First sunshine after weeks of rain, Kamogawa, Kyoto

Shiga Omimaiko Nakahama

But not exactly sure how I’m going to do that

Ohara

I think mostly to protect young kids

BUT, Nintendo allows you to change your nickname whenever you want without limitation

So, what do my son and his friends do to communicate? Yeah that’s right…

They change their nicknames constantly to tell others they’re opened to game

Or it’d be like “jump in my private session” or “going to my dad’s hometown, can’t play” (it’s shorter in Japanese)

Neat but since they also change their avatar picture constantly, it’s hard to track who’s who if you have a lot of friends on

People always find a way so why make their life so hard to begin with…

Between the OoT remake (game of my childhood)

The 2D, turn based FF

Millienials are eating good this fall

We need to talk about Final Fantasy

FF Resonance more specifically

The demo is out and it is so damn beautiful

GTA6 is going to be huge but a new turn based FF is bound to be bigger in my home

What have I been up to? Lots of things, actually. Went to Hokkaido with the family for 11 days. We stayed in a Club Med resort for a week and explored Otaru and Sapporo for a few days as well. Kids had “cried-on-the-last-day” types of fun. I ate way too much but it was all worth it. The climate in Hokkaido was very nice in July, it really did feel like we escaped Japan for a while.

Early July, I accepted an offer for a Senior Designer position at a GenAI startup in Tokyo that specializes in Manga/Anime content. Just started the job two weeks ago so still the early days but everything is new and exciting and everyone seems to be going at the speed of light.

I refreshed my home office a bit with a new desk (electric standing) which was on my shopping list for a good while. It’s been amazing for my focus, leg blood flow, and overall just a fantastic trick to keep my body engaged throughout the day. Whenever I feel a bit agitated, now I just move to my standing position and can stay that way up to 2 hours. Do all my meetings standing too.

I’d love to do more 1-on-1s and generally any brainstorming or design thinking work while walking. Standing helps but walking really is the biggest creativity generator for me. I just feel calmer and more focused and generally more positive when I walk. Something else to think about if I ever go back to consulting one day. I’d love to do design walks.

Iwakura Rice Fields

Woof…

But I’m taking a break right now

10 days in Hokkaido

I’ll write again when I’m back

Stay hydrated

It’s just one bar for now because I DON’T GO OUT bar hopping that often.

But I can think of one or two more I’d like to add later.

Mina the Hollower is incredible.

The world is filled with secrets and fun, unexpected interactions.

The attention to details is remarkable.

And the sprites are gorgeous.

Get it now!

I started playing Saros.

I’m not sure what to think yet about the structure of the game compared to what Housemarque did with Returnal a few years which I thought was mesmerizing.

First, if you never played before, this is a roguelite type game.

When you die, you start over from the start.

Saros does offer checkpoints though, so it’s a little more manageable than Returnal.

But the moment to moment gameplay is superb.

This game feels like all the good parts of video games.

Beautiful art direction, extremely crisp 3D sound effects, uber tight gameplay.

It feels new and it feels old.

It feels new because of the haptic feedback in the controller.

The beautiful graphics of course.

The cinematography of the bosses.

It feels old because it reminds me games from the amiga era almost.

It can be part action, part platforming, part bullet hell.

The difficulty makes it go from extremely frustrating to immensely satisfying.

Finally killing a boss after X failed runs feels so so good. Liberating almost.

It’s the simply joy of playing good ol’ video games.

(which has been stuck at the same level for 10 years)

1/ watch and read more stuff in JP every day (easy)

2/ take an online class weekly (doable, small budget)

3/ homework on app or book (hard routine to maintain, still got to find the right app or book anyways)

Capcom has been cooking so far this year.

Did not play it but heard great things about RE9. Horror is not my jam though.

I got Pragmata at the top of my wishlist.

We’ll get that Onimusha reboot somewhere down the line this year.

Somehow, I cannot believe GameFreak (the studio behind Pokemon, mind you) is also making this absolutely crazy looking game.

Another great year for Japanese games?

And all I can think of is:

I cannot wait to check out all of the todo, fitness tracking and note taking apps my LinkedIn feed is about to come up with!

It’s gonna be epic!

(NOT)

Via Apple Shortcuts

But now I found a pairing that I really love looking at.

PP Fraktion Mono for body text.

PP Editorial New for headings.

Lots of contrast which I like a lot.

Such an awesome foundry that allows free personal use.

Also the color scheme has been “harmonized”. I had a solarized-inspired light mode and a space blue, super techy dark mode which felt like 2 different publications when I swapped back and forth which was jarring almost.

I think that I found a relatively good balance between the two.

I deleted this section a little while ago.

But now I am bringing it back.

Snip snap, snip snap!

I just missed it, I thought maybe I could simplify it a bit

I removed categories, it’s just one long feed of texts now.

If you read this, you are awesome.

I’ve recently wondered how my childhood would have changed had the school year started in April instead of September. To be honest, I’ve always found it quite depressing to start with a new class, a new teacher, make new friends as the winter was visibly approaching. Maybe that’s just me looking at Japan with my rose-tinted glasses again though.

Spring means a lot of new things for everyone at the same time and, you know, cherry blossoms, picnics, drinks at the river. It’s exciting, it’s fun. It’s really a fun time.

A fun time except I hurt my back at the gym, which is the official version I tell everyone. But in reality, I think it happened during my sleep. But ssshhh. That injury sort of snowballed into many different smaller injuries… the rib cage muscles, the shoulder, and whatnot. My body is trying to communicate something. The funny thing is that whenever I search for my symptoms online, there’s pretty much always some doctor advocating that yoga is a good approach to recovery. So now I got to do yoga I think. I tried many years ago and it really sucked but if that’s the price to pay so my body can function a few more decades with less pain, I think I’m open to it now.

In other news, I’ve been tearing this site apart. I wrote some case studies, I migrated my old portfolio in a sort of archive. I redesigned a bit, cleaned stuff up. I simplified my themes because I think at some point I had 7 and it was just ridiculous and messy. So now sorry, there’s just the two (light and dark mode); we’ll let it at that until I catch the bug again.

I’ve been toying with the idea of publishing notes related to work, design and AI on my website but I still don’t know what the right approach is. All my notes are super messy right now. It’s a big collection of bullet points with no shape or form. I need to read, categorize them, discern the good stuff from the bad stuff. Ugh. I think I’ll do it, but I need time. I need another season worth of time.

I’m writing this on January 1st. I’ve had delicious soba for lunch, as is tradition. I’m having kuro mame daifuku (black soybeans mochi rice cake) right now with my coffee, yummy. Cold has settled in Kyoto. Maybe I said this already but I love winter here. It’s often quite sunny. We have less tourists. Sometimes we have snow and we play all day outside with the kids.

AI has become the norm for most things at work. I certainly enjoy not having to perform tedious coding tasks but also, I constantly wonder if we’ll realize when we do not have “control” over our codebase anymore. Sort of like the boiling frog metaphor, you know?

2026 feels like a good time to ask myself and others a few questions:

• What kind of software do I still want to build in 2026 and beyond?

• What’s my profession now?

• I enjoy using the power of 10,000 suns in my terminal but can I use any of it to build more connections with people?

• How will all this stuff affect my children? At school but beyond as well. I didn’t plan any of this in 2017. I thought we were like 50 years off. Or to be more honest, I didn’t think about any of this at all.

• And by the way, will we ever go back not thinking about any of this at all? As in, when does this become so ubiquitous that it ceases to be a topic of conversation between adults?

I write this from Fake Autumn 2025. Temperatures are down but let’s not rejoice too quick. Summer will kick our arses one last time at least between now and mid-October, as is tradition now.

Enough with the weather update. Life has been good. We spent the month of August in Marseille. I can’t tell if my kids enjoyed it or not.

My son decided that he will attend our local Japanese elementary school after 2 years at the French International School. His Japanese is quite rusty and he has a lot to catch up… But, it’s been 3 weeks already and he’s having fun. He leaves for school and comes back on his own (or with the neighbours). It’s been quite interesting for him to point out all the little cultural differences.

The students are the ones responsible for serving the meals at lunch. They also make teams to clean different parts of the school every day. His class went and visited the behind-the-scenes of our local supermarket.

I’m not too sure exactly whether and how I should document his “exchange program” year. More on that later maybe.

It’s a challenging game but very very fun.

Can’t recommend it enough for anyone who love 2D adventure games like Metroid or Castlevania, Ori, etc…

On the side, I’ve also been playing Dragon Quest 3 HD2D which is basically Team Asano’s remake of Japan’s favorite RPG ever.

I’m not old enough to remember playing these oldies on the original NES but I absolutely love the minimalism of the design, even if that ofc means a very simple (barebone) story.

You’re basically thrown into a vast world full of mysteries, treasures and quests, and nothing really to tell you where to go or why. You, as the player, have to figure out most of everything.

Weirdly refreshing in 2025.

Thought it would be easier to share and update going forward.

Work portfolio next hopefully 🤞

I don’t produce a lot of shareable design artifacts

So I need time to storyboard this, create assets and put it together

I watched Scavengers Reign and it was awesome

The whole ecosystem they created was fascinating

The plot was simple yet gripping

The characters were great, my fav were Kamen and Levi

The show was sadly canceled but it’s so good, I’m sure there’s a little hope a follow up can be made one day.

Also Common Side Effects from the same creators was great and was renewed for a S2 so there’s hope.

I am quite convinced already this is a great format for me to get the writing started.

It’s also great at sequencing ideas in very simple sentences.

And really, that has always been the biggest blockers to writing blog posts to me.

Blog posts are usually short essays with a beginning, a development and a conclusion.

Writing a good blog post, in my view, is more cognitively loaded than writing a few texts.

It’s a little bit like writing a plot vs writing a dialog scene:

Writing a dialog is quite organic to me while…

… writing a plot requires a birds eye view and a greater discipline I find?

Not sure if this is a shared “universal” experience or a case by case.

But the amazing thing with blog posts and longer formats in general is that they have better staying power.

A chat bubble is very ephemeral by essence while a post or an essay can stay a reference forever.

So now I wonder, what could I do that would help me to turn small chat bubbles into longer posts.

A few ideas to develop later:

I could write answers texts that ask me to clarify (a little bit like playing chess solo)

I could create a tool off some LLM API that do a reverse prompting off my texts (asking me to clarify everytime it detects ambiguity)

I could fork down from a specific bubble into other chats, like “threads” (this doesn’t solve my text to essay problem at all but it does help expanding and creating more material, which is also worth looking into)

This was way too long. Ok bye.

This thing is awesome!

Well, the ergonomics are quite bad but vertical handheld always had this issue to me, and it’s made worse by the fact this specific handheld is tiny…

Having said that, it does fit in any pocket

And it can play anything comfortably up to the PSX

I even managed to run Crazy Taxi (Dreamcast) on it with no issue…

Right now though, I’m replaying Zelda Minish Cap and just started Mother 3 (fan translation).

Bye

It’s called the Trimui Brick

It looks like a slicker GameBoy

My plan is to install MinUI on it as well as some essential classics.

I’m sure the device will become an Apotris machine at some point but it will be interesting to show some old games to my kids and see how they respond to them.

Do not ever eat anything from an all-you-can-eat buffet

Ever, in any under circumstances

Don’t do it!

It’s a trap. It will make you sick 🤢

Here’s the feed

Going to jump in with 2 tarnished friends

Maybe I’ll write a small bubble-chat-based review

See how it goes… 🤞

I will publish it here on this website

I’m so excited about it because you see

After you’ve lived in a city for a while

Extended family and friends will sometimes message you to get your tips and tricks…

And actually most of these are not even direct

It would be like my mum or my sister bullying me to help their friends

And at the beginning I’ll be like, ok fine, and write a whole thing that’s personalized

But after 10 years it got old

So now I’ll have this link ready to go muahaha (machiavelic laugh)

A grinding good time!

Level 5 used to be one of my favorite game dev

Then mobile games happened…

But, with this, it seems they are finally back!

I love watching tons of little progress bars go up

I don’t know, it’s a condition with me at this point 🤭

But then I got a bit sidetracked and added other themes.

Right now I’m just swapping colors and fonts but maybe, maybe in the future I will also change the layout slightly.

Also updated the colophon

I’ve been playing Remnant 2 coop with a friend lately on Gamepass

It’s really great!

It’s Resident Evil and Dark Souls had a baby except it’s coop.

I expected nothing from it and I am kinda amazed by how much fun we’re having with it.

Maybe that’s the secret ingredient to enjoying games again.

The lack of expectations…

Trying out another Markdown app called Markdown Pro right now

I also made a script that detects changes to my messages folder on my iCloud Drive and pushes to GitHub automatically

Maybe a bad idea?

Synced Obsidian via iCloud

Now I wondering how I could push from mobile…

What did I do, you think?

I removed tailwindcss and postcss and converted everything to vanilla CSS

Péter dans un verre d’eau, tu connais ?

I stepped outside this morning and it’s already 25 degrees. Dude, it’s not even June yet. What is this.

Tsuyu(梅雨) is coming and we decided to be brave and run away, leave Japan for a month this summer. We’re going back home, see the family, enjoy the mediterranean summer for a few weeks.

In April, we spent a weekend in Shiga. In May, another in Kobe and now we’re thinking to go to Maizuru early June, check out the sea with the kids. They love doing getaway weekends so much. I need to find a moment to take us to Tokyo later.

Celebrating my first anniversary of actually going to the gym and exercising. It’s helped me a lot with hormonal levels and my mood. Also I’ve lost some weight which is nice.

It’s really time to publish this website. I just won’t do it. That is serious evidence I am not able to ship anything without threats and violence… No, let’s do it this time.

So I did ended up waiting for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2

It’s just as amazing as the first one so far

There’s really nothing like it, 10/10

Should I pull the trigger on DA: The Veilguard?

Or maybe wait til Kingdom Come Deliverance 2?

I loved the first one

A medieval RPG where you go from peasant to hero

Yeah let’s wait, it’s just 4 more days…

I think it’s the trackpad and the keyboard

I have the Glove80 in my office. Typing without it feels wrong now.

I could maybe buy a portable mouse for when I’m on the go at least…

But I also want to show some of my work stuff.

I find it pretty hard to conciliate both lives together on a website.

That’s why for the longest time I always had two sites.

A personal fucked up one.

And a professional portfolio.

I wonder if I could merge both of my worlds here…

I want my website to help me think.

I don’t want to have to think to help my website, if that makes sense.

Blogging… never really worked for me.

Blogging assumes you already did all of the thinking and are able to formulate it, grrr; I have attention deficit just thinking about that

And then I stumbled upon this blog by artist and designer anhvn and I thought the chat bubbles format was genius.

I reached out to her on Mastodon and she kindly told me it was ok to borrow the idea

Actually, she wrote about this in a post from 2022

One of her inspiration, Max Krieger, who also seems brilliant BTW, and ends up his post quoting The Tools for Conviviality from Ivan Illich 😎

I’m not very good at writing formal English, but I’m a pretty decent chatter

So I’m gonna try this and see.

We celebrated my son’s 8th birthday, that was a ton of fun. We finished Astro Bot over the break and now we sometimes go back to it to chase after the last unlockables. It’s really that good. Next up on the list will be Monster Hunter Wilds with online friends.

I still work as a product designer at a Japanese company. AI has creeped up enough to become a weekly conversation internally. I write this as DeepSeek just came out and Nvidia stocks plummeted for reasons.

I’ve had this personal website on my computer for about a month (really not sure), I’m quite satisfied with it. Lies again. I’m embarassed by it but I’m embarassed by everything so I haven’t really published it yet. Maybe later. I’d love to maintain an “open garage” philosophy with it, keep tweaking it over time, that sort of thing. I’ve seen & heard people talk about digital gardens. I’ve always liked the idea but it’s not really that yet, I think that’s ok?

Discussing summer vacation plans with the family. Am I really going to Hiroshima in August? It can’t be possibly worse than Kyoto?

Lolololol

Shit’s about to get omega weird in here!!!

For posterity, I’m leaving my test messages. I’ll deal with the embarassment later.