The tl;dr is “Yui x Ritsu”

The slightly longer story is that if you watch K-On! while really trying to overinterpret every interaction and assume more stuff is happening off-screen, a few romantic dynamics develop, with Yui x Ritsu being the most obvious.

The full story is 13+ charts and an 8 page writeup that I did as a personal project to justify this overinterpretation. I may post it somewhere if I ever decide to clean it up and make it presentable to the public eye, but there’s a lot in there. Ui x Nodoka. The Azusa->Yui->Ui and Jun->Mio->Azusa parallel. Yui-Mugi breakup arc. The Azusa human instrumentality arc.
My friends have called me schizophrenic for making these charts and while I don’t agree with their non-clinical use of the word “schizophrenic”, you should know that when I say “speculative / non-obvious” for K-On! in particular, it’s at about that level of extreme interpretation.

Cardcaptor Sakura, Princess Tutu, Toradora!, Maison Ikkoku, Chuunibyou, and Kare Kano are all contenders. If I can expand to speculative / non-obvious romance, then K-On!, Hidamari Sketch, Hibike! Euphonium, and Bocchi the Rock! are also up there.

Overall, the main couple from Cardcaptor Sakura may be my favorite, just extremely cute and well-paced. Miya & Yuno from Hidamari Sketch are also a really great couple.
Also, shoutouts to this guy who did an extreme overanalysis of how gay Hidamari Sketch is.

I have some screen recording software on my computer that I occasionally accidentally leave running. One time, without knowing that I was recording myself, I ended up watching a whole movie with my friends, so the whole movie and our conversations were recorded.

A couple years later I found the video file and decided to rewatch the movie via the recording I took, so I was also hearing my conversations from the past.

So many times during the movie rewatch, I would come up with the exact same response in the conversation just before or after my past recorded self would say the same thing.

Not a cheese expert or anything but as for “whatever tf is in that cheese” it’s usually just real cheese mixed with water and emulsifiers. Worst thing about it is likely salt content and saturated fat content, afaik not really any worse than regular cheese.

https://xkcd.com/154/

Bigfoot sightings appear to be less coastal than a normal population density map, and especially more concentrated in Washington and Ohio, but otherwise yeah

As someone who actually did learn Japanese through watching anime, it took me about 3 years. I started watching anime regularly in 2018 and when I was watching Hori-san to Miyamura-kun in 2021, the last two episodes had not been subtitled, so I watched them raw and mostly understood it.

A lot of people will say that it’s impossible to learn just via watching anime, but have not actually tried it. Yes, if you have subtitles on, it’s easy to let yourself totally ignore the Japanese. But it’s not impossible, and if you are focused, you can still learn even with subs turned on.

Later on, I started taking classes in Japanese at college and started learning a lot more. But just knowledge from watching anime was enough to pass an oral placement test and skip the first 2 semesters. If you are serious about learning Japanese, I recommend taking classes or studying it seriously online. There’s also better input resources than anime such as streamers or even conversation analysis audio for linguistics research.

But I am convinced that anime is still a very good tool because many people like anime and are already very motivated to watch it. This is a very big strength because the biggest obstacle to learning language is giving up. This, combined with Japanese’s very very simple grammar and verb conjugations actually makes it a very easy language to learn, imo.

Imo, pre-2012. I think you could also argue that 2018 or 2020/2021 is the start of the modem era of anime, or even 2006.

Any topic? What do you think about water desalination?

Neon Genesis Evangelion, scene where

Depends on which part of them needs to be blessed?

How do you define consciousness?
If it’s any kind of complex system, then of course it can be permanently destroyed. The same way that a computer or a building or a car can be destroyed and not exist anymore, even if its physical components still do.
And if consciousness is a material or an energy or something real, what’s the evidence that it even exists? Why do you believe it exists?

Couldn’t figure it out for a bit, the censored word is “jizz”

I don’t believe it actually bans “Pikachu” when spelled as 光宙 because ピカチュウ is actually a pretty reasonable reading, although maybe not the #1 most obvious one. Based on a random Japanese article I read about it (link), I really don’t think 光宙/Pikachu will be technically illegal, although all the English articles will say so because it’s click fodder.

The law bans: things that are not related to the kanji reading at all, things that add unexpected extra stuff on the end of the obvious reading, or things that mean the opposite of what the kanji means.

I don’t believe any of this applies to Pikachu, and the examples they cite are not really comparable.

I looked at some of the examples of early 1800s use of “where are you?” and it seems to be used often as “where are you going?” (most common) or something else like for example “from where are you buying that?” etc.

Also seems like the way they process it, it doesn’t just look for the immediate following question mark, the question mark can be later on.

Waiting (I’m in a hospital waiting room)

I’m gonna pretty decisively say “no”.
By the very nature of memes, you don’t know if they are talking about real events or just joking, you don’t know who created it or their biases, and you only get an EXTREMELY simplified perspective & information. You are also limiting the news that you see, maybe missing out on something important in favor of something funny (not to imply that we should maximize the amount of news we see).

I disagree with your point B about memes, that they don’t ask you to pick a side. I feel like memes are often more biased than traditional news. Even in cases where news is extremely biased, you can be aware of the bias and judge them consistently because they are not anonymous.

あのーヒトデと交換していただけませんでしょうか？
Text: Ummm, could I trade it for a starfish? (Spoken very formally)
Not 100% sure what she is talking about, maybe the popsicle.
Maybe should be interpreted more like “could I have that [popsicle] in exchange for a starfish?”

If the word is plural and ends with s then you use s’ but for a single James, you can write James’s.

It’s tough having a high IQ. Most people don’t understand the world and the flaws of humans, at least at the level I do. As such, I find it hard to connect to other people. Most people are morons. I feel deep sorrow in knowing the direction the world is going and that the inhabitants of the world are mostly idiots.

…

Why do so many people (in this thread) unironically feel this way? “Intelligence” is a socially constructed and often useless idea that includes and excludes many things seemingly at random. For example, chess is often thought of as something that’s very intelligent, but skill at chess is (just like nearly anything else) based on practice & experience. Just because you’re good at chess and did well in school doesn’t mean that you alone can understand the problems in the world at a deeper level than an average Jo.

Everyone should read “What Is Intelligence, Anyway?”, a short excerpt from Isaac Asimov.

I’ll paste the part I think is most important, but the whole thing is worth reading:

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.