I used to like cats more, and I understand that in some situations they're the better pet (e.g., apartments), but no cat has ever managed to even scratch the surface of the immense effusion of love that the right dog will give you without fail.
Source: I am biased and my dog is/has always been adorable and the best
On July 12 2017 12:30 Ketara wrote: They're usually not feral. It's normal for families to let their animals roam during the day and come back for dinner. Cats and dogs.
Meeting with the parents went well. I'm unofficially engaged. Apparently we don't get to make it official till November for cultural reasons.
Probably a stupid question - if I have HBO Now, I can watch GoT at premier time on Sunday, right?
On July 12 2017 20:48 Requizen wrote: Had a lightning storm last night and it killed our router through the surge protector. I'm actually kind of impressed.
Luckily this is still at the old place so we might as well just move the computers and stuff and buy a new router.
That storm is coming our way soon. Hoping for a good one.
At least it was the router and not your PC power source or something. I had a scare with my TV yesterday cause it was stuck in a boot cycle (is that even what its called with TVs now? i guess they are smart enough) but all I had to do was unplug the USB and it worked fine.
I'm gonna go on my summer holiday soon (wee!), gonna do something like 2 weeks in Philippines, 3 weeks in Japan and 2 weeks in Korea.
I doubt our TLers have much info on Philippines and Japan, but if we have anybody who has spent time in Korea I'd be interested in talking to them about stuff.
On July 12 2017 16:12 Ketara wrote: Weddings gonna be in California broseph.
Sweet. Shorter flight.
On July 13 2017 10:36 Ketara wrote: Hey guys.
I'm gonna go on my summer holiday soon (wee!), gonna do something like 2 weeks in Philippines, 3 weeks in Japan and 2 weeks in Korea.
I doubt our TLers have much info on Philippines and Japan, but if we have anybody who has spent time in Korea I'd be interested in talking to them about stuff.
On July 12 2017 12:30 Ketara wrote: They're usually not feral. It's normal for families to let their animals roam during the day and come back for dinner. Cats and dogs.
A significant portion are strays at least (talking Bangkok, the rest of the country didn't seem as bad). And probably 5-10% of the strays are feral. More of the dogs than cats, but meh. Probably the worst part of the culture shock for me, there might be 100 stray animals just chilling at the rail station, and a few dozen along every street.
Good lawd, Bangkok is estimated to have 300k stray dogs. Whelp. Wouldn't surprise me if they had half a million stray dogs and cats. So that's like... 25k-50k ferals if I'm right? Yeesh.
I'm gonna go on my summer holiday soon (wee!), gonna do something like 2 weeks in Philippines, 3 weeks in Japan and 2 weeks in Korea.
I doubt our TLers have much info on Philippines and Japan, but if we have anybody who has spent time in Korea I'd be interested in talking to them about stuff.
On July 12 2017 12:30 Ketara wrote: They're usually not feral. It's normal for families to let their animals roam during the day and come back for dinner. Cats and dogs.
A significant portion are strays at least (talking Bangkok, the rest of the country didn't seem as bad). And probably 5-10% of the strays are feral. More of the dogs than cats, but meh. Probably the worst part of the culture shock for me, there might be 100 stray animals just chilling at the rail station, and a few dozen along every street.
Good lawd, Bangkok is estimated to have 300k stray dogs. Whelp. Wouldn't surprise me if they had half a million stray dogs and cats. So that's like... 25k-50k ferals if I'm right? Yeesh.
I'm sure it depends on what you define as a stray. If somebody is feeding it is it a stray animal? Or does it have to actually spend most of its time in property that belongs to a person to not be a stray animal?
It's common practice (and horrible) for Thai people to buy puppies, and then give them to a local temple when they get older and aren't cute anymore. The temple culturally is not allowed to refuse the puppy, so the Thai people get to have a cute puppy and when it grows up just buy another one. The monks at the temple will go out and feed their herd of 20+ dogs once a day, but other than that they don't really have the time or manpower for that shit so they just let them roam.
Are those strays? Or are they temple dogs? There's a specific word in Thai for them, "soima", which means alley dog. They're everywhere.
But people do nominally take care of them. They tend to be pretty friendly generally too as long as you don't fuck with them.
Our village probably had 20 of them or so, and a couple would come out and hang with me and let me pet them. The rest would just sort of keep to themselves but they wouldn't bark or anything.
In bangkok it might be a bit different, I've only spent about a week there total, but generally yeah, you see a lot of dogs everywhere, but people do feed them.
re: Holyflare, just any general information would be great. What's interesting to see, what cautionary tales do you have, any suggestions of where to go or what to do, what sort of budget should be expectable, etc.
Makes you wonder though how much money they made off his trademark illegally. I mean shit, I bought one when I saw "out for a rip" on it, lol. I assumed since guy is pretty small time they asked him and paid him a marginal sum for trademark / copyright. I guess maybe Coke just assumed as such a little guy he wouldn't have a trademark.
That said, I could see Coke trying to spin that they didn't use it as a trademark part of the product but as a marketing expression; as such they wouldn't be breaking the registered trademark but only his copyright as the original creator of the creative work. In which case Coke would only be liable for goods sold after his first cease and desist notice. Not a lawyer in the slightest (but I passed a P.Eng. Law and ethics exam, go me), but seems like a grey area. I wonder what the Case Law looks like.
Huh. Maybe I should go to Law school; kinda nervous how this whole Oil and Gas equipment design thing will shake out as Oil and Gas loses market-share... Other option I guess is to start making low level code projects and make a portfolio, no school required there I guess.
On July 12 2017 12:30 Ketara wrote: They're usually not feral. It's normal for families to let their animals roam during the day and come back for dinner. Cats and dogs.
A significant portion are strays at least (talking Bangkok, the rest of the country didn't seem as bad). And probably 5-10% of the strays are feral. More of the dogs than cats, but meh. Probably the worst part of the culture shock for me, there might be 100 stray animals just chilling at the rail station, and a few dozen along every street.
Good lawd, Bangkok is estimated to have 300k stray dogs. Whelp. Wouldn't surprise me if they had half a million stray dogs and cats. So that's like... 25k-50k ferals if I'm right? Yeesh.
I'm sure it depends on what you define as a stray. If somebody is feeding it is it a stray animal? Or does it have to actually spend most of its time in property that belongs to a person to not be a stray animal?
It's common practice (and horrible) for Thai people to buy puppies, and then give them to a local temple when they get older and aren't cute anymore. The temple culturally is not allowed to refuse the puppy, so the Thai people get to have a cute puppy and when it grows up just buy another one. The monks at the temple will go out and feed their herd of 20+ dogs once a day, but other than that they don't really have the time or manpower for that shit so they just let them roam.
Are those strays? Or are they temple dogs? There's a specific word in Thai for them, "soima", which means alley dog. They're everywhere.
But people do nominally take care of them. They tend to be pretty friendly generally too as long as you don't fuck with them.
Our village probably had 20 of them or so, and a couple would come out and hang with me and let me pet them. The rest would just sort of keep to themselves but they wouldn't bark or anything.
In bangkok it might be a bit different, I've only spent about a week there total, but generally yeah, you see a lot of dogs everywhere, but people do feed them.
re: Holyflare, just any general information would be great. What's interesting to see, what cautionary tales do you have, any suggestions of where to go or what to do, what sort of budget should be expectable, etc.
Well I visited quite a few places in 2 weeks. First of all I recommend buying something called the JR pass (i think that's what it is called) that enables you to ride on a select number of bullet trains.
Initially I was based in Osaka and from there you can visit so many things like Nara (good temples, lots and lots of cute deer!), Hiroshima and near Hiroshima is a shrine/gate in the water to visit by boat too (do it in same day). Loads of food in Osaka too, there's a main street dedicated to it. I was sharing with 2 other guys in a hotel and it was like 8 years ago so I'm not sure I can remember the price but I'm sure there are much cheaper options than hotels. Think I went to a mountain via cable car from here too. Mount koya? Something like that. Good to look for old time buddhism and mountains. The monks had ferraris.
Went to Kyoto after that I think (JR pass will take you there) Definitely visit Kyoto if you want a face full of culture. There are temples/shrines/culture everywhere. Food is of course great too but not as much as Osaka I'd say. Hotels cheapish there too. We stayed in one with traditional baths. Would recommend.
Went to a hillside village calles Takayama(?) after that (JR pass). Thus is a traditional village with great views and shrines and you can stay in traditional little tea houses sleeping on the floor mattresses and have a nice prepared traditional Japanese breakfast (wasn't a fan lol). There are some shrines but there are really nice walks to do here. Definitely recommend for a change of pace.
Tokyo after that and stayed with some friends I knew on the outskirts. JR pass got me on the underground lines too so definitely value for money after the wholw trip. Google some things to do because there are so many. Definitely recommend akihabara and the park with cherry blossoms somewhere near there. Also all the fashion districts are nice to see.
So basically:
JR pass Kyoto for culture bomb Osaka for food/good transport links to many famous sites Tokyo for tokyo sake Takayama for tradition
Don't get addicted to pachinko. Eat lots of ramen because it's amazing there. Coco curry best chain too. Food is generally incredible. Pocari sweat best water. Convenience stores are great. Kind of hard to communicate if you don't know Japanese so get a phrase book. Lots of Tokyo speaks English though. Best to find a Japanese friend.
We spent most of our week+ long honeymoon in Tokyo. You can easily spend all your time there. Every single neighborhood is different and there's something either entertaining or historical at all of them. And food. Akasaka has this one street that's all little food places and it's magical.
We also went up to Iiyama for a day. Might be too warm now but the snowy little town there is awesome.
Other day trio was out to Odawara and Hakone. Odawara has lots of cool historical stuff but otherwise is just a pretty cute small town. Good to walk around in if you don't care about excitement. Hakone is a pain to get to but the view in the mountains is amazing and the hot springs are 10/10. There's also randomly a museum for The Little Prince which apparently they love over there.
But yeah Tokyo was great. Tsukiji is a little overhyped, it's basically just an open air market around the docks, but the sushi is fucking insane because they literally buy it off the boats 100 yards away and the flavor is out of this world. The big mall (Sunshine something) is cool but it's mostly just a mall. Shrines are awesome if you like looking at old architecture, the ones in Harajuku are really cool. Akihabara is awesome if you like anime and game shit. The royal castle is pretty cool, we got into the tour on some sort of deal and it was super interesting if you like historical stuff. And basically any restaurant you walk into will be good, we picked random places every meal and the only one we didn't like was this one diner chain that was kinda greasy. Everything else was great.
And yes HF is right. The JR pass is awesome, lets you get lots of places. The more rural, the less it works though, but in the city and big suburbs it's great.