Category: Thoughts

This is How it Starts

 in Road Trip, Thoughts • 2 Comments

Happy New Year!　╰(*´︶`*)╯♡

This is how it starts.

With a pretty blank journal, a pen, and a dream — a daunting, thrilling, not-fully-thought-out-at-all dream. But the thing has been there noodling around in my head for awhile and has recently been more a lot more boisterous, begging for my attention. At some point late last year I just thought: Screw it, I’m going to do it.

I sometimes tell people that one of my dreams is to travel around Japan in some variety of camping vehicle and just truly enjoy, study, and appreciate the country. Experience, learn, and totally get the hell out of my comfort zone. I especially want to visit little known places, because sure I’ve lived in Japan for over thirty years/over half my life, but there is so much I just don’t know about and haven’t seen.

But also, I’m getting older. That thing that happens to all of us every minute of every day, but we (or I, at least, I can’t speak for anyone else) do a very good job at forgetting.

My son is in Hokkaido at the moment,1,700 kilometers/1,056 miles away, so why the heck not visit him? Right now my income is from supporters of my podcast Uncanny Japan on Patreon. So I can do that from the road. Even better, I can gather all kinds of extra content (photos, videos, research, stories, soundscapes) while on the road to share with them. Win! Win!

The loose plan is to spend several weeks (a month?) driving up the west coast of Japan, hanging out in Hokkaido for awhile, then drive down the east coast. I know I’m going to have to avoid the rainy season, summer, and winter…so that leaves early spring or fall.

And there you go, that’s all I got so far. But I do have a notebook and a pen!

I’m going to start the planning, and *gasp* blogging about that planning, as well as blogging about other random things, kind of bring my Living-in-Japan identity and my Writer identity together in one place. Because social media platforms … *hard eye roll*

So here we go. Blog post number 1 checked off my To Do List. Does anyone else have any challenging, scary, or seemingly impossible goals for the New Year?

 

printed out map of Japan

 

It’s Been Awhile…Alternate Title: Does Anyone Blog Anymore?

 in Thoughts • 2 Comments

Follow me on Mastodon

It’s been awhile 👋.

Recently, Life Things have been coalescing in a way that has me itching to write on here again. I’ll talk about the one special Thing that tipped the scales a little later. But for now, I think we can all agree social media is what it is, and it’s not getting any better. Not that I completely hate it. It’s a place to meet and interact with cool-cat people from all over the world, people I’d normally never get a chance to meet and interact with, so there’s a Yay!

But when you kick up the rock that is FB/Insta you’ll find the wretching-ly gross Zuckerberg and his lot. Twitter is ad after ad after ad and there was the Musk-Near-Miss incident that gave me a case of the vapors. Oh, and if you know what’s good for you, you won’t get me started on what I think about TikTok.

I’m exhausted by it all*.

Exhausted by the constant feeling I need to keep up, all the time, everywhere, all at once. Exhausted by the worry I might miss some important friend or family member’s Big News. Exhausted by having to scroll or hide the infinite stream of Reels/Shorts/Clips/MindNumbingWhereDidTheLastHourGo?15-SecondVideos. And they also have all the pretty numbers to tell you how many times your post has been seen/interacted with/impressions/engagements/…effing hell, already. It’s kind of like if you were trying to figure out a way to drive millions upon millions of people insane all at once, this would be it.

Andrew Lewis is attributed as saying, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

I don’t pay for any of those platforms. They could disappear in an instant** and there wouldn’t be anything any of us could do about it. Well, until the next Cerberus-like “service” pops back up and I’m signing up and clicking the Accept Terms and Conditions without reading.

I do pay for my domain name and this here site, however. People can visit if they like. Leave if they like. It’s all cool. Most importantly, though, it’s going to be a slow, quirky life here with photos and updates and perhaps a thought or two about books, movies, food, writing, life in Japan, bell crickets***. So please come back if you’d like. That would be nifty keen.

Here’s a thing. I’ve been dipping the proverbial toes into the ai art-generators and that’s a hoot. I asked Dall-E to give a visual representation of my return to the blogging world. Here are couple hilarious results:

Bologo!

Boloog!

Ai generated art typewriter with funny face the words boloog!

And my personal favorite, Go Bogl!

 

I’ve loads of Mini Posts to share. I hope you stick around. ♪(๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♪

XO,

terrie

 

Note: My absolute favorite places to hang with people these days are with my amazing Patrons on Patreon and those above mentioned cool-cats on my Discord**** server. But since Patreon isn’t really a blogging site so much (a bit clunky actually) and Discord is so incredibly not conducive for having and following conversations (everything just gets buried), I’m going to just start talking into the void here, tossing out tidbits of loveliness hopefully, some weird, a little silly and please feel free to chime in in the comments. I’ll write back.

 

* That said, I’ll still be there doing my one post (or fewer a day). I love the people, not the soulless platform that has us all by the … throat.

** although with the money they’re making, you can bet that won’t be happening any time soon.

*** I finally bought some Japanese suzumushi/bell crickets and there’s a real cricket love story to go along.

**** Let me know if you want a Discord invite. Sound/Tech Guru, Richard, is in charge of all that.