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The weather in Tokyo is pretty fantastic at the moment. The sun is often out and it’s pleasantly warm without being disgustingly humid. And so it was that on Saturday we took the kids to Shakujii Pond to finally go out on the pedal-powered boats they have for rent over there. A fun time overall but my God, am I out of shape. Pedalling the two boys around was absolutely exhausting.
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After that I took Rowan to Omiya on the E5 shinkansen and then came back to Tokyo on the E7. It was my first time using my IC card to walk through the shinkansen ticket gate and it was great.
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Speaking of bullet trains, a few weeks back Rowan started watching Netflix’s 2025 Bullet Train Explosion (新幹線大爆破) on quasi-repeat. I finally sat down to watch it with him and was surprised how good it is. And not just ‘good for a Netflix film’ but genuinely good. It’s technically a sequel to the 1975 film The Bullet Train (新幹線大爆破) but it doesn’t require any knowledge of that film to enjoy. For a Western audience, the train-will-explode-if-it-slows-down plot will seem like a rip-off of Speed but that’s because the 1975 film did that concept first.
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I was extremely perturbed in March when I discovered one night that Emma was having a ‘conversation’ with Google’s AI Mode. After confirming that there’s no real way to disable this (AI Mode can be disabled for a child’s account but then the child can just log out of their account to regain access), I blocked Google entirely. That wasn’t much of a solution, though, since most search engines now offer the option to convert your search query into a chat with an LLM-based chatbot. I asked a friend with a daughter that’s the same age as Emma what he was doing and he admitted he didn’t have a good solution. He got back to me a few days later, though, to ask whether I had thought of using Kagi. Kagi is the paid search engine that requires a login to use. I imagine that makes it a tough sell to new customers but it’s perfect in my case because it means I could whitelist it as a site on Emma’s iPad and then ensure Kagi’s chatbot is disabled for Emma’s account. This does mean paying around US$200 a year for the family plan which isn’t exactly cheap but ultimately worth it for me.
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Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this month and this interview in Esquire was one of the better pieces that I read. I link to it, though, as an excuse to note the absurd amount of it took me to properly understand the iconic ‘Yum’ iMac poster (if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, see this post on Matt Fuller’s blog). The image is of course an overhead shot of a circle of iMacs, shot from directly above. For years, however, I saw an image of visually distorted computers that were stretched vertically, evoking the classic scene from Day of the Tentacle where the characters are travelling through time in the Chron-a-Johns (YouTube).
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My all-time favourite run of albums is Björk’s sequence of studio albums that begins with 1993’s Debut and ends with 2001’s Vespertine. I remembered an interview in which Björk expressed frustration about the different way that credit is apportioned to male and female artists who work with producers. I had misremembered her as referring to Mark Bell (she actually referred to Matmos) and I suspect that’s because he is credited in the title to the version of ‘Immature’ that is on Homogenic—technically, ‘Immature (Mark Bell’s Version)’ (Apple Music). All of that is an absurdly long wind-up to mention that I wondered what else Mark Bell had done and was saddened to discover that he died at 43 in 2014 (Wikipedia). I am 43.
