As I will do every week now, I’d like to thank — and point out — this site’s sponsors, currently residing in the sidebar to the right. The latest one is Tokyomade, an online store that offers all sorts of fun design goods, straight from Tokyo. It joins other sponsors Tokyo Recohan, OK FRED, and affiliate TAB Jobs. As always, if you are interested in advertising on this site, please contact me for info on rates.
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Jean Snow lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming in Tokyo -- sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for the following online/offline publications: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Game|Life, and The Japan Times. He also manages the gallery space at Cafe Pause.
Jean Snow is a daily contributor to Wired magazine's game blog, Game|Life, covering game news from Japan and beyond.
Arcade Mania is currently on sale through Amazon Japan, with the same edition available for pre-order on Amazon US (to be released January, 2009).
Tokyolife: Art and Design covers Tokyo's cultural output of the past few years, covering the works of over 80 influential creatives. Jean Snow provided coordination assistance.
The Superfuture Superguides are a series of PDF travel guides to some of your favorites cities, updated monthly, and obsessively compiling the best places to shop, eat, and drink. The Tokyo guide is edited by Jean Snow.
He is also the design/culture editor at Neojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx, here.
PauseTalk is a regular series of events that take place at Cafe Pause on the first Monday of every month, with a start time of 20:00. The idea is to create a forum where Tokyo-based creatives can get together and discuss their own projects, as well as cultural currents of the city. The next edition happens October 6.
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Find out more about how to advertise directly on this site here, or by contacting me.
At a certain point of commercial “noise” from both you and the sponsors, people may start asking themselves “Does Jean really need the money?”
I think it’s one thing to have ads on a page (I counted ten on your main page, and they’ve been encroaching on the main text area recently), another to tell people in your own voice to click them. Is it an admission that this commercial drive isn’t really working? That we’re interested in what you have to say, but not in ads?
In my view, you aren’t just talking about good design, but exemplifying it here. Would you endorse a lovely chair whose form was interrupted half way up by an ad for a hotel? Is there going to be a moment when the commercialism of this site finds its level and stops increasing? Surely it’s already led to quite a few spin-offs (TV appearances, other writing work) which keeps you well supplied with game consoles, cell phones, plasma TVs and so on?
This may just be the Slow Life Berliner in me speaking, of course… I know in Tokyo there’s no such thing as “too much bling”. Nobody ever feels financially secure!
Actually, I notice that a lot of the ads are taken by your friends for their own small businesses, so I guess it’s a bit more complex than I’m allowing there. And they are useful services — I’ve recommended Tokyo Recohan to friends myself. And OK Fred!
Regarding these “thank the sponsors” posts, it’s because a great deal of people follow this site through the feed, and so never see the ads. This is a way of giving the sponsors some visibility to the feed readers (as I do want to keep the feeds with full text and images).
Why ads? As you may or may not know, I have a day job, different from what I do and talk about here, and I would like to be able to leave that day job and spend 100% of my time in the pursuits I talk about on this site. I spend a lot of time updating this site on a daily basis, and would like to see it contribute — financially — to the development of my career.
Ah, fair enough, Jean! Excuse my probing… making ends meet is a challenging enough design task in itself, and we all have to do it. Good luck in making this your main focus!
i would also think that. hosting your own blog. as in, your server, your WP system. you have to maintain. spam issues, etc. verse.. using liverjournal. is a much more expensive, and time consuming setup. extra on a high traffic site like this.
Years ago on your blog you taught english to mucousy little kids. you don’t still do that do you?
Yup, still do that part-time.
Jean you’re a Tokyo blog legend and design expert,
get out of the eikaiwa racket. the rest of us suckers need heroes!
You think I don’t want to?