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It was my birthday. I have reached the grand old age of 44. I was a little surprised to see that this year Ginza Cozy Corner had Sanrio characters for the seasonal selection box of tarts and cakes it regularly sells. Then I saw that’s exactly what they did last year and I felt even older.
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I had completely forgotten about the iPhone preorders starting at 9 pm JST on Saturday (why Saturday this year?) when Brandon messaged me at 8.57 pm to wish me luck getting an order in. That set off a mad dash to my phone to place my forgotten order. Fortunately, I had gone through the pre-preorder process the day before and all the critical information was ready to go. I launched the Apple Store app and (a force quit or two later) put in a preorder for a 256GB iPhone 18 Pro Max in the new burgundy colour for pick-up from the Shinjuku store on Friday. Then, on Friday, I went down, waited about 10 minutes and came back home, phone in hand and money out of wallet. I was busy all day and only got around to setting it up in the evening but so far, it seems very good. Not sure it was worth the price but let’s see.
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Speaking of prices, Japan is greatly increasing its visa application fees starting from 1 October. I felt bad about not submitting my visa application back in June before discovering that the earliest I could submit a renewal was 14 September. That said, here we are on Friday 18 September and I still don’t have everything ready to go. Next week for sure.
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I got my Zig implementation of Janet to a point where I consider it ‘done’. Of course, that then meant it was time to move to using it as the base for a fork of Janet that I hope I’ll be able to announce in the next weeknote.
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I started watching Only Murders in the Building again. The theme song started playing in episode 1 and I wondered why I’d waited so long. The experience of watching it can never be back in 2023 as I felt trapped in that hospital ward but it’s still an incredible amount of fun. I wish the kids were old enough to enjoy it with me. I really think that theme song might be my favourite of all time.
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A couple of weeks ago I watched Barry Ferns’ video on Steven Bartlett, a YouTuber who I’m vaguely aware of but have never really paid much mind. I thought it was fine, mostly confirming my priors that this genre is mostly there as a vehicle for advertising. Ferns made a follow-up video, ‘Diary of a CEO Responded to My Takedown. I Wasn’t Ready For This’, and if you’ve got an hour, I recommend it. It goes through the research you may have been familiar with regarding parasocial relationships before developing into something interesting.
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If you want something a little lighter, Brennan Pollack (AKA Ego Dip) made one of his reconstruction videos about Arctic Monkeys’ ‘505’. I remember listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare a lot in 2007 while I was working in Mikunigaoka on the JET Programme. I’m old now and didn’t realise that it had apparently become popular on TikTok but I’m glad it did. The song is great (Apple Music).
