• The Week #325

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    • 🪙 It was Silver Week last week, like Golden Week, but in September instead of April, and not every year, only every 4 - 6-ish years. I bridged the gap with holiday and had, including weekends, 10 days off in a row. I needed that.
    • 🎂 I turned 41. We went for separate cakes rather than whole this year because a whole cake is too much cake for 3 people. I went for a Mont Blanc and while it was really good, it was so unbelievabely rich. I only needed half.
    • 🎮 Growing up and in college I owned a few different Gameboy systems – the original, a blue Gameboy Pocket (blue), an Advance, and a DSLite (white). Much to my chagrin, these have all disappeared over the years for one reason or another. I never owned a 3DS. For my birthday present to myself, I bought a used (and promptly modded, super easy) a Nintendo 3DS (colbalt blue). Why? I'm glad you asked.

      I wanted a small game system I could take around with me – something to do on the train/airplane etc.. when I don't feel like reading on my Kindle and isn't scrolling on my phone. Maybe a bit of an odd choice as I don't play games on my phone. 

      Gameplay can also be paused in an instant by simply closing 3DS, no need to press a button and navigate to a menu. Physical and reliable. Unlike a Switch, it fits in your pocket and can be thrown into your bag as the screens and buttons are protected.

      It could be just the games I am picking to play (Ocarina of Time mostly, a litle Animal Crossing),but the games feel like the're designed to be played, not to get your addicted. The pace and depth feels a bit slower and a bit deeper. 

      And the games that aren't deeper are just silly fun – AR shooting game where it uses the camera to make you/something a flying monster and you shoot at it with balls all around you.

      It's a bit nostalgic of a simpler time for connectivity. The 3DS has Wifi, but when you turn it on it doesn't have ads like the Switch. It's used for the eshop (now closed) and detecting other 3DS users around you. ( There aren't many, I took mine with me into Shibuya at night and not a single one, maybe I'd have better luck with Akihabara).

      The 3DS subreddit and YouTube are full of videos about people going through a similar jounrney – slowly unbundling what we bundled up with our phones. Finding the right level of technology in our lives.
    • ✍️ The 3DS/DS also sported a collection of educational software, not just games. Leo has taken to these like a fish to water and willingly practices his kanji and math using the Doraemon games. 

      Yes, similar things exist on tablets and or dedicated education devices (android tablets), but then you've got all of the problems that tablets bring or a something that requires a subscription, internet connection, and cancelation fees when none of that should be required. Finding the right level of technology in our lives. Or maybe just fully embracing un-enshittified tech?

  • The Week #324

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    • 🗺️ My maps have broken on my site and I need to fix them. Truth is, it didn't just happen this week. But blockage was inconsistent enough where I wasn't sure if it was actually broken or a transient error. The mapping code hasn't changed in years, so will be a good one for me to dive into and upgrade while I'm there. 
    • ☔️ A typhoon came and went. It skirted along Tokyo and dumped 2.5x the usual monthly totals of rain in 24 hours. While we were fine, this amount of rain isn't normal. Naturally it comes during a 3-day string of public holidays.
    • 🍕 Using ground meat to make sausage has been a new thing of mine (Doing something 3x makes it a thing). This kicked off by wanting American-style breakfast sausage patties and a) not being able to find them locally, no matter the shape, and b) wanting to lower the amount of processed meats in our diets. Using ground meat + seasonings, you know exactly what's in it and it's quick to make/store.

      While we were stuck inside, I realized also I had all of the ingredients for Italian sausage (fennel, sage, oregano, garlic and friends) as well. So this batch of sausage got split in two. I immediately put the Italian sausages on a pizza and :chef-kiss:. I foresee me buying larger packages of ground meat to experiment more and freeze.
    • 🧑‍💻 I spent some time cleaning up a maintenace PR for Tanzawa. It's getting close to being ready as I clean up the commits left over from OpenCode. I'd like to hurry up and get it in so I can point the robots at my maps. But also quality must be maintained.
    • 🎶 As much as I want to dunk on it, the freakin' algorithm delivered again (though as background music to a video) – Olivia Dean. I especially like her song "Nice to Each Other" (Apple Music, YouTube). 

  • The Week #323

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    • 🗡️ I was very wrong to guess we had another month left in Tears of the Kingdom. We had a few more days. Which is to say, we beat Tears of the Kingdom after 2.5 years! When Leo first beat Ganon, he/we went in with a "this is just practice" mindset, and yet he kicked his butt. Such a good game.
    • ⚔️ Lining up with the 40th anniversary of Zelda, Nintendo has announced dates for and released gameplay footage of a Zelda themed Switch 2 and a remake of Ocarina of Time. I have never been more tempted to pick up a Switch 2.
    • 🍄 This is a Nintendo heavy week. When we saw Super Mario Galaxy movie they gave you a collectable playing card and another card with a QR code to enter a contest. I completely forgot I entered it, but received notification this week that we won! Sometime early next month a question block cushion and Yoshi blanket should arrive 🎉.
    • 🤒 Leo spent a couple days back from school sick. He hasn't been sick for probably 6 months. Between school closing for rain and this, he only went to school twice last week.
    • 📚 I finished reading Crafting Engineering Strategy. I'll need to re-read parts of it as I go apply what I learned, but it's given me a lot of food for though for how I can approach my work in a different way. Next up I've started on Essentialism, a book I heard a lot about when it first came out, wanted to read, but never did.

  • The Week #322

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    • 🗡️ After a couple of years, but we finally got the master sword in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I think we've still got another month or so in the game. 
    • 📚 Always thinking how can we foster a love of reading, I don't know why it took me so long to realize I should embrace Leo's current boom and get books about that. Embracing the Zelda boom, I picked up an Ocarina of Time manga. And he's already finished it just 2 days. My next task will be to figure out how I can transition from comics to actual books.
    • 😋 We went to a friend's house for lunch and they made us some Sri Lankan roasted chicken and potatoes, it was soo good. I really need to visit Sri Lanka.
    • ☔️ While we were at our friend's house we got notice from the school that due to the expected level 5 rain school would be closed on Monday.  It rained a lot overnight, but not too much out of the ordinary. And on Monday itself. just light rain. I appreciate the caution, but also working while the boy is stuck indoors has its challenges.

  • The Week #321

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    • 🍫 As we're reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory before bed, I tried to see if Leo would watch the original and to my surprise, he watched all of it! He's a huge fan of the oompa loompas. As we're still reading the book, he's remembering the dialogue from the movie and repeating it.
    • 🍂 We had the first states of autumn in Kanto over the weekend with a low of 20 degrees. It felt fantastic and, despite me not drinking pumpkin spice lattes, I found myself wanting a pumpkin spice  latte. It's meant to cool down Friday this week, but I doubt it's for good.
    • 🏫 School is back in session. While it is nice to get back to routine, that routine also brings with it routine challenges. I know it's summer camp school vs regular school, so it's not fair comparison, buuut when he got home from school this summer he'd blurt out and tell us what he learned i.e. he was excited and having fun, while at his regular school even if you ask him what he learned he doesn't remember. Something must change.

  • The Week #320

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    • ⚽️ Ted Lasso is back on (🎉). I'm very glad it's been renewed and given he's coaching the women's team in Richmond, it opens an entire new storyline. The first 3 episodes have been fantastic.
    • 🍕 We had one of Leo's classmates and family over pizza and it was a success. It was nice to be able to talk with other foreign parents about school, raising families in Japan and the like. I also have a sudden unexplained urge to visit Sri Lanka. Maybe a good use for the miles I've been accumulating.
    • 🧽 The dishwasher broke. During the dry cycle it just made some beeps and started flashing. As it broke on the weekend I had to wait for the manufactuer to open so I could call to get someone to repair it. I was expecting to have to do all my dishes by hand for a week, but they were able to come out and fix it same day. There was a leak somewhere in it that had been going for a while, so replacing a part fixed it up. They're meant to last 10 years, so hopefully this repair gets it another 3 to actually reach the target lifespan.

      The repair man was fairly soft spoken. As we were finishing up, I got semi-nihongo jouzued, but it was in the context of when he saw my name and called he was nervous because...would he be able to communicate. And that I could communicate and communicate well, he was relieved. Recently he's been doing a lot of repairs for Chinese customers and that's been difficult.

      Yay for me, but also,  I can't help but wonder if experiences like his bubble up and is one of the drivers behind the surge with the far right in Japan and the increasingly strict requirements for permanent residency. (No idea where he stands on all of it, it wasn't a political conversation and just something he said in passing.)

  • The Week #319

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    • 💤 Jet lag coming back was brutal. Waking up at 2am after 5 hours sleep feeling fully rested is great...until about 3pm. Fully covered now though.
    • 🐪 Since Leo went to the British Museum and saw the ancient Egyptian artifacts, he's been on a bit of (his first!) history kick. To encourage this wider range of thinking, we found that a museum with high quality replicas in Yokohama called Mystery of Tutankhamen and made a visit. It was pretty cool. While looking about I also learned that Leo knows how to make a mummy/how you remove the braaaaiiins.
    • 📚 I finished reading Team: Getting Things Done with Others, a book co-authored by David Allen (of GTD) about applying GTD to teams (makes sense, right?). If you're a fan of GTD and work on a team, I recommend giving it a read.
    • 🤖 Being a paying member of Kagi (it's great, you should subscribe to your search engine and such), I'm trying to use more of it. As of late, I am getting into(?)  Assistant. Essentially it's an AI chat interface, but I can group them into chats if I want to save them longer than 24 hours. This is proving handy as I research various topics (as one does). Aaaand I just found out there's a kid mode, I may be upgrading to a Family Plan soon.

  • The Week #318

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    • 🇬🇧 English classes went well for Leo. He is motivated to learn and speak English. While playing Switch at the hotel, he even started speaking to himself in English, "I hate lynel... because they are strong", which is perhaps the longest sentence I've heard him speak in English. By the end of the program he was playing with kids in the park, as kids do.
    • 🛝 The Diana Memorial Playground re-opened and we were able to visit the opening weekend! I hadn't realized that Heer's bench was directly in front of the playground. When we arrived there was a massive queue. 30 minutes later and we made it in where Leo played for a couple of hours. As it hasn't rained in London for over a month, the water features were all off.
    • 🍺 Leo wanted to visit a pub while we were in London, which doesn't too much convincing from me. I settled on The Engineer, which was a short walk from our hotel. The atmosephere was great and the food delicous. I shared the fish and chips with Leo and had a Guiness Zero. Love a cozy pub.
      The Engineer at Golden-ish Hour
    • 🪐 On the plane ride home I watched Project Hail Mary. Such a good movie. If you haven't seen it yet, do watch it. It makes me wish I understood chemestry better – it seems quite useful when you're out in the middle of the galaxy and need to understand what it is that's around you.

  • The Week #317

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    • ✈️ We flew to the UK – work for me and a week long english course for Leo. The flight itself was smooth as can be with ANA. While Leo didn't really watch movies on the console this time about, instead he played his switch and piano in Garageband.
    • 🇬🇧 Escaping the humidity of Japan has been nice, but it's been 31 degrees during the day here as well. And it hasn't rained in a month, so parks that are usually full of green grass are brown. The mornings are still glorious. We went to the Diana Memorial Playground again this year, but it's still in the final stages of the rebuild. It's meant to be open for Summer 2026 – let's hope it finishes in the next couple of days.
    • 🕹️ The Science Museum still has the video game history exhibit going, so we had to go. Many of the games were the same, but many where not. This year we played our first first-person shooters together with Golden Eye for the N64 and Halo3 on X-Box. The latter being his favorite game that he played this year.
    • 🪩 We explored Camden as well. Last year we went to Camden after the London Zoo, we barely could see anything. This year we could actually go deep into Camden Market and browse / look around. I think the main driver for that was there are a number of anime and manga shops, so every so often he could see a lot of Dragon Ball figures or an entire Bandai store full of gacha-gacha 😅. 

  • The Week #316

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    • 📚 Before bed each night we read to Leo. This week we started having reading time where we all read together for 10 - 15 minutes before we read to him. After a couple of weeks, we finished reading Matilda. I haven't read the book since I was in the 5th grade and mostly relied on the movie/play for my recollections of the story, but it did end differently than the movie. (Spoiler alert!) Not by a huge amount, but they did not have the adoption papers ready to go.
    • ⛺️ I tried to sell the tent and failed, but not because of a lack of trying. The company that I'm selling it to sends you a box, you put the tent in the box, then Sagawa comes and picks it up the next day or so. The large box was said to be a rectangle that would fit the tent and a bit. However, the box that arrived was a smaller square box. Thankfully I could send them a message on LINE and get a new box ordered, but I won't be able to actually sell the tent until next month when I'm back from a trip.
    • ☕️ I watched a video about Global Village Coffee House, the name of 90's esthetic that was everywhere e.g. Starbucks etc... and it made me feel like it's ready for a revival. With all of the stupid things happening everywhere, how nice would it be to get a coffee, sit on some comfortable seating, and think about us as the global village that we are. So good, right?
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