• 0 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle



  • I bet it’s more to do with how little Americans own their own culture. Copyrights in the USA used to expire after 30 years, after which it became public domain. Or in other words, culture was returned to the people as a whole.

    Nowdays the copyrights last beyond a lifetime, and Americans grow up in a world where they almost never experience relevant pop culture outside of being owned or controlled by someone. When you find American content, you don’t think of “American culture” you think of “This is owned by Disney” or “This is owned by Paramount” and so on and so forth. You have original authors and content creators, being the gods of the world they created, and everyone else are “fan artists” or “fanfic writers,” being implied to be lesser. Those fan artists will be fan artists their entire lives, and their works will never be ‘canon’ in the eyes of the Owners. If you like Harry Potter but not Rowling, too bad. The public cant reclaim it.

    That’s not how culture works though. Culture remixes, reinspires, deconstructs, rebuilds, and memes on. That’s how everyone did stuff before the advent of recorded media. The good stuff is repeated and boosted. In a way, the Internet culture that emerged in the 90s sought out to rebuild what was lost after the 1890s.


  • Oh, I just got back from there.

    For a vacation less than 90 days, you only need a passport from your home country, and proof of your return flight in less than 90 days. Drugs were covered in another comment, but dont bring veggies or meat products into Japan, even if its like a Slim Jim thing you got at the airport, they’ll give you a hard time over it. The trip can be long, so its worth planning it out to give your future tired self less things to think about. Expect to be sleep deprived your first 2 days.

    Travel agencies are good for booking hotels in advance, which i highly reccomend to do 1 month before. I stayed 2 weeks and that I think was a great amount of time. I booked the hotels and plane in advance, then had $2000 in savings to convert to cash yen for the actual trip. Use cash, Japan is very cash heavy. That was way more than enough spending money actually, i probably could have done it with half that amount. Fall time has great weather, and I avoided the more expensive spring season / cherry blossom bloom. That sounds nice, but tickets are more expensive that time of year.

    Travelling in Japan, there’s the fast way and there’s the cheap way. For trains, they have the shinkansen and the regular regional trains, and for roads theres the side streets and the expressway. Beware expressway tolls. Getting out of Osaka wasnt too bad but getting back in beaned my wallet for ~$90 USD. Theres toll gates less than 5 minutes apart there. If you have 4 or more people in a car the expressway might be cheaper than the shinkansen, which you need individual tickets for each person. Using the expressway isn’t required, you can take side streets the whole way.

    I had local friends who knew the language and could drive. They made my trip amazing. I tried to study some japanese language but when it really came time to interact with people i could not cut it. I really needed my friends to do anything more than sightsee and shop outside of tourist traps. My appearance and dress alone indicated me as an Obvious Foreigner and so people were quick to help and give me menus to point at. Even if your speaking skills were terrible, manners make up for it. Learn the local customs and formal etiquette, and people should forgive awful broken sentences and be patient with you. If you remember only one phrase: sumimasen. It’s excuse me / sorry / can i have your attention all rolled into one phrase.


  • A lot of the time its impatient management who want the fastest solution right now, demanding their jenga tower built from hollowing out the middle and never allowing time to fill in the gaps with any new blocks.

    But i’ve also seen just plain inexperience from devs who have never seen a project become technically bankrupt. Some people just carry the expectations for a short lived app into a constantly iterated long lived app, not realizing that is the way to crunch and missed deadlines.

    Compounding the inexperience issue is the use of bad architecture. Architecture is a bigger picture thing, not something to bang together a bunch of use cases and a bunch of factories. The purpose of architecture is to keep development easy and smooth for now and the future. If it doesnt feel nice to work in, it’s not doing its job. If devs keep trying to cheat it, its time to add convienience tools to encourage them to do it right.

    Clean Architecture for example is very nice, it really shines in projects intended to be iterated continuously on for over 5 years and many more. It mitigates the pain of replacing and upgrading old obsolete stuff. Using it for one marketing campaign app that’s going to live for only 3 months is overkill though. For very short projects, you can see how its the wrong tool for the job.

    Selecting the right architecture involves understanding the patterns used and knowing what problems those patterns were meant to solve. Thats the way to know if those problems are relevant to your project.