Feel free to delete if not racing

Insiders worry that Hollywood is the next Detroit—but it's actually much worse than that

I apologise that the site has been a bit slow since it suddenly turned into a travel blog. My plan was to roll out my poor man’s CDN before we left, but I ran out of time. It’s definitely not just a nginx GeoIP lookup that refers image requests to a different cloud instance running in Toronto depending on where you’re coming from. I’m trying to use the computer less on this trip—if you can believe it—but I’ll see what I can do to improve this a bit. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-24.

Imagine you didn't know what money was.

I’m typing this today as we travel from Tōkyō to Nagoya on the Shinkansen, the best form of transport in the world. It’s fast, quiet, convenient, smooth, spotless, punctual, and the booking system is even understandable after you’ve made a bunch of mistakes! The seats in the reserved Green Cars are bigger and more comfortable than business class on a loud, shaky aircraft, and the windows are gigantic. You also board at a station without going through all the rigmarole of an airport. I’ve been lucky enough to go on the Shinkansen half a dozen times now, and it never gets old. It’s the peak of human transport. I would fight people who disagree, but (a) I wouldn’t be able to bear the secondhand embarrassment, and (2) I’d want you to at least have a bit of dignity. I’m considerate like that! It’s wild that I’m using the free Wi-Fi, while connected to the WireGuard VPN back at our house in Sydney. For the next hour, our home Internet is on a bullet train! How cool is that!? Anyway, that’s today, I’m supposed to be writing about yesterday. I think the Beatles sang a song about that. Yesterday was our last full day in Tōkyō for a while, so we went hunting for the OM SYSTEM OM-3 that we’d failed to find in Akiba on our first day. We did a bit of digging and found one going for almost ¥20,000 cheaper in a Yamada Denki in Shinjuku, which we took as a sign. We got to the store, and sure enough there was a whole row of OM SYSTEM kit alongside the Nikons that I’m sure I should have got if I weren’t so irrational. But picking it up in person and using it for five minutes, the OM-3 reminded me of everything I loved about my old Olympus E-M10. The retro-styled Nikons were fun to use, but the OM-3 felt so precise, engineered, and crafted in a way that’s hard to describe, and that no other camera company gets close to. I didn’t even need to think twice, and a few minutes later the very attentive and flustered staff member was running around assembling all the pieces we needed to complete our order. He was also exceedingly cute, though you didn’t read that. I needed to charge the battery on the new toy, so we broke for lunch while we headed back to the hotel. We stopped in a little hole in the wall soba store where I successfully had my first solid food of the trip! We figured strings of carbs with light sauce would be easy on the stomach. I could have cried; the food is what I miss most about Japan, and I finally felt like we arrived! There was likely nothing special or unique about this plate of food, but it was the best fucking thing I felt like I ever tasted. After spending my months of savings on a silly slab of photographic gear, and remembering what food tastes like, we made a quick detour to Harajuku to see if the Pompompurin cafe had space! Alas, they did not, but we enjoyed some coffee at another lovely little café near the station before heading back to the hotel. Neither of us are the target audience for Harajuku, but it’s probably not one of our favourite places in Japan. I’d say it’s because it’s swarming with tourists, but that’d be a bit hypocritical (cough). We dropped stuff back at the hotel and headed back to Akiba to see if luck would strike twice. We hadn’t seen our favourite English vtuber Ninomae Ina’nis’s autographed memorabilia or life-sized cutout at the new AmiAmi vertical figure store, but we thought maybe it might be around in their previous anchor store in Radio Kaikan. And she was! She’d signed the massive lifesize cutout, and a bunch of other art and prior releases that were on display. There was also a tonne of previously released merchandise for other Holo talents, of which we may have partaken (cough). I feel like there was more Hololive stuff in general around the weeb stores this time around, both in new and second-hand outlets (it used to be that Niji had them cornered). It’ll be interesting to see how that changes with some of the high profile departures of late. I love Hololive, the community, and all the talents, but it’s hard not to worry there’s something brewing internally that’s dissuading some of their biggest names from staying. Anyway! The plan was to check out some HARD·OFF second-hand hardware stores in Akiba, but we ended up spending the rest of the evening exploring all the stores in Radio Kaikan. You know you’ve been there a while when that orchestral Aud Lang Syne rendition starts playing everywhere. Rather than taking the JR and Metro back to the hotel, we decided to have an evening stroll instead. Japan, like Singapore, is such a joy to walk around at night; it’s so clean and safe. It also gave us an opportunity to get a cheeky snack from a certain ubiquitous establishment. Next stop, Nagoya! I’ve only ever gone past it on the train—this specific Shinkansen service, funnily enough—so I’m looking forward to seeing a new part of the country. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-23.