(the set is Adventure in Transylvania, from the artificial-scarcity, made-to-preorder-only Bricklink program)

have now made Barad-dur in pottery, yarn, metal (from a kit), and Lego bricks

future potential Barad-dur mediums: wood, k'nex, origami, junkyard scrap, cake

trying to remember the clown car of npcs who talk to you in MP3, where they lost the plot

-Admiral Dane, obviously
-Frozone, I Am Robot, pink Mystique
-Father Brain, Sister Brain, Cousin Brain?
-Ridley w/blue cancer (screams FUCKFUCKFUCKYOU the whole time, though not in Space-English)

His underling was also on the chain, and it was bonkers seeing the jarring contrast between ~her~ clean-cut professional correspondence with all the code-switched pleasantries + basic understanding of English syntax, and his email equivalent of feces smeared on a dumpster. Talk about failing up!

yeahhh sadly the NA publishers (usually?) ain't doing local variant scripts for each ENG region 🫣

the sauna is the lurking roadbump.
the untraveled American mind cannot conceive of the cheap+casual sento/sauna facilities common in so many proper countries.
"is this manga author an aristocrat?" they will wonder.
so, it's especially important that the famiresu translation keeps him down to earth.

validating!
only took me 40 minutes and 4 skeets to get there

we can intuit that the author intends "famiresu" here to mean a place you go for 1) something more substantial than just coffee + pastry, and 2) an encyclopedic menu, offering so much more variety than ~just~ soba, and 3) a overall budget-friendly meal

...actually, that would be a "diner"! duh!

this was the quandary I faced with my first TL'd sentence of the day (author comment on a jacket flap).

"I’d love to live somewhere that puts me within a five-minute walk of a sauna facility, a fast-casual restaurant, a soba shop, a huge public park, a gym, and approximately five different cafés."

the esoteric art of the ドリンクバーis one that Japanese society lives by, which explains their inner harmony and honor and longevity.

***and yet, the perceived affordability of what Americans think of as fast casual (Chili's, Applebee's, etc.) is heavily dependent on income/state/politics/upbringing.
Is Saizeriya truly equivalent to the Olive Garden experience for both: Bubba J. Klanby and Chadwick Q. Waspington?
Loc is impossible

"You wish now that I had died and Funderberker had lived.
"Yes. I wish that."

I call this "hedging the bet"!
Strategic ambiguity is such a cornerstone, since heaven forbid we actually get to speak to the author 😵‍💫

as Tolkien intended, surely 😝