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Tiger Lily 31

Island of Gods 2

...And this is what a young priestess,' accompanied by her assistant, ritual to hear the voices of gods might have looked like as her male vassals look on. These pics are not from Okinawa but are actually from Yoshinogari archeological sites in northern Kyushu, circa 2nd to 3rd centuries, and are recreations of what life may have looked like in one of Japan's ancient fortified domains. Historically, these shamanic kingdoms led by female spiritual leaders eventually gave way to the hierarchica...

Tiger Lily 30

New Saki :-)

Island of Gods

As a matter of fact, many of scenes in our Saki Stories, a.k.a. AGMG and AGVG, use my actual photos as backdrops - and here is one from Ogami Island (residence of Saki and Tomokazu) that has not yet been used showing the "mushroom rocks" on the western shores. Ogami is an islet a few kilometers off Miyako, and being a remote island off another remote island in an island chain has fostered ...

Tiger Lily 29

Gatekeepers of Woodward

Unlike the large metropolis like NYC or LA, cities in the U.S. Midwest tend to be very compact in size - and standing in the city center you can look around and tell where the downtown begins and ends, and can also get rough coordinates of where you are with respect to its larger buildings and other landmarks. City of Detroit is no exception, and David Whitney Building (now and hotel where Saki and her dad Nate are currently staying) and Broderick Tower across the street are such examples. A...

Tiger Lily 28

(Tomokazu…)

Now I Am Become

“...We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

- J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1965

Photo taken on August 15, 2023 2023-08-15 13:01:35 +0000 UTC View Post

Tiger Lily 27

“Wow….”

Dayton, OH

It is fairly well known that this Ohio city was the cradle of modern aviation as we know, as Wilbur and Orville Wright (aka the Wright Brothers) ran a small bicycle shop there - although the caveat is they switched locations a few times, and we know the title of "birthplace of aviation" is also contested by Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Interestingly, Dayton is also the host to the huge U.S. Air Force National Museum, so here together with the Wright Brothers museum you can substantially ...

Tiger Lily 26

Octo Saki!! 

And the series continues :-)

Chimera

It is without question that Ford Motor Company, headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, garners certain level of respect from the business world, that since its humble beginnings has made a number of technological and managerial breakthroughs that forever changed the American (and the world's) way of life as we know. However, its downtown Detroit rival General...

Admiral and I 12 [End]

...Akashi had been dreaming. Possibly the extensive breath hold and lack of new oxygen to her brain had caused her to be delusional. Pathetic me, Akashi thought, daydreaming like this after I decided to sacrifice my life. Akashi was now operating at a level beyond any human capacity, but then she knew she wouldn't last much longer. Her shoulders would give at any moment, and then her makeshift blockade would shatter into pieces. But the Admiral still needed time. Tick. Tick....

Terrain, Terrain....2

(Continued) Personally, one of the notable features of this accident was the very treacherous terrain it happened to take place. Just prior to the crash, one of the plane's wings scraped off a mountain ridge into a U-shaped groove (which is still visible today, a grim reminder) before pounding on a steep slope beneath the 1,600 meter high spur. While the first half of the Boeing 747 was pretty much gone upon impact, the second half broke off and skidded down a few hundred meters, thus letting...

Tiki

(Oh!!)

Tiki witnesses the rule of survival of the fittest.

Admiral and I 11

Continued from here 

"Oh Admiral...I am so happy...."

https://www.patreon.com/posts/69335131

Bonus pic is Akashi KanColle 10th Anniversary version :-)

Terrain, Terrain...

As we go into the month of August, there are two de-facto "anniversaries" in that are never celebrated nor marked as holidays on the Japanese calendar. One is August 15, which is the end of World War II in the Pacific (which, as a side note, is actually debatable as the signing of articles of surrender didn't take place until September 2), and the other is August 12, which is when the deadliest commercial airline crash in history took place, a.k.a. the 1985 Japan Airlines Flight 123 accident....

Hold Breath with Me

(Hang on, Onii-san…you can still do it!!)

Tick....tick....

Getting to the Bear Bones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cu4mnPb4g4

Due to my recent China trip, YouTube algorithm has been feeding me a lot of news from there lately and, man, this one from Hangzhou Zoo has come in lots of times (it seems the fake/real discussion has even made it into mainstream media). So I thought we might as well want to take a poll to see what everyone thinks. Please submit what you bear in your mind!

Thank you for your support!!!

And...congrats on for making 2nd place in the polls, Saki, wherever you are right now XD

Guangzhou Style

During the past week I was in Guangzhou, China for work (FYI, this is a city a few dozen kilometers inland from Hong Kong or Macau). Although I know not many Japanese people like to travel to this much bigger western neighbor now, and obtaining the visit visa was a big pain, I nonetheless admit I really enjoyed the stay. The food was very good (important!) and there was this air of  benign aggressiveness with its people, that I may choose to write about later on.

In the pic - "Laws...

Wreck Crisis (for Navy and Cobalt fans)

"!!....oh no....."

Continued from https://www.patreon.com/posts/wreck-crisis-85458960

Thanks for your support! And what would happen next?

"I have heard about tomokatsugi, the demon in the sea. When ama is diving, something is following her and she calls ama over. After that, all of sudden, you lose the concentration and get lost. You ended up ascending somewhere i...

The Notorious BIG

This used car dealership chain (BIGMOTOR Co., Ltd.) has been all over the Japanese media in the last week or so, and their series of reported malpractice (like intentionally adding damage to customer cars to boost revenues from insurance claims, or applying weed killers to public roadside trees to make their signs and inventory more recognizable) should keep YouTubers afloat for some time - who tend to report on horrible things they saw or heard XD

Well anyways, there are some queer thi...

The Captain's Daughter 7

"......!!"

BFF?

I've recently heard that the U.S. is often times "benevolently ignorant" of other nations, while the other nations are "malevolently cognizant" of the U.S. I side with this argument. While the others are keenly watching America and reflecting what move would work best in their interest, America assumes that things are pretty cool with the others (at least the "Western" buddies it believes to share values with), although the specifics slip its mind.

True, while one awkward remark from th...

The Captain's Daughter 6

Glub Glub....

The Usurper

Well, this is just my take that, if Facebook was our beautiful front yard with flowers on a porch, Twitter is our concealed sink hole, ready to attack the nonchalant visitors from below to protect our fragile ego.

And Japanese Twitter users are said to spend three times as much time on this SNS as their U.S. counterparts. That gives an insight as to how honorable and dignified the Japanese people are :-)

I digress, but Elon Musk has recently been called the "reincarnation of 2023-07-27 12:59:01 +0000 UTC View Post

The Captain's Daughter 5

"def isPerfectSquare(x):

    s = int(math.sqrt(x))

    return s*s == x...."

Re: Authenticity (Part Two)

(continued)..Hans Christian Andersen was a novelist and all his works were gifts of his creative mind. Which is fine, but in the eyes of the "real" folklore collectors of the time like the Grimm Brothers, Andersen was just a disturbance. In fact, it is told that in sincere admiration of these German brothers Andersen once paid them a visit, but they being serious linguists and professors. bluntly showed him the door. So Andersen was definitely not authentic, which then begs the question, what...

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