#kirakira-names

#kirakira-names

This year's collection from our roving photographers at Minerablu features some of the most impressive fits we've seen in a long while, both extravagant and super-subtle.

The vibes around Pokémon Champions have been mostly bad for a number of reasons since it launched today, but really I should have caught onto how much of a disappointment the Switch battle simulator would be right when I booted up the game and it handed me the absolute most sauceless Pokémon trainer this side of the Paldea region.

This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko bumping man shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender dynamics and the stresses of modern life.

Virtual Cram School Wish High is a new online school by Tokyo-based company Luminaris. According to the publication, all teachers are "active VTubers," meaning streamers who use digital avatars to represent themselves instead of showing their real faces. Tuition at the online academy is the equivalent of around $63 per course per month, on subjects including mathematics, English, physics, chemistry, world history, Japanese history, and geography.

We can now look back on November 28, 2025, as the start of a mass-psychosis event. In an era of neo-puritanical television slop, a fresh, horny breeze swept in from Canada: Heated Rivalry, a six-episode series about two professional hockey rivals turned lovers, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, stirred something deep in the American psyche. Ordinary taxpaying adult women, many of them my friends, suddenly lost control of their faculties over "the gay hockey show."

You've got your obvious bangers, such as Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and Jujutsu Kaisen, but there are at least twenty weekly releases currently airing that are worth watching. Hell's Paradise, Fate/Strange Fake, Sentenced to Be a Hero, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, Trigun Stargaze, Golden Kamuy - I could go on, and that's without including the stuff that just finished airing, such as Spy x Family and To Your Eternity.

but thanks to the opening of Pokemon's first ever amusement park on 5 February, this year, they are likely to come earlier. Unlike the rollercoaster-filled thrills of Tokyo Disney Sea or Universal Studios Japan in Osaka, PokePark Kanto is essentially a forest populated by models of the creatures from the perennially popular games. Nestled in the quiet Tokyo suburb of Inagi, half an hour from the city centre, the park is a walkable forest with more than 600 Pokemonin it.