The Lady Who Loved Insects is a charming short story set in the Heian period. The story follows a young noble woman who has intellectual interests, such as studying insects, in a society where women were supposed to be wives and sometimes poets. The Lady Who Loved Insects can be found in The Riverside Middle…
Facelift and Code Tweaks
After some work, I’ve finished a much-needed layout change and tweaked a lot of background code. Hopefully, it will make JP load faster for mobile readers. Google recently started downranking websites that violate their CoreVitals framework. JP failed the framework test. The tweaks have JP around 90-95% compliant now, up from around 70%. It will…
JAXA, The Japanese NASA
JAXA, or The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, formed in 2003 with the mergers of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, the National Aerospace Laboratory, and the National Space Development Agency of Japan. The new agency began with the launch of several observational satellites and the ambitious Hayabusa mission. Hayabusa’s goal was to study Itokawa,…
Are Fans Entitled?
Steve Shives, a Star Trek YouTuber, released a video titled “Fan Service Leads to Fan Entitlement” where he outlines how catering to fans causes problems. He argues that fan-service, defined as giving fans what they want, can make fans entitled. Entitled fans demand the story, characters, and lore to develop as they want it to…
Stranger in the Shogun’s City by Amy Stanley
History tends to represent the voices of men and those in power. Typically, governmental officials, who are most often men, know how to read and write. And those documents are what survive. The majority of people in the past were illiterate and unable to write. Because of this, their voices disappeared outside of a few…
Geishas and the Floating World: Inside Tokyo’s Yoshiwara Pleasure District
Geishas and the Floating World by Stephen and Ethel Longstreet examines the history and development of Tokyo’s red-light district of Yoshiwara. The name of the book misleads a little. Most of the book focuses upon the prostitutes that worked Yoshiwara. The authors note that geisha weren’t sex workers, but geisha did blur the line as…