Beards, Anime, and 99 Kinds of Cheese
Sixty hours. That’s what Fantasy Life on the 3DS cost me before I even noticed what was happening. You play a small unemployed adventurer being dragged across a pastel fairy-tale world by a possessed butterfly, saving everything from something unspecified. It sounds exactly as tedious as it is completely absorbing. I’m a Paladin now and I regret nothing.
The anime I’m equally lost in right now is Taiyo Matsumoto’s Ping Pong—two table tennis kids and their team, zero large-breasted superheroines fighting the apocalypse, none of the usual furniture. It’s written with actual intelligence, it looks like nothing else in the medium, and it carries a cool emotional temperature I find genuinely rare. I’m rationing the remaining episodes.
On the music side: Ibeyi, the French-Cuban twin sisters Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz, released a track called Ghosts that sits somewhere between ritual and ambient pop and sounds like a room you want to stay in. The video is worth your time, and you should keep their name somewhere accessible. They’re going somewhere.
And because the universe occasionally delivers: A Bathing Ape and Hello Kitty did a capsule collection—clothing, phone cases, plush toys, even a mug. Baby Milo and Kitty-chan all over each other across an entire product range. Spring is coming and you’re going to need something new and stupid to wear.
If you’ve stood at Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, you know what I mean when I say it’s one of those few places that makes you want to cry a little from the sheer fact of it. The first time I stood there—in front of the Starbucks, on what felt like the corner of the whole world—I nearly did. The lights, the crowds moving from six directions at once, the synchronized enormity of it. Worth getting there by any means necessary. Japan Guide has everything you need.
If your beard is more religion than fashion statement, or if beards simply do something to you on a cellular level you’ve stopped trying to explain, Bristlr exists for exactly this condition. It’s Tinder for people who know a good beard deserves more than appreciation from a safe distance. Sign up, start scrolling, and before long you’ll have occasion to use your hands—or your lips, or whatever else you generally deploy on people you’ve only just met. No judgment.
The January Rolling Stone has Nicki Minaj on the cover, billed inside as hip-hop’s killer diva, and she gives them a line I actually believe: I want to finally give people a glimpse into my private life.
If you like Terry Richardson’s photography or breasts in general, get yourself to a newsstand.
If I had an identical twin there is one thing and one thing only I would do with them: everything, across every possible interpretation of the word—after lunch, after school, after bed. No law, no church, no social contract could reach us. We’d be too alike to resist and too alike to feel anything but completely understood. I don’t have a twin. This makes me unreasonably sad.
Melbourne pizza legend Johnny di Francesco has made a 99-cheese pizza, and it is a sincere achievement. He told The Guardian: Nobody’s done this before—so I wanted to be first.
I don’t know what you’re doing tonight but I’m going to buy cheese.
And if I had to spend the rest of my life reading exactly one blog, it would be Kenza Zouiten’s. I rarely have any idea what she’s actually writing about—something involving parties, holidays, and apparently Tokio Hotel—but she represents, to my mind, the platonic ideal of a Swede. I’ve never been to Stockholm, but I’m certain everyone there looks like her. Every single person. Men included.