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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I met a somewhat old man on a Greyhound a few years ago who was pretty delirious and drifting in and out of sleep. Turns out he had been traveling non-stop for three days, heading from Georgia to his home in Oakland. He had been on a roadtrip with his friends in (what he described as) a cursed Mitsubishi which broke down a final time some 2500 miles from home. All his friends took flights back, but our protagonist did not bring any kind of ID with him and couldn’t take a plane. So there he was, having not slept much at all in 3 days, on the i-10 between Tucson and Phoenix.
    He also borrowed my phone to call his wife, who it seemed had not sanctioned his roadtrip at all and was very mad at him. She eventually hung up on him. Handing my phone back to me, he assured me that she wouldn’t stay mad at him after seeing his baby-blue eyes upon his arrival in Oakland.

    I don’t remember so many of the details, but hearing this guy’s life story and about his impulsive cross-country roadtrip was kinda strangely inspiring.


  • Lots of other languages have days named after the sun, moon, and 5 planets or the gods associated with the planets. Obviously we have Sunday and Monday, or lunes in Spanish, but that’s also why in Spanish, Mars = Marte, Tuesday = Martes. Probably most famously in English is Thursday coming from Thor’s day (Þunras dag) with Thor being the equivalent to Zeus or Jupiter, which is where jueves comes from in Spanish. In Spanish though their sun-day got remained to God’s day (domingo) and saturn-day to sabbath (sabado). Probably most interesting is that the connection even applies to Japanese. The days go in this order: 日月火水木金土 which means “sun moon fire water wood metal earth” which are the classical Chinese 5 elements connected to everything from the 60-year sexagisimal calendar to the bagua tao trigrams on the Republic of Korea flag. And if course, they’re also the names of the planets with Mars being fire-planet, Mercury being water-planet, Jupiter being wood-planet, Venus being metal-planet, and Saturn being earth-planet.

    So the planet Jupiter (etc.) is to some degree represented in the Thursdays (etc.) of three different languages. Not really saying that this makes more sense than Portuguese, but I think it’s cool




  • “designed to be sung to the tune of ‘Home on the Range.’”
    (1) Oh, give me a clone
    Of my own flesh and bone
    With its Y chromosome changed to X
    And after it’s grown
    Then my own little clone
    Will be of the opposite sex.
    (Chorus) Clone, clone of my own
    With its Y chromosome changed to X
    And when I’m alone
    With my own little clone
    We will both think of nothing but sex.
    (2) Oh, give me a clone
    Is my sorrowful moan,
    A clone that is wholly my own.
    And if she’s X-X
    And the feminine sex
    Oh, what fun we will have when we’re prone.
    (3) My heart’s not of stone,
    As I’ve frequently shown
    When alone with my own little X
    And after we’ve dined,
    I am sure we will find
    Better incest than Oedipus Rex.
    (4) Why should such sex vex
    Or disturb or perplex
    Or induce a disparaging tone?
    After all, don’t you see
    Since we’re both of us me
    When we’re having sex, I’m alone.
    (5) And after I’m done
    She will still have her fun
    For I’ll clone myself twice ere I die.
    And this time without fail
    They’ll be both of them male
    And they’ll each ravage her by and by.

    Source: autobiography of Isaac Asimov





  • Yes, it’s very dry where I am.
    My thought isn’t that 34° is (or isn’t) a problem, rather that without knowing where it is it doesn’t really mean very much. If OP is in Dubai or northern Mexico or something then 🤷‍♀️ 34 sounds pretty normal. I just think the post would make more sense with some context.
    It’s always 34° somewhere in the world.





  • A bunch of other people have mentioned Ghibli movies and since I’m in the middle of a binge through every Ghibli movie I think I’ll recommend one that I hadn’t seen before a few days ago: Only Yesterday or Omoide Poroporo.
    It’s Isao Takahata, not Miyazaki, but it’s easily my favorite Ghibli movie and one of my favorite movies of all time. It feels so real and relatable, the whole movie is essentially a really slow-paced series of flashbacks to the main character’s 10-year-old self and every detail is so well-thought-out and interesting.
    Very worth watching, although I’ll mention as a disclaimer that all the friends I was watching it with thought it was super pointless and boring.




  • リリィ is a common way to write it, although I’m not sure why it’s more common than リリー (perhaps just cause the ィ is more of a phonetic addition rather than a semantic one). Here’s a list of fictional characters whose name is spelled リリィ. It’s probably supposed to be a less obvious way to evoke the idea of yuri. There seem to be a couple other series that have had similar titles like “Comicリリィ” or “アサルトリリィ Bouquet”.
    Anyway, the “Lily” isn’t the only remarkable part of the title, what does “Momentary” mean here? Leave it to Japanese pop media to take random English words to make titles that kinda work? but wouldn’t really work well in English. Shoutouts to “Battle Tendency” and “Delicious in Dungeon”.
    But yeah, it’s definitely not a localization of yuri/ユリ/百合 because the title doesn’t say that at all.



  • I love archaic inconsistent Japanese. 今日 (obviously きょう) used to be pronounced the same way but spelled… けふ. There’s a Wikipedia page on historical kana orthography and the example the use on the page’s main image is やめましょう spelled as ヤメマセウ. The old kana usage sticks around in pronunciation of particle は and へ. There also used to be verbs ending in ず that turned into じる verbs like 感じる. Here’s a post on Japanese stack exchange where somebody explains verbs that end with ず, づ, ふ, and ぷ.
    Honestly I’m glad I don’t have to learn historical inconsistent spellings, but part of me thinks that it’s really cool and wishes it was still around.