You’ll probably notice a few superficial changes to the site, and that’s just me playing around a bit, slightly modifying things. I really got tired of the little icons found everywhere, and as I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve always wanted to de-emphasize the dating system, putting the articles up front (but no worries, the dates still appear at the end of all articles). I did most of it on Christmas day, and will continue to nip and cut here and there over the next few days.

Update: I didn’t really like where I was heading with my changes. Decided to go back to how it was before, and to slowly start rethinking the whole site.

Plus Minus Zero has put up info on its second collection of wares. Again, beautiful stuff. Link via Dezain.net.

I think I’ve already proclaimed my love for the Frog Style collection, and today I picked up two more from the brand new series. Volume 10 sees frogs representing the animals from the Chinese zodiac. I got the tiger and the wild pig.

A few desserts at the Pause cafe.

I was looking through book/magazine distributor Yohan‘s website, and found this section where they review/point out various nice-looking cafe/bookstores in the city. Pictured above is Book Club Kai.

Yet another musical gift, this time a Christmas song from Tokumaru Shugo. Here’s a direct link to the MP3 file.

I’ve had an account on Flickr for ages, but never did anything with it. I’ve never really found any use for all the community sites that have come and gone over the past few years, and this just felt like more of the same. But I recently read an article at Wired News that made me see how cool Flickr really is, and I started thinking that I should start playing around with it a bit. Well, today’s the day, and I finally uploaded a few pics. I think I’ll start uploading more and more pics there, and see what kind of feedback I get from it. One of the selling points for the site is that they offer a lot of RSS feeds. For instance, you can subscribe to a feed of just my pics, or subscribe to feeds of certain keywords, say “tokyo,” which will see my pics included in it. There’s probably more fun stuff to do there, so I’ll continue to play around, examining the various features.

Christmas giving in the form of music continues with Patrick’s Christmas medley done in the style of his Glad en Mono alias. Get into the holiday spirit, Casio style!

Merry Christmas from Digiki! He’s just posted the ANIMALS DON’T CARE remix project on his site (MP3s). This is the only way you’ll get to listen to it, and it will only be up for a week, so go get it now!

The album cover is by Florence Manlik.

Japan Design Net features 35 pictures of Maiwa Denki’s “The Nonesense Machines” exhibition, now on at the ICC. Link via Dezain.net.

Seems like one of the new trends this year was for mail-order ramen from famous shops throughout Japan. In the mood for a steaming bowl of Hakkaido ramen? It’s just an internet order away. The Yahoo! Japan Shopping section lists the most popular sales, and the top 5 are all from Ikebukuro’s Taishouken shop. I doubt they do international orders though.

Marxy points us to a NEW YORK TIMES article on the opening of the new A Bathing Ape shop in New York, and then goes on to explain why Bape is dead (or at least isn’t the Bape of old anymore).

Yesterday I had a look at the documentary that was made on Jesper‘s Tokyo Style in Gothenburg (TSiG) project, and quite liked it. It gives you a nice look at what happened during the event, interviewing a lot of the participants, like Namaiki, ODD, Afrirampo, Shing02, and more. A good document of something I wish I could have attended. I was sent a DVD of it, but don’t know if they plan on selling it on the TSiG site, or maybe offer some kind of stream.

As for the TSiG blog, it hasn’t been updated of late because of frequent comment spam attacks, which caused the host to disable the MT installation. It should be back up and running within the next few days. Also, we’re looking for some new bloggers for the Tokyo side, so if it’s something you’d be into, if you share the TSiG sensibility (i.e. cool happenings in Japan), please contact me.

Another link from Octopus Dropkick: Tokyo Films. Some nice photography in the diary section.