Video Games Taught Me How To Navigate Through Tokyo (More or Less)
Except for some suboptimal subway exits, I think I'm doing a pretty good job at navigating through Tokyo. In a way, this isn't my first time to the city. I've played Shin Megami Tensei IV, set in a post-apocalyptic, geo-fronted Tokyo. Much of the game involves navigating from one node of the subway to another, and locating the demon-mutated remains of popular tourist spots. It's not a perfect mapping, but it gave me a rough idea on how things are placed - like how Ueno and Akihabara are near each other at the top, and that Roppongi and Shibuya are at the other end.
That's my theory at least. It could also be that the transport grid is arranged along fairly rational lines. And transit information is always available and updated.
Spring Forward
Finally the semestral break in earnest, after the Roman Law Conference and a two-week internship. We are still having those kinds of days - mornings with cold, gray skies - when you have to struggle to get out of bed before noon.
Hurtling through tunnels and countryside as I write this, on the shinkansen to Tokyo. Hoping to get a lot of writing done whenever I'm not chasing one of the thousand and one cool things I can do, buy, or eat in the city.
Forecast bumps up sakura season by one more week. I'm tired of waiting for spring, so the plan is to get up early mornings for a walk by the seaside, get back to get some writing done before lunch, go to classes, more writing in the library, and then dinner at home. Then more writing before going to bed with a book.
The Internship
More of an immersion really, shadowing Ito-Sensei and Umeda-Sensei as they go about their work. We had a good conversation going about lawyer advertising (not prohibited, but highly regulated in Japan) and law firm websites (unacknowledged by both bench and bar in the Philippines, which means it ends up being advertising via the backdoor). It's a change of pace from the practice I have back home. My translator (and "legal guardian") Yoshiko was awesome, I was extremely lucky that she was my guide through all this.
The time was too short for any meaningful comparative law, so I tended to focus on fundamentals like the way they allocate spaces (the conference room, not lawyer's offices, is the hub of activity and is usually the biggest area of any law office), as well as record keeping and filing (I'm translating some case management forms, hopefully to be used in the office).
Legis Informatica
Dead tired aftera two-day conference on Roman Law. Stipulatio looks like an archaic way of arriving at an agreement. Until you realize that transactions protocols proceed by query and response. The web is buzzing with the ghosts of dead Roman formulae.
Strangely, this is my best takeaway from the whole thing (don't ask me how we got here, though): Visceral fear of death and destruction is the key to well-regulated autonomous programs. Robots have to learn that we can fuck them up.
The Aspirational Homescreen
This is from a question from Note to Self, which asked its listeners to describe their relationships with their phones.
My phone (or at least its homescreen) is an aspirational anchor. It belongs to this parallel-universe version of myself, someone who does not compulsively check Facebook or Twitter, who blogs regularly (about interesting stuff from curated sources), and who has a lot of interesting thoughts that need to be noted down right away (in Evernote).
In reality, it's a struggle uninstalling Facebook, then installing it again. But I want to keep trying.
Five Point Update - February 7, 2016
1. Track in heavy rotation - Run into the Sun by Joachim Svare, Julia Michaels. I am trying to invoke some sympathetic magic for some earnest spring weather.
2. What I'm watching - Foundations of Modern Social Theory with Iván Szelényi, a series of Yale lectures made available on YouTube:
The subject can be dry at times (especially when he starts covering Weber), but the guy's enthusiasm for ideas is infectious. Plus: lots of juicy gossip on the personal lives of philosophers.
3. Purchase I'm excited about - The uni-ball KuruToga mechanical pencil. It's got a sophisticated internal mechanism to prevent breakage and ensure the point stays sharp. Plus, diamond-infused lead - which gives you an idea how worthless crystallized carbon really is.
4. Article I'm reading - You're Wrong About Voicemail by Leslie Horn. The Philippines was overtaken by text and email before it had a chance to develop communications practices around voicemail. Which is a shame.
5. Podcast I'm listening to - Note to Self, which explores all the good and maddening ways we relate to our phones and our tech.
Susan Kare (Layers 2015)
From Wired:
Here, Kare, icon of icons, talks about the creative decisions behind some of the best-loved symbols of the past four decades.
Susan discusses her history with Apple and icon design, and sits down with John Gruber to talk design.