Into the Web Archive
When I promised to delete my blog by the end of 2020, I thought I would have nothing better to do. I got side tracked by employment and people.
It was no fun to me to figure out a bulk export script for my text, images, and maps from wordpress to Jekyll and Hugo.
Even though I keep thinking I am new to blogging, my domain is seven years old. It is not young, it is not old. “A viable, die-able age” as Roy put it in The God of Small Things. For a while, a post explaining the Tokyo Subway Pass had a lot of traffic because no-one else seemed to want to explain how it worked. I suppose it feels new because the design was never as I wanted; the traffic is not as high as new bloggers who started in the year of Covid-19; I have never outgrown my ambivalence to whom I was making this information available to.
Despite the ambvialence, I had published over 200 posts and pages. Some 50 were related to the Shikoku Pilgrimage, which has been migrated. Even though I’d tried my hand at other posts, that was the seed that actually took root for a blog to grow. I diversified to cafe reviews, which probably numbered close to 100 at peak. It is like the mint I planted for fun in my mom’s garden – an easy weed to grow that overtakes everything else. They were the first batch that I dumped a few years back. Every successive cafe deletion has felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders. I was taking up less server space, creating less traffic, removing unnecessary middle-class expat attention to places that had been founded for local communities. The last set were LGBTQ and Chinese-language resources.
My subscription expires this month and it’s a good a time as any to bury this skeleton.
The below are migrated posts:
- LGBTQ Guides: Hong Kong, Queer Chinese Media, LGBTQ Tokyo,
- Maps: Coffee Walks, Taiwan Cafes, Berlin Asian Food
- Japan Hiking: Kunisaki, as well as the Dewa Sanzan’s Mount Haguro, Gassan, and Mount Yudono
- Maps of Tokyo: Wheelchair Accessible Tokyo, Muslim-Friendly Tokyo, Vegan & Vegetarian Tokyo, Tokyo Cafes, Jimbocho’s bookstores
I have submitted the posts that I do not have the energy to migrate into the Internet Web Archive
- Japanese-English Food Book Guides in Tokyo
- Guide to the Tokyo Subway 1-3 Day Pass (2019 Update)
- Mandarake HQ Nakano Broadway Guide for Anime, Manga & Collectibles
- Nakano Broadway: An Otaku’s Photo Essay of Mandarake+
- Anime Locations & Otaku Stuff
- Shinjuku’s Anime Locations
- Durarara’s Anime Locations
- The Market of $1000 Rice Cookers: Rice in Japan Explained
- Historical Tokyo Walk: Nihonbashi – Fukagawa
- Yamaguchi Shimonoseki Coffee Map
- Japan’s Version of Every Good English App
- Getting around Mount Ishizuchi – the most complicated markdown tables I had to manage
- Migrants’ Pride 2018 in Hong Kong – one of the few pieces that requires documentation
Manually deleting everything takes time. It is not efficient in a world obsessed with automation. Though I have loathed the tedium, I would like to take the time. I would like to take the time to say goodbye to these memories. Many I only remember when they come across my screen. Like my documentation of local tokyo; settling in Hong Kong.
The pieces I will miss are:
- Gujo-Hachiman
- Yahiko
- Invsible Tokyo - a local foreigner’s diary
- Trave Expenses explained - 10 tips on a public budget sheet