The Hirose River in the fading light of a lovely mid-November afternoon

"Malort advent calendar" is already such an unhinged concept but every little window just having Malort in it really pushes it over the edge into something transcendently funny

When I encounter myself as a different colored cursor because I have the Google Doc open in two tabs

trying to switch off the AI bloatware that has been pinned to the top of every single menu in every single app

The Yanai Initiative is pleased to invite proposals for a symposium entitled “Experimental Translations in/with East Asian Languages,” to be hosted at UCLA on April 10-11, 2026. Deadline November 30, 2025, 11:59 PM (PT). See more information threaded below. ⬇️

~Sendai rainbow posting~ 🌈✨

Y'know, the news did say this morning that we could expect some earthquake activity off the coast today in Miyagi and Iwate...

ワープわくわく!!

There are no words for how evil this is

テレ朝さんもマムダニ=「急進左派」だそうです。「民主党左派」なら全然違和感ないのに、なんでわざわざ今回の選挙戦に関する英語の文脈ではそもそもあまり出てこなかった(というか、英語のどの訳語に当てはまるのかさえ定かではない)を「急進左派」というレッテルを貼りたがるのだろうか。恣意的なものを感じざるを得ないのですよね。 youtu.be/ErGpmFp9hhc?...

Today is publication day for MANGA'S FIRST CENTURY in North America! It's available at bookstores large and small. ahorbinski.com/books/ If you've already read the book, please consider leaving a review online! It helps. And if your budget is tight, requesting the book at the library is great too!

This is a Sendai weather appreciation post, brought to you from 青葉城跡.

Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed. Here are the key take-aways 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

I (unfortunately) still have a F@cebook page due to family reasons, and my algorithm over there was messed up for a bit, but now it's finally back where I want it: local buy/sell pages and videos of hoof trimmings.

My dad sent me this

My take on the World Series? I support Shohei Ohtani’s role as global ambassador for Oi Ocha. I’m a regular Ito En drinker and I agree with Ohtani’s take: “So much is happening these days. It makes sense to take a break for green tea.”

me, looking at all the forest visible from my Sendai apartment: "I bet I'm looking at so many bears right now"

Who needs cars when you have a bike and some bungee cords?

future grandchild: like shit, from an ass? me in 30 years: Swear to God. Then he demolished the White House

このような広告こそヤバい 😍

With the AWS outage, now‘s as good a time as any to post this old strip.

society would be massively improved if ring doorbells were banned completely actually

Still the greatest endorsement of all time

I dreamt I was invited to give a talk at another university, and when I got there, the talk was actually just my contact and I playing Smash Bros for an audience.

I am fascinated by the prevalence of this Sendai dialect mascot. You could even hold little speech bubbles with tokens of Sendai dialect in them!

Now that I've been in Sendai for nearly a month, one of the big things I've noticed is how much more bikeable the city is compared to Tokyo (or at least the parts of it I frequented).

Tokyo’s average annual temperature has increased by about 3.0 °C from ~1876 to ~2019. This includes both global warming and additional warming due to urbanisation and continued loss of green spaces. Meanwhile, Tokyo Met Gov’t is felling hundreds of mature trees in downtown parks for redevelopment.

Been trying to read some isekai lately.

The massive kokeshi in Nishi Park here in Sendai pleases me every time I see it.

the post office is a public service. it doesn’t need to make money. public transit doesn’t need to make money. the library doesn’t need to make money. some things exist for the public good and we desperately need lawmakers to stop thinking about them in terms of capitalism. these are not businesses.

Each day you will be confronted with three unmarked doors. Behind door one is getting all your work done. Behind door two is getting enough rest and exercise. Behind door three is a tiger. Good luck.

BBC News captures Doctor Who himself Sylvester McCoy at the Trump protest seemingly unaware of who they're interviewing.

I feel this needs to be said again but LLMs are not implementing usage-based theories of language unless one interprets the latter in the shallowest, devoid of their most interesting assumptions, way. “Usage” is not just frequency ffs.

guess what stage of moving this is

If you see this, repost with a vampire that's not Dracula

tfw you need to get a cardboard box home (and a bunch of other stuff), but you came by road bike today

When I think about the fact that universities are ALSO supposed to be repositories of knowledge and expertise you can't get elsewhere (and not just job training or even educational enterprises) I immediately go to ancient languages. I don't think ppl realize you can just lose them

From Darkness to Hypervisibility! A one day symposium on the promotional and creator cultures of social media at UQ in November. CFP and details here: hass.uq.edu.au/event/sessio... @bradyjay.bsky.social @antmandan.bsky.social

I recall really enjoing Tim Wise’s piece "Forget STEM, We Need MESH” (media literacy, ethics, sociology and history) pre-pandemic and thinking and talking about it often. Link. medium.com/our-human-fa...

Part of me really wants to go to the Osaka Expo, but given *waves hands* all that, it seems mostly like a nightmare with small children. An experience that's 95% waiting in line in the sun? And crowds? That sounds like immediate and persistent misery.

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

A great read on UChicago, arguing we’re seeing the result of decades of mismanagement: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal.”

People on two wheels are trying to reclaim the streets for human beings from deadly, huge, overpowered four-wheeled metal boxes.

R.I.P. Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), you wolde have lovid "Kyoto" (2020) by Phoebe Bridgers.

another way in which LLMs make me feel like an alien as compared to their many fans: I find their default fawning conversational tone to be intensely, viscerally repulsive and suspicious.

We headed to Moomin Valley to celebrate :)

I'm always happy that I live here in Japan, but today I am especially happy, because I left my backpack with most of my important possessions in it on the train, and it turned up within the hour completely unscathed at the final stop.