Reviews by pizzaiolo

Seriously. I can’t stress just how delicious the okonomiyaki is! I went with a non-vegan Japanese family and they all enjoyed it as well and seemed surprised with how it is similar to the original. I can’t say for myself since I have not tried the original okonomiyaki recipe.

We also tried the fake meat skewers, which were delicious. The food is a bit on the oily side, but if you don’t mind that, you’ll love it like I did.

Be aware that the establishment is not fully vegan so, when in doubt, ask. Vegan restaurants in Japan are visited by foreigners en masse, which means there’s a good chance the waiter will speak English. If not, well, better work on that vegan-survival-Japanese.

This coffee shop, near Waseda University in Tokyo, has a unique atmosphere, centered around veganism and the constructed language Esperanto. Its intended goal is to introduce veganism to Esperanto-speakers, Esperanto to vegans and both ideas to everyone else!

It’s not crowded at all, probably because neither veganism or Esperanto are well-known in Japan. The good thing is that means you’ll likely have a more intimate vibe.

The food is pretty delicious, cheap (!) and it comes in pretty sizeable portions (Japanese portions are notoriously small). Also, the owner is very kind and loves to chat, if you feel like it.

One of the available meals at SOJO (Own work. License: CC-BY-SA.)

The one thing that could improve is the menu: there aren’t many options, and since it’s a tiny shop run by only one man, that might continue to be the case for the time being.

Disclaimer: I’m both a vegan and an Esperanto-speaker, so my take is probably somewhat biased, but if you look around, other reviewers share similar opinions.

Tobira is one of the most often recommended Japanese textbooks for pre-intermediate learners in communities like /r/LearnJapanese for good reason. It is a great book with very useful grammar explanations and examples which themselves use grammar points previously learned. The essays contained in the book are interesting and not overly difficult.

Also, the accompanying official website offers extra resources like audio and even pre-made Anki decks! It’s very convenient, and it would be even better if the decks contained example sentences as well instead of isolated words.

This book definitely does not hold your hand with English translations and it feels like a shock to many students who recently finished Genki II, and rightly so. But if you bear with the initial discomfort, you’ll see your Japanese visibly improving.

I have only two main problems with it: the grammar notes section is way too far away from the reading material, which is a nuisance. Also, the vocabulary list sometimes contains words that are too basic and some more complex expressions used in the texts don’t make it into these lists for some reason. Apart from that, it’s a great book and I feel fortunate to have stumbled upon it. Don’t let the lack of English scare you, embrace it!

Here’s a great add-on for Firefox, which brings you amazing, little-known artwork from the Europeana collection right to your browser, whenever you open up a new tab. It’s gorgeous and the minimal design also heightens the beauty of it all. This is unmissable for art-lovers. The cherry on top is that all images are freely licensed, which means you can reuse them for whatever purpose!

However, there are several points in which it could improve. Since this is a review of the initial public version (1.0.9), it can kinda be forgiven for some of these mistakes. Firstly, it makes you give up your data to the Googleborg, with no opt-out mechanism (fortunately I’ve blacklisted Google Analytics from my hosts file, and so should you). Come on folks, it’s 2017 and Piwik is here, there’s no need to mistreat your users under the excuse of “we need user metrics”, there are better ways of getting statistics.

The second sin is retrieving the images over an insecure https connection. Let’s Encrypt is here and can be set up fairly simply, so this one is easy to fix. Thirdly, it claims to have its source code under the MIT/X11 License, but the actual source is nowhere to be seen. It’s a little perplexing since they have so many freely licensed projects on the web, so I think they probably forgot to upload it.

Final, and minor points: the image loading times should ideally be faster. How long do we normally spend on newly opened tabs? Only as long as it takes to get us to our destination, so images need to load faster to grip out attention before we resume browsing. Also, the images shown are a little repetitive; maybe the list of curated artworks is too short?

Overall, this is a promising add-on, and even with these issues, I’ll still give it a great rating due to the novelty and design approach taken here. Here’s hoping the next iterations will be even better!

É difícil achar algo de positivo aqui, mas pelo menos a equipe do hotel foi gentil. O hotel em si é bem fajuto, o café da manhã é fraquíssimo (com direito a pão velho e Tang de laranja, única opção de suco), as paredes estäo descascando, só tem uma tomada que funciona no quarto, o banheiro tem teia de aranha, a decoração, quando existe, é cafona… Enfim, nada se salva aqui.

Evite.

Jisho is an excellent online dictionary for English speakers. One of its most amazing features is that you can basically throw at it anything, and it will try to help you: voice, drawings, English words, Japanese words (either in any Japanese writing system or using the Latin alphabet) and even full phrases!

But for this reviewer, perhaps this most interesting aspect is how Jisho pulls together a bunch of free culture projects to deliver an amazing product. It uses the JMdict, Kanjidic2, JMnedict and Radkfile dictionary files (CC BY-SA), Tatoeba example sentences (CC BY), the System of Kanji Indexing by Patterns, or SKIP (CC BY-SA), kanji stroke order diagrams from KanjiVG (CC BY-SA) and last but not least, Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Jisho is a great testament to the power of a free commons.

Having said that, it is with a heavy heart that one realizes that Jisho itself it not free-as-in-freedom. The developers have freed some related tools used in the making of the website, but not the thing itself, which is quite disappointing. It’s that one dent that forbids this reviewer from giving it a full five star rating in an otherwise impeccable project.

Shin Godzilla, or Godzilla Resurgence is a 2016 Japanese movie, another in the Godzilla franchise. It’s a fun, fast-paced film that will surely satisfy monster movie fans and casual cinema-goers. To anyone else, a word of advice: it’s very silly.

It’s got it all: bad dialog, particularly off-putting editing, a soundtrack that doesn’t always match the moment, a googly-eyed, flailing gojira, two-dimensional characters, badly spoken English and a strange love for bureaucracy. It’s the kind of film that could be fun to watch with friends, as you make fun of its multiple deficiencies, but not really as a good monster film.

Maybe this reviewer’s Western eyes fail to capture some essence that made Japanese audiences love it: it was the highest grossing live-action Japanese film of 2016, helmed by none other than brilliant Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno. It seemed like it had everything going for it, but in the end it was a major disappointment.

Atribuição: Dornicke (CC BY-SA 4.0)

O Museu Nacional de Belas Artes é uma ótima atração para o fim-de-semana no Rio de Janeiro pros que gostam arte. O espaço é grande, mas não o suficiente para cansar demais as pernas do visitante, o que é ideal; além disso, contém obras clássicas de pintores e escultores brasileiros consagrados, com um acervo mais voltado para o século XIX, ainda que também existam exposições menores com arte moderna brasileira.

Dito isto, o museu parecia um tanto subutilizado à época da minha visita, com certas áreas fechadas aos visitantes. A falta de ar condicionado na maior parte dos salões também não ajudou a atenuar o forte verão carioca, que acaba cansando o público ao longo da visita.

Sempre é possível melhorar, mas num quadro de crise como o que vivemos, o museu acaba se ressaltando pela qualidade do acervo e da curadoria, assim como pelo bom estado de conservação do edifício e das instalações, todos acima da média em comparação com outros museus cariocas.

Local bastante agradável, com temática surfista e cozinha 100% vegana. Há uma loja com artigos a venda e o local também aluga caiaques para quem quiser se divertir no Canal da Joatinga. É uma casa modesta, mas bem decorada e com um ar bastante descontraído e relaxante.

A comida em si é deliciosa, embora venha em relativamente pouca quantidade. O preço também é bem salgado: pedindo uma porção de petiscos (bolinhos de feijoada), o prato do dia e mais a bebida já é suficiente para atingir a marca dos R$45, então certamente não é um restaurante para se ir com frequência.

Apesar de tudo, vale muito a pena conhecer, degustar e prestigiar um dos poucos espaços veganos na cidade. Aproveite para ir em uma ocasião especial e ganhe alguns mimos do gerente ;)

Archive-webextension is a Firefox add-on for saving pages into the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The importance of this work is commonly neglected, but the web is very volatile and ephemeral, which warrants care so that people can have access to this whole treasure trove. Backups are important, and archiving the Internet is serious business.

The add-on itself is simple, and was made mainly to replace a previous add-on that did this work, but became incompatible with newer versions of Firefox, as it is no longer maintained. It is made as a webextension, so that it can be compatible with the new directions Mozilla is taking Firefox. It works well and I can recommend it to anyone interested in helping save our shared history.

That being said, internationalization would be a welcome addition (and not too complicated either), so I’m giving it four stars. It can always improve, right?!

Disclaimer: You may find my opinion biased as I’m part of Peers, the same project that archive-webextension belongs to, and I speak to its author, zPlus, on IRC sometimes. Although really, I couldn’t find much to complain about in this add-on, and I think it fills an important role.