American Gaijin

  • The Brain

    So I heard an interesting question the other day – I found it on the thumbnail of YouTube video.  It’s apparently part of skit by Bill Burr – which I haven’t watched, and at the moment, don’t plan to.  But it asked an interesting question, one which has been reverberating through my mind ever since…

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  • Thoughts on Worship

    As with most of my posts, wherever you think this is going to go, it probably won’t, so take that for what you will. I have been on a binge of watching Babymetal and Sakura Gakuin lately.  No idea why, it’s just what popped up on YouTube and I get bored.  So I was churning…

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  • Thoughts on Idols

    I mentioned a couple of posts back about a video by Sakura Gakuin, where they were singing a song called “Graduation Toss” and where they pretty much were finding it impossible to hold it together.  You could see it on their faces throughout the song.  One girl was just about one word away from completely…

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  • Losing

    I admit it.  I play a waifu game. These are a form of “gacha” games – of which “Raid: Shadow Legends” is perhaps one of the more artificially famous varieties.  Except the characters are all very beautiful women, most of whom have very large breasts.  I mean, very large breasts.  One character has what I not…

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  • Magic

    As a child, the world was magic. When you’re a child, you don’t know how anything works, and generally, even if someone explained it to you, you wouldn’t really understand. I remember a few things as a child.  I remember in first grade they played a video of two alien puppets in what was supposed…

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  • Yui Mizuno: Unfinished Business

    For those of you who are unfamiliar, Babymetal started with three singers:  Nakamoto Suzuka, Kikuchi Moa, and Mizuno Yui.  At one point, Yui had to leave the group for unspecified health reasons (which are none of anyone’s business, if we’re being blunt about it) and hasn’t been heard from since.  Many fans miss her a…

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  • Graduation Toss

    So lately I discovered a song by the (now defunct, iirc) group called Sakura Gakuin called “Graduation Toss”.  In particular, a live, extremely emotional version where nearly all the girls are on the verge of crying throughout the song, and people seem to take a rather unhealthy interest in exactly who’s near tears and when. …

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  • Thin-Skinned Japanese People: One Mystery Solved

    So, last night, I had a question answered that’s been bugging me for years. On YouTube, one of the major things I tend to watch is Japanese or Japanese-oriented content.  One channel I currently follow is a guy who reacts to random Japanese videos as a “try not to laugh challenge”.  I remarked that the…

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  • The Trouble with the Internet

    Writing in this blog is difficult.  I think it’s because there’s a mix of two drives – a need to share, and a rather strong distaste for the medium in which I’m sharing. I’ve been on the net, in one form or another, since I was maybe seventeen or eighteen.  That’s…  around twenty-five years now,…

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  • Playing to My Talents

    So here’s something I bet you didn’t know:  the concept of a “talent” is actually a biblical concept.  Specifically, in the times of Jesus, a talent was a large block of silver, maybe 80 lbs or so.  They were very, very valuable.  Today, it would be just over $4,000.  The concept of a talent being…

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