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…

Screen full of monitors for different sensors of the SLIM moon lander, with an inset showing two commentators

“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!

Chad selfie on the outer moat pointing to Osaka Castle

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” 🤔 🎼

The curtain goes up on the mandoliners about to play their third actA lyric sheets with songs from the 1960s and 1970s

Current status: mandolin concert 🎶

Theatre from the back. The brocade curtain displaying Biwako scenery is down and people are seated waiting. A 24 piece orchestra of mandolins, guitars, and other stringed instruments plays on stage.

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 🙏 🤲 🙇‍♂️

Screenshot of a page with the following highlight: “Find the strength to do both.”

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…

A bowl of rice porridge with a number of visible green herbs

Concentric circles of content

Boris goes through his complex social media setup:

Mostly POSSE bmannconsulting.com

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 partial-POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) but not quite ready for PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site).

POSSE ± PESOS?

I use Micro blog as my main launch point on the web now, cross-posting to my 🦋 Bluesky (@chadkohalyk.com) and 🐘Mastodon account (@chadkoh@indieweb.social). I have Bridgy working for my Bluesky account so replies there come back here which is good, but haven’t figured out a workaround to do that for my Mastodon account. The Micro blog has its own Fedi address which can be followed at @chadkoh@micro.blog, but I x-post everything anyways so there isn’t really a need to follow that. I don’t really want to go through another Masto migration and consolidate my main fedi presence to @micro.blog 🫤 (my turn to cite Erin Kissane, this time on the challenge of Mastodon migrations).

Twitter of course is gone (archives here or here) and I do have a company Fedi handle @chad@fission.social which I actually don’t use that much since any “professional” content I post pretty much just goes straight into my normal feeds.

I really enjoy the bookshelf and photos features of Micro Blog. It gives people a good sense of what is going on in my world without overwhelming them. There is much more detail on my Goodreads (in terms of updates and tracking of reading) and Flickr (where I post a lot more pics than what goes on my blog). I could theoretically push my Goodreads RSS feed and all my Flickr posts back to Microblog but I think that might be a bit overkill for most audiences. 🤔

Simple diagram showing Micro.blog in the center, arrows pointing out to Mastodon and Bluesky, and some questioning arrows from other services to Micro blog (Flickr, Letterboxd, Goodreads), implying the question of “to PESOS or not?”

Social “media” sidebar

Goodreads is the social reader’s bane of existence. Truly a template of corporate acquisition, centralization, and enshittification. I was able to quit Facebook and Google (except for shared docs with people) but cannot quit Amazon! Anyways, I started using Bookwyrm (chadkoh@bookwyrm.social), a fediverse social book-tracker, last year. It is mostly okay but has some shortcomings. I would love to make a Goodreads alt using the AT Protocol (see my call on Bluesky here).

I use book social networks not for their recommendation engines, but for the social part: I want to know what everyone else is reading! ATP could be a good solution because you don’t have your book activity and reviews locked up in another silo, and ATP could provide the underlying infra for social network effects. I wonder if the ATP approach could result in a better experience than ActivityPub in this instance? 🤔

Once you have books, then you do film, tv, comics, anime, etc. Media tracking, sharing, and reviews are a huge part of user-generated content online, and just like journalists being able to take their audiences with them I think people with a large corpus of social UGC would appreciate being able to maintain control over their activity.

Concluding consensus

The online CCU (Chad Cinematic Universe) has many different components and I fear bringing them all together in one place… is just too much! Splitting things up a little, with specific feeds (just follow my books on GR or BW, or movies on Letterboxd, or photos on Flickr) allows people to get just the right amount of Chad they can handle. If they want a more general feed they can go directly to https://micro.chadkohalyk.com and get a little taste of everything. And then of course, if they want a personal wrap-up on more of a monthly basis, they can subscribe to my newsletter (glibly named chadlibs) where I just share the highlights. I try to provide options to meet people where they are at… which has led to this fairly complex setup. But I do think it could be better.

Any suggestions?

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 ⛩️

Stone Torii at a shrine with new years decorations. Airplane flies over in the blue sky above

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

Map of Japan showing a level 5 quake at the Noto Peninsula

明けましておめでとうございます🎉🐲