PauseTalk Vol. 40

Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

May 11, 2010

HUGE thanks to everyone who made it out to PauseTalk Vol. 40 tonight to help me celebrate the event’s 4th anniversary. The conversation maybe wasn’t so smooth — due to the turnout of 30 or so — but it was great to see so many people there, and the overall vibe was definitely good. Lots of people were there for the first time, and they mentioned really looking forward to the next edition. And big thanks to Design Festa‘s Stephen Lebovits for treating everyone with tickets to this weekend’s bash at Tokyo Big Sight. Even my dog showed up to help celebrate, and seemed to be quite the hit with those who went outside to hang out with him for a bit.

Since it’s become so difficult to keep track of everyone who comes, I think it’s time to stop with the attendee lists, especially since they are always so incomplete. Also, I mentioned it in passing towards the end, but I’m going to have a special game-themed edition sometime this summer (not a regular edition) with the idea of bringing together people working in the industry. More details to be revealed when we eventually choose a date. The next regular edition of PauseTalk (Vol. 41) happens June 7.

Update: Here are a couple of photos from last night’s event, as well as one of my dog posing with attendees.

Have something to add? Feel free to leave feedback through either Twitter or Facebook, or contact me by email.

Tagged: Design Festa, Events, Meta, PauseTalk

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 is March 5.

We hereby define a new term, that of the magaziner, described as a person who exerts an unhealthy amount of love for all things magazine. The Magaziner is a site that mostly focuses on the intersection between magazines and the digital frontier, and what it means for the medium. This does not preclude the inclusion of a healthy amount of print love.

Codex is a weekly music podcast hosted by Jean Snow, recorded in Tokyo. Playlists for all episodes are posted on the site, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds of posts and episodes.

Jean Snow is a contributor to Arcade Mania, your guide to the arcade gaming scene in Japan (Amazon US/Amazon Japan). He also provided assistance on Tokyolife: Art and Design, a guide to Tokyo's cultural output of the past few years, covering the works of over 80 influential creatives.

He will be contributing to the upcoming fifth editions of The Rough Guide to Tokyo and The Rough Guide to Japan, due for release in 2011.

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Jean Snow is Executive Director of the PechaKucha organization. He also helps run the PechaKucha Night in Tokyo -- please get in touch if you are interested in presenting at a future event. For a more intimate salon-like discussion group, join him at his monthly PauseTalk event.

A longtime resident of Tokyo, he lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming, sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for various online/offline publications, including the following: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, 1UP, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Wired's Game|Life, PingMag, CNNGo, Phaidon, and The Japan Times.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this site, and also follow him on Twitter and Facebook, or get in touch by email.

He serves as editor-at-large at Néojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx.

He also writes a monthly column covering Japanese product design for The Japan Times, called "On Design." It appears on the last Tuesday of every month, in both the print edition and online.

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The "Jean Snow" logo is written using the free Kirimomi Swash typeface. The "M31" logo is by Ian Lynam, and is part of a series of 31 unique designs. The site's design is based on the Grid Focus WordPress theme by Derek Punsalan.