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Donald Trump made unhinged threats over Greenland to Denmark, an ostensibly allied country. This is grotesque and a repudiation of the world order that the world rightly respected America for setting up. I am intentionally not linking to stories about it because I believe that what Trump wants more than anything is attention and I don’t want to encourage that. Instead, I would direct you to Mark Carney’s speech at Davos (YouTube). Carney is calm, clear-eyed and courageous. I hope the middle powers (such as Japan and Australia) can join like-minded countries like Canada in resisting this brutality.
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I took Rowan to Asobono again. Like the dedicated father that I am, I might have fobbed him off but it was one of those fantastically crisp Tokyo winter days and I got it in my head that he and I could go up to the sky deck of the Bunkyō Civic Centre and look out on Mount Fuji (Japanese). Alas, much to my chagrin, it’s closed for renovations until December 2026.
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After that didn’t work out, I wanted to do something novel and so when Rowan and I walked past Bubba Gump Shrimp Tokyo and there was no queue, I decided to go there for lunch (Japanese). Bubba Gump? Like in the movie? Yes, like in the movie. Why is this a thing? Why is it a thing in Tokyo of all places? Your guess is as good as mine. All I can say is that I found it charming, albeit quite expensive. I’d be tempted to go back there with the whole family but I shudder at the cost.
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I’ve started playing games on Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck. I started with the 2013 remake of Tomb Raider which I did in fact own for the PS3. (I just looked up the receipt and am shocked to discover that I got it less than four months after it came out—I almost never play any recent games.) Why play that? Well, I started Rise of the Tomb Raider but realised I barely remembered any of the first game and so went back. The interface is unfortunately ‘stuck’ in Japanese but I can read well enough to understand most of the instructions (the dialogue is in English). I’ve taken to having the Steam Deck always display the frame rate and it’s basically locked at 60fps.
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Back in 2021 I idly wondered whether you could have ‘a good value’ (as opposed to `good value’)? This seems to be an Americanism, or perhaps a regional thing within the United States. The person I originally noticed saying it was Marco Arment of Accidental Tech Podcast fame but the other day Apple pundit John Gruber did it too:
It’s a decent value for $130/year, a great value with the education discount, and it’s nice that Apple is still offering one-time purchasing, per app, for those who object to software subscriptions (or those who simply know they only want to use one or two of these apps).
‘A decent value’? Not merely ‘decent value’?
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In late 2019 and early 2020, I listened to a lot of 5 Seconds of Summer’s ‘Teeth’. It never turned me into much of a fan of the band beyond that song (well, and 2018’s ‘Youngblood’) but for reasons I can’t explain I never even tried listening to much else. This week I checked out 2022’s 5SOS and while it hasn’t changed my overall impression, I did quite like ‘Me Myself & I’ (Apple Music).
