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A Day’s Work

I just spent the entire day — over 12 hours — working on my site/blog. That may sound crazy, but it’s been a rather enjoyable experience.

The first half of the day was spent recreating posts that were missing from my archives (as I described in this post). Since then, I’ve been making my way through all of my posts, starting with the very first one in 2002, and re-inserting images/photos that I get from the Wayback Machine. I’ve just reached the end of 2003.

Yes, it’s long work, but the reason I’m still at it is because it’s turned out to be an amazing look back at what I was up to in those days, and how the site evolved and turned into the “design guide” that a lot of people remember, and which led to me eventually starting a career in writing.

The other fascinating thing is that I’m rediscovering things that I’ve done that I had completely forgotten about. Hey, a huge part of my site was a photolog called TB.Grafico — how do you forget that? And I’ve also realized that my Tokyo Boy moblog (oh yeah, short for “mobile blog,” that was a thing back in those days) actually ran on its own blog installation, and so has been basically unavailable online for years, even before I had my server issues (and I do plan on rescuing it once I’m done going through my regular posts). Oh, and I produced an ezine called Geisha, and right now I have no idea how to find any of the issues (at least 9 I think), or if there’s any chance that I’ll be able to dig up any of them.

This entire process is certainly going to take weeks, and I’m happily looking forward to it.

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Special Edition

As I work at reconstructing my blog — I’m currently in the process of manually re-posting the 3 years of lost posts (2011-2014) thanks to the Wayback Machine — it has me thinking on what I want to do when I go back to older posts and start cleaning them up. I’m referring here to the fact that images didn’t really make the transition from the database I used, and so instead of having “image not found” type messages appear on those posts, on top of removing the code for the image, I’m wondering if it would be interesting to sometimes go and try to find a new image that I could add to that post. My fear though is that it could come off as a bit too “George Lucas’ Special Editions,” as I don’t want to alter what those posts represent.

But as I dig back, and re-read posts here and there, I do find that a lot of them highlight an interesting point in time in Japan’s art & design coverage (from a foreign perspective), and I am finding it a shame that these posts are missing images now — and I think the strength of my blog was always that it was a visually interesting place to visit, more than for what I was writing (which was quite basic).

On a related note, I’m now also thinking that it would be interesting to spend some time revisiting some of the things that I covered in the past, in a “where are they now” kind of way, to see how some of these things have evolved, or wether they (person, thing, or spot) still exist.

Over the years I’d really lost my excitement and interest in blogging (outside of my media consumption Tumblr), and it’s funny to me that revisiting this site’s past is what has re-energized me on that front.

Update (16/08/13): Well, managed to find and re-post pretty much all of the missing posts (the period between my last database backup in 2011 and when I started writing on Tumblr in 2014), except for the period between May 8, 2012 and June 16, 2012, which unfortunately didn’t get covered by the Wayback Machine (in part because of the changes I made to the site at the time I think, getting rid of prominent archive links). It also seems like the Wayback Machine has done a terrific job of keeping images, so although it’s gonna be a hell of a long job, I should be able to rescue most of the images for old posts.

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PauseTalk Tonight

Just a reminder that tonight (Monday, February 7) marks the February edition of PauseTalk (Vol. 47). It all happens at Cafe Pause in Ikebukuro, with a start time of 20:00 — the cafe is reserved from 19:30, so feel free to come early and hang out. For more on PauseTalk, visit the official site, or check in on the Facebook event page .

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Codex 17

A new episode of the Codex is up (17), and you’ll find it for download here.

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PauseTalk Next Week

It’s been a long time coming, but yes, following a 2-month hiatus, PauseTalk Vol. 47 is happening this Monday (February 7) at Cafe Pause, with the regular start time of 20:00. The reason for the hiatus was because attendance was getting low at the end of last year, and so I figured it was time for a break. Here’s looking forward to a new edition, and to some good talk! For those interested, here’s the Facebook event page.

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PechaKucha Night in Tokyo Vol. 79

After a two month break because of the holidays, PechaKucha Night in Tokyo is back on tonight (January 26) at SuperDeluxe for Vol. 79. It kicks off as always at 20:20, and feel free to come and say hi — I’m always sitting at the very front, next to Mark and Astrid (the MCs). Here’s the list of presenters.

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Codex 16

A new episode of the Codex (16) is up, and you can download it and check out the playlist here. And it looks like we’ll be recording a new episode of Radio OK Fred this week, so stay tuned for that too.

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PauseTalk Coming Up

It’s still a couple of weeks away, but since I’ve had a few people ask me, yes, following a 2-month hiatus, PauseTalk will be back next month (Vol. 47), happening on the first Monday of the month as usual (in this case, February 7). I’ll send the regular Facebook reminder a few days before it happens (and post about it here as well).

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Codex 15

It feels like it’s been a long time since the last episode of the Codex, but that’s just because the last two episodes were recorded so close together. This week’s episode ends with a track by Broadcast, to mark last week’s unfortunate passing of lead singer Trish Keenan — strangely enough, it was a track I had already selected to play on this episode.

You can download the episode below, and find the playlist, or subscribe to the RSS feed so as not to miss any future episode — the show is in the iTunes Store too.

Codex 15 (39.7MB)

1. The Magnetic Fields – “I Don’t Believe in You”
2. M.I.A. – “Internet Connection (Huoratron Rum Aid Rmx)”
3. Justice – “The Party (feat. Uffie)”
4. The Forms – “Fire to the Ground (feat. Matt Berninger)”
5. Asobi Seksu – “Trails (Deerhoof Remix)”
6. Belle & Sebastian – “The Stars of Track and Field”
7. Junip – “Always (Prefuse 73 Remix)”
8. Peaches – “Downtown”
9. Wavves – “Mutant”
10. Broadcast – “Pendulum”

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Codex 14

I know I recorded episode 13 just a couple of days ago, but I was suddenly in the mood to record a new episode of the Codex, and so here we are. It follows a theme I first visited last year, where I play tracks taken from albums that start with a particular latter — last time it was “A,” this time it’s “B.”

You can download the episode below, and find the playlist, or subscribe to an RSS feed to as not to miss any future episode — the show is in the iTunes Store too.

Codex 14 (35.3MB)

1. Unrest – “Winona Ryder (XY Version)”
2. Digiki – “Wikifi”
3. TTC – “Dans le club”
4. Sebadoh – “Drama Mine”
5. Pavement – “Embassy Row”
6. Kan Takahiko – “Blow”
7. Comesta Yaegashi – “Sanpo – Marunouchi no Nichiyoubi”
8. Marxy – “Intro To”
9. Mice Parade – “Ground as Cold as Common”
10. Pixies – “Is She Weird”