u/jonhollandwww

There's been a lot of discussion lately about how Japan is changing fast, from izakayas struggling to stay open to shifting consumer habits driven by convenience stores and online shopping. One thing that doesn't get talked about enough is the slow decline of shotengai, the covered neighborhood shopping arcades that used to be the heart of local commercial life across Japanese cities and towns.

Many of these streets date back to the postwar era and have real character to them: familyrun tofu shops, oldschool kissaten, hardware stores that have been in the same family for three generations. But foot traffic has dropped significantly over the decades, and in smaller cities especially, entire shotengai blocks now sit halfempty or fully shuttered.

Some local governments are trying to revitalize them, occasionally with creative popup markets or artist residencies, but it feels like a losing battle in many cases.

What's interesting is that foreign visitors sometimes discover these places and love them precisely because they feel authentic and unhurried compared to the more touristheavy areas. Yet that appreciation rarely translates into the kind of sustained local patronage that would keep them alive.

Has anyone here spent time in a shotengai that left a strong impression? Are there examples of successful revitalization efforts worth pointing to? Curious what people think about whether these spaces can realistically survive longterm.

i have like 30 old servers from a client refresh sitting in my storage unit dell r630s mostly, some hp decent specs. figured id sell them on ebay like i always do.

i spent like 3 hours just listing 5 of them. photos, descriptions, shipping calculations. its so draining. and then ebay holds your money for 2-3 weeks if youre not a top seller. plus the fees are just stupid at this point.

i just need these things gone. my wife wants the storage unit back for her moms furniture and honestly im getting tired of looking at them. anyone used an itad buyer before? curious what the process is like. do they lowball you hard or is it actually worth it compared to ebay.

Been spending some time lately digging into expected goals data for forwards across the top five European leagues and I keep running into the same question: how predictive is xG actually at the individual player level versus the team level?

At the team level the literature seems fairly settled that xG is a decent predictor of future results over a large enough sample. But when I try to apply similar logic to individual forwards, the variance feels enormous. A player can massively overperform or underperform their xG for an entire season and it's genuinely hard to tell whether that reflects real skill, goalkeeper quality faced, or just noise.

I've been looking at players like Anthony Gordon and similar wide forwards who tend to accumulate xG through lower quality chances in wide areas. Their finishing conversion rates swing wildly year to year even when the underlying chance quality stays relatively stable.

Has anyone built models that reliably separate finishing skill from variance at the individual level? I'm curious whether postshot xG models do meaningfully better here, or whether the sample sizes required just make it impractical for a single season of data.

I'd also be interested if anyone has compared across leagues where defensive quality differs substantially. Does xG travel well when a player moves leagues, or does the model need significant recalibration?

Happy to share some of the numbers I've been working with if there's interest.

I am currently going through a separation where the property and assets are split between Going through a messy separation right now. Most of our assets and property are actually over in New Zealand, but the legal stuff is starting here in NSW. My ex is dragging this out like crazy and I'm honestly running out of money for my lawyer.

I’m looking into options to fund the legal fees until we finally do the property split. I found JustFund New Zealand online, but I'm completely lost on how this works with cross-border assets.

Can a NZ funder even look at my situation if the case is handled here, or do I need to find someone local in Australia? Anyone dealt with this trans-Tasman asset mess before?

i didn't think this part would be so hard honestly. i love my engagement ring because it's super simple, but now that i'm actually looking at wedding bands i cannot make up my mind. one day i'm convinced i just want a plain band. then i see one with tiny diamonds and i'm like... wait maybe that looks better. then i see a curved one and i'm back to square one. i've been looking at solitaire rings for way too long at this point and somehow choosing the band feels harder than choosing the engagement ring did.

if you have a solitaire, what did you end up pairing it with? are you still happy with it now or do you wish you'd gone a different direction?

would honestly love to see pictures because i keep changing my mind every other day.

Started paying more attention to tap water quality after my kid kept complaining about the taste. Reno water isn't terrible but the chlorine smell is noticeable, and as a nurse I'm probably a bit more tuned in to that stuff than most people need to be.

Did some reading and ended up picking up a pure water systems benchtop water filter a few months back. A countertop unit made more sense than committing to a full undersink install in a rental. The taste difference was real and noticeable pretty quickly. Kid drinks more water now, which is the main thing.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around what actually matters: TDS levels, sediment, chlorine, fluoride. There's a lot of noise out there and it's hard to know what's worth caring about versus what's just marketing.

For anyone who's tested their tap water at home, what did you find and did it change what filter you went with?

Over the past decade Japan has quietly built up a remarkable craft beer culture that often flies under the radar compared to sake or whisky. Small regional breweries are doing genuinely interesting things, incorporating local ingredients like yuzu, shiso, sansho pepper, and even matcha into their brews, creating something that feels distinctly Japanese rather than just imitation Western craft beer.

What strikes me is how many of these places are rooted in specific regional identity. A brewery in Tohoku using locally grown hops, or a Kyushu outfit experimenting with shochu barrel aging. There is real craftsmanship happening that connects to local agriculture and food culture in ways that actually mean something.

Yet a lot of these smaller operations seem to struggle with visibility even domestically. Some izakayas and restaurants still default almost entirely to the major commercial labels, which makes you wonder whether the broader market is actually shifting or whether craft beer remains fairly niche even by Japanese standards.

For people living in Japan or with solid knowledge of the local food and drink scene, curious to hear your thoughts. Are craft breweries gaining traction with Japanese consumers, not just expats and tourists? Are there regional breweries you think deserve far more attention than they currently get?

i've been doing erp for about 8 months now. it's helped with some of the obvious compulsions. checking, counting, that kind of thing. but the mental rituals are still there. the rumination the constant analyzing. i can't turn it off.

my therapist says i'm making progress but i don't feel it. i still spend hours going over conversations in my head. i still can't let go of things

has anyone found anything that helps with the mental side of ocd? not just stopping compulsions. the stuff that happens inside your head that nobody sees

I built a linear bench power supply using an LM317 with an opamp feedback loop to regulate the output more tightly. At no load, the output sits exactly where I set it, say 12V. But as soon as I draw anything above around 500mA, the output starts sagging noticeably, sometimes dropping 0.5 to 1V depending on the load.

I have a 2N3055 pass transistor to handle the current, and the opamp is supposed to compare the output to a reference and correct via the LM317 adjust pin. The transformer secondary gives me about 18V AC, rectified and filtered with a 4700uF cap.

Things I've already checked: the filter cap looks fine on my meter, the 2N3055 isn't going into thermal shutdown, and the reference voltage stays stable under load. The voltage drop seems to correlate with higher current draw, but I can't figure out if the problem is in the feedback path, the transistor gain dropping, or maybe insufficient base drive.

Has anyone run into this with a similar topology? I'm wondering if the opamp output current is too low to properly drive the transistor base, or if there's a compensation issue causing the loop to respond too slowly. Any suggestions on where to probe first or what values to double check would be really helpful

Hey everyone, I've been working on a player performance scoring model in Python that tries to distill multiple statistical categories into a single composite score for easier comparison across positions. The idea is to weight metrics like progressive carries, key passes, pressing intensity, and defensive actions based on positional role, then normalize everything to account for team context.

The part I keep getting stuck on is small sample sizes. A player with 400 minutes looks very different statistically from one with 1800 minutes, and naive normalization tends to either overrate or underrate lowminute players pretty significantly. I've tried Bayesian shrinkage toward positional averages as a prior, which helps, but I'm curious what approaches others are using.

The secondary challenge is deciding how to weight team context adjustments. A midfielder on a high possession side will naturally rack up more progressive passes, so raw numbers are misleading. I'm currently using a simple league average possession differential correction but it feels pretty rough.

Would love to hear how others are structuring their composite models, what data sources you're pulling from, and how you're thinking about the minutes threshold problem. Open to feedback on methodology or interesting papers worth reading on the topic.

I've been thinking a lot about sustainability in nursing lately. Not the big stuff like changing units or leaving bedside, but the small everyday things that actually help you reset mentally and physically after a hard day.

For me it took a while to figure out that I needed some kind of transition ritual between work mode and home mode. I started keeping a change of clothes in my car and changing before I even start the drive home. Something about not walking through my front door in scrubs helps my brain actually switch off. It sounds small but it genuinely changed things for me.

A lot of nurses struggle with this, especially those of us working nights or rotating shifts where your schedule never really stabilizes. The mental load of charting, difficult patient situations, short staffing it follows you home if you let it.

Curious what actually works for people here. Not looking for the generic stuff like drink water and get enough sleep. I mean the real specific habits that you actually do consistently. Do you have a playlist for the drive home, a specific food you always make, a show you only watch after shifts, anything like that.

Would love to hear what other nurses have figured out, especially from those who have been at this for a while. The newer nurses here might really benefit from hearing what the veterans have learned.

Hey everyone, currently studying for the CompTIA A+ Core 1 (2201101) and I keep hitting a wall with the ports and protocols section. There are so many to remember and I want to make sure I actually understand them rather than just blindly memorizing numbers. I've been going through Professor Messer's notes and Mike Meyers' course and both cover the material well, but the sheer volume of ports makes it hard to retain everything under pressure.
A few questions for those who have already passed or are further along in their studies. Did you focus more on understanding what each protocol does in context rather than drilling the numbers raw? Did flashcards work for you, or did you find another method more effective? Were there any particular ports that kept tripping you up on practice questions?
I'm not looking for anything exam specific, just general study strategies and how people approached this topic conceptually. When I understand the why behind something I retain it way better than rote memorization. Any advice from people who have been through this would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance.