Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The 24-hour gym that I go to near my apartment is moving up the technology chain. Replacing a contactless card key system that allows users to go in and out, the gym recently introduced a facial recognition system that allows those registered to open the door just by scanning their faces. It is more convenient for users who are unwilling to carry their card keys around. And from the gym's perspective, it effectively prevents users from lending their card keys to their non-paying friends. The goal is to eventually entice all users to switch over to the facial recognition system and get rid of all card key users. Some users seem to be quite resistant. Even though the gym sent multiple emails to users about registering their faces for the new system, and posted the same notice on the gym's premises, the majority of the users continue to show up with their card keys. Even though gym staff is around when these users visit, the users do not seem to have any intention of speaking to t...

Like other countries in the world, summer in Japan is often defined by summer festivals, ranging from more traditional family outings in local shrines and fireworks events, to more modern ones that involve trending musicians from all over the world. In the pre-COVID days, crowds would have gathered by the thousands, crowding around stages and drinking from dawn to dusk. Even when outdoor festivals are not happening, balmy summer nights would have driven many youngsters to the plentiful bars and nightclubs of the country's biggest cities, as hopping among them would have taken such a physical toll.

Turn on Japanese TV and one often sees programs about foreigners living in the country. The shows have foreigners introducing their cultures to a Japanese audience, stories about foreigners who lived in the country for decades and how they interact with the community, and unfortunately, many foreigners who choose to caricature their own cultures to make a living as foreign TV stars. But as COVID rages on and Japan remains firmly shut to the very idea of accepting new long-term foreign residents, TV shows about foreigners have also evolved somewhat in line with the changing attitudes during COVID.

The after-school hours of underaged children in China are going through a revolution in recent days. Almost in a targeted sequence, the Chinese government killed off for-profit after-school tutoring, limited the number of hours for gaming to one per day, and if that is not enough, reemphasized that children are not supposed to go through private tutors giving lessons in private homes. For tens of millions of kids who have heretofore been occupying their hours after school with homework, cram schools, and video games, their nights have just become much freer, to a degree that probably worries their parents. 

OnlyFans was supposed to be a game-changer for the porn industry. A field long plagued by the ease with which a casual audience can find content for free, its workers have searched far and wide for ways that they can consistently monetize their (quite literally) sweat and tears on and off the screen. OnlyFans, with its ability to have content creators price different levels of access to content and a variety of other physical and virtual goods, inadvertently promised workers in the porn industry to be paid their fair share, cutting out the porn studios, distributors, and websites that all undercut what performers can truly earn.

If there is one thing that biased Western media coverage got right about the current state of Afghanistan, it is the precarity of governance in the era of post-Taliban takeover. As the Taliban streamed into the major cities of the country practically unopposed, a large number of locals have spurned the new government, fleeing to the Kabul airport in the hopes of catching an evacuation flight to a new homeland. Many of these people genuinely fear for their lives, having collaborated with the Western "occupiers" and the previous "puppet" government that the Western allies propped up at great expense. 

As Kabul falls and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is nearly complete, there is a rather bipolar coverage of the events on the ground among Western media outlets. On one hand, there are extensive analyses of what led to the fact that an Afghan military, 300,000 men strong, that was trained and equipped with modern, US-made guns, tanks, and fighter planes, at the cost of more than USD 80 billion over two decades, simply disintegrated in the face of a two-week assault by a group of guerrilla fighters carrying nothing more than rifles and grenades.