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On Saturday, Eri took Emma to an open day at Bunka Gakuen University Junior and Senior High School, which unfortunately was limited in capacity so wasn’t something we could all attend. I wasn’t expecting to find any Times Car car-sharing cars available (I am aware how many times I just wrote the word ‘car’), but lo and behold there was one available on short notice so I booked it and then took John and Rowan over to Hobby Center Kato, the model train shop that’s attached to the Kato Precision Railroad Models head office (Wikipedia). Since it’s not really the purpose of the building, the shop isn’t that big but it does have a rather intricate diorama set up on the ground floor that was fun to see. I probably flubbed the entire trip by not spending the money to ‘play’ with the upstairs diorama. I think the idea is that you get a train and a brief window of time to operate it on a dedicated track so that, in theory, you don’t mess things up for anyone else but I know my boys and I’m not confident they would have, like life, found a way.
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I wish I’d had somewhere more interesting to go for lunch but the best option was a nearby Gusto, a Japanese ‘family restaurant’. I’ve written about visiting family restaurants a couple of times before, but in looking for a good explainer for readers unfamiliar with Japanese Western cuisine (not a typo), the Government of Japan actually has a decent English-language webpage. My tax dollars hard at work, I guess.
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Monday was Marine Day (Wikipedia) and I decided to celebrate by taking Emma and John to see Toy Story 5. The movie has been out for a few weeks now and I was a little surprised at how few cinemas around us were showing the subtitled version (i.e. the English dub). The easiest to go to was the Toho Cinemas in Shinjuku which I’m not sure I’d ever visited. This is the one with the Godzilla sticking out the top. It’s a bit of a shame that the district where the cinema is located, Kabukichō (Wikipedia) is a red-light district because the cinema would otherwise be the obvious choice for us to frequent. We went at 9 in the morning so nothing risqué was even open but the short walk from Seibu Shinjuku Station to the cinema was pretty rough on the nose.
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I think the opinion we’re supposed to express about TS5 is that it’s emblematic of the complete creative bankruptcy of the U.S. entertainment industrial complex but I am going to zag and instead tell you the movie was great. If you want an example of how bad things can get, there is at least one in cinemas right now—from Disney no less—but it’s not TS5. The reason Toy Story 5 avoids this problem is that it’s not really a Toy Story movie in the sense that these films are about Woody and Buzz. It’s really like a spin-off, with the focus this time on the cowgirl Jessie. I don’t know if Pixar can pull this trick again but it worked a treat this time.
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I had some inchoate sense that AT Protocol (Wikipedia), the protocol behind Bluesky, is better than alternatives like ActivityPub (Wikipedia). I only just came across this but in January of this year, Dan Abramov (a proponent of AT Protocol), wrote a good primer that helps make that sense much more solid.
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Speaking of links to the web, I thought about writing to Hank Green (Wikipedia) about Crossmate as I know he’s into word games. I wanted an e-mail address and went to his personal website to find one. There’s not one listed there but his website is delightful.
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I was talking to Eugenia about the band Garbage (we were discussing the first CDs we’d bought in the 90s) and that prompted me to go back and listen to Version 2.0. I mostly bought the CD for ‘I Think I’m Paranoid’ (Apple Music) but the whole album is a banger.
