My goals for this trip:

- Locate and buy a used 1981 "Epoch Cassette Vision"

- Do not sink time into following developments in, or writing social media threads about, the United States election (I am not saying this is inherently a bad thing but it is simply not what I should be doing right now)

If I do this right expect this account to consist of pretty much photos for the next month

Okay I asked and apparently Mastodon wants to see what the Japanese Laserdisc cover for "Barbarella" looks like. (In my opinion: This is a very good piece of packaging.)

PS what is this second movie [EDIT: It's The Gorgon (1964) with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee]

Went to a Japanese arcade and was expecting to come out complaining about how everything's rhythm games now but instead I'm walking out just super impressed with the high production values on these incredibly polished rhythm games with compelling mechanical concepts

Also: all the games feature music by Toby Fox. Good for him!

Oh by the way also at the arcade there was an AMAZING ddr successor called "Dancerush Stardom". Instead of the nine plates there's just basically a giant touchscreen, it has depth because it's clear with an array of flashy lights underneath, it richly combines elements from multiple rhythm game concepts (not clear from the video but it often has you drop your foot and slide it left or right), some tracks assume two people on the plate dancing around each other(!)

@spookysquid playing:

Extremely incredibly good: Waking up with the sun

IMO not so good: the sun in Osaka, Japan at the end of October raises at 6 AM and sets at like 4:30 or something

Japan doesn't have daylight savings time, but of course daylight savings time would make this problem literally worse. Sometimes I actually kinda wish the world had daylight savings time in reverse

EDIT: Wait. DST is in the *summer*. Is what I really want for DST to be year-round?

I think as a good socialist I'm not supposed to get excited about "oh look at all these nice consumer products"

But

Wow I really do like Japan's consumer products!!

The temporary deodorant and hand moisturizer I picked up here. I like them more than my regular brands

I like the convenience store onigiri. It fills a hole in my day to day life in North America

Arcades are (in Osaka?) relatively common, relatively cheap, and have games I actually want to play

The map claimed on the grounds the presence of a "Labyrinthian Fortress". We followed the map and found a large building there but there was a $9 entry fee, to see an exhibit about uniform fashion, and no apparent labyrinth. We did find this mysterious Object outside.

Perhaps if you go to the fashion exhibit, and become sufficiently lost within it, the labyrinth will Reveal itself

Truchet tiles spotted

They did this cool thing where there was one area of the walkway tiles with the chaotic/aperiodic Truchet tiles, and another area tiled with one repeating tile that formed a complete unbroken picture with the Truchet tiles but were themselves totally regular, so it was like this rough border with order on one side and chaos on the other

This is still in the park around the Tower of the Sun. Every individual little part of this place had so much care and thought put in it