A selfie from the elevator inside of the Sun

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

Miguel Sternberg @spookysquid
M?iguel Sternberg? @spookysquid
??Mig??uel Ste?rnberg? M?i?g?uel? Ste??rnb?er?g ?? @spookysquid
Hmmm those photos may be getting cropped horizontally by Mastodon and ruining the intended effect unless you click on them
Data corruption in mesh buffer
Waste Paper • Please Waste
Please
He has Neck

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

Pictures of World
Water
There is a hole in everything
I was really captivated by this water fountain. Its design is just so thoughtful for a water fountain
I don't even know if the design is *good*. I just know that this object was designed by someone who had very specific thoughts about the nature of a water fountain
Okay now I am going to post some platonic forms
Cubes
Orbs
Two 50 yen coins, overlapping in four dimensional space. To capture this phenomenon Miguel proposes the term "Hyperyen"
Photography is a way of seeing
Cubeset

Note: If you like the posts above from my visit to the Tower of the Sun, you may also like Miguel's thread on Bluesky with his own photos from the day. Miguel paid extra to be allowed to take photos inside of the Tower (above described as "Him") above the first floor (they appear to be very concerned about people dropping their cameras and make you rent a lanyard) and so got some shots I was not able to

https://bsky.app/profile/spookysquid.bsky.social/post/3l7pbc3vtlt26

Miguel Sternberg (@spookysquid.bsky.social)

It's him!

Bluesky Social

I concluded my day by making… making what what may have been a very unwise purchase.

Or maybe it will turn out to have be the wisest purchases I have ever made. It is too early to tell

I just… I saw them, I was getting something at the pharmacy by the subway station and I saw them, and I thought "do I want one of these?" and suddenly the thought hit me, a lightning bolt of absolute certainty, that no, no what I want is *four of them*.

They are posable.

Public service poster on the Osaka subway admonishing the reader not to play Pokemon Go at situationally inappropriate times
Public service announcement on the Osaka subway admonishing you NOT to have meet-cutes on the subway!! You could damage your vintage 2007 flip phone!!!
Vending machine from the Osaka subway labeled "FEED ME ORANGE" which has a bunch of whole oranges on a hopper and when you pay it pulls one, squeezes the juice out of it, and serves you just-made fresh orange juice
I started writing some body horror about dropping Kirby in your bathtub and it turns out he's a bath ball and he dissolves while smiling the whole while, but everything I came up with was too horrible to post
Nyaan and Nyaang
Promotional signage by Rene Magritte

Ok I got a explanation from a protected account abt this https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113400800877383368

Apparently "image" is "Wasei-eigo"— an English borrow word that took on a distinct meaning unlike its original meaning. This happens in all languages, it's why reborrowing exists, but it happens so much EN->JA there's a word for it.

The English word "Image" in a Japanese sentence means "impression" or abstract mental picture. So someone left "image" in a Japanese sentence untranslated, bc it was "already English"…

We're gonna see some projection mapping tonight!
"Please refrain from hitting, kicking, or poking the artwork", a prerecorded voice said
Found an egg
Beans
Normal Trees
E G G G G G G G
There's a guy on the Osaka subway wearing a full penguin costume… he's got a good vibe. I trust him implicitly
Toilet paper with unusually intricate branding
Okay, Mina-san, it's time to go to Nagoya! Time to get in your travel bag!
Me when I am in a subway and suddenly the train bursts out from underground into daylight and is now outside traveling across a bridge over water
Thanks, Google Translate

We passed by another of those "Feed Me Orange" juice-squeezed-while-you-watch vending machines (see upthread) but this time I just looked at it and was like… well, actually I could really go for some orange juice right about now.

So I tried it and… okay!! It was actually some really good orange juice!!

Okay wait re: last post I just realized if I'm going to post about the orange juice robot machine I PROBABLY should have mentioned the reason I was by this vending machine in the first place, was because it was on the street outside a gorgeous, UNESCO-World-Heritage-recognized 1200-year-old Buddhist temple overlooking on one side the entire city of Kyoto from above and on the other side a literal magic waterfall. That's probably relevant
Sorry I didn't mention this detail earlier
What was interesting about this temple (Kiyomizu-dera) was it was really more of like… a complex? There's a part built in the 8th century, and a part built in the 1600s, but then there's just all this other … stuff, all around the site, which seems to be its own thing with its own individual history, some of it very mysterious if you can't read Japanese signage (attachment #2: why are there dogs? why do they look so friendly? are they meant as guardians? or are they just happy to see you?
Anyway if you choose to drink from the waterfall whose water possesses mystic powers, it turns out they dealt with the sanitation problems inherent in this by storing the ladles used to capture and drink it in a machine that constantly sterilizes them with UV light. Japan has this religion thing down to a science (spoken approvingly)
Dotonburi River, Osaka at night. This image has not been postprocessed
Immediately following taking this photo I waited 20 minutes in the rain outside a tiny six seater Izakaya meaning to politely step in when someone stepped out, thought maybe I should actually check they were accepting customers at all, found out they weren't, stepped in a puddle and drenched my socks, got completely lost and wound up at Crab
Emotional French Toast

Ran into Toby Fox in the basement of a mall in Osaka

(the location these were found for sale implies these at some point were in a gacha machine)

Spiffy is cool. Tuxedo Sam. Tuxedo Sam always turns up in the middle of everything. Being spiffy and cool is easy for a little blue penguin.
When you get tired of femme moding and you decide today you will just fall back to comfy Robot
( If you saw my offthread post earlier: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113411029765148169 You may notice something: This is cyan! It is now hanging from my backpack. )

Walking through the Osaka rail station I saw a dude in his late 40s wearing an open button-down under which was a T shirt reading "FOLLOW YOUR FUCKING DREAMS". I am telling you this because I wanted to post the below image but it did not seem like enough of a post by itself.

But I do like this image

Trains Gender

To follow up on my post above (Quote: "Beans") Miguel just posted a thread of his photos from that event on bluesky, and he got a photo of the projection mapping monoliths half sunken in the lake

https://bsky.app/profile/spookysquid.bsky.social/post/3l7wvq7r6dd2y

Miguel Sternberg (@spookysquid.bsky.social)

On a rainy train to Nagoya with @spinningmind.bsky.social and @dryad.technology for the next leg of my trip. Good chance to post about TeamLabs Botanical Garden Osaka, which we hit up a couple nights ago.

Bluesky Social

Going for some slightly aggro fashion choices tonight

I was like "hmm my hair's a little out of control tonight… might as well lean into it"

Okay this is maybe a little too specific to ever come up but if anyone ever wants a recommendation for an Indian restaurant in Nagoya, Japan, I have you covered

(Fluffiest naan I have ever eaten in my *life*, it was incredible)

@mcc hate it when i want to trans my gender but the doctor tells me i have to go over four bridges and wait a thousand days first
@mcc the trains’ gender reveal party as they pull up is still a bit over-the-top
@mcc All of these things are true. Penguins are just on a different level.
@mcc DRNKMENU feels like something from an old Pokémon game where they had strict character limits.
@mcc neat
@GreenSkyOverMe I was startled by the intensity of the colors (IRL) (And also as they came out in the picture)
@mcc mmmm donburi river 😋
@mcc Vibes of the Chicago River here: big buildings, close to the narrow river. Much better lighting here, though.
@mcc I read “ladles” as “ladies” and was most confused.

@mcc psh in Catholicism we always learned god kept the wine chalice clean

They also used alcohol wipes between each person. But mostly god.

@jason now I'm trying to figure out if wine has sterilizing properties. Maybe not because of the sugar…?
@mcc I’d definitely assume not
@jason @mcc I think we can all see where this is going, right? Clearly, the only way forward for the church, is to replace the wine with high concentration spirits.
@lunarood @mcc as a lapsed Catholic, now Buddhist, I’ll gladly take the UV ladles 😁
@mcc If they were at a shrine I would expect them to be foxes and it would be something to do with Inari, but you did say it was a temple... But then again that's a torii so maybe that part IS a shrine? It does get complicated.
@mcc Oh Google does seem to imply there is an Inari shrine nearby, Fushimi? So that would make sense then.

@mcc

Feels like you're burying the lede, did you drink the magic water or not?

@mcc if UV light doesn't destroy holyness but does destroy bad things, if we expose priests to large amounts of UV they should survive unless they where bad? I think we have modern age ducking....

@daubers The water isn't exposed to UV, only the drinking utensil used to capture the water

It is not clear to me what guarantees the shrine/city of Kyoto makes about the sanitary safety of the shrine water itself.

@mcc awh. There goes that business plan. Wonder if they do similar at Lourdes
@mcc usually they are either guardians of the temple, a representation or deceiples of the deity this temple is dedicated towards
@4censord yeah i'm used to seeing statues in such a configuration it's just these seem like… like i dunno, just dogs someone would own. like they're just the fierce lion-dog things i see most often. they're like… good bois
@mcc Here, all the supermarkets now have these kinds of machine that will just let you fill up a whole bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice and it is so good.
@WAHa_06x36 @mcc same over the bay. I usually get a bottle for the weekend. The only downside is I would prefer blood oranges sometimes, and they only rarely have those

@mcc I get the impression Japan is gradually moving towards Arabic numerals for convenience... not helpful when you're trying to check something like this though!

If you didn't already find it, it's 二百六 (ni-hyaku-roku)

@http_error_418 Arabic numerals are most common here it seems, but I was hoping to know how to pronounce it. So, thanks. (I can get a sound pronunciation by tapping the button with the speaker but I am not VERY good at copying Japanese phonetics.)
@mcc I think the most helpful general rule I've learned so far is that vowel sounds are very short unless otherwise indicated