Golden week finished up a few weeks ago. A good time to reset and enjoy some hobbies and explore. S and I checked out a few stations near where we’re looking to move to something this year. Trying to find something further out from central Tokyo. Hoping for cheaper rent1. Even though it’s further out, the area is actually a bit more lively than our current station. It’s a common connection point for the rest of the area. Should be rather fast access into Tokyo. We found a coffee bean shop that roasts the beans to your order. It’s the first one we’ve come across that has competitive pricing with our usual bean-man.
Moving to another country had a weird impact on book consumption. I still feel like I am figuring it out. Much more aware of how much space books can take up, which affects me impulse buying physical copies2. How am I going to move these to the next place? Would I bring these back to the US? Ebooks seem like they should be the answer for this. But seems the industry really does not want to move forward on ebooks. DRM is pretty common to the point that the more independent ebook sellers are forced to have it. Which makes it hard to read it on your desired e-reader. Instead it has some weird adobe reader like garbage. So you end up on kindle or kobo stores. It’s a pain. That said, I have been reading on a kobo lately. And I’ve been getting through way more books out on it than the iPad.
I have returned to my 750 words routine. This has me thinking about writing a bit more and I am trying to find more ways to be writing. Devine had this interactive fiction project called Paradise. To them, it was sort of like a interactive fiction meets operating system. You could basically create the world within the game which is a lot of fun. It was in the browser and you could interact with what other people created. There was some amount of programmable interactions. It was fun to play around in, but I believe it’s no longer online. Since I’ve been checking out the elixir programming language, I think that an interactive fiction project could be a fun way to learn the language. I need to find some recommendations for some good interactive fictions though. I want to see what people are trying out with the format. Get some ideas for some mechanics and then see what I can do myself.
Lately, I have been watching videos about oil painting. Painting in oils always seemed the most difficult to me. I think there’s some amount of truth to that. There’s considerations you need to do in oil painting that is just not a problem when dealing with gouache. You have to be careful with the materials, but the painting process itself seems to have a lot of flexibility. I am curious. But will continue down my gouache route for the time being.
Shout out to Anh's blog. It’s so cool. I want to get tiny drawings to put around on my site. She does neat designs on her website. Very handcrafted and polished. She shares from time to time how she goes about making stuff. I like that she has a style guide on her own writing. I am not nearly that consistent.
The rental fees many apartments charge, it takes a year or more to actually start saving money unless you really harshly cut comforts. It’s tricky in our case as we want enough space for us both to work from home. ↩︎
This does not phase S though, she goes through so many books. But she’s also selling them after her stack gets too tall. Though I don’t know how well second hand books in English sell here. ↩︎