First off, I need to mention that I recently upgraded Movable Type (the server software that I use to generate this blog) and MT-Blacklist (the software I use to filter out comment spam), and as a result, there may be some cosmetic glitches on various pages throughout the site (though I'm pretty sure I got 'em all).

More importantly, there's a bug in MT-Blacklist that's causing all comments posted to the site to be delayed by a few hours. There's not much I can do about it at the moment—I just wanted to let you know.

Another casualty of the upgrade was the loss of the subscriptions. See that little box on the right? People have been submitting their e-mail addresses in there to receive updates whenever I post a new entry, but the master list seems to have been wiped out. It's not such a big deal, really. If you were a subscriber before, and you'd like to be subscribed again, just re-enter your address. Some of you may prefer to get your notifications through an RSS feed, and that's available as well.

There have been a few suggestions to the effect that the quality of the writing on The Account has taken a dive of late, and to those people I say: indeed. It's less a question of the novelty of living in Japan wearing off (believe me, it never does) than it is of my attitude towards blogging having changed. When I started writing, I was working a punishing schedule at a monolithic corporation that left me little time for recreation. For many of those first months, I didn't even have 'net access, forcing me to hunt-and-peck my way through those early chronicles in a smokey internet cafe charging three bucks an hour. It was a baffling, isolating time, offering little by way of emotional support, or any kind of support, really. In those days, just getting that stuff off my chest was a much-needed release, and a way of feeling connected to my peers back home.

But it was an expensive and time-consuming habit. Some of my longer entries took more than a day to write—my account of the Kyoto trip required well over ten hours spent preparing photos, writing descriptions, uploading and proofreading. I'm glad my five-day sightseeing experience has been preserved for future generations, but still, ten hours. Thirty bucks.

As regular readers know, life is different now. I work shorter hours, spend more time with friends, and tinker with my animation project whenever I can. If I have ten hours to spare, I'm likely to spend it shopping for microphones in Ginza, or playing darts with Daisuke, or getting my 3D character to blink properly. All of which I've done in the last week, but who wants to read a blog about that?

Ginza, dusk.