Walking through history in Heidelberg
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Old friends and older castles
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London, Part 2 — Another trip report
Sunday, June 7, 2026
Samurai at the British Museum, the treasures of the British Library, and just enjoying the lovely weather
Reading the Journals of Younghusband
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
The overstuffed bed of the Seman Hotel in Kashgar was a luxury after a 30+ hour bus ride along the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. The lighting in the room was low, with shadows adding more complexity to the fancy moulding and cornices. I read Peter Hopkirk while leaning on a mountain of pillows. Prior to becoming a hotel in 1950, the building served as the embassy of the Russian empire in the 19th century.
Elaborating Westminster Abbey
Sunday, May 24, 2026
The churches of western Canada I have experienced are angular, one floor buildings constructed out of cedar or some such wood in the 1960s or 70s, usually with an era-appropriate abstract stained glass window often depicting a dove or flowers. Pretty basic, frontier stuff. Travelling to Germany I saw a lot of old impressive churches, but the insides were sparse, utilitarian affairs. Still, a level up for me. Although the fantastic Hagia Sophia in Istanbul started as church, its status as a working mosque puts it out of the running.
Handwriting, journaling, and LLMs
Monday, May 18, 2026
There is a cubby of my bookshelf with some ragged handwritten journals, dating back to my first real trip abroad to Thailand and Hong Kong in 1994. Most of my major trips have an associated journal, filled with disconnected chickenscratch, laid down at night in hostels and hotels after long days of seeing important temples or trudging through deserts, mountain passes, and crowded hot city streets. There is also a 5 Year Journal that my wife got me with entries from my years in Nagoya.
Podcast: Biography of Tor
Thursday, April 9, 2026
Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy This episode of Peoples & Things completely nerd sniped me. On recommendation from Biella Coleman, hosts Lee Vinsel and Paula Bialski interview Ben Collier about his new book Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy (available Open Access from MIT Press. I love ethnographic works on computing history and especially admire Biella’s book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.
Back from ATmosphere Conf 2026
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Recovering from the four+ days of the second annual ATmosphereConf, this year held here in Vancouver at the UBC campus. It was more than twice as big as last year’s inaugural event in Seattle, and even more international with many folks coming from Europe, Japan, and Brazil. The community is very thoughtful about how to make hashtag#opensocial better for communities, as demonstrated by some excellent presentations from folks like Erin Kissane, Blaine Cook, Rudolph Fraser and many many more.
AAS conference report
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
No longer online?
Exilic design
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
NDC are back. exilic design [is] the act of knowingly building within the Para-Real… protecting our own memory through deliberate fragility. (Emphasis mine) the exilic are venueless. Their participants know the server won’t be there tomorrow. They treat the right to disappear, distort, and misremember as sacred, or at least, as inevitable. They document on their own terms, with their own tools, and preserve through adaptation. They recalibrate after loss, borrowing from sneakernet traditions for out-of-band transfer and redeployment.
Engaged Buddhism message
Monday, March 2, 2026
Doug from Doug’s Dharma has had enough 👏
Newspeak House — College of Political Technology
Friday, February 27, 2026
Chad opens an event at Newspeak House At the top of Brick Lane on Bethnel Green Road in east London the streets are lined with four-storey buildings tightly packed shoulder-to-shoulder, alternating brick and plaster. At street level there are pizza parlours, cafés, vinyl record stores, and a shop that sells terrariums. One building, measuring four gabled windows across with two wide storefront windows at the ground level, has nothing in the display for sale.
Discovering deep history in London
Sunday, February 22, 2026
An unexpected thing happened to me on my first trip to London earlier this month. I stayed in Brick Lane close to the venue (which I will write about separately!) for the event I put on. The first four days I stayed in the area prepping for the event and meeting people, so pretty much just work work work… but after the event was over (and I finally got a full night’s sleep) I had 3 days to explore the city, which I did mostly on foot.
Competition Bureau Canada report on Data Portability
Friday, January 23, 2026
Last week the Canadian Competition Bureau released the report Your Data, Your Control: How data portability can unlock competition and empower consumers. The surprisingly readable report centers around an experiment exploring data portability in the insurance sector, calculating that “introducing data portability could save Canadians “between $1.10 billion and $3.83 billion in both time and money on their annual costs.” I decided to read the report to understand how the Canadian federal government thinks about data portability in general, with an eye towards other digital spaces like social media, cloud, AI, and the types of stuff I am interested in.
Best of 2025
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Notable reads, watches, and questions for the year
Surburban Development Cycle — a case from Japan
Sunday, December 28, 2025
For a couple of years we kept a very small apartment in Kyoto for monthly visits while we were taking care of my parents-in-law. The rent was cheaper than getting a hotel each time, and my parents stored stuff there which justified the expense. The apartment was on the very edge of southwest Kyoto in a neighbourhood called Rakusai Newtown, a housing project started in the 1970s for the families of men working in the factories of West Kyoto.
Judging AI on its ability to expand capacity
Sunday, December 28, 2025
From Evgeny Morozov’s essay Socialism After AI: The driving imperative would not be “growth” measured as ever more commodities, but the enlargement of what people are actually able to do and be, individually and collectively. On that view, AI would be judged by whether it opens new spaces of competence, understanding, and cooperation, and for whom. A tool that lets teachers and students work in their own dialects, interrogate history from their vantage points, and share and refine local knowledge would score highly.
You live the story you write
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
But you don’t remember that you wrote it… and that is what makes life fun
Vancouver’s “Powerbroker” — a sort of review of “Becoming Vancouver”
Sunday, October 19, 2025
Who is the Robert Moses of Vancouver?
Re-framing Franz Fanon
Friday, October 17, 2025
Lewis Gordon on Frantz Fanon This is a beautiful interview with Lewis Gordon, scholar of the work of Franz Fanon. Gordon contends that many people mis-interpret Fanon, especially around his views of political violence. Gordon’s reframing of Fanon is succinct and captures a side I didn’t get before. Here are couple of choice quotes, but the episode is short and I encourage you to listen tot he whole thing. Dr Gordon is a great speaker.
Exploring AI and American Fascism
Friday, October 10, 2025
mikerugnetta.com’s excellent essay on slopaganda, agit slop, and what it really says about power
New Kit! Ricoh GR IV
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Early Xmas!🎄🎁 New kit! 📷 I mulled getting a Fujifilm X100VI when they came out but wanted something smaller. Been watching the iteration of GRs and when they announced the IV I signed up right away. Gonna carry this thing everywhere! #photography
Back to Birken
Saturday, September 27, 2025
A travel report from my 7 day silent retreat
Revisiting Malazan
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
There and back again
Summer Travel
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Travelogue by bullet point
Why BrainRot
Sunday, August 3, 2025
In the second segment of this Neverpo.st episode researcher Emily Owens discusses “BrainRot” as a rare method of decompression for today’s teenagers: There are loads of things you could do to decompress. Sometimes it is use your phone, but oftentimes it’s go for a walk, like go for a swim, take your bicycle out, paint a painting, write a little story. And we’re, I think, systematically discouraged from doing those things because those things don’t make anybody any money.
TTRPG hole
Tuesday, July 8, 2025
Unboxing my new Starter Set of The One Ring. (Now some very personal blogging that will only interest a few of you) Last week I wrote about the fantasy hole I have been in. Contributing to this is the fact that we are also in a Table Top Role Playing Game hole as well. I have been playing TTRPGs with the same group since 2013. We started together after a big Board Game Night where we organized two simultaneous sessions of The Red Box to introduce people to tabletop gaming.
Fantasy hole
Monday, June 30, 2025
Yeah, I have fallen down one in the past few months for sure. Last year my brother introduced me to The Blade Itself (2006) by Joe Abercrombie, part of the (currently) 10 book series called The First Law. A year later and I have completed the first trilogy, the three standalone novels, and the short story collection. Keep in mind that I am not one to binge book series… in fact I like to spread them out a little since I prefer variety in my reading diet week-to-week.
Scale
Monday, June 30, 2025
It is possible to identify a natural scale. When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself. These scales must be identified and the parameters of human endeavours within which human life remains viable must be explored. — Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
Coffee recommendations in Kyoto and Osaka ☕
Saturday, June 14, 2025
I was watching this cool tour of coffee shops and roasteries in Vancouver that hits a lot of the famous places. The Youtuber does some of these tours when he visits locations so I prepared some reccos for him for the next time he is in Western Japan. Thought I should share them here for you KYOTO WEEKENDERS COFFEE TOMINOKOJI maps.app.goo.gl/yX4yemvBa… Ambiance is top. They aren’t open very often. Don’t bother bringing a laptop since there are no tables.
Une petite catharsis of anomie — a review of Deep Work by Cal Newport
Thursday, May 22, 2025
Deep Work is Cal Newport’s highest selling book. He published it in early 2016 and it made waves at the time since he strongly argues against social media. Cal is infamously not on social media (unless you count blogging and podcasting 😜) so it is a little ironic that the reason I finally decided to pick up this book was due to a post I saw on social media. Although the book explores quite a few topics, to sum it up from my perspective, he introduces a term well known in software circles to a more general audience: context switching.