can't express enough gratitude to normal for girls for hosting masked shows with big ol' cr boxes. had an incredible time. my legs feel like pudding now. dancing in heels is hard work

that one's free for anyone who can make good use of it

I appreciate when manga translations include both transliterations and translations of onomatopoeias. yeah actually I am interested that "gata" is the onomatopoeia for "clatter" that's really cool

"posh ketchup" - Prue Leith, describing tonkatsu sauce

Joey Fox posted on itsairborne.com

My 6 Favorite HEPA Filters & Air Cleaners

2. Classic Corsi-Rosenthal Box

The classic box fan CR-Box was invented during the COVID-19 pandemic and is THE most cost effective method to clean the air. They have been shown to be remarkably effective and outperforming most commercial HEPA filters on the market. It can also be scaled up as there have been many CR box builds where entire schools came together to provide one per classroom.

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This article is legitimately helpful, but I'm mostly posting it because I find it extremely amusing that (at least as of a year ago) the best-in-class air filter by cost and among the best overall is literally just taping a bunch of filters to a box fan yourself. Hilarious and easy on your wallet! But what's even funnier is Joey's #1 recommendation:

Joey Fox posted on itsairborne.com

1. PC Fan Corsi-Rosenthal Box

The PC fan CR box was a recent invention to find a method to achieve high clean air delivery rates with very low noise. Noise is the greatest limitation of in-room air cleaners and PC fans are the best option to address it. There are no other air cleaners on the market that have the capability to supply 150 lps of clean air at 35 dBA. Nothing comes close.

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The only thing better than than taping a bunch of filters to a box fan? Taping them to a bunch of PC fans instead! Granted the ones linked here are a little more sophisticated than that, but elsewhere on his site Joey presents one that absolutely is just fans and tape:

Joey Fox posted on itsairborne.com

The Mini PC Fan Corsi-Rosenthal Box

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it'll turn on automatically if you have it enabled at the OS or browser level. let me know if you notice any issues!

A lot of my friends don't like star ratings for media, and I get it. It's inherently reductive, boiling down your complex and contextual mental-emotional response to a single linear scale that's often taken to approximate some absolute notion of "quality" that probably doesn't even exist in the first place. That's why I always make sure to write down actual textual thoughts about everything I review—to have a place to capture the nuance and context that's never going to be visible in a star rating.

At the same time, I always enjoy the intellectual exercise of comparing very different things across the same lines. Back in the day I did yearly "Natto Awards" among all the media I'd journaled that year, and I'd always have a lot of fun doing cross-media categories like "best horror" where movies, video games, and novels were all in competition with one another. It's not particularly fair as a way of determining quality, but that hardly matters when quality is fake anyway. What it does do is get you thinking about what it means to successfully inhabit a genre across media, and what each medium brings to its takes on the same ideas. I find star ratings do something similar, pushing me to really think about how much I appreciate a film or video game and to try to articulate why.

By far the biggest reason I use them all the time, though, is just that my memory for these things is awful. My subconscious is particularly liable to just toss out memories it deems "irrelevant" by its own mysterious criteria, and it turns out that what I thought of a given film—or even whether I saw it at all—is roundly considered irrelevant. But not to my conscious mind! I actually care a lot about being able to remember how much I enjoyed something long after the fact, and star ratings are a major way I do that.

To that end, I also try to keep a pretty consistent rubric of what each rating means, so I don't shift too much over time. I do inevitably move somewhat and have to self-correct, of course. This post was itself inspired by me realizing that I've been giving out ★★★½ and to a lesser extent ★★★★ ratings too eagerly. So, as much as a reminder to myself as anything, here's my schema. It's presented as whole-star tiers only; I'll add a half-star if it's particularly enjoyable or well-made relative to its tier.

• ★ : Corresponds to the "#bad" tag on my old media journal. Actively poorly-made, offensive, and/or otherwise miserable, either with minimal redeeming qualities or simply irredeemably noxious.

• ★★ : Corresponds to the "#eh" tag on my old media journal. Did not vibe with me. Nothing is egregiously wrong, but nothing is outstandingly right either. Alternatively, there are things I liked about it but somewhat more things I disliked.

• ★★★ : Corresponds to the "#good" tag on my old media journal. Solidly enjoyable. Not a barn-burner,…