Some Notes on Moving Forward

a few changes and some new stuff

In a little over a week, I’m going to be making a move to Japan. I don’t know what the future holds but I know that I signed a contract for a 1-year teaching job AND I bought an akiya - an abandoned house in Japan. So for at least the next year, I’m going to be making a go of living in Japan and making my ramshackle house livable. I named it Satoshi Manor because I bought it with small profits from Bitcoin and Satoshi are the smallest units of measure in Bitcoin. It’s a pretty small house, so it’s sort of fun to call it a manor as well.

You can read the blog post I wrote about why I bought an akiya on my old blog at https:/www.vagobond.com. I’ve always been a fan of owning my own content and my own means of distribution, so I’ve held on to Vagobond for a long time now - although, if I’m honest - it’s not really like I own it at all. I rent the name annually from ICANN, I pay for hosting with Namecheap.com, and the CMS is self-hosted Wordpress - so at any point, I could effectively be locked out or cancelled by any of those three organizations (not so much by Wordpress but they could do an update that took away control etc.)

At this point, I’m becoming more and more of a fan of using Substack. For the past couple of years we’ve been publishing our weekly podcast/space Web3 Writers using Substack and that distributes it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Youtube. I like the community on Substack, and I like the portability where they allow you to import/export your email lists, your content, and everything else. I fell like Substack is developing into the best social network on the planet and it is doing so under the guise of being a CMS and distribution system.

My change in timezones is going to make continuing to do our regular Web3 Writers almost impossible for me. It was hard enough from Hawaii’s time zone - but don’t worry -

Rionna Morgan

E. R. Donaldson

and

OddWritings

plus the rest of the gang from PageDAO and Vagobond Media are going to keep it going - it’s just unlikely that I will be joining many of those spaces. I’ve talked with a few friends in more Asia Pacific timezones about branching into a second space - which would be really cool if it works out.

I want to get settled into Japan before jumping into that however. What I will be doing though - is starting a new video podcast segment where I will share things about my life and adventures in Japan. The truth is - I speak almost no Japanese, I’m not a carpenter or handyman, and in pretty much every aspect - I have no idea what I’m doing. So this should be fun.

(Image is not my house or me - generated by AI - but sort of does look like me)

It’s actually pretty amazing that I managed to buy a house, navigate that process, get a job in Japan, navigate that process, and figure out how to set all this in motion at all. I really hope it’s not a huge disaster, but if it is, I’ll let you know and share the journey.

My ultimate hope is that this all works out better than I can even imagine (that’s a huge order because imagination is my strong suit) and other friends end up buying houses in Japan too, learning from my experience, and we can develop into a sort of decentralized living community. We’ll see - first I have to get me sorted.

So that’s it. I’m going to put together my first video over the next few days that talks about the planning and execution of this whole thing. I’ve got one more episode of Web3 Writers before I hand the mic over to our friends.

Let’s do this.