LMNT

Twenty years ago today, I made Aqua Neue, my very first “system replacement” icon set. It was a big step for me. For some reason, this was like a rite of passage. Making a system replacement set is a ton of work, because it requires a diversity of icons. It’s not just documents and folders, but also toolbar icons, sidebar icons, and trash cans. I was seventeen. I was just about to graduate from high school. Had I not pursued making icons at this scale, at this point in my life, I may never have…

I used Vivaldi in earnest for a few days. While I believe the intentions to be great overall, what I dislike seems to be deliberate decisions, either fundamental or principled, that are unlikely to change over time. Upsides You can customize virtually anything about the UI. It’s not made by Apple, Google, or Microsoft. Downsides The default settings are geared toward power-users, elevating features that most people probably don’t care about, making customizing mandatory in practice. The vast…

Still in awe about the abundance of flowers in a dense city environment.

Luka sent me a care package including Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It’s all I ever wanted, really.

There are some moments, places, little scenes, times of day that really make me feel like I’m living in a Ghibli movie.

After my first “Japanese business meeting” at Yoyogi the other day, I felt like I deserved an indulgent Milanese pizza lunch at Spontini. Gosh, it's so good and unlike other pizza around here.

I love hand-painted signs. Going down a rabbit hole of who painted a nearby sign, I stumbled upon another they painted while walking around Harajuku.

Mid-day, when you get the sun coming through the trees, through the canopy over the train station exit? Yeah, that’s the stuff.

Someone lost their BTS keychain. ☹️

On the way back from lunch, Nob, Daikichi, and I spotted the “Ham Sandwich” kindergarten bus, which I hadn’t seen since taking Nikki to her bus stop in the morning, when I moved here nearly three years ago. 「懐かし！」(Nostalgic!)

I used to have a burger blog called Burger Digest, where I rated and reviewed the cheeseburgers I ate. And in large part due to nudging from friends, I’ve decided to relaunch it. That’s right, Burger Digest is back by popular demand! Burger Digest [RSS]

Time for another entry in the Louie-redesigns-a-logo series. Like other entries, this is just for fun and to think visually. First, look at these close-ups, then read the analysis with comparisons below. The actual English-language logos for these games are very disappointing to me. The letters in Winds appear to have a whimsical serif motif, but the W is unlike the others, and the S has what appears to be a serif that belongs on the top or bottom terminating at an angle in...

After Splatoon shopping at the Nintendo store, we walked over to Panda Express in the rain. And Nikki, overwhelmed with the amount of food in her box, held it up to her head to demonstrate how large it is. Looks normal to me! And then it occurred to me: this may be the only place I’ve seen have American Chinese take-out containers in Japan.

Kosuke and Tomomi just returned from their Philadelphia trip, so naturally Ayano and I went to Philly their first day back. And it …was messy. But very, very good.

Went out for a spontaneous hanami in Sumida park.

You cannot possibly imagine the surprise on my face when a Happy Turn-themed train arrived on the platform. Inside they even had jumbo Happy Turn hung in the ad spaces, with loose powder in the wrappers. Happy Turn is a snack.

The Clock app on iOS has barely changed since iPhone OS 1.0. And that's fine, because world clocks, alarms, stopwatches, and timers are pretty widely understood and don’t need constant redesigning. But there’s something odd, something that’s bothered me forever. There’s nowhere in the app to view the current time with seconds. The only place on iOS to view the progress of a minute is in the Clock app icon, which shows the current time including a second hand. But kind of awkwardly, whe...

So iconic that they had to bring it back. Download wallpaper from LMNT