Month: August 2016

  • The Trouble with Comments

    I haven’t had comments on this site for quite a few years — I can’t remember when I made the switch, probably around the early 2010s, but it was a reaction to the constant battle against spam, as well as noticing that comments on the site were getting lower, and I figured that feedback could…

  • Street Typography

    Lately I’ve been really enjoying the “nodoca” and “typosanpo” accounts on Twitter, that share photos of signs — and their typographic messages — in Japan. I’ve also come across this page by Tokyo-based designer Dan Vaughan, where he’s doing the same thing. The photo in this post is from this tweet.

  • Reigns

    I haven’t been playing games on iOS of late, but finally got around to trying out Reigns last night (a game I’d been hearing raves about), and loved it. It’s such a simple idea – a binary text adventure game (think choose-your-own-adventure) – but presented in such a beautiful way, and with the added mechanics…

  • Only Yesterday

    I don’t quite know why I’d never watched this movie before – I’ve watched pretty much every Ghibli film, and I thought I had seen this – but I was reminded of it recently because they’re planning a new western release for it with new English voice acting (the film originally came out in 1991).…

  • Airbnb’s Tokyo Office

    A new post on Designboom showcases the beautiful new Tokyo offices of Airbnb, produced with Suppose Design Office. Despite the news we hear of Airbnb having some legal issues in Japan — or even just not being welcomed by residents who dislike seeing their neighbors rent out their spaces — it seems like the company is…

  • Picotachi Vol. 35

    The indie gaming scene in Tokyo is on the rise — the Branching Paths documentary illustrates this quite nicely — and one of the components of that growing scene is the Picotachi series. Organized by game dev Joseph White at his Pico Pico Cafe — a lovely space in Kichijoji — it’s a bilingual show-and-tell series…

  • Toco Toco on Daisuke Ishiwatari

    Toco Toco is an interview video series directed by Anne Ferrero (who also directed the fantastic Branching Paths documentary), and the latest episode features Guilty Gear director Daisuke Ishiwatari. The series was recently re-launched and currently focuses on game creators — the previous episode focused on Suda51.

  • The Get Down

    This show is fantastic. I’m three episodes in (of the six episodes we can currently watch, with the second half coming out at a later date), and I’m just so in love with the cast and awesome music – well, pretty much all of the music, I just don’t care for the “modern” hip-hop that opens…

  • Batman: The Killing Joke

    I didn’t like this much. More than anything, I just thought it was boring. I do remember that the original graphic novel was a classic story back when it came out, but I haven’t read it since then (although I do still have an original copy in one of my long boxes in my parents’…

  • Twinsters

    Watched this yesterday, a touching documentary that follows two girls born in South Korea who discover they are twins (they were each adopted, with no knowledge that they had siblings) after one spots the other in a YouTube video, and then they connect via social media. A story of our times – the power of…