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We received our first Level 4 flood warning on Tuesday evening at around 9.30 pm. Level 4 is the level at which evacuation is recommended. This is the first warning we’ve had since moving into the house and it was certainly unnerving. I like the area where we live but it does come with a greater flooding risk than any of the previous places we’ve been in since coming to Tokyo. Apparently, evacuation in a flood situation can mean retreat to the upper levels of a building if the level of inundation expected is minor. So, given that Nerima’s official hazard map shows our street as having up to 50 cm of flooding, we decided not to leave the house and instead bring the kids upstairs. A real time-ish measure of the river’s water level indicated the rate had already started to ease at the time the Level 4 announcement was made and, sure enough, over the next two hours the waters fell back down and it all ended without any flooding at all.
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Apple’s annual iPhone event was streamed in the early hours of Thursday morning. Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pros and the much-anticipated foldable iPhone, iPhone Duo. There was no mention of the ordinary iPhone 18 (or a successor to the iPhone Air) but the rumours are that those will be announced early next year. I’m not sure what to do. My iPhone 14 Pro Max is four years old and I’d like to upgrade but the new Pro Max starts (starts!) at ¥240,000. My 14 Pro Max cost ¥165,000 in 2022 and, at the time, I was able to trade-in my 13 Pro Max for ¥89,000 which made that price feel a lot more reasonable. My 14’s Lightning Port no longer works and it has some dings on its frame that mean it’s not eligible for a trade-in so if I do upgrade, I’m paying the full price. There’s also the fact that—charging port aside—my phone is actually doing just fine. The battery capacity is down to 75% but the Pro Max’s battery is so large that most of the time, that’s more than enough. I really only notice when I’m out all day with no opportunity to charge—and even then, so long as I put the phone on low power mode, it’s not an issue. If I hold out til February, I’ll likely be able to buy a refurbished iPhone 17 Pros Max for a reduced price; how much less, I don’t know.
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I’m not sure how I’ve managed to go this long without having seen this but back in November 2021 Michael Arndt, the screenwriter for Toy Story 3, put up an amazing video on YouTube. It’s a recording of a lecture he originally delivered back in 2011 at Pixar about the lessons he learnt in the writing of Toy Story 3. Pixar famously has an iterative story process where they produce animatics (which they call ‘story reels’) that they screen for their core creative team to watch and evaluate during the development of a film. The amazing thing about Arndt’s video is that he got permission to include a number of these story reels for several key scenes in Toy Story 3 so that he can illustrate how he originally wrote it and then how the finished scene in the film turned out. It is 72 minutes but if you have any interest in story or film, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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I was asking ChatGPT what ever happened to 1990s alternative rock band, the Presidents of the United States of America, and after we went back and forth a bit, it recommended that I might enjoy their little-noticed 2004 album, Love Everybody (Apple Music). I’m not sure how I feel about passing on a recommendation from a chatbot but I did think it was pretty good.
