The death of Photobucket

Yesterday the internet was full of the news that Photobucket had decided to start charging $400 a year for the privilege of third-party linking, breaking millions of photo links all across the internet and devastating the blogging and forum communities. I post a lot of pictures with all my food and video game posts, and they're all hosted on Photobucket. The pictures still work, for the moment, but I'm not taking any chances.

So now I have to go through my posts and correct hundreds of photo links and point them to the new hosting site I transferred everything to. I already fixed my Japan tag, mostly so that my Japan vacation blogstorm would be in order, and I'm working now on the anime conventions tag. Doing video games or food will...take a lot longer, though fortunately my photo captions transferred over so if I do wake up to a bunch of dead links, I'll be able to reconstruct everything pretty easily.

And I was actually paying for a Photobucket plan, too, because I had so many pictures there! Oh well.

Darker than Black, Week 46: Raaka Virgin Chocolate Genmaicha Crunch

I've occasionally seen fancy food being marketed as made with genmaicha, or "Genmaicha Brown Rice Tea" (see also Panko Bread Crumbs or ATM Machine--玄米茶 is literally "brown rice tea"), and it always makes me laugh. Genmaicha is upper-end working class food, a way for people to stretch out their supplies of tea in the post-war period when shortages were common. But just like with sushi rice, it turned out that he additives were pretty tasty and improved the whole product, and so it's still sold to this day. Including at the Persian grocery store in Andersonville, which is why we currently have half a bag of genmaicha in our tea cupboard.
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