Yōkoso – welcome to the Japan category of this blog. This blog was inspired by my love of Japanese culture and their consumer trends. I was introduced to chambara films thanks to being a fan of Sergio Leone’s dollars trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
Getting to watch Akira and Ghost In The Shell for the first time were seminal moments in my life. I was fortunate to have lived in Liverpool when the 051 was an arthouse cinema and later on going to the BFI in London on a regular basis.
Today this is where I share anything that relates to Japan, business issues, the Japanese people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Lawson launched a new brand collaboration with Nissan to sell a special edition Nissan Skyline GT-R. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Japan.
There is a lot of Japan-related content here. Japanese culture was one of odd the original inspirations for this blog hence my reference to chambara films in the blog name.
I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.
If there are any Japanese related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.
The rear-wheel drive AE86 model generation of the humble Toyota Corolla has a dedicated following. The cars were light, had twin-cam engines, a very balanced weight split and a limited slip differential.
Back in the 1980s in Ireland they were a steady performer on the local rally scene. The AE86 because of its simplicity became very adaptable for street and motorsport tuning. The AE86 popularised car culture internationally, turning up across media formats and supported by a vibrant cottage industry of parts manufacturers who exported their parts around the world.
The car entered popular culture across Asia and beyond through the manga and anime adaptions of Initial-D, which told the tale of Takumi – a student holding down two jobs – a petrol station attendant and delivery driver for the family’s tofu business in a Toyota AE86 Sprinter Trueno.
Takumi’s adventures in the family AE86 went on to be portrayed in an 18-year long manga series, a Hong Kong film featuring Taiwanese entertainer Jay Chou as Takumi, 27 game adaptions at the time of writing and at least 12 anime series or feature length films.
This soft culture footprint gave the AE86 an impact across Asia, hence the Malaysian meet-up that Hagerty shot in Kuala Lumpur. Will the popularity of the AE86 die off with this generation of young adults? It’s possible given that over a quarter of them in the US don’t drive.
Toyota / Hyundai motorsport collaboration
In advance of Rally Japan, Toyota’s Gazoo Racing and Hyundai’s N Sport held a joint event in Korea. It’s quite rare to see rival manufacturers partner in this way.
How to read a compass
This took me back to my 12-year old self away at scout camp (which I did only once) doing the activity for my map-making activity badge. Taking bearings from multiple locations and triangulating them allowed me to plot out my map. I need to dig out my Silva compass that my Mam and Dad probably still have somewhere in their attic.
I found myself using the basics of reading a compass when living in urban Hong Kong and Shenzhen as the extremely tall buildings stopped GPS from working that well. Sharing here, partly out of nostalgia and the the life skills benefits.
Hello Kitty and an adoption mindset.
Japan popular culture commentator Matt Alt put out a video about the history of Hello Kitty and Sanrio. One of the interesting things that came out of the video was how adult women embracing the playfulness of Hello Kitty, rather than ‘adulting up’ then became on the leading edge of technology adoption. I thought the idea of a ‘playful mindset’ and adoption was very interesting – yet something that we don’t often think about. I used to think about it as curiosity, but it’s more specific and it can be fostered regardless of age.
Welcome to my November 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 16th issue. 16 is a low power of two which saw it used in weighing light objects in several cultures. For instance in the British Imperial system of weights 16 ounces were in one pound. This lived on far longer with British drug dealers who looked to sell cannabis in ‘teenths’ (16ths) or eighths of an ounce. Prior to decimal being implemented in China 16 taels or liǎng equalled one catty or jin. Chinese Taoists counted on their finger times and joints of the fingers with a the tip of the thumb, so 16 can be counted on each hand.
The highlight of November was meeting up for brunch with Calvin who I used to work with in Hong Kong and collaborate with on occasion for projects going in-or-out of China. He was passing through London on his way to Web Congress in Lisbon, supporting one of the burgeoning number of start-ups coming out of Shanghai.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Ghost Signs – how legacy signage allows us to peer back into history, camcorders having their ‘lomography’ moment and much more.
Layers of the future – or how innovation doesn’t exist in a fully-formed world, but instead exists within layers of progress over time.
Presidential election beliefs – amongst the autopsies of the campaign that have been discussed, one of the things that struck me was the role of presidential election beliefs that have wrong-footed analysis
Klad & more stuff – a Russian pioneered integration of dark web markets and concealed ‘Amazon locker’ type infrastructure to deliver a new approach to drug dealing. Other items include bottlenecks in gadget manufacturing, internet maturity and more.
Books that I have read.
Dead Calm by Charles Williams – the early 1960s crime novel packs a lot into the story. Trauma, mental illness, murder and intrigue on the high seas. Dead Calm was later made into a film and relocated from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
Jipi and the paranoid chip by Neal Stephenson. A short story that fits into the Cryptonomicon universe of Stephenson’s books – shares the story of Jipi a former flight attendant who works for Mindshare Management Associates Inc. – an agency that distracts tourists to Manila from the rapid construction work taking place during a China-like economic miracle. Because of her personality, Jipi has to track down errant AI powered car alarms fitted with plastic explosives that were designed to deter thieves, but AI happened. If you’ve ever had to write prompts, you’ll likely appreciate it.
Things I have been inspired by.
The fame game
Irish rally driver Rosemary Smith, had the skills but never did get the fame. Smith even got behind the wheel of a Renault formula 1 car to get a test drive at 79 years of age.
I am by no means a sports addict but even in my psyche I know the names and reputations of several famous sports stars across hurling, gaelic football, motorsports rugby league and even soccer. Sid Lee and Appino have raised the issue of how this fame gap is bridged in women’s sports drive into long term mainstream success. Where is the women’s sport equivalent of Stig Blomqvist, Arnold Palmer or Michael Jordan who are hailed in a similar way? Want to know more, reach out to Rory Natkiel.
Yes, Christmas really is getting earlier
My local supermarket started to sell mince pies right after the August bank holiday this year. It had Christmas decorations for sale before the Halloween ones. Christmas seems to be coming earlier this year. The Guardian researched how Christmas was arriving earlier each year, from charting music to mince pies and Christmas puddings going on sale. This year lo-fi girl had their first Christmas soundtrack up on November 4th. If you want a change from the Spotify Christmas list, try this old mix from former streetwear boutique The Hideout.
WARC noted how companies like John Lewis with dedicated Christmas campaigns look to gain a first-mover advantage to aid the talkability around their campaign and gain the full benefit from their emotion driven campaign bedding in and building new memory structures.
WARC predicted that Christmas advertising spend would rise 7.8% to over £10.5 billion. Big growth for search, online display and out of home compared to last year. The biggest losers including TV, direct mail, magazine and print news media.
Things I have watched.
Famous Hong Kong cinema film director Johnnie To criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview for the BBC’s Chinese language service. With that in mind, I thought it prudent to buy up as much of his back catalogue as possible because the classics amongst them may be harder to get hold of in the future.
PTU – PTU starts in a similar way to Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog with a policeman losing their duty weapon. However that’s where the parallels finish. In Stray Dog the young detective looking for his gun feel empathy at the end with the criminal who used his weapon. The moral being two-fold – crime starts with a few wrong choices, but are still human. In order to deliver law, over time the policeman needs to become less empathetic, losing a bit of their humanity. PTU on the other hand shows how police blurred the line between the law and crime with extra-legal methods to solve crime. It also highlights the complex relationships between criminal gangs and the police. To keeps the tension going with PTU throughout the film. The ambiguity between police and criminals would not be allowed in future Hong Kong films thanks to the National Security laws that have come into force.
Election – The literal Cantonese title for this film is ‘Black Society’ – which as a term covers all kinds of organised crime groups. Two members of the Wo Lin Shing are up for election become leader (aka chairman or dragonhead) of the organised crime group. It’s a common trope in Hong Kong cinema that these elections happen on a regular basis. Wo Lin Shing is a stand-in name of the very real Wo Shing Wo – a group that have a side hustle doing wet work for the Beijing forces at work in the city.
The film focuses on the election and immediate fallout. Lok runs a more rational campaign, whereas Big-D runs a showy campaign offering money for votes. The elders appoint Lok and Big-D tries to steal the symbol of power. To moves the tension and action on at a rate of knots. It features many of the heavyweights of Hong Kong cinema including Simon Lam, Louis Koo, ‘Big’ Tony Leung, former policeman Nick Cheung and Lam Suet.
Not a Johnnie To production, but I have been enjoying Detective Chinatown on Amazon Prime. The show is similar to the BBC show Sherlock and CSI in the way its plot devices and how its story arcs work. It has been interesting to watch for a number of reasons. The series was produced for Chinese streaming platform iQiyi – think Chinese Netflix. The series is based in Bangkok, Thailand. The senior Thai police representative is portrayed as dramatic, volatile and religious in nature – interesting stereotyping by the Chinese production team. The plot line has a very supernatural aspect to it, which is generally considered to be a no-no with Chinese censors. I am curious to see where they take the show.
Useful tools.
Mac keyboard shortcuts
Alongside David Pogue’s Missing Manual series of reference books for each version of macOS, MacMost’s videos are a great resource for the Mac user. MacMost now have a free downloadable table of Mac keyboard shortcuts.
AI-powered diagram creation
Ever sat in front of a blank Keynote or PowerPoint slide and wondered how to represent something? I am across the Napkin AI which takes your written text describing something and renders it into a diagram. I don’t use these diagrams as the finished product, but as an inspiration for me then to artwork together in Keynote, OmniGraffle or PowerPoint. You can output from Napkin AI as a PNG file. At the moment it’s free to use as a beta product.
Woznim
Woznim allows you to record the names of people and where you met them to try and aid in recall of of them if you run into them again. It reminds me of Foursquare and social bookmarking. Foursquare because of its where 2.0 location based data and social bookmarking because if you develop the Woznim habit it could be life-changing, but if it doesn’t gel with you it’ll be dropped as a service in no time. At the moment it’s an iPhone-only app.
Bluesky
Bluesky has been having a moment as another tranche of social media users follow The Guardian’s lead to leave Twitter and need a micro-blogging service. Bluesky has got a good deal of attention because of its starter packs and list features. Whether Bluesky will continue to grow into a vibrant post-Twitter place isn’t certain yet. But if you are going to use Bluesky then these two tools might help:
Bluesky tools directory. There is a surprisingly rich set of tools available rather like ‘golden age’ era Twitter.
Starter packs. Starter packs are a set of curated recommended accounts to follow based around interests. This site has a large directory of them covering everything from professional interests to sports passions.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my November 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into the Christmas season and the rush to complete projects before clients disappear on holiday.
This post about layers of the future was inspired by an article that I read in the EE News. The article headline talked in absolutes: The external power adapter Is dead. The reality is usually much more complex. The future doesn’t arrive complete; instead we have layers of the future.
Science fiction as an indicator.
The 1936 adaption by Alexander Korda of HG Wells The Shape of Things To Come shows a shiny complete new utopia. It is a tour-de-force of art deco design, but loses somewhat in believability because of its complete vision.
https://youtu.be/knOd-BhRuCE?si=HfIDYsaa7nUZKrYE
This is partly explained away by a devastating war, largely influenced by the Great War which had demonstrated the horrendous power of artillery and machine guns. The implication being that the layers of architecture assembled over the years had been literally blown away. So architects and town planners would be working from a metaphorical clean sheet, if you ignore land ownership rights, extensive rubble, legacy building foundations and underground ground works like water pipes, sewers, storm drains and cable ducting.
In real-life, things aren’t that simple. Britain’s major cities were extensively bombed during the war. The country went under extensive rebuilding in the post-war era. Yet even in cities like Coventry that were extensively damaged you still have a plurality of architecture from different ages.
In the City of London, partly thanks to planning permission 17th century architecture exists alongside modern tower blocks.
You can see a mix of modern skyscrapers, tong tau-style tenements and post-war composite buildings that make the most of Hong Kong’s space. Given Hong Kong’s historically strong real estate marketplace, there are very strong incentives to build up new denser land uses, yet layers of architecture from different ages still exist.
COBOL and other ‘dead’ languages.
If you look at computer history, you realise that it is built on layers. Back in the 1960s computing was a large organisation endeavour. A good deal of these systems ran on COBOL, a computer language created in 1958. New systems were being written in COBOL though the mid-2000s for banks and stock brokerages. These programmes are still maintained, many of them still going long after the people who wrote them had retired from the workforce.
These systems were run on mainframe computers, though some of these have been replaced by clusters of servers. IBM still serves its Z-series of mainframe computers. Mainframe computing has even been moved to cloud computing services.
In 1966, MUMPS was created out of a National Institute of Health project at Massachusetts General Hospital. The programming language was built out of frustration to support high performing databases. MUMPS has gone on to support health systems around the world and projects within the European Space Agency.
If you believe the technology industry all of these systems have been dead and buried by:
Various computer languages
Operating systems like UNIX, Linux and Windows
Minicomputers
Workstations
PCs and Macs
Smartphones and tablets
The web
At a more prosaic level infrastructure like UK railway companies, German businesses and Japanese government departments have been using fax machines over two decades since email became ubiquitous in businesses and most households in the developed world.
The adoption curve.
The adoption curve is a model that shows how products are adopted. The model was originally proposed by academic Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations, published in 1962. The blue line is percentage of new users over time and the yellow line is an idealised market penetration. However, virtually no innovations get total adoption. My parents don’t have smartphones, friends don’t have televisions. There are some people that still live off the grid in developed countries without electricity or indoor plumbing.
When you look at businesses and homes, different technologies often exist side-by-side. In UK households turntables for vinyl records exist alongside streaming systems. Stuffed bookshelves exist alongside laptops, tablets and e-readers.
Yahoo! Internet Life magazine
Yahoo! Internet Life magazine is a microcosm of this layers of the future co-existence . Yahoo! is now a shadow of its former self, but its still valued for its financial news and email. The company was founded in 1994, just over 30 years ago. It was in the vanguard of consumer Internet services alongside the likes of Wired, Excite, Go, MSN, Lycos and Netscape’s Net Center.
Yahoo! Internet Life magazine was published in conjunction with Ziff Davis from 1996 to 2002. At the time when it was being published the web was as much a cultural force as it was a technology that people adopted. It was bigger than gaming or generative AI are now in terms of cultural impact. Yet there was no incongruity in being a print magazine about online media. Both existed side-by-side.
Post-print, Yahoo! Life is now an online magazine that is part of the Yahoo! web portal.
Technology is the journey, not the destination.
Technology and innovation often doesn’t meet the ideals set of it, for instance USB-C isn’t quite the universal data and power transfer panacea that consumers are led to believe. Cables and connectors that look the same have different capabilities. There is no peak reached, but layers of the future laid on each other and often operating in parallel. It’s a similar situation in home cinema systems using HDMI cables or different versions of Bluetooth connected devices.
Pagers went back into the news recently with Hizbollah’s exploding pagers. YouTuber Perun has done a really good run down of what happened.
Based on Google Analytics information about my readership the idea of pagers might need an explanation. You’ve probably used a pager already, but not realised it yet.
A restaurant pager from Korean coffee shop / dessert café A Twosome Place.
For instance if you’ve been at a restaurant and given puck that brings when your table is ready, that’s a pager. The reason why its big it to prevent customers stealing them rather than the technology being bulky.
On a telecoms level, it’s a similar principle but on a bigger scale. A transmitter sends out a signal to a particular device. In early commercial pagers launched in the 1960s such as the ‘Bellboy’ service, the device made a noise and you then got to a telephone, phoned up a service centre to receive a message left for you. Over time, the devices shrunk from something the size of a television remote control to even smaller than a box of matches. The limit to how small the devices got depended on display size and battery size. You also got displays that showed a phone number to call back.
By the time I had a pager, they started to get a little bigger again because they had displays that could send both words and numbers. These tended to be shorter than an SMS message and operators used shortcuts for many words in a similar way to instant messaging and text messaging. The key difference was that most messages weren’t frivolous emotional ‘touchbases’ and didnt use emojis.
A Motorola that was of a similar vintage to the one I owned.
When I was in college, cellphones were expensive, but just starting to get cheaper. The electronic pager was a good half-way house. When I was doing course work, I could be reached via my pager number. Recruiters found it easier to get hold of me, which meant I got better jobs during holiday time as a student.
I moved to cellphone after college when I got a deal at Carphone Warehouse. One Motorola Graphite GSM phone which allowed two lines of SMS text to be displayed. I had an plan that included the handset that cost £130 and got 12 months usage. For which I got a monthly allowance of 15 minutes local talk time a month.
I remember getting a call about winning my first agency job, driving down a country road with the phone tucked under my chin as I pulled over to take the call. By this time mobile phones were revolutionising small businesses with tradesmen being able to take their office with them.
The internet and greater data speeds further enhanced that effect.
Pagers still found their place as communications back-up channel in hospitals and some industrial sites. Satellite communications allowed pagers to be reached in places mobile networks haven’t gone, without the high cost of satellite phones.
That being said, the NHS are in the process of getting rid of their pagers after COVID and prior to COVID many treatment teams had already moved to WhatsApp groups on smartphones. Japan had already closed down their last telecoms pager network by the mid-2010s. Satellite two-way pagers are still a niche application for hikers and other outward bound activities.
Perun goes into the reasons why pagers were attractive to Hesbollah:
They receive and don’t transmit back. (Although there were 2-way pager networks that begat the likes of the BlackBerry device based on the likes of Ericsson’s Mobitex service.)
The pager doesn’t know your location. It doesn’t have access to GNSS systems like GPS, Beidou, Gallileo or GLONASS. It doesn’t have access to cellular network triangulation. Messages can’t transmit long messages, but you have to assume that messages are sent ‘in the clear’ that is can be read widely.
What is Chinese style today? | Vogue Business – street style at Shanghai Fashion Week has been low-key. The bold looks of the past have given way to a softer aesthetic that’s more layered and feminine, with nods to Chinese culture and history. This pared-back vibe was also found on the runways. Part of this might be down to a policy led movement against conspicuous consumption typified by Xi Jinping’s ‘common prosperity‘.
Where to start with multisensory marketing | WARC – 61% of consumers looking for brands that can “ignite intense emotions”. Immersive experiences that are holistic tap into people’s emotions and linger in the memory. It’s also an opportunity for using powerful storytelling to communicate a brand story.
Airbus to cut 2500 staff in Space Systems | EE News Europe – “In recent years, the defence and space sector and, thus, our Division have been impacted by a fast changing and very challenging business context with disrupted supply chains, rapid changes in warfare and increasing cost pressure due to budgetary constraints,” said Mike Schoellhorn, CEO of the Airbus Defence and Space business.
Cocaine Cowboys by Nicola Tallant tells the story of the Kinahan organisation. The Kinahan organisation is a group that wholesales and retails illegal drugs in association with other organised crime groups. Tellant explains how deprivation, geography and economic growth fuelled drug trafficking and abuse in Ireland. Isolated council estates and economic hardship drove a heroin epidemic. The subsequent Asian Tiger economy only uplifted young professionals who then were a ripe market for cocaine. Cocaine added to Ireland’s already difficult relationship with alcohol use and abuse.
Crime journalism such as this is popular in Ireland because it is so concentrated through blood and marriage ties. We don’t have the kind of diversity that the British criminal underworld has. This means that it’s much more ‘relevant’ to Irish society.
But the book title itself is very interesting. There is a clear parallel to the scale of the cross-border drug trade between the US and Mexico.
Irish country music star Daniel O’Donnell courtesy of TG4
But there is also an underlying western theme across Irish culture. The vast majority of us are at most a few generations from the farm. We have had hard times which is why country music appealed and even morphed into a localised genre Country and Irish popular in rural areas and amongst lorry drivers (or in American truck drivers that drive ‘semis’.)
Tallant’s stance is definitely anti-Kinahan; but the book title Cocaine Cowboys gives them the hero status and taps deeply into the mainline that the cowboy and related elements like country music have into Irish culture at home and abroad. Cocaine Cowboys might be the inspiration for the next generation to replace the Kinahans.
If you want to know more beyond the book Nicola Tallant and her colleagues at Irish tabloid the Sunday World host a podcast called Crime World.
After peak woke, what next? The Economist – in the past decade, a form of wokeness has arisen on the illiberal left which is characterised by extreme pessimism about America and its capacity to make progress, especially on race. According to this view, all the country’s problems are systemic or structural, and the solutions to them are illiberal, including censorship and positive discrimination by race. This wokeness defines people as members of groups in a rigid hierarchy of victims and oppressors. Like the Puritans of old, adherents focus less on workable ideas for reducing discrimination than on publicly rooting out sinful attitudes in themselves and others (especially others). The Economist has analysed how influential these ideas are today by looking at public opinion, the media, publishing, higher education and the corporate world. Using a host of measures, we found that woke peaked in 2021-22 and has since receded. For example, polling by Gallup found that the share of people who worry a great deal about race relations climbed from 17% in 2014 to 48% in 2021, but has since fallen to 35%. Likewise, the term “white privilege” was used 2.5 times for every 1m words written by the New York Times in 2020. Last year it was used 0.4 times per 1m words. – Of course, woke’s failure could be viewed by proponents as a sign of deep-rooted systemic prejudice
Economics
Why Britain has stagnated? | Foundations – this reads true and hits hard. My parents came to the United Kingdom when the motorway network was being built, power stations were being constructed and the first generation of nuclear submarines were being constructed. In London the Victoria line was constructed. Now the UK struggles to build any infrastructure and its strategic industrial capabilities have been hollowed out or disappeared.
FMCG
Unilever moves on ‘sub-par’ marketing | WARC – That means consistent execution in marketing innovation, marketing quality, proposition sharpness, execution of pricing, execution of distribution. Fernandez suggested that, on a scale of 1-10, the business is currently at around six but needs to get to eight or nine (“ten doesn’t exist”). A&P spending is increasing as a proportion of revenue, from 13% in 2022, to 14.3% in 2023, and 15.1% in H1 2024. “There is an implicit recognition that our level of investment was not in line with our ambition of volume growth,” he said. That increased investment is not there to fund a growing volume of marketing content, he added. “I’m much more concerned about the quality of the stuff that we put in the market than the amount”. And that also means a focus on brand-building. “We see other people putting much more focus on promotional pricing,” he said, “but we always will prefer to invest in long-term, equity-building activities.” – CFO burns marketing teams ‘I believe our marketing was subpar”
Is marketing entering its ‘era of less’? | WARC – based on Gartner CMO surveys marketers are increasingly being seen as cost centres and are being asked to do more with less which is affecting mar tech spend, staffing and agency spend.
Innovative research that literally put people in the driver’s seat | WARC – More than half of strategists (59%) are integrating AI into their strategy development process in a cautiously progressive way. They need to identify the skills that AI can’t replace, such as getting buy-in for a strategy, and double down on them. Speedy access to research and insight (74%) and streamlining repetitive tasks (74%) are the top opportunities strategists see in leveraging AI in the strategy process.
Future of Strategy 2024: Synthetic data – speedy saviour or another example of the industry’s arrogance? | WARC – it’ll be useful when time is of the essence, and you want to ‘speak’ to people and get their thoughts on your hypotheses, ideas or campaigns. In that scenario, I can see how that approach may replace an ad-hoc focus group set up hastily in the agency’s boardroom. But we’re not here purely to understand people. If the role of communications is to move people emotionally, shouldn’t we also be here to feel people? As Richard Huntington, CSO of Saatchi & Saatchi says: “You can’t feel data.” The beauty of humans (and the beauty of ethnography) is that so often it’s not what we say that powers an ‘insight’ or a strategy, a campaign or some NPD… it’s what people don’t say. It’s the nods and winks, the gestures, the objects with meaning they have in their homes and in their lives. That texture isn’t picked up by a typical conversation – be that with synthetic data or in a focus group. These feelings that are elicited from ethnography are the special sauce that can separate the wheat from the chaff.
Home | LibreOffice – Free and private office suite – Based on OpenOffice – Compatible with Microsoft – I have 35 years of content saved, and LibreOffice can open them all. When you’ve been writing for years, your manuscript formats will often be obsolete (though I’ve tried to make decisions that make my poems available platform agnostic, such as using plaintext, but line breaks and stanza breaks don’t always translate well in markdown). LibreOffice is an incredible tool for opening 25 year old wordperfect files when I need them.
Apple Knew Where the Puck Was Going, But Meta Skated There – the PAN or personal area network has been talked about for 20+ years. What this misses is that the Orion glasses were possible thanks to silicon carbide lens which are a non-trivial thing to manufacture at scale
