By Ping, For Ping
It’s late and I’ve got two days to cover here so let’s bullet point this. There’s a lot of housekeeping in this chunk so this will go quick. Tuesday Morning – Still Nagano Well, Obuse to be exact. Obuse is a charming little town about 30 minutes from Nagano by bus, known for being home […]
Some personal news: I finally got my first nihongo jouzu. My advice to others planning to visit Japan is to learn just enough of the language that people in bars will think you’re an amusing novelty and buy you drinks. Fed up with the lousy weather, I decided it was time to ask for some […]
Today I rode the Shinkansen, and this is as good a time as any to address my convoluted itinerary. Two weeks sounds like a good length of time aborad, but after travel it’s effectively only 10 or 11 full days. The original plan was to spend a little over half those days in Tokyo, move […]
When the tour guide begins the trip by asking “Why did you choose to do this today?” that probably means you aren’t going to get to see what you want to see. The answer of course is “I booked this two weeks ago, how was I supposed to know?” But we live with the consequences […]
I’m becoming much more aware of how many chimes and jingles there are for… everything. The elevator sings a song when it arrives. The train sings a song when it leaves. Microwaves sing to celebrate a job well done. I wonder if it will start to grate on me after a while. Something that will […]
The problem with promising daily updates on an international trip is that the first entry will always be about jet lag. I knew that and I ignored it, because I foolishly chose optimism. Luckily I had learned this lesson last year, where a series of plane delays meant I arrived in Bergen at midnight instead […]
I’m posting this while waiting to board a 13 hour flight to the other side of the world, again. When I went to Norway last year, I had every intent to create a travelogue of sorts out of my experience. I kept a diary and took extensive notes and photos with that in mind. On […]
Hey, do you like Wrecking Crew? What’s your high score in Mach Rider? Which Atari 2600 game is better, Haunted House or Ice Hockey? As a Nintendo-obsessed child I felt a drive to know my history, which meant playing all the classics. When the Wii introduced the Virtual Console, you best believe I dropped $5 […]
I’m gonna be honest: I was hoping Giant Bomb would ride off into the sunset. A quick recap for anyone who doesn’t keep up with video game journalism: Industry staple Giant Bomb, founded in 2008 by ex-GameSpot writers as a sort of punk-rock alternative to the grind of reviewing everything a 7/10, received orders from […]
I wiped my Twitter account. I haven’t checked Twitter since late 2024, but really the decision was made by early 2023 and has been inevitable since 2015. If you’re tuned in you can probably correlate those dates with specific events but going into detail about why I quit would be like airing grievances at a […]
