It’s been nearly two months since I left for Japan. In that time I’ve had a lot of opportunities to wrangle my thoughts into something more coherent. My trip lasted ten days and had me covering Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nara. I stayed in one neighborhood of Kyoto and two in Tokyo to cover this territory. I travelled with two other lifelong friends with a loosely coupled schedule so that we could be free to re-arrange at a whim.

At long last, my trip five years in the making, whose planning began in 2019 and was sadly cut short due to COVID-19 in March 2020 is finally coming to fruition. Myself and two of my best friends are finally making our way to Japan for ten days, tomorrow. Not only that, I began a new job role this week at my employer which will prove to boost my skills towards modernization in the software development.

Welp I went ahead and did it AGAIN; I switched to the warm embrace of Apple and purchased an iPhone 14. My current Google Pixel 5a is a nice phone in working order, but its over two years old and so I was feeling the itch to upgrade. I managed to catch a Black Friday promotion for some money off of a new phone and figured, why not? See there’s some backstory here: my growing frustration with Google as a money.

Yo I am trying out Hugo as a replacement for Wordpress! Content will be restored as I figure out ways to port it.

The internet sucks lately. Well, not lately. There has been a rot that has been setting in for years, now more accelerated by rising interest rates making “free money” technology ventures very unpopular and risky. What we’re seeing today is what Cory Doctorow famously coins as Enshittification. Quoting him directly from that link: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

Today bums me out. Why? Because the Peoria, IL Round 1 location is closing tonight at 10pm for good. For those who aren’t familiar, Round 1 is an arcade chain in Japan and the United States which offers a mix of food, bowling, karaoke, classic arcade games but most importantly to me, Japanese rhythm games. Back in its pre-COVID heyday, it was opened until 2am and allowed adults only after 10pm which made it an excellent spot to have a beer and play some games with friends or sing our hearts out.

Starting straight from the Gizmodo headline: Imgur bans NSFW Content, Begins Purge. Doesn’t get much simpler than that. Back in the early heyday of reddit, imgur was created by a sole developer attempting to offer an image hosting solution to a budding reddit in the wake of Digg’s utter collapse. This site has grown massively in the intervening 15 years due to the ease of posting images anonymously, without an account.

The blog has been quiet lately because I’ve been mired in a well over a month long major work effort at my job. As a software developer responsible for a platform used by thousands, I’ve had a lot of work to deliver lately. On top of the late work nights, on call times, desperate panicked calls and more; my son is fourth months old and hitting a famous growth spurt. With that growth spurt comes a major sleep regression.

Unless you live outside of the United States, it would be impossible to ignore the news of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade. Republicans, Christian nationalists and reactionary conservatives have been pining for it since decades before I was born. Rather than lament the disastrous path that women’s rights in this country is headed down, because rant I can, I am going to focus in on a specific harrowing problem.

Summer Solstice, also known as Litha, is less than twenty four hours upon us as of my writing. You wouldn’t know it based on the record heatwave many of us have been facing in the center of the country! Climate change continues its ravages across the world, heavily distorting the seasons in many parts of the globe but that discussion could take up many blog posts, I will set it aside for now.