Being a language teacher in a foreign country is never easy, in a country as prejudiced and complex as Japan it’s even harder. Here’s a little video which pokes fun at the ridiculous and uncomfortable situations of an English teacher in Japan. It’s a bit hit-or-miss but I was cracking up one minute in.

Now if you excuse me I have to go call the police, there’s a lood party next door.

[Japan Probe]

This isn’t exactly a new entry in our long series of cosplay sells TV ads, but it is a derivative of one. Kyowa, a brand of backpacks in Japan, is taking a page from Aeon with their latest TV ad. In Kyowa’s ad we see a foreign aerobics instructor doing an energetic routine while repeating a tagline and… weird creatures dance in the back.

Aeon’s ad featured a cute anglo-japanese idol doing a dance along with little kids dressed as bears in the back. Perhaps when it comes to Japan and backpacks you better not mess with the formula. It’s almost like mad libs!

Foreign female dressed as NOUN does VERB while little PLURAL NOUN dance in the back.

I propose: Foreign female dressed as a zebra does pantomime while little ducks dance in the back. I’d buy that backpack! Now its your turn guys, show us your ideas in the comments!

[Japan Probe]

We’ve all heard horrible voice acting, for crying out loud, we love anime and there’s hardly a better example of horrible voice acting than english dubbed anime. Games are no exception though, specially during the days of the PSX and the early years of the PS2. Here’s a video compilation of some of Videogame’s worst voice acting moments.

It becomes pretty obvious pretty fast that bad voice acting is out there and there’s plenty of it, but that there’s also a huge amount of horrendous dialogue to begin with, specially Japanese games localized to english. Dear localizers, stop trying to sound like what you think a cool 13 year old sounds like. Now if you’ll excuse me “I have to stay alive and write this article before I die”.

I cant believe no one had done this before, if you had asked me I’d sworn I’d seen this some years ago. A group of researchers from Colorado University took a group of Roombas, those cheap, charming and delightfully exploitable vacuuming robots, and turned them into a gigantic Pac-Man game, complete with user controlled Pac-Man, Furtive ghosts and many, many dots.

Now how about someone sets one of these lose in the highway for a quick game of Roomba Frogger?

[Gizmodo]

Are you a witch? Are you or have you ever been a member of the communist party? Do you sell an R4? You haven’t? Funny because your friends say you do!

Oh haven’t you heard? Witch Hunts are in style once again thanks to Nintendo in Japan. The company, along with a coalition of other gaming industry companies are asking people to rat out people or companies selling the R4 backup player for the Nintendo DS. In a secure and anonymous website users are asked to tip Nintendo off about individuals or companies selling the device which allows you to play downloaded copies of games, they are even going after personal auctions selling an R4. The intention is to use the information in a legal suit Nintendo has against the selling of the device.

Call me old fashioned but when you’re asking your customers to rat out on each other, even on a personal level, that’s just asking for trouble. Thankfully this is only in Japan, sadly this is only in Japan and unless Nintendo somehow insults the nationalist spirit of Japan no one is going to say as much as a peep about it.

[Kotaku]

Mark another one that after over a year of tracking went past my head, the giant Tetsuyin 28 statue built on Kobe for the character’s 30th anniversary was finally unveiled last month. No moving parts, no steam, no dramatic lighting. Just a quiet reminder of the founder of Japan’s dream of one day ruling the world with a robotic fist.

I for one welcome our future mechanical overlords.

Who hasn’t had one of those days where a super hero team starts harassing you for no reason? I know it happens to me at least twice a month! This is also the story of Katori Shintaro, who never thought he was a good guy, but never thought he was a bad guy either. Especially not one bad enough to destroy the earth.

This skit came out years ago, before DDN even existed, for completition’s sake and due to the request of Sanime over in our chat, we’re posting it.

This weekend comes with a feeling of great loss for geeks of all associations. Shel Dorf, Comic-Con’s founding father, has died this past Tuesday, he was 76.

Beyond the rift comics and manga have, or any other flavor of geekdom, we should all be grateful for Dorf’s work to the community as a whole. Basically pioneering pop-culture conventions, at least in the western world, is no small feat! He turned a small 300 people convention in 1970 into the behemoth that is Comic-Con nowadays with over 125,000 people in attendance.

Whether you’ve been to Comic-Con or to Otakon, AX, ACEN, or your local anime club’s convention, you owe a lot of that groundwork to Shel Dorf and his team. He was a man that lived for his passions. Let’s take a moment to reflect on that and celebrate all that he brought forth. May he rest in peace.

[Chicago Tribune]

Finally a solution to a problem we could have easily solved by now if it weren’t for society’s double standards and ridiculous rules like decency and respect. No I’m not talking about solving unemployment through slavery, I’m talking about cold boobs.

The Japanese have taken it upon themselves to create the Bust Beauty Pad, a USB-powered bust warmer. Just plug it in to a USB port and insert the warming pads under your bra and soon the twins will be all cozied up. It probably also works on man-boobs too but… let’s not go there. Talk about trying to invent a better mousetrap, though! Last time I checked us men still had hands! And maybe you don’t know it Japan, but here in the western world some men are even willing to pay good money to solve this problem with this hands-on approach.

There’s supply, there’s demand. I don’t know, it seems like the free market could have solved this problem ages ago. Perhaps a cop and trade system is in order, see what I did there? Yeah I’m witty like that.

[Bust Beauty Pad / Via Tokyomango]

With every gaming generation that passes we continue to strive for better and better graphics, photorealism isn’t that far away from us, so perhaps it’s only natural that retro graphics are making a comeback. The folks at design group Alaskan Military School took it to the extreme though. They set out to represent classic games with just a 15 pixel grid. As ridiculous as it may seem, they achieved amazing results with a few, such as the video above which, if you haven’t deciphered it yet, is Street Fighter’s Ken Masters v. Blanka. Check out their website for the complete collection.

[Alaskan Military School / Via Boing Boing]