Posts with tagged with "japan"

I teach high school in Japan, well I entertain students under the auspices of helping them use English. I do this professionally, which means that at the moment, it is my profession, I get paid to do it. Because nobody really cares that much about what I exactly I do, I design my own lessons and projects! The most recent project we're doing is writing reviews of something, because even though I hate the concept of reviews with essentially every fiber of my being, it's important to be able to express your opinion in some way.

I am so full, I have no room for anything left in my bulging stomach. We made some spinach fettuccine, it is so good. I eat and eat it until there is only space in me for liquid. And yet, for some reason or another, I feel myself drawn to the cabinet, to that place where I keep my pouches of slug vomit and preserved dicks. I am bored, I still don't have a Wii U, what the hell am I going to do, get stickers in Paper Mario?

In Japan, companies have to pay a certain amount of money, a small tax, to sell toys. For some reason, if their toy includes a kind of candy item, the item is classified as a candy instead of a toy, and the tax is either reduced or negated. It is for Precisely This Reason that the shelves of many Japanese grocery stores and supermarkets, despite lacking exotic items like "

If you have ever gotten your hands on a Neo-Geo cartridge and thought "mercy me, blow me down and snap off my wimpie these things are huge," wait till you get a hot load of these hushpuppies. Holy shif! These are Nintendo's special cartridges for the Super Famicom Box system, a relatively rare variation of the Super Famicom that was built specifically for installation in Japanese hotels in the mid-90s.

Yeah, I got a 1080p set. But let me tell you about the TV I actually use to play sweet games on. I dug it out of the garbage on a Sunday morning once. The garbage, outside, down between my building and the other building, where the old ladies secretly sneak down to in the middle of the night to throw out old luggage. It looked the right size, not too big.

Boss' new Drive Shot canned coffee isn't brown or yellow but somewhere in-between, the color of what you'd get if a Hershey bar could take a piss. As I pop the lid I notice it smells about the same, watered down, sweet, a hint of milk, the memory of coffee beans. I imagine some old man down at the local rotary club sucking it down like a babe at the teat out of a paper cup with the fold-out handles, and start to gag, even as I pour the thin swig down my gullet, dampening my cavernous gorge.

Have a look at Nintendo's Japanese website. Go ahead! It looks pretty nice and new and clean. But did you know that those fancy links and smooth navigational bits discretely conceal original product pages for hardware long since discontinued—some of them dating back to 1996, with what was the first version of their homepage? I've noticed these parts of the site before, but never really dug in until today, when I was looking for pictures of discontinued playing card sets.

I get lost in places like this, arcades with rows of games, multiple floors, each one a bizarre wonder I only ever knew from pictures in magazines. It feels like I could be anywhere when I stumble into one of them, only passively aware of where here actually is, up winding sets of stairs in nowhere buildings filled with smoke and a hundred digital characters screaming all at once. Here on the third floor of Magical, literally across the street from another game center called SANX, for some Street Fighter IV, I feel like if it weren't for the machines with the HD screens, I could be back in 1998.

In a couple months like clockwork clickin' it will happen, the double-language sheet will magically appear on my desk to ask me if I'm sticking with My Life, if I wanna choose to stay here in for my last eligible year as a high-school teacher in this program, to become more of a Japanese citizen than I was a Pittsburgher, longer than I was a college student, longer than I've lived in any one place since I was eleven.

What's more fun than a plastic packet full of cardboard? A plastic packet full of cardboard with Mario pictures printed on it! Yes, New Super Mario Bros. Wii Stage Set Gum is simultaneously the worst and most awesome candy-related product I have ever savagely grabbed from the shelf with my teeth and spat into the shopping cart with a walrus-like emission of sound. This thing hearkens back to a time when we had to use our imaginations for entertainment, when we had to have fun with spartan paper products.