Years ago, I was in the midst of some personal difficulties. A friend of mine heard about it, and drove over to my house. Texted me that he was outside, and was available to talk. I said “no,” I wasn’t in a good place to talk. They said something to the effect of, “Well, I’m just gonna sit here ’til you come out.” I went out a few minutes later, we drove to a nearby beach, and talked for a few hours. It was the turning point in that series of events, and one of the most memorable moments of my life.
It was that moment that taught me what it meant to be a great friend. Ever since then, I’ve tried to live up to that example for the rest of my friends. And while it’s never entirely clear whether you’re doing things right, I’ve never, ever, ever, regretted showing up.
Yeah, it’s effort. Yeah, it’d be way easier to let them sort it out, and let’s be honest, they’ll probably be fine in the end.
But what are friends for? Are they for shooting the shit casually when you’re bored? Are they so that you’re not alone when you go to things like sporting events? Meh. You can do that kind of stuff with anyone.
Friends – the close ones – are the support system that keeps you alive when you’re overwhelmed. When you’re on the receiving end of that support, it’s because you need it, and you need folks who’ve known you forever to help guide you through trauma. When you have the chance to be on the giving end of that support, jump in with both feet, and seize the opportunity to do one of the greatest things you can do for someone you care about.
One of the surprising things of the last few months is that I’ve had reason to think about what a new job for me would look like. And there’s a lot.
I mean, I’m privileged as fuck to be able to even consider some of these questions. But I do get to consider them, and so instead of blindly doing the “default”, I’ve gotta think about what the best, most sustainable, most fulfilling version of work looks like for me.
Full time? I don’t know. I think probably if I was working 9-2:45, that’s about the right amount. Which means about 30 hours a week. Work when the kids are in school, and when they’re home, they’re priority #1.
Remote? Sort of. This is probably the biggest open question, because there’s two things I know for sure:
I never want to work full-time in an office or commute ever again. Period.
The thing I miss about work is the people, and the kinds of interactions and idea-acceleration and spontaneous nonsense that comes from being in the same place at the same time.
So while I really worry that it’s trivial to end up with the “worst of both worlds”, I think something like working co-located a few times a month for those in the area, and ensuring that about once a quarter we’re in the same place at the same time makes some amount of sense. And it’s probably an evolving thing. Early on, at the very beginning, more face time, but as we coalesce on the details of what we’re building and how, more independence. But even when we’re in the same place at the same time, temporal flexibility is required, and the ability to go deal with family stuff is #1. How to manage that? I still don’t really know.
There’s also questions of how much I’d be “in charge”. I expect that if we were to do a thing, I’d mostly be focused on high-level stuff. Team structure/culture, game direction, focus, process. But the details of what we’d be building would not generally be my focus most of the time. I think that makes a “not full-time” schedule more compatible with my actual job.
Will something actually happen? I have no idea. I think the opportunity to think about this, and potentially make something really cool with people again is alluring. But yeah – the world’s changed since the last time I had a job. Much of what I know about work is different, and learning to adapt to all the new bits and pieces, and wielding the old experience that still works… it’ll be an interesting challenge to navigate.
Most of the studio leads I’ve seen fail over the years failed because they couldn’t adapt. It’s not that they weren’t smart. It’s not that they lacked experience. It’s that the world changed, and they couldn’t see that the things that brought them success before wouldn’t bring them success again. For me, as a team lead (and also in my personal life as a parent) – missing this transition is one of my biggest fears.
One of the goals for this “school year” (yeah, the kids go back to school tomorrow!) is to start writing more on my blog, rather than on LinkedIn or anywhere else that’s owned by some giant corporation. Between Twitter’s catastrophic self-inflicted implosion or Facebook’s constant privacy and ethics woes, it’s clear that even though these platforms help focus an audience and provide nice means of feedback, I want the things I make to live on a platform that I own, and not have it attract eyeballs or create value for someone else.
That’s a big theme of the last few years. Over and over again, I’ve busted my ass to make other people rich, and I’ve managed to make them very, very rich. Far richer than I’ve made myself, by many orders of magnitude. I’m really fucking good at it, and I’m not going to do it for other people from here on out, even if the consequence of that is not doing it at all.
But in any case, the point is that I’ll be writing more here, or on some more focused public-facing locale that discusses specific topics. Probably resumes, game design, and leadership. I don’t know if all three would be in the same place, but who knows.
One thing that’s been bugging me for a long time, though, is how many “old school” gamers I know who have embraced the modern business of mobile games. Pay-to-win, the never ending crush of timers and FOMO, blah blah blah. In some ways, it is what it is, and you can accept it and internalize it, or you can be someone shouting at a tidal wave. I get it. But the thing for me is that while I do think that mobile games are here to stay, I don’t have to like it, and I don’t have to spend my time making them.
In 2009, we pioneered a lot of F2P stuff with Self Aware Games. Am I proud of that? Kinda? I mean, we had to survive, and to survive, we had to try a lot of things we’d never done before. We weren’t the first to offer chips in a casino game for real money, but we pushed the boundaries in a lot of ways – some interesting, some effective, some that likely established some precedents that made the world a worse place.
For me, F2P was interesting, because it enabled live games-as-a-service, where you’re making $, which allows you to keep spending on keeping that game interesting. And creating that feedback loop, where we build stuff, we observe the players, see what’s working, and respond was always really interesting and satisfying. And for a while circa 2009-2016, which was when I stopped working on mobile games, the fact of the matter was that premium priced games were literally impossible to base a business on. Piracy rates were astronomical, and the price people expected to pay for thousands of hours of work was $1 and not a penny more.
So F2P grew out of the circumstance. And the live-ops side of things is super interesting. Still is. I think it’s one of the places where there’s still a lot of fertile ground, but so much of gaming is driven by F2P and VC backing that the push for growth-uber-alles-all-the-time leads you down some weird roads, and makes a lot of games inevitably feel more like pain that fun.
For me, there has to be a future in games as a business. Where you acquire users, and those users are “profitable” from day one. And you grow at a sustainable rate, because you’re growing only when your player base supports (or demands!) growth. Not because your VC needs you to be a $1B company in 24 months or bust. Not because the founders all wanna be part of startupland and the pseudo-“celebrity” that goes along with it. Not because you’re so steeped in the F2P pressure-oriented psychologically manipulative FOMO sea that you can’t see any other way.
I don’t know what that is (yet), but there’s something there. Maybe it’s Apple Arcade. Maybe it’s a chance to reset the business side of things as Vision Pro’s marketplace gets established. I don’t know. But I know that the F2P grind isn’t for me. Not as a player, not as a developer.
I was reading One Piece the other night, and was on Book 89, and it said for the next book, “Coming in 2019”, and I thought, “That doesn’t seem so long ago, but it’s been four years.” And there’s something in my brain where my kids are still 6 and 9, not 10 & 13. We still don’t frequently go to restaurants. We see fewer people. Life is different, and I don’t know that it’ll go back to what I’d considered “previous normal” any time soon, if ever.
And obviously, a lot of people have decided their time worrying about COVID is over. But it’s not. My friend just got it. My mom got it recently. We had to go to great lengths to make sure my dad didn’t get it.
Despite all the precautions, Ei-Nyung, K and I all got it anyway. J didn’t, which is great. But we’d had all the available vaccinations, and our experiences with it were relatively mild. I don’t see it as, “We took these precautions and this happened anyway, what a waste,” – instead, it’s “We took all these precautions, which let us get it late, which meant we got vaccinated and because of that, our symptoms were mild.
Some of my friends weren’t so lucky, got it early, and are still struggling with severe long-COVID symptoms. I have no idea what the long-term health impacts are, and some of K’s classmates have had it more than three times (and because of that, perhaps, are unwilling to take any precautions, I guess).
The reason we took so many precautions was that we didn’t know what the impact would be. Or rather, we could see what the impact would be, and we hoped that delaying or avoiding getting infected as long as possible would pay off long-term. We managed to (to date) avoid exposing my dad, for instance – that was worth it. All the shit – the masks, the distance from friends, the change in our behavior – it’s for us, sure, but for me (and I assume Ei-Nyung), it was for J & K more than anything else.
And it’s weird – their lives from 6 & 9 to 10 & 13 have been really different than my life at that age. They didn’t get to spend a ton of time with friends from school, since we couldn’t pod up with anyone. I think their long-term social relationships will be fine – they both have friends they like – but it feels like … I dunno. It’s just different.
I don’t regret the choices we made. I’d make them basically all the same if we had to do it all over again.
But the time? The impact – it’s weird. there’s definitely a strange gap in our history. I hope the kids will look back at that time and understand that we were doing our best to keep them safe, and happy, and healthy. More, I think we actually did that. The impact wasn’t nothing. I believe it was worth it.
For the shinkansen ride from Kyoto to Tokyo, I asked if we could sit on the left so we could see Mt. Fuji. The ticketing folks were super accommodating. The clouds were not.
After we arrived, we dropped the bags at the hotel, and then booked it to Odaiba. The kids met their second cousins today, and we hung out with my cousin & his awesome family for dinner. We ate some delightful food at a place that had a picture of Keanu Reeves outside. Ei-Nyung encouraged me to sneak the bill, and I managed to get the drop on my cousin, which was a hilarious moment.
Got to see the big Gundam at exactly the right time. Our friend had gone to see it during the day & was like “WTF THIS SUCKS”, but at night, with lights, synced to the scenes in the anime from which the statue was pulled, it was pretty spectacular.
We decided to have a “new Tokyo” day today. Got Ghibli and Teamlab Planets tomorrow, then an “old Tokyo” day before we go. We ended up going to Akihabara, since I have a lot of fond memories of it from my youth, and boy – it is not for me anymore.
Used to be a place where you could get a lot of interesting electronics that were leagues beyond anything you could get in the states. But now that your iPhone does every conceivable thing, that kind of tech isn’t super relevant. So Akihabara is a lot of hobby shops with statues of anime characters, model robots, and … not a ton else?
We ended up going to one of those five-story toy stores, and they had a ton of One Piece statues (though we don’t have any need to have a character statue), and on the upper floor, they had a ton of robots and models – a bunch of stuff I’d never seen before, but was waaaaaaaaay too expensive. Picked up a Skids Transformer, solely because it was the very first Transformer I ever got way back when.
Also went to Super Potato, which is a huge retro game store. But because of the language barrier and various region locking, there’s nothing there that was super appealing, even though it was neat to see. It’s not like I’m gonna go buy a Famicom. There was also some odd livestream of some sort of girl group, and it elicited from what appeared to be a crowd of guys the kind of reaction that a BTS performance would elicit from a bunch of girls. At least, that’s how it seemed.
But yeah – too loud, too crowded, not the kinds of things I’m looking for. I think maybe if I was super deep into cameras or something, there’d be something here that I’d find interesting still, but it isn’t the revelation of my youth. Alas!
Also saw a crazy-ass Warhammer “cafe” – which had a ton of really gorgeously done up terrain for people to actually play on, and a lot of the best-painted armies I’ve ever seen.
the picture of the dude in the sunglasses and the mask is from a Japanese show called Run for the Money, which is on Netflix. It’s awesome.
We also tried to stop at a “Petit Kirby Cafe”, where they had awesome looking Kirby-themed confections. Alas, without a reservation, they wouldn’t even let you purchase any food. JUST FOR TAKEOUT. It’s crazy. They were processing people SO slowly, I was just baffled. They could easily have done this without reservations & increased their throughput 5-10x.
The stuff looked awesome, but they don’t “release” stuff until after 3 without reservations, and I wasn’t gonna sit around and wait for an hour in the hopes there’d be anything left.
We also ate lunch at the “Ramen Street” in the Tokyo train station. First bowl of ramen on the trip, and it took us almost a week in Japan to get to it. It was interesting to see the variety of ramen that they’d jammed together. The one we chose had a mix of bowls with normal noodles, and some with buckwheat-y noodles. Not soba, but sort of a hybrid soba/ramen noodle. Pretty darned good. Tomorrow after Teamlab, we’re gonna try to hit up the Ramen area of Aqua City, which also sounds like a collection of interesting spots all jammed together into one place.
Dinner at the Ninja restaurant. Cheesy but fun. Kids seemed to enjoy it a lot, and the food was surprisingly high quality given what it could have been.
And if you’re a food dork, note the quote on the wall and it’s author.
That part was very surprising!
The next day was basically “art day”. Ghibli Museum and Teamlab Planets. Ghibli was amazing. Loved it. Watched the Kitten Bus movie. What a neat concept for an animation museum. It’s basically laid out like an artist’s workspace, with lots of work-in-progress and reference material around. For a hand-drawn studio like Ghibli, it was super immersive, and showed off what kind of craft goes into these things.
The museum was spectacular – it felt like you were in one of their movies. Not necessarily anything specific (though I wouldn’t be expert enough to say for certain), but it just felt like Ghibli through and through.
Teamlab Planets. Amazing. More on this later.
After TeamLab, we went back to Odaiba for ramen. I had a tsukemen, which was good, but maybe a bit too fish-forward in the broth for me. Ei-Nyung had a ramen that was at least as much green onion as it was noodles.
We’d hoped to stop by Joypolis (a huge ass Sega arcade that I thought had closed down ages ago), but unfortunately… they closed at 7, and we got there at 8.
Last full day in Japan, we wanted to go see something more traditional.
This morning, we went to Senso-ji, which was nice – even though it was lightly drizzling, the place was packed. Funny how the little merch shops still sell the same kinds of vacu-formed plastic masks they have for the last 45 years at least.
We also had a very instagrammable ube dessert thing, where they had a thin layer of roasted sweet potato, ice cream, and then they pressed a steamed purple sweet potato through a ricer to make these thin potato noodles that went all over the top. It was really good.
Ei-Nyung went to go visit with a friend, and so the kids & I went to Shibuya to find a melon cream soda float. This was disappointing, even though it looked good. The actual soft serve was really good, but the melon soda was weaksauce.
But yeah – between Senso-ji and Shibuya and three weeks of fairly aggressive walking including nearly a week trying to walk around with a left foot that has been declining from blinding agony to merely painful, I’ll be glad to get home and put my feet up for a bit.
Tonight, we meet up with @hapacheese and our old housemate & mutual friend Brandon (who we last saw in London a few years ago). Tomorrow we pack up and head home. It’ll be a long day of traveling, but it’ll be nice to get home.
I have to say also, of the many awesome things that we’ve seen, TeamLab is definitely going to leave a lasting impression. The exhibits were surprising, full-body kinds of experiences, often strikingly beautiful in ways I haven’t experienced, and it’s something I’d very much like to see more of, which is not something I say about a lot of traditional art. If you’re in Tokyo, you could go.
One thing that I hadn’t expected at ALL even having seen some stuff when figuring out if we should go to it was that you go through the exhibits barefoot, because there are some where you’re walking in water. In one, knee-high. In one, you’re walking up a slope with water rushing down. When you get to the top, there’s an illuminated column of water falling from the ceiling.
In another, the water is opaque, and there are projections on it from abstract lights, to later images of koi.
I don’t remember if there was a third water section, but maybe. There were also numerous exhibits with lots of mirrors that made the spaces seem much larger than they were – in the room with all the LED strands hanging from the ceiling, it was genuinely disorienting, as everything seemed to go on forever in every direction.
One of the reasons I think that this would have been very difficult to do in the US is sad – it’s delicate, and the space requires a certain amount of cooperation to enjoy. You can’t grab the flowers in the garden exhibit – it’s a bunch of hanging orchids. One (foreign) kid was grabbing the ends of the strands, but that was it – everyone else was respectful. There was one kid going places in the LED room he shouldn’t have, but everyone else? Totally respectful. It’s frustrating, because it’s like, “Dammit, this is why we can’t have nice things.” There’s a lot of Japanese culture I dislike – it’s too rigid, too hierarchical – I’d never want to work here, for instance. But there’s also something about being able to hold “society” or “team” in high regard which is in direct opposition to America’s “individual uber alles fuck everyone else” mentality. The kids clean the schools together. People coordinate their movements in rush hour mostly fairly elegantly because they have to – there’s too many people for an individual melee to work.
So Teamlab to me, yeah – we saw it in Tokyo, and I wish I could see something like this closer to home, but I also couldn’t imagine it. The concessions they’d have to make for the exhibits to be durable enough or for them to not be totally dominated by Instagram buffoons who think the space belongs to them would make it worse in every way.
One funny thing in the Teamlab exhibit was that some sort of organization that employs exclusively Indians was apparently having some sort of corporate retreat there. It was just weird seeing a horde of yellow-shirted Indians all moving around in a big group, but they seemed to be having a grand time.
Packed up and about to head out. Got two hours between when we check out & the train to Narita, so we’ll poke around the Tokyo station area for a bit. Shinkansen to Narita, then to San Jose airport via ZipAir, then a friend picks us up for the drive home. Will amount to a very long day with one minor point of stress which is “checking in to ZipAir”.
Looking forward to being home, but not homesick. Amazing to me that we managed a three week trip with a lot of moving around without anyone losing their minds. 😀 Portends well for the future!
Last minute swing by the Kirby Cafe Petit, and I was able to ask her nicely enough in Japanese that she let us buy stuff without a reservation.
Bah. Flew out of Tokyo at 4pm. Didn’t sleep more than 15 min. Got in at 10am. Was groggy all day. Made it to bedtime, at which my body decided it was time to wake up. Thanks, body.
Man. I know I’ve said much of this before, but this was a hell of a trip. Before we left, we were trying to think about what “success” looked like. Was there something we wanted to get out of the trip that we’d be disappointed if we didn’t do it? There were some small things we weren’t able to do – for me, a lot of that revolved around my foot injury and not being able to see some more traditional “old Japan” stuff. I definitely want, while the kids are still young, for them to walk in a Japanese castle interior that looks like a Japanese castle interior. I have absolutely no idea why that means something to me, except that it felt like such a transportative moment when I was a kid that I feel like it’s important to me that they have that experience.
But otherwise? We had such a great experience. I feel like we got to “see Korea” and “see Japan” both as they are today, and dive into their history and culture in a way that will illuminate the kids’ life forever. We got over the uncertainty and stress of traveling to both of these countries – both heightened by each of our history and expectations. I was terrified of meeting up with family and just sitting there in silence with the language barrier. Technology made that easier. But if that technology wasn’t there at all, it’d still have been worth it. I’ll have to track down my two female cousins who I spent time with when I was young – it’ll be a bit harder, since my mom doesn’t talk to their dad basically at all any more, but I can probably figure it out.
We ate a ton of food. So much good food. We had a lot of country-specific food in the place you’re supposed to have it. The kids will have a weird love of convenience stores and vending machines that unfortunately does not carry over at all to convenience stores or vending machines in the US.
Next time, I want to go a bit more out in the sticks. If there’s a reasonable way to stay in more countryside locations in both countries, that’ll be great. Every urban location will be right on top of a train station, though, because the difference between 5 min. to a train and 15 min. is eternity.
My favorite moments:
The mango I ate in Jeju. Holy fucking shit. Life changed in a mouthful. I’ve never had anything that good. I think that’s correct. Despite all the fancy-schmany restaurants we’ve been to, I think one bite of mango blew it all away. Wild.
How absurdly uncomfortable the Hanok in Seoul was. I mean, I hated it in the moment but it’s SO … memorable? Why would anyone do that to themselves?
TeamLab Planets – I desperately wish I’d a.) have brought a better camera, and b.) know how to use a better camera, because there were things in there that the photos we have just don’t do justice, and I don’t know how to have taken a picture that’d have captured it.
Omi, my cousin’s young son, would grab Jin’s face. Jin would make an expression and a groan, and Omi would cackle and double over the way that really young kids do. Nayu, his daughter, grabbed Kuno’s hand while walking and wouldn’t let go. Kuno was visibly uncomfortable, but Nayu was beaming in a way that… I dunno. She was just so happy. Kuno’s never had the older brother experience, so maybe he got a moment of it then.
Sitting in Cafe Onion in Seoul at 7 in the morning, totally wrecked from travel, and eating a bunch of delicious pastries and wondering how we were going to make it ‘til 3pm. For some reason, the small bits of suffering during the trip seem to have stuck in my mind and ended up as positives. 😀
Just seeing all the people we know. Friends we haven’t seen in years, if not decades. Family I haven’t seen in 20+ years.
Seeing the kids get through it all together. I’m not trying to brag here or anything – but they made it through a 3 week trip in six places and had no problems at all. A moment of grumpiness here and there, but practically speaking, flawless victory. It makes it so much less stressful to plan for another trip like this.
Every goddamn time the kids were surprised or delighted by something. I feel like that’s the purpose of my life at this point in some weird way, and it was great.
Picked up a Gundam at the airport on the way out. This was super fun to build.
We arrived in Osaka, and rode a Hello Kitty-themed train from the airport to the hotel. We were staying at the APA, which is a fairly nice hotel with comically small rooms. Like, the room is the size of the bed and almost not any bigger than that. They claim it’s for “eco-friendly” living, which okay, sure – and it’s definitely efficient, but for weary travelers looking to relax a bit, it was … cramped. We’d grabbed food in a department store basement. Which was one of my goals for the trip, so mission accomplished.
Ended up on an awesome looking nightlife street on the walk back from visiting with my uncle and aunt, which was delightful. On the way there went to the One Piece store, Nintendo Osaka and the Pokémon Center, which were all in the same place. After dinner stopped off at Yodobashi Camera, which is like an REI, Best Buy, Fry’s Electronics at its height, and Toys R Us all injected with powerful steroids and smashed together. Sensory overload.
This morning we went to Osaka Castle, which was beautiful on the outside. The grounds were impressive. But the interior is now essentially a modern museum and looks nothing like a feudal castle, which is quite disappointing.
Ei-Nyung made a point re: the difference between the castles here vs. in Korea. These are all fortifications for war, where Korea’s are much less… defensible. Way more open, walls, sure, but not like Osaka Castle with a huge moat built on a stone mountain.
Universal Studios Osaka + Super Nintendo World. Mario Kart ride was awesome, Yoshi’s Adventure was a total waste. The overall atmosphere was bananas, and waaaaaaaaay too crowded.
Bye, Osaka. Your bed-sized rooms at APA were strange but alright. Shinkansen to Kyoto (a ridiculous extravagance for a 15 minute trip but they’re such badass trains and JR Pass = whatever). Stopped off at Dotonbori just for kicks (and Takoyaki), and now at a ryokan in Kyoto with a lot more space. Gonna walk over to Hanamikoji (there’s a board game named after the street) and then meet up with a bunch of Oakland friends for dinner at the place they’re staying.
In Osaka we got some souvenirs at the One Piece shop, and then went to a rando capsule toy shop and spent $15 on nonsense. I got a very tiny Tony Tony Chopper and the kids ended up with some B-tier character wanted poster One apiece keychains.
Can’t go to Japan and not have some conveyor-belt sushi. Kura in Japan is better than in the US, and cheaper.
All of this is super up my alley. It’s very Japan to me, and reminds me a ton of when I was a kid. Totally delightful. So glad the kids get to experience it. And meet family. But they’re not into stuff like Gundam or Transformers, and the age of comically compact Japanese electronics isn’t relevant anymore. But the historical stuff, the food streets, the sort of overwhelmingness of things…
On the way out of Osaka, we did a quick stop in Dotonbori for food & sightseeing.
So, got a bad case of plantar fasciitis starting yesterday evening. Getting up to walk to breakfast at the ryokan we’re at this morning was agony. Spent about half an hour jabbing the corner of a table into the bottom of my foot and stretching it out, and that made it walkable, sorta. Went to a massage place, and tried to ask them if they could do something specifically about my foot and calf, and they said, “sure, sure”. Ended up getting a nice general massage, but it did jack and squat for my foot, alas. Picked up some athletic tape to tape it up and it does feel a bit better with some support, but dammit. Not the best outcome. Haven’t wandered around Kyoto too much as a result.
esterday we met up with friends from CA who were in Kyoto at the same time. We walked over, had dinner, and walked back. Today, Ei-Nyung took the kids out while I was waiting to get foot stuff addressed. I picked up some treats that were basically cream-filled mochi-wrapped strawberries, with a bit of sweet white bean paste, which were nice – barring any comparisons, they were delicious. But I’d hoped they’d be a little more like a “yuki ichigo” (snow strawberry) I’d had in Hiroshima 23 years ago – which was a mochi-wrapped cream-filled strawberry with a small slice of maybe pound cake, which is to this day one of the best desserts I’ve ever had anywhere.
This was good, but it wasn’t that, so it was a little bit of a bummer. But Kyoto is weird. The shrines are impressive, but there’s a lot of super weird eighties architecture. And the area I was wandering around had like 10 nightclub/bars on every block and I’m like, I have no idea how most of these places could possibly sustain themselves – they’re like a bar on the fourth floor of a half-wide alleyway in a maze of alleyways.
Decided sort of ad-hoc to go to Nara today to check out the deer, despite the foot. Ended up on an absolutely baller train on the ride home. Last night the kids had the fanciest-schmanciest meals of their lives, and despite it being a lot of stuff they’ve either never had or actively dislike (like eggplant) they did an awesome job and ate it all. It was amazing. We met up with our friends Max & Hannah, and the dinner was at the ryokan they were staying at (which was sort of on the scale of that train we ended up on).
The kids ate it all. I was super impressed. There was a lot of stuff in there that was unfamiliar to them, or explicitly things they don’t normally like (eggplant, for instance), but they did a great job. They’re not picky eaters. Given their own desires they’ll tend toward fairly simple food, but if you put something in front of them, they’ll try just about anything. Despite the look on Kuno’s face. Note how fancily he’s drinking.
The deer are hilarious. You buy little packages of rice crackers that are for the deer (not the healthiest thing for them, I imagine, but better than the tourists feeding them random shit), and they walk up to you, and “bow” to try to encourage you to feed them. You give them crackers, and then they’re like, “SWEET YOU’VE GOT CRACKERS” and the bowing goes out the window. Fuck that, now they’ll pull on your shirt, or headbutt you in the rear. FEED ME. It’s awesome.
When it’s one or two, no problem. When it’s like, six, it starts to get a little intimidating.
I was thinking there HAVE to be tons of tourists who think they’re going to dress up and have a Disney Princess experience with these deer and be very surprised.
The train was a “limited express” from Kyoto to Nara. You had to pay a bit extra for the express vs. the standard train, but it cut about 1/3 of your travel time out, which for us was worth it (maybe 15 min each way?). But for your extra … $5.50 total for four people, the upgrade in trains was absolutely bonkers.
I was a bit bummed that the foot injury had killed some of the time we spent in Kyoto. Today turned that around. In addition to Nara, we also ended up going to a Kaiseki dinner with some CA friends (Eric & Christy, who some of you may know, as well as another couple we know that they’re traveling with). So two nights of nice dinners in a row with friends, a really hilariously memorable train ride, and being chased around by hungry deer. While we missed out on a LOT of what Kyoto has to offer, we were never gonna be able to see it all anyway, so whatever. We’ll hit up Fushimi Inari and the gold temple next time.
We did stay at a lovely ryokan in Kyoto. It’s surprising how much more comfortable this was that the haneok in Korea – a huge part of that was tatami is way softer than hardwood-over-concrete.
Tomorrow am, we pack up and head to Tokyo to visit my cousin in the evening.
We were talking about the most memorable bits of the trip for each of us over dinner, and for me, it was weird, because it wasn’t a thing. It was having the kids experience Korea and Japan, and specifically for me, that they got to experience some of the same things I experienced as a kid. Not literally, of course, but that culture shock of how different some things are, and what it’s like to be in a place like downtown Osaka or seeing the historical bits of Kyoto (and Seoul), which is super, super different than our experience back home – or anything they’ve actually experienced before.
It was such a formative part of my childhood experience. Even though my trips to Japan were a relatively small amount of actual time, I felt like the experience was a critical bit of my identity, and shaped how I perceived the world and my place in it. And knowing that the world was bigger than Oakland/Piedmont, or even California, and the difference in cultures – I believe that it helped me think differently. I hope the kids find some pieces of that in their mindset going forward.
We went to the biggest palace in Seoul today, which was beautiful. The grounds were large and I wish I had the stamina & weather to just explore it slowly for two days. It was apparently the royal ruling center, with the living quarter palaces a walking distance away. It’s within a stone’s throw of the Blue House (Korea’s president lives/works here, like the White House for the US). It was a mildly grey day when we left. It did not end that way.
You might notice in that last picture there’s quite a lot of rain. Huge thunderstorm that caught a lot of people (including us) off-guard. We ended up very soaked. While everyone huddled under the eaves of the palace, we decided to make a break for it to get nearer to one of the city streets in the hopes we’d be able to hail a taxi (narrator: they were not able to hail a taxi).
Eventually, we made it to the subway dripping wet, and took the subway back to the closest station to where we were staying, and walked back in the rain, which had fortunately died way down. Exciting! Damp!
Later, Ei-Nyung’s friend brought us a LOT of fried chicken. We left the traditional-but-comically-uncomfortable place we were staying at, our last stop in Seoul, and took a delayed flight to Jeju Island. For the record, if you rent a car from Hertz in Jeju, it’ll be at the Lotte rental. And literally NOTHING ANYWHERE will tell you that.
Which is a strange tactic, Hertz. We found this out because a random other tourist happened to overhear us looking for the Hertz, and she’d said that she booked something through Hertz and it ended up at Lotte. I have no idea, honestly, how we’d otherwise have figured this out other than asking every shuttle driver individually.
But otherwise, an uneventful drive from North to South (approx 40 min), and we arrived at the Grang Seongwipo (not a typo), where the host, “Uncle Jae”, is sort of shockingly charming. We went to have dinner at a place that specializes in pork. You literally cannot order anything else. It was great.
I then had a cookies-and-cream ice cream sandwich from the CU, a convenience store (between CU, GS25 (a “lifestyle platform”) and 7-11, in the cities in Korea you’d have a convenience store at maximum a block or two from you at al times, which was, indeed, “convenient”. The sandwich was made up of two very thin layers of pound cake sandwiching the ice cream. It was fantastic.
The next day, we went to the nearby waterfall, which was gorgeous.
That first one was good, so we went to two more.
Stopped at Ray’s Mango on the way back from the 1st waterfall, and this was the best mango I’ve ever had and it wasn’t even close. Wow. the thing (in the picture) is a mango smoothie with mango ice with some cream, and then big chunks of the best mango ever.
Things I’m not worried about here:
Broken windows
random shootings
aggressive, potentially violent racism
violence of any kind
that our stuff will get stolen
Kind of a massive psychic load off. It’s weird that that’s the noise we live under constantly in the US.
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Hamdeok beach today. This was on the northeast side of the island, so we drove up from Seongwipo (center south), about 45 minutes away. Lovely sand, blue water. Crisp & refreshing. 😀 Next time we stay in Jeju, I think the goal will be to stay closer to a beach. This time, the goal was “waterfalls”, and you know, mission accomplished. So next time, “beach”.
Jeju’s oranges are fucking delicious.
The oranges are super bright. Tart without being overbearing, incredibly juicy. If you took a juicy mandarin and added 5% lemon for acid, it’s sorta like that.
And the food market was less of a madhouse than Gwangjang Market with more variety. We missed a section until after we’d eaten that looked amazing and would definitely be tomorrow’s dinner if we were still here. Alas! Next time.
I didn’t remember much from the first time I came here in 2001(?), but I’d definitely come back here. It really does have a “Hawaii of Korea” vibe. Great food, chill, lots of natural beauty. A nice break between Seoul and the places we’ll be in Japan.
On the trip, I’ve been playing Phoenix Wright, and reading Range, by David Epstein, which I’d totally recommend.
The book is about why generalism is good, which is a message I definitely like hearing. 🙂
Thanks for a great trip. Bye, Korea! Until next time.
6/9 – We left at midnight between Wed/Thurs. arrived at 4am Friday, but couldn’t check in until after 2:30. We wandered around our hotel’s neighborhood for a while, and saw some neat stuff. A small park with some outdoor exercise gear (heavily in use by 6am), and a restaurant that was serving sit-down meals that was absolutely packed.
We ended up at a place called Cafe Onion, which had a neat variety of interesting pastries from traditional croissants to very un-traditional stuff. Their signature thing was a large bready canele-looking thing that was covered in a mound of powdered sugar. Delicious, and weirdly less sweet than I’d expected.
The place was PACKED by 7:30am – but weirdly, mostly with Japanese tourists? It’s probably in some K-drama that’s popular in Japan or something. But it was bizarre. Everyone in there was Japanese or white-ish.
We went to a palace and toured around, which was rad.
The palaces’ paintwork was super interesting, and there was SO much of it. Maintenance must be a nightmare. There were also some neat details – roof “trim” that showed what seemed to be clear evolution from a dragon to a Korean – the way those t-shirts show cavemen evolving into people, then into computer nerds. We took an English-speaking tour of the palace’s garden, which was long, exhausting, but gorgeous and super interesting. You’ll see in a later post the difference between Japanese and Korean “palaces”, but the Korean one was very chill and serene.
We parked our big stuff in a locker, but I didn’t sufficiently empty out my backpack, and carried around way too much rando shit. I ended up very, very wiped out. But we finally checked in, and then collapsed in a heap.
6/10 – At N Seoul Tower waiting for some sort of music/martial arts performance to start with Ei-Nyung’s high school friend, who lives in Seoul.
N Seoul Tower was super fun. The martial arts performance was super fun. Mostly katas, but then at the end they chopped a bunch of reed bundles with swords and polearms. The traditional Korean drumming was … very confusing. I kept trying to figure out what time they were playing in, and could not make it work.
I asked Ei-Nyung’s friend after the performance, because she used to play those kinds of drums, and she said that Korean traditionally drumming is always in a triangle. But it wasn’t 3/4, I think – there were parts that were in 4/4, parts that were in something else, constant tempo changes (which they all adjusted to immediately). It was really neat. But disorienting. And as with most “Traditional” drum performances, there’s a point where you’re like, “Oh, yeah – this is the rhythm section that gets you motivated to go kill your enemies.” It was great.
We wandered around the neighborhood a bit – ended up at this PIKNIK place to have breakfast. There are a LOT LOT LOT of cafes in Seoul. Like, in this neighborhood, we passed at least 50, while walking.
N Seoul tower had two things, aside from the usual ridiculous views that you’d expect from an observation tower.
1.) They had an array of massage chairs that were AMAZING. Legs, arms, back, neck, head. Huge pressure from little air bladders and textured fabric. Fantastic. 10 minutes for 1000 won ($1). Incredible. After all the walking, it was a godsend. We both assumed we’d get a massage in every single massage chair we passed for the rest of our time in Seoul, and technically, we did. We just didn’t see any more after this.
2.) The men’s room was the greatest bathroom I’d ever seen. The stalls were whatever. But the urinals were essentially right up against the viewing window without anything surrounding them. It was like you were peeing directly out of the tower onto the city from the sky. Brilliant.
Then we ended up in Gwangjang market, which was… not. This is probably the low point in the trip for me (…which isn’t that low! But it’s also the only time I got actually upset from frustration & exhaustion and crowds and hunger).
We also met up with Hannah, who you can see in the photo. But yeah – Gwangjang sucked. Too many stalls all serving basically the same things. Nowhere to sit. Too many people. No way to tell what’s good or bad or why or how, because everything is super overwhelming and crowded. Are these bindaeduk good? Or are the ones that look exactly the same, prepared in exactly the same way, in the stall right next to this one better? I have no idea. I have no idea how anyone could tell other than trying it. So combine a weird sense of analysis paralysis with HUGE CROWDS AND TIGHT SPACES AND NOWHERE TO SIT AND NEVER STOP AND WHERE ARE THE KIDS AND IT’S REALLY HOT and yeah – it wasn’t for me. At all.
6/11 –
I think this might have been the best sign we saw in Korea. You have to zoom in and look at the pictures of how not to use the escalator.
We went to a place for breakfast called Bonjuk. It was really close (and my legs and feet have just been trashed from a lot of walking over the last two days). I’m not normally a huge fan of jook – it’s just … kinda there. And this is a chain. So even though I’d suggested it, it was more “Hey, here’s a pretty Korean-y breakfast, we should do it,” than “I am very excited about how this is going to be.”
It was GREAT.
It was bulgogi with a lot of garlic, and “Shepherd’s Purse”, which I’d assumed was gonna be some seafood that was euphemistically named or something, but it was just an herb – the green stuff in the porridge.
The rice was porridge-y, but not obliterated. It was like having properly al-dente pasta, where the rice had structure and bite, but was still rich. The meat was salty and very garlicky, in a way that really worked well with the porridge without being overwhelming, but cancelling out the “boringness” of rice porridge.
The kids had a beef & seaweed version, which is like miyukgook, a soup that Ei-Nyung makes that is delicious. And she got a chicken & ginseng version, which was also very distinctly different and delicious.
Yeah, I was super impressed.
Then we went to a VERY INSTAGRAMMY little mall, and I got a shirt. We also went to a tiny cafe & got drinks. There’s strawberry milk everywhere, and some areas where there are like five independent cafes on every block. It’s bonkers. Ended up also getting a traditional-ish Korean dessert, which is a bit of what looks like corn syrup (traditionally honey) that’s then coated in corn starch and hand-stretched a bunch of times until you get like 2^14 little tiny strands of sugar, and then they wrap (filling) in a layer of the cottony sugar stuff. It was a whole rehearsed sales pitch for tourists, but ti was still a VERY GOOD sales pitch, and I was gonna get it anyway the moment we walked over to the stand, so I didn’t feel like I was coerced into something. 😀
Ends up looking like a lot of little cocoons – usually filled with nuts, but since Jin’s allergic to walnuts, we got them with smashed Oreos & chocolate. They were GREAT on the spot, but definitely worse as time went on. Did not age well. Apparently they’re called “Dragon’s Beard”. 6/12 – Breakfast this morning was a vanilla latte and this, which is “sujebi”.
It’s an anchovy-broth soup with vegetables and torn dough pieces. Really good, and like yesterday’s porridge, something I enjoyed quite a bit more than I thought I would.
And a little variety of fried chicken from last night. We went to a food truck gathering at the Han riverside over by Gangnam, which was clearly the rich part of town. Obvious from say, Lamborghini Urus sighting, and a bunch of people riding very expensive bikes on the bike paths. The chicken was alright. Soy garlic, yangnyam (spicy and sweet, this is when done well, my favorite fried chicken), and a bunch of fried chicken skin, which was GREAT, except that it was coated in honey butter sugar, which was way too much, and made it kinda blah overall. But it was really nice to sit outside riverside on the grass. As crowded as Gwangjang was, while this was a well-attended collection of food trucks, the crowds were somehow not overwhelming.
Self-explanatory. Over in Hongdae, where we went yesterday, which is like “fancy, hip, $$$ Telegraph Ave” for the Bay Area folks.
There used to be a “One Piece Cafe” in Seoul, which had a full-size replica (or at least something akin to it) of the Thousand Sunny, but unfortunately, that closed permanently a while back. They moved some of the stuff to a new place in Hongdae called “Play One Piece”, which is a merch shop.
Sadly, it wasn’t all that well stocked – or was stocked with later stuff in the storyline, which didn’t resonate as much with me. A lot of what they sold were figures, some of which were neat, but also bulky – we’re not gonna carry stuff like that around for 2.5 more weeks. So that was a bummer, but it was still a neat place to go check out.
Kids and I went to the CoEx convention center/mall to meet up with @eingy. It was comically huge. Went to the aquarium, which was surprisingly decent.
The CoEx “library”. Apparently a real library. We also went to the CoEx aquarium, which was surprisingly decent. I’ve never seen an aquarium with meerkats and beavers, though. Pretty weird.
I also got a watch at CoEx. Weird to get a Japanese-themed watch in a Korean mall, but I’d never seen this Dragon Ball watch before, and this is very much an “If you know you know” kind of thing. Super, super obvious to any Dragon Ball fans (ran into one much later in the trip at the Kirby Cafe who commented on it positively), but if you don’t know, it’s just a weird kinda loud watch. 😀
Also, about half the taxi drivers in Seoul are out of their fucking minds. And yet seem to not have their cars utterly destroyed, so… yeah. But between a guy persistently doing 40% faster than the speed limit, someone who only binarily modulated the gas, and a dude who (successfully) basically pushed a bus out of the way in a lane they were already in… taxis were an ADVENTURE. They’d either be staid and normal or completely insane.
I would love a guided architecture tour of Seoul. It’s full of neat buildings. Ei-Nyung’s friend was talking yesterday about how there have been politicians who have pushed for big splashy “event “ architecture, and how it created a lot of tension with residents who wanted more spent on services.
…while I agree that money would be well spent on those in need, there’s no question that Seoul is an internationally top-tier city as a result, and if the focus was solely on pragmatism without a bit of showy nonsense, the city would be measurably worse. I dunno. It’s a weird balance. You spend on some flash, it attracts international attention & investment, the pool of money you have to spend grows. Does it ever actually get spent on those in need? Do they spend more as a result? I have no idea.
Quality art.
I’m surprised at the number of unmasked folks in Korea. I’d expected more. Seems like maybe 30% indoors, 10% in crowded outdoor spaces? We ended up getting caricatures drawn at a place that had a very distinctive style. Turned out alright. I think she captured Jin really well, but Kuno’s not super recognizable to me.
You know the phishing e-mails you get that are full of bizarre spelling errors? Part of the purpose of those is to weed out the people who aren’t going to fall for the scam.
When someone talks to you about web3 games and uses the phrase “interoperability”, I want you to think of that as the exact same thing.
It’s something that sounds good on the surface, but if you know anything about game development, it falls apart immediately. Web3 “interoperability”, where you can take an NFT from one game and use it in another? No one’s going to do that. There’s no financial incentive to do so. It’s fundamentally not how games are built. And not just traditionally – even if someone fully embraced web3, there’s no incentive to ever make something that takes an NFT that someone bought elsewhere and create content for it in your own game.
So when someone says, “Yeah, man – you can buy this magic sword NFT, and when you get bored of Game X, you can take it to Game Y where it’ll be a super valuable house! How awesome is that?” what you should hear is, “I either know absolutely nothing about how games are made, or I think you’re stupid (or ignorant) and am trying to sucker you.”
Read through Bob Iger’s book, “The Ride of a Lifetime” and really enjoyed it. He’s a good storyteller, and a lot of his “leadership lessons” are things I want to have confirmed by someone of his stature, so … yeah, I liked it a lot.
One thing that struck me, though, is that Iger fairly deftly understood how streaming and other tech was going to disrupt Disney’s distribution channels. I don’t think he’s going to be CEO of Disney really long enough to ride the whole next wave, but I think whoever succeeds him will have to have a really good understanding of how much tech is about to change content creation.
I think we’re many years off from machine-written scripts – but what I think AI can do is essentially “Rapid prototype” entire movies, where you can stuff a script into it, and get some basic performances/visuals out quickly – like, faster, more detailed, moving storyboards. It won’t replicate the hand of a director, or the nuances of human actors (at least not yet), but I’d be very surprised if a lot of preproduction steps of films validate scripts and ideas by quickly turning them into like… “quick renders” of scripts that are largely done by machine.
And then you’d have a director essentially work with some folks to “tune” that quick render so it more closely matches their vision, and you’d invest time in specific sequences to flesh them out in more detail. But I expect you’ll get to a point where you can have a pretty phenomenal pre-vis of your movie by just using off the shelf tools.
Maybe the way tech will be disrupting content creation will be totally different. But that seems like a plausible path forward to me, and I think, again, that the best uses of tech/AI will be those that are *driven* by artists, and refined by artists.
Haven’t wandered around Kyoto too much as a result. 
