Tag: archives

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Meta

Mission Accomplished

Well, it took 4-5 months of work — doing it here and there, mostly on weekends — but I’ve finally managed to go through all of the 7500+ posts on the site (since rescuing my site archives back in August, but with most of the images missing) and got the images back in. There are posts here and there where it was impossible to get the image back, but I’m pretty satisfied with what I was able to rescue — and as I’ve done a million times, I give great thanks to Wayback Machine.

There’s still stuff I’d like to do, like go back and add proper tags to older posts, and incorporate some posts that were part of my moblog, or maybe even incorporate all of the posts from SNOW Magazine (my one year web magazine experiment), but I think I’m going to take a break for now, and explore doing that sometime next year.

But man, sure feels good to have my site back with proper archives, and I’m glad I was able to finish it before the end of the year.

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Meta Personal

2008 and Down

In my continuing archival work on this site, I hit a big milestone last night, in that I finished April 2008, which is pretty much the last time I regularly hit a month with 80+ posts — it only happens again a couple of times in November/December of 2009 for some reason.

I think the reason for the reduction in posts was that it was around the time I started contributing regularly to Wired‘s Game|Life blog, for which I was doing around 5 posts daily.

This means I should hopefully be speeding up as I go through the rest of the archives, getting it all finished in the weeks to come. That won’t be the end of it all though, as there are a few other things I’d like to do, like going through the first few years again to improve tags on posts, and also incorporating my early moblog posts, which used to be done as a separate blog.

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2005

This weekend I managed to finish going through the posts of 2005 (all 1063 of them). As I was going through these posts, I could see that it was a really important year for me. My first professional writing work started in 2004 as I became editor of MoCo Tokyo (a spinoff site to MoCo Loco, where I was also a contributor), and then at the very end of that year I started my monthly anime and design columns for Tokyo Q, but it was in 2005 that I started my monthly “On Design” column for The Japan Times, wrote for Gawker’s Gizmodo and Gridskipper, and also wrote some other freelance pieces. I’d definitely point to that year as the start of my writing career.

It was also the year I started writing almost weekly round-ups of Japanese magazines — which years later led to me starting the now-defunct The Magaziner website. It was also the year of me and Jesper’s first big collaboration together, in the form of our “Mamma Gun” exhibition/event at Cafe Pause, part of Swedish Style/Tokyo Design Week.

I’m pretty thankful that I can go through archives of my life like this, and see exactly how things happened and evolved.

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Meta Music Personal

The New 52

No, I’m not referring to the “New 52” revamp that DC Comics launched in 2011, but rather to the fact that as we close off the month of August (it’s just past 23:00 as I write this), I’ve written 52 posts on the blog this month (this will be post 53).

The last time the site had over 50 posts in a month was in December 2009 (89), and that was truly when my activity started reducing drastically, as it then hovered around 10-20 until the summer of 2012, and then down to barely 1-2 per month in the years that followed until now. You can easily see this by looking at the monthly archive list in the sidebar of the site, which I have active right now.

The desire to start blogging again was sparked when I started work on rescuing the archives of the site earlier this month. After the initial repopulation of posts (the text at least), it’s been a long process of going through each post, trying to find the original images, either through the Wayback Machine, or through some image archives I found on my laptop. I’m up to March 2005, and counting.

Seeing what I was doing and how much fun I was having (and how I gradually went from amateur blogger to published writer) has been a blast, and it put me in the mood to try and do it again for a bit. I’m especially surprised that I got to 50, considering I started doing it in the middle of the month, with this post. As I wrote at the time, I’m still considering it nostalgia blogging, and I’m still having a lot of fun doing it.

So for the first time in about 6-7 years, the blog is active again, and that makes me happy.

FROM_TOKYO_TO_NEW_YORKI noticed that back in the day I used to finish long update posts with a note on what I was listening while I wrote it. I’ve been in a retro groove of late, and am currently listening to a compilation produced by Fantastic Plastic Machine for Uniqlo in 2005 called Synchro: From Tokyo to New York.

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Photography Technology Web

Hi and Goodbye

Screen Shot 2016-08-28 at 12.46.23

Earlier this year, the fine folks behind the “moment sharing site” Hi (né Hitotoki) shared some big news: they would shut down the site on September 1, as part of a novel archiving project (here’s what Craig Mod had to say about the “Hitotoki Archives” project). We’re just a few days away from the site shutting down, which means you still have a chance to share a moment or two, that will be preserved on physical media.

I received a notice the other day to download all of my contributions to the site, which I’ve done. I was never a big contributor to the site, but it’s nice to see these shared moments again, and I’m thinking of incorporating them in my blog (as you know, I’m very much in an archival state of mind these days).

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