George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
7d ago
You are not wildly off, but this is an exaggeration. There are many private schools at the secondary level in Japan. They cost more and in general may have a higher academic standard. Their accreditation is only relevant in terms of what they may prepare students to expect in the college entrance exam. In some cases these private high schools have International Baccalaureate programs, etc. As for university, the highest ranked schools are public (Tokyo, Kyoto, Kobe, etc.) But any kid from any high school, public or private, who can pass the entrance exam can get in. This, as you say, is the purpose of cram schools at the high school level.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
13d ago
No, don't let me put you off. Anyone who is halfway self-aware and tries to do as the locals seem to be doing will be welcomed with open arms. It's everyone else that is tedious. There are also many places to go besides the usual tourist areas--and even they are not so bad if you go during off hours.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
13d ago
Check out these posts from a few months ago.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
16d ago
This second one? Not. Fun.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
18d ago
I only included this because it is the most common scenario. A friend seems to be drinking too much? Watch him waste away and maybe mention it to a 3rd party, but don't intervene. Another friend has a bad boyfriend? It's her life, watch it unfold and pick up the pieces later, maybe. Online, people love doling out life wisdom. IRL, people keep quiet generally. I agree with you, though.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
20d ago
If memory serves your particular experience may not mirror that of the usual heterosexual dude.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
20d ago
You should visit Japan. You could probably one-arm curl many here.
Post script for the literal-minded: I mean most women here are considerably slimmer than the average American female. Though perhaps Americans are becoming slimmer? This caveat brought to you by Ozempic TM.
PPS: Maybe Helmet is not American. Still.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
21d ago
I would imagine it depends on the kind of thing you want to verify. In the old days (meaning last year) I would often simply ask, after an answer had been produced: "Really?" and the LLM would double check itself and at times respond with really annoying phrases like "You caught me!" and proceed to explain why what it had just reported to me as accurate was, in fact, inaccurate. Again, it depends on what it's doing for you, and how it's been calibrated by you to do that (though calibration is not perfect. I've long inserted that it should not fabricate or embroider, and at times it still does.)
The easiest thing to do is just ask it. "Can you produce the pages and precise quotes of xyz?" Depending on the response, continue questioning it until you're where you want to be.
Others will very likely be able to suggest a more efficient strategy.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4d ago
Perhaps add "and legs" to your username. Do let us know how you fare.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
7d ago
For any school in Japan, if a kid can pass the entrance exam (these can begin as early as junior high) he or she can get in. There is a 推薦 / suisen or recommendation-based or so-called "escalator" system as well for kids who begin school in, say, Takagi Goodschool elementary--they will probably then go to Takagi Goodschool JHS, HS, and even university if there is a TG University (sometimes the Takagi Goodschool is associated with a different university and is a feeder school for that one.)
If I am understanding your question correctly, yes, some children who are legacy entrants (whose parents or whatever went to Takagi Goodschool) will go there as well. But as I say, any kid can go there if they pass the entrance test. Still, you will find that some suisen students are exempted from what are sometimes considerably difficult tests (because they are athletes or demonstrate some other skill, or have a very good recommendation from someone at their high school who is a known and respected quantity.) This results in a lot of students who got in via social standing/parental influence/hereditary reasons and then some who are just really smart and/or know how to study for tests.
Not to get too much into it, but Japan has a system where low level students are filtered very early in a way that doesn't seem to happen in the US, at least not how I understood it as a kid. Here, a kid who has no real academic skill will be counseled, channeled into a JH school or then HS where none of the kids are really so academic, and they will focus on sports or trades or whatever, or be pushed to universities or junior colleges or 専門学校 senmon gakko (vocational schools). Of course some do fall through the cracks and become delinquents or just move into something else. Students can opt out as young as 15 (and some do, if they have no parent pushing them to continue.)
I don't know much about specifically Catholic schools, though, so there very well may be something going on there that I am not aware of.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11d ago
I'm only conversant in aikido, which is more like action yoga or something. In that, I've been thrown (usually into a subsequent roll) by guys who were very skilled, and also brutally slammed into the mat by guys who seemed to be channeling a different martial art. At my size (about 177cm, 73 kg) there are women who are both taller and heavier (fewer in Japan) of course. The very skilled akiidoka can move you (me) even if I resist, male or female. The regular rando is like an unbalanced sack of oranges. Reading your updates makes me want to try BJJ though the prospect of abject humiliation is always mildly daunting.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11d ago
Two points
I tried not to be overly aggressive
and
I probably let her get it in a little deeper before we started than I would have let a man.
seem to be illustrative here. Now I know nothing about BJJ and I expect I'd be out squatted by Mrs. 5hr. But in my experience, at least in cases where there is clearly a size difference (as you describe), the woman gets the advantage from the tenderheartedness (for lack of a better term) on the part of the man. There's no way around that I think unless you just turn that off (which I don't know how to do short of rage, which is unhelpful). Closing your eyes is probably instructive in a sort of Obi Wan way, but I suspect hobbles you as you lose an important sense. Interesting though.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
18d ago
A relative term, no doubt. In what I know of present company, I'm normie. Then again I'm a semi regular poster, so there's that.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
18d ago
It's difficult to judge from this distance. You certainly appear to be verbally very sharp, articulate, together, and self-aware. But of course you have a far better grasp of what's what here.
What makes you trust the stress score rather than your own feeling? I sense a loop here, as if you are feeling stressed not from stress, but from this score. While ironic, this is the very nature of so-called biofeedback. Just a thought.
Thank you for the response. Just to press the point, is the worst that would happen to a hypothetical child that he or she would end up like you? Is that so bad?
Posted in the wrong place.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
20d ago
there is no future for me
This sounds foreboding and if I were less American I wouldn't ask you about it, but I am still rather very American and often poorly mannered, so what do you mean by this?
As a single man I had two separate convertibles. Mainly because I love convertibles.
First, a 1966 Sunbeam Alpine which had been my father's. I accidentally burned it to the ground along with part of my parents' house in the summer of 1989. I had been driving it since 1986. I am pretty sure my dad bought it because he wanted to feel like Sean Connery in Dr No though that one was Robin's egg blue. I loved that car to distraction, drove it through my first years of university, had it repainted and the engine rebuilt and had just installed a new cloth top before the accident. Which is a long story.
Then a Toyota Corolla of my mom's, a Volkswagen Jetta which was the first car I paid for myself, then my first car in Japan was a 1993 Eunos Roadster aka Mazda Miata, used (8 years old when I bought it). I sold it when I got engaged. It was fun but Osaka isn't friendly to convertibles (lots of standing traffic.) I liked driving through the city at night though. Also it is possible to have sex in that car in the driver's seat with the hardtop attached. I am here to assure you of that, doubtful though it may be.
Since then nothing special. A Suzuki, a Toyota. Currently another Mazda but a CX8 Diesel which is primarily driven by wifey and which is much less my taste but carts the family around well.
Edit: Found a photo of me the Sunbeam (pre-torching.)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
24d ago
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
25d ago
I looked at his Twitter this am and regret it. Essentially, and this hasn't always been true I think, I am on the opposite side of most of his rants. I won't link them because they don't need signal boosting. I also notice he is followed by Jordan Peterson, for some bizarre reason.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
25d ago
It is, in fact, that. It's an artifact of Chinese. To some degree this can be done in Japanese (三日か四日 for 3/4 days) or (三四天 in Chinese) but it's more common in Chinese. Don't rely on me as an expert but that's my take.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
25d ago
Context, for those of us not in on it?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
27d ago
And that's fine. I've been burned a sufficient number of times on reddit to be comfortable with my (excessively) skeptical (or sceptical, if you like) approach to posts and interactions there. Which is why I included the caveat term "personally" as in "I personally." Certainly you and whoever are free to do whatever suits your own temperament. I was on reddit from around 2013 to 2021, and for a large part of that period it was fine, and I even felt somewhat at home. There was a time when I wasn't sure what was wrong, and then it hit me.
As for the issue at hand, it's difficult without an actual controlled test to have any sort of granularity in judging responses. Even the VVIQ test relies on a 5-point Likert scale, and it's not entirely clear how valid/reliable it is. Questions beyond simply "Can you see the apple?" and "Do you notice colors? Can you rotate it in your mind? Can you imagine a bite taken out of it?" and so on and so forth can help, but even then there's a lot of noise. Whether a number or even a great number of redditors chime in saying they have no visual image does not negate that in that moment in that house with those people I was with there may have been a lack of clarity, to say nothing of the fact that about half of the people were Japanese (and thus prone to conformity in a group setting) as well as interacting in a second language, adding another layer.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
27d ago
From what I can find the term aphantasia was first coined as recently as 2015 in a paper titled Lives without imagery.. This despite the existence of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire or VVIQ which predated the 2015 study by 40+ years.
The Guardian article you've linked makes the point at the end:
Keane’s work was proof that you do not have to be able to picture something to be able to draw it. “People had conflated visualisation with creativity and imagination, and one of the messages is: ‘They’re not the same thing.’”
I wouldn't suggest that creativity and visualization are "the same thing" but I think to suggest that there is no correlation between the two is counterintuitive, and bears investigation.
In a 2020 study Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing Zeman et al found evidence that aphantasics have deficits im object memory (what something looks like, its color, shape, size, etc.) but not spatial memory (location, relative distance from other objects, directions, layouts) and in fact in some cases aphantasics outperformed non aphantasics in this regard.
Also there seems to be no real difference in an aphantasic's ability to draw what they see (eg a still life) rather than what they imagine (Medusa, a leprechaun, etc )
Train is arriving, have to cut this short. Thanks for engaging.
This is an interesting take. I've no idea how accurate, but certainly interesting.
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