Notices by マリオ (Mario Menti) (mario@neko.cat), page 4

Except for the Swiss connection, literally none of this is even remotely true. They must have used Gen AI 🤣

Oh, Tama! タマや

#MiekoKanai #OhTama #金井美恵子 #タマや

@JillsJoy @BlandGLdramas ah, I guess this is based on Sang Young Park's novel?

Very late to this as usual, but watched The Boy and The Heron (君たちは どう生きるか, How do you live your life) tonight.

What a brilliant film. And because in my Japanese evening class we're currently covering 敬語 (keigo, honorific speech), I think my ears started picking it up everywhere. Things like 奥様が部屋にいらっしゃらないんですよ, and when the great uncle tells Mahito to look at the stones he says ご覧 (look) rather than 見て, I couldn't help thinking "yeah, we just learned that" 😅. Still feel like (and am) very much a beginner, but it's nice when some things fall into place.

But I digress, it's a great film regardless of your Japanese knowledge, or lack of it.

#君たちはどう生きるか #TheBoyAndTheHeron #StudioGhibli

Starting to look like autumn

https://www.instagram.com/tokyotimes_lee/

“Clutter isn’t really an east versus west thing,” continued Tsuzuki. “It’s a rich versus poor thing. Wherever you go, anywhere in the world, the wealthy have the luxury of living in clean, minimal spaces, while the poor have to make do with small, cramped ones, without any way to hide their belongings.”

Great long read, with some nice photos by one of my favourite Tokyo street photographers, Lee Chapman (IG link to his account in the comments, if anyone is interested).

After Marie Kondo: the return of Japan’s joyful clutter | Life and style | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/oct/17/after-marie-kondo-the-return-of-japans-joyful-clutter

@kojinmanus I'll never not love envy, but I think I need to give it a proper listen. Listened to it a couple of times but while working, and there's a couple of songs that caught my attention, but some of it felt more like "usual envy"... but as I say, it may grow on me once I listen properly. I increasingly find that albums I end up really liking are not those that immediately catch my attention.

I still buy a lot of music, and my Jellyfin-based collection/streaming is slowly growing (just under 800 albums so far - I only tend to upload albums I buy digitally, so there's still a lot of CDs I may (or more likely may not) be bothered to rip and upload.

Jellyfin is really quite nice (you can also use it for video streaming, but I only buy music, no films or TV series). I host it on a very modest Ubuntu AWS EC2 instance, with the audio files stored on AWS S3 and mounted on the EC2 instance (so storage is pretty cheap too).

And is has a nice web player, and good 3rd party apps for both Android (Symfonium is my favourite) and iOS (Finamp). The Jellyfin server even has a Last.fm plugin so everything scrobbles. 😀

#Jellyfin

@flowerpot she's always helping

The usual problem trying to do this week's Japanese homework 😹

#LearningJapanese #JapaneseHomework #日本語を勉強する #日本語の宿題 #CatsOfMastodon

“For me, the cat is my teacher,” he says. “Actually, not only cats, but trees, insects. ... They are all living without thinking about progress. They repeat the same thing and eventually die. That’s all. That’s the cycle of life, the cycle of nature — and only human beings are going, like, linear, and we ended up destroying the Earth because of that.”

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2024/10/12/film/cats-of-gokogu-shrine-kazuhiro-soda

Good piece on AlphaFold, especially if (like me) you don't really understand what it does.
#AlphaFold

I was a beta tester for the Nobel prize-winning AlphaFold AI – it’s going to revolutionise health research
https://theconversation.com/i-was-a-beta-tester-for-the-nobel-prize-winning-alphafold-ai-its-going-to-revolutionise-health-research-241084

Han Kang’s Nobel win underscores essential role of translators as literary taste makers.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2024/10/11/books/han-kang-translation-nobel-literature

Chill Friday evening 😽
#CatsOfMastodon

I really like this - 怪物 (kaibutsu, "monster") from the new album (with the same name) by 黒岩あすか (Asuka Kuroiwa).

It starts with a simple repetitive piano melody and almost whispered spoken vocals, but halfway through slowly becomes louder and more intense with noisy drums and distorted guitar.

「呪いをかけて、わたしに呪いを。
呪いを解いて、怪物になる前に。」
“Cast a curse, cast a curse on me.
Break the curse, before I become a monster.”

She was quoted somewhere saying this about the album:
とても怖い怪物に変化してしまうこともあれば、 自分で良い呪いをかけて、とても優しい怪物に変化することもできると思う。 どう捉えるかは人それぞれ、わたしは優しい怪物になりたい。だから「怪物」というアルバムを作りました。
Sometimes, we might turn into very scary monsters, but I believe we can also cast a good curse on ourselves and transform into very kind monsters. How we perceive it depends on the person. I want to become a kind monster. That's why I created the album "Monster."

Wanting to become a kind monster seems like a good life goal to me 😅.

#黒岩あすか #AsukaKuroiwa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uBCGkZEX2w

@sean I mean, on reflection, given one file is JS and one is Ruby, I should have known this wouldn't work automatically... 😅

Some amazing pictures here of (and inspired by) Kowloon Walled City, both contemporary photographs and more recent AI art by Bianca Tse.

Speaking of the latter, the recent flood of Gen AI-generated images has left me bored out of my skull, so these inages serve as a nice reminder that in the hands of an artist, AI *can* be used to create very impressive and interesting art. But it takes more than a bit of prompt engineering 😁.

HKFP Lens: Hong Kong's notorious Kowloon Walled City revealed

https://hongkongfp.com/2024/10/11/hkfp-lens-hong-kongs-notorious-kowloon-walled-city-revealed-in-new-photo-exhibition/

❤️ 👏

Japanese atomic bomb survivors win Nobel Peace Prize - BBC News

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5y23qgx0qo

@sean ah, perfect thanks! I had stupidly assumed that because it wasn't hardcoded in one place anymore, the validator file would have picked that up too... should have checked. Thanks fir your help! 😊