Society & Culture
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Quest with Questers
I was making a thumb drive with videos for my cars and kinda went down an old school rabbit hole. I remember when we had groundbreaking sounds, lyrical feats, and French hip hop was a thing. Remember Luck of Lucien? That’s this dude: AKA Lucien Revolucien. But hip hop kinds fell victim to its own success. I know, because I grew up through the revolution. Hip hop won the war against against old values and just became the BGM. My daughter saw me flipping through YouTube videos and lamenting the current near-absence of female rappers. She said, “Well, there sure isn’t any Lauryn Hill.” Damn, I raised my kids right.
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Assekoeken
Couque d’Asse is a popular Korean-made cookie featuring a delicate, crisp biscuit with a creamy white chocolate or coffee filling, often sold individually wrapped. The name is a nod to the French word “couque,” meaning “cake,” and “d’Asse,” which refers to the Belgian city of Asse, although the cookie itself is a modern snack from Korea. To add a bit more to the cultural mix, this is a Japanese cookie being sold in a Thai department store. Why did they make the “D’asses” plural if it refers to a singular Belgian town? Because they love couques?
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“It would be an honor if you would go to homecoming with me”
I’ve been gone from the states for so long, I didn’t even understand what a hoco proposal poster was. My immediate thought was that it must put an awful lot of pressure on the girls. But when I asked my daughter, she said girls feel insulted if you don’t make a poster. I’m so old and out of it. The title of this post was an answer to “how to ask someone to hoco without a poster,” which appeared among the first page of search results for “hoco poster,” along with an illustrated WikiHow guide.
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A few shorts from the past month
I regret nothing. Except accidentally washing my passport when I got back home from all the trips. We went to Pattaya and Phuket on separate trips to visit students interning at various hotels. Met a lot of cool people and saw a lot of crazy things. I got what seemed to be food poisoning in Pattaya, possibly from a beloved plate of seafood rad na, but who knows? Food poisoning happens (for me, every five years or so), and the culprit is not always clear. I took off for the Phuket trip still feeling nauseous. On the plane from Don Muang to Phuket, we sat in back of a foreign…
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Many centenarians actually do not live to 100?
An Ig Nobel prize winner this year says: The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on. Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death. The Japanese government has run one…
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Playing with Gemini Live
I’ve been trying to force Gemini Live and Chat GPT into reversing their original positions on several topics this weekend. They are both initially resistant to changing their stances on issues, reminiscent of stubborn kids who enter debate on an issue while blindly following the One True Way which they had collected and put in their basket for later use. However, if pressed, both of these AIs will come around – they can be convinced both textually and verbally, which s somehow satisfying to me. One interesting prompt is to ask AI to compare itself with competing systems. I found that they talk similar trash about each other, but when…
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Old Tom and the Law of the Tongue
Yesterday, I was still recovering from a cold I came down with at the end of the year, so I had a good excuse to put off work and feverishly surf old RSS feeds. I ended up stumbling across the best Wikipedia article I’d seen for ages: Killer whales of Eden, New South Wales I want to start in reverse chronological order. New South Wales, Australia, is home to the Eden Whale Festival, which celebrates the southern migration of the humpback and other whales. This area is historically important for being the home of a whaling industry after the arrival of Europeans, and much further back, subsistence whaling by native…
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Chicano Subculture in Thailand and Japan
There was a resurgence of interest in “Thai Chicanos” last year, resulting in a few articles and videos across the web. The most entertaining video, however, is the one from almost a decade ago, about the “Cholos of Bangkok,” by Coconuts TV. Also last year, an interesting YouTube video documenting “Japan’s Chicano Culture In LA” was published by Peter Santenello: However, the true counterpart to the “Cholos of Bangkok” is “Inside Japan’s Chicano Subculture” by the NYT: From a language and culture standpoint, all of these are enthralling. I’ve watched them all multiple times and pick up on new details every time.
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“Masterpiece Of Human Documentation”
I might as well use this as a chance to mention that we may be going-going back-back to Cali-Cali within the next couple of years… but if the streets back home vibe like this every day, I might not even mind being away from Thailand for very long.
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Tokyo Olympics 2021 (2020)
The Olympics needs better commentary. Like this: note: It’s now known as Artistic Swimming, not Synchronized Swimming.
