Categories
Meta Personal

Twenty Nineteen

Changing the look of my blog used to be something I loved to do, whether it was creating a new look from scratch or heavily customizing themes and templates I would find online. I’d do it on an almost seasonal basis. This “design” aspect of blogging is something I’ve lost interest in along the way, with the only thing keeping me going being the desire to write. For that reason, when I started blogging more heavily again a few years ago, I was fine with using the default “Twenty Fifteen” WordPress theme.

This past weekend when I went into the back-end to write a couple of posts, I saw I could upgrade to version 5 of WordPress — which I did — and with it came a brand new default theme, “Twenty Nineteen,” which is what you’re seeing now if you’re reading this post on my website. It’s simple and minimalist, which is how I like my design, with some nice typography, and so I’m happy to switch to it. I still want to customize it a bit more (just tweaks that are baked into the customization options), and will add a few new pages to flesh things out (like an “About” page, which I haven’t had for years).

Part of the customizable aspects of the new theme that I liked was to have a little tagline at the top, following the site’s title.

Blogging since 1998.

Writing that, I realized that I didn’t really commemorate the fact that as of last year, I have been blogging pretty regularly for over 20 years. The archives on this site go back to 2002 (this is the first post), but that just marks my start of using Blogger as a proper engine for my blog (which later changed to Movable Type, and then to WordPress).

My origins of writing regularly on the web started in 1998 (in the summer I think) when I launched a site to celebrate Acadian culture (the French-speaking culture from where I grew up), and as part of the content for the site I wrote a weekly column about my life in Japan (I had moved there in May of that year). That site lasted about 3 years, and since I wanted to continue writing regularly about my life in Tokyo, I launched my own site, jeansnow.net. For at least a year, I continued to write and code everything in HTML, until I came across this thing called Blogger that looked like a pretty great way to automate a lot of what I was doing.

And now, over 20 years later, here I am writing this post.

Categories
General Meta

State of the Blog

Back when this blog was the most active, I liked to kick off the new year with a post that shared some of my intentions for the coming year. Although it included things I wanted to do with the blog, it went beyond that, and would lay out projects that I was hoping to make happen. As 2018 comes to an end, I’ve been feeling like it’s time to do something similar, focusing on this site.

As I’ve written before, after this site was on what amounted to “life support” for quite a few years, I started writing again regulary a couple of years ago. In part it was by merging my media consumption diary with this site (it used to live on Tumblr), and then it was by blogging about Japan-related happenings again. I eventually tired of the latter — it just wasn’t the same when not there, and made me miss my life in Japan more than anything else — so I stopped, and tried to focus on things that touched my current reality, i.e. being a game developer here in Montreal. I launched what was to be a weekly column called “Game Boy,” but as much as I enjoyed writing those posts, I started feeling like I needed to write something “proper” (meaning more thought out), and then I started procrastinating a bit, which led to no new posts. At the same time, my media consumption diary (called “Debaser“) started building a huge backlog, to a point where I just stopped updating it, other than adding the movies that make up my movie marathons (as I like collecting them in a post when I’m done said marathon).

What to do?

For the foreseeable future, I’m doing two main changes. First is that I’m no longer going to log all of my media viewings like in the past, and instead will just continue to write-up the movies I watch as part of my various marathons (or whatever content fits the bill, as I did for my October horror marathon). I’ll also keep doing my seasonal anime posts, which I started doing again last year (here are this year’s winter, spring, summer, and fall posts).

As for the rest, I’m going to combine my old blogging style — quickly written short posts — with my current gaming interests and life. I’ll still tag them in the “Game Boy” category, which will make them all easy to find.

I do still like the exercise of writing regularly — whether anyone is reading or not — and so I just want to find a way to do so that is interesting and fun for me, and doesn’t feel like something I need to do or that I’m behind on.

In the meantime, I invite you to check out my “Favorite Media” list for the year, an annual post I quite enjoy putting together, and that I’ve done for 9 years now (20102011201220132014201520162017, 2018).

Categories
Art Design Web

10 Years of Spoon & Tamago

Big congrats to my buddy Joseph (aka Johnny Strategy), who recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of Spoon & Tamago, a site I’ve been happily reading (and often linking to) since the very start. We became friends through our shared love of blogging about similar aspects of Japanese art, culture, and design, and it’s really great to see how he was able to celebrate the milestone — read this post, which also includes a nice video that offers a nice wrap-up of the site’s last 10 years.

Categories
Meta Personal

Back in the Saddle

A year ago today, I rescued the archives of this site, and the process of going back and fixing all of those old posts (I wasn’t able to rescue all of the images, and so had to manually replace them with the aid of Archive.org) got me wanting to blog again about my love for Japan culture, and I’ve been doing it pretty regularly since.

For years, updates on this site had become quite rare — if you look at the archives now you’ll see plenty of posts each month, but that’s just because I imported my Debaser diary (previously on Tumblr, in which I write-up the media that I’m consuming), and so it makes it seem like I was consistently writing here. But that wasn’t the case. After a couple of posts about the rescue efforts (which ended up taking months), this was the first post that felt like a traditional JeanSnow.net blog post.

A year later, I sorta have a routine now where I mostly put up new posts on the weekend, saving stuff I want to highlight until then, and putting them all up in one batch. It would probably be better to parse them a bit more, scheduling them to go up on a daily basis, but I guess I don’t really care about doing it that way.

A couple of days after that return post, I wrote this, saying I had no idea if I was going to continue doing it or not, but I’m now happy to still be doing it. Blogging like this is how I started my professional writing career, and even though I’m just doing it for fun now, I like that I’ve come full circle, doing pretty much the same thing I was doing 15 years ago — although it’s not quite the same in that I’m no longer based in Tokyo.

Categories
Games

Japan Mobile Game Analysis

I’ve recently been enjoying posts by Motoi Okamoto that take a look at the mobile gaming scene in Japan, offering up analysis on how these games are successful — he’s been sharing them on Gamasutra, but you can follow him directly through his blog as well. His latest post offers up a look at Fire Emblem Heroes. Okamoto spent many years working at Nintendo, and currently runs his own development studio, with a focus on social/mobile games.

Categories
Art Music Web

Retro Records

This is a pretty good blog — and Twitter account — if you want to check out old records from Japan. It’s in Japanese, but the point here is really to look at the awesome collection of covers. Looks like they organize a lot of nice events too.

Categories
Meta

New Home for Debaser

I’ve been doing my Debaser “media consumption diary” for a few years now on Tumblr, and a couple of weeks ago I decided to import all of the posts I’ve written there (over 700) to this blog, as I figured why not just bring everything to just one site. I still wanted to keep it separated in some way, so they all live in the “Debaser” category, which you can access through its own page here — I’ve installed a plugin that lets me set it so that these posts don’t show up on the main feed of the site, for those who just come for the Japan-related news stuff (but they still get mixed up with everything if you visit monthly archive pages — you can’t win them all). Oh, and that means that I’m no longer updating the Tumblr blog.

Categories
Food Photography Web

State of Tokyo

State of Tokyo is a rather nice new site by Alex Abian covering the people and places of Tokyo, with beautiful photography throughout. Looks like it’s going to be fun to follow, with coverage of places like Takeo, a tiny little restaurant in Shibuya that is run in the mornings by the pictured Takeo (in the afternoon, it turns into a different restaurant).

Categories
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.

Categories
Meta

December Gonna Be December

So following the return of my regular blogging here, November marked the first dip in number of posts — down to 62 from the previous month’s 85. I don’t think it’s a sign of anything in particular, probably just didn’t have as much time to devote to writing posts.

One thing I am looking forward to preparing this month is my annual “Favorite Media” post, which I have been doing for the past few years (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015). It’s a fun exercise, taking the time to look back at what I enjoyed throughout the year. I’ll probably start working on it soon, and post it within a week or two.