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Posted by Oona McGee

https://soranews24.com/2026/03/29/starbucks-japan-has-a-secret-coffee-press-service-that-not-many-people-know-about/

Elevate your Starbucks experience with a special service that’ll turn heads during your visit.

Sometimes the best finds in Japan are the ones you stumble upon yourself, and that’s what happened when we stopped by Starbucks the other day and saw a handwritten message on the chalkboard at the entrance that said: “Why don’t you order a coffee press?” Despite visiting Starbucks countless times, we’d never heard of a coffee press service before – we hadn’t seen it advertised anywhere, and moreover, we’d never seen a customer sitting down with a coffee press inside a store.

Curious to try it out, we sidled up to the counter and asked the staff for the coffee press, upon which the barista immediately whipped into action like a pro, handing us a menu filled with a variety of options.

As if sensing our overwhelm at the many options, the barista kindly asked us if we preferred our coffee black or with milk, and when we stated our preference for the latter, they recommended three bean types: “Light Note Blend“, “Colombia“, and “Cafe Verona“. With the “Light Note Blend” purportedly tasting like a light milk chocolate, that was the one we ordered, and after taking a seat at a table, the barista brought the coffee press over to us on a tray, complete with a mug and a small paper cup of milk.

The coffee press usually takes a few minutes to extract the coffee, but given that time had already passed between preparation and serving, the barista told us it was ready to plunge straight away.

▼ Depending on where you are in the world, you might know this as a French press, a coffee plunger, or a cafetière.

First, we tried the freshly brewed coffee on its own, pouring a small amount into the mug and drinking it straight. It had a thicker, more satisfying mouthfeel than drip coffee brewed with a paper filter, as the French press retains the coffee oil, so we were able to fully enjoy the soft richness and light, low-bitter taste that’s said to be a feature of the Light Note Blend.

After enjoying it straight, we poured the rest of the coffee into the mug and added milk, which gave birth to a mild and light café au lait flavour. It had a gentle mouthfeel that seemed well suited to the spring season, and we totally fell in love with the taste.

We’d initially been concerned that a coffee press coffee at Starbucks might be dark and bitter, but the Light Note Blend showed there are a wide variety of options to suit your taste. Not only did the coffee press elevate our everyday Starbucks visit into a fancy cafe style experience, it also opened our eyes to new possibilities, and now that we know the true extent of the beans on offer, we’ll be ordering the coffee press option more often.

Images©SoraNews24
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https://soranews24.com/2026/03/29/starbucks-japan-has-a-secret-coffee-press-service-that-not-many-people-know-about/

https://soranews24.com/?p=729799

fbhjr

( Read more )

m_findlow posting in

fandomweekly

Theme Prompt: #294 - Pining
Title: Always and ever
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating/Warnings: PG.
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 1,000 words
Summary: Ianto can’t understand why it’s so difficult to move on.

( Read more... )

mellowtigger

Yes, I attended the main #NoKings rally in St. Paul, Minnesota, today. Yes, I heard Bruce Springsteen sing. Yes, I heard Bernie Sanders speak.

No, I don't feel better for it.

I've grown too old for this stuff. I left the house about 12:45pm, and I was sitting in my chair in the living room again about 6:45pm. My arthritis hurts too much to go 6 hours with no proper seating. I spent much of those 6 hours on buses or light rail train. I spent too much time standing in line waiting for mass transit transportation.

Lesson learned: I need to carry some kind of cane/chair combination, so I can always sit, no matter where I'm at. I got old, fast, during the pandemic.

kingstoken

I'm moving on the 31st, so I'm going do my first quarter reading wrap-up now because I don't think I'll be finishing anymore books in next few days. The first part of the year has actually gone really well, I have read seven books and completed a full series! I'm sometimes terrible about continuing series, so I was very surprised by that. Anyways, here are the books I read:

Magician by K.L. Noone - a sweet M/M fantasy romance, although it also felt very melancholic to me. I don't know if it was the author's intention, but one of the main characters is sort of semi-immortal, or at least lives way longer than any normal person, and he falls in love with a human man. The issue isn't really brought up til near the end of the novel and I wish there had been more internal thought or angst about this issue. That being said I did like the characters a lot and the way the author described the magic was interesting, and almost poetic at times.

The Knight and Necromancer series by A.H. Lee - this is three books, The Capital, The Broader, and The Sea. I'm just going to talk about them together because I read them back to back (and they have kind of smushed together in my head), which is something I rarely ever do, but the story was compelling enough that I wanted to keep reading and I was lucky enough that my library had them all on the hoopla app. So this series is a M/M fantasy romance about a Knight, who is the brother of the Queen, and a newly fledged Necromancer. The Queen is trying to make an alliance between her kingdom and the necromancer's mentor. There is a big bad that is trying to destroy the kingdom, people don't trust necromancers so every time something terrible happens they try and blame it on the necromancer, plus there is demons and dark magic involved. And while all this is going on a romance has developed between the knight and the necromancer. I will say my recurring complaint with this series is that it's heavy on the fantasy and light on the romance. What we get of the romance is good, but I wanted more of it. (This actually the opposite problem of most fantasy romances I've read)

Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson - The main character has a condition similar to the "50 First Dates" movie where she forgets the previous day every time she goes to sleep, only instead of being played for laughs it's treated as the kind of horrific thing that it is here. Anyways, this woman knows something is wrong, and she can't trust her husband, and she knows this because she writes herself a diary and every day she reads it. You follow her as she tries to piece her life back together. There were moments where it felt you were taking two steps forward and one step back, but it makes sense in the context of the story. Overall, a very memorable concept for a mystery.

Justice League, Volume 1: Origin by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee - I was kind of surprised to find this comic volume in a free little library, but I enjoyed it. It is about the formation of the Justice League and these characters meeting for the first time, I think this is part of the new 52. I liked that they had Batman using his head and taking on more of a leadership role, because he is so under powered compared to the rest. I did feel that Superman was out of character though. Overall, lots of action, but it needed more character moments.

The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths - just finished this one today. It was nice mix of modern mystery and Gothic, which isn't easy to pull off. It is very centred on this school where one teacher dies, which leads to another murder, and it's all connected to another teacher at the school. There were three main POVs, I really liked Claire and Harbinder's POVs, one is an upper-middle class teacher and the other is an immigrant working class police detective and they both bring different perspectives to what is going on. My least favourite POV was the teenage daughter, Georgie, but I do think the author did a good job of capturing the feeling of teenager thinking they are way more grown-up than they actually are. Overall, a solid and enjoyable mystery.

chazzbanner

Though I was so tired yesterday I didn't actually sleep very well.

Today I had an appointment for a haircut. Buses run much more frequently since the E line started through my neighborhood, quite the change for Saturdays! I unexpectedly caught an earlier bus, so walked to the IDS center for a coffee before my appointment.

It was a bit hard to judge how to dress. It was under freezing at 10:00 but by the time I got home it was probably 20 degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer, say 45F/7.2C. But windy! I noted the frozen lake (BMS) in passing.

After lunch "I just said, what the heck" and did the delete-reboot-enter deal. It worked! Email on my iPad. I also realized the reason why books stored on the Kindle cloud didn't appear on the iPad Kindle app (downloadable). This time when a notification popped up on my MacBook asking "allow this laptop to communicate with other devices in the area?" I knew the answer should be Yes! Lovely book covers appeared in the iPad app, ready for me to scroll through.

-

erinptah

Clearing out some nice links:

Mastodon poll (now closed, but please enjoy the results): “Pick the best fallacy“

Interview with Rachel Manija Brown, writer turned bookstore owner: “I had never intended to open a bookshop. I always thought it was one of those idle daydreams that people who love reading and books have. I never planned to actually do it because I didn’t think it would be successful—they frequently go out of business. But after I moved to Crestline, which is a very small town in the California mountains, the little town did not have a bookshop.”

The promised official postmortem of the AO3 downtime in early March 2026 from AO3_Systems is out! (I added that link to my earlier post about the downtime.)

Speaking of AO3…I checked the backlog on some fandom tags where I hadn’t seen updates for a while because their RSS feeds glitched, and now my To Read list has ballooned by +9 pages.

Art process:

Watching a video on iconic DC writer/artist Darwyn Cooke, which led me to an interview with this quote:

“I don’t work in a formal fashion — I don’t sit and type a full script and then draw it. What I do is I plot it. And then I sit down and draw it and then I write the dialogue afterwards.”

Oh, hey, that’s what I do.

Pretty sure I’ve never heard anyone else describe making comics this way. Maybe they just won’t admit to it, because Having A Script is seen as the “professional” way to do things? But nobody could accuse Darwyn Cooke of not being a professional — and here he is, revealing this is the process that works for him.

Vindication, hah.

Cat news: The fluff has also survived his latest vet visit!

This went so much smoother than it used to in his younger years. He didn’t struggle at all once he was in the carrier, allowed the vet to pick him up and carry him to a different room for shots, and didn’t pee on anything (or anyone).

I hope that means on some level he’s internalized “the scary trip doesn’t last too long, you’ll be home safe soon, just hold very still and wait for it to be over.”

dhampyresa

A book being slow-burn doesn’t mean it has to be slow.

yourlibrarian posting in

marchmetamatterschallenge

Hello everyone! It's our last check-in before our wrap up post on April 1.

Comment below with any of the following:

1) What tags have you found yourself using the most often?

2) Did you write new meta based on the last post's prompt? Share it here!

Remember, if you post to AO3 or Squidgeworld, don't forget to use the Nonfiction tag to identify your posts, and add them to the March Meta Matters Challenge collection!

cosmolinguist

Today is brought to you by diffrentcolours, who rescued me from missing lift club by offering to drive me there when I slept through my alarm and woke up ten minutes before we'd have had to leave the house.

(This also means that we could deliver the outdoor cat shelter, which is no longer needed by our neighborhood cat, to a friend who's in the process of being adopted by what had been his next-door neighbor's cat.)

And then this afternoon he drove V and me to the garden center to buy compost to re-pot a giant houseplant and straw mulch (it's called Strulch!) for the outdoor gardening season. And then to B&M to buy a bag of rocks. V is working on making a barrel pond for the backyard, which leads to some funny purchases -- last time I bought three random biggish rocks, called "rustic slate."

And then sadly D was too wiped out to go to a gig tonight that we'd been kinda planning to, which is a shame but probably would've meant that if we hadn't done errands this afternoon we wouldn't have gotten much further than the bus into town before he was wiped out. Still calibrating as recovery goes on.

And I was pretty tired too, having lifted all the bags around. The rocks were tricky because we couldn't get a shopping cart so I just had to fireman-carry the bag around the store. It wasn't super heavy but it was really awkward, and I was worried about tearing the bag. Plus the rocks were cold, seeping the body heat out of me. The bag was labeled "North Sea cobbles" and I feel like they remembered their chilly home while pressed to my shoulder.

So I made easy dinner (bangers and mash) and we watched the Twins second game. Which they won! But I was so pessimistic the whole time, D made fun of me. The bullpen didn't collapse! Royce Lewis had a great game! It was weird but I hope this happens every day!

It was a nice day. And tomorrow we have D&D -- the DM spun up a character for me last time, but we ended up just watching the movie (sadly without audio description this time!), but I offered to come along this week as a couple of the usuals won't be there because they're sick. I'm a fighter, my favorite thing to be, and the DM described the niche as Utility Himbo so that's basically his name. Bo, for short! So I'm looking forward to that tomorrow.

loganberrybunny

Public

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) film poster

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)
Comedy-drama | Letterboxd 3.8/5 | IMDb 7.6/10 | BBFC U

Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith is the son of a First World War US Marines hero. He himself has been quickly discharged from the Corps owing to hayfever – but he invents a story of overseas combat to avoid upsetting his proud mother. A chance meeting with six real Marines sets off an ever-escalating sequence of events, which with a mayoral election coming up have real political consequences.

It's a very watchable film, with Eddie Bracken great in the lead, and it pokes gentle fun (as much as wartime censorship allowed) at uncritical hero-worship. It's still a little bit all-American for this British viewer, though it thankfully avoids the quasi-religious overtones surrounding the US Marines that can make such movies uncomfortable on this side of the Atlantic. I don't like it as much as Blighty's own The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in terms of satirising aspects of wartime even while said war was happening, but Preston Sturges's film is energetically paced, generally well acted and entertainingly scripted. ★★★½

Current Mood: sleepy

mx_morden

Ten minutes to midnight. I'm listening to the new The Academy Is... album and sending messages to my friends as we try to plan a trip to Madrid to hang out with R in a couple of months, and, one by one, they're all falling asleep. It's almost April, but a cold wind has been blowing from the Arctic for the past few days, and it's been raining a lot. Going out tonight felt like stepping back into December. I'm feeling a little nostalgic. I need to wake up early tomorrow, but I don't really wanna go to sleep just yet.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Freak Out - The Academy Is...

arimamary

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hudebnik

We were planning to go to the "No Kings" march in midtown Manhattan today, but

shalmestere has been dealing with persistent leg pain (behind the left knee) for several days, it was still in evidence this morning, and she decided that standing and walking slowly for several hours on asphalt might not be a good idea. So I went stag to a smaller march in walking distance of home. However, the smaller one started several hours earlier, and the "march" portion of it was over by the time I arrived; it had become a "rally" in front of the county courthouse, with a variety of elected officials, clergy, and musical groups.

There were two "No Kings" specific songs at the rally. One, No Kings in the USA, was new to me; the recording includes a bunch of apparently-famous musicians I've never heard of. The other I had first heard a day or two earlier when one of its writers, John Forster (whom we know through the local chapter of the American Recorder Society), e-mailed us a video. The other co-writer was Tom Chapin, and the video has cameos by a couple of other Chapins, Noel Stookey, Jon McCutcheon, Christine Lavin, Judy Collins, and a bunch of other musicians whose names I didn't recognize. The song is days or weeks old, and in a fitting example of the folk process, people at today's rally were already changing the words: the chorus became "No kings! No kings! in Queens".

nnozomi posting in

guardian_learning

部首
水 part 11
波, wave; 泥, mud; 注, to concentrate ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=85

词汇
而, and; 而是, but; 反而, instead; 然而, however ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
大家注意安全, everyone be careful
来苏肯定拥有地星人的基因，而他自己不知道他的异能呢, Lai Su must have had Dixing genes, and he didn't know about his own power.

Me:
趁夜色已微凉让爱意掀起波浪🎵
你不要放弃得太早，反而再努力一下吧。

cornerofmadness posting in

comment_bingo

You can find my card here.

( All the fandoms I read )

eta - I need tags for the amazing digital circus, & the raven cycle. Thanks

Current Mood: accomplished

schneefink

A little over a month ago I finally started my Hades II 1.0 playthrough, and I've been having a lot of fun. I just reached another milestone today so I thought now is a good time to post some notes.

( My first 62 runs )

torachan

The Boysenberry Festival will be ending while we're in Japan, so this was our last chance to check it out and I'm very glad we made the time for it because, as usual, they had some really delicious stuff on the menu.

( Read more... )

snickfic

In which I review two movies with main characters named Grace.

Ready or Not 2 (2026). Immediately after the events of the first movie, Grace is kidnapped, handcuffed to her estranged sister, and put into a new hide and seek game against the heads of all her in-laws' fellow rich devil worshippers.

This was a great time. It's not as tightly written as the first, and I have some quibbles, but Samara Weaving is once again and absolute delight, and the cast of rich assholes was a lot of fun, even if they couldn't bounce off each other quite as well as in the first movie because they're not all related to her. I adored Sarah Michelle Geller as Ursula, one of a pair of twins who take the field together, and one of my biggest regrets is that we didn't get more of her and Grace interacting directly. Even with the little we have, I ship it really hard.

I also enjoyed how the movie managed to take multiple key themes and plot points from the first movie and put new spins on them, and I enjoyed the expansion of the lore.

I wasn't totally sold on the sister relationship. I didn't have a problem with the estrangement part or how that got used to retcon in a family member for Grace, but I wanted their history to be a lot messier. "I didn't take you with me when I moved out at age 18 because I didn't think I could take care of you" vs "You abandoned me" just isn't that interesting a conflict to me, you know? Nor does it offer much room for interesting resolution. I've seen people say they found the movie very shippy for sistercest, but I'm not really into it, unfortunately, because they just weren't fucked up enough for me.

Also, this movie was straight to a distracting degree. ( spoilers )

So: overall not quite as charming as the first, but still very fun.

--

Project Hail Mary (2026). Ryan Gosling stars as xeniobiologist turned middle school science teacher Ryland Grace, who gets recruited for an interstellar mission to try to save the sun from getting eaten by space microbes.

Gosling is the only human being on screen for about 80% of the movie, and he carries the movie so effortlessly that I was genuinely surprised to realize that this movie is by far his most financially successful leading role. He's been getting lead roles for 20+ years, so it feels like oh yeah, of course he's an A-lister, but actually I think this is the movie that is going to cement that for him. And good for him!

The other main character is the rock alien, who is primarily a puppet augmented with animatronics and CG. I wish I'd realized going in that he was mostly practical, because I'd have paid more attention. The sets are also fully practical, and I read somewhere that there is zero green screen work; when Grace is doing his spacewalks and so in, Gosling was being filmed against matt paintings that were touched up later. And you can feel it! This is a megabudget SFF movie that was nonetheless made with love.

There are some other characters in the flashbacks, but the only one I cared about was the administrator of the mission played by Sandra Huller, whom I absolutely loved. She brings such gravitas that it felt like she was in some other movie entirely. I looked her up, and it turns out she starred in that movie Anatomy of a Fall from a few years ago, which I definitely need to see now.

The story itself is really linear, even taking into account the flashbacks in the early part of the movie. There aren't really any surprises here; you'll get the movie you saw in the trailer. I enjoyed all the montages of Grace Doing Science, which I gather is the novel author Andy Weir's big strength. The ending stutters a bit, in the sense that there were about three in a row and it wasn't clear which one was the actual end, and I have some worldbuilding/plot questions about how things shook out, which I assume Weir answered them at length in the novel.

It didn't blow my mind like it seems to have blown a lot people's, but I had a good time. If you're in the mood for a space adventure, especially one with a lot of practical filmmaking, you should check it out.

shipperslist

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Hemlock B Bootsalotta

I didn't get this far in life by pacing myself

Starbucks Japan has a secret coffee press service that not many people know about

Week in Photos

[#294] ALWAYS AND EVER (TORCHWOOD)

more later, maybe

First Quarter Reading Wrap-Up

"Yes"

Nice links roundup + Darwyn Cooke + More cat news

Short PSA

March Meta Matters Challenge, Check-in No. 8

Utility henchqueer

Film post: Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

(no subject)

#008

Another protest march

第五年第七十七天

Bingo Blackout

Hades II 1.0

2026 Knott's Trip #2 (3/28/26)

movies: Ready or Not 2 and Project Hail Mary

whyy-yy?

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