Wow! Another Christmas, the fourth I’ve celebrated since Japan Is Doomed started way back in 2006. I hope everyone gets what they want for Christmas, and has a wonderful and memorable time!

I’m here in Japan, away from family for the second time. It still feels lonely but thanks to Skype and the like, maybe a few thousand miles won’t feel like that far for a while.

I will do a big end of year post like I did last year in the near future, as well as New Year’s resolutions for 2010.

But until then, have a wonderful day, and thanks for reading!

Hi guys! Just a brief update. As I may have mentioned, recently I made a mistake that resulted in me losing 2500+ photographs from the last year. It was pretty gutting, although thanks to the blog and my Flickr account (more on that later!) it wasn’t life destroying.

But to prevent that ever, ever happening again, I set up a gallery, so that I’d be able to view my photos from anywhere in the world. Then I thought – why not let everyone look at them?

So whilst they’re not very well managed, and I got sick of writing descriptions for them, they are all available. I’m still using my Flickr account as a sort of ‘showcase’ – all my favourite photos will be uploaded there. But if you’re really into photographs, or just want to see what I deemed ‘not so good’, head over to the gallery. If you click the link at the top of the page, you’ll see a menu to navigate to both of these.

Hope that wasn’t too boring!

I get a good number of emails asking me various things about my course. As I write about it quite a bit (collection of posts available here) it makes sense people are interested. IF you do have any questions or want to ask anything that I don’t cover here, please do feel free to mail me. Today I’m going to try to provide as much useful information as I can, and I will update it when I can.

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It’s been far, far too long since I did any photography. But today went out to a nearby rock climbing cliff with my sister and her boyfriend (and the dog!) and took some photos. I’m really happy with the way they turned out. I’ve attached my favourites to this post. You can check out the whole collection here. (23 photos in all)

In other news, I’ve started writing a new article which I hope to finish in the next day or two. If I don’t have to sell my laptop (and potentially my hands) to pay for my accommodation in Japan…

In this entry, (which is now on JapanSoc please soc it!) I will attempt to cover every general topic popular JapanSoc stories deal with in a single article, thus guaranteeing it will get so many socs that the site itself will be sucked into a black hole and the world will end, thus doing the job the Large Hadron Collider couldn’t manage.

Alright, the first thing I need to do is look at some of the most popular stories of all time. There have only been five articles that have collected 30 or more socs;

1. New Extra Social JapanSoc!
   JapanSoc manager Nick finally allowing freedom of speech. Prior to this all communication had to be done in the form of binary code, written out by hand onto pieces of paper and sent to Nick’s house.
2. JapanSoc Chooses the Best Japanese News
   An article praising the site and it’s users for choosing the most appropriately interesting news. Apparently “Japan Is Doomed author Mike loses sandwich, please donate generously to fund a replacement” isn’t suitable.
3. Japan Blog Matsuri April 2009 Edition
   The theme was ‘Slow times in Japan’, and over 30 writers wrote about what they do on their slower days in Japan. I was going to write an article, but I was having a slow day so I did what I usually do on those days: nothing, then lunch, then more nothing.
4. Japanese people know, “you’ve been living in America too long” when…
   Apparently some Japanese people cited reasons to start worrying you’ve been living in the US for too long. My personal suggestion? You understand what’s going on in Boston Legal.
5. THAT Is One Exhausted Salaryman (PIC)
   A picture of a poor salaryman who fell asleep on the train whilst rocking out to some Bon Jovi or something. Personally I don’t think it’s nice to laugh at people’s tiredness. So I refuse to post it here… alright alright I was joking.

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