Tag: somewhat unrelated

Dust in the Wind

Something I’ve not heard others talk about is just how damn dusty Japan seems to be. For all of the ritual cleaning they teach in schools, entropy seems to have a huge head start here. Take a moment to examine any less-often used surface and you’re likely to find what looks like it could be decades of built up dust. It could be just that or it could be that it just collects a lot faster here.

At first I noticed this sort of thing just by virtue of my height. At 6’4″ I have a front seat view of all sorts of places that are out of sight and out of mind for the natives, but over time I’ve started seeing it in stranger places. An otherwise well maintained restroom will have a single pipe, easily in reach and plain sight of any would be cleaners, with a tiny carpet of very visible dust. The tops of books on a shelf will have an obvious layer of fuzz along them. Air filter sheets with the words “please change me” that become visible when enough dust is filtered are very, very visible and seem doomed to stay unchanged.

Is this dustiness due to the huge amount of area used as farmland? Dust from mainland Asia that’s blown in from more aggressively polluting countries? The lack of central air ventilation in most places? It’s hard to be sure. Apart from the dust there’s plenty of rust, sunbleaching, cracking, and tearing that leads me to think it’s something more in the culture. Not a lack of caring so much as a disdain for the disused, especially if it’s man-made. If it is being used, maintenance may vary, but it will be used until it disintegrates. If something isn’t in regular use, does it need to be maintained, or should we just sit back and let entropy take the wheel?

The List Persists

Image unrelated.

I’ve proven fairly poor at keeping the blog flowing, though I feel oddly fine with it. The last 12 months have been all sorts of strange, and The List proved more of a constant focus. While I finished very little, I made progress on quite a lot.

45,000 words I’ve managed to write, which is only half way there. More importantly, it’s half way there. With how things were going last year, I didn’t imagine I’d get that far. It’s been a few hundred words here an there, usually on the bus back and forth. The important thing is just to keep going and not to worry whether or not it’s trash. Trash can be fixed. Blank pages can be fixed, too, and usually by writing trash. It seems to be a pretty simple two-step process (after the various steps leading up to getting myself to start in the first place.) I feel pretty good about getting the first draft out this year, and having some time to take care of the last mile on a number of other things.

As noted above, I’ve obviously failed at the whole “post a bunch of stuff on the Internet” thing. The next blogs-per-month data set for 2019 is going to have a big hole in the summer. Life happens, and it keeps on happening. It doesn’t help that at any given moment I feel obligated to dislike doing anything on Facebook or Twitter. It’s part of why I ended up going the blog route at all. Searches for “Why you should hate Twitter” and “Why you should hate Facebook” result in piles of rants, which may all be justified. “Why you should hate WordPress” results in mostly unrelated things, and one post telling me I’m supposed to think WordPress is confusing, but I should use it anyway. They’d done a better job of one of the following: 1) not being evil, 2) not looking like they’re evil, 3) somehow controlling all Internet opinions of them. I’m guessing it’s one of the first two.

Something I have certainly learned, and it explains a lot of what feels like the procedural generated Internet of today: quantity > quality until people actually start looking. I have no idea how many people have read this vs. how many have “read” it (picking up key words and randomly subscribing automatically because someone decided they should code a robot to do that.) If I were interested in aggressively amassing followers I’d probably be better off setting up something to scrape reddit for that auto-summarizing bot and just copy/past them. I’m not really into that, though, so I’ll just keep posting when I post. Perhaps this year the mood will strike more frequently. Perhaps more now that I’ve started getting Chase to record his complaining about things with me. Why keep all that to ourselves when we could have randos consume it and share in the whatever that is. The important thing is it’s a good time, and there’s plenty of creative commons music to slap on it to give it that extra bit of pizazz.