Either you really really hate Beastie Starter or you really really love it. (I’m in the latter camp.)
How did this photo even come out this well? It was shot with 1/20 shutter speed, and I’m usually real shaky, plus I wasn’t even trying as hard as most of the other photos that were this good.
Still.
Those lights were intoxicating.
If anyone needed proof that using real names online doesn’t magically make everyone behave in a civil manner, may I suggest reading Donald Trump’s election night tweets?
Unless Google is doing something they simply aren’t allowed to do, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about. My suspicion is they’re just being drama queens while they get the app finished to give something people to talk about.
It shouldn’t be a big shock to anyone, but I’m headed back to Japan in early 2013.
Plane tickets are purchased as of this afternoon and through the miracle of Hipmunk, I have somehow managed to grab the best plane tickets I could have imagined.
- Tickets were $1285, round trip, which is bananas. Last year’s were in the $1600 ballpark, IIRC?
- Quebec-Toronto-Narita on January 23rd, and Narita-Toronto-Quebec on March 6th.
- That means no US layovers; no TSA porno scanners, no crotch pat-downs, and no scary US customs people.1
- Toronto layovers are somewhere around 4 hours each, which means I will actually be able to do things at a leisurely pace instead of this year’s layover in Chicago, which was one hour long, and involved going through US immigration and customs, grabbing a train to the US/Canada terminal, and going through security all over again.
- No Montreal! I purposefully went with the airport in Quebec because Montreal traffic is completely fucking retarded and the last thing I need when I’m trying to catch a plane. My initial flight searches a few months ago came up with Quebec-Montreal-Vancouver-Tokyo, which honestly, I wouldn’t have minded just because driving to Quebec is sane and driving to Montreal is basically torture, but eliminating Montreal altogether is even better.
- And this is just a nerd point, but all flights are Air Canada, so in theory, that means I can use Passbook to get on all my flights. Yay.
Current plans:
- Accommodations haven’t been dealt with yet but I have a good idea of where and what I’m going to do; unless anything goes wrong, I’ll be staying around Ichikawacho in Yokohama.
- Meetups with various Twitter people! If you’re cool, nudge me and we’ll do something. I can do anything in the Tokyo metro area fairly easily; if you’re from outside of there and you’re super special, maybe I can come out to your hood.
- AOU, which apparently is called Japan Amusement Expo now.
- Lots of photos.
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I’m sorry you thought I was suspicious, Officer, but maybe you should be more tolerant of people who didn’t get enough sleep because they’re super-excited to go to a foreign country they haven’t been to before, whose only business in the US is a layover anyway. ↩
