Vancouver Art Gallery 🎨

Started listening to the long Samir Amin essay from 2004 The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World which seems appropriate after finishing the latest Pankaj Mishra book. 📚

In an area of downtown Vancouver that I don’t frequent very often, and has changed significantly since I used to live in the area 25 years ago

Been dreaming and looking at old photos from Hawaiʻi and India. I had some memorable hotel experiences there, and would love to to go back.

Finished The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra 📚 I’ll need time to process this. Pankaj Mishra’s righteous teardown of Western tradition (racism, slavery, colonialism) puts Gaza and the Shoah in a wider context as he tries to wrestle it away from politicians with narrow agendas. …

I am going to this! In fact, there will be a couple of open social Chads there. Come join us! lu.ma/3rjg60rc

website design inspo (sound on) y-n10.com

Started reading: The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra 📚 Had this on pre-order and it just dropped. One of my fav authours so I couldn’t wait to start!

AI Energy Score: ranking models so developers can choose based on energy consumption huggingface.co/spaces/AI…

Currently reading: The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay 📚 #AmReading

It’s bao time at Crystal Mall! 😋

I know it’s just a number, but it’s a pretty BIG number #2k #meditation (I should be better at this 😅 Especially considering I haven’t been using this app the whole time)

New kit! Boox Go 10.3 Got this for reading papers which is a focus for 2025.

Oh this is interesting! They built a system to keep track of citizens assemblies: www.mysociety.org/2024/11/1…

I must post this from @unseenjapan.com since I lived for 4 years in Nagoya and really enjoyed my time there. I’d also recommend the Port of Nagoya Public Aquarium and the Antarctic survey ship Fuji. Lots of shopping and good food too! unseen-japan.com/nagoya-po…

Lovely bright moon behind clouds lit by the setting sun 🌖 ☁️ 🌞

Thanks for the mench Neverpost! 👋 Traffic Camera Selfies: Got a shoutout on one of my fav podcasts: I hit up producer Hans Buetow on Bsky about this ep of Neverpost (section 2) where he tries to figure out how many cameras are in the world. Wild. And not a bad pronunciation of my last name! As you know, I back Neverpost and rate them highly. For other …

(╯‵□′)╯︵┻━┻ New table from Coast Contra!! #HipHop #bars 🔥🔥🔥

Started reading: The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager 📚 #amReading #booksky

Wow! Talk about lifelong learning 💪👴🏻👏

Happy Setsubun 👹 It’s that time of year to eat a big sushi roll 🍣 in the 西南西やや西 direction and watch preschool kids be traumatized! 😊 youtu.be/i-nLtf3Ns…

All the different bilinguals in my home: There is no one way to raise bilingual kids. Every family is different, and the context where they learn language can change. Previously I wrote about bilingualism expectations (and plurilingualism) in the context of raising our kids. If you think about bilingualism in terms of time, there are …

So much #FOSDEM FOMO … just look at all those stickers!!

Home: We got the keys! 🔑 For the first time, we have a home of our own. 🏡 A few months ago we found a place and had our offer accepted. Earlier this week we finalized the documents. But now we have the keys to our very own townhouse. After many years of bouncing back and forth between Japan and Canada, …

What a day… what a week… time for a nice Ethiopian coffee break ☕️

4 o’clock in the morn… up making tea, hot compresses, and decongesting the kid who can’t sleep. 💤

Happy Lunar New Year! 🌕 🧧 🐍

stuck deep in the walled gardens of our various web apps, none of which talk to each other. We have to log into things twenty times a day. Everything is a subscription, or selling our data for ads. Nothing “just works”. @ruperts.world from Unternet has an idea of where we go from here.

Organizing Community Thriving: It has been six months since we moved to Surrey from Osaka. In that time we have explored our neighbourhood, the kids have gotten used to school, and I have re-connected with friends and family, and made a ton of new connections. We lived in Kelowna for 8 years, which is plenty of time to build up …

Very much enjoyed my time at UBC today. Just caught the sunset on the drive home. The edge of Canada!

Lovely sunny day at the University of British Columbia where I am touring the new Emerging Media Lab. I graduated from UBC in 2001 and things are quite different. I love the energy on campus! This is part of that ✨✌️#VancouverEnergy ✌️⚡️

This new stage of “post”-capitalism does not look emancipatory, but more like techno-capitalist authoritarianism. 🗣 “For the tech elite, politics offers what overtapped markets can no longer guarantee: new returns.” 🗣 “Rather than prognosticate, now is the time to …

Current status: up past midnight helping daughter study for math final

Oh this looks like some interesting reading from @zelf@sunbeam.city (h/t @aynish@merveilles.town) #OpenSource #P2P #LocalFirstSoftware sunbeam.city/@zelf/113…

Not really a milestone, but a good round number 🧘 #meditation

Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking. — Eduardo Galeano …

My lovely wife 💞 flew to Kelowna today for a Kelowna Japanese Language Society event. She sent some pics of the Rockies mountains 🏔️ and Okanagan Lake 🛶 for you all

Okay. Back home. Tucked in. It’s 2:30am. Time to go to sleep finally. 💤

After a weekend of hacking on LoFi software where we talked about EMRs and hospital applications, I now find myself in the ER with a sick child, experiencing our existing system. Everything’s under control, so I sit here and observe.

Welp, it’s been 5 days nursing a feverish teenager. Now it is time to go to the clinic and find out what is actually wrong. After waiting around all day (9am to 5pm) we now know. Pneumonia.

The People vs Anglocentrism: What’s it like to be a non-English speaker in an online world dominated by US tech bros? 🌍 h/t to Dame.Outlaw Reminds me of 2018 with Cambodian keyboard problems.

Look what arrived! You can download a copy here. A lotta friends in this mag 🥰 Looking forward to reading. #opensource #governance

Oh this would have been a very fun thing to attend! I recorded a number of Mongol spots when I lived on Iki. iki-guide.com/archives/…

15yo: What’s the difference between waffles and pancakes? 🥞 🧇 12yo: Waffles are just pancakes with abs. 🥁

Started reading: Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers 📚 Already 15% in 🚀

I can’t stop watching her covers! 🎵🔥

Ominous 😳

Osechi day 2 🍶🍱🎍🐍

Over the past couple of months I have had some conversations with a few people about what conferences are worth going to in 2025. I started putting together a list hackmd.io/@chadkoh/…

Good morning! It’s drinking time 🍶

明けましておめでとう🎍 Happy New Year! Just got back from 初詣 We rang the bell and got おみくじ。2025 is the year of action 🐍 and doing good for everyone. Let’s do it together! 💪

On this New Year’s Eve we are watching the 紅白 highlights on YouTube and making snide comments, as is the ancient Japanese tradition 🙃 アケオメ everyone!! 🎊 youtube.com/playlist

Best of 2024: Favourite photo of the year: The Nintendo World train in Osaka through cherry blossoms. Taken during April’s Micro.Blog photo challenge What a year. 😫 Closed down a company. Pulled all roots out of Japan and moved to a new city in Canada. Began settling down. Kids in a new school. Started a …

Pre-ordered a number of books for next year, so my reading is pretty much decided for the first few months. I use Bookshop.org and Libro.fm and have both set to attribute sales to Mosaic Books, my old independent bookstore in Kelowna. Don’t live there anymore but still give what support I can 📚❤️

Last meditation 🧘 of the year. I missed 3 days this year, but got a good long streak in the end. insig.ht/VtryaWguM…

📚 Loaded up on some 2025 books from here heatmap.news/culture/2… ℅ @heatmap.news @HeatmapNews@flipboard.com #books #climate #climatecrisis

Today was mochi 🍡 pounding for the New Year 🎍at Nikkei Center, then popped over to Aberdeen Centre for a shop and a snack🧋 and then to Tsujiri for a matcha parfait 🍵 Pretty full day! 😋

Taiwan Trip Report pt 4: Inconclusion: Now that we are at the end of the year, and I have this arbitrary deadline looming, I thought I’d better finish off my series on travelling to Taiwan. Taiwan was extremely stimulating, and I have been promising to write my conclusions after doing a series of posts. At the same time I held off for …

Just had one of those epic brainstorming sessions in the bathtub! 🛁 Filled my dive slate with basically a manifesto. 📜 Going into 2025 with a plan! 💪

Back from a delicious meal at Afghan Kitchen. We’ve been spoiled this Xmas. On the Eve we had homemade bison stew 🦬 🍲 and crab+prawn 🦀 🍤 Mac & Cheese. On the Day we had some top notch Chinese 🥡 This is why we came to Vancouver.

Afternoon at the Urban Safari

Notes from Germany: I didn’t notice it in Frankfurt, but maybe that was because it was such a sunny day and after the 10 hour flight from Vancouver I was a bit jetlagged. Happy people enjoying the warm rays, walk the river under the watchful eyes of the statue of Karl de Grosse (aka Charlemagne), King of the Franks in …

Started reading: The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie 📚

My Coffee Advent Calendar Experience: For the past couple of years, some of my Fission comrades would get an Advent Calendar from Revolver Coffee in downtown Vancouver. Revolver is a pretty famous specialty coffee shop around these parts. Each year they gather together some interesting beans, package them up in little baggies, and ship …

Watched Sicario for Xmas day today. Not sure why but a re-watch had been building for a while. I guess I was visited by a lonely ghost of Medellín 🎥

Had a very busy year, so just binged the latest #DoctorWho in prep for Xmas special. Finally completely fell in love with Ncuti Gatwa in Rogue 💗 Happy to interleave with Flashcasts from my friends at the @incomparable@zeppelin.flights 🎙

Xmas lights along the shore at White Rock, BC 📸 www.flickr.com/gp/sandba…

Last day of school before the winter break! 🎉

Amazing review from @brainvsbook.bsky.social This series is like if Silent Spring and Das Kapital had a baby and raised it in a pulp SF novel from the sixties, but then sent it to shojo manga finishing school. Want! brainvsbook.wordpress.com/2024/12/1…

Listen to @uncannyjapan.bsky.social talk about how to make salt and the Salt God in Japan. Take a look at this shiogama 塩釜 at Jūrin-ji temple, built southwest of Kyoto in 850 and home to the famous poet Ariwarano Narihira. See the full album here: flic.kr/s/aHsmMUh…

Shannon Falls, just south of Squamish on the way to Whistler. 3rd highest waterfall in BC

I just got burned 🔥 🔥 🔥 by my 12 year old: “You ain’t got no rizz! The only thing you pull is push doors!” 🚑 🚑🚑

Just found out one of my favourite authors Pankaj Mishra has a new book coming out in Feb: The World After Gaza. Instant pre-order. 💸 His essay on Gaza in the LRB from earlier this year is magisterial. 🎓

Up to Day 8 on my #RevolverCoffee Advent Calendar. Been some fun ones in here so far. ☕

Reminded of Ibn Khaldun’s writing on solidarity and mutualism. That was in the 14th C. Asabiyyah is an important word to add to our political lexicon in this century too. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asab…

I read Limitarianism earlier this year, which I recommend. This visualization adds to her argument: eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-w… H/t to @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social

Finished The Talented Mr. Ripley 📚 The interiority is remarkable. I wonder how people in 1955 took this book!? It must have blown minds and caused a controversy of some sort: witch hunt/book-banning/congressional hearings? The travel was super real too, she must’ve lived in Italy. 🤔

Was just doing the math: in a few weeks is the anniversary when I left home and secretly went to Japan as an 18 year old. (There is a whole story there!) Anyways, I am now a year older than my father at that time. Wow! THIS is how young he was! 🤯

From Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social both the neoliberal consensus and the Palo Alto consensus have collapsed, leading the political economies of Washington DC and Silicon Valley to move in very different directions. See the discussion on BSky.

Day 2 of #RevolverCoffeeAdvent and I really like this one! No spoilers, but it is from one of my favourite regions. ☕️

Smooth flight over the Rocky Mountains 🏔️

Current status: Airport, about to fly back to Vancouver. ✈️ A little bit of snow in Kelowna. Just here catching up with fam and friends before the hols. ⛄️

November Newsletter is out, on the theme of making connections #newsletter buttondown.com/chadkoh/a…

OMG this is epic… from the @uncannyjapan.com Discord

Completed my challenge of 35 books! 📚 www.goodreads.com/user_chal…

Picked up my advent calendar from revolvercoffee.ca in Gastown today ☕ Comes with a little booklet for tasting notes! 📝

“He has no fear of cowardice” Some 🔥 lines in this section of The Saint of Bright Doors by @vajra.me 📚

🚨 THIS WEEK 📢 for the Metagov seminar we are hosting Kaliya Young and Day Waterbury to discuss their new paper “Exploring the Remarkable Regenerative Patterns and Practices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).” #Metagov #SummerOfProtocols researchseminars.org/talk/Meta…

Shining a light on the Dark Forest theory of the internet: In Against the Dark Forest internet writer and thinker Erin Kissane (who has just been killing it recently) re-assesses then challenges the notions of the Dark Forest (and by association the Cozy Web). People in my corner of the internet will already be familiar with the writing of Yancy Strickler, …

In the second bookstore of the afternoon with my kids. They just love going to the bookstore, running around to see what’s available, talking excitedly about which they read and which they want to buy… and then leaving to go to the next one! I think we did well with these girls 🥹📚

4-nil!!! #COYS

My DWeb Seattle Social Trip Report: Here are some photos and a bit of an overview of our recent, cross-border #DWeb event whtwnd.com/chadkoh.c…

Started listening to The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera 📚

Good morning all! 🙏 🙇‍♂️

Just watched Wim Wenders 1977 film The American Friend. Beautifully shot and I admire the young Bruno Ganz’s moustache… but this film is MESSED UP 😳 I need to watch it again and make note of all the connections between the scenes.

Neverpost, a show about the internet: Why do young content creators scream into their mics and blowout all the sound? When you need to reply to an important email, do you do it on your phone or wait until you get to a computer? What is the internet “megadungeon”? What about Poster’s Disease? Why does nobody use hashtags anymore, and who …

This story is lovely. And from it I found out about silentbook.club so tempted to start a chapter! 📚

Saturday night, so eating homemade tanghulu and watching BlueLock with my daughter

Renunciation and technology: “But why wouldn’t you use it? It’s so convenient!” I was surprised that he was surprised. I was talking to a very intelligent technologist, someone who thought deeply about his craft. It got me thinking about the respect shown to renunciation in this culture, compared to other places I have been. …

Rainy Friday night dinner date with my wife in Gastown (I forgot to take photos of the food! Sorry!)

Cindy Mochizuki, director of BETWEEN PICTURES: THE LENS OF TAMIO WAKAYAMA takes questions at the Vancouver Asian Film Fest. Tamio travelled to the US south in 1963 to join and photograph SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement. Later, back in Canada, he photographed the Powell Street Festival. #vaff

Went to Amazon.ca to check on something and this was on my For You page 😬😬😬

😞

After months of waiting, my wife’s new Permanent Resident Card arrived! 🎉 Now we can leave the country 😜

Just found out about the passing of Kei Kamanishi, the last surviving member of the legendary Asahi baseball team made up of Japanese-Canadians disbanded during the WW2 internment. He was 102 years old. I never met him in person, just on a virtual call. 南無阿弥陀🙏📿

I can hear the fireworks 🎆 Happy Diwali everyone! 🪔

Our IETF Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (DIN RG) will be in Los Angeles in Dec 9th at ACM featuring speakers like Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr and @martin.kleppmann.com Check out the schedule #dweb conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2…

CITED is back and taking on "economics": The CITED podcast is back! It has been a few years. I’ve previously enjoyed their work on the reproducibility crisis in scientific publishing and many of their critical episodes on their original run in the 2015-2018 era. Gordon Katic and the CITED team have an engaging narrative technique for …

This Gulabjamun cheesecake is 😋

Just been sitting ant home tonight watching the #bcelxn results come in. Still too close to call! 😬 #cdnpoli

Gawd I really need to get out and do a photo walk soon… I really like our new neighbourhood, but I sure miss living in downtown Kyoto/Osaka

Setting the table for a special dinner tonight #IYKYK

Lovely walk and talk in the forest with a friend this afternoon. We talked travel, politics, games, and the joys of back-end infrastructure… all while surrounded by GREEN #mosstodon #lichensubscribe

I… AM… CANADIAN! 🇨🇦 🦫 🍁 pudding.cool/2024/10/c…

I blazed through the book, and have a lot more thinking to do, but am glad I could spend some more time processing by listening to this excellent conversation:

It me

Coffee time ☕️

Last night I started The Armageddon Protocol by @danmoren.com 📚 This is the final book of his Galactic Cold War series. Congrats to Dan who I have listened to for years on The Incomparable. 👏👏👏

Only a few more letters needed for the Internet Society’s campaign against Bill S-210 which jeopardizes user privacy and encryption. If you are in Canada it only takes a minute to add your voice: actionnetwork.org/letters/e…

Started The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The first chapter is a breath-taking departure essay for the book on the purpose of writing — in one word: clarity. I can see how this projected started as his “On Writing” or “Why I Write”. 📚

Ghetts is a master craftsman. I have been listening to him non-stop for the last month. I remember him from back in the day, but only recently came back to his newer work which is amazingly intricate. Levels! Who else on the UK Drill scene has this level of wordplay that I should be checking out?

I did the thing! #cdnpoli #bcelxn

Woke up from a dream that I was still at the conference, meeting with all the people that I didn’t get a chance to talk to. 🥰

Look who’s back 🇨🇦

🚈🚄✈️✈️🚝🚝🚌 BER → FRA → YVR Goodbye Germany! It was fun!

Check out the list of participants in the #OpenSourcePledge #opensource opensourcepledge.com/members/

“Hoi, chummer! Slot your hoop and get ready to dance with the chrome. This sprawl’s got more heat than a dragon’s drekhole, so keep your wits jacked and your nuyen close. Welcome to the Big Smoke - time to run silent, run deep.” 👨‍🎤

Some shots of the Festival of Light in #Berlin tonight down at Alexanderplatz

Causal Islands Berlin: “What if people could just… do things?” This was one of the themes of Causal Islands Berlin, the fourth iteration of the “Future of Computing” conference, and the first one to take place in Europe. I flew out from Vancouver last week to reconnect with some old friends and meet new potential …

DJ party at the cafe in Berlin

What’s gud, peasants? CURRENT STATUS: Baroque

Feeling terribly jet lagged? Some Classic Quebec Poutine will help right? Right?

I missed sending out my personal newsletter last month so this is a double, but I kept it short. buttondown.com/chadkoh/a…

Had a nice time walking around Mannheim taking selfies in front of old/impressive things Mannheim Gallery on Flickr

Now that I’ve been in Germany for more than 24 hours, some impressions: 🚗 fast driving 🎨 graffiti ✝️ churches ⛪️ more churches ◼️squat square buildings 🗼lotta round towers…? 🍞 bread 🥖

Took the train from Frankfurt to Mannheim. Really enjoyed seeing some of the countryside. Inter-city train travel is so civilized… reminds me of Japan

Wandering around some European plazas recently myself, I am so glad for this! Amazing that they turned these lovely spaces into car parks! www.politico.eu/article/e…

Started listening to Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie on the plane to Germany. Loved his First Law series and looking forward to getting back into the universe! 📚

Made it to Frankfurt 🇩🇪

(Squeezed out that long blog post just as the call for boarding happened! Enjoy the Taiwan photos. I will be posting lots of Germany photos next)

Taiwan Trip Report pt 3: Taipei: This post is part of a series. See the introduction here → Despite being the beginning of May Taipei was very warm. The sun was out as we walked the wide sidewalks around Taipei Station downtown, cars and scooters zooming by. Even when it was cloudy, crossing the Keelung River through the tech area …

🚌🚃🚋🛫 Heading to YVR and then to Frankfurt! See you all in Germany 🇩🇪 Causal Islands next week!!🎉🎊🪩

Nice lively discussion about different communities of women and power throughout Japanese history booksonasia.net/podcast/b…

Wow 😳 Canada’s first ever tsunami tower is being built in BC canada.constructconnect.com/joc/news/…

Hanging out with the monthly tech coffee crew this morning at Trees Cafe. Made a bunch more connections!

Went to Katsuya for… Korean Pizza 🍕

Got #DnD 🎲🐉⚔️🧛🏻‍♂️ tonight so did my #craigsgymclass early. 2 min planks are killing me bruv! 😩 How am I gonna get to 5🖐️⁉️

Okay, more Germany trip recommendation requests: what’s good in Mannheim? Also, thinking aboutut popping over to Strasbourg for a day. Any reccos for there?

Some very interesting speakers lined up for #CIGF2024 on November 27th: canadianigf.ca/event-det… #InternetGovernance​ #Canada #IGF

Dusky downtown #Vancouver. Clear blue sky with a little chill signifying Fall. 🍂

A nice #Bluesky from downtown #Vancouver. Congrats on 10 million users! 🥳 Gorgeous day here. Fall is just around the corner!

Tonight I did days 13+14+15 of #craigsgymclass. Now I am all caught up: 0+1m40s+1m50s plank 🪵 55+55+60 squats 🏋️‍♀️ 4x7+5x5+3x4 pushups 🙇 Finished it off with a run too! 🏃‍♂️

Amazing 👏 👏 👏 (via @molly.wiki) modem.io/blog/blog…

Planning my trip to Germany at the end of the month. Who do I know that is there? Any recommendations for things I should see? I will be in Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, and then Berlin for #CausalIslands berlin.causalislands.com

I am riding out the side effects of this Covid booster 💉 💉💉 💉 💉 💉 by watching tons of UK drill videos 🩸🔪🥷🤫🎵

Started reading The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor 📚

Comparing ambiguous apples and polysemous pigs: From pages 24-25 of Babel by R.F. Kuang, where the Latin teacher scolds the student Robin for not remembering his macrons: ‘Even the length of a single vowel matters, Robin Swift. Consider the Bible. The original Hebrew text never specifies what sort of forbidden fruit the serpent persuades …

Started reading Babel by RF Kuang 📚

I did my undergrad in Linguistics, but only speak 2 languages. People always ask: “What is the easiest/hardest language to learn?” The answer can be captured in a concept from Xerox PARC: Tesler’s Law. All languages are complex in their own way, it’s just about where they hide their complexity.

Two new physical 🙀 book purchases today! 📚

Lovely Saturday. 😎 We went to a neighborhood festival, I almost got on the nightly news (as an interviewee not for doing anything shocking! 🙈), then Japanese school with the kids, took a spin around Metrotown, and finally classic Crystal Mall dinner 🥟 🍜 🧋 🥡🥢

Excellent font. Great site. Stay to the end for the little game. departuremono.com

“instead of a personal computer, this is a communal computer” Lovely to see Dynamicland in action

Finished Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie 📚 This is the final book in the First Law trilogy, which I can’t stop recommending to people. The way it all wraps up, coiled tightly like a spring in a watch, powering the most intricate hands round-and-round as it tells the story. Brilliant!

Day 2 of #craigsgymclass September challenge is done 💪 20s plank 🪵 25 squats 🏋️‍♀️ 2x6 pushups 🙇 I also went for a short jog and a walk.

#craigsgymclass begins! plank 🪵 squats 🏋️‍♀️ pushups 🙇: Now that I am back from summer holidays and things are settling here in my new home in Canada it is time to start taking care of my health for the first time in years. I have been walking lots, building back up to jogging, but I decided to kick off September with something I did a couple years ago: …

C - Deception Island, Antarctica H - São Miguel do Araguaia, Brazil A - Lake Guakhmaz, Azerbaijan D - Akimiski Island, Canada K - Golmund, China O - Crater Lake, Oregon H - Southwestern Kyrgyzstan Check out the NASA site that spells out your name in Landsat images 🛰🗺 via @davidho@mastodon.world

10 days catching up with family & friends in the Okanagan. Luckily no fires! Weather was amazing! Saw a ton of people we haven’t seen since we left for Kyoto. But there are still more! We’ll be back soon. Just now got back to the coast, getting ready for school next week. Have a good weekend! 🥂

First day of the Armstrong Fair, the local annual carnival + agricultural sales event + cowboy cosplay convention

Enjoying some nice Okanagan wine wine 🥂 while watching the sunset over Okanagan Lake 🌅

Me tryna figure out how to type, mouse, and scroll on my friend’s Svalboard ergonomic keyboard. It is mind-blowing! 🤯 (I can’t even type my own damn name 😅 but it’s amazing how little movement you need to control this once you got used to it) See more: svalboard.com

Doing a little holiday reading and writing here in the bright and dry Okanagan

Catching a water taxi over to Granville Island to meet a mate from the Osaka tech community visiting Vancouver! 🛥️

Sitting on the patio of a roastery called Kafka, looking over Rainbow Park with prominent indigenous flags, listening to an episode of Everyday Anarchism, next to a guy reading Marx in Spanish. #onbrand pca.st/episode/9…

Wearing my shark shirt to the Vancouver Aquarium today. During the show a diver swims with the black-tipped reef sharks 🦈

I have a /uses page. Thinking of adding a “will not use” page 🤔: a list of software/services (eg. Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Substack etc etc etc) that I avoid, maybe with an explanatory link or two. I think RSL has a list like this. What do you think? Too long? 😅

“[Users can] access a map showing the city’s 900-plus camera network, pick the nearest camera to them, pose for the image, and capture a memory. A little button on the app captures the snap for you, and you can keep it in your phone like a photo booth strip, or as a polaroid-style photo.” My city …

A bit early, but here is Sunset Beach looking into English bay, downtown Vancouver 🌅

My first Espresso Soda ☕️ 🥤 Different, but good! 😋

Via @manton Nice icon set on We Distribute with icons for many platforms and fediverse apps. I hope @buttondown and other services adopt these soon!

Gorgeous day but only 24°C so I had to get a warm drink. (🙇‍♂️ Sorry FamiChiki crew back in Japan 🥵)

When you get up in the middle of the night, never check your email. Why won’t I learn!? 🥱 🥱 🥱 (Today’s gonna be a long one)

Liquid Layers and TLDraw… what a demo! 🤩 grantkot.com/draw/

After a couple months off, I am back to the First Law series with Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie. Exciting! 📚

Lovely day for a festival in #Vancouver

We representing Iki at the Powell Street Festival, the biggest Japanese Canadian festival in the country. #Japan #Canada #ikijima

Hundred Rabbits is on the Orange site and I am happy for them to get more recognition! 💯🐇 news.ycombinator.com/item

🇨🇦 (It’s July 31st!?)

This was a tough listen… Sometimes with @neverpo.st shows I’m tempted to skip an ep since it is not a topic I am particularly interested in, but when I do start listening they just draw me in. That team is really good at engaging audio storytelling www.neverpo.st/to-brb-or…

Day off today so I started reading the kind fantasy novel Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree 📚 It’s about books! I love books! ❤️

Thank you to all the community organizers who participated in #LOCALHOSTVan. 🥳 We wrapped up with Van Hack Day where I saw some great demos. I am now at home about to fall on my face after 9 straight days of events… tomorrow is off. Later this week I will be doing follow up. Thanks again!

And with that, #IETF120 is over! So many new insights and friends. I have a lot to digest and follow up on. Tomorrow: OurNetworks.ca

What a day talking about interoperable instant messaging protocols, deep space networking, and a bunch of other amazing things! #IETF120 has been super stimulating. So many interesting people here. Looking forward to tomorrow morning’s Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (dinrg)

Good morning #IETF120! Today is the first day of the official meeting week. My first session is with GAIA, the Global Access to the Internet for All working group, chaired by Jane Coffin who I had the pleasure of meeting at the IGF last year.

Downtown Vancouver is hoppin’! We got #IETF120 hackathon, the fireworks, and a Caps match at BC Place ⚽️

At the #IETF120 #hackathon

Utterly wiped… Walked around the neighborhood to check the distances to the schools. Sat in the park for a bit. Coffee in a local cafe. I think after all the stress of the last two weeks, my body has finally released all that tension. We are here, it is over, we are settled. 💤

When I was just a wee lad of 12, my uncle took me here to White Rock to see the ocean for my very first time. 🌊 It has been nearly 35 years and I have returned. Fish & chips 🐟🍟 got more expensive, but the sunset’s still free 🌅

[Me about to propose a new office/livingroom/dining room layout for the new condo] 💁‍♂️: Dear Wife, come into my Mind Palace 👸🏻: [walks away] 💁‍♂️: Where are you going!? 👸🏻: To the bathroom… aka your Mind Palace 🔥 💁‍♂️: 💀💀💀 #truelove

Okay, so we were able to successfully sleep on beds last night, the first night in our new condo. I was totally wiped after dealing with hauling, installing, then returning a bum aircon. But got the new one in this morning so we won’t die of heat as we continue unpacking. Next up: Office.

I have traded sunsets of buildings with sunsets of forests and mountains

Taking a short selfie break while hauling all our stuff over the second mountain pass of the day.

Executing a highly coordinated multi-city international move during a heat dome while heavily jet lagged… do not recommend 🙅‍♂️

Nothing says “Back in Canada” like a late night root beer and poutine

Back 🇨🇦

Current status: 🇯🇵 Osaka ✈️ 🇹🇼 Taipei ✅ Gonna hang here in Taiwan for a bit, then: 🇹🇼 Taipei ✈️ 🇨🇦 Vancouver

Current status: 🇯🇵 Osaka ✈️ 🇹🇼 Taipei ✈️ 🇨🇦 Vancouver

Loaded up

For our last night in #Japan we went down to Nanba. Ate dinner at Kani Dōraku HQ and watched the crowds on Ebisu bridge taking photos of Glico Man. Then down Dotombori to a shrine where you pour water on completely mossed up Buddhist statues #Osaka #mosstodon #lichensubscribe

SÖT Roastery has been on my “to go” coffee list for a while ☕️

After a long hard move, time for some rest and relaxation at the onsen ♨️

Last night in Sakuranomiya. The shippers took our luggage to the airport. Tomorrow the junkers come to take away the rest of our stuff. We go to the hotel tomorrow. This was a great neighbourhood, and this apartment gave us a ton of epic sunsets. 😍 #Osaka #sunset

Okay here is a full album of pics from all over southern Osaka. Includes occultists, wishing shrines, pagodas, ripped devas, and cute 3 legged crows!

Couple more holy spots here in the Nanba area: Mitsudera has a hotel built OVERTOP of it. This wooden temple survived the WW2 bombings so they are protecting it. Then of course you have his worship the Glico Man and some excellent takoyaki signage 😉 #Japan #Osaka

Getting in a last temple visit: Horikoshi Jinja ⛩️ (where your 1 wish will be granted) and Shitenno-ji ☸️ which is Japan’s first temple originally constructed in 593 by Emperor Shotoku Taishi #Japan #Osaka #Buddhism

Currently reading: Buddhism by Dalai Lama 📚 Needed some easy, non-fiction reading that I can put on while packing and riding planes and the like over the next week.

Quizzing my daughter about football. The only thing she knows she learned from the Blue Lock anime, and she showing big attitude: Me: “Explain the Offside Trap” Her: “That’s the little cage at the side of the field, right?” Me: 💀 💀 💀 #football #footie

“The world needs a community powered browser engine free of corporate interests and focussed on putting people first” Announcement for the Ladybird Browser Initiative, a 501c3 building a new browser engine from scratch

Nice! All the vids are up for the #localfirst conf in #berlin in May! Check the trailer: Full playlist here →

open-internet-governance.org/letter some proposals for the Global Digital Compact (GDC) can be read to mandate more centralized governance. … we believe it will be detrimental to not only the Internet and the Web, but also to the world’s economies and societies RT ✊ #InternetGovernance

My final monthly personal note from Japan just went out. buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…

#quote

Lovely final day in #Kyoto. Went to temple ☸️ visited the family grave 📿 got some new chopsticks in Gion 🥢 walked Shinkyogoku 🛍 and met with family for a last supper 🐎🍣 We moved away from Kyoto to Osaka last year, but it still feels sad to say goodbye … this time for real 👋 🥹

Today is Jiji’s 命日 so we came up for a ceremony and one last visit to the cemetery in Kyoto before going to Canada in a week 🙏 📿

Started listening to “Throne of Jade”by Naomi Novik 📚 Heard a podcast about Master & Commander which put me in the mood for Napoleonic wars… with dragons! 🐉 micro.blog/books/978…

Been a while since I posted a #truelove quote 💁‍♂️ Her: “Ever since you cut your hair short you look like a pineapple face.” Me: “Je ne suis pas un ananas”

Chinowa #Japan #Shrine ⛩️

Panelists from the Atlantic Council give a primer on #internetgovernance history, how things changed with the Snowden revelations, the recent push for multilateralism, and how China sees the Global Digital Compact as a way to gain more leverage. lemmy.ml/post/1723…

Whoa! Slay 💅 #bloomScrolling

Other than last day of school, it’s last day of Spring & National Indigenous Peoples Day, but also the 3rd anniversary of my father’s death. So I’m looking back on my writing and reflecting: chadkohalyk.com/2021/06/2… reviewcanada.ca/magazine/…

Last day of school. 👩‍🎓 (No more lunch-making! 🙌 Daily fights about internet usage 😒)

Night run photo. 🏃‍♂️ Getting close to that full Moon and the end of spring 🌱💐

Recognize the ills, let's do better — Short summary of : Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short) by Ruha Benjamin 📚 In order to flourish as individuals and a society we must free ourselves from the strictures of standardized testing, industrialized education, “accelerated learning”, technocratic utopianism, solutionism, longtermism, white supremacy and …

Warming up to listen to the whole new Evgeny Morozov podcast series with an excellent interview by @bigblackjacobin.bsky.social and @jathan.bsky.social from This Machine Kills pca.st/episode/e…

I am in the middle of two book series right now: Joe Abercrombie’s (@joeabercrombie.bsky.social) “The First Law” and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s (@aptshadow.bsky.social) “The Final Architecture”. In the middle I tells ya!

A handmade #FathersDay card from my smart A 12 year old daughter. Pretty great despite the commentary track. 🧝‍♀️💍⚔️(Both my kids spitefully refuse to watch the films or read the books because I have been trying to get them to since they were little)

Oh I am so happy this out! Just dropped and can’t wait to listen. Thank you @tatsushu@historians.social #ikijima #壱岐島 pca.st/episode/2…

Packing, packing, packing… 📦 📦 📦 11th move in 4 years, 3 of which were international moves under pandemic conditions. We are getting good at this, but tbh I don’t want to do it anymore 😭

Whoa! New Evgeny Morozov podcast just dropped! (With music by Brian Eno!) www.sense-of-rebellion.com

Various hydrangea #bloomscrolling #japan

Rokuharamitsuji. See how colourful Japanese temples used to be before all the wabi-sabi? Finally got to see the Kūya statue. He’s said to have introduced the nenbutsu to Japan. The figures coming out his mouth represent the syllables NA-MO-A-MI-DA-BUTSU #kyoto #Japan #Buddhism

At Sanjusangendo, the EXTRA WIDE temple built to accomodate 1000 life-sized 1000-armed Kannon. Inside is ASTOUNDING (no pics 😞). My 1st time after 25 yrs in Kyoto! This is the backside where they have an annual archery competition where young women wear their best kimono and shoot for New Years

Apparently my Gr9 daughter’s friend group says that I am “basically three teenage girls in a trenchcoat” 🤷‍♂️💅

During my run tonight I was encouraged by this banger: “Run towards your future!” spamrisk.bandcamp.com/track/goo… #anarchism #punk #bookchin #MutualAid #utopia

Post-run cooldown under the train bridge 🏃‍♂️🚈

After sharing this on MAE, our tech policy community, I continue to share this link to others. The report shows how Big Tech controls AI through corporate VC, share structure, cloud credits, control of infra, dual affiliation research positions, open source, and more: lemmy.ml/post/1630…

I finished Ursula Le Guin’s book “The Lathe of Heaven” yesterday and one of the quotes I still have in my mind (especially as I listen to this old interview of David Graeber this morning) is “All we have is means.” #utilitarianism #anarchism

Finished The Lathe Of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin 📚 She was the master. I need to read more of her books. What a great tackling of Utilitarianism… and in 1971!

CURRENT STATUS: Night run along the river 🏃‍♂️

Happy Monday #bloomScrolling

Squeezing onto the crowded train. Hair coiffed. Long dark slacks. Shirt tucked in. Hip hop in the earbuds. Monday morning rush hour. Been a long time for this remote worker! (It’s just for a meeting at the kids’ school. I am just having fun salaryman cosplaying 😇)

🤔 Thought provoking: 🖌️ Creative > Productive ⚙️ From a Sari Azout presentation about how she uses Sublime.app sublime.app/card/copy…

Started the audiobook of The Lathe Of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin 📚

Started listening to: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz 📚 (Abandoned at 25%. Just not enjoying it enough to continue… so many other books out there that need reading!)

Very interesting map. Iraq and Syria have started shutting down again during May, and apparently have been doing so to prevent cheating on exams for the last several years 🤨 pulse.internetsociety.org/shutdowns <img …

Current Status: Night run 🏃

Watched The Beautiful Game which wasn’t the greatest movie but I had to because 1) it was football, and 2) I love seeing things like the Homeless World Cup and CONIFA World Cup in popular media (look ‘em up!) ⚽️ #football #footie boxd.it/wotY

Gorgeous day. Went with my wife up to Minoh Falls. Took photos of falls, the river, leaves, the city view, and all the insect illustrations on the public toilets 🐝🪲🚽🤔 (Click to see full album on Flickr)

Current status: Minooo Falls #Osaka #Japan

Read in 2024: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch 📚 … this wore me out. Emotionally… wrung out. Each chapter he just squeezes, squeezes, squeezes. The characters are so real. Lynch’s writing is very poetic. He uses denominalization heavily. The writing makes everything feel alive, even the dead.

Jiufen: This post is part of a series. See the introduction here → (see the whole album in full screen on Flickr here) The gold rush at the turn of the 1900s caused a boom in the small mountain town of Jiufen, with its sweeping views of the sea towards both the northwest and northeast. The narrow road …

Popped down to Kobe Chinatown for some snacks 🥮🥟 before heading over to Merikan Park to see the Port Tower 🗼 and discovered an Aloha dance festival! And me in my Hawaiian shirt! 🌺👕 #otp 💅🫰 flic.kr/s/aHBqjBt…

Visited ⛰️ Mount Maya today 🚠 and took a few photos: cable car timelapses, cityscapes, mountain-top temples, and snakes 🐍 flic.kr/s/aHBqjBt…

Started Justice by Means of Democracy by Danielle Allen 📚

AMAZE 😍💅🧝‍♀️🧝‍♂️👑💍 #lotr www.youtube.com/shorts/D1…

Since I was travelling last time, this edition of my personal newsletter is a little full. Covers all the hits from the last two months: chopping up tuna in a back alley, baby sushi, and existential ennui. 🍷 buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…

Kaohsiung and Tainan, featuring Fo Guang Shan: This post is part of a series. See the introduction here → (see the whole album in full screen on Flickr here) Kaohsiung is a port city in southern Taiwan, developed by the Japanese as an important industrial hub. We hired a tour guide who carted us around to different locations including the port …

Taiwan trip report - Introduction: Taiwan has been on the bucketlist for a while. In the year 2000 I was an exchange student in Kyoto learning Taiwanese from a fellow exchange student who was so excited for elections that he flew back to Taiwan to vote. That was only the second presidential election since the military dictatorship …

🐦‍⬛♬ Mirlo is a collectively owned music service experimenting with novel governance concepts like “exit to community” to make sure power resides with the musicians and listeners. Only a couple days left and they are SO CLOSE to their goal! SUPPORT! www.kickstarter.com/projects/…

Started Prophet Song by Paul Lynch 📚 www.goodreads.com/book/show…

Current status: Prom dress shopping with my daughter. 👗🛍️ 👧🏻: We HAVE to go together. You are supposed to whine and complain about the time and prices and generally be awkward and embarrassed and old. It’s traditional! 😇

Finished The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin 📚 in just over 24 hours. Could not put it down.

Nostalgia riddim! Bluku bluku!

Started reading: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin 📚 Loved, loved, loved, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow”

Walking down a side alley today we saw these chefs outside a sushi joint with this 100 kilo tuna. They were selling ¥150 beers and doing a “breakdown” demonstration. So we stuck around and watched. Here are the highlights!

Current status: in a back alley in Osaka where they are about to clean a 100kilo tuna in front of a small crowd #Osaka #Japan

(love being able to correct my spelling errors in Micro.blog and Mastodon after posting… hate having to give up or repost on Bluesky 😭)

Philosophers ranked by their punk credentials: I would put the Buddha a bit higher on the scale since his critique of the caste system, and the workaround he created for people to escape it, was revolutionary 🪷✊🧘👨‍🎤 #punk #philosophy #buddhism

Annual medical checkup day. Just ran the gauntlet at the local health office 🏥🩺. Really wish we did this in Canada, it is a great marker. (Also, amazed at how much I have shrunk in the past couple of years! 🙀)

Finished Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie 📚 Can’t stop this series! But don’t want it to end, so going to take a break before I read the final volume.

This was absolutely delightful ncase.me/crowds/

Ikijima’s population has dropped by 140 and is just below 24K now. There are only 2727 children on the island. #ikijima #壱岐島 iki-guide.com/archives/…

It’s my birthday. So I watched End of Evangelion and started reading Non-things by Byung-Chul Han 📚 Yeah, middle age is a breeze 😬

Elaborate handmade birthday card presented to me at dinner 🎂 Daughter 1: I wrote it all in Old English. 😇 Daughter 2: Why? So he could understand it? 😈 🔥 🔥 🔥 💀

My last day as a 45 year old had a spectacular sunset. My 12 year old took this photo 📸 🌆 👌

View from the Cybozu Osaka office. We are here and ready for our workshop tonight

Sitting in a crowded Umeda café reviewing my slides for tonight’s workshop on The Culture Map. If you are free this evening, why not come down to the awesome Cybozu office and hang out with us: www.meetup.com/osaka-web…

Myaku Myaku train in the early evening 📸 🚋 🦠 #Osaka #大阪

It could be better for everybody — a review of Limitarianism in just 335 words: 📚 Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is an ethical framework advocating for limiting excess wealth and redistributing to the benefit of wider society. The book builds its case by historically analyzing the rise of inequality over the past 50 years through global …

Nice review of a beautiful looking book: The Uyghurs: Kashgar before the Catastrophe Photos are from 1998. Compare with the NYT photo essay from 2019 I linked in a post with some of my photos from 2004. What a place. 😔 chadkohalyk.com/2019/04/0…

Finally finished processing and uploading my Taiwan photos to Flickr. I ended up picking 307 out of 1800 and organizing them into a number of albums. Link below, but I will to write a trip report soon with context. www.flickr.com/photos/sa…

Fun NBN interview with Richard Jaffe about his book Seeking Sakyamuni, a book I adore. 📚🎙 Interview: newbooksnetwork.com/seeking-s… My chapter notes: www.goodreads.com/review/sh… Also good to hear @ssiddiqui83’s voice again! #Buddhism #Japan #history #books #podcast

Started the second volume of The First Law series Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie 📚

When I arrived at Osaka Castle Park Station I was wondering why there were so many people walking around? 🤔 Was it a concert at Osaka Dome? 👩‍🎤 NOPE! It was the 2024 Craft Gyoza Fest! 🥟🥟🥟 #Osaka #Japan #餃子

Perfect blue sky at Osaka Castle 📸🏯

Listened to the latest ep of CBC Spark on the negative impacts of a culture of productivity, which is a good ep and all, but ends with the shocking announcement that CBC is cancelling Spark after 17 years! 😱

Old school beats from Meth 👐 and look at who tops the list as enemies of music being defeated in this new Droog claymation video: The Algorithm ⚙️ 🎶 youtu.be/RKOpb-fZd…

Stopped at School Bus before the kids get home for a little writing on the patio in the sun ☕️

Under the tracks 📸 #Osaka #Japan #streetPhotography

If you are in Kansai come out to OWDDM on May 18 when we will be introducing Erin Meyer’s excellent book The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. This in an interactive session. www.meetup.com/osaka-web…

🤦‍♂️ OMG why do I do this to myself… it was just a week #travel #photography

Finished The Blade Itself (The First Law #1) by Joe Abercrombie 📚 4.5 rounded up. Some plotholes and cliches but excellent narrator sells it. Before even finishing I got the rest of the series. Been a while since I read a rollicking fantasy like this. Definitely reminiscent of Locke Lamora.

Wall art in the alley behind Kyobashi Shotengai #Osaka #StreetArt

Metagov has a $200k grant program for improving interoperability amongst decision making tools. Applications open until May 31st. Learn more: metagov.github.io/interop/ Email interop@metagov.org with your questions #governance #interop #grants #research

ISOC has a new hefty research program covering: Greening the Internet The Internet Economy A Trustworthy Internet Decolonizing the Internet www.isocfoundation.org/grant-pro…

Landed at Kansai International Airport. A guy in the lobby asks me for directions. I help him out. He identifies himself as Canadian 🇨🇦 “Hey! I’m Canadian!” 🍁 Canadians helping Canadians, all over the world 🤝

Currently at the airport getting ready to leave Taiwan for Japan. It has been a great trip. I have learned a bunch, and had my curiosity piqued even more. If anyone has any recent book recommendations on Taiwanese identity formation in the past decade, please let me know!

Taipei Zoo!

The Grand Hotel Taipei, much bigger than the one in Kaohsiung at 16 floors and 500 rooms. We saw the Centennial Dragon 🐉 which came from when this spot was a jinja ⛩️ during Japanese colonial times. We also went down the secret escape tunnel for visiting heads of state, equipped with a slide! 🛝

こんな絶景のあるファミマって見たことある！？ #台湾　#九份　#コンビニ　#絶景

Today was the National Palace Museum in Taipei which is FULL of treasures dating back to the 16th C BCE‼️ We saw many jade pieces, the pork-meat jasper, and this ball made from a single piece of ivory, has 21 independently moving spheres in it, and took 3 generations to carve‼️🤯🤯🤯 #Taiwan #art

View! Wish I coulda seen this in clear weather youtu.be/sMy44Kv-M…

Bit of a different newsletter this month since I’ve been on the road. It picks up from my last one talking about “making” and building skills. Here’s a missive from an old gold-mining town in northern Taiwan: buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…

Pano of Jiufen for you youtu.be/qNs1X7AdP…

Day 30: 📷 hometown (@mattypenny) #mbApr I am literally 9,788 kilometers from my hometown, but this community clinging to the side of the mountain at the northern tip of Taiwan is home to many, and a sight to behold! 😍

Absolutely poured on us after our arrival to the old gold mining village of Jiufen. We walked the covered old street, had tea, watch clouds go UP over the mountain ridge. Then for a few glorious moments took in the view before being soaked and running home. See the Spirited Away tea house? #Taiwan

Lovely day in Taipei at the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial and amazing Lungshan Temple. It was a hot one! We ate bao at this great soy milk place for breakfast, got to see the changing of the guard at the memorial, and later got a family foot massage. Informative and relaxing day. #Taiwan

Day 29: 📷 drift (@SimonWoods) #mbApr After days of rain and cloud on this #Taiwan trip, we got a perfectly clear 34ºC day with just this little wisp of cloud drifting above the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall

Scrambled onto a packed high-speed train 🚄 from Tainan to Taipei. Had to stand the whole 1.5hr journey, but we made it 😮‍💨 Immediately went for fish tacos 🌮 and tea 🍵 (a very Taiwan combination) 😋 They served craft beer, cocktails, and tea out of a long bank of draft taps!

Day 28: 📷 community (@stupendousman) #mbApr Depiction of community festival at the Taiwan National History Museum. #Taiwan

Catching up on some journaling on the balcony with a nice view before we leave. #Taiwan

Lovely day at the Grand Kaohsiung Hotel. Next we drive up to Tainan to visit the National History Museum. In the evening we will catch the High Speed Rail to Taipei.

Tonight we are staying in the Grand Kaohsiung Hotel, a grand place indeed which has hosted many dignitaries over the years including Chiang Kai Shek, Chadian president Idriss Déby, and Reza Pahlavi Shah. They have a giant duck and a nice pool! #Taiwan

Day 27: 📷 surprise (@Sdevore) #mbApr One of the suprising things visiting the holy site of the Buddha tooth relic (see previous post) was finding… a DINOSAUR display!? Unexpected… but at least its a herbivore! 🌱🦕

Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum houses one of the 3 tooth 🦷 relics of the Buddha ☸️ It is a massive facility. No photos inside unfortunately. We saw the reliquary, got small bottles of holy water, and ate a fantastic vegetarian meal. But, there was a surprise (see my next post) #Taiwan #Buddhism

We showed up just as they were getting the night market set up. It was absolutely pouring when the plane landed. But not too bad the rest of the day. We had “Buddha Head” fruit for the first time. Ate some great noodles at a vegetarian 卍 stand. So full of street food right now! 😋

Day 26: 📷 critter (@7robots) #mbApr Some delicious critters at the night market from our first day in Taiwan.

On the train to get on the plane to fly to Taiwan!🇹🇼 Getting a jumpstart on Golden Week. All my photos for the rest of the Micro.Blog April photo challenge #mBApr will now switch from Sakura 🌸 to Taiwan themed. 🧋🥭🍍

Hard wind out there today 🌬🪨

Day 25: 📷 spine (@thedimpause) #mbApr To the east of Osaka, floating above the tops of the buildings in the distance, is the Ikoma mountain range, the spine that runs up the middle of Kansai separating the Osaka Plain from the Nara Basin. This is my morning coffee view from the balcony. ☀️☕⛰️⛰️⛰️

Day 24: 📷 light (@eumrz) #mbApr The cherry blossoms are long gone, so I have not held myself to that rule for the last couple of weeks, but I am glad to get you some cherry blossoms for tonight’s photo 💡🌸

Imagine interacting with your connected notes with a more engaging canvas view… that is programmable! “Visual-Semantic Morphism” is just one thing that came up in this cool presentation from @orion@hci.social www.youtube.com/watch #Obsidian #OpenCanvas #ToolsForThought #UX #HCI

Started listening to The Blade Itself (The First Law #1) by Joe Abercrombie 📚 Recommended by my brother. Been a while since I read a straight forward fantasy in this style. Wanted something I could listen to on the airplane this week.

Well, hello there. 👋 If you don’t mind terribly, I should like to recommend this lovely video essay about Wes Anderson films and living with pain 🥹 Be well! I wish you the very best. youtu.be/5G_sn4OIN…

Started listening to Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns 📚 Chapter notes on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6450313181) and Bookwyrm (https://bookwyrm.social/book/1617013/comment#reviews) if you want to follow along. #EconomicJustice #limitarianism

Wife left the city for the mountains 🏔️ today. Came home with a giant mushroom 🍄‍🟫. Broiled it and cracked it open and a long centipede came out!! 🐛😱 Children are mortified and have sworn off food “for at least a week”! 😂

Day 23: 📷 dreamy (@maique) #mbApr Love this local flower shop overflowing with leaves and twigs of all shapes and sizes. It makes me think of James C Scott. It also makes me think of my wife, since I buy stuff 💐 for her here. Store name translates as: 夢 - dream 挿 - to put into a vase 花 - flowers

Just enough capitalism – A quick review of Slow Productivity: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport 📚 Cal Newport’s latest advice book tackles the question of productivity in knowledge work. Factory work can much more easily be measured and systematized. Newport points out that office workers, writers, artists, and scholars are often assigned tasks and must come up …

Day 22: 📷 blue (@lzbth) #mbApr A reclining Myaku-Myaku, official character of the Osaka Expo 2025. (and yes, I know you are wondering but I can confirm he has an eye on his backside) www.expo2025.or.jp/en/overvi…

Just finished: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers 📚🥰☕️🫖🤖

Day 21: 📷 mountain (@dejus) #mbApr Pouring rain 🌧️ so couldn’t get you a pic of Ikoma mountains which look amazing from my apt… so I went to the Ancient Mexico exhibit and got this ziggurat. See more pics: www.flickr.com/photos/sa…

Be kind! Forgive yourself! Don’t let things go to your giant Dry Clay Head (Mark Manders, 2015-2016)! (Currently on display at the National Museum of Art, Osaka) #Osaka #art

So, besides showing googly-eyes 👀 at the X100vi I have also been watching vids about the new Supernote (since I want an eInk tablet for reading papers) and been looking On1 vs Capture 1 as a Lightroom replacement. Feels like a whole new generation shift for personal kit 📷 📝 👨‍🎨

It was a nice blue sky this morning around Umekita before the 黄砂 yellow dust came in from the Gobi desert and clouded things up. #Osaka

Day 20: 📷 ice (@the) #mbApr 25º in Osaka today. Tea, Waffles, and アイス

I’ve been watching too many Ricoh GRIIIx vs Fujifilm X100vi YouTube videos 😬 😬 😬

It was a gorgeous day in Kyoto today. Here are some random snaps from #EverydayKyoto

Today we had lunch at おてらハウス in my old neighbourhood which serves only 精進料理 vegetarian Buddhist cuisine. As it is spring, there are lots of bamboo shoots in the meal. #EverydaydayKyoto #food

Day 19: 📷 birthday (@crossingthethreshold) #mbApr In Japan orchids like this are usually presented as gifts to celebrate a new shop opening. Happy birthday! 🎈🥳

Visited my friend @hermosawavephotography.com at his Kyotographie exhibition featuring his book “Empty Kyoto” The exhibit runs until Sunday so get down there to see prints and hear some stories about the photos. hermosawavephotography.com/emptykyot… #photography #kyoto

Started Slow Productivity by Cal Newport 📚 on recommendation of @pratik

Day 18: 📷 mood (@agilelisa) #mbApr Every time I ride my bike past this…

Whoa I felt that quake in Oita all the way here in Osaka! Long! #earthquake #Japan #地震

Day 17: 📷 transcendence (@drewbelf) #mbApr You are connected to those in the past, in the present, and the future. You are transcendent. (📸 This is my family altar 仏壇 🙏📿)

Rewilding the internet: The “internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.” Robin Berjon and Maria Farrell not only show how we have arrived at this online monoculture (and the dangers therein), but how we can take steps to seeding more diversity (and therefore resilience) for the good of the whole forest. This …

Day 16: 📷 flâneur (@chrisaldrich) #mbApr Daughter got some new kicks and immediately decorated them in her style. She travels at her own pace. 🌈✌️

Day 15: 📷 small (@jmanes) #mbApr Since I started this April photo challenge my 12 year old daughter has been inspired and has been participating with her iPhone. Today she took a better “small” photo than I did so I am posting hers in lieu of mine (with due credit!) 👏

The next stop of my (unplanned) specialty coffee tour of Kitahama #Osaka is Brooklyn Roasters, right on the river with a fantastic patio. The shop is a combination coffee ☕️ and flower 💐 shop! Oh the smells! 🥰

Enjoying a pour over and cookie at the School Bus Coffee Stop in Kitahama #Osaka ☕️

This morning when I woke up to gentle sunlight and blue sky coming through my window, while everyone else was still sleeping in, I started A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers 📚

Day 14: 📷 cactus (@christopherchelpka) #mbApr Last Xmas my daughter gave me this little felt cactus to put on my desk so I would have some green around me that wouldn’t die 🌵 (In the background is a photo of my daughters in their kimono 👘🥹)

Day 13: 📷 page (@robj) #mbApr After finishing off a 250 page notebook, I recently bought a new Leuchtturm1917 in Stone Blue. Also got a new Uni Jetstream Edge in a matching colour. More on journaling: chadkohalyk.com/2021/02/0…

What a day! 🌞 Sports Day ⚽️🏅🏃‍♀️ for the school so I was out in the sun all day photographing the kids. OD’ing on Vitamin D right now. Need a shower and a lie down.

Day 12: 📷 magic (@DaveyCraney) #mbApr The cherry blossoms are almost done 🌸! Here are fortune slips that must not have told of the best future, so were left behind. Check the Replies to see a gallery of other charms and magical items I captured on today’s ride. #桜　#Japan

Day 11: 📷 sky (@jedda) #mbApr Today was cloudy, so I decided to go shoot the Umeda Sky Building in the dark for you. Of course, I had to get some sakura 🌸 in there. Check the replies for some closeups of the hole that goes to the 40th F roof and daytime shots

During my walk today… a school that pretty much every child wants to go to #osaka #anime #esports

Day 10: 📷 train (@starrwulfe) #mbApr The Nintendo Train through the cherry blossoms 🍄👸🚋🌸

It has been mostly cloudy, but I have gotten a few 🌸 cherry blossom shots and put them up on Flickr if you wanna have a quick scroll www.flickr.com/photos/sa…

Day 9: 📷 crispy (@rom) #mbApr Karaage (fried chicken) with some sakurai mochi and hanami dango 🌸🍡

It is SOOOO windy out! 🌬 There are cherry blossom 🌸 petals on my balcony I am on the 12th floor!

Day 8: 📷 prevention (@anniegreens) #mbApr “Memory Park” is full of cherry blossom trees and a hanami spot for families in my neighbourhood. 🌸 Lovely, no? But notice the low building just beyond the trees? On the other side of the cranes? That is the Osaka Detention Center. Prevention.

Deb Chachra (@debcha@mastodon.social / @debcha.bsky.social) on CBC Spark. She hits a bunch of the main points of her great book “How Infrastructure Works”. Worth a listen! www.cbc.ca/listen/li…

Day 7: 📷 wellbeing (@ridwan) It’s been ☁️ overcast ☁️ every day during this cherry blossom season 😞 but finally we got some blue sky. An old friend from Kelowna who lives in Fukuoka came up to 🚅 Osaka to visit us for the day. Being together 👫 Under the sakura trees 🌸 We share well-being 🥰

Started listening to Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky 📚

Day 6: 📷 windy (@Miraz) I went out to try and capture something for today’s @challenges theme, but it is just not that windy 😫 Staying within my self-imposed cherry blossom rule, I got a shot of a single petal in a pond rippled with a gentle wind. 🌬🌊🌸

Day 5: 📷 serene (@chiawase) 🌸🌸🌸 🌸🏯🌸 🌸🌸🌸 Just sat and watched this scene for a while this afternoon. Many feels from real life … IYKYK

Day 4: 📷 foliage (@pratik) Although we are only at something like 60% bloom for the whole region, some varietals bloomed last week. Now the leaves 🍃 are poking through the blossoms 🌸 There is still time for 花見 hanami flower-viewing. Then comes 葉っぱ見 happami leaf-viewing 🍻

Finished Northern Ireland: The Fragile Peace by Feargal Cochrane 📚 A very readable, yet comprehensive, history of Northern Island over the past 100 years. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Day 3: card 📷 (@val) Some sakura 🌸 themed greeting cards at a backstreet stationery shop. Unfortunately they didn’t stock any of those fancy 3D constructable ones where you get a whole tree, or the music light show ones. Still, the Japan levels are turned up to 11 on these 🎚️🇯🇵

People not looking up so much today ☔️ (See yesterday’s pic micro.chadkohalyk.com/2024/04/0…)

A little night walk down by the riverside in my neighbourhood which is called “Palace of Cherry Blossoms” 🌸🏯 Finally the blooming has started. See all my sakura shots for the day here: www.flickr.com/photos/sa…

Day 2: Flowers 📷 (@davegullett) A photographer enjoys the blooming cherry blossoms

📷 Day01 : toy (@pcora) Cherry blossoms will be blooming over the next couple of weeks, so I am going to see if I can somehow maintain a parallel theme as this photo challenge progresses. Today I popped down to the Lego store to capture some toy cherry blossoms 🌸🧱

Gorgeous day at Osaka Station 🌞 😎 🧸⛲️

What are you into? What would you like to GET into? My newsletter this month is on “making” and hobbies. Consider the possibility: maybe you aren’t looking for something to DO, but looking for a community to do something with? Read it here 👇 buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…

Kyoto is CRAZY with tourists right now. We went to visit the family grave since we missed out last weekend. Cloudy, but got a couple of nice photos of cherry blossoms 🌸 📸 #EverydayKyoto #Kyoto #Japan #sakura

Spent all day in the Wakayama mountains at a very eclectic Buddhist temple that will open soon. More photos but here are a few random shots. The main statue of 1000 Hands Kannon-sama is being shipped from China, and there is an opening ceremony by a Malaysian Zen master in the coming weeks.

This was another great ep following the one with Simon Willison about finding the boundaries of LLMs oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/… #podcast #machineLearning #LLM #adversarialML

Bluesky, blue building 📸 No edits. Taken from the north side of Osaka Castle park.

Gorgeous spring day. Hung around Umeda enjoying the warm. There are still no cherry blossoms outside yet due to the cold, but the Hilton has a bunch of trees growing on display in the lobby that are fully bloomed! 📸🌸

Today I found out about Rev. Joanne Yuasa who this year started working as a chaplain at Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) Base Kingston, where I went to graduate school. She is the first Buddhist chaplain in the Canadian Forces! Wow!

Finished Governable Spaces by Nathan Schneider (@ntnsndr@social.coop) 📚 A positive read with a bunch of interesting branches to explore next. You can see some short chapter overviews: www.goodreads.com/review/sh…

Appreciated this discussion about operations research and the “universal science” of advertising. Surviving adtech like I have, I was really nodding my head along with the discussion about how ad agencies play both sides of the transaction www.patreon.com/posts/328…

Really itching to go out on a photowalk. I’ve been on the backstreets at night but need to capture more. This rando snap I took since I liked the mix of stopping and going in one moment. 📸 Anywho, next week the sakura 🌸 will bloom so I will definitely be taking lotsa shots

This is fun to play with jnolan.shinyapps.io/Populatio…

RIP Vernor Vinge file770.com/vernor-vi…

Haunting #longread on Irish remembrance & forgetting against the background of extremely low corp tax rates, 80+ datacenters (with 40 more approved!) using a fifth of electric output causing www.theguardian.com/world/202…

Appreciated this accessible piece on the antitrust case against Amazon. (TLDR; jacking Marketplace fees to subsidize other parts of the business) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc…

Really enjoyed this interview of renowned scholar of Japanese history Thomas Conlan by the always excellent @becedo.bsky.social on his fascinating account of the Ouchi family. I am definitely picking up this book newbooksnetwork.com/kings-in-… #japan #history #podcast

Handy comparison of Free and OpenSource Photo Libraries https://meichthys.github.io/foss_photo_libraries/ #photography #FOSS

Getting a boba at this neighborhood Taiwanese and Vietnamese cafe🧋

Lovely day to explore the backstreets of Nakazaki, home to many tiny coffee shops and art galleries #osaka #coffee ☕️

Currently reading: Governable Spaces by Nathan Schneider 📚

I would really like browsers to track the “Referrer” for new tabs. For example, if you click on a link in an email, from a social media post, or Discord/Slack/Signal/Messages/etc please store a link back. Especially useful in the age of the cozy web, where I have a number of small social networks.

Started Northern Ireland: The Fragile Peace by Feargal Cochrane 📚

Takoyaki right from the traditional source 📸

Started listening to Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1) by China Miéville 📚

Want to learn how to make digital music with visual programming? Or do you just want your mind blown for 10 straight minutes? Either way, we got you 🤯🎶🐸💘🦜 https://youtu.be/DNBKdU6XrLY?si=B0AQToJ2PLAQpCZZ

internet.exchangepoint.tech/internet-… Mallory Knodel (@mallory@techpolicy.social) points out that 2024 is a big year for Internet governance. One of the challenges that I witnessed at IGF in Kyoto last year was the multilateralism v. multistakeholderism fight. Mallory writes: States are …

We have been considering moving away from DnD as we wrap up our current campaign. Started reading this as one of the candidates The Wildsea: RPG by Felix Isaacs 📚#ttrpg

Monthly newsletter is out. This month’s message is short since there are so many links to photos of plum blossoms and castles and Tokyo! buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…

Had this Korean roast today. Nice and light. Very smooth to drink! Had it at a small weekly pop-up. The owner travels lots and brings back all sorts of beans which he serves. Just spent 3 months in Sri Lanka, India & Nepal and has some assorted beans from there too. ☕️

Networking our networks: The HN Tokyo Meetup. As one Kansai person told me: “I can tell it’s a meetup for people who are into frameworks.” Last week I went up to Tokyo on my annual pilgrimage to meet with old friends and make new connections. I timed my trip to coincide with the monthly Hacker News Tokyo Meetup. These …

Blue sky at the train station. Today in Osaka was warm with a perfect sky. Spring is coming! 🌱🌼🌸

Osaka Castle from Genpachi Bridge. In a couple of weeks all those trees will be pink with cherry blossoms 🌸🌸🌸

"we all can't be Buddhas": I am posting this publicly so that I can reference it in links going forward. There might be a more common way to express this sentiment, this is just the way that I often do in conversation. It is something I came up with in discussing intentional communities with my wife a while back. Oftentimes, …

Just watched DUNE for the first time since the theatre. I think I like it a lot more on the second watch. It is actually really well put together, quick pace… Just all the slomo and prophesying slow it down. Looking forward to seeing the second part in the next couple of weeks.

I haven’t been sick for quite a while. So I suppose I should not feel so betrayed, so wronged for being sick on this long weekend 😷 But it still sucks 😞

Back in the big 大

The HN Tokyo hntokyo.io meetup last night. About a 100 people on the PARCO rooftop in Shibuya. Gorgeous view. Tons of new friends made. The startup scene in Japan is so different compared to when I struggled in 2009-2010. Lots of interesting projects and successes!

Today I met @jamesvandyne in person! He showed me around his lovely office and then we went for a taco lunch 😏 We had a fun conversation about working in green tech, his CMS project Tanzawa, and all the cool innovation happening now on open social. The web is getting weird again! 🤘🥳

On the Shinkansen 🚅 bound for Tokyo. Meeting some old friends and new over the next few days as I do my annual working holiday in the big city. I am taking this time to do some strategy work, and also to attend the Hacker News Tokyo meetup for the first time. HMU if you see me there!

Good time connecting with the wider community of devs in Osaka. We talked about all sorts of topics including using CoPilot in multilingual environments. Then had a good hour of networking before heading back to the station and off for drinks and more conversation meetu.ps/e/MRJGJ/1…

Enjoying @emilydingwrites@mastodon.world latest newsletter #MovableWorlds The writing is evocative and the accompanying little clips & photos really set the mood. It just makes me want to sit down and write! I wish my newsletter could be so well crafted… movableworlds.co/p/finding…

The Heritage Foundations playbook for a Republican 2025 presidency will throw gas on the #ClimateCrisis turning everything including dishwasher cycles into a Culture War. Just scan the headers on this review of the 900 page document 🤯 heatmap.news/politics/…

Listening to this podcast talking about using profilers to not only carbon-optimize your site, but also Linux, and your house 🏡 pca.st/episode/6…

GitHub's Innovation Graph: Rest of World has a piece on the fastest-growing countries for software development featuring GitHub’s Innovation graph. I got a peek at this last year at the GitHub booth at the IGF2023 in Kyoto. One of my favs is Economy collaborators which represents international collaboration on projects. …

Had a call with a friend I knew from Kyoto. We went to China together in 2004. I saw him once in Oakland in 2013. We occasionally have catchup calls, but have not met in person in a long time. I have a few friends like this. They are all great and I am lucky to have them. 🥰

Blue sky in Osaka (We are here to see the plum blossoms, but they are not quite ready yet)

Leopard print 🐆 on the subway doors is 💯 🎯 Osaka

Big day today: the keys 🔑 have been handed over! We moved to Osaka in October and put our Kyoto apartment up for sale. Sold in December, and the new people took possession today. An 18 year long chapter is now over.

Speaking of Dungeons & Dragons, We have a long-time group doing the Strahd campaign… the DM commissioned cute voodoo dolls of our characters!! 😍😍😍 Amazing! #DnD

I know people are hatin' on AI/LLMs but they’ve improved my ritual spellcasting efficiency significantly! 🧙‍♂️😜

A wide-ranging and thought-provoking ep about crypto, AI, VCs, ZKs, quadratic funding, democracy, anarchism… Audrey drops the inspiring line “bridging polarity to plurality” 🎯 podcasts.apple.com/au/podcas…

🙏 🥰 daverupert.com/2024/02/a… (Attached is a fuzzy photo of a server rack in a church alcove that I took at the Internet Archive more than a decade ago)

Started reading: Global Digital Data Governance: Polycentric Perspectives by Carolina Aguerre, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, Jan Aart Scholte 📚 #InternetGovernance

More on Decentralization: Of course a couple days after writing my post consolidating thoughts of decentralization I found a piece by Nathan Schneider in my Omnivore called: What to do once you admit that decentralizing everything never seems to work This further makes the point that the centralization-decentralization …

“Live in a small apartment rather than a big, drafty house… Fly rarely… Work less… exercise … Tax the rich… basic income… capital toward home care and nursing homes, not arms…neighborhoods dense and walkable…” etc www.newyorker.com/books/und…

Started reading: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell 📚

Today at lunch I popped down to Namba Yasaka ⛩️ for a bite 🦷 More pix 📸 www.flickr.com/photos/sa… (The plum blossoms are out!)

Just an hour left in the last day of January, so sent out my monthly personal note with a little advice that might make you feel a bit better… it’s working for me! buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…

On decentralization: I really appreciated Mark Nottingham’s memo RFC 9518 on Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards. In it he provides a wide-ranging and balanced introduction to the topic in quite a short article. I have been collecting bits of arguments for decentralization (in a centralized location …

Spoke at Osaka Web Designer and Developer Meetup about my journey in tech. Talked about the never-ending technologies I had to learn, and the socio-economic context around each career shift. We then discussed future trends. 📸 www.flickr.com/photos/sa…

Watched this vid yesterday arguing that El-P is the most influential white rapper. So catching up on his non-RTJ stuff while doing laundry and chores around the house (like installing a new daughterboard on my keyboard)

Chilly blue sky from under the life insurance building

Mmmm 😋 Ethiopian coffee and walnut cheesecake o’clock at Ourlog Coffee Roasters ☕️ 🍰

They even sent stickers all the way to Japan for me! Thanks @jean!

Gonna be up in Tokyo on my annual retreat from Feb 18 to 21. What should I see? Who should I meet?

The high school volleyball teams brought home some silverware from the regional tournament this weekend!! 🙌🎉 Girls Volleyball team got first place 🏐 and the Boys Volleyball team got second 🏐🏐 💪💪💪 But, in a not-so-twist, I bet you can tell me WHO received the LARGER trophy??? 🏆 🤔🤔🤔 🫠🫠🫠

TIL that Wikipedia maintains a list of hoaxes, ie. times the org has been tricked, and how long it took to correct the record. Talk about institutional transparency! Can you imagine a {insert “trusted” institution} doing this? …

“Change moves at the speed of trust.”

CO₂ emissions from Osaka to Tokyo: 🚅 Shinkansen is 4.2kgs/person ✈️ = 12x🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅 🚗 = 30x 🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅 🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅🚅 From www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023…

Tragic discussion unseen-japan.com/noto-peni…

Spotted on the entrance to a Starbucks at Umeda St. Other than seeing one small pro-Palestine demonstration (4 people) I haven’t seen much here. Mostly just disbelief on the news. This might not even be related! 🤷‍♂️

Started listening to: His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik 📚 Saw a review: “imagine Aubrey-Maturin, but Stephen Maturin is a dragon.” Instant download!

SLIM lander press conference hence starts in 5 mins www.youtube.com/live/Udh6…

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon was launched last September from JAXA’s southernmost facility at the Tanegashima Space Center. I visited last spring and got a tour and ate “moon rice” for lunch. Photos: 📸 🌙 🍚 www.flickr.com/photos/sa…

10km to the surface of the moon! Watching the SLIM lander live on YouTube www.youtube.com/live/Udh6…

“Ministry for the Future” is my fav radicalizing read about the #climatecrisis, filled with real-life proposals played out in the book. Watch KSR’s rousing speech about what he’s learned since, including initiatives like 30 by 30 that are making real progress.

First book read in 2024: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers 📚 🤖 🍵 🥰 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Out for some fresh air… and some castle! 🏯 Osaka Castle is an amazing facility. Although it dates back to the 16th C, it has been rebuilt (a couple times) and features a cool collection in its museum. Take an elevator to the top for a nice view!

It was a fun concert. In the third section they played mandolin renditions of hit songs from decades ago while the crowd sang along. Made me imagine being in my 70s at a concert singing “I Think We’re Alone Now” and “Killing in the Name” 🤔 🎼

Current status: mandolin concert 🎶

Started reading Becky Chambers’ acclaimed solarpunk novel about a tea monk serving up comfort and I think this prayer will be immediately understood by my comrades @fission.codes, @robin.berjon.com, and more 🙏 🤲 🙇‍♂️

Started reading: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers 📚

Just watching this new show “Rainbow Closet” and it’s intense 😭 The power of a national broadcaster. (バリバラ is another good show!) plus.nhk.jp/watch/ch/…

And now Kakuei Tanaka’s house is on fire!? #2024GoesHardOnJapan www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html…

Thinking about another annual retreat to Tokyo. Last year I went up for a few days, stayed at the Tokyo Dome Hotel, and met up with some old IRL friends, new Internet friends, and some startup meetups. FUN! Thinking about going again in Feb. Who should I meet this time?

It’s the 7th of January so time for a steaming bowl of Seven Grasses en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana…

Concentric circles of content: Boris goes through his complex social media setup: Mostly POSSE bmannconsulting.comBoris Mann https://bmannconsulting.com/blog/2024/01/06/mostly-posse/ I appreciate the walkthrough and seeing others’s setup. After about 3 months on Micro.blog I feel like I could still go further. I am …

Watched Forrest Gump tonight for the first time since I saw it in theatres when it came out in 1994. Wow, still stands up 👏 😭 👏

Perfect blue sky for some 初詣 ⛩️

2024 is “The Year the World Votes” because nearly half the world will be voting for new national leadership. Here is a roundup from FP. A big year for fighting disinformation. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/02/top-global-elections-2024-india-russia-mexico-bangladesh-taiwan-venezuela-uk/

This panel of women leaders from the Yukon was a fun listen and very inspiring for 2024. The assumption of subsidiarity in the North reminds me of what I read in Graeber+Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything #governance www.canadaland.com/podcast/y…

Earthquake! Whoa we felt that in Kyoto

明けましておめでとうございます🎉🐲

ゆく年くる年 is literally my favourite TV show. I look forward to it every year! #nhk

Sent out my final newsletter of the year! Now it is time to kick back, get the noodles going, and watch some end of year Japanese TV (for the last time…) 🎍🔴🎤⚪️🐲 buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…

Best of 2023: I think this photo is my fav of the year. Historically my annual “best of” posts are a roundup of the best books and film I consumed, but this year I would like to add a little bit more about personal developments. With my father-in-law passing in 2022, this year was about cleaning up the estate, …

Hagia Sophia: As described in my previous post, Istanbul is a city of layers. Nothing demonstrates this more than one of the gems of the city: the Hagia Sophia. Built on the site of an earlier Christian church erected in 336 AD by Constantius II (son of the Emperor Constantine) the current building was made in …

Nice discussion with @becedo.bsky.social on how Nihon Shoki & Kojiki are treated through time newbooksnetwork.com/meanings-… If you want to hear what’s IN the Chronicles, I recommend this great podcast by @tatsushu@historians.social sengokudaimyo.com/podcast

Got a nice snack pack for the winter holidays from the company. 🎁 It’s a nice tradition. This year I got a chocolate set 😋

Merry Xmas! 🎄 After opening prezzies we drove to Ako, famous for Chuushingura (The 47 Ronin), and had lunch with a lovely view of the Seto Inland Sea. So nice and warm 🥰

Christmas Eve on the water! Cruising around the Biwako on the Michigan

Last day of work for 2023 is done. ❄️ What a year! 🗓️ And I finished it with Inbox Zero 💪 Tonight I took a yuzu bath 🍋🛀 as I enter 10 days of rest, relaxation, and recharging 🧘‍♂️ with my books and my family ✌️🥰 Hope you too enjoy your hols! 🥂🍾🎊

11 year old: “OMG my friend she is SO ready for the zombie apocalypse! She can climb trees 🌲 she has a katana 🗡️ AND she has an iPad with OFFLINE games!” 📱👾

From Heatmap Daily: “Americans often refer to their electricity or gas providers as ‘public utilities.’ But only about 15% of the population is served by a government-owned, customer-owned, or member-owned electric utility.” The rest are private monopolies. #ClimateCrisis

Perspective on Palestine — Review of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: In The Hundred Years' War on Palestine Rashid Khalidi takes us through six turning points of modern Palestinian history woven with family and personal history, including his frontline experience escaping Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War. Khalidi has a long history as an advocate and an academic …

My copy of EMPTY KYOTO and 2024 Calendar from @hermosawave@photog.social has arrived! 📸🎋⛩️ hermosawavephotography.com/emptykyot…

My uncle-in-law was decorated with the “Order of the Rising Sun” 🎖️ for his contributions to basketball in Japan 🎊 This is his medal. When you tilt it in the light it really shines! ✨

Chili crab time! 🦀

Interesting ideological analysis of Cixin Liu’s popular Three Body series, especially this bit on how Chinese and American reactionaries use one another madeinchinajournal.com/2023/12/1…

He also has this striking map showing countries coloured depending on if most of their wealth is owned by the bottom 80% or top 5%. (Luckily in this map New Zealand and Australia were not left out… still not suprised though) From www.rubenmathisen.com/blank-2

Maps showing “% of Total Wealth Owned by the Top 1 Percent” per country by continent. From www.rubenmathisen.com/blank-2

Another great video from About Here: #density #urbandesign

It is Dec 15th in the year of our Lord Buddha 2566 and it is deva-damned 23°C out here‼️ 🥵

Adobe PDFs… just… no… NO! 😫

Daughter’s grade 6 class is working on the topic of “materialism” right now. It is inspired by this photography project from a while ago where families around the world brought all thier belongings outside for a portriat: …

I’ve heard of “ducks in a row” … but… 📸 🐦

My 14 year old daughter to me: “I’ve never seen a grown man cry… except for when you watch Totoro. Every… single… time…” Truth! 🥹🥹🥹🌱🌽🐈🚌

Blue skies and primary colours walking around the neighborhood today 📸 #Osaka #Tenma #Ogimachi

Started reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi 📚 Only one chapter in and it’s more complex than I thought. Got new perspective on the “triple bind” of metropole (London) enabler (League of Nations) and settlers that don’t answer to the metropole. So much detail in this book.

Been shopping for overear headphones to replace my old Sony’s. Today these landed in my inbox randomly! They look great! Love the idea of repairables that can last forever. They are just missing the holy grail feature for headphones: a MUTE button 🔇 shop.fairphone.com/fairbuds-…

Started listening to the full-cast audio of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett 👼😈 📚

Finished How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra 📚 Enjoyed it a lot. Full of wonder! See my chapter notes here: www.goodreads.com/review/sh…

Osaka Tenmangu. Sugawara-no-Michizane stopped on his way to Dazaifu before being elevated to God of Letters. (Learn more about him and the fight against covid: chadkohalyk.com/2020/09/1…) More 📸 flic.kr/s/aHBqjB6…

Nice intro to an incisive book. End of the year is a time for reflection, but it is ALWAYS a good time to re-examine your inner work camp. #burnout My review from 2017 here: chadkohalyk.com/2017/07/3…

Clock tower at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. I graduated the One Year Program in 2000, and came back to work in the PR office from 2002-5. Now, in 2023 I am here with my 11 year old as she takes the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

Posted my end of month roundup newsletter. This month’s theme is “Continental Edges” buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…

I see the traditional Christmas Kurage have been set out 🎄🎅🏽🪼

Istanbul — Look around, feel history: Istanbul, Constantinople, Nova Roma — the city at the crossroads of the world — is a city of layers. First settled 6000 years ago each new community was built on top of the previous. And being located at such a strategic point as the world’s only trans-continental city, there have been a lot of …

Today is a working day of planning and reading. The perfect day to walk-to-think, periodically stopping at cafes to read/write. I am wandering through Kyobashi and Shiromi where I get a view of Osaka Castle 🏯🍂 and spot some tourists driving gokarts 🏎️ in costumes 🤷‍♂️ Stimulating!

Uploaded a bunch of photos/vids from Istanbul. You can check out the collection. I will follow up with a blog post later this week. 📸 www.flickr.com/photos/sa…

Early Sunday morning, everyone in the household asleep 😴 I sit on the balcony in the cool autumn weather 🍂 with a cup of steaming coffee ☕️ bathing in the warm sun 🌅 I hear birds🐦‍⬛ and kids at practice in the baseball diamond ⚾️ below. Enjoying being reflective. 🥰 Take care ya’ll!

In this in-depth Syllabus interview with Evgeny Morozov, William Davies presents a handy periodization of neoliberalism, including how their thought has changed throughout. +nuance Well worth the read www.the-syllabus.com/ts-spotli…

Takes me back to when I was working in Nagoya port as a bunker agent one season and boarded about 120 ships. Fun to learn how to read infrastructure like this: hakaimagazine.com/videos-vi…

Enjoying“How Infrastructure Works” by Deb Chachra with a nice mocha and donut at my new local coffee joint, a funky hipster place that is also an art gallery and skateboard shop 🛹☕️🎨 📚

Currently reading: How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra 📚 I was looking forward to start this book, but chapter 1 has me really excited. I will do chapter notes on Goodreads as usual.

A nice little video walkthrough of Embark, featured in the latest Ink & Switch essay on dynamic documents: www.youtube.com/watch

After 24 hours of 🚕🛩️🚌🛩️🚌🚕 I am back in Osaka 🇯🇵 Perfect blue sky and 17°C. Gorgeous! Kids will be home soon and it will be Turkish Delight for everyone 🙌 🇹🇷

Wheels up! See you in Japan!

Last view of the sunset coming up over the Asian side of Istanbul, across the Bosphorus Strait. Soon I will be getting in a taxi to the airport, and making the long journey home, to the other edge of Asia.

Appreciate this deep dive on the costs to provide secure and private chat from an org I whole-heartedly support: Signal. They even dig into some of their unique privacy-preserving techniques, eg hiding GIF search terms (Meta aquired Giphy, getting a bunch of data before selling it on to …

Istanbul is the city of cats. I am at Kahve Dunyasi, a sort of Turkish Starbucks. It is pouring rain outside, so the cats take refuge inside the cafe!

Only a couple days left in Istanbul. Went back to the Hagia Sophia. Just amazing to think of this being built in the 6th century, and added to and extended for centuries. The dual half-domes hold up that gorgeous main dome, that still stands 1500 years on 🤯

Rooftop breakfast overlooking the Bosphorus as the sun rises over Asia

More scenes from Istanbul: the Galata Tower, symbol of the old 13th Genoese colony at the Fenerbahçe stadium in Kadikoy on the Asian side of Istanbul many many flags for 100th anniversary of the republic night view from above the Grand Bazaar

Some scenes from Istanbul: the Hagia Sophia inside the Hagia Sophia sun rises over the Bosporus from Asia the walls of Theodocius II, built in the 5th C

The roar of the chanting fans in the Besiktas stadium beside my hotel MIGHT keep me up for another 50mins for the second half of their Europa Conf match… but their passion is DEFINITELY putting a smile on my face! 😁⚽️🏟️

Welcome to Istanbul!

Whoa! The route is through Russian airspace! No polar route or southern bend for me this time. Turns out Turkish Air is one of the 55 that still fly through Russia: www.businessinsider.com/airlines-… See you in 13h40m 👋

The last time I was at T3 Haneda was before the border opened last year. It was a total ghost town, not one restaurant open and I had to eat at 7-11. Now it is full of tourists having late dinner at 9pm at a ton of open restaurants along halls designed to look like old Edo streets.

Almost time for wheels up! (Osaka Itami Airport)

Just left the house. It is now 🚎🚌✈️✈️ Osaka → Haneda → Istanbul

Attending the Internet Governance Forum - Stakeholders: (This is a post in a series about attending the Internet Governance Forum 2023 in Kyoto.) To describe where the Internet Governance Forum fits in terms of internet governance, we have to also describe the other stakeholders in the system. Internet governance is polycentric. The IGF is just one part …

Today, November 5th in the year of our lord Buddha 2567, the weather was 28 flippin’ degrees celcius here in Osaka 🥵 #ClimateCrisis

Took the new bike for a ride down the river this afternoon. Hit the old Sakuranomiya Public Hall, which used to be the entrance of the Japan Mint; across the street is the current Mint building; the bridge beside the Mint lit up with Osaka Castle top right; the Imperial Hotel with a dinner cruise.

Been prepping for my trip to Istanbul next week. Getting excited! So much to see so I have to be choosy. If you have recommendations please share! 🛫🇹🇷

“Some thoughts are come in to your head to die… but if brain is sick enough?” Genius 👏👏👏 ⌨️ #mechanicalkeyboard www.youtube.com/watch

And now for a little specialty coffee. This is an Ethiopian bean from Tamiru’s Sky Project. You can learn more here shop.glitchcoffee.com/en/produc… ☕️ #coffee

Found a nice little restaurant in the Asahi Newspaper buildings in downtown Osaka for lunch with my wife. I used to come to these buildings 20 years ago to train in jujutsu. A lot has changed!

Attending the Internet Governance Forum - Experience: (This is a post in a series about attending the Internet Governance Forum 2023 in Kyoto.) The Kyoto International Conference Center is a sprawling complex on the north side of the city, at the very last stop of the Kyoto Municipal Subway line. The subway exit features a circular chamber with a 10m …

Monthly Newsletter is out! buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…

IETF got backronym game 👏👏👏 SIP Best-practice Recommendations Against Network Dangers to privacY (sipbrandy) DANE Authentication for Network Clients Everywhere (dance) Serialising Extended Data About Times and Events (sedate) WebRTC Ingest Signaling over HTTPS (wish)

Attending the Internet Governance Forum - An intro: The Internet Governance Forum is a multistakeholder forum established by the United Nations and held annually around the world since 2006. The 18th edition was held in Kyoto, the city in which I reside, so I decided to attend. I have been to a few technical conferences, barricaded in rooms with …

Another of Japan’s charming manhole covers

Took the train up to Kyoto to the old apartment to pick up some things and see how the real estate agency interior designer staged the place with all kinds of modern furniture. We took some family selfies on the tiny European couch and at the dining table with the fancy plates 😂

Under the bridge art in Osaka

Well, we made it. Moved to Osaka successfully. Still some unpacking to do, but we made good progress. Really helps being minimalist 😅 Today at lunch the kids and I counted through every move we‘ve done since we first left Canada: 2020 = 4, 2021 = 3, 2022 = 3, 2023 = 1. We are getting good at it.

Went to Osaka to pick up keys to the new apartment. Popped into the neighbouring Tenjinbashisuji shopping arcade, which is said to be Japan’s longest at 2.6km and over 600 shops. Myakumyaku, the Expo mascot welcomes us!

Look what arrived the day before we move out! It is the pre-order I made forever ago of Jocelyne Allen’s translation of Susumi Higa’s award-winning OKINAWA manga. ⌛️😅📚

Goodnight Kyoto (from my balcony of the past 18 years)

Since I moved my standing desk, monitor, and everything out of the coworking space in preparation for our move to Osaka, this has been my standing work setup

On my way to get a latte ☕️ and maybe a slice of cake 🍰 just walking past a 13th C temple ☸️… as you do in #EverydayKyoto (only 4 more days left until we move 😢)

Forget that man baby manifesto, I recommend this one 🌱 www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com

GOLD: an acronym for sustainable web design principles = Green, Open, Lean, Distributed. 🌱Read more at branch.climateaction.tech/issues/is…

Stopping flying considerations: 🔗 Should I stop Flying — Outside Online Appreciate the discussion in this piece. It is something I have thought about for years, and actually one of the reasons I don’t look forward to when I return to Canada where everything is so remote. Imagining a no-fly future — whether due to carbon …

Good morning, clear blue sky. ☸️ 📸

Got a Covid booster in one arm, and a flu shot in the other 😵‍💫

🐡 Fugu skin hot sake 🍶

🌅 Sun has set on the final day of the #IGF2023. I attended 21 sessions, only about 5% of what was on offer. I had many interesting hallway discussions and took 7000 words worth of notes. I still have much follow up, and will write about takeaways. But for now, good night IGF, and thank you! 🙇‍♂️

Gorgeous day for day 4 of #IGF2023 at the Kyoto International Conference Center. Today we discussed how the nature of the internet has changed and how the IGF can evolve as a multistakeholder forum for the future. This year there are over 8000 participants, the most in the IGF’s 18 year …

Day 3 of #IGF2023. Starting the morning off with a Tor session. The weather has finally brightened up so we can get a nicer view of the Kyoto International Conference center’s garden. THIS is the Kyoto I want everyone to experience 🥰

Official greetings at the opening ceremony for the #IGF2023 conference. Lots of messaging around keeping a SINGLE internet, and “global digitalization” (getting EVERYONE online)

A few snaps from Day 0 of the #IGF2023 (Descriptions in the alt tags)

Been in #IGF2023 sessions all morning. Doing booths and hallway track in the afternoon. Just had Taro Kono and Maria Ressa walk by.

Just finished Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy by Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman 📚 (off the cuff review posted on Goodreads)

The new Nintendo mural is complete in the Hankyu underground passage between Karasuma and Kawaramachi stations! I popped down early before there were many commuters to take some photos. Symbol of Kyoto! 🎮📸

The UN’s #IGF2023 is about to kick off on Sunday. Over 7200 people will be attending here in Kyoto. Already I feel like a ton of people have arrived, but it is hard to delineate them from the regular tourists 😅 Still though, getting excited! intgovforum.org/en/conten…

Opening with a quote from Invisible Cities and celebrating reading to muse on atomization and social capital? This was a nice little read reviewcanada.ca/magazine/…

Been waiting for the internet repairman for 2 days, recalling those times on the road with spotty to no internet connection. O! Where art thou device-to-device sync!? ⛈️👰 #LoFiSoftware

Goodnight Kyoto

Finished The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow 📚 If you want to catch up on 20 years of Cory Doctorow’s advocacy for a better society in just a few hours — or get someone ELSE caught up — this is just excellent!

Sharing my Mastodon and Bluesky links with the accompanying 🐘 and 🦋 emoji I realize the “Elephant & Butterfly” would make for a cozy pub

First!: Hello there! 👋 Thought I would give a quick self introduction. I am a 🇨🇦 in 🇯🇵 interested in tech and society, Buddhism, travel, and more. You can get to know me more here: micro.chadkohalyk.com/about-me/ I have a large collection of posts at my main site (https://chadkohalyk.com), most recently: …