Notices by マリオ (Mario Menti) (mario@neko.cat)

@threedaymonk haha, I feel kind of similar about the "corporate era" 😅 Three years ago I started a job at a large company, after having been mostly self-employed and working for small start-ups the previous 15 years. It's a change for sure, but I did end up actually enjoying a lot of it (not everything of course, and as you say, things can be chaotic and bureaucratic, but then there are things about startup life I didn't like either...)

Nice interview on Weixin with Paranoid Void, one of my favourite bands ever, from their recent festival appearance in China (interview in English, Chinese and Japanese).
#ParanoidVoid

Paranoid Void: TMS-Live 独家对话 | Montreux Jazz Festival 现场
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/YrU4QKKfsMEyXChcJafuVw?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaf6G7DlrNx1n95H2l6-Oq1VbudCPZAXe-uyHJVaDQ9-F3xV8Zz3iJLaIc8Tkw_aem_XfrNlyUpopddBp-3ACLG-w

LOL, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre loses his seat in Ontario ❤️

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/apr/28/canada-election-polls-mark-carney-liberals-pierre-poilievre-conservatives-donald-trump-live-updates?filterKeyEvents=false&page=with%3Ablock-6810970a8f082de087ab9c90#block-6810970a8f082de087ab9c90

I can't help thinking that "For the first time ever [thanks to Gen AI] , teaching as well as the best human tutors is within our reach." is wildly optimistic, at best. 🤔
#Duolingo

https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-replace-contract-workers

Hello, how is your Monday going?
#WorkingWithCats #DeskCat

Oh look, 20,000 artists scrobbled on #lastfm 🎶

Watched Flow this evening, and it's all kinds of lovely. I loved how it ended with that scene of (literal) self-reflection, which is alluded to at the start, and throughout the film (e.g. the lemur's mirror).
#Flow

@kotaro no apps or APIs for either of them though, as far as I know

@kotaro a couple of others I like that you could try (I mostly use then to translate between English and Japanese:
- https://translate.kagi.com/ (requires a subscription to Kagi search, but that in itself is really really good, 100x better than Google search these days)
- https://laratranslate.com

♫ Top 5 artists of the Last.week: wachi 蛙池 (37) SuiseiNoboAz (33) kanekoayano (23) Deerhoof (20) 橋本絵莉子 (20). #myweekcounted 562 Scrobbles with Lastfm #music via @lfm_blue

RIP #DavidThonas #PereUbu

https://thequietus.com/news/remember-them/david-thomas-pere-ubu-obituary/

@PiggyInSpace I saw them live in Tokyo a year ago, good fun 😊

New #Deerhoof out tomorrow 😻
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deerhoof-noble-and-godlike-in-ruin/

"HERE'S A THING I DID, AND WHY YOU SHOULD TOO" is the kind of headline that immediately makes me skip the article. Here's why you should too. 😁

I took this photo a few days ago, walking through Kamakura, and didn't really think much about it. Until someone said "this looks straight of Ghibli", and I guess they're right. 😊

And no stupid Gen AI required. 😅

#Kamakura #鎌倉 #Ghibliesque #Japan #日本

Hello from #DeskCat 😸
#CatsOfBluesky

♫ Top 5 artists of the Last.week: ZAZEN BOYS (12) モーモールルギャバン (12) Paranoid void (11) 橋本絵莉子 (1). #myweekcounted 36 Scrobbles with Lastfm #music via @lfm_blue

@shiawase speaking of translation, I actually liked the translation on the whole. It's quite old-fashioned (it was translated in the 1950s by Edward G. Seidensticker), but that slightly old-fashioned English works really well given the book is set towards the end of the 1930s.
It's quite funny how he added footnotes to terms like "sushi", which nowadays would be considered to be understood by any English reader, but clearly that wasn't the case then.
He couldn't find a way to translate the original title though (細雪), because the nuances don't translate into English (eg the 雪 mirrors Yukiko, perhaps the main character in the novel), so he didn't want to go with something literal like "light snow" or similar.

Someone is happy I'm home 😽
#CatsOfBluesky

I finished Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters in a marathon session on my flight back from Tokyo.
Fantastic book, but I didn't expect that after 562 pages, it would end with this sentence. 😅 ❤️

#Tanizaki #TheMakiokaSisters