For a while now I’ve been thinking about what I would like to use this site for, and I now know what I’ll be doing.
As is proclaimed in the tagline I’ve been using for a few years now, I’ve been “blogging since 1998,” starting the year I moved to Tokyo. The first post on this site is from 2002, because that’s when I started the current iteration of the site using WordPress — before that I was first hand coding everything, and then used the “Blogger” platform for a while. And as I wrote in that very first post on THIS blog, these were to be my “digital diaries from the Japanese front,” in which I chronicled the stuff I was obsessed with in Tokyo in terms of art, design, culture, etc.
Fast forward leaving Tokyo in 2015. Since then, this blog has been pretty directionless, and has been turned in recent years into a place where I share my media-related lists (various movie marathons, year-end book reading lists, year-end lists of favorite media).
So, what’s next?
During my time in Montreal (from 2015 to 2021) I never really engaged with producing anything outside of work, but since arriving in Shanghai in 2021, I first reconnected with my PechaKucha family last year and along with my partner George relaunched the PechaKucha Night series here (we just had our sixth event a couple of weeks ago). And then after organizing of couple of PauseTalk events in Tokyo during visits last year, I decided to launch the series here in Shanghai, with a first event in February, and the next one happening at the end of the month.
So that’s where I think the focus will be, on sharing more about these activities I’m producing here in Shanghai, whether it’s to promote them, talk about what’s going on behind-the-scenes, etc.
It’s still a work-in-progress — as is the design of the site, I just quickly switched templates but there’s more I want to do — but that’s how I like to do things, just jump in and then adjust as I go along.
So here’s to the next phase.