This video was recommended to me by my friend Lou. It explains the psychology behind why I would rather watch Big Trouble in Little China over and over again rather than trying to tackle some new show that will likely turn out stupid. Star Wars is totally dead now, but it’s been on the decline ever since Greedo shot first in 1997. Even though Kathleen Kennedy is finally leaving Lucasfilm, the damage is done. I couldn’t care less. I still love the original, unaltered trilogy regardless. There is a subconscious reason for wanting to watch the same stuff. It connects to the comfort of nostalgia. It’s soothing, and a form of emotional regulation. Something stable in a chaotic world.
Last summer when I visited family, I was lectured about how I’m “still living in 1982.” I never really thought of it before, but yeah, watching Blade Runner on a weekend in the dark with the headphones on in the present day, it lets me connect with that insecure, 15 year old Greg who watched it every Friday night because he didn’t have friends to hang out with because his friends at school were getting high with each other. That 15 year old Greg who had a crush on a girl but didn’t know how to win her heart, let alone even talk to her. And it was that 15 year old Greg who was contemplating himself, determining what kind of person he wanted to be, and focusing on bettering himself.
B-Side Label stickers can be found in stores like Loft and Village Vanguard. When visiting Yamashiroya in Ueno, I found these great Capcom stickers by B-Side Label.
There were a lot of Namco B-Side Label stickers too!
Yeah, that’s a lot of stickers. They had some pin badges too. Check these out:
They had this other stuff, too. Brand new Famicom cartridges of Rockman, Pac-Man, and others. They looked like they’d been recently re-manufactured.
It’s 2026, a new year which will certainly be filled with Leftist and Islamic violence for sure. Let’s celebrate.
We drove to the in-laws’ place Saturday. They live in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, and it takes at least 4 hours to get here. We had lunch at a restaurant and did some shopping, so it took us closer to 6 hours. On Monday the 29th, I thought it might be nice to finally buy the Macross DYRL 4k/bluray which came out nearly a year ago. I also decided to get the Wings of Honneamise/Royal Space Force movie on bluray. (If you haven’t seen this anime, you really need to as it is a stellar movie that was underappreciated for its time.)
I was using a free trial for Amazon Prime. I signed up for a free trial when I bought a calendar for my daughter for Christmas, which turned out to actually not be free shipping. I thought, “hey, at least we can watch some movies for free through Prime.” Well, if by “free” it means “400 yen,” then yes. Very few shows are actually free on there. I sometimes begrudgingly rent movies on Prime because the local video store thinks that it can compete with online services by reducing the number of titles they have available. (Make that make sense, please!) On Christmas night, I rented the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “Jingle All the Way” for only 100 yen since it was a discount Christmas rental. I’d never seen that movie before, and I once worked with a guy who was an extra in that movie. So we watched that, and then “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” with David Bowie. A movie about atrocities in a Japanese POW camp is certainly not a festive Christmas movie, but it was a movie I wanted to see nevertheless. Oh, and I was able to see some episodes of Spy Family for free.
As my Prime free 30-day trial was coming to a close, I decided to use Prime to buy some crap. So I got those two anime bluray movies, and I bought a plastic model of the ship from the Raiden II video game. I bought these on Monday. Prime promises next day delivery, but they weren’t scheduled to arrive until Wednesday. Well, whatever. I just wanted to watch those movies to bring in the new year. So Wednesday morning comes along and the update from Amazon says that it was “out for delivery.” Oh gosh, neat. Can’t wait. Then it says that there was a failure to deliver. I looked at the details and the claim is that the address is incomplete. But it’s the same address that my mom-in-law uses to order and she has a Prime account herself. But that’s what the claim was: the delivery was cancelled because the address was incomplete. The message said, “The delivery company is holding your package because the address is incorrect or incomplete.” OK… HOW? My mom-in-law has stuff deliverer to this house all the time.
I tried to reschedule the delivery, but I was unable to reschedule for later in the day. Which means no Macross on New Years Eve. CRAP. And since the 1st was a holiday, I wasn’t able to schedule the delivery until today, the 2nd. I updated the delivery info by re-entering the address so that there would be no mistakes. Then around 10am, the delivery status was updated once again with, “The delivery company is holding your package because the address is incorrect or incomplete.”
So here is the problem: this incompetent driver can give us the runaround day after day like this and with me somehow unable to reschedule a delivery the same day in perpetuity like this, but we will drive back home tomorrow and do not have time for this nonsense. If the delivery was being handled by Kuroneko Yamato, Sagawa, or even the post office, then I could contact them and even drive to their location to pick up the package in-person since this driver is such an incompetent moron. But shipping was fulfilled through Amazon, which means they have one of those independent contractors doing the delivery instead of a professional. They make it pretty hard to find this information, but I finally found where I could have an Amazon rep call me. So I talked with him and said that while I am angry, I understand that it’s not his fault. I ended up just cancelling the order and I told him that this half-assed driver who doesn’t know how to do his own job needs to be reprimanded.
I told him to just cancel the order and I told him that I’ve already cancelled my Prime membership. That order was close to 20,000 yen, cancelled because of the incompetence of that half-assed driver. Now Amazon has to ship the stuff back to where it came because of that lazy imbecile. We’re going back home tomorrow, and I know that if I had rescheduled it for tomorrow morning, we’d just get the same run-around waste of time. Nonsense.
For the feedback for the customer service I received today, this was my response:
This order was terrible. I’m extremely dissatisfied. I live in Gunma Prefecture but am staying with family in Nagano Prefecture this week. The Amazon customer service person was fine, but this driver in Komagane, Nagano Prefecture, is a complete idiot. I ordered on Monday and it was supposed to arrive on Tuesday. We were home all day on Wednesday.
“The delivery company is holding your package because the address is incorrect or incomplete.” This is a stupid excuse! I used the same address as always. The driver didn’t deliver on Wednesday or today. If I try again, I’m sure they’ll make this excuse again. I’m heading back to Gunma Prefecture tomorrow. I don’t want to see these half-assed excuses! It’s a waste of time! I wanted this item on Wednesday. I won’t tolerate the same excuse over and over again.
This driver is half-assed. I want him to be properly reprimanded for not doing his job. I won’t tolerate this idiot! Because of him, I canceled this order worth about 20,000 yen. I’m glad I canceled Prime as well. I plan to reorder these items from Yodobashi Camera.
So I looked up the same items on Rakuten and found them there. I had over 1500 points saved up, so even though these items were slightly more expensive, I ended up saving money. Free shipping and all that. Suck an egg, Amazon!
Arkanoid II: Revenge of Doh for MS-DOS, Taito/Nova Logic (1987) When Dad bought the family our first computer, a 286 AT computer back in the summer of ’89, I bought a simplistic, 2-button analogue computer joystick. It came loaded with a bunch of crappy shareware games, most of which used colored ASCII characters. But the first real game I bought for that computer was Arkanoid II: The Revenge of Doh for MS-DOS. It came on a big 5.25″ floppy disk, yeah!
A:\>arkanoid.exe was the command that ran it. I’d switch to the A: floppy drive and type “arkanoid” to run the game.
I had to calibrate the joystick every time I played the game, going from the top right position, click the button, go to the bottom left position, click the button, and then center and click again. That analogue joystick provided decent control for this game, which of course used a knob in the arcades to control. Later we bought a mouse for our computer, but for some reason the paddle in the game didn’t move as fluidly as it did with the joystick for some reason.
Arkanoid II was ported to MS-DOS by Nova Logic and it let you customize your own levels. Later when I got a Thunderboard (Soundblaster clone) to upgrade the sound, I ended up playing it to death all over again to experience the game with proper sound.
Another Taito game I bought for MS-DOS was Qix. I somehow do not remember ever encountering Qix in the arcades as a kid, and I would have loved playing it since it sort of reminds me of Tron.
One year for Christmas I also got Sky Shark, the famous Toaplan shmup distributed by Taito, also ported to DOS. The cover art for this game (as well as the NES version) prominently featured Flying Tigers-inspired artwork of a P-40 Warhawk attacking battleships, and Mom knew I was really into the Flying Tigers at that time. However, that didn’t survive for long because I had once left it in the disk drive by accident. When Dad booted the computer he realized a disk was in the drive, and mindlessly he took it out while the floppy was reading the disk, which ruined the data on the game. The other Taito games I had were Operation Wolf (which worked great with a 2-button mouse) and Rambo III, which was a sort of Metal Gear-inspired stealth-focused game.
Soba, udon, sushi, yakitori, and beer! Daiso and Seria are the largest 100 yen store chains here in Japan, but I think Can*Do has the best charcter tie-in merchandise.
Last month when we went to Keyaki Walk Mall in Maebashi, I found another big display of Dragon Quest merchandise at Loft! I showed the Dragon Quest sale at Loft last year on my blog. This time it was for the release of DQ I and II.
“Welcome to the Loft Dragon Quest I & II 2025 goods campaign!”
The first things I noticed were all the plush dolls. These retro character sprite cushions look cool.
Cups and silverware.
So much random stuff. Soap dispensers, clips, pins, stickers, and so on.
There’s a pet shop in Maebashi called Wing 21 where Mayu buys crickets to feed to her beloved pet, Kuromaru. There are two meerkats in cages there and every time we go there, I call out to the two meerkats, “Little guys!” They get SO EXCITED to see me every time. So this time the pet clerk lady asked me if I’d like to hold one. My facial reaction alone was enough for her to know that I really wanted to. So, I got to snuggle and smooch this little meerkat. SO CUTE! I want one! But, no pets are allowed in our apartment. Plus these little guys have gotta be super expensive. They’ve been there for a couple of years now and they do not have a home yet. Kinda sad. There was a third one, but that one must’ve been sold about 3 years ago. She didn’t recommend that I hold the other one, because it is too “high tension.” So I guess it gets too excited and acts up if you hold it. It was pretty jealous that I held the other one.
One of the places I visited with friends in the Phoenix area is a new Daiso in Chandler! It provides an identical experience to a typical Daiso in Japan. Items just cost more than 100 yen, of course. When we used to live in Arizona, these types of items were available at Asiana Market and other Asian stores, but now Daiso officially exists in Arizona. Wow.
Walking into the store, it looks so much like a typical Daiso store.
Lots of neat crap for kids, of course. I wasn’t expecting to find Touhou merchandise!
Gudetama and Cinamarroll stuff too.
Yep, this is typical Daiso goods! Straight from Japan.
Price conversion charts are posted about the store to let people know how much the items cost in US dollars.
Mayu discovered a store called Kuroda Toy Doll （黒田人形店）in Maebashi’s Central Shopping Arcade on the internet and on Saturday we went there to check it out. Shoutengai （商店街）are covered shopping arcades and a tradition of Japan. Unfortunately, sometimes these shopping arcades have grown unsuccessful over the years with empty real estate. In English they call this one Maebashi Rose Avenue and this is where Kuroda is located. We’ve only ever been to this shopping arcade once before, when we happened to be in the area during the Tanabata Festival in July several years ago.
Kuroda specializes in traditional toys, so basically nothing which involves video screens. The first thing I noticed upon entering was their selection of Tomica cars.
Misato’s car from Evangelion.
Macross and Gundam Tomica!
Back to the Future Part III and Castle of Cagliostro cars. I bought the BttF III Delorean with the ’50s tires at Village Vanguard earlier this year. I hadn’t seen the one with train wheels until now.
A nice, modest selection of plastic models was there. Here’s the Gunpla selection. I bought the F91 Gundam kit at this store.
Here are car, ship, castle, and other plastic models.
An RC Delorean from Back to the Future! I’ve never seen this before.
There were many older anime and game figures. Here’s Kasumi from Dead or Alive and Mai from King of Fighters.
Plenty of traditional, wooden toys too. A meow-meow tower and… a toy for Klingons? Oh never mind… that would be “Qapla,” not “Kapla.”
There were so many different toys there, such as kendama, plush dolls, and so on. My daughter Ulan wanted the bullet plushy from Super Mario Bros and I got the F91 Gundam model. It’s a neat store.
