No, silly woman! You will not get a melanoma in the 5-minute walk from the station to your home!

Many Japanese women use umbrellas on sunny days to protect their skin from the Sun. They actually prefer their skin to be as white as possible (deathbed-white).

This woman takes it a bit too far. She opens her umbrella on a very cloudy day, for a 5-minute walk from the station, at almost 6pm in the afternoon.

Don’t tell anyone, but I think we’ve found a vampire!

Remember this post from a few days ago? I got very upset because Facebook keeps messing with its users’ personal information. In this case, they replaced everybody’s email address with a @facebook.com address. That was too much for me and I decided to leave, after removing my personal information from there.

I must admit defeat. I’m sad to say this, but Facebook wins.

My intention was to go through my friends’ profiles, write down the contact information and other data I wanted to keep (mostly birthdays), and then leave.

However, I found that I couldn’t get any contact information for most of my friends, because almost nobody has changed back to their real email address. Nice lock-in there, Facebook.

Also, during these days I’ve kept receiving friend requests from people I know in real life, messages from my family (even though I told them to email me instead), event invitations, etc. I admit it: it’s difficult to leave Facebook. So that’s it, I admit that I suck

As a damage control measure, I’m removing as much personal information from there as I can, but I’ll stay.

Look at this video. This is how typical anti-nuclear protesters in Japan react when you try and talk to them.

So violent. How do you reason with someone like this? This is why you hear so much from anti-nuclear protesters, but you don’t hear from us pro-nuclear: anti-nuclear are many, irrational, violent and (most of them) don’t understand what they’re talking about. Because of this, pro-nuclear people feel threatened and prefer not to say anything.

Most of the song is insults, threats and yakuza-speak, but he also manages to drop a nice amount of lies (maybe just because he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about).

Let me clarify a few of them:

With technologies like solar power and other renewables, we can get all the electricity we need without nuclear power… and cheaply, too.

No. This has been discussed again and again in many places. Most of these aren’t economically viable, or just won’t work in a country like Japan that doesn’t have the resources. But hey, maybe I’m mistaken. Show me real data that proves that we can depend on the renewables, and I will happily agree with you.

More after the break.

Yesterday there was a blackout at home while I was at work. It lasted about two minutes, and I learnt about it because one of my monitoring systems at home sent me a notification saying that two of my servers had rebooted.

You know, I’m not used to blackouts because this is the first one in the 10 years I’ve been living in Japan. Usually I wouldn’t really care about the power going offline for a few moments, especially when I’m not home. However, I’m sharing my room with two little ferrets. They don’t stand the hot weather very well, so I keep the air conditioner on during the whole summer for them. Yes, 24×7. And yes, it’s expensive. When I came home yesterday I found the air conditioner turned off because of the blackout, and the room temperature was very high. Nothing happened to my ferrets this time, but it could have.

Read on for my opinions about all this anti-nuclear movement.

There are several things going on in the world right now that I consider worrying enough to write about. These are (in no particular order):

• Religion
• WikiLeaks
• Animal abuse
• Nuclear power
• Political corruption in Europe
• Intellectual property

I’ve started writing about a couple of these (nuclear power and intellectual property), but I never seem to be able to finish because there’s always something new happening that changes my priorities: Julian Assange is denied the appeal for extradition, or a new anti-nuclear demonstration, or the political party that got Greece in all this trouble wins the national elections again.

Since I can’t decide what to write about first, I thought I’d just write this post summarizing what my opinions are, and then decide on a subject based on what gets me the most death threats. Please note that I’m not talking about posting a tweet or two, but writing multi-page posts containing real information about the subject.

So here we go.The following are my opinions.

Look at this product page from G-Technology (Hitachi):

Wow! That must be an awesome product, right? Over 90% score from almost 450 reviews!

Too bad it’s a lie. Keep reading for my experience with this external disk.

The Japanese music industry sucks. Look at bands like AKB48 or Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ). If you are living in Japan then you must be sick already of seeing them everywhere.

In case you hadn’t heard about them, I’m going to share the pain:

AKB48 is an all-girl band composed by *64* members, whose only talent is being young and cute. They jump around in the stage singing without much grace, but that doesn’t matter much, because their fans (mostly male otakus) only care about their looks.

They started in their own theater in Akihabara, where they performed daily in front of their fans (they still do). The group is actually named after the Akihabara district.

(Traducción en castellano debajo. Spanish translation follows.)

English:

I’ll go straight to the point: the situation here in Tokyo is normal. There’s no panic, no exodus, and no immediate danger.

However, western media is spreading fear and lots, lots of bullshit among our families and friends, because being alarmists brings them advertising money.

Because of this, family and friends are pressuring those of us who stay in Tokyo to leave the city. This is causing trouble for many of us.

To the media:

For fuck’s sake, please stop publishing crap in order to bring more viewers (and therefore, more advertising money) to your publications/programs/whatever. What you’re doing is just taking advantage of this situation in order to try and make some money at the expense of everybody who knows someone in Japan. You’re causing more trouble to us than the earthquake did!

To our family and friends:

We are fine. The situation in Tokyo is normal. There’s no panic, no exodus from the city, and no immediate danger of radiation exposure as the media would like you to believe.

Some links in English:

• Realtime streaming of a Geiger counter in Chiba. Showing normal levels of radiation.
• A post from MIT nuclear engineers explaining why it is physically impossible that radiation from Fukushima will affect Tokyo or surroundings. Who would you rather believe? Experts in the matter, or journalists who do it for the money?

Castellano:

Iré directamente al grano: la situación en Tokyo es normal. No hay pánico, no hay ninguna huída de Tokyo, y no hay peligro inminente.

Sin embargo, los medios de comunicación están difundiendo miedo y montones, montones de basura entre nuestras familias y amigos, simplemente porque el alarmismo les trae ingresos por publicidad.

Debido a esto, nuestros familiares y amigos nos están presionando para que dejemos la ciudad. Esto nos está creando problemas a muchos.

A los medios de comunicación:

Por lo que más queráis, dejad de difundir mierda para atraer más público (y por tanto, más ingresos por publicidad) a vuestras publicaciones/programas/lo que sea. Lo que estáis haciendo es simplemente aprovecharos por motivos económicos de la terrible situación en el norte de Japón, para hacer dinero a costa de todo el que conoce a alguien en Japón. ¡Nos estáis causando más problemas que el terremoto!

A nuestros familiares y amigos:

Estamos bien. La situación en Tokyo es normal. No hay pánico, no hay huída de la ciudad, y no hay peligro inminente de exposición a la radiación como os quieren hacer creer los medios de comunicación.

Algunos enlaces:

• Streaming en tiempo real de un contador Geiger en Chiba. Mostrando niveles normales de radioactividad.
• Niveles de radioactividad en España. En algunos casos, superiores a los de Chiba en estos momentos.
• Japón no vive en el caos. Un post de otro residente en Japón.
• Huída de Tokyo, 17 de marzo 2011. Un vídeo de otro español en Tokyo mostrando la realidad de la situación en estos momentos. A él también le han presionado sus familiares y amigos, y se ha visto obligado a dejar la ciudad en contra de su voluntad.
• Entrevista en El País a César Molins, doctor en ingeniería nuclear. Explica por qué no hay peligro.
• Carta pública a los medios. De un grupo de españoles viviendo en Tokyo, cansados del sensacionalismo de los medios de comunicación.