The Sears Tele-Games version of Atariʼs Flag Capture, which was known as simply Capture
People forget how primitive video games were in the early years. For a very long time, the only way to start a game was to press the Restart button on the console. It would be years before anyone dreamed up the idea of starting or restarting a game by pressing a button on the controller thatʼs right there in the playerʼs hand. Itʼs so elementary that people today take for granted that itʼs always been that way.
In the early years of video games, there was no such thing as sitting back and relaxing while playing a game, unless it was something with no end, like the free draw mode in Surround. You had to reach out and touch the console every few minutes when the game ended.
I think that Yamato Transport has one of the best corporate logos on the plant. The delivery company uses a stylized mother cat carrying a kitten by the scruff of its neck.
Relatable content with bold colors. Itʼs my understanding that people in Japan just call the company “Black Cat.”
A bottle of real Pocari Sweat (left) and a bottle of American Pocari Sweat (right)
Pocari Sweat is an interesting thing. Japanese people love it because itʼs a great hydration drink. Americans who like to cosplay Japanese, but will never go there and know of Japan only what they read on the internet, like Pocari Sweat because of its quirky, to American ears, use of the word “Sweat.”
When recovering from a sunburn or the flu, Pocari Sweat is my go-to drink. It used to be rare and exotic, but now it's available in Japanese-themed stores across America, and guzzled down by people who know nothing about Japanese culture other than comic books and a vision of Akihabara that is 30 years out of date.
Most of them don't know that the Sweat theyʼre sucking isn't the real thing.
In this photo above, a bottle of real Pocari Sweat is on the left. On the right is the American version, which an internet search shows is actually bottled by the Crystal Geyser Water Company at its co-packing facilities in Bakersfield, California.
Is there a difference between Japanese Pocari Sweat and Bakersfield Pocari Sweat? But hereʼs what's in each:
Ingredients
Real Pocari Sweat
Water
Sugar
High fructose corn syrup
Salt
Citric acid
Artificial flavor
Potassium chloride
Calcium acetate
Amino acid
Magnesium chloride
Ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) as a preservative
American Pocari Sweat
Purified water
Cane sugar
Less than 1% of:
Citric acid
Natural and artificial flavors
Sodium citrate
Grapefruit juice concentrate
Salt
Potassium chloride
Malic acid
Calcium lactate
Glucono delta-lactone
Monosodium glutamate [MSG]
Magnesium carbonate
Ascorbic acid (to help protect flavor)
Another interesting difference is the serving size. The suggested serving size for the American Pocari Sweat is one full bottle — 500 milliliters, giving you 130 calories.
The suggested serving size of the Japanese Pocari Sweat is 100 milliliters — a fifth of a bottle, giving you 25 calories. If you decided to drink the entire Japanese bottle anyway, thatʼs 125 calories.
Is one better than the other? Perhaps if you have strong opinions about high fructose corn syrup, or grapefruit juice. But taste-wise, I canʼt detect a difference. The Japanese drink has about 4% fewer calories, assuming you drink the entire bottle. And like many Americans, I am a firm believer that 1 container = 1 serving.
Still, itʼs useful to know the difference, if you hang out in places that attract fake Nihonjin. To sort out the posers, just look at the label on the bottle. Real Pocari Sweat sold in America will have a paper nutrition label pasted over the original Japanese label.
Iʼm supposed to have super-duper awesome benefits with United Airlines because I have a Chase credit card. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to see what those benefits are. Naturally, the link on the Chase web site was broken. It just looped though a login screen over and over.
Since Iʼm a paying customer, I moaned about it to Chaseʼs customer service.
I ended up booking my ticket on another airline, and forgot all about it until I got this in the the mail today. I guess someone at Chase figured it would be faster to mail me a book about the benefits than to fix the link.
I guess this ends up being a story about good customer service, because not only do I have the book, but I just checked, and the link is fixed, too.
Smells like a white linnen sheet flapping in the breeze atop a grassy hill
Saturday, July 30th, 2022Alive18,722days
My debit card, after a million tumbles in the dryer
I lost my debit card a month ago. I found it today, wedged under one of the fins in the dryer. That means it not only went through the washing machine, it went through about 30 dryer cycles.
The card still works. The chip is fine, and the mag stripe works OK on newer machines.
I see people on the internet all the time claiming that plastic cards and cash are things of the past, and no longer needed. Thatʼs only true if you never go anywhere interesting, never eat anywhere unusual, and never do laundry.
Have you ever noticed that if you search for “doctor patient vaccine” in Adobe Stock, 90% of the fake doctors injecting their fake patients are using the same technique that a junkie uses to mainline skag? Have these photographers never received any kind of vaccine ever in their lives?
Street signs embedded into various sidewalk corners in Midtown Houston — poorly
When I lived in Houston the first time, there were many streets in Midtown that still had their historic tile mosaic street signs intact. In the decades I was away, the streets of Midtown were rebuilt, and the old curb signs removed so that the sidewalks could meet A.D.A. standards. Fortunately, the City of Houston decided that instead of throwing away the historic mosaics, it would embed them into the face of the sidewalks to preserve them.
The results is bad. Really bad. What you see above is the result of two things I've observed:
There is a very common attitude of “good enough” in the greater Houston area, where people will do a half-ass job and if it's good enough, consider it the same thing as done well.
You canʼt tell someone to arrange tiles in a “checkerboard” pattern because a surprising number of people have never played checkers, and donʼt know what a checker board is.
The first point I've learned from actual people. Iʼve met a number of people with this “good enough” attitude, and lack of pride in the things they do. One guy who thought this way bought his wife a used iron from eBay because he thought it was a “good enough” anniversary present.
The second point, I discovered while trying to explain the situation with mining rights on the checkerboard sections of the Navajo Nation. The person I was speaking with had no concept of what I was saying until I showed her what it looked like on a map. Until then, she had no reference for “checkers” or “checkerboard.”
I suspect what happened to the sidewalks of Midtown was a combination of a lack of pride in one's work, combined with a lack of basic knowledge. The result is that it makes the City of Houston, and its people, look stupid to anyone who uses a sidewalk in Midtown.
Today I learned from tech support at Citibank that Safari is not supported for “security reasons.” She recommended that I use the vastly less-secure Google Chrome browser, instead.
I sure wish I could book a flight on United Airlines. But for three days in two different browsers on two different computers, all I get when I search is this screen, which never changes.
The coffee of the day is Starbucks Veranda roast. I got this bag for free with my wife's Starbucks points/stars/thumbs/whatever. It's very hard for free coffee to be bad, so it must be good.
My memory is that Starbucks used to have a Veranda coffee, and a Blonde coffee. This is labeled both. I know that blonde is a type of roast, so I'm a little corn-fused here. Maybe Starbucks comnbined the two products into one to cut down on SKUs.
I finally got around to fixing up the over-the-air antenna hooked up to my TV. I re-scanned and found 121 channels.
Not all of the channels are great. But that's no different than the DirecTV service I have in my apartment, for which I am obligated to pay $80 a month. Except that the majority of the dross over the air is shopping channels and infomercials, while DirecTV seems to be 90% pornography, sports, and also shopping.
The important thing is that with the over-the-air antenna, I get The!Movies!Network!, and MeTV+. I've also discovered a channel that is mostly British and Australian DIY and lifestyle shows, like Escape to the Country, of which Darcie and have long been fans. Going to have to rev that $20 ATSC DVR into high gear for a while.
Here's a table of what I found, mostly for my own reference, and subject to change with a shift in the wind.
If you're viewing this on a mobile phone, you won't be able to see the table until you hold your phone horizontally. That's because tables look like absolute pants on phones.
A flock of birds captured in an aerial photo on Apple Maps
Sometimes if I canʼt sleep, I like to scroll through Apple Maps and see what can be seen. On this particular night, I found a flock of birds near NASA. They look like egrets or something similar to me.
Some people like to measure a computerʼs ability to asking if it can run Linux. Some ask if it can run Doom. I ask, ”Can it run Zork?” The answer for my TRS-80 Model 100 is “Yes, with a little help.”
My headless M1 Mac Mini crashed hard, so I had to hook up a monitor and re-install macOS Monterrey, which after 30 minutes helpfully tells me, “About a minute remaining.”
And by “About a minute” it meant a little under three hours.
