In years past, you'd always see them outside convenience stores and in parking lots, coping a squat next to their Subarus and Hondas, smoking cigarettes. They were tough looking. They were thugs. And they'd sit like they're squeezing out turds.

In Japan, there's a style of squatting called "yanki zuwari" (ヤンキー座り) or "Yankee sitting". Here, the Japanese word "yanki" (ヤンキー) does not refer to Americans or "Yankees". Rather, it refers to the slang for a type of juvenile delinquent that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s.

That style of sitting enabled them to cop a squat anywhere and rest their elbows on their knees while puffing on cigarettes. Yanki talked and acted lower class, and this trademark manner of sitting wasn't exactly polite. This squatter's ass barely hovered above the ground, and their crotch was wide open—a far more blunt version of the standard squat. Yanki zuwari made people look like they were going number two, hence the other name for that style of sitting: "unko zuwari" (うんこ座り) or literally "poop sitting", because it mimics the squatting style used with traditional Japanese toilets.

Yanki zuwari often appears in manga, TV, and video games. Whenever juvenile delinquents are shown in Japanese pop culture, they are often squatting like they're taking a dump. For example, during the last Kamen Rider series, Kamen Rider Fourze, the hero was a delinquent student, and the show featured inevitable yanki zuwari. It's trope. It's trite.

Not only that, but the style of sitting is parodied. Recently, at a toy fair in Tokyo, a figure of Ultraman kaiju Zetton doing yanki zuwari was on display. Photos, like this one from Japanese website Moeyo.com (NSFW), soon went viral, appearing on Japan's largest bulletin board 2ch, with people commenting how funny it was to see this monster squat like a delinquent. Likewise, the 3D art image (link NSFW) at the top of this article is rife with yanki zuwari parody.

While yanki zuwari lives on, yanki saw their heyday in the 1980s and 1990s. Today their numbers have decreased, but they still exist: Earlier this year, an online dating service aimed at yanki launched in Japan.

Still, as the numbers of yanki have declined, so has the number of people squatting yanki style. You can still see it in Japan—this style of squatting is not that uncommon—and certain "rougher" neighborhoods will always have folks squatting in random places, whether that's in front of Family Mart or on a train platform. As Zokugo Dictionary points out, perhaps fewer and fewer people are doing yanki zuwari these days because maybe more and more young people don't see it as "tough". They see it as totally uncool.

But is it possible to look thuggish while taking a dump? For decades, Japanese delinquents did.

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PS Vita's 2.0 System Update hit, adding PC style email, PlayStation Plus, WiFi transfers with a PC, better browser functions, weather for Maps, and easier usability, among other features.

Above is a Japanese promotional clip for the update, which should be hitting all Vitas.

PS Vitaシステムソフトウェア2.00アップデート [YouTube]

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That up there isn't some joke image someone tossed up on Tumblr. It's a real photo, taken from the Library of Congress' video game collection, and it features vintage strategy guides, rebound and preserved for the ages.

The image was taken from a recent in-house interview held on the Library's site, which goes into detail on how old games are actually being stored, including the tricky solution to breaking down bulky old PC boxes so that every last piece of cardboard can be saved.

An example shown is Fallout 2, and how the box, warranty, inserts and marketing all have to be isolated and re-packaged to fit with the library's catalogue standards.

According to David Gibson, a Moving Image Technician, there are now over 3000 games packaged like this, and over 1500 strategy guides. You can check out the full interview, including shots of Day of the Tentacle boxes, below.

Yes, The Library of Congress Has Video Games: An Interview with David Gibson [Library of Congress]

And you don't even need a Windows tablet, phone or laptop to do it.

Designer Evan Roth has made this deck of cards called Solitaire.exe, which recreate the famous Windows 98 deck of cards for use in the real world.

The cards should recreate everything short of the chaotic victory screen, but then, you can always do that just by freaking out and throwing the cards all over the room.

You can buy one at the link below, if there are any left by the time you get there (there were only 500 made).

Evan Roth Solitaire Deck of Cards [Cooper-Hewitt, via Laughing Squid]

William Wu is a concept artist, formerly of Ubisoft, who spent two years of his life drawing fantastic images of colonial America for the just-released Assassin's Creed III.

Prior to his work at Ubisoft, Wu was employed at Intel, where he was involved in the ill-fated Project Offset.

If you like what you see, you can check out more of his art on William's personal site.

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they're big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on them below and select "open in new tab".

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Hitman: Absolution's "Saints", a troupe of stripper nuns, aren't actually in the game for long, but they'll forever live in infamy for their appearance in a rather silly pre-release trailer for the game.

But hey, who were gamers to criticise the clip, when so few of us were actually strippers! For all we know, it could have been a totally accurate representation of a deadly demographic.

To settle this once and for all, Forbes' Carol Pinchefsky follows on from her awesome Prometheus interviews (asking real scientists about the flick's awful science) by sitting down with "Athena" for a light-hearted chat with a former stripper to get her thoughts on the characters.

Forbes: These women are called "the Saints" because they also happen to be Christians.

Athena: That doesn't seem very plausible. I don't understand why strippers would seriously become assassins, especially if they are Christians. I mean…what kind of Christians are they? Are they Republicans?

The joking comes to an end as the interview progresses, however, when the pair look a little more closely at why it was OK for "normal" women to be portrayed sensibly in the game, but why it was then OK to go bananas with the strippers, when as Athena points out most women working in the field are "single mothers and college students".

It's a good read, if only because it's pretty far removed from what you'd normally expect for an interview about a just-released game.

A Stripper Reviews the Saints of 'Hitmen: Absolution' [Forbes]

Grand Theft Auto IV was released on PC, but when Grand Theft Auto V was announced, a personal computer version was nowhere to be seen.

It's still nowhere to be seen, but Rockstar is at least talking about it, Dan Houser telling IGN that "Everything else is up for consideration. That's all I can give you."

"The main thing is we are not... we are a third-party publisher", Houser added, speaking about both a possible PC and Wii U version. "We're not Nintendo, we're not Sony, we're not Microsoft. We love all of them in different ways. But we can do what we want wherever there's the appropriate business opportunity and chance to find a market. If that's on Apple we put something on Apple. Wherever it might be. I think that's the fun in what we do. We see ourselves as a content company that uses technology. We don't make it; we use it to make the most fun stuff."

While a PC version seems likely, don't count out a Wii U edition either; GTA games have graced Nintendo handhelds in the past, and that Wii U gamepad must be interesting to somebody at Rockstar.

GTA V: Burning Questions Answered [IGN]

Yesterday, a user on NeoGAF had a weird experience when he was able to access what looked like a debug menu for Nintendo's new Miiverse service. Completely by accident.

As he poked around and found he couldn't do much of anything, theories arose that he'd simply accessed a dummy or shell menu, which have been confirmed by Nintendo today, who say the only thing he'd accessed was a "mock up".

"It has come to our attention that some people were able to access a mock-up menu on Miiverse following the launch of Wii U in the U.S.," a Nintendo rep told Kotaku earlier today. "Please note that this was only a mock up menu and has now been removed and is not accessible."

We'll have more from Nintendo on the state of the Wii U's launch tomorrow morning.

Microsoft very quietly announced a new Xbox Live Arcade game today called Karaoke. On the surface, it sounds rather harmless; partnering with The Karaoke Channel, it lets users stream around 8000 songs from a central library, and you can use SmartGlass to queue up tracks and save a favourites list.

The weirdness comes in when you learn how you pay for the thing. It's not an up-front purchase. And you don't pay for songs. Instead, there's a small rotating library of free songs. To access the entire library, you pay, by throwing down for blocks of 2, 6 or 24 hours.

In other words, you're renting the game. Or paying by the hour. However you want to put it. It's certainly a novel approach to a console game. Let's see if it actually pans out (I have my doubts, since for some reason it doesn't support Kinect, meaning you need a compatible microphone).

The pre-release hype from outlets like GameStop led most people to believe that the Wii U was a launch-day sellout. And hey, for some retailers, it probably was. But that doesn't mean the new console is sold out.

At time of posting, late on Monday night, there are nationwide retailers in the United States with Wii U consoles in stock and on the shelf—which is not surprising, considering Reggie Fils-Aime told us America would be getting a larger stock. A quick search of Target's website, for example, shows five stores in the NYC/NJ area around our head office have Wii Us on the shelf. Gadget Review points out that a number of Sam's Club stores across the US also have units in stock.

Seems Best Buy will rarely be in danger of being without them over the holidays either, with Game Informer's Jim Reilly being told "While we will have a constant flow of inventory for the Wii U throughout the holidays, we expect there to be great demand."

In terms of online retailers, Walmart still has Wii Us in stock on its national site, albeit at a $60 markup (though they are offering free shipping). Its records also show it has units available in stores.

Whether the console is under-selling or Nintendo was, unlike the Wii, ready for demand, it doesn't matter. All we know from this info is that if you'd resigned yourself to missing out on a Wii U in 2012 because you didn't preorder at GameStop, you have options.