I have so many questions…
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When I visited Tokyo in 2019 (my first time in Japan, and I am desperately hopeful it won’t be my last), there was a crime spree gripping the city. It was in the papers, on all the television news reports…
Umbrella thefts. A gang was wandering around and stealing people’s umbrellas that they left outside restaurants. They were having special umbrella-lock-boxes installed at major public institutions!
The Japanese, man.
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Obviously they needed to protect themselves from whoever’s throwing the fish.
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Just got a newsletter from Feuerland… they are expecting to sell out of the 2nd printing of Ark Nova as quickly as the first and a 3rd is already in the works.
However, the more interesting–IMO–bit of news was that they had a contest for Terra Mystica fan factions and will be publishing those and the plan is to have them as PDF but also also they are supposed to be implemented on BGA 
which is nice even though I have a hard time playing the game in async in our forums game right now. But I guess I just haven’t played much recently. In any way I think that’s a lovely thing to do.
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Going to try a no buy month in Feb.
Mainly so I can afford an 18XX in March 
. For those that follow the thread it will be 18NewEngland
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18New England also has the prettiest box cover from All Aboard Games 
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Yeah, going with that an 1889 which seems to come with a good amount of Quality of Life improvements in the box
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As a follow-up, I spoke to the old guy who mans the gate at the school opposite our house and asked if he knew of anyone throwing rubbish in front of our house in the evening. He replied “not rubbish, food for cats” and something to the effect that the locals have been troubled by this for some time.
I asked him to take a note of the numberplate if he could, but I don’t think anything will come of that - the angle and distance from where he usually sits wouldn’t work out.
Anyway, confirmation is something.
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“Food for cats” great. So then who’ll clean the bones and the mess and the stench? The cats?
Some people…
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Yeah, the way it’s being done as a drive-by indicates that the driver knows they’d be in trouble if on foot. Still, a very strange situation. I don’t think I can be bothered to lie in wait, not knowing the frequency or timing, and I’m not sure if it would even be legal or effective to install a camera pointing that way, so just got to hope we get lucky and see the car again, get the numberplate, and can then report to the police.
The Osaka group I posted this story to had a variety of responses ranging from “go to a large police station and insist on talking to a detective” to “don’t go to the police because that’ll result in the cats being killed”, along with “put up a no littering sign”, “get a water spray”, “clean up the fish, they might be poisoned”, “what’s wrong with feeding cats?”, “feeding strays is illegal”, etc., etc. People are weird.
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Is there a Japanese equivalent to the RSPCA? They could deal with the cats, although perhaps not the drive-by fish lobbers… People are definitely weird.
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Yeah, it’s not really the cats that we want dealt with. They do yowl uncannily just like screaming babies/toddlers at odd times during the night, which is guaranteed to wake me up, as highly attuned as I am to such noises, but not every night, and they seem to have stopped pissing on our porch for the moment. The kids like them (chase them a little).
Just want to have a stern warning delivered to the crazy fish-flinger. There’s a law involving fines and responsibility for spaying stray cats, I’m sure something could be leveraged.
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Bravo! Full marks.
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Better that than these foxes in the UK. I couldn’t tell if someone is being murdered
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Fox screeches are horribly otherworldly, especially if they kick you out of sleep.
If I recall correctly, there has been some research on the fact that cat mews are pitched at around the same frequency as the cries of human children i.e. they trigger instinctual responses in most people to play attention to what the noise is and to respond to it.
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Someone let this guy know!
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Man. I remember hearing about Bungie because I played Marathon on the Mac. 5 years before Halo.
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I am in bed and ready to go to sleep and it is barely after 11. If the world ends due to this unheard of circumstance, please know that I am sorry.
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