animated stick men

 
there are 700 of these animated gifs on this site and are excellent to just watch, all at once.

sushi kitty

mobile phone dangly things featuring hello kitty masquerading as a piece of sushi…
 

how do you say ‘all aboard’ in swedish?

my biggest regret of the moment is not visiting the new ikea store when i was in perth last week.
however, i now realise that the perth store is not the biggest thing in ikea land right now - it’s the kobe store in japan  which is celebrating  its opening by redocorating a monorail train completely ikea [...]

library war 図書館戦争

Put my two favourite things together and this is what you get - TOSHOkAN SENSOU. The action comedy anime adapts Hiro Arikawa’s popular novel about battles fought to preserve libraries when a new law threatens to clamp down on freedom of expression in 2019.
See the trailer here.
I hope they translate this into english.

this is why

this is why i think that my ikebana teacher is the best in australia and i can only aspire to reach the levels of creativity that she has.  look at the amazing composition of the container, the materials, the background screens and the wooden poles to the side.
this was shown at the recent melboure international flower [...]

square fruits

i can’t believe that i lived in japan for so long yet NEVER encountered the phenomena that is the square watermelon, which was brought to my attention the other day. the square watermelon is not new - i am told it has been on high end japanese fruit store shelves for at least the past decade and even earlier [...]

origami book

this youtube origami looks a bit tricky. havent tried it yet though. the nick drake musical accompaniment makes what could be a pretty daggy origami instructional video quite ‘cool’.

vend-o-mania

you name it, there is a vending machine that dispenses it in japan.
probably the biggest vending urban myth is the ONE vending machine in inner city tokyo that dispenses used women’s underwear. no one has ever seen it but everyone talks about it. well apparently this is it:
 
vending is a national passtime, as seen by [...]

cellphone novels - segoi!

why wait for expensive ebook readers like kindle or whatever when, like in japan, you can download an ebook into your mobile phone. apparently over there one of the fastest growing genres is the cellphone novel.  writers, young kids who have grown up using cellphones,  are actually writing them from the phone keypad and uploading to websites [...]

mains and dessert, at the same time thanks

 Available for a short time only from Kikuya, a ramen shop near Tokyo’s Kitasenjyu Station. Other items on the menu include white ramen (yogurt), red ramen (tomato), natto ramen, milk ramen, hot cocoa ramen, and pork kimchi ramen.
 oishii, ne?