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Well, that’s the earliest boundary for the date at which the general public might have become aware that a fairly obscure regional/mining term had acquired a different meaning

rig_gnorant (1992)
Short Fiction
• The Boy, the Dog and the Spaceship (1974) also appeared as:
• Variant: The Boy, the Dog, and the Spaceship (1993)
• Little Green Spaceman (1974)
• Find the Lady (1975)
Witches of Wimmering (1976)
Marooned on Splatterbang_(from Escape from Splatterbang). (1978)
Sweets from a Stranger (1978)
The Galac Invaders (1980)
Cutie Pie (1982)
Mind-Milk (1982)
Nightmare's Dream (1982)
Oddiputs (1982)
Perfect Paul (1982)
Space Invaders (1982)
Swap-Shop (1982)
Teddies Rule, OK? (1982)
The Thieves of Galac (1982)
Glory Hole (1984)
Monster (1984)
Bonkers Clocks (1985)
Spook (1985)
Ghost Alarm (1986)
• Brainblaster (1987)
Living Fire (1987)
Love Bytes (1987)
One is One and All Alone (1987)
Susan's Plant (1987)
The Golden Lump (1987)
• The Gun That Didn't Go Bang (1987)
• Whooo-ooo Flupper! (1987) also appeared as:
• Variant: Whooo-ooo, Flupper! (1987)
• The Telly Is Watching You (1989)
The Model Village (1990)
Broops! Down the Chimney (1991)
Perfect Host (1994)

020

A fascinating mix of Buddhist meditations on the impermanence of life and acceptance of its fragility and the earliest comedic anecdote i know of about someone getting a kettle stuck on their head

out as an unintelligible, muffled roar. "I can't find any similar case in my medical books," said the doctor, "and there aren't any oral traditions either." The priest had no choice but to return to the Ninnaji, where his close friends and his aged mother gathered at his bedside, weeping with grief, though the priest himself probably could not hear them.
At this point somebody suggested, "Wouldn't it be better at least to save his life, even if he loses his nose and ears?
Let's try pulling the pot off with all our strength." They stuffed straw around the priest's neck to protect it from the metal, then pulled hard enough to tear off his head.
Only holes were left to show where his ears and nose had been, but the pot was removed. They barely managed to save the priest's life, and for a long time afterwards he was gravely ill.
54
There was a ravishing acolyte at Omuro, and various priests were scheming how they might inveigle him into going out with them. They enlisted the help of some talented entertainers who carefully prepared an elegant hamper and fitted it into a kind of box which they buried in the ground at a pleasant spot not far from Narabigaoka.® The priests, after scattering autumn leaves over the place so that no one would guess anything lay buried there, returned to Omuro and induced the boy to accompany them on the picnic. The priests, delighted with their success, tramped around the neighborhood with the boy until they came near the mossy spot where the box was buried. There they sat themselves in a row. ""'m absolutely exhausted," said one priest. "I wish

53
This story too is about a priest at the Ninnaji. A farewell party was being offered for an acolyte about to become a priest, and the guests were all making merry when one of the priests, drunk and carried away by high spirits, picked up a three-legged cauldron nearby, and clamped it over his head. It caught on his nose, but he flattened it down, pulled the pot over his face, and danced out among the others, to the great amusement of everyone.
After the priest had been dancing for a while he tried to pull the pot off, but it refused to be budged. A pall fell over the gathering, and people wondered blankly what to do. They tried one thing and another, only succeeding in bruising the skin around his neck. The blood streamed down, and the priest's neck became so swollen that he had trouble breathing. The others tried to split the pot, but it was not easily broken and the reverberations inside were un-bearable. Finally, when all else had failed, they threw a thin garment over the legs of the pot, which stuck up like horns, and, giving the priest a stick to lean on, led him off by the hand to a doctor in Kyoto. People they met on the way stared at this apparition with unconstrained astonishment.
The priest presented a most extraordinary sight as he sat inside the doctor's office facing him. Whatever he said came
[ 46 ]

A woodcut of a drunk medieval Japanese monk with a metal pot stuck on his head

there were somebody to burn autumn leaves!"* said ab-other. "Why don't you miracle-working priests try praying!" asked a third. The priests, rubbing their rosaries and da-orately describing magic gestures with their fingers, started to walk towards the tree beneath which the treasure lay buried. After this extraordinary performance they scaped away the leaves, to find nothing. Thinking they might have mistaken the place, they roamed over the whole mountain leaving nowhere undug, but still there was nothing, Someone had observed them burying the hamper and stolen it while they were off in Omuro. The priests, for a time at a loss for words, presently fell to quarreling most un-pleasantly, and returned in a rage to the temple. Any excessively ingenious scheme is sure to end in a fiasco.
I. Omuro was another name for the Ninnaji.
2. Asobi-höshi may originally have been priests who specialized in dancing and singing, but by this time höshi included entertainers who dressed as priests without taking orders.
3. Narabigaoka is the name of three hills of similar shape in the west of Kyoto. Tradition has it that Kenkò lived here and that a tombstone at the foot of one hill marks his grave.
4. An allusion to lines in a poem by Po Chüi quoted in Wakan Roei Shi
"In the forest we warm our wine by burning crimson leaves; on the rock we write verses and brush away green moss." The lines were often alluded to in Japanese writings. The meaning here is, "I wish someone would warm saké for us!"
55

290

“But you make love to one…”

45
Kin'yo,* an officer of the second rank, had a brother called the High Priest Ryogaku, an extremely bad-tempered man.
Next to his monastery grew a large nettle-tree which occasioned the nickname people gave him, the Nettle-tree High Priest. "That name is outrageous," said the high priest, and cut down the tree. The stump still being left, people referred to him now as the Stump High Priest. More furious than ever, Ryogaku had the stump dug up and thrown away, but this left a big ditch. People now called him the Ditch
High Priest.
壹
times a mal
를
M
she saL

170

This btw, was written in about 1330

22
In all things I yearn for the past. Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased. I find that even among the splendid pieces of furniture built by our master cabinetmakers, those in the old forms are the most pleasing.
And as for writing letters, surviving scraps from the past reveal how superb the phrasing used to be. The ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened. People used to say "raise the carriage shafts" or "trim the lamp wick," but people today say "raise it" or "trim it." When they should say, "Let the men of the palace staff? stand forth!" they say,
"Torches! Let's have some light!" & Instead of calling the place where the lectures on the Sutra of the Golden Light* are delivered before the emperor "the Hall of the Imperial Lecture," they shorten it to "the Lecture Hall," a deplorable corruption, an old gentleman complained.
1. This is apparently a reference to Genji Monogatari; it might therefore be better to translate kano ki no michi no takumi as "that [well-known] master cabinetmaker."
2. Tonomoryo is translated by R. K. Reischauer as "Bureau of Palace Equipment and Upkeep."
3. Kenkô contrasts the old, oblique command and the present, direct one.
4. The full title of the sutra in Japanese is Konkömy Saishoö-kyo (Sutra of the excellent golden light). It was the most influential Buddhist text in eighth-century Japan, and in Kenkö's day lectures on it were delivered at the palace in the fifth month every year.

132

A grey autumn day Curled in a sagging chair Being pretentious

Translated and with a preface by DONALD KEENE
ESSAYS in IDLENESS
The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko

1. This passage is ambiguous. The words sukoshi kakotsu kata mo have also been interpreted as meaning if when making complaints about the world one is not in accord... or if ever there is anything on which both parties do not agree."
0
The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known. The books I would choose are the moving volumes of Wen Hsüan, the collected works of Po Chü-i, the sayings of Lao Tzu, and the chapters of Chuang Tzu. Among works by scholars of this country, those written long ago are often quite interesting.
I. A collection of poetry compiled by Prince Chao Ming of Liang (501-
31). It was known as Monzen in Japan and exercised great influence.
The phrase may be interpreted as meaning Kenko would read Wen Hsüan, which consisted of moving volumes, or that he would read only the moving sections of Wen Hsüan.
[ 12]

1111

Richard J @preachypreach.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Write a remarkably empathetic and subtle chapter on the psychology of kamikaze pilots and acknowledge tucked away in a footnote that you were one of their targets

Western reactions to kamikaze tactics were a great deal more complicated than this summary would suggest, and included not merely anger and disgust, but (especially after the first shock had worn off) curiosity, bewilderment, and even pity for the young pilots who were believed (quite incorrectly) to have been dragooned into the suicide oper-ations. I recall that my own reactions as a young sailor (who in 1944 was liable to be confronted with the kamikaze in a rather direct and unpleasant way) were mainly surprise and a sense of strangeness.

000

Ah, the first Orange Revolution

Saigo's views on Westernization were equally ambiguous, but ultimately contributed to his disaffection with the new regime. During his early years the most urgent question in the country was whether to open Japan to the West and, if so, under What conditions. The failure to solve this problem in any satisfac tory fashion was the most immediate reason for the downfall of the Tokugawa regime. As one of the leading members of the anti-Bakufu movement, Saigo started his career as a convinced xenophobe, who rarely missed an opportunity to chide the government for its weak-kneed attitude to "foreign barbarians." Observing the depredations of Western imperialist nations, he impugned their claim to be the champions of civilization:
Civilization is the upholding of justice; it has nothing to do with outward grandeur, palatial magnificence or gorgeous clothing or general ostentation of superficial appearances... Once I got into an argument with a man. He refuted my argument that the Westerners were uncivilized [and]... asked me to give him reasons for my belief. I explained to him that truly civilized countries would have led the uncivilized ones to enlightenment by adopting a policy of benevolent and well-meant teaching, but that, far from this being the case, they have been barbarous enough to benefit themselves by conquering weaker countries by force of arms and treating them with a ruthlessness which becomes the more
9.141 intense the greater the ignorance of the conquered
Ironically enough, it was the punitive bombardment of
9.142
9.143
Saigo's home town by the English navy in 1863 that convinced him to change his position. For all his idealism and adherence to traditional ways, he was enough of a pragmatist to know that there were times when Japan must use Western methods to combat the West. Thus he grudgingly accepted the idea that, if his country was to survive the foreign onslaughts, it would be obliged to adopt modern industrial technology. The outmoded Bakufu regi…

200

Richard J @preachypreach.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The precise spot-on parody of a long-running comic nobody south of Morecambe has ever heard of is low key one of my favourite bits

1100

#regularnerdery it’s vital to note that the new Cathay peasants set has soldiers with ducks.

080

This is quite fascinating in its own way (about the 1638 Shimabura Rebellion in which a mass of peasants on Kyushu, literally at the edge of the Japanese world, rose up in a Christian revolt against the newly established Tokugawa shogunate and slaughtered down to pretty much the last person)

later the momentous rebellion broke out.
W days
Most contemporary Japanese accounts ascribe exclusively religious origins to the revolt. Modern scholars, however, give overwhelming importance to economic factors and insist that Shimabara was not essentially a Christian uprising but a furious protest by peasants in a poor, backward region of Japan against extortionate taxation by their feudal overlords. Kather surpris-ingly, the economic motive was also stressed by European b servers, including Duarte Correa, a Portuguese Familiar of the Holy Inquisition, who at the time of the rebellion was languish.
7.16
ing in a Kyushu prison waiting to be burnt at the stake. Corre was hardly an economic determinist, but in his account of the uprising he stressed the miserable conditions that drove the loca population to despair and quotes a Japanese gentleman who remarked that "the rebellion could not be due to the rebels being Christians, since in times when there were many such, including
7.17
famous captains, they never had rebelled."
Naturally the shogunal authorities had good reason to emphasize the religious nature of the revolt, since this provided concrete justification for their anti-Christian policy; and for the local officials it was obviously preferable to represent Shimabara as a result of religious fanaticism rather than as a desperate revolt of starving people against their oppressors. "L'on attribuait la révolte à la raison réligieuse," writes Pagés in his famous history of Japanese Christianity: "mais telles n'étaient pas les véritables
7.18
causes." The Japanese government, he points out, stressed the religious motive

120

I mean there’s good reasons why academic historians are now a lot more cagey and caveating in their judgments as, frankly, the profession has, well, become less welcoming to the gentleman amateur, but you do kind of miss the days when they felt free to sweepingly call people idiots.

Đạt
Emperor Godaigo's Restoration, which was intended to change the entire course of Japanese history, turned out to be an unmitigated fiasco. The immediate reason was the chaotic policy of distributing rewards to the men who had participated in overthrowing the Kamakura Bakufu. Most of the warriors who had switched to the loyalist side did so in the expectation of substantial compensation. As George Sansom has eloquently expressed it, "Through the heraldic battle cries and the lofty speeches of the feudal warriors there can be heard the persistent murmur of Property! Property!" Under the new royalist regime, however, land rewards were given mainly to members of the Court nobil-ity, who had contributed virtually nothing to Godaigo's victory.
This and similar injustices were bound to anger the armed men who, having thronged into the capital with their claims, were now confronted with bureaucratic delays and corruption. Because Godaigo believed that he should rule as well as reign, he insisted on personally confirming all the new land holdings.
While indignant warriors were being denied their deserts, he himself did not hesitate to indulge in conspicuous luxuries such as rebuilding the Palace. This shabby treatment of the Emperor's

271

Ha, reading this right now (which is very good ) which was pretty much inspired by Certain Events and the author knew him personally and it’s possible I think, to read footnote 45 as more being about twink death than deep-rooted veins of Japanese culture tbh

Ivan Morris
THE NOBILITY OF FAILURE
Tragic Heroes
in the History of Japan

Acknowledgements

Mishima Yukio once suggested to me that my admiration for the beauty of Japanese Court culture and the tranquil world of Genji might have obscured the harsher, more tragic side of his country. By concentrating my studies in recent years on men of action, whose brief lives were marked by struggle and turmoil, I have perhaps redressed the balance, and it is to Mishima's memory that I dedicate this book. He and I disagreed about many matters, especially politics, but this never affected my admiration or friendship.

5.64 "The Chronicle of Yoshitsune,
5.65 The characteristically Japanese word wakajini ("death at a young age") evokes a keen sense of "the pathos of things," and it is certainly no coincidence that so many of the most beloved heroes in Japanese history died very young:
They shall not grow old, As we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.
Mishima Yukio was appalled by the idea that he should still be alive at the indecent age of 45 and realized that there was little time to be lost if he wished to qualify as a Yamato hero.
5.66 Yasuhira's act of treachery turned out to have been useless. Only a few

150

To out this into perspective, this battle was 600 years and at least three regimes prior

141

I mean, yes, a lot of the black metal scene played up transgressive shock value for effect, but it’s an eye-brow raising rhetorical trick to not note that at least one of the people mentioned here is a no-fucking-shit actual neo-Nazi.

murder, and possible anımal sacritce (a decapitated hare was tound at the door of another burnt down Norwegian church earlier in 1992).
One figure in this original circle, Bård Guldvik 'Faust' Eithun, killed a gay man in the town of Lillehammer by stabbing him thirty-seven times. Eithun reportedly felt no remorse over the murder, claiming he simply wished to release some aggression. Another central figure, Kristian 'Varg' Vikernes
- founder of the band Burzum - stabbed to death Øystein 'Euronymous'
Aarseth - founder of the band Mayhem - allegedly over disagreements
about record contracts and the state of their emerging genre. Vikernes was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison, and on the day of sentencing, two churches were burnt to the ground in a symbolic show of support.?
As well as its core members murdering and assaulting each other, this scene - which was composed largely of young white men - was notorious for its shocking performances, sonic innovations, and espousal of mis-anthropic and militant Satanist views. One lead singer of Mayhem - Per
'Dead' Ohlin - would slit his wrists on stage, hoard dead birds under his bed to enjoy the stench of death, and adorn himself in 'corpse paint'. He eventually committed suicide aged twenty-two in a house in the woods near Kråkstad, leaving behind a note which read, 'Excuse the blood ..?. He was found by Euronymous, who photographed the corpse with a disposable camera and used the picture as the cover art for a forthcoming Mayhem album.25

Would the original scene have become as popular and influential if it weren't for its shocking past? In early black metal, the art itself was infused with the bloodshed that surrounded it. The genre's sonic characteristics were reinforced by its brutal origins: this music sounds violent, aggressive, and angry. Dead's macabre spectacle combined with his fast-paced howling music created a powerful expression of emotional pain and mental illness, among other difficult topics. This demonic theatre is part of the marvel of the genre - I can say this from experience after seeing the Swedish metal band Watain in a little backstreet venue in Reading, England, and being splattered with pigs' blood while the musicians screeched in front of a flaming altar of impaled fish-heads.
At the end of the day, these young men were accountable for their own criminality. Most black metal fans (including myself have not set fire to churches or stabbed anyone, and the genre today has substantially developed and mostly left behind its literal Satanic leanings to embrace themes of social justice and eco-activism. And yet, some lovers of the music are still vulnerable to its allure. In a 2016 interview, the vocalist of black metal band Carpathian Forest, Roger 'Nattefrost' Rasmussen, alleged that he knew of two or three cases where people had committed suicide because of his music. He admitted that Carpathian Forest may well 'make an impres-sion' on fans, but that ultimately 'people should do whatever they feel like ... kill each other, whatever, right?'26

1100

well, you can't say this isn't a not unuseful phrase to know to illustrate how to use 興味 or 'interest', Wanikani

Context Sentences
俺はエロゲに全く興味が無いふりをしている。

I’m pretending that I have no interest in hentai games.

050

Quite specifically the bit about Nostradamus which i read in the mid 80s

NOSTRADAMUS Born in France in 1503, Nostradamus correctly forecast the circumstances of the death of the French king, Henry II, at the hands of the Scottish Lord Montgomery in 1559. His prophecies are couched in obscure verse, but he may have foreseen the French and Russian Revolutions and Britain's part in the Second World War.
Ominously, he also wrote of a world catastrophe due in July, 1999
ADAMY
NIMIVA
Machrynas
TATI
RIOR
JOANNA SOUTHCOTT (1750-1814) In middle age, this Devon woman declared herself to be the saviour of mankind, and gathered a number of disciples whom she assured would be preserved for the Second
Coming. All the world's ills will allegedly be cured when her box of prophecies,
kept in Bedford, is
opened. This can only be done in the presence of a group of bishops, who have so far declined to co-operate
RICHARD BE
ex-sailor
'nephew o direct desc
He made I dictions of and Gusta declared in the death ascendan‹
Joanna Sc
John's W
众
dacunt.
METAS. M
N
NOSTRADAMUS
JOANNA SOUTHCOTT

020

Out of curiosity and looking up what Larkin’s “ugly red-brick 1950s house in a Hull suburb “ actually looks like, I find out it actually has the toad work squatting on the Juliet balcony

The house where Larkin lived.On the Juliet balcony, a toad in a suit and tie.

3102

Despite the Grimdark marketing that’s all over this; there’s something more interesting in this being the tale of a mother stuck in the horrors of a low fantasy world army (and a keen awareness of what the life of a camp follower was); one of the faceless people dying for the spectacle of the hero>

A WOMANoF
THE SWORD
ANNA SMITH SPARK
"A fierce and compelling story of love, life and loss."
Adrian Tchaikovsky

140

Tonkatsu curry and rice? Yes please. (All now eaten so no photographic evidence)

060

Time for some percussive cooking

4240