I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and decided not to go back to sleep, since we would be traveling today back to Tokyo for to last phase of our trip. softlykarou and I lay around in bed for a couple hours, packed up our souvenirs and clothes, and headed out to find some breakfast. softlykarou's initial idea of Cafe du Monde turned out to be a dud because the one in Kyoto Station ( Read more... )

...is called Let's Speak English (though I keep reading it as "Let's Speaking English"), written and drawn by an ALT in Japan. It's a collection of 4koma comics about her life there, with plenty of episodes I recognized from my own time in Japan. Like how the centrality of rice to the traditional Japanese diet leads to odd ideas about American ( Read more... )

marianlh's post about the cutest little rust monster reminded me of the webcomic Dark Places and how sad I was that by the time I had discovered it, it had stopped updating. Late in its run, though, there was an expository page that really caught my attention:


( Read more... )

I've been reading a webcomic for three months that I just stopped reading, and the reason why drove me to write about it.

Let me explain. The webcomic is Quantum Vibe, which was mentioned on RPG.net as pretty good, though with a libertarian bent. "Well, whatever," I thought. "I read Atlas Shrugged[1], I can read this if it's recommended on ( Read more... )

I finished reading Nausicaa last night. The ending was a bit odd in comparison to the rest of it ("Killing is bad, except those guys. They all need to die so we can live." What?), but overall it was quite well done ( Read more... )

( Cut for those who don't play )

I don't understand how insurance repricing works. I got a bill for around $800 from the doctor today. Okay, not surprising, he's a specialist. What was surprising is how far down insurance reduced it: $180. That's to $180, not by $180. And most of my bills are like that. Either health care is obscenely overpriced and only people with good insurance ( Read more... )

(that's "Happy new year ( Read more... )