they all look like mass-produced emotionless fembots fresh off the assembly line…)

“Go Fish yourself”

(not sure how I feel about someone hijacking the Amelia meme to build their social-media engagement; at least it’s not some Leftist weenie trying to subvert it)

Not every baffling picture is AI…

(amusingly, when I used several edit models to try to restore and colorize this photo, they all gave Godzilla a dog head unless I specifically called it out as “a picture of Godzilla”; so, yeah, beware invented details in “AI-enhanced” photos)

Days Of Future Past

「記憶を残したまま小学生（何年生でもいい）に戻れる」

My translation:

(had to go all the way up to Flux.2-Dev to get the text to render accurately, which took 3 minutes to render; Klein and Qwen Image Edit’s text rendering ranged from “passable with terrible spelling” to “complete gibberish inked in a random font”)