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2022 Goals
Last year was one of disruption, multiple changed plans, instability, and finally settling in. I have no big plans for 2022, except maybe to try and get to Japan during the summer to tie up some loose ends there. Thus, my…
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New writing elsewhere, by me (2021 edition)
In the spring of 2021 I set myself a goal to pitch more publications and get more of my writing out there. Things got in the way, and well, since the summer I have not been doing as much writing as…
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2021 in Books
With just a couple days to spare, I made my Goodreads Reading Challenge of 40 books. It was a close thing, but I was able to make it up in the final months of the year. Here is how the numbers…
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Continuing a Japanese porcelain legacy โ Review of The Art of Emptiness
In the mid-seventeenth century the nobles of Europe were thrown into an addiction crisis. With the fall of the Ming Dynasty, and the chaos that ensued, where were they to get fine porcelain to decorate their palaces? As luck would have…
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Interviewing Superintendent Kubota
This month I was in Unseen Japan for a piece called How Schools on Remote Japanese Islands are Fighting Depopulationโ In that article I detail the genesis of the study abroad program my family and I went on for our year…
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My year on Ikijima, a remote Japanese island
Between May 2020 and June 2021 I moved my family to the remote island (ritล ้ขๅณถ) of Ikijima. To find out why, check the FAQ. Three months after leaving Japan and returning to Canada, I would like to reflect on that…
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Meditation stats snapshot
It has been a while, so I took a bit of a snapshot of my meditation tracker data on Insight Timer today, exporting it into Numbers for some visualization. Some quick stats: 930 Total sessions 14,800 Total minutes 753 Days with…
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Antiracist baby in Japanese
In the community we lived in on Ikijima there is a kids club that meets every Friday after school. A local non-profit put together a small office out of bits of wood and corrugated plastic to do its work. It had…
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A bumpy ride into the electric car future
So, we bought a thing. When I asked the dealer to take a photo he said โDo you want the big bow?โ and I was like โYes please sir I would very much like the big bow!โ It is a Nissan…
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A systematic culture of failure
Okay, what follows is a rant full of wild generalizations about Canadian โculture.โ While on the one hand all I really want to do is vent about how terrible our experience was moving back to Canada (under both emergency and pandemic…
Got any book recommendations?