Welcome to sunday links, my weekly break from the regular blog to share links to some interesting things. Normally I write every day. One post from this week you may enjoy is heartthrob 101, an overview/review of the classic Konami dating sim Heartthrob Memorial: Under The Tree of Legends.

article

“the blender who would recite shakespeare” (or, “towels and glue”) by tim rogers

TOKYO — Seven days a week, from six in the morning to nine in the evening, an elderly woman’s loudspeaker-amplified voice recites telephone numbers over the city of Koenji.
 
Between each digit of the phone numbers, she pauses for three clicks of a stopwatch. Then comes the next digit.
 
The loudspeakers stand at the tops of electric poles owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (Tepco). They point into living room windows, kitchen windows, bedroom windows, and the third floors of shops, bars, and restaurants.
 
One can measure the decibel level of The Voice as it travels into a third-story window as roughly equal to the sound of a subway train approaching from forty meters away.
 
From street level, the sound is comparable in volume to highway traffic at thirty meters.
 
“That’s within the legal limits,” said a representative of the Suginami Ward local government office. The representative asked not to be named.
 
(Note: all sources contacted during the investigation of this article specifically asked not to be named.)
 
Asked with what she had measured the sound, the representative of the Suginami Ward Office said, “We used an instrument which we brought with us for the purpose of measuring the sound. The instrument showed that the sound was within legal limits.”
 
Asked to show the instrument, the representative of the Suginami Ward Office said that she could not show the instrument.
 
Asked if the instrument was her ears, the representative hesitated. The other representative of the Suginami Ward Office stepped forward to announce that they would not be answering further questions about their sound-measuring instruments.

video

Heartmore on the Shore with Dierdre Lowenfang, WRYU 106.2 (1/3/22 broadcast) [04m00s]

Copyright Alefgard Broadcasting Corporation
Copyright Charlock Media

music

Here in Heaven 2 by Elite Gymnastics

You want me to use you, so that you can feel useful, because that is the only way that you feel loved. If I can be truthful, I feel like I'm the one that's being used. Can't you see I love you? Isn't that enough? Is it okay to go through life being untouchable? Is it okay to be in love with something dead? What happens to us if we accept that I'm unfixable? It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, I didn't mean what I said.

toy

Everyone probably knows about the excellent death generator, the toy that lets you generate fake screenshots from video games. It's what I used to make the "Wanted!" sign at the top of this entry. But what you may not know is that it probably has a lot of new games and new features since the last time you looked at it. Maybe you knew that, too. But just in case you didn't know it exists, or didn't know there's more now, here's your notification.

Remember when we would call a blog post that only exists to link to something "mindless link propagation"? And we'd abbreviate it MLP? That sure means something different these days, huh? 🦝