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Trump Team Reportedly Getting Fed Up With Elon Musk's Weird Behavior

While they look cool, diffraction spikes aren't necessarily desirable, since they can blot out other objects. For now, scientists will have to live with them. But future telescopes, like the planned Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, could have no spikes at all due to its advanced configuration ...

Once You Notice This Weird Thing About James Webb Space Telescope Images, You Won't Be Able to Unsee It

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Weird New Quantum Experiment Sounds Suspiciously Like Time Travel

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This is by (source: ). Kane is a seed investor of Root Ventures. Twitter thread Kane @kane 12-20-2021 https://twitter.com/kane/status/1473015351654830088?embedable=true&thread=true Feature image generated via prompt of ‘A cute cat operating heavy machinery HackerNoon Stable Diffusion

Examples of Weird Infrastructure Tests: A Thread

Boy, do I have the country to write about this week: Turkmenistan. weirdest Turkmenistan’s former president made a multilingual rap video introducing his country…despite the fact that it’s bizarre AF and the video editor was his horse (probably), it’s a super fun thing to watch 👇 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xZoa5ArhgA&embedable=true 3 Things To Know Before We Get Started The country came into existence in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, having been a Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic as Part of The Great Socialist Soviet Union (It’s a mouthful) since 1925. This had a new president, Saparmurat Niyazov, come into power. He was a totalitarian and despotic dictator who started a personality cult (more on that later). For simplicity, let’s call him Samurai. When Samurai died from a heart attack in 2006, another ‘President’ Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, became the dictator of Turkmenistan until 2022. Let’s call him Burgundy. Bizarre things Samurai did Ruhnama He decided he had a direct line with God, which manifested in (The Book of The Soul). Think of a watered-down version of Ruhnama Mein Kampf + the Bible. was a mandatory read for school children, students, and those holding state employment. Oh, if you wanted to get a driver’s license, you had to have read it too. Ruhnama There even was a social study field called (creative, I know). Half of the exam questions for the 2006 University Entry revolved around themes set in Rahmana Studies Ruhnama. has been translated into 50 languages, though. Go figure 🤷‍♀️ Samurai said that God told him whoever reads it thrice will go to heaven. I’d say go on Amazon right now! Ruhnama Other crazy things he did Banned the use of lip-syncing at public concerts. Abolished the Turkmen word for bread and replaced it with , his mother’s name. Gurbansoltan Made the second Sunday of August “Melon Day” in honor of melons as he thought they were delicious — finally something I could sign up for. Ordered that all mountains and places in Turkmenistan + months and days of the week be named after Turkmen heroes, poets, and leaders. In 1997, when he tried to quit smoking, he passed a law that banned it in public to eliminate the temptation. Gold teeth were discouraged as he thought everyone was better off chewing on bones to strengthen their teeth and lessen the rate at which they fall out. Banished dogs from the capital, citing unappealing odor. Also forbade citizens to own more than one dog or cat (I’ll bet the guinea pig sales went through the roof). Ordered the closure of all hospitals outside Ashgabat, stating that the sick should go to the capital for treatment. He banned reporting or mentioning contagious diseases such as AIDS or cholera (peekaboo — if we don’t mention it, it means it doesn’t exist — I wish not talking about my student loans would make it disappear). He banned car radios because he considered them to be useless. Oh yeah, he also built a golden statue of himself that was rotating to face the Sun at all times. Bizarre things Burgundy did He was a bit more chill and reversed lots of eccentric laws Samurai brought into existence. He was still an authoritarian dictator, though. Black cars were banned in favor of white because it “brings good luck.” He was obsessed with Akhal-Teke horses. So much so his entire office only had one prominent motif all over the furniture — horses. He’s a former dentist turned rapping president, as we witnessed earlier. He liked a dog breed so much he made a golden statue for it 👇 But he also clearly doesn’t know how to hold a dog. Imagine being a guy who is so bad at holding dogs that Putin has to save it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLLZYFzkqKo&embedable=true Let us not forget the time when he tried to kill the rumours he was dead by driving around a BURNING HOLE IN THE GROUND (everything’s normal, nothing to look at)👇 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYiYi8-wCx0&t=11s&embedable=true More Bizzare Things About Turkmenistan Have you ever wondered why there’s a carpet in their flag? You probably didn’t, but I’ll tell you anyway: because they LOVE carpets. There’s a Ministry of Carpets, a National Carpet Museum, and a public holiday to honour carpets. They even used to have the world’s largest hand-woven carpet record until Iran beat them in 2019. If you want to purchase a carpet, you need a receipt with your age, origin, and date of purchase. This must be certified by the Ministry of Carpets or else the carpet can’t leave the country. I’ll say it one more time: carpet. It’s one of the least visited countries in the World — the top 10 least visited countries in fact. Locals used to have state-subsidized gas, water, petrol, and electricity between 1993 and 2019. Turkmenistan is the only country officially recognized by the United Nations as a neutral nation. Eat that, Switzerland. It has a burning hole that’s been on fire since 1971, dubbed (featured in a fast and furious video by Samurai seen above). Gates of Hell It was a man-made disaster — a Soviet drilling rig accidentally punched into a massive underground natural gas cavern. This caused the ground to collapse and the entire drilling rig to fall in. So they thought: — it did not. Why don’t we set this on fire? Maybe that’ll solve this? Took me 3 hours to research this, but it was worth it 😂 Random fact: when I was very young, there was a trend in Lithuania to have a carpet hanging on the wall (seriously). You’d walk into someone’s living room, and there’d be a proudly displayed carpet hanging on the wall. It looked something like this 👇 To Sum Up I think we all learned today that Turkmenistan is a super bizarre place to be. Although I wrote this piece with a bit of humor, let’s not forget it’s essentially a dictatorship run by eccentric weirdos. They clearly try much harder than North Korea to portray themselves as cool and fun. Turkmenistan is brandable, as they say in the marketing world. Also published . here

Turkmenistan: A Dive into Eccentric Dictators and Their Quirky Rules

Some mathematical oddities I never quite understood Consider the following equations : 1 / 9 = 0.1111…1111 0.1111…1111 * 9 = 0.9999…9999 From this, we can conclude : 1 = 0.9999…9999 From this, we can conclude : 0 = 0.0000…0001 Now, consider this : 1 / ∞ = 0.0000…0001 – 1 / ∞ = – 0.0000…0001 This would lead to the following conclusion : 1 / ∞ = 0 = –1 / ∞ 1 / 0 = ∞ = – ∞ When I draw a graph for 1 / x, that is precisely the result I would expect. I never really understood why people keep saying that 1 / ∞ ≠ 0. I’be been taught this in high school, but it never made any sense to me at all. This, especially considering the the fact the “limit” of 1 / x is ∞ or -∞ for “x → 0”. Why can’t we just use “limits” to determine the value of infinity in equations? Why can’t we just say that 1 / 0 = ∞ because ∞ is the resulting value of the limit of 1 / x with “x → 0” or that 1 / ∞ = 0 because 0 is the resulting value of the limit of 1 / x with “x → ∞”? I guess the typical argument against the argumentation here-above, would be that the “limit” of 2 / x, 3 / x or 4 / x with “x → 0” are all also ∞. This, they argue, makes the argumentation here-above invalid. But does it really? I guess it does, if and only if we treat ∞ as some kind of garbage bin that represents any value that’s infinitely large. However, I’m not convinced that we should. Why can’t we just define ∞ as eg. the number 100000000…000 (with an infinite number of zeroes)? Basically, you’d have something like ∞ = 10ⁿ, with n = ∞. If we would define ∞ like that, we could easily argue that 2 / x is equal to 2*10ⁿ (n = ∞) and thus 2∞. Or, if we would multiply two infinite values, we’d end up with 10²ⁿ (n = ∞), or ∞². Basically, why can’t we just use ∞ as a normal number? Why can’t we have different orders of magnitude and express those by using a notation like 2∞ or ∞³? Doing so, I believe, would significantly improve our understanding of infinity because it would give us a broader understanding of the impact of multiple values of infinite magnitude have on each other. Also, why must we treat the value of x / x as undefined for x = 0, when we intuitively feel it should be 1 (eg. when looking at its graph, or dividing by x at both the top and bottom of the fraction) and the limit of x / x for “x → 0” also gives us that value? We must we treat the value of 1 / x as undefined for x = 0, looking at its graph tells us it should be ∞ or -∞ and this is exactly what you get when calculating the limit? Why can’t we just use the limits as the actual value instead of some ackward workaround to deal with supposed undefineds? I find it hard to believe that I’m the only one who believes it makes far more sense to say that the value of 2 / x is 2∞ for x = 0 than to say that the “limit” of 2 / x is ∞ for x = 0? Right?! Notations similar to those used for 10²ⁿ and 2*10ⁿ, with n = ∞, could also be used for n = -∞ (= infinitesimals). Whether n = -∞ or ∞, it always makes sense to preserve the differences between 10-ⁿ, 2*10ⁿ, 3*10ⁿ. Sure, these differences may seem irrelevant, but they become relevant whenever you multiple these numbers by 10⁻ⁿ. So why choose to lose this information? Why treat 10ⁿ * 10⁻ⁿ as “undefned” for -∞ and ∞, when we know that 10ⁿ * 10⁻ⁿ = 1 in every other situation as well as the “limits” for -∞ and ∞? I had hoped the videos below would help me better understand why infinity is given such a strange treatment by mathematicians… but unfortunately they don’t! In fact, mathematics never made less sense to me than it did after watching both videos.

From zero to infinity

Airchat founders Naval and former Tinder executive Brian Norgard believe that speech communication strengthens human connection. The new social media app they are working on and launching, AirChat, is meant to bridge the polarizing divides in our world. They say they designed AirChat to be simple and intimate, offering a new way for individuals to connect and engage in meaningful dialog, and the app is being touted as Silicon Valley's new obsession. It is currently open by invitation to US and EU phone numbers, but the founders have signaled that they will expand soon. AirChat was introduced at X-Twitter as a combination of Twitter and Clubhouse and has been making waves in our feeds for the past few weeks. The only difference is that instead of writing a post, you share your content by talking about it, and you don't need to gather under a different topic. The app quickly transcribes what you say, and as your followers scroll through their feeds, they hear your voice in transcription. I tried AirChat, an app that is especially talked about for the success of its transcription technology, where tech enthusiasts, leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors invite each other and quickly tighten the ranks. AirChat was developed by Naval Ravikant, an Indian entrepreneur who is also the founder of AngelList, is quite famous on Twitter, and reaches millions with his podcast where he advises on mental models, and Brian Norgard, former Tinder. They aim to bring a sincere new approach to social media by taking us away from X's increasingly toxic news feed, which is corrupted by ads and fake bots. Imagine that there are many people we know only through the internet whose posts we read but still haven't met. After following each other on AirChat, you realize that you have never heard their real voices before. The platform is built to give you the feeling that you are actually chatting with each other. Although the excitement that spread when Clubhouse was first launched seems to be happening in Airchat, we will see if it will end up similar. A Week on Airchat With Brian Norgard being a former Tinder manager, it makes me wonder how they're going to use emotion to retain users. They are given 20 invites, and you are motivated to invite people you know personally and send invites to people you would enjoy chatting with. In reality, however, we all know this is not realistic. After Clubhouse became very popular, users started selling their invites to people who were thirsty to get into the app and couldn't get an invite. While Airchat itself doesn't seem to be in a hurry to make money for now, the fact that its founders are also investors could quickly change the course of the app. In addition, there are some who are skeptical of Naval's efforts to establish its own social media, criticized for being close to the “center-right “ and Trump. When the Tinder experience is added to this, this suspicion increases a little more. So, how is Airchat in terms of user experience? First of all, really, at first, it feels weird just being a stalker. You see the posts in your feed one after the other, but hearing the texts in the post owners' voices creates a diversity of sound and noise because of the voice recordings from different environments. If you're looking for a quieter new social media environment, I doubt it will scare you away from Instagram or TikTok. Clubhouse was so popular for a while; probably the most important reason was that it gathered people who really had something to say, and some of us really needed to say it. In that sense, people would turn on their microphones and talk for like an hour as if they were giving a lecture. The content and the flow of the conversation was interesting, you really wanted to stay there and participate. The fact that everyone could find a community to talk to satisfied us and motivated us to keep using it. Airchat is different, it's no different from Twitter in terms of post flow and sharing, except that now you can have a voiceover of your posts. This doesn't seem to add any new originality. In fact, an early version of AirChat was launched last year, and the aim was to improve the app's vision by getting feedback from early invitees. After this testing period, they rebuilt the app from the ground up. Key Features : All posts and replies are audio recordings transcribed by the app.


Social features include following users, scrolling through a feed, replying, liking, and sharing content.


Users can share photos and videos.


When you want to reply to a post, you need to record your voice.


You can speak Turkish, and it is translated directly into English. Although the app's Turkish translation is not very good, other users have commented that the Hindi and Spanish translations are successful.


Posting with your voice can be a hand-shaking activity at first, but it's not as scary as it sounds, and you can re-record your post if you say the wrong thing.


If you're the kind of person who sends voice recordings on WhatsApp instead of texting, you might also like using it.


The ability to block and mute contacts is active now. Early adopters who feel they've found their niche are already sharing the app, and podcasters, in particular, may start to embrace Airchat as a potential additional distribution channel. But is AirChat Here to Stay? That will perhaps depend, as always, on whether people on the platform can find a community to express themselves. The Airchat stream feels like you're in a coffee shop in San Francisco because, for now, most of the users are from the tech industry. This has not been the case for Threads, Meta's new social media experiment, or Bluesky, which developed a culture of toxic communication very early on. Jack Dorsey’s, former founder and CEO of Twitter, has now stopped invitations to the Bluesky app. It's also telling that when AirChat introduced a channel feature, two of the first to pop up were "Crypto" and "e/acc," which stands for Effective Acceleration, an aggressive pro-tech movement, casting doubt on the future of the app. Looking at the content currently streaming on Airchat, you can't find many non-tech-related conversations for now. Although we use X reluctantly, we can still catch a variety of content. AirChat's naive approach to content moderation is also questionable. Naval posted the following note on his Airchat account on this subject: "We will try to put as much of the moderation tools in the hands of users as possible. "
Naval Ravikant also argues that AirChat should function like a dinner party;"You can't kick out someone who comes to your house as a guest for participating in a civilized discussion. But if that person starts shouting at you violently, it is wise to intervene. We don't want to moderate for content, but we will moderate for tone." This is another point where AirChat parallels Clubhouse. Clubhouse's approach to content moderation was even weaker because there was no way to block people. AirChat blocks any user, and muting features are now active. When Clubhouse was active, it inadvertently hosted antisemitic and misogynistic speech and was unable to intervene. With this minimalist approach to content moderation, it's easy to see AirChat's dilemma here. What happens if someone shares copyrighted audio on the platform or if someone discloses another user's confidential information? We don't know if there is a real plan in place to deal with these situations. We'll have to wait until after it goes global to see if it fades from minds and phones as quickly as Clubhouse did. While the concept behind AirChat may seem quite civilized in a romantic framework, it is a fact that we no longer trust or believe in users or the "genius" founders of social media, and it can quickly become toxic. Airchat founders Naval and former Tinder executive Brian Norgard believe that speech communication strengthens human connection. The new social media app they are working on and launching, AirChat, is meant to bridge the polarizing divides in our world. They say they designed AirChat to be simple and intimate, offering a new way for individuals to connect and engage in meaningful dialog, and the app is being touted as Silicon Valley's new obsession. It is currently open by invitation to US and EU phone numbers, but the founders have signaled that they will expand soon. AirChat touted touted AirChat was introduced at X-Twitter as a combination of Twitter and Clubhouse and has been making waves in our feeds for the past few weeks. The only difference is that instead of writing a post, you share your content by talking about it, and you don't need to gather under a different topic. The app quickly transcribes what you say, and as your followers scroll through their feeds, they hear your voice in transcription. I tried AirChat, an app that is especially talked about for the success of its transcription technology, where tech enthusiasts, leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors invite each other and quickly tighten the ranks. AirChat was developed by Naval Ravikant, an Indian entrepreneur who is also the founder of AngelList, is quite famous on Twitter, and reaches millions with his podcast where he advises on mental models, and Brian Norgard, former Tinder . They aim to bring a sincere new approach to social media by taking us away from X's increasingly toxic news feed, which is corrupted by ads and fake bots. Imagine that there are many people we know only through the internet whose posts we read but still haven't met. After following each other on AirChat, you realize that you have never heard their real voices before. The platform is built to give you the feeling that you are actually chatting with each other. Although the excitement that spread when Clubhouse was first launched seems to be happening in Airchat, we will see if it will end up similar. AirChat was developed by Naval Ravikant, an Indian entrepreneur who is also the founder of AngelList, is quite famous on Twitter, and reaches millions with his podcast where he advises on mental models, and Brian Norgard, former Tinder A Week on Airchat A Week on Airchat With Brian Norgard being a former Tinder manager, it makes me wonder how they're going to use emotion to retain users. They are given 20 invites, and you are motivated to invite people you know personally and send invites to people you would enjoy chatting with. In reality, however, we all know this is not realistic. After Clubhouse became very popular, users started selling their invites to people who were thirsty to get into the app and couldn't get an invite. started started While Airchat itself doesn't seem to be in a hurry to make money for now, the fact that its founders are also investors could quickly change the course of the app. In addition, there are some who are skeptical of Naval's efforts to establish its own social media, criticized for being close to the “center-right “ and Trump. When the Tinder experience is added to this, this suspicion increases a little more. So, how is Airchat in terms of user experience? First of all, really, at first, it feels weird just being a stalker. You see the posts in your feed one after the other, but hearing the texts in the post owners' voices creates a diversity of sound and noise because of the voice recordings from different environments. If you're looking for a quieter new social media environment, I doubt it will scare you away from Instagram or TikTok. Clubhouse was so popular for a while; probably the most important reason was that it gathered people who really had something to say, and some of us really needed to say it. In that sense, people would turn on their microphones and talk for like an hour as if they were giving a lecture. The content and the flow of the conversation was interesting, you really wanted to stay there and participate. The fact that everyone could find a community to talk to satisfied us and motivated us to keep using it. Airchat is different, it's no different from Twitter in terms of post flow and sharing, except that now you can have a voiceover of your posts. This doesn't seem to add any new originality. In fact, an early version of AirChat was launched last year, and the aim was to improve the app's vision by getting feedback from early invitees. After this testing period, they rebuilt the app from the ground up. Key Features : Key Features : All posts and replies are audio recordings transcribed by the app. Social features include following users, scrolling through a feed, replying, liking, and sharing content. Users can share photos and videos. When you want to reply to a post, you need to record your voice. You can speak Turkish, and it is translated directly into English. Although the app's Turkish translation is not very good, other users have commented that the Hindi and Spanish translations are successful. Posting with your voice can be a hand-shaking activity at first, but it's not as scary as it sounds, and you can re-record your post if you say the wrong thing. If you're the kind of person who sends voice recordings on WhatsApp instead of texting, you might also like using it. The ability to block and mute contacts is active now. All posts and replies are audio recordings transcribed by the app. All posts and replies are audio recordings transcribed by the app. Social features include following users, scrolling through a feed, replying, liking, and sharing content. Social features include following users, scrolling through a feed, replying, liking, and sharing content. Users can share photos and videos. Users can share photos and videos. When you want to reply to a post, you need to record your voice. When you want to reply to a post, you need to record your voice. You can speak Turkish, and it is translated directly into English. Although the app's Turkish translation is not very good, other users have commented that the Hindi and Spanish translations are successful. You can speak Turkish, and it is translated directly into English. Although the app's Turkish translation is not very good, other users have commented that the Hindi and Spanish translations are successful. Posting with your voice can be a hand-shaking activity at first, but it's not as scary as it sounds, and you can re-record your post if you say the wrong thing. Posting with your voice can be a hand-shaking activity at first, but it's not as scary as it sounds, and you can re-record your post if you say the wrong thing. If you're the kind of person who sends voice recordings on WhatsApp instead of texting, you might also like using it. If you're the kind of person who sends voice recordings on WhatsApp instead of texting, you might also like using it. The ability to block and mute contacts is active now. The ability to block and mute contacts is active now. Early adopters who feel they've found their niche are already sharing the app, and podcasters, in particular, may start to embrace Airchat as a potential additional distribution channel. But is AirChat Here to Stay? But is AirChat Here to Stay? That will perhaps depend, as always, on whether people on the platform can find a community to express themselves. The Airchat stream feels like you're in a coffee shop in San Francisco because, for now, most of the users are from the tech industry. This has not been the case for Threads, Meta's new social media experiment, or Bluesky , which developed a culture of toxic communication very early on. Jack Dorsey’s, former founder and CEO of Twitter, has now stopped invitations to the Bluesky app. It's also telling that when AirChat introduced a channel feature, two of the first to pop up were "Crypto" and "e/acc," which stands for Effective Acceleration , an aggressive pro-tech movement, casting doubt on the future of the app. Looking at the content currently streaming on Airchat, you can't find many non-tech-related conversations for now. Although we use X reluctantly, we can still catch a variety of content. AirChat's naive approach to content moderation is also questionable. Naval posted the following note on his Airchat account on this subject: Bluesky Bluesky Effective Acceleration Effective Acceleration "We will try to put as much of the moderation tools in the hands of users as possible. " Naval Ravikant also argues that AirChat should function like a dinner party; "You can't kick out someone who comes to your house as a guest for participating in a civilized discussion. But if that person starts shouting at you violently, it is wise to intervene. We don't want to moderate for content, but we will moderate for tone." "We will try to put as much of the moderation tools in the hands of users as possible. " "We will try to put as much of the moderation tools in the hands of users as possible. " Naval Ravikant also argues that AirChat should function like a dinner party; Naval Ravikant also argues that AirChat should function like a dinner party; "You can't kick out someone who comes to your house as a guest for participating in a civilized discussion. But if that person starts shouting at you violently, it is wise to intervene. We don't want to moderate for content, but we will moderate for tone." "You can't kick out someone who comes to your house as a guest for participating in a civilized discussion. But if that person starts shouting at you violently, it is wise to intervene. We don't want to moderate for content, but we will moderate for tone." This is another point where AirChat parallels Clubhouse. Clubhouse's approach to content moderation was even weaker because there was no way to block people. AirChat blocks any user, and muting features are now active. When Clubhouse was active, it inadvertently hosted antisemitic and misogynistic speech and was unable to intervene. antisemitic antisemitic misogynistic misogynistic With this minimalist approach to content moderation, it's easy to see AirChat's dilemma here. What happens if someone shares copyrighted audio on the platform or if someone discloses another user's confidential information? We don't know if there is a real plan in place to deal with these situations. We'll have to wait until after it goes global to see if it fades from minds and phones as quickly as Clubhouse did. While the concept behind AirChat may seem quite civilized in a romantic framework, it is a fact that we no longer trust or believe in users or the "genius" founders of social media, and it can quickly become toxic.

A Week at AirChat: Very Fresh, but Weird...

Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . A WEIRD TALE CHAPTER XXIX. A WEIRD TALE On an early June evening Rainbow Valley was an entirely delightful place and the children felt it to be so, as they sat in the open glade where the bells rang elfishly on the Tree Lovers, and the White Lady shook her green tresses. The wind was laughing and whistling about them like a leal, glad-hearted comrade. The young ferns were spicy in the hollow. The wild cherry trees scattered over the valley, among the dark firs, were mistily white. The robins were whistling over in the maples behind Ingleside. Beyond, on the slopes of the Glen, were blossoming orchards, sweet and mystic and wonderful, veiled in dusk. It was spring, and young things must be glad in spring. Everybody was glad in Rainbow Valley that evening—until Mary Vance froze their blood with the story of Henry Warren’s ghost. Jem was not there. Jem spent his evenings now studying for his entrance examination in the Ingleside garret. Jerry was down near the pond, trouting. Walter had been reading Longfellow’s sea poems to the others and they were steeped in the beauty and mystery of the ships. Then they talked of what they would do when they were grown up—where they would travel—the far, fair shores they would see. Nan and Di meant to go to Europe. Walter longed for the Nile moaning past its Egyptian sands, and a glimpse of the sphinx. Faith opined rather dismally that she supposed she would have to be a missionary—old Mrs. Taylor told her she ought to be—and then she would at least see India or China, those mysterious lands of the Orient. Carl’s heart was set on African jungles. Una said nothing. She thought she would just like to stay at home. It was prettier here than anywhere else. It would be dreadful when they were all grown up and had to scatter over the world. The very idea made Una feel lonesome and homesick. But the others dreamed on delightedly until Mary Vance arrived and vanished poesy and dreams at one fell swoop. “Laws, but I’m out of puff,” she exclaimed. “I’ve run down that hill like sixty. I got an awful scare up there at the old Bailey place.” “What frightened you?” asked Di. “I dunno. I was poking about under them lilacs in the old garden, trying to see if there was any lilies-of-the-valley out yet. It was dark as a pocket there—and all at once I seen something stirring and rustling round at the other side of the garden, in those cherry bushes. It was white. I tell you I didn’t stop for a second look. I flew over the dyke quicker than quick. I was sure it was Henry Warren’s ghost.” “Who was Henry Warren?” asked Di. “And why should he have a ghost?” asked Nan. “Laws, did you never hear the story? And you brought up in the Glen. Well, wait a minute till I get by breath all back and I’ll tell you.” Walter shivered delightsomely. He loved ghost stories. Their mystery, their dramatic climaxes, their eeriness gave him a fearful, exquisite pleasure. Longfellow instantly grew tame and commonplace. He threw the book aside and stretched himself out, propped upon his elbows to listen whole-heartedly, fixing his great luminous eyes on Mary’s face. Mary wished he wouldn’t look at her so. She felt she could make a better job of the ghost story if Walter were not looking at her. She could put on several frills and invent a few artistic details to enhance the horror. As it was, she had to stick to the bare truth—or what had been told her for the truth. “Well,” she began, “you know old Tom Bailey and his wife used to live in that house up there thirty years ago. He was an awful old rip, they say, and his wife wasn’t much better. They’d no children of their own, but a sister of old Tom’s died and left a little boy—this Henry Warren—and they took him. He was about twelve when he came to them, and kind of undersized and delicate. They say Tom and his wife used him awful from the start—whipped him and starved him. Folks said they wanted him to die so’s they could get the little bit of money his mother had left for him. Henry didn’t die right off, but he begun having fits—epileps, they called ‘em—and he grew up kind of simple, till he was about eighteen. His uncle used to thrash him in that garden up there ‘cause it was back of the house where no one could see him. But folks could hear, and they say it was awful sometimes hearing poor Henry plead with his uncle not to kill him. But nobody dared interfere ‘cause old Tom was such a reprobate he’d have been sure to get square with ‘em some way. He burned the barns of a man at Harbour Head who offended him. At last Henry died and his uncle and aunt give out he died in one of his fits and that was all anybody ever knowed, but everybody said Tom had just up and killed him for keeps at last. And it wasn’t long till it got around that Henry walked. That old garden was ha’nted. He was heard there at nights, moaning and crying. Old Tom and his wife got out—went out West and never came back. The place got such a bad name nobody’d buy or rent it. That’s why it’s all gone to ruin. That was thirty years ago, but Henry Warren’s ghost ha’nts it yet.” “Do you believe that?” asked Nan scornfully. “I don’t.” “Well, good people have seen him—and heard him.” retorted Mary. “They say he appears and grovels on the ground and holds you by the legs and gibbers and moans like he did when he was alive. I thought of that as soon as I seen that white thing in the bushes and thought if it caught me like that and moaned I’d drop down dead on the spot. So I cut and run. It mightn’t have been his ghost, but I wasn’t going to take any chances with a ha’nt.” “It was likely old Mrs. Stimson’s white calf,” laughed Di. “It pastures in that garden—I’ve seen it.” “Maybe so. But I’m not going home through the Bailey garden any more. Here’s Jerry with a big string of trout and it’s my turn to cook them. Jem and Jerry both say I’m the best cook in the Glen. And Cornelia told me I could bring up this batch of cookies. I all but dropped them when I saw Henry’s ghost.” Jerry hooted when he heard the ghost story—which Mary repeated as she fried the fish, touching it up a trifle or so, since Walter had gone to help Faith to set the table. It made no impression on Jerry, but Faith and Una and Carl had been secretly much frightened, though they would never have given in to it. It was all right as long as the others were with them in the valley: but when the feast was over and the shadows fell they quaked with remembrance. Jerry went up to Ingleside with the Blythes to see Jem about something, and Mary Vance went around that way home. So Faith and Una and Carl had to go back to the manse alone. They walked very close together and gave the old Bailey garden a wide berth. They did not believe that it was haunted, of course, but they would not go near it for all that. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. L. M. Montgomery (2004). Rainbow Valley. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5343/pg5343-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.

A WEIRD TALE

That's Ryan Kaji. He's 8 years old. Ryan has more views, fans, and subscribers than you'll ever get in your life. Is that a good thing though? The answer might be that it depends on who you ask. Picture this. Your kid comes up to you and says "Mummy/Daddy, I wanna be a YouTube star! Can you post a video of me on YouTube, pleeeeeeease?". What do you say? Do you oblige, refuse, explain why you don't think it's a good idea, or why maybe you think it is a good idea but that in all honesty you just can't be bothered doing it right there and then? I've faced this exact dilemma and it's not a unique one. My daughter is the exact age as Ryan. My friends that have kids my daughter's age have been asked this same question by their kids too. A few of them gave in and filmed adorable but potato quality videos of their kid playing video games and uploaded it to YouTube. My issue isn't the quality. Obviously. The issue is that it is friggin creepy. Filming your rugrat, uploading said rugrat to the Web for the entire world to see and turning your new-found hobby into a multi-million dollar enterprise, amassing tens of billions of views, millions of subscribers, selling thousands of toys, getting into legal battles (Ryan Toys Review)...all with your kid, being the mascot of your gargantuan new enterprise forever and into DIGITAL INFINITY. That's weird bro. Knowingly or not you've just nullified any potential right to privacy that your kid had. I'm not pretending I'm some kind of moral arbiter. As a parent we all make mistakes and I am certainly far from perfect. Just ask my wife. This thing just strikes me as one of those situations that's a really bad idea. And it might not be apparent from the start to the parents. Or anyone else, but I think in due course we'll all be scratching our chins and wondering why we ever thought it was a good idea. So as I was saying; My daughter asked me directly if she was allowed to make a video of herself on her tablet and upload it to YouTube because, well, her friend had a channel and she wanted to as well. Monkey see monkey do. started This was followed up by me asking her a couple of weeks later what she wanted to do when she grew up and the response was to be a YouTube star! I explained to my daughter that I didn't think it was a good idea because anything that you upload to YouTube can be seen by anyone in the world, it can be saved, downloaded and distributed and for a little kid that might be dangerous because there a naughty people out there, naughty people have access to YouTube too. She understood. That was a couple of years ago. She's a little bit older now and the discussion has come up again. She's a little older but a lot smarter and so now the conversation has changed to how she could potentially upload videos to the Internet while being safe. We've thrown around some ideas and its a work in progress. The point being is that if I don't need to cite facts from FBI.gov or statistics about a global pedophile and child pornography networks to my eight-year-old when discussing the potential downside in uploading personal and private information online and she Why don't the parents of these kids get it? gets it. Or am I just naive and they do get it but don't care because y'know money? I honestly don't know. A bigger question: What is YouTube doing about it? What are the global content giants doing about children and kid-content on their networks? Have they thought about it? Is it just going to be one of those 'costs of doing business' situations in a few years? Because I suppose eventually kids like Ryan might grow up and decide they're not too happy that their parents uploaded their entire lives for the world to see. AR Contributing community member and investor of, https://safenetwork.tech/ Image source: Uploaded by: Ryan ToysReview,Aug 6, 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_8VwSlyxuA #How to show your support? Consider buying me a beer or coffee with Crypto — Options below. 0xa6F834525b5b44a7F1188B4D1323dDee865fc643 Ethereum ETH: bc1qkckgslfczefjw9fvg7c2lmpgk9g5q9pyqk4nmy Bitcoin BTC: 4B23PZr53mYGNXzLvNXh5mcSQ5ABwi2RaEc2jfZLwj3vKgrQ7TmjsGNLoeKTnseUZUbeucpv3bihuYWLS1DtQnsvVWxFjtH Monero XMR: bnb10lxgm4k34aqgsqyxjrf80de9yupm3n9fd0rr9z Bincance BNB: addr1qy7rusmc3l03mnds6mhv7v0c6qh3hqgcwwhqqgn7r0e0pufu8eph3r7lrhxmp4hweucl35p0rwq3suawqq38uxlj7rcs5574fv Cardano ADA: #Andrei R, 🔥Crypto Fireside P.S. This is not financial advice, DYOR. P.P.S My vested financial interests in Crypto? I own FIRO and that is all :)

Posting Videos of Your Kids on YouTube Is Weird

Online forums are filled with interesting thoughts and questions. Yet, once in a while, some strange ideas pops-up. In this slogging thread, our community shares a few of the weirdest questions they've seen asked online. This Slogging thread by Mónica Freitas, Linh Smooke, Sara Pinto, Jack Boreham and Abeer occurred in slogging's official #random channel, and has been edited for readability. Mónica Freitas Dec 22, 2021, 3:57 PM In this thread, I want you to share the strangest questions you've seen on forums or social media. Get creative. Let's shock each other before 2022. BTW the answer is 190 cm or 6 foot 2 (according to the internet). "How tall is Donald Trump?" and other weird questions online. :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing: 1 Linh Smooke Dec 22, 2021, 4:07 PM I would like the people who make this question popular to share their secrets! “How come I never get sick” . 😂 1 Sara Pinto Dec 22, 2021, 4:14 PM Mónica Freitas, "What happens if you eat plastic"... Is anyone planning on doing it and just balancing out the chances? Haha. 😂 2 Mónica Freitas Dec 23, 2021, 3:06 PM Linh Smooke, HOW? I feel like I'm constantly sick during the wintertime. I think we need to reach out to those people. This calls for an investigation. 😂 1 Mónica Freitas Dec 23, 2021, 3:08 PM Sara Pinto, Oh, to be the most "developed" living being on earth...ahahaha, I think this follows the same line of "what happens if you swallow gum." 😂 1 Mónica Freitas Dec 23, 2021, 3:09 PM I also appreciate this question: what happens if a woman takes viagra? It seems like a lot of people are experimenting 🤔 Sara Pinto Dec 23, 2021, 5:57 PM Mónica Freitas, so, I tried to search for weird questions in Portuguese, I just typed the start of a question, and the first thing that popped up was: " Why don't animals drive?" 😂 Important question! Everyone should try this in their first language. Mónica Freitas Dec 27, 2021, 2:49 PM Sara Pinto, ahahaha why don't they? I want to know! Mónica Freitas Dec 27, 2021, 2:51 PM Sara Pinto, for me it was: why does it have to be like this? I guess people are slightly depressed at the moment. Sara Pinto Dec 27, 2021, 3:00 PM Mónica Freitas, personally, I think it would be kinda weird to see a duck turn the wheel with its wings 😂 😂 1 Sara Pinto Dec 27, 2021, 3:05 PM Mónica Freitas, I see there are a wide variety of questions. What are the weirdest ones you have found? Khamisi Hamisi, Jack Boreham Mónica Freitas Dec 27, 2021, 3:15 PM I think it would be adorable, ahah. Jack Boreham Jan 1, 2022, 10:54 AM Why are animals important? Jack Boreham Jan 1, 2022, 10:54 AM What kind of question is that? Mónica Freitas Jan 3, 2022, 2:21 PM Jack Boreham, my bet on the first one is that it is connected to vegetarianism. Someone is probably researching reasons to change their diet. Mónica Freitas Jan 3, 2022, 2:22 PM Jack Boreham, have you seen the second one online? Ahahaha Jack Boreham Jan 3, 2022, 9:50 PM Mónica Freitas 😜 Mónica Freitas Jan 5, 2022, 3:08 PM Apparently, there's a lot of people trying to figure how the difference between a restaurant and a cafe. Mónica Freitas Jan 5, 2022, 3:11 PM Also, how to test rice purity is trending. Mónica Freitas Jan 5, 2022, 3:12 PM Abeer, what weird questions have you seen online? Abeer Jan 5, 2022, 6:03 PM Mónica Freitas, I remember seeing screenshots from Yahoo Answers with some of the most ridiculous questions. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is “Does looking at a picture of the sun hurt your eyes?” 😂 1 Mónica Freitas Jan 6, 2022, 12:46 PM Abeer Nah...is that for real?! Ahahah 😂 1

"How Tall is Donald Trump?" and Other Weird Questions Online

If you've been a part of the crypto sphere over these last twelve months, chances are; you've substantially increased your net worth, and you've seen some stuff, a) b) maaaaan... A long, long time ago (around about June) I started a silly little show called 'Nevermind the Shitcoins'. In just 18 episodes (not including bonuses and trailers), we've covered some of the craziest crypto and blockchain stories from around the magical internet money world, in a game we call 'Non-Fungible News'. So, what better way to kick off 2022, than by taking a quick peek over our collective shoulders at the weird and wonderful stories from last year? Maybe we'll spot a trend or two, maybe we'll just chuckle, either way, in no particular order: Mr Goxx and his Goxx Box Ever feel like you're no better a trader than a hamster on a wheel? Well, you're probably right. Mr Goxx found celebrity status this summer as his owner decided to hand over his private keys to the little furball. And what do you know? Mr Goxx was pretty good, even managing to make money on Tron somehow. Sadly, he passed away in November this year, maybe a side effect of the mid-November BTC price drop? Tungsten Cubes Psst, hey, kid! Looking for alternative investment vehicles to diversify your digital pixel art portfolio? Well, you're in luck then! Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of Tungsten cubes! They're cubes... and, well, they're made of Tungsten. What's not to love!? Crypto aficionados went doolally for the precious dense lumps this summer, oddly enough, following a strange incident with a typo and funny man of CoinDesk, Neeraj. And for those who like their dense lumps larger, Midwest Tungsten are offering time-share NFTs which grant one day a year access to their safely stored 14 inch cube. A bargain at ~$250,000, right? I'll put you down for 2. Canadian Codeslaw 2021 saw more DeFi protocol hacks than ever before, and while many of these exploits resulted in relatively happy endings with funds being returned, others did not. In October, a Canadian teenage smarty pants managed to swipe a cool $16m in a hack before being subsequently doxxed by the internet. However, things got interesting (depending on your stance), when little Canadian Andy point blank refused to return the funds, claiming 'code is law', and that he would fight this case 'to the death'. Unfortunately for him, however, it seems the Canadian law enforcement aren't convinced yet, and a warrant was recently issued for his arrest. *Before you start feeling sorry for little Andy, I probably wouldn't. When researching for the podcast I also found out the kid is a horrible white supremacist proud boy type. So, you know, not every story is as black and white as it seems. Vitalik's Infinite Garden Once upon a time, there was a half stick insect man, called Vitalik Buterin. One day, he got very mad about his World of Warcraft character being nerfed in a new update. But he didn't get mad, no, he got Ethereum. I'm sure the makers of the real movie will do a better job of the tagline with the 1000+ Eth they raised, but I can't be too far off the mark. 'Ethereum: The infinite Garden', probably won't be coming to cinemas near you anytime soon. Maybe you can stream it somewhere though. Or not. I mean, life's short. Eth to Fight Pirates, Bitcoin to fight Cocaine Dealers Here's a two-for-one to round things off, it seems crypto is much more useful than we even us blockchain dreamers dared believe, according to Bill Gates and a Columbian politician at least. Sadly, whilst Gates is only planning on fighting online pirates with the Ethereum blockchain, Colombian officials are much more literal in their claims. They plan to follow in El Salvador's footsteps, and make mining Bitcoin using the countries numerous waterfalls more profitable than legacy trades the nation is otherwise famous for. Why not, eh? Nevermind the Shitcoins If you enjoyed these oddball stories, you might also like: Look at all those happy faces (including Hackernoon's own Utsav and Amy!) enjoying life and cracking wise about crypto, why wouldn't you want to give it a try? Link -> nevermindtheshitcoins.com I'll be announcing details for series 3 soon, so watch this space!

The Weirdest Non-Fungible Crypto News Stories of 2021

Gotcha with a catchy title. Punchline: it's all weird. Case closed. Nah just kidding but since you're here to stay a little while, hear me out. I'll run through some cross-language similarities but mostly point out key differences and by the end you may just agree that not all that is weird is bad. After all some of the weirdness is uniquely powerful and to harness it you'll just have to deal with the weird parts of JavaScript. JavaScript powers the Internet. Sure HTML is the only in-browser language that's absolutely necessary to render web pages in a web browser, but go ahead and disable JavaScript in yours and see how far you can get along on your daily routine. In fact users can neither sign up nor login to hackernoon.com without it enabled. Even with all of JavaScript's power and necessity many people claim to dislike the language, with lower level programmers especially scornful of it. A lot of the disdain has to do with how this language behaves differently than others, and plenty of perplexing screenshots float around the web to make the case. console.log() Comparing Languages For many, a first ever glance at a JavaScript file will quickly resemble other programming language files. Sometimes code is imported from other locations at the top. Then comes functions and variables. Curly brace syntax is commonplace for many developers and is even quickly intuitive to Python monolinguists. For those well-versed in JavaScript (JS) it may come as a surprise that keywords promoted for use in modern JS (ES6+) are not unique. "async", "await" and "const" are reserved words in multiple other languages, and the keyword "let" was used all the way back in 1964 with the original version of BASIC. Even lesser used JS keywords like "abstract", "implements", "protected" and "volatile" have long been used elsewhere. JavaScript is defined as being single-threaded with a synchronous execution stack; however, awaitable callbacks are made possible by modern browsers resembling multi-threaded asynchronous computing environments. That's pretty weird because an implementation seems to invalidate its definition. But definitions (nitpicking) aside, JS is dynamically typed, a concept shared with Python (PHP, Ruby and more), and differs from the many other popular programming languages which are statically typed. Dynamic Typing Unlike synchronicity, JS holds true to its dynamic typing definition. Values cannot be defined with mandated types such as integer and string unless using TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript. A great deal of JavaScript's weird parts stem from this inability to explicitly declare value types. If you've been writing JS for a while you've probably experienced this: + + + 222 22 // returns 244 "222" "22" // returns "22222" "222" 22 // returns "22222" The addition operator concatenates numeric strings, as well as numeric strings with numbers. This behavior is consistent with the addition of non-numeric character strings: + "ab" "cd" // returns "abcd" One may assume then that the subtraction operator would deconcatenate numeric strings and numbers, thus returning "2" in the following case: - "222" 22 // returns 200 Weird, right? Not exactly, it's pretty logical upon further investigation. If subtraction behaved like addition, you wouldn't be able to make sense of this: - "222" 11 // returns 211 Sense is made of it though by returning 211. There's no way instead for deconcatenation to make sense of it, just like there's no way to make sense of this: - "ab" "cd" // returns NaN So if it makes sense, what's the big deal? Well that's what I wonder anyway, Wikipedia states that some of the above are "quirks that have been subject to criticism" ( ). I'll counter with the opposite, the behavior above makes sense when considering bigger pictures. Enough of the sensibility though because there are certainly cases of JS behaving weirdly, especially involving data types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Weakly_typed [] + [] [] + // returns "" false // returns "false" Empty array and Boolean operations returning strings leaves me wondering how strings are implied. In the first case above I'd expect the return of a single array containing values from both arrays, and in the second case an error. Playing with the first case a little further: [ , ] + [ , ] 1 2 3 4 // returns "1,23,4" Again, I'd prefer an array containing those four numbers rather than the concatenation. For my wish to be granted I would instead need to do this: .toString() [ , ].concat([ , ]) 1 2 3 4 // returns [1, 2, 3, 4] Yeah, that's weird. I'd like to see the above two examples return what the other returns but as they say: it is what it is. Back to adding an array and a Boolean, again I'd prefer to see an error and not a string containing false. In the same vein if I wanted an array containing a false Boolean I'd think the addition assignment operator (+=) would do the trick: array = []
array += array var false // returns "false" But it doesn't. Again, another silly string. Oh well, I don't make the rules but here are just a couple more: === < == <= typeof NaN // returns "number" NaN NaN // returns false null 0 // returns false null 0 // returns false null 0 // returns true Look, there's a seemingly infinite amount of examples like these. Google "the weird parts of JavaScript", it's a little overplayed. My recommendation is to read what others have written before me, experiment with DevTools' console to build intuition, values during development and send front-end errors to your server during production. Who's adding arrays and Booleans, anyway? Maybe use a little Python to clean up your data because as they also say: garbage in, garbage out. console.log() Web Browsers Statements upon JS's weird parts often gloss over or omit entirely the language's purpose. JavaScript along with HTML and CSS (known as client-side languages) work together directly on web browsers while other server-side languages can generate code in the aforementioned client-side languages. JavaScript was extended to work server-side with Node.js over a decade ago. JavaScript can create, modify and delete HTML elements, as well as set style similarly to CSS. Web browsers are obviously very complex and JavaScript is a common denominator because it has many capabilities, and even responsibilities that others do not. Take a look at Mozilla's JavaScript documentation ( ) and you may notice the usual programming language topics outlining statements, operators, functions, classes and errors, but you'll also find that an enormous amount of the language pertains specifically to the control of web browsers and Internet processes. Functions, objects and situations involved with JS differ fundamentally from C++, Java and other ubiquitous languages where runtime environments are often thought of in the context of operating systems like Windows and Linux. Instead considering that JavaScript mostly runs in browsers, developers must become accustomed to the workings of Chrome, Safari, Samsung Internet, Edge, Firefox and more. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript Many languages send information from web servers to web pages. JavaScript is the language responsible for the opposite, sending information from web pages to web servers. It's doing a good job of making the web intimately interactive, and technology like WebSockets continually works to expand these more dynamic capabilities. Uniqueness (weirdness?) further stems from the fascinating functionality of Node.js (technically an abstraction upon JS). As of 12/23/2020, npm's all-the-package-names lists an astonishing total of 1,106,444 packages. Consider that at the same time Python, often touted for its extensibility, has 279,386 Python Package Index (PyPI) listings. It's undeniable that JavaScript and its tools are more functional than many like to admit, and I'll claim even more functional than many other languages labeled "functional" when it comes to everyday use. After all, scripting languages are made to get stuff done. HTML has its weird parts, maybe you didn't know a variable can be defined in HTML with a tag. There are a number of lesser-known tags like , , and (check out for more). Adopting their use makes the task of creating search engine indexes (and snippets) easier. You're probably used to wrapping everything in tags on pages instead of using more descriptive , , and tags but admittedly, old habits do die hard. CSS has its weird parts too; vertical padding with regard to percentage is relative to the parent element's width, not height. Finally, a little Python: <var> <abbr> <dfn> <hgroup> <ins> https://dev.to/christopherkade/unusual-html-tags-worth-knowing-3gbk <div> <header> <main> <section> <footer> >>> a = >>> b = >>> a is b
True
>>> a = >>> b = >>> a is b
False
>>> a = ; b = >>> a is b
True 256 256 257 257 257 257 I rest my case. Conclusion Are the dynamic typing problems any concern at all? Yes, of course at times they present problems for some people in some situations. But frankly some of the oddities floating around are so odd that people should deal with them simply by avoiding them. And by sticking to triple equals ( ) and maybe strict mode ( ) too. Write code that's conceptually more traditional, even if it is more verbose, and you will likely not only have more workable code but may also spend less time debugging. Verbosity can actually be brevity. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Equality_comparisons_and_sameness https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Strict_mode Otherwise to conclude it may be safe to assume that the language comes across a little weird because it does so many things that other languages don't. Considering we can quickly transport information comprised of ones and zeros and whatnot across space and time using various languages, it's all weird. So to harness the power of JavaScript, which is the power of the web, learn some about the weird parts but don't harp on them, in turn you'll be more powerful and less weirded out.

The Weird Parts of JavaScript

Japan is home to many things, but perhaps its most unique element is its unparalleled otaku (nerd) culture. With one of the largest video game markets and industries in the world, Japan is home to hundreds of video game developers and publishers, each trying to one-up the other and make a game unlike anything else that has come before it. This cold war within the Japanese video game industry has led to some of the wackiest, craziest and weirdest games ever to be played. Just when you thought you’ve seen it all, Japan comes out with something no one in their wildest dreams would ever think of. From eliminating vampires by stripping off their clothes to playing pinball with falling boogers, the games on this list are guaranteed to have you scratching your head in confusion and facepalming out of astonishment. All of these games are available outside of Japan (if that’s where you’re reading this) and are playable in English. : this post contains affiliate links to product pages Disclaimer 1. Mister Mosquito Box cover for Mister Mosquito. Our first game is an insect simulator developed by Zoom Inc. that was originally released in 2001 on the PlayStation 2 in Japan and then localized in English by Eidos Interactive’s Fresh Games. While it had great sales and reception in Japan, it didn’t get much hype in North America or Europe. However, it has since gained a cult following and is regarded as one of the weirdest and craziest games ever made. In Mister Mosquito (known as Mr Moskeeto in PAL regions and in its home market as Ka, the Japanese word for the bug) you play the part of a pest that everyone knows and hates with a fury: the common house mosquito. … regarded as one of the weirdest and craziest games ever made. Gameplay consists of terrorizing the Yamada family in the comfort of their own home by sucking their blood while trying not to get smacked in the process. In order to find the perfect opening, players can also distract members of the Yamada family by turning off the lights, switching on electronics or simply waiting until the target falls asleep. Due to its low sales and cult following, Mister Mosquito has become something of a collectible item in the West, with used copies selling on eBay for upwards of US$70. If you ever see the game at an affordable price, be sure to pick it up — Mister Mosquito is a must-play for retro game lovers. Good for: PlayStation 2 lovers and those who like simulator games. Available on: and Amazon eBay 2. Chibi-Robo One of the weirdest Japanese games that received positive reception outside the country is Chibi-Robo. Originally released on the Nintendo GameCube, Chibi-Robo is about one tiny robot’s mission to bring happiness to the Sanderson family while fighting off evil robots programmed by a toy company. In Chibi-Robo, players must collect happy points by bringing happiness to the Sanderson family. How does a tiny robot make a family of three happy? By doing mundane chores around the house, of course. The gameplay of Chibi-Robo revolves around picking up trash, scrubbing the floors and tending the garden among other tedious household tasks. How does a tiny robot make a family of three happy? By doing mundane chores around the house, of course. Despite this wacky premise, the game received an 8.2 out of 10 rating on IGN and 8 out of 10 rating on Eurogamer. Numerous sequels have been made and released on the Nintendo DS and 3DS, but the original Chibi-Robo remains the highest rated game in the series. Good for: People who enjoy silly and original gameplay and lovers of Nintendo. Available on: and Amazon eBay 3. Food Fantasy Food Fantasy. With personified foods, restaurant management and evil creatures roaming the world, Food Fantasy is one of the most unique mobile games on the market. It was developed by Elex Wireless and just published in the spring of 2018. Food Fantasy is an eclectic mix of game styles comprising Japanese role playing games (JRPG), a business and a cooking simulator all mixed into a bizarre, yet incredibly fun, package. In this mobile game, you are part cook, part restaurant manager and part adventurer. While running your restaurant you must also manage staff, create new recipes and fight evil creatures. Battles are fought using summoned food souls, personified food spirits that both fight your battles and staff your restaurant. Food Fantasy is a mobile game that can be played on the go for a few minutes or even hours at a time. Good for: People interested in JRPGs and cooking simulators. Available on: or Android iOS 4. Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed. A play on the words “Akiba” and “strip,” Akiba’s Trip is an action-adventure game set in the Akihabara Strip of Tokyo. Furthermore, the gameplay consists of attacking enemies by stripping off their clothes. Developed by Acquire Corp. — a veteran action game developer that brought us the Tenchu and Way of the Samurai series — Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed employs smooth and enjoyable real-time battle mechanics. While the game’s premise may just sound like an unseemly excuse to get a look at animated undergarments, the plague of monsters infesting the Akiba Strip leaves the main character, Nanashi, with no other choice. … the gameplay consists of attacking enemies by stripping off their clothes. In Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed, players fight against synthetic humanoid vampire-like creatures known as Synthisters, who — instead of feeding on blood — suck away people’s sociability and take away their will to live. The only way to defeat these creatures is to weaken them with physical attacks and strip off their clothes, exposing them to their biggest weakness: sunlight. Good for: People who like action or beat-em-up games and people who want to see an incredibly accurate recreation of Akihabara’s Electric Town Available on: , and . Amazon Steam PlayStation Store 5. Wario Ware Gold Wario Ware Gold. Easily one of the weirdest games ever released by Nintendo, the Wario Ware series was made for people with short attention spans or very, very little time on their hands. Wario Ware Gold is the newest release of the series and is available on the Nintendo 3DS. Like every other title in the series, Wario Ware Gold consists of a series of minigames, each lasting around three to five seconds with boss levels lasting around 10 to 20 seconds. Usually, games start with just a single word as explanation such as: “stop,” “catch,” “stomp” or no explanation at all. From picking your nose to barbecuing ham, there’s no predicting what game will come next. Because Wario Ware Gold is the latest release of the series, it encompasses all the minigames from the releases that came before it and includes a total of over 300 minigames. Not only are these games fast, but they are also nonsensical and wildly crazy. From picking your nose to barbecuing ham, there’s no predicting what game will come next. While the premise sounds a little bit unorthodox, Wario Ware games are the perfect games to play on-the-go, during your commute or when you’re in the waiting room. Because there is no continuity between each minigame, you can literally pick up and play Wario Ware anywhere for seconds, minutes or hours at a time. Good for: Those with little time to play, people who like fidget spinners and gamers with little to no attention spans. Available on: Numerous titles are available on and the Amazon Nintendo eShop Japan is home to many over-the-top games — some that may not be entirely appropriate for viewing at work or in public, which may be why one of your favorite games may not have made this list. While all of these games are worth a try, I think that Wario Ware is a game like no other and should definitely be next on your list of games to play — especially if you’re a Nintendo 3DS owner. Also published on: https://blog.gaijinpot.com/5-of-the-weirdest-japanese-video-games-you-can-play-in-english/

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