I’ve been following Scott Adams’ Dilbert comic stripg for many, many years now. I have most of the Dilbert comic strip books, several of Scott’s books (including his just-released How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big) and I’m an early member of the DNRC. Translation: I’m a huge Scott Adams fan.

Usually Scott’s comics are apolitical, but in his February 7th comic strip he takes a very clear stance against homophobia:

Scott, my respect for you has now officially gone through the roof.

On February 4th 2014 there was a debate between Bill Nye (American scientist known for his The Science Guy educational program) and Ken Ham (the creationist behind the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis). The topic was:

Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern, scientific era?

The whole debate is available online here (warning: it’s over two hours long), but this is not what I want to write about this time. During the debate, Matt Stopera from BuzzFeed asked 22 creationists to write a message or question to the other side. Most questions were quite dumb. This one is my favourite:

I thought it would be fun (for me) to reply these questions, so here are my answers (keep reading).

The Kanamara Matsuri (かなまら祭り, steel phallus festival) is a shinto event organized by the Kanayama shrine (金山神社, Kanayama Jinja) in the Kawasaki province. It takes place the first Sunday of April every year.

This festival has its origins in the Edo period (1603 – 1868), when the town’s prostitutes visited the shrine to pray for protection against syphilis. Currently the festival is dedicated to fertility and it collects funds for HIV research.

The events start at eleven in the morning. There are performances of traditional Japanese music and dance, and also a very fun penis-shaped daikon (Japanese radish) carving contest. Around the shrine grounds there are stalls selling candy and key rings also shaped like penises or vaginas. This year there were also one or two stalls selling adult sex toys.

Around one in the afternoon the visitors go on a procession around the town carrying two mikoshi (神輿, portable shinto shrines) and a wooden cart carrying a huge ping penis.

After the procession many of the visitors head to the Kawasaki Daishi (川崎大師), a very beautiful buddhist shrine around ten minutes walking from there. The avenue to the entrance of the temple grounds has many shops selling souvenirs and food, that reminds me very much of the Nakamise street before the Senso-ji temple in Asakusa.

Enjoy the photos. Feel free to let me know if you’re interested in going next year, because I’ll go again too.

Keep reading to see the photo gallery.

No, I haven’t turned gay (but hey, I don’t know about what will happen in the future). This is actually about a Japanese woman who decided to start looking for a boyfriend on GitHub, of all places. For those of you who (unlike me) aren’t computer nerds, GitHub is a hosting service for software developers who want to store their projects online using the Git revision control system. I know, it sounds nerdy because it is. The point is that by posting something like this on GitHub, it is likely that she has ensured remaining alone for the rest of her life. Or not. There are lots of desperate male geeks out there too.

Her original application (in Japanese) is here. I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I translated it into English for you.

Enjoy

Background

I’ve been getting old without being very interesting to men. I’ve started to feel afraid of not being able to ever get married. Because of this, I’m sending this application for a life partner.

Requirements

I found this video while I was wasting time in YouTube tonight. I shows what driving in Tokyo feels like. I think it is awesome.

The video starts in the Wangan-sen (Bayshore Route), then crosses Odaiba, the Rainbow Bridge, leaves the Tokyo Tower behind, goes through Roppongi where you can see the Mori Tower to the left, and heads towards Shibuya.

Enjoy.

No, silly woman! You will not get a melanoma in the 5-minute walk from the station to your home!

Many Japanese women use umbrellas on sunny days to protect their skin from the Sun. They actually prefer their skin to be as white as possible (deathbed-white).

This woman takes it a bit too far. She opens her umbrella on a very cloudy day, for a 5-minute walk from the station, at almost 6pm in the afternoon.

Don’t tell anyone, but I think we’ve found a vampire!

Remember this post from a few days ago? I was talking about how Hitachi is spamming its customers (me being one of them), and I ended the post with “Buy a Western Digital instead”.

Well, after that blog post a very polite representative from Hitachi actually replied via email asking about the hard drive’s serial number and part number. I wrote back to him just a few minutes ago, and I got an automated error message from their mail server:

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has been acquired by Western Digital.  Our new name is HGST.  When sending email messages to HGST, please adjust your email address to use the “hgst.com” domain.  Example:jim.smith@hgst.com

Emphasis mine. Initially I thought it was some kind of joke from their mail server admin(s), but it’s actually true. Here’s the press release from Western Digital. The press release is actually from March, so I was three months late with my buy a Western Digital comment.

What will happen now? Will they stop spamming non-US customers regarding US-only campaigns? Or will it get worse?

Yesterday I was walking in Odaiba. I love the view from Tokyo Bay at night from there. However, it was a bit chilly, so on my way back home I decided to walk inside the DECKS shopping mall instead of the avenue outside. There on the second floor of the mall I found a shopping area decorated as the Tokyo from the 1950s. It’s called the Daiba 1-chome shopping street (台場一丁目商店街, Daiba 1-chome shotengai). In all my years in Tokyo I had never been here. I don’t know for how long it has been here, but it’s a very nice place. There are restaurants, a food court, shops where you can buy old clothes, a candy shop… all of them with an atmosphere that reminds the 50s.

I liked the place. Especially, I liked a retro game center with game machines ranging from the 70s to the early 90s.

Unfortunately I didn’t have my Nikon DSLR camera with me. I took photos with my iPhone, but the quality is quite bad because of the bad lightning. Most of the photos are from the retro game center.

Photo gallery after the pause. Enjoy.

Imagine that you’re a professional photographer: you earn money by taking photos and licensing them to customers who want to use them. One day while browsing the web you find a web site using one of your commercial photos illegally. You wonder how many people are doing the same, so you run an online search and find out that there are many, many web sites using your photo illegally.

You want these people to stop using your work. You could try and contact each of the web site owners, but you know that it’s going to be pointless because most don’t have contact information, or the contact person doesn’t have access to the web code, or they will just ignore you. You decide to send DMCA takedown notices to the companies hosting each of these web sites, so they will get in touch with their customers and ask them to remove your photo from their web sites.

As a result of the DMCA takedown requests, many of the web sites remove your photo, others offer to license it, as they should have done from the beginning. It seems to be going well.

Until a crazy psychotic person enters the scene.

This is not a game review, it’s a rant.

Probably you’ve heard already about Junk Jack by Pixbits. It’s an iPod touch/iPhone mining game, similar to Minecraft, but two-dimensional and not so advanced in what you can build. The game is open and simple: you ‘farm’ stuff by destroying the blocks that make up the game world, and then you use those blocks to build stuff (tools, weapons, furniture, etc). The graphics are adorable in pure 8-bit fashion and the music and sound effects are good. Search online if you want a real review.