I forgot to post it last week when it was published — blame the nasty flu virus that has gotten me down for the past week — but the January edition of my “On Design” column was published on the 31st in The Japan Times, and you can read it online here. Pictured above, Postalco‘s fantastic new Snap Pad (and until February 16, you can catch Postalco’s “Wheel Printer” exhibition at the Creation Gallery G8 in Ginza).

Over the past month or two I’ve been occasionally stopping by the AQ office in Nishi-Azabu (either at lunch time, or after work) for a bit of card gaming with my friend Ryan, who is AQ’s resident graphic designer. For these sessions, we play either Warhammer: Invasion, or more frequently, Magic: The Gathering. It’s Magic that we’re playing in these photos — in their conference room. The photos were all taken by AQ’s Paul, using the Olloclip lens on his iPhone.

As promised in the post about PauseTalk Vol. 56, there’s now a Facebook gallery of photos from the event, all taken as usual by Michael Holmes. Big thanks as always to Michael for attending and sharing these photos.

As I posted on Monday, my Codex podcast is back because I’ve finally found a way to record it live, using music from Spotify and mixing in my talking bits, thanks to Nicecast. As I wrote in the show post on the Codex site, I’d pretty much given up on doing the show because I couldn’t find a satisfying way to record the whole thing live, which is something important to me. I had tried Nicecast back at the end of August, but at the time it didn’t properly support Mac OS X Lion, and so there were issues getting the songs to properly play from Spotify. But since then they upgraded the app — I only realized it the other day because someone tweeted it to me — and I was glad to see that it now works without a hitch (well, mostly, as there is one little glitch in the show I recorded, episode 40, at the start of one of the tracks).

It’s good to be doing these again, and one other interesting thing about using Nicecast is that as I record, I’m actually streaming the session to the web. So in the future I’ll probably share that link, for those who would like to listen in live as I record the podcast — that has the added bonus of making it feel that much more like a radio show, which is really what I try to do with Codex (hence the reason I don’t want to just edit a show together in Garageband, or similar software).

Also, since the music is coming from Spotify (for the most part), I can share the playlist that way too — so if my voice annoys you (and that’s completely understandable), you can still enjoy the music.

Since the show was on hiatus for about 3 months, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, so you can expect quite a few episodes this month. Also, let me remind you that last year I did a Christmas episode (10), so if you’re looking for some more tunes to put you in the holiday mood, do give it a try.

The last time I went to Mount Tanigawa, during the summer, I got the worst sunburn I’ve had since I was a kid, but this time it was all about the snow. Me and my wife went yesterday and were greeted by quite a bit of snow — no worries though, as that’s what we were expecting. Although we had a tiny trail of hardened snow to walk on — thanks to other hikers — if you walked off it you would literally have both legs completely buried in snow. Some bits were slippery too, but we had our ice spikes on, so we were fine. In this post I’m including a few photos I shared on Instagram, and I’ll put up a few more sometime this week.

This is what it looks like when you’re sitting on the very first train of the day, at 5:02, leaving on the Saikyo line at Ikebukuro Station. To be fair, there were actually quite a few people who were catching the first train to get back home after a night of partying (this was Sunday morning).

We took the cable car to go up to one part of the mountain, and then hiked the rest, just like we did on our last visit. I believe it is possible to climb from the very bottom, but it would take a very long time (you would need more than a day), and some parts are quite dangerous.

There are two peaks, both are close by, and this is the post on one of them, which indicates an elevation of 1963m (the other peak is higher by a few meters).

Nothing like having your lunch when you’re on the top.

I’ve always liked how Craig Mod writes “satellite” articles to his main essays, and after my post on cars was up, I realized there were a few things I forgot to add, and it didn’t feel right to just shoehorn them in. So consider this an addendum.

Senna
After I tweeted a remark about watching the Senna documentary last night, my friend Jairo Neto (@jaironeto) — who is also organizer of the PechaKucha Night series in Sao Paulo — replied with a few remarks that I’d like to share.

man, did I cry with this documentary
the most important thing that he did was that he showed that you could be a winner with discipline and focus..
and that was something unique at the time. Brazil was just coming out of a military dictatorship, people were stunned by Senna
yes, and by that time, he was investing in his Institution for children, so there was a comic book character called “Senninha”
so for young kids (like me) he was a real living hero

Arcade Racers
I think that what I wrote makes it sound like I no longer play arcade racers, but that’s not true at all. One of my favorite games of recent years is Split/Second — I loved it so much I played through it twice — and I’m a huge fan of the Burnout series. I also quite enjoyed last year’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit — it was a blast alternating between the speedsters and the cops, and also trying to beat the times of my friends (which usually ends up being CheapyD, who’s my only friend who likes racing games as much as I do). And after playing the demo for Need for Speed: The Run, in which avalanches are happening all over the place as you speed through a mountainous road, I’m looking forward that too. It reminded me of Speed Devils, which was my favorite racing game on the Dreamcast.

Forza + Top Gear
One of my favorite things to do these days is to take the cars that I see featured on Top Gear for a drive in Forza 4 — even better, I can actually try them out on the Top Gear test track, just like The Stig does, since it’s one of the tracks included in the game.

Pagani Zonda Cinque
My favorite car to drive in Forza tends to evolve the more I play — especially as I discover new cars to drive — and my current fave is the Pagani Zonda Cinque. It drives suprisingly well (tight controls) for a car that has that much power.

I’ve never really considered myself to be a car guy. Sure, when I was a kid there was a time when I had a few car posters in my room (I recall a Porsche 911 and a Ferrari Testarossa, and I think one more, but can’t remember what), and I do love the act of driving, but I’ve never really cared much about owning one (I briefly had a Toyota Corolla, when we moved back to Canada for a year) or lusted over any. But these days, because of a game called Forza and three British dudes, I find myself with cars on the mind quite a lot.

It’s no secret that over the past few years I’ve come to accept the fact that racing is one of my favorite gaming genres. It’s funny, because I never particularly was attached to any racing game growing up — I think my favorites though would be F-Zero and Wave Racer — but since this latest generation of consoles, I really have come to love the act of driving in a game. Truth be told, this goes even beyond racing games — I actually love the driving parts in non-racing games too. While playing L.A. Noire, I actively drove to every single area, even though I could have fast-tracked instead, because I absolutely loved moving through that city in the different vehicles I would find in the game. It’s also one of the reasons I dislike the Halo series so much — what at first sounds great, riding around in a Warthog, becomes an exercise in frustration because of the silly driving controls.

I also always disliked sim racing games. My motto used to be, “if you have to use the brakes, then it’s not for me.” What I liked were arcade racers, and I just couldn’t understand what the fun was in driving around “carefully” on boring race tracks. But the first game that “evolved” my taste in racing games was Project Gotham Racing 3. Although not fully a sim, it was a nice sim-like game to get you started, and the realism of the cities — racing around in Shinjuku — was an absolute blast. I loved Project Gotham Racing 4 too, and became quite attached to the in-cockpit view.

Then came Forza. I remember getting Forza 2 (which I bought used), and not really liking it. I played maybe 20 minutes or so, and just felt that it was too realistic (and the track was boring). Then Forza 3 came out. I tried the demo, and the in-cockpit view (which wasn’t in Forza 2) completely sucked me in. It was enough to get me excited about the Forza world, and while waiting for the release of the game (which was only coming out a few weeks later), I put in Forza 2 and ended up playing 20-30 hours. Another aspect of modern sim racing games that appealed to me was the racing line — I want to feel like a pro racer when I’m playing, and this gave me a chance to properly learn how “racing lines” work, and when I need to start braking. The Forza “rewind” feature also assured that I wouldn’t get frustrated with the game if I did a stupid move late in a race.

And that brings us to now, with Forza 4, which I’ve been obsessing over ever since I got my copy. The big revelation for me this time is the “Autovista” mode, which not only lets you explore every aspect of some of the cars included in the game, but more importantly, includes reviews by Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear. I ended up enjoying these so much that it made me check out the show for the first time — never in my life had I been interested in checking out a “car show” — and I’ve been absolutely hooked, and am going back through the series, season by season. As most fans of the show know, what makes it so great is not just that they cover exotic cars, but it’s the humor in how they do it, and the fun personalities of the three hosts.

So am I a car guy now? I don’t know, I don’t think so, but I sure love playing Forza 4, I really love watching Top Gear, and recently I’ve been getting a kick out of spotting some of the cars I’ve been driving in-game out in the real world — like that Audi R8 pictured above, which I spotted last night as I was leaving the office in Ebisu. In a city like Tokyo, you can see a lot of luxury and sports cars on the road — even seeing a Ferrari drive by is not that strange (I even spotted one this afternoon, while walking my dog).

I’ll finish this by adding that last night I watched the Ayrton Senna documentary, Senna, which I thought was fantastic. The only time in my life that I ever followed racing was Formula 1 during the Senna era, and it was something that I stopped after his death. So watching the documentary was not only interesting because of the amazing story that was his life and accomplishments, but it also provided a nostalgic trip to my youth.

Update: Here’s an addendum to this post.

My “On Design” column is a week early this month, appearing in today’s edition (Tuesday, November 22) of The Japan Times — or you can read it online here. Pictured above, 15%‘s Ice-Cream Spoons.

I’ve taken quite a liking to writing in iA Writer for Mac. Although the app has been out for quite a while — and despite the fact that I was a big fan of the iPad version — I never picked it up because I really didn’t think I had a use for it. I’ve been an enthusiastic user of Google Docs for years now, and there are many aspects of using that service that I quite like that iA Writer doesn’t do (sharing documents, having a good search engine for all my archived documents, etc.)

But with the recent sale on the iA Writer app — in preparation for the upcoming update that will add iCloud support (the sale may be over as you read this) — I decided to give it a try just for kicks, and I must say I’ve really fallen in love with it.

The reason for this love affair is a mix of a few things, including simplicity (functionality is barebone, just what you need), focusing (both because of the a full-screen view that hides everything else, and the app’s “focus mode”), and strangely enough, its support of Markdown.

I must say I’ve never used Markdown in the past, but I’ve taken quite a liking to the way iA Writer formats the text when I use the various elements. As an added bonus, the app I use to write blog posts (the ScribeFire extension on Chrome) supports it, so I’ve taken to writing new posts in iA Writer, in Markdown, and then copy/pasting it in ScribeFire.

Now, it’s not necessarily for everyone, especially if you need to format text for printing, but all I’ve ever needed in a text editor is a blank slate and a word count, and so it works for me. I would like it to support some sort of auto-syncing with Google Docs though, so that I can easily save all of my documents there, especially if it’s something that I need to share with others (for now, I copy/paste it in Google Docs, once I’m finished writing it in Writer).

I’d just like to take the opportunity to congratulate Tokyo Art Beat on its 7th anniversary, which was celebrated in style last night with a terrific event at Dictionary Club in Shibuya. I’ve been one of the biggest cheerleaders of TAB since its start — I’d rather not remember what it was like trying to find info in English on art/design events before its existence — and I’m so happy that not only is it still going, but that it seems to be in great shape. So again, congratulations to the TAB crew, as well as to the AQ crew for all its tech and production support.

Pictured above, a mini burrito from Libre at the party — it was really good, and so I definitely recommend you go check out the proper Libre shop in Aoyama. And I must say that the Dictionary Club is a really nice event space, and I’m hoping I’ll get to see more stuff there.

I’ve put up a few pics taken during last week’s 3-day trek in the mountains in Nagano — previously mentioned in this post. It was a pretty great trip, and we’re already planning on going back there in May, when the hut (Karasawa) re-opens (and it will completely be covered in snow).

I’m very happy to announce a new little project of mine called Instabike Tokyo. It all started last week when I discovered a site that Amsterdam-based illustrator Laszlito Kovacs had launched called Instabike. The idea was a simple one, and can be explained with this mathematical equation: Amsterdam + Bikes + Instagram = Victory! I loved the idea — and I need to thank my main man in Amsterdam, Luis Mendo, for turning me on to this — and immediately thought that it would be great to do the same thing in Tokyo, and a few days later, and with the blessing of Laszlito, Instabike Tokyo was born.

I will say that my version is a bit different in that my plan is to cover Tokyo cycling culture in general — one of the ideas behind the original Instabike site is to capture shots of cyclists from behind. The density of cycling in Tokyo would make this a hard thing to do.

Laszlito has now put up an Instabike hub page — and I’m assuming he’d be open to other cities joining in. For Instabike Tokyo, on top of the Tumblr site, you can follow the project through Twitter, and there’s a Facebook page as well.

Let me point you to a new post on The Magaziner that helps explain why you should go and support this Kickstarter campaign to help finance a fourth issue of Letter to Jane on iPad. Tim’s a friend of mine, and he’s been doing some amazing work in terms of editorial publishing on iPad — first with his independent magazine called Letter to Jane, and then by collaborating on the third issue of Port magazine. I really want to see this fourth issue happen, so please consider chipping in a few shekels — and for $200, he’ll even give you the source code.

This month’s edition of my “On Design” column is in today’s The Japan Times, and can be read online here. Above, Branch’s Paper Chopstick Rest.

I have this other little site called The Magaziner where I obsess over magazines. For the past few months I took a break from writing up any new reviews (sticking mostly to news items and covering the occasional new releases), but I’ve found a way to make the review process a bit easier (by adopting a template, based on something my friend Andrew Losowsky had been developing for a site that never launched). The first one up is for what I’d say is my favorite iPad magazine, SPIN Play.