Strange and Weird (and Cool) Things from Japan
Okay, that headline was a bit inside, but I am sure my good buddy G. will appreciate the craziness of this one.
I sure hope this isn’t meant to be serious. The original was annoying enough, but had a certain unique style. This is… atrocious. If at least they had used the Choco Party girl as the lead singer…!
news.com.au reports that a Japanese man started a petition to enable him to get married to a Mangacharacter:
Taichi Takashita launched an online petition aiming for one million signatures to present to the government to establish a law on marriages with cartoon characters. Within a week he has gathered more than 1000 signatures through. “I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world,” he wrote. “However, that seems impossible with present-day technology. Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorise marriage with a two-dimensional character?”
Reportedly, while it is not sure whether Takashita was serious, some of the people who signed the petition are.
I’ve moved this blog to a new server. Better, bigger, faster, newer. I also took the opportunity to finally update Wordpress. I am sorry if anybody tried to reach the site today and hit a wall.
The good news is that the current version of Wordpress makes posting images much easier, and that means it’ll be less annoying for me to post and that means … more weird stuff from Japan.
Have fun!
There is a Japanese company called D-Barcode which took on a mundane, boring, and unimaginative part of our consumer life and gave it a makeover: Barcodes. This is one of those ideas they are so simple, that it took a designer genius to come up with it. The result, I may say, is absolutely cool:
Beautiful Japanese Barcodes
If I had any kind of company that sold packaged products, I’d immediately steal this idea.
More Beautiful Japanese Barcodes
Nice, huh?
(Via Dark Roasted Blend.)
Twenty servings of oozy goodness in one convenient plastic bucket. And when you are done with it, the bucket can serve another important function…
While we are on the subject of contact lenses, behold this attrocity:
Did you see it? It’s easy to miss at first glance. Here’s the closeup:
Yes, that’s right: It’s the Hello Kitty Contact Lens. I honestly do not know which I find dumber, the “eye enlargement” contact lenses or these; I guess I’ll have to wait for the day that someone combines the two.
(Via Kitty Hell.)
Japanese are obsessed with “cuteness”. Part of that seems to be that the bigger a girl’s eyes, the better. Characters in anime usually have really huge eyes. Anyway, since surgery can only do so much for a woman’s eyes, there are now these contact lenses which give the impression of bigger eyes…
Sounds scary? It certainly looks weird…
Japanese beauty ideals nonewithstanding, I think these lenses catapult a woman right into the uncanny valley.
If this doesn’t scare you, you can buy these things at this exceedingly professional web-shop here. I feel compelled to add that I am not affiliated with that website, nor do I know how reliable they are.
(Via InventorSpot.)
The BBC reports that a woman was arrested for living in a man’s closet. She had moved into the small storage area one year ago, because she had “no other place to live”. The 57 year old house owner had become suspicious after he had noticed food disappearing, and installed a surveillance system. It filmed the woman walking around in his absence.