In the original comic she is hanging up a German flag and her roommate asks her if that means she’s LGBT+.

The right always has a quick answer because they are throwing the same shit at every problem.

“It’s the foreigners/religious group abc/political group D! Just get rid of this one group of people and all will be good.”

Housing crisis? It’s the immigrants. No jobs? It’s the immigrants. Lonely? It’s the left and also it’s your own fault, just hit the gym.

It’s easy to have a solution for every problem within seconds if you just claim every problem is the fault of the same 3-4 groups of people.

I don’t think noone else is offering solutions. The problem is that the other solutions are harder to implement or take more time and effort. “Women are at fault and you need to hit the gym.” I can fix that in half a day, just get mad at women and fill out an online application for a gym membership in my area. The solutions of the manosphere are easily solved with capitalism: just buy product abc and pay to train your body.

Meanwhile, the real solutions are much harder: build a community. Find people in your area for a hobby, commit to regular meetings. Get to know people, manage disagreements, have uncomfortable conversations, invest time in others until you’ve slowly built a group of people around you that trust each other and are open about their feelings. Communitybuilding takes a long time. Compared to that, the manosphere’s solutions are quick and easy and you can already get yourself started at home.

It’s also a good way to get people into questioning authorities. “The government has been lying to you about vaccines all along.” leads to “You can’t trust the government at all.” and ultimately “Vote for parties that will dismantle our current democratic system.” The anti-science/anti-vax crowd has always had a giant overlap with the politically far right.

I find that a bit funny given that in the last 15 years or so Japan has officially done a lot to attract tourists. Wanting to become a tourist destination, branding themselves as a place for holidays. I’ve seen so many “Visit Japan” campaigns, usually sponsored by the Japanese government, in the last decade or so. I get that it sucks for the people living in those cities and good for them that their city council does something to help, it still feels weird after years and years of campaigns to attract more tourists to Japan.

I’ve stayed in hostels before, but at least here in europe I haven’t found many with single or double rooms. I also have a tent and went camping, but that only works fine in good weather. Also my last experience camping wasn’t too good, as there were several people having loud parties until 3 a.m. and the people in charge of the camping ground didn’t do anything about it and just told me to leave if I don’t like it.

I’ve also learned the hard way that not all hostels offer you a fridge to use. Many have breakfast buffets and don’t allow you access to the kitchen, although that varies from country to country I think.

I’d love to have an RV one day, that would solve so many problems (except for loud parties on camping grounds). Right now I don’t even have a parking space for a car, so that’s in the distant future.

I am not a fan of AirBnB, but I have several life threatening food allergies and it’s often the only option I have. I’ve stayed at hotels where they assured me they could take care of people with allergies on the telephone before, I always write my allergies in the booking, just to arrive and be told by kitchen staff that everything is prepared on the same cutting boards and actually I can’t eat anything they have. They usually also don’t allow you to store your own food, neither in the kitchen nor in the little fridge in your room.

I just wish there were more hotels with fridges or even little cooking areas to make my own breakfast. I’ve only encountered that twice. So far AirBnBs are my best option to stay in a different city. And it wouldn’t even be that hard, just put in a slightly bigger fridge and some plates in hotel rooms and allow people who can’t eat your breakfast buffet to use it.

I just feel like that’s often forgotten in the discussion, that AirBnB - as bad as it is - also covers a niche for people with health issues that hotels aren’t willing to cover. And that’s also part of their success. Hotels are very standardized to fit the needs of most people, but as soon as you have health issues or can’t eat a lot of things for whatever reason AirBnBs quickly become the better option.

I could name you at least 10 off the top of my head in the city I live in.

You know they don’t want to do that. If they did, people would ask questions like “How come my 40$ homemade Spaghetti with fresh spinach sauce lists soylecithin, yeast extract and xanthan gum as ingredients?”

I’m shocked that it isn’t a law already. It’s been obligatory in the EU for 10 years. Although a lot of restaurants don’t follow it…

Two and a half days. Also how I came to really understand how abusive my mother is. I needed surgery for a knee injury. I wasn’t allowed to eat since the evening before. I went in, had surgery and my parents took me home to “take care of me”. I was so hungry after the surgery because it was like 2 pm and I hadn’t eaten since maybe 4 pm the day before, so I asked if we can stop for food. I was told no, we have food at home. “Home” was an hour by car away.

So we come home, I somehow manage to get into bed and ask for food. My mother exploded, yelled at me to not be a lazy good-for-nothing that slouches around on the bed and that the only way I was getting any food was by getting up and sitting at the dining table like a normal person. I really don’t know why I thought they’d treat me better this time. I guess I thought they’d know it’s a legit surgery (unlike non-legit things like flu and fever that has never been an excuse to stay in bed). Anyway, I had my bottle of water with me but no food. Probably not enough water either. On the evening of my second day there my leg was feeling good enough for me to hobble into the kitchen and grab some snacks.

On the bright side, I learned that the stuff I’ve been telling myself like “Yeah they’re assholes but will be there for me when I need them” was a lie.

There’s this café in Nagoya, Japan, that serves sweet spaghetti: the spaghetti are flavoured with strawberry or chocolate and then you have fruits and sauces on top. It’s delicious.

Edit because I just went through old photos and found one of the sweet spaghetti:

Or a calliope mini, they are geared towards elementary school kids.

I think is is fascinating how much time Japanese teachers spendon extracurriculars

From what I know, a lot of hobby activies happen in school in Japan and are supervised by the school’s teachers: choirs, soccer teams, guitar lessons, baseball, judo etc. These are all things that in most other countries aren’t connected to the school system and are organized either by volunteer groups or professionel instructors (e.g. in seperate music schools or neighbourhood soccer clubs).

I just really really don’t care for it. Not the math, not physics. I don’t care if you can calculate the velocity of a car downhill. I don’t care how heavy the tower of our local castle is. I’ve yet to meet a math problem apart from grocery cost that I care to know the answer of.

I was actually always pretty good at math, I had Bs and sometimes As. I can memorize the formulas and fill them in and do the equations. But none of it interested me even in the slightest.

I started actively disliking math when people around me pushed it on me as this be-all-end-all definition of intelligence. Understanding math isn’t enough, you have to actually LOVE calculating advanced math problems in your head, otherwise you’re not smart.

I grew ip with a narcissistic mother and I can spot those people, too. Sometimes others don’t believe me someone is bad news until month later when they get screwed by that person. I’m always baffled how people fall for the obviously fake niceness.

Yes, there seems to be an English translation. Maybe if someone has it they can post the odficial English translation.

I just started reading “The giant squid” by Fabio Genovesi and I really loved the opening. I couldn’t find the official English translation, so here’s the original and my rough translation:

Del mare non sappiamo nulla. Nulla di nulla, eppure il mare è quasi tutto. All’inizio c’era solo lui, poi ha concesso un po’ di spazio secco e polveroso alla terraferma, e noi subito superbi a dire che il centro del mondo è New York o Pechino, come una volta Babilonia, Atene, Roma, Parigi… invece il centro del mondo è il mare.

We know nothing about the ocean. Nothing at all, and yet the ocean is almost everything. In the beginning there was only the ocean, then it gave a little space - dry and dusty - to the lands, and we immediately haughtily proclaimed that the center of the world is New York or Beijing, like we once did with Babylonia, Athens, Rome or Paris. But instead the center of the world is the ocean.

I mean it has nsver been really useful to learn a language. You learn no grammar rules, no long texts or dialogues. I just used it for vocabulary training which it was ok for.

I’ve been using it for a while and it’s gotten really bad. Sentences are grammatically incorrect in my native language that I am supposed to trabslate to. So if e.g. the exercise is to translate from new language to my native language, the correct answer is marked as false and instead I have to type a sentence that’s wrong in my language.

Also the sentences you practice with have gotten really absurd.