In reality, we hire social media to distract our minds from our unpleasant, average life. And, by faking photos, to convince others, including ourselves, that our life is amazing while internally we are in pain.

* We hire social media to create a virtual representation of the life we want to live, but never actually live it.
* We hire social media to observe the life we want, but never actually experience it.

This comment right here is what got me to close my laptop and go out for a run. My reward (beyond energizing me for the day) was this great view of Mt. Fuji with the moon overhead. I naturally posted it to social media.

A restored visual gallery of the archived Geocities sites, sorted by neighborhood.

• This week was my first full week on burning vacation days With Leo's school canceled it means we've been playing and hanging out everyday. It's been a lot of fun. One good thing that's come of this is he's being exposed to English all day long, so he's trying to speak English more.
• Leo's also developed enough (as you do when you're 3 and a half) to have mostly regular (if not somewhat bizarre) conversations. He sees a knot on a tree while swinging on the swings have we have a full conversation about how it looks like an eye, grandma and how he likes trees. I hope to remember these days for long to come.
• We had a going away zoom-nomikai with my old team. It was a lot of fun to just shoot the breeze. Kai found these games you can do together while on zoom. Simple things like someone has to draw a picture and the other participants have to guess. Or everyone is assigned a secret word that, if they say it they lose, and everyone tries to have a conversation to get that person to say that word. I was skeptical at first, but it was a lot of fun.
• I went to Tokyo (proper) for the first since February 2020. When I got on the Shonan-shinjuku line at the front, to look out the window, the driver closed the screen so I couldn't see out of the big window. At the next stop, I sat down and he opened it back up. Maybe he thought I was going to record it or something and it made him uncomfortable? 
  
  One thing I missed, and I hadn't realized it, was how when walking around Tokyo, you're just minding your own business when suddenly a fantastic smell comes from some little hole-in-the-wall restaurant. You don't get that much walking around my neighborhood as it's mostly residential.
• The reason for the trip to Tokyo was my first (and last) visit to the new BP office to turn in my laptop and pick up some personal items that I had left at the old Shinjuku office back in early 2020.
• Jan reported some bugs in my microformats in Tanzawa, which I've since fixed. Yay!
• I went to the Odakyu Romance Car Museum (just outside Ebina station) with Leo. The Romance Car is a limited express train that runs from Shinjuku to Hakone / Enoshima. I've only ridden it once a couple years ago when we took Leo to Shinjuku to meet some old US co-workers.
  
  The museum itself is a blast. Beyond 4 or 5 real Romance Cars (2 of which you can actually sit in), they've got a huge diorama of the Romance Car route with model trains running up and down. There's even a few that you can drive with real(ish) train controls. Leo drove the Enoden around. Totally worth a visit if you're in the area - or even if you're not.
  

  

I was even more excited to learn that the small web exists today just as it did back when I was a kid. It's just less visible.

Loved this screengrab of Geocities neighborhoods. I love this idea of a collection of sites in a given neighborhood and getting webspace (there’s a term I haven’t used in 20 years).

It may exist already, but it would be neat to have a modern Indie/Small version of web neighborhoods (naturally still on your own domain/site). Which neighborhood would I settle in?