I’m really not sure what I just read. I mean, I know what I read in terms of the words - but I don’t understand what its purpose is. But I don’t necessarily think it matters…

It was thoroughly diverting, held my attention and made me wish that more people wrote pieces like this where the only real purpose is the conceit, and the subsequent journey the author takes you on.

Excellent deduction, but somewhat rushed at the end. Almost sloppy. If Mendez is flying to meet up with a friend at a hotel, it's clearly necassary to check if there are any hotels on that island to begin with.

We can, of course, assume that if there's an airport, there's a hotel, but being a Russian territory even the most benign assumption may prove false, so it's still prudent to check.

The good news is that there is not one, but two hotels on Iturup, both with impressive ratings (even if across a dozen reviews each). With this in place, I trust, we can put the final dot to the story of finding Shawn Mendez and his views on the annexation of the Kurils.

Sort of on-topic: The Kuril islands are a big deal in Hokkaido. I attended a protest there (by accident) a few years ago with many Japanese demonstrating for a return of the islands to Japan. It was kind of odd as an outsider because the protest clearly has no effect, and there's no chance of it ever happening outside of Russia losing a war.

He says he's only a couple hundred miles from Japan, not that the flight is a couple hundred miles. He could be in Taiwan and flying to Naha (there are evening flights on that route).

Or, more intriguingly, he could be a supporter of Okinawan independence who doesn't acknowledge Okinawa as part of Japan, in which case he might also regard Okinawa as being in the Seibu Hyojunji timezone rather than Japan Standard Time.

This… this is impressive dedication to a gag blog post. Enjoyed the read.

Oh Man. A few years back, my daughter played so much of Lost in Japan repeatedly. I thought the singer was another girl, because of the others in the playlist such as Kate Perry, and Justin Beiber.

This is hilarious, I need to find more blog posts like this.

The article suspiciously leaves out whether there’s a hotel on Iturup Island, on which the whole argument hinges.

Quick Google Maps reveales there indeed is one.

What a relief!

According to Genius, some fans believe the lyrics to reference when he toured in the Philippines and flew to Japan after. https://genius.com/14147648

The timing of the song being released in 2018 lines up.

This reminded me of "Where is Ja?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo-ddYhXAZc

And thus was born a new game, one that combined knowledge of history, politics, and pop trivia.

There is a mistake in blogger's logic. Mendes never says that he is flying to Japan. He only states that he is a couple hundred of miles away from Japan. He could be flying from South Korea to Taipei.

"we'd be in the same timezone" certainly does not imply that he's not currently in that timezone

What a journey. Bravo, I am surely convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.

Reading this felt very similar to watching “Pitch Perfect 237” (Anna Kendrick 9/11 conspiracy) https://youtube.com/watch?v=MiC9X_MoE1M

Precisely the type of thing I immensely enjoy reading on a holiday!

This is also an exercise in deductive reasoning, which I recently read, somewhere here on Hacker News, is a good skill to exercise.

It’s sad that LLMs seem unable to produce that kind of brilliant deductive reasoning.

But just how seriously should we take Shawn Mendes' stand on the Kuril islands? How big of a hit was _Lost in Japan_?

This misses one obvious possibility; that it just happened before Okinawa was returned to Japan.

(Granted, that was a while ago, and he looks young-ish, but I don't really know anything about Shawn Mendes, so am entirely open to the possibility that he's in his 70s and doing that blood boy thing from Silicon Valley.)

Man this is so dumb I love it Unfortunately the song is stuck in my head again...

lovely

So I just had a fun 5 minutes trying to talk gemini around to believing that Shawn has a position on the Kuril Islands dispute by submitting all the evidence in the article, but the llm is pretty impressively consistent and insistent that the song is figurative etc. Miss the days when it was so easy to get an LLM to argue for anything by persistence.

I'm patting myself on the back. After reading the first couple paragraphs, I went Eh? and came here to the comments. Thanks everyone for saving me the time.