mesmerised by your loser aura

1. The Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game was launched in Japan in 1999 and soon became a big hit in Thailand. At its peak, you could probably find students duelling in the corner in the morning before school started, as well as during lunchtime and breaks (providing they didn't cause so much disruption for the teacher to ban them). Since this part of the story is taking place in 1997, they're taking a bit of artistic license to fit it in there.

2. While Wall's ice-cream was already well established in the 1990s, Thai-style coconut ice-cream was also popularly sold by street vendors, especially in more rural areas. Paithong is one of the largest franchises, and having to run to catch the sellers' bike before it sped past is among everyone's childhood memories.

3. Both khru and ajarn are titles that have been used for schoolteachers, while ajarn is also used for university lecturers. Technically, there's a historical reason as the titles used to be associated with degree qualifications, though in practice, students usually just learned to call teachers khru in primary school and somehow changed to ajarn in secondary or upper secondary school. With educational system reforms in the 2000s, the ajarn title was officially discontinued, so today khru is officially used for all school levels.

4. We actually did have water pump-guns with reservoirs in the 1990s, though they were still a relatively fancy item. The PVC-pipe blasters, however, were a classic for 90s upcountry Songkran celebrations. They were the weapon of choice for charging through sois on the back of pick-up trucks while the dwellers defended their turf. They were so powerful - and dangerous - that they were banned in 2003.

5. Printing of the 10 baht banknote (recognizable by its brown colour) was discontinued in 1996. By the turn of the millennium, local mom-and-pop grocers' were already disappearing in Bangkok, but they held on for a bit longer upcountry.

6. Songkran really used to be a wild free-for-all where no one was spared, despite whatever attempts one might make to show one's intention of not participating. The situation is now much better, with both enforcement of regulations as well as changing social norms. (Nowadays, the worst offenders tend to be uneducated tourists, which has led to much online discourse.)

7. Dinsophong, the white powder/paste commonly associated with Songkran nowadays, is commonly translated as "soft-prepared chalk" or "white clay filler". Technically, the material is "marly limestone".

8. Channel 9's weekend morning anime broadcasts have long been a mainstay of shared childhood memories, especially in the 1990s when there were few other forms of entertainment.

9. The kitchen's set-up is indeed very archetypical of the setting. The rice cooker would have been quite a modern style for the time, though. Butter cookies in red round tins have long occupied a shared collective memory, with how they seem to come around every New Year's, and how the tins seem to end up with some sort of storage use in every household (typically for mom's or grandma's sewing supplies).

10. Taxi was a rock band active between 2001 and 2005 (so it's actually anachronistic for the series - the album cover in the poster is from 2002). Loso was active from 1996 to 2002. The poster is from their Superstar Project album, released in 2000.

11. You either bought school uniforms from specialty shops like this one, or if your school was big enough, it would have had a school supplies day where uniforms, textbooks and other accessories would be sold by contracted suppliers coming in to the school. I think these specialty shops still exist, though they've become much rarer as hypermarket chains ate up much of the back-to-school business.

12. Comic rental shops were another mainstay of entertainment that have all but disappeared nowadays. The official licensed print of Dragon Ball was originally published in 1995-1997 (so August must have re-read them several times already), while One Piece began serializing in Thai in 1998.

13. The Chok Dee paper bag became ubiquitous in the 1980s, being used by small shops for every kind of merchandise. Their use sharply declined with the introduction of plastic bags, though Chok Dee still exists today, now recognized as a classic vintage item.

14. Thai-style ice-cream would be served either on buns or in plastic cups, with an assortment of toppings, and things are still pretty much the same today.

15. The Apaimanee Saga referred to is a Thai comic first published in 2001. Naruto was printed in Thai under the title Ninja Katha. I couldn't find the exact date, but the cover seen here is that of volume 38, which was published in Japan in 2007.