Places in Tokyo

Apr. 20th, 2026 01:12 pm
rynling: (Default)
[personal profile] rynling
Last week, a few of my students told me that my Japanese fiction class has inspired them to visit Tokyo this May, and they asked for recommendations. I’m the sort of boring nerd who loves bookstores and bases my travels on a foundation of finding nice cafés to sit down and chill out, but I did my best to make a list of places that might be fun for people in their early 20s. This was a labor of love, so I thought I’d share it here too.

So here are some of my favorite spots in Tokyo:

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And now for some daytrips:

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Re: Tears of the Kingdom

Apr. 19th, 2026 09:05 am
rynling: (Cool Story Bro)
[personal profile] rynling
Anyway my trick is that writing fanfic helped me remember how much I enjoy playing these games.

Like check out (this) design draft of Zelda from The Archives of Hyrule by the amazingly stylish Conito. How can I not love this character?

Tears of the Kingdom

Apr. 19th, 2026 07:43 am
rynling: (Gators)
[personal profile] rynling
I also started a new game of Tears of the Kingdom!

My deep dark fandom confession is that, while I understand and agree with the (many) criticisms of this game, I’ve actually really come to love it. A lot of the big-picture story ideas are poorly considered, but most of the smaller game design choices are brilliant.

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* My answer to any and all questions concerning Ganondorf is that he’s a dramatic little bitch, so it's best just to sit back and enjoy the show. He raised an entire castle into the sky for fun! Are you not entertained? Give the man his flowers.

The Wind Waker

Apr. 18th, 2026 06:13 pm
rynling: (Terra)
[personal profile] rynling
The Wind Waker is a marvelous game. A miraculous work of art. A blessing directly from heaven. A beautiful shining treasure on this earth.

I haven’t gotten to the relaxing part (the sailing) yet, but that’s okay. I always forget what an incredible charm offensive the opening hour of the game is, and I’m always delighted.

I love how, when Link is leaving Outset Island, the music crescendos into a heroic swell as he waves goodbye to everyone on the island from the stern of a pirate ship – but just when the song is about to reach its climax and transition into the classic Legend of Zelda theme, it crashes to a halt when Tetra is like, “Are you fucking done?” I love her so much, and also. That’s thematic foreshadowing babeyyyy.

I also somehow managed to forget how cool the first encounter with Ganondorf is. I love the way his face distorts into the most bitter and unhinged smile, and the way he ever-so-slightly twists his chin to signal the Helmaroc King (his giant pet murder bird) to release Link back into the ocean. Ganondorf covets that wind, and I covet... his magnificent bone structure...

2026 Writing Log, Part Fifteen

Apr. 17th, 2026 08:14 am
rynling: (Mog Toast)
[personal profile] rynling
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It’s the end of the semester, and I’m running on fumes. The absurdity of the current worldstate isn’t helping. Still, I’m going to make a serious effort to vent less and be more chill and normal going forward. I set up my Wii U to play Wind Waker, and hopefully spending some relaxing time on the Great Sea will help. But I won’t lie, a productive eight-hour workday with a Death Note would help more.
rynling: (Gators)
[personal profile] rynling
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You get why I suspect that this answer was created by Gen-AI, right?

It’s not so much the writing itself, but rather the tone and context. The student’s answer is completely wrong, but it’s written with complete confidence. His answer is something that could conceivably be possible... but again, it’s totally unsupported, not to mention totally irrelevant. So where does the student’s confidence come from? And also, given that he’s apparently unable to read the specified paragraph, where does that smoothness of writing come from? Why does he feel the need to write a perfectly balanced three-sentence paragraph when a simple four-word answer would suffice?

I am so fucking ready for this semester to be over, you have no idea.

I am a Blogger™

Apr. 15th, 2026 07:28 am
rynling: (Cool Story Bro)
[personal profile] rynling
I'm currently reading two books about bloggers and influencers (Hooked and If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You), and I was thinking about what I would even talk about if I shared aspects of my real life online. Is academia interesting? I don't think it's interesting! Also generally only bad things happen. For example:

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Fun times, fun times.
julian: Picture of the sign for Julian Street. (Default)
[personal profile] julian
On Sunday, we had Ny's Online Thing. (Wake. Memorial.)

It was very good; full of singing and poetry and science facts and art and memories and sadnesses. and made me sort of/almost cry at various time periods, but because I was the Official Zoom Host I felt like I couldn't, like, take breaks, which is of course Never True. Once it finished, I ended up with a dyspeptic-and-congestion-related headache that took a bit to clear out, but it did eventually.

There were a thousand small details that I didn't quite think of, which makes sense because generally I'm not the one hosting large Zooms, or, for that matter, organizing memorials. And also, the sad.

The general inchoate "we" of the Discord have been hashing out ethical stuff about posting and/or linking to the video of the memorial. Because, it was a semi-public event, but also private, and the simultaneous chat in particular had a lot of linking up wallet names and online handles that is perfectly fine in a semi-private space, but less so in the wider world. And yet, one of the things I appreciated about Ny was that she created a life where she could, to the extent possible, be as much herself as she could, out loud, and I don't want her life's celebration muffled.

But, we didn't quite make it clear that it might be posted later, or ask people if they were OK with it being posted (see above re: small details), and in the general sense, we're fans of opt-in rather than opt-out. So we've come to a (current) compromise. I am quite positive there will be further movement later. (For all I know, someone'll make it a Project to ask everyone who was there if they're OK with it being public, or if they'd like their identities ambiguated. I'm sure not doing it, though, because I have overdue client notes to write.) But anyway, for now, we're not sending out the chat, but will send out the video. So!

If you're interested, either

a) email vicka about it, and she can send you the video. (vicka's the one with the Ny Page, which was where I originally found out about the dying-of-COVID part. Her email is findable on the wider andor pages.)

or b) PM me/comment here/email me/send me a carrier pigeon, and I can send you a link to the video, which is on Mega, which is how I got it to vicka because I decided I wasn't up to figuring out SCP. I'm not including the chat there because of the aforementioned linkages.

Or c) [personal profile] gingicat is, soon, going to post the link to the announce-list, if you're on that.

Yay ❤️

Apr. 14th, 2026 10:24 am
rynling: (Default)
[personal profile] rynling
Bloodborne Video Game Getting R-Rated Animated Movie Adaptation From Sony
https://variety.com/2026/film/news/bloodborne-video-game-r-rated-animated-movie-adaptation-sony-cinemacon-1236720936/

PlayStation’s Bloodborne is being developed into an R-rated animated feature for Sony Pictures that the studio says will embrace the carnage that made the game so popular. Sanford Panitch, president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group, promised during the studio’s CinemaCon presentation that the long-rumored film will be “very true” to the gory spirit of Bloodborne, which follows a traveler who journeys into a gothic city full of nightmarish creatures.

Not gonna lie, they had me at "animated."

The case of the missing notifications

Apr. 11th, 2026 11:58 pm
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

I am an Educator™

Apr. 11th, 2026 07:25 am
rynling: (Gators)
[personal profile] rynling
If you're wondering how I've been handling the near-total use of Gen-AI among my students this semester, pretty early on I just threw my hands up and said: Okay you win, no more papers. Class is now more or less an in-person interactive podcast with pictures (PowerPoint standup with crowdwork?) and that's fine. Less work for me.

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Anyway my actual job is to be a researcher. I'm not getting paid to reform higher education.

2026 Writing Log, Part Fourteen

Apr. 10th, 2026 08:32 am
rynling: (Mog Toast)
[personal profile] rynling
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I don’t know how this works for other people, but one of the weird things about writing fiction for me is that I really have to sit down, shut out the rest of the world, and put myself in a certain headspace. I’ve been neglecting this practice, and I’m getting kind of rusty. It feels very selfish to carve out that sort of “room of one’s own,” but I need to get my fiction writing stamina back!
forestofglory: A green pony with a braided mane and tail and tree cutie mark (Lady Business)
[personal profile] forestofglory posting in [community profile] ladybusiness
After years of struggling to read new-to-me fiction, I’ve recently entered a phase of reading graphic novels and comics and I’ve been reading so much! (It helps that I accidentally got into a comics-based fandom via stress-reading fic late last year.) It’s only April yet I have already read more books this year than I have in any year since 2020, it's truly wild. I haven’t had this much fun reading in ages!

I wanted to share some of the things I’ve been enjoying, so I thought I’d write a rec list. I find graphic novels easier to focus on when I’m stressed than prose novels, and I also love getting to see so much art. I’ve been mostly reading MG and YA works – it feels like there is a lot going on in that space right now! Plus it’s a space where there tend to be many stories focused on friendship, which I really enjoy. I’ve also been choosing more lighthearted things to read. The world is stressful and I can’t deal with stressful reading at the moment.

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rynling: (Gators)
[personal profile] rynling
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I think I can achieve the first four on my own; but, for the fifth, self-publishing really isn't going to cut it. Unfortunately, that’s not up to me, so it’s definitely worth focusing on what I can do without the approval of gatekeepers.

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