You’re in the right place. Thank you for the long post.
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Sounds like you’re having a kinda wistful in-between time over there. Those can be tough but also kind of make you feel like you’re alive, I find? Dunno if it’s that way for you.
If you feel like sharing it’d be great to see those little snowpersons in the things you made thread!!
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I found an extremely cool place today. It’s a shop in a nondescript office plaza with basically nothing else around, called Soyodo LLC. In the front it’s a pretty small space with a selection of Chinese goods of various types. There’s a calligraphy section. There’s crappy toys. I found blue/red 3D glasses there, which was exciting because I found out yesterday that a pc engine ranma game uses them. Now I can enjoy contra legacy of war in all it’s eye destroying glory too.
They also had signed photos of these ladies. Who are they!? The one on the left looks very y2k familiar. If anybody knows, please tell me!
Anyway - head toward the back and you’re in rows and rows of books and media. Four aisles of this length and density. It’s primarily books but on the rightmost aisle there’s paper goods, wrapping paper and the like, and in the leftmost there’s cds, DVDs, blu rays, and vcds. That’s what I was after.
Stuff was absolutely stacked. All those boxes are full of stuff. What kind of stuff? It feels like it would take a month of searching to find out. At the very back of the media area on the right is all the children’s stuff. On the left, naturally, is all the pornography. It’s your one stop shop for dads n grads!
It was pretty intimidating and overwhelming, even as someone with a passing familiarity with Chinese pop (cantopop especially), and a let’s say better than average awareness of Chinese and Hk cinema. These cds were coming in formats I’d never encountered. Something that looks like a full book for some reason? In a leather case that says Ferrari??
I saw some familiar formats like the giant box o anime, but a lot of it was new to me.
I also found a bunch of vcds. What I didn’t find was DVDs from the 80s/90s, when they had nearly everything else, so I went to ask. The lady at the register didn’t speak English so we communicated through translation apps. I had asked if she had any “DVDs for movies like these” with a few examples from my vcd pile - assuming wrongly that she would recognize the movies (whoops). She said she didn’t know, but called her husband to come help me. He didn’t speak English either but led me back to the area where all the media was and sort of gestured vaguely at the entirety of it. Thanks buddy!
I found a few Tai Seng DVDs (local Hk media importer) but only of TV dramas and kung fu lessons. In the end I just bought a bunch of vcds and a few cds and vowed to return with a better translation for what I wanted, because it became clear as she looked at all the vcds, looked at me, looked at the vcds, and said - did you know these are all Chinese?? She probably thought I was looking for American movies from the 80s!
Here are some of the vcds. I bought 8 or so. It’s silly to buy vcds but they had a lot of weird titles there that I’ve never seen. BTW that sexy and dangerous movie is a parody of the young and dangerous series… There’s a car photo like that in the series proper but I can’t find it.
So what was up with the cds in the book looking things?? Pressed cardboard cd holders is what.
And what of the Ferrari case? At first, it’s got an intro and information about CDs and why they’re cool. Then of course you’ve got sexy girl and fashion girl. Then like 30 pages of a notebook for some reason. The cds are shoved into a sleeve in the front and back.
As I left the lady told me they were gonna have “all new stock” next month whatever that means, but I’ll return. Heck of a place to find, and I hope next time I’ll discover the secret trove of DVDs.
That’s what I did today!
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This thread does not appear in search. Why?
At the end of September I moved to Gap, a city in the Hautes-Alpes region of France.
It’s for an assistant teaching program, one I also did five years ago (the 2019-2020 school year ended early, of course). While I am over the idea of doing temp jobs for little money, I accept it as a consequence of having decided that where I want to be takes precedence over what I have to do to be there.
Gap in particular is not precisely where I want to be forever, but it’s nice. For the first time in almost two years I don’t have to drive 80 minutes round-trip to go to work or buy groceries; there is a library and several movie theaters; it’s possible to find clothes at the thrift store again.
Today there is snow in the mountains.
Food pic from the other day sorry.
Now, more importantly, for all the game heads:
A couple weeks ago I visited Montpellier, where they love Pac-Man.
One day I was walking down the street not even thinking about video games (miraculously no sign of Pac-Man). So it was really for no reason at all that I thought: “I wonder if they have any good arcades here…” At that very moment I heard a familiar countdown noise coming from a building ten feet away.
Never been anyplace in the US where they had this so I played a few rounds. OurRun 2 is very fun with the resistant steering wheel and gear shift interface, but is significantly more difficult in the arcade than at home! Couldn’t even get to stage 4 on the easiest route.
On my last day there I sat in a park listening to a 50+ year old man play the FMA theme on guitar.
Back in Gap: when I read 15 volumes of Berserk a year ago, about 10 of those were French scanlations. Here though I can get the whole series at the grocery store across the street, so I’ll probably start buying them. (Half the price as in the US.)
To make the place feel more like home I bought this stereo from someone on Leboncoin. Been having fun listening to the radio but I just bought a cable from the hardware store to plug in my music. Pretty cool 
You were right FishHead I really should have known better…
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This makes me feel both better and worse about that tongue-in-cheek comment I’ve been worried about coming across wrong ever since I foolishly made it.
Looks like an absolutely beautiful area! Can’t really go wrong with the alps. I’m always impressed by people moving relatively far away. I’ve been living within the same 20km radius my whole life. My family moved out of the big city into a suburb when I was 5 and I moved back into the city after I had my first job for a year and that’s it.
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Never apologise for a café gourmand!!!
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as someone who only recently decided to act on this line of thinking, I empathize and congratulate you! looks like a very nice place to live
That stereo looks really cool, classy look and is the housing on the speakers made of wood? I don’t have space for one of these but I’ve always wanted to have something like it.
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Please! Do not. You caught me with me hand in the cookie jar even though the lights were off and you were in another room and you didn’t know about the cookies or the jar.
It’s a double edged sword, now I’ve got friends on both continents and have doomed a portion of my future savings to international plane tickets for weddings and Christmases (all the money I’m saving buying reasonably priced manga).
It’s particle board, so made of “wood*” but not as nice up close and personal as it might look in that photo. Still a good system, seems like it’s barely been used. If you have a bookshelf, you’ve got room for one of these!
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I’m madly in love.
Exactly two weeks ago I met a girl I had met twice before, seven years ago. We first met in Hamburg, my hometown, as part of a 1-on-1 language exchange. And then a second time one month later in Tokyo - she lived in the suburbs and I went there on my first ever solo-trip to Japan in 2017.
We had chemistry back then, but because life is not straightforward - and because we lived a world apart - it didn’t go anywhere…
…until she wrote me in late July of this year that she is coming to Berlin as an au pair starting in september. (She used a winky face! I had to consult a girl friend about the winky face.) We agreed to meet again once she got somewhat settled in Berlin. We decided that November 1st was a good day to meet.
She arrived by train. There was a problem with her hotel booking. It quickly became obvious that while it was possible to resolve that with the hotel it definitely wasn’t anybody’s definition of a good time and so I offered to take her in for the night to avoid unpleasant customer service and start having a good time exploring the city.
We had a good time but in the evening the weather was getting pretty horrible and we decided to go home. While I like to say that I’m an optimist my apartment was not prepared for receiving guests at the end of a busy work week. I hurriedly made the place presentable while excusing the mess about 20 times.
We made dinner together. We watched The Boy and the Heron on Netflix. We skipped several steps of what we both independently imagined to be a potential path to maybe-hopefully getting to know each other.
We decided not to wait seven years before we meet again. I’ll pick her up at central station tomorrow at 4pm and she’ll stay the whole weekend this time. I’m excited. I’m nervous. I feel like I’m 14. Not sure where this will go but here’s to hoping.
(This post brought to you by editing FishHead, who kept writing FishHead from posting a mile-long romantic & dramatic retelling of what happened seven years ago until now.)
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Beautiful
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went to biosphere 2 today. odd place, not entirely sure how to feel about it. on one hand it’s an incredible achievement of science. on the other hand its directionally evil.
edit: i guess discourse will auto grid for you lol
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I went to a friend’s tap dance performance last night — I’d never seen a tap show before and didn’t really know what to expect. It had this giant convoluted plot with an environmentalist bent. It was such a good time.
It was an original show that was equal parts hokey and sincere — it was really heartening. I love seeing people getting a chance to show off such an impressive niche skill.
I got a shirt and it goes so hard.
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insanely cool shirt
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When I share things about my life on IC publicly, I tend to do it a bit obliquely because while I trust y’all individually, I don’t trust the web crawlers.
I am prepping to present my capstone tomorrow. It’s the final large piece I have to finish to complete the masters program I’ve been in for the last two years. I’ve worked very hard at it, learned a ton, and I suspect I’m at the top of my class. So I’m preeeety stressed about it, but I’m also sure it will be just fine.
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I am art directing / costume designing an indie film out here at cape cod for the next few weeks.
I had always wanted to go because I think it’s the kind of place that activates white people epigenetic memory, and it’s quite beautiful.
I have some problems with the production, but the crew itself is a bunch of good people and it always resembles summer camp.
The coolest thing thus far has easily been shooting at the Cape Playhouse , which is the kind of the type of theater a president would get shot at.
Anyway…. Today was our day off so we went to Plymouth Rock. I told the guy at the museum my ancestor went over on the Mayflower and his was the same as mine, so I guess I gained a cousin today, despite his reluctance to want to acknowledge that, which, fair.
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good joke. also sounds awesome
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I pray I will never be thirsty enough to need to drink from “Cumby’s Chill Zone”.
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this sounds like a restaurant homer and marge take the kids because they can’t afford the real place
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Cumby’s Chill Zone also sells Pokémon cards if that is more your vibe
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