I’m here. In Tokyo. Finally. During my idle time on the flight over I kept on thinking, “what am I going to write to everyone once I finally get to Japan?” Most of you already […]
Somewhere around six months ago, I was sitting in my apartment talking on the phone with my mom. From just outside my window I could hear Buddhist monks chanting at Ninnaji, an enormous wooden temple […]
“They are an intriguing people. From the moment they wake, they devote themselves to the perfection of whatever they pursue. I have never seen such discipline.” -The Last Samurai. Seeing that fantastic archery demonstration the […]
Peder and I left our pousada in Trancoso and started out for our day’s 30 km walk at around 11am. The plan was to follow the coast all the way to Arraial d’Ajuda, a neighboring […]
KaZantip 2011: Black Sea Paradise
Warning: This post contains a few NSFW photos. View only in good company 🙂 The Republic of KaZantip, the legendary Eastern European Shangri La of parties, lasts for just one month a year in a […]
The following is not actually a single narrative of one continuous evening, but a composite of many. It’s written as a representative summary of my average night out in Kyoto. Nothing is exaggerated. It’s Saturday […]
Throughout all the various additions and revisions to this website over the years, I’ve built up quite a pile of custom code – in the form of WordPress plugins, widgets, templates, and sometimes as standalone libraries. For ages I’ve thought of releasing some of these as free plugins, so others could take advantage of what I’d written… Continue reading »
I’ve written several posts now about Matt Harding, a YouTube phenomenon who became famous as the result of a simple video that shows him dancing goofily at various spots around the world. This video became so popular that it’s since turned into a full-time career; Matt is now a published author, and stars in more than a handful of major TV commercials.
A few months back I read an interview that struck me as particularly interesting. It touches briefly on the human perceptions of distance, of tribal boundaries, and of how we understand (or don’t understand) the scope of the international world we now live in. As someone who tries to experience as much as possible of the diversity this world has to offer, I found his observations particularly insightful… Continue reading »
When I left my job as a video game programmer in Japan in late 2007, I never actually had the specific intention of becoming a long-term freelance programmer. Nor did I have some grand scheme for country-hopping to different parts of the world every month of the year. Truth be told, I didn’t even know what I’d be doing beyond a short trip to Brazil I’d scheduled for the following February.
It didn’t take me long, though, to learn just how rewarding – and how easy – a mobile lifestyle can be. A lifestyle with total freedom and constant adventure. Especially after a solid year of fixed hours and following orders under rows humming fluorescent lights, it probably isn’t hard to understand why the prospect sitting on a tropical beach with a laptop, learning a new language, witnessing a new culture, and partying in a new city anytime I wanted was a damn attractive alternative.
Yet because my new lifestyle had unfolded not as a plan but as an evolution, I’d never really gave it that much deliberate thought. In fact, I never even knew there was a name for it. Until just a couple months ago, when a friend sent me a link to an interesting article. Continue reading »
Over the five-year lifetime of this blog I’ve written some wildly different articles – about everything from nerdy ways to customize your cellphone to narratives about epic nights of partying at Brazilian Carnaval. Some of these posts I’ve been particularly fond of, and others I never really gave a second thought. This little blurb about the strange subculture of Hosts and Hostesses in Japan definitely falls under the latter category; yet to my surprise, it’s become one of the most-viewed articles on the entire site. Continue reading »
My last post, written more than ten months ago, began with the words “It’s certainly been awhile, hasn’t it?” Never could I’ve imagined that those words would mark the start of my longest blogging silence by far since creating this site nearly half a decade earlier.
I’ll bet you all thought I fell off a glacier in Antarctica or something, but in fact I’ve been right here in Los Angeles for (almost) the entire time.
So what’s the deal?
Well, you might recall that the decision to return from China last February (instead of continuing South through Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand) was made to give myself a chance to catch up on a growing list of projects, both personal and professional. It’s that list that’s kept me here all these months, as one thing just seems to keep leading to another.
And although I still have no concrete plans for the next big adventure, I wanted to write to assure you that it’s never been my intention – and still isn’t – to leave this blog out to die. Nor is it my intention to get a regular desk job and abandon my adventuring ways. At least not yet, anyway. I’ve just been on hiatus.
Continue reading »
|
Contact | Terms & Privacy ©2004-2026 Justin Klein |
|
HTML5 Valid 05-01-2026 22:00:30UTC 0.34s 65q 29.15MB |
