AAS conference report
No longer online?
No longer online?
With the release of the Dune 3 trailer I have started Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert 📚 Hopefukky I will have forgotten enough by December to enjoy the film.
Up until 2am reminiscing with the wife about all the little neighbourhoods we lived together in in Japan: Oike and Demachiyanagi in Kyoto, Chiyoda in Nagoya (in 3 different apartments!), and of course Sakuranomiya in Osaka. There were more, but we made many memories in these.
Day 3 of #AAS2026 about to start on a gorgeous clear day here in Vancouver.




This session at the Pan Pacific Hotel with Saori Katada (who wrote one of my fav books on Japanese foreign policy) and Kei Koga (a powerhouse on Japanese security policy) was excellent. Really looking forward to reading their new book. #AAS2026



After last night’s excellent panel on Northeast Asia piracy from the 14th to 17th C, starting this morning with a discussion on modern Buddhist diplomacy #AAS2026
All checked in! #AAS2026
Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Some old travelogues:
Part 1: chadkohalyk.com/2023/07/1…
Part 2: chadkohalyk.com/2023/07/2…
NDC are back. exilic design [is] the act of knowingly building within the Para-Real… protecting our own memory through deliberate fragility. (Emphasis mine) the exilic are venueless. Their participants know the server won’t be there tomorrow. They treat the right to disappear, distort, and misremember as sacred, or at least, as inevitable. They document on their own terms, with their own tools, and preserve through adaptation. They recalibrate after loss, borrowing from sneakernet traditions for out-of-band transfer and redeployment.
Got my dental bone graft stitches out, so I no longer have those little spiders dancing on my tongue. Now I have to wait 5½ months until the next stage where they will drill the implant into my newly reconstructed upper jaw 🦷
Was itching to read something in paper and after a long discussion with an LLM about moody recommendations and narrowing down my massive To Read list, I ended up picking up The Buried Giant: A novel (Vintage International) by Kazuo Ishiguro 📚
Egads… I ended up binging A Knight of Seven Kingdoms in a single day. Light and brutal 😊
Speaking of layers of history (cf. my long post on London) Hari Kunzru walks the city and skates from one historical layer to another, from reality to fantasy, and back. Fabulous writing.
“You know you don’t have to hit SAVE all the time anymore right, bruh? It’s not the 1920s.”
— my 16yo as I help her with homework
Big news!
Doug from Doug’s Dharma has had enough 👏
Perfectly clear day and a warm 12°C for my walk while listening to Dhamma talks on this uposatha day




February email update is now released! 🛫
Dolls are out for #ひな祭り Doll Day! We brought the entire set over in the 19 boxes we sent from Japan in 2024. We didn’t have space to get them out last year in our tiny condo. This year we still don’t have a rack for the whole set, so just the Empress and the Emperor are out. 🎎
Excellent evening of co-op showcasing, solidarity, and FOOD at www.solidstate.coop tonight! #SurreyBC
Chad opens an event at Newspeak House At the top of Brick Lane on Bethnel Green Road in east London the streets are lined with four-storey buildings tightly packed shoulder-to-shoulder, alternating brick and plaster. At street level there are pizza parlours, cafés, vinyl record stores, and a shop that sells terrariums. One building, measuring four gabled windows across with two wide storefront windows at the ground level, has nothing in the display for sale.