tiredofsametab

As someone who speaks conversational Japanese (well, probably more since I do banking, doctor, etc. on my own, but my grammar is far from perfect), and fluent English, Google’s AI can make some… questionable choices when translating at least. My wife (fluent Japanese speaker who knows a little English) and I decided to play with its translator function when I got a pixel phone and once again a bit latter trying to come up with some English practice for her.

Japanese is definitely a bit more difficult to work with since it’s so context-dependent and has lots of homophones (one reason translating things into Japanese and back can be interesting, particularly in the older days of Google Translate). It’s fine for short, concise, and non-complex sentences, but even certain formal grammar and honorifics can be bad with the AI translation services.

I don’t use salt but rather soy sauce and/or fish sauce which is salt + umami. Smoked paprika also adds a nice smokiness if you’re not using any kind of smoked chilis.

Cincy-style chili has cinnamon among other things, so that makes sense. I accidentally grabbed the wrong spice jar and dumped cinnamon directly into my non-Cincy-style chili and it still came out pretty decent.

I used chantix back in the day, but it also required me basically not leaving the house for a month to really get there. When and where I quit for the first time (I would later start dating a smoker and relapse, then quit again), smoking was still allowed indoors and I had a huge association with drinking and smoking. Same for certain other places and situations. I basically had to do everything I could to avoid those. It got easier with time.

Expected treasure, but safe contained a live panther; would not buy again.

apologies to XKCD

I hate to be a killjoy, but it’ll clearly be a single deposit layer dated to on or after the latest date-able item. The fill will all be the same and its own distinct layer against the rest of the area. If you have a long enough time to keep it open, want to dig more, and have different fills, you might be able to accomplish something, but the different fill materials would likely have no real match in the surrounding still making it obvious.

Mid-40s: it feels fine. It both complicates and un-complicates various things for later in life, but that’s life.

I do like kids, but never wanted my own (at least biologically; I never fully ruled out adoption). We have nieces and nephews we can spoil instead of our own, heh.

Oh, I wasn’t even thinking about places that changed time; I thought it was something just related to winter itself, hence the confusion. Thanks!

“Great, we could sleep one hour more” can you explain this? I have no idea how the season determines how many hours of sleep everyone gets in a day,

I keep wanting to buy a 500 or something a bit newer for nostalgia, but that’s hard (a) from Japan where they never really got off the ground and (b) as time goes on they get fewer and more expensive. Not a furry, however.

1 Can Cream Of Cheddar

I have never heard of this before. Huh.

Japanese usually just say 時計回り (clockwise) or counter-clockwise

My dude, look at my post history. I actually noticed it and though “eh, I’ll fix it later” since my wife had finished her coffee and we wanted to free up a table for the people waiting at the cafe.

Yep. I’m getting worse at typing on my phone as I get older. Or my phone keyboard/screen protector sucks; one of the two

If japanese has one, I’ve never heard it. Japanese wife hasn’t either. She was surprised it’s a thing. She said maybe tradesmen might, but certainly nothing everyone knows

Depends upon how you’re seeing liquid. If you just mean water, definitely not. If you mean things that behave like liquids behave or are in their liquid phase (is magma liquid here?) then I’m not sure

like using imperial units.

Not even proper ones; they’re US Customary units now so all the names are the same but many have different metric equivalents. As someone trying to convert his family recipes to metric and weight-based, this was maddening when all I could get were cup measures for the “wrong” size of cup. Add differences in flour between countries and that was a fun time.

When I was last in the US, most of the supermarkets and such had the eink displays, but most other places didn’t yet.

The reason usually mentioned is that the labels are produced centrally or some such. Though "They know the price to charge at the till’ might be slightly off when the tax is calculated on the transaction as a whole rather than on a per-item basis (i.e. rounding shenanigans). That seems like a totally solvable problem to me, though.

I took my wife to meet my parents and had to remind her when we went shopping that we had to add tax to everything (and tip in bars/restaurants/etc.) Some things looked cheaper than in Japan until tax (especially at that time when the exchange rate was awful).

• learn the language AND CUSTOMS
• don’t hang out in foreigner/english bubbles
• don’t assume anything works the way it does in the US (from gasoline and driving to medical to government). There are lots of little things that seem like they obviously must be done X way but aren’t in other countries
• be careful with any investments. It’s very easy to end up with PFICs which are punitively taxed (making retirement vehicles here in Japan outside of the national pension prohibitive for me, for instance).
• celebrate
• bring any snacks that you can legally bring but they can’t legally sell (some things with food dyes, etc. if you really like them are banned in some countries to produce/sell but not eat).