Pinned Tweet
This is actually insane, but hear me out
Did you know that..
Exactly 8681 days from when Watanabe Mayu was born, she stood on Kouhaku Uta Gasen 2017 on 31 Dec 2017, her final day performing as an idol
Exactly 8681 days from when Ikeda Teresa was born, she was announced as Nogizaka46 center at 00:52 JST, 16 Feb 2026
Same number of days
Same point in life
They were six years apart, yet perfectly aligned
The origin and the echo, aligned to the day
One was closing her idol story on prestigious stage One was beginning to shine at the center of one of Japan's national idol groups
Their turning points happening at the exact same life moment
You cannot make this up
"Japan was even weirder. Phones on different carriers couldn't text each other at all until July 2011"
AH!
So that's why they always used email to message each other back then
When I watched old AKBINGO!, I never understand why they use email. Like, SMS existed?????
Why would anybody use email on their phone? lol
Americans text on iMessage and most of the world uses WhatsApp because of what a single text message cost back in 2010.
In the US it was basically free. Almost everywhere else, every text showed up on your bill.
AT&T charged $20 a month for unlimited texting back then. Once you've paid the flat fee, the next text costs nothing, so Americans never had a reason to download anything. Then iPhones grew to about 60% of the US market, and iMessage slid right into a habit that was already there.
Most of the world paid by the message. If your brother worked in Dubai or your mom lived in Lisbon, every international text was money.
WhatsApp was built for that bill. Messages went over data, so the carrier never got to charge per text, and after a free first year it cost $1. What won India and Brazil, though, was the list of phones it ran on. WhatsApp shipped on BlackBerry in January 2010, Symbian that May and Nokia's basic Series 40 phones in 2011. iMessage needed an iPhone, and WhatsApp ran on whatever Nokia you already had.
That's also why Germany, Spain, Italy and the UK are green. When Facebook bought the company in 2014, Zuckerberg said its community had started in Europe, India and Latin America, which is why so few Americans had heard of it.
Pretty much every other color on the map follows the same rule.
Korean carriers charged 20 won for a short text in 2010. KakaoTalk launched that March as the free option and got so big that SK Telecom, KT and LG U+ teamed up on a rival app called Joyn in 2012. Joyn shut down, and Kakao still has roughly 90% of Korea.
Japan was even weirder. Phones on different carriers couldn't text each other at all until July 2011. When the March 2011 earthquake jammed the voice networks and data kept working, Naver's team in Japan built LINE in about three months. It launched a few weeks before cross-carrier texting even existed.
The Philippines is red because Globe made Facebook free to use without data in 2013 and Smart sold Facebook access for 2 pesos a day. Messenger cost nothing while every other app ate your prepaid load, so the whole country settled on the free one.
Just look at what that was worth. Facebook paid $19 billion in 2014 for 55 employees and 450 million users, roughly $42 a head for people who'd been paying WhatsApp $1 a year. It's past 3 billion users now.
The carriers spent a decade charging people by the text, and every one of those charges ended up selling the app that put them out of business.
Look at that orange line (AKB48) upward trend
We're so fucking back
Nighthawk retweeted
“the CIA was still supplying Ukraine with intelligence on Russian air defense dispositions that helped facilitate Ukraine's deep-strike campaign.”
Did you ever doubt the Lockheed Liberals, anon?
Hahahaha. “Ukraine's strikes on Russian oil infrastructure have been greeted with a ‘shrug’ in Washington, according to a U.S. official who spoke to the Kyiv Independent. Another figure close to the administration told the Kyiv Independent that much of the administration's rhetoric around Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure was aimed at a domestic audience, pointing out that the CIA was still supplying Ukraine with intelligence on Russian air defense dispositions that helped facilitate Ukraine's deep-strike campaign.”
kyivindependent.com/ukraine-…
