Not a requirement, just an accepted norm. There’s plenty of counter-examples on supermarket shelves, too (and why they all have 写真はイメージです (photo is an illustration only) on the box).

The quality and value of pancake mix really varies between countries. I’ve found that Japan, for instance, has really good pancake mix that is cheaper than buying the raw ingredients… Flour is rarely bought for home cooking, and there’s a generally high standard for store bought baked goods. In contrast, Australia has cheap flour and store bought baked goods are generally mediocre at best.

Saaaand?

I’ve only spent a day there. Quiet. Good cheese in the south, good pastries in the north. Orient bay is a nice looking beach but the was water pretty rough and seaweedy when we visited. The boardwalk in Philipsburg has great promise but is just kinda sparse and hot… needs lots more shady trees. The town itself is quite nice.

Cheesy tomato ramen. I found a store in Tokyo (Suginami) that makes this and found if so comforting I started making it regularly.

Fry an opinion. Add a can of chopped tomatoes, some gochujang or sambal, or any other naturally high msg sauce and reduce. Pour sauce over ramen. Cover with heavy blanket of shredded tasty cheddar.

If I or my partner have had a bad day, this is easy to prepare and usually lifts the spirits.

There’s also the fact that half the ‘jokes’ were just a scene going on longer than you’d expect.

I think a lot of the body shaming jokes don’t land not because we are uptight PC wokies, but because when you don’t stigmatise something, it loses its social power. Oh that person has a mole? So what? The boomer humour was ‘oh, it’s bad to have a mole, but you should never say anything about it!’ when you don’t believe either of those statements there is no joke, and the scene goes on for like 5 minutes…

I think the main issue was that Mint doesn’t have good power management tools (so I used a third-party utility). Not a ‘gaming’ laptop but it does have a dedicated Nvidia GPU and I got the drivers working fine, and most games ran better than than they did on windows. I’ll check out CachyOs! Thank you for the suggestion. I haven’t tried Fedora in a decade (and not on this PC, obviously), so I’ll take a look at that, too.

Last time I tried (Mint) the dealbreaker for me was battery management. I tried various utils and settings but I couldn’t get as much juice of of the same charge using Mint and still have good performance. If anyone has any suggestions I’d be grateful!

I think 280€ is a huge saving. I think of saving holistically, rather than each individual item. If you make similar savings on three other annual expenses, that’s 1120€ more in your savings account earning 50€ p.a.

If your 1.28€ coffee is costing you 50€ a year, coffee is now FREE for the rest of your life! When we were saving to quit our jobs, this is how we motivated ourselves; with a list of expenses and we got to cross them off one by one as they were covered.

Not only are you saving more money now, you’ll actually need less money to maintain your lifestyle. Every $1 saved in a recurring expense is more like $2 saved in that way.

Don’t always go for the cheapest item though - shop around! The homebrand Lidl coffee is my choice in Europe, but it’s not as good as the homebrand Aldi coffee in Australia… but the Woolworths one tastes like bong water. If I lived in one place rather than travelling though, I’d get a moka pot and use beans rather than instant.

Really enjoyed this movie, and found it (sadly) educational about how little we’ve come.

just a bit watery

Did you dry out the eggplant and zucchini? If not, an hour or so before assembling, slice your veggies and lightly salt the slices and lay on paper towel; I’ve found that makes a huge difference.

…her grandfather gifted her a Cessna 150 airplane for her 10th birthday. Over the next few years, Pasterski got help from a mechanic and others in rebuilding the plane’s engine and constructing the frame for a new aircraft. (snopes)

OK, that makes more sense. She worked with professionals over a 4 year period, repurposing parts from an existing craft. Good (& rich) parents got her tutors. Let’s extend these opportunities to more kids, regardless of generational privilege.

Tried to get a student visa last year for a language course… Full physical, police check, pre-booked accommodation for the entirety of stay, in-person interview at embassy, TB screening!? The number of hoops made it impossible before the course start date…

This would be a welcome change! Especially with more countries joining Schengen, limiting the number of places that aren’t in the 90 day limit.

Wouldn’t your normal fear response be to… get out of the way?

As someone regularly uses Japanese and sometimes uses node.js, this is a handy library to know about! Cheers!

I was a Sega boy, she was a Nintendo girl… rather than chemistry, it was like magnetism - opposites attract!

To be serious though, yes, from day one, 23 years and counting, no change in feeling.

Luggage is only weighed at check-in (and possibly at the gate for LCCs). After check-in, before security, take the jacket off and put it in your luggage. If there’s scales at the gate, put it back on before getting in the line.

!shiningforce@lemmy.world approved meme.

I think they should keep up the tourism campaigns, but they need to focus them on areas other than Kansai and Tokyo.

There’s so many great place all over Japan, but of course most flights are into Kansai or Narita airport, so naturally people are going to look for attractions and accommodation nearby. There are many international airports, but they are of course only available from closer east Asian Countries, but that does make up the bulk of the tourist population (half of all tourists are from China, Korea or Taiwan), so advertising those cities heavily would be a good start - “Come to Miyajima, we don’t speak Mandarin, but we’ve got 50 varieties of mandarins!”

A big issue in my view is the increase in cost of the JR rail pass and the price of and difficulty to navigate shinkansen in general. A cool campaign would be a free/cheap train ticket from Tokyo to the north, or Osaka to the west included with your international plane ticket.

Also, I believe Chinese driving licenses aren’t valid in Japan, because of the IDP requirement - if the biggest tourist demographic could hire cars and go off the beaten track, that might distribute the crowds a bit.

That’s why I employ a staff of a few dozen multilingual interpreters to follow me to the supermarket to translate the ingredient labels in the import isle.