Day 2 continues! After TeamLabs Borderless, Annie and I decided to make our way to the Making of Harry Potter tour; but on the way, we stumbled into an art gallery display! It was amazing!

There was a lot of cool stuff – including one of my favourite manga artists Ogure Ito (Oh Great!) — who draws AMAZING art that I love a lot. I won’t bore everyone with a long winded rant, but please enjoy this gallery of some of the photos we took!

Click on the images to view a larger version!

Interestingly – they expressly prohibit video recording!

I think this might actually be in place to counteract the rise of nuisance streamers in Tokyo. It’s a tragedy that their awesome, high-trust society, is being ruined by brain-rot kids from America (presumably as that’s all whom the headlines are about nowadays).

The gallery was peaceful, quiet, and we saw a few other tourists but all of them were fantastically respectful and appreciative of the art!

I didn’t capture ALL the pieces in the Gallery – there were quite a few more, but they were from series and individual one-shots that never made it to the West.

The images in this post are all clickable to show a larger version! So please feel free to 🙂

Day 2 of our trip was busy busy busy! So busy in fact, that I’m splitting it across multiple blog entries. This post is essentially Day 2, Part 1.

We started our day heading towards the Azabudai Hills district of Tokyo – a new sort of “business park” full of skyscrapers and art; it was actually a stunningly beautiful, almost Cyberpunk 2077 vibe to the place.

Within a shopping complex attached to the station we found ourselves at our destination: TeamLabs Borderless – an art installation involving interactive, digital art pieces that provided a sensory experience to you! I had been to the TeamLabs Planets exhibition previously last year in May 2023, so I was very excited to see what was in store for us here. And straight off the bat, it looked like it was going to be special.

We weren’t greeted with some intense chlorine hammer to the head because of an introductory water feature (in Planets) — so thankfully we stowed our stuff away in the locker room, and proceeded into the project!

It’s hard to sort of capture how 360-degree the displays of art are. They grow, they change over time, some of them even move from room to room!

There were flowers that would shed their petals and float past us on gusts of wind, and you could follow the river of these petals flying past across different rooms. You’d see hints of creatures or little different animations here and there, it was a seriously “wondrous” experience that started prepping my mind for “what amazing things could happen” next.

The whole exhibition was very much a pleasure to see – even with all the people moving around, it didn’t feel overcrowded. They did a great job maximizing the space they had with a huge maze-like layout.

Some of the artwork had more than a connection to nature and took on more of a mystique – almost shamanistic symbolism used through pieces heavily inspired by calligraphy.

Definitely hypnotic – it’s like being immersed in a really cool screensaver (go 90s kids 😃😂)

Throughout the exhibition, you can hear crystalline sounds, in the background constantly, and you start to feel drawn to a centralised room that honestly, video won’t do it justice, but I’ll call it the “Lightfall” room. Reminiscent of a giant waterfall of light – the room changes and reacts to users standing in it, with lights, and patterns moving around them at times.

There’s way too many exhibits for me to run through – but there’s a few more highlights that were really awesome. The infinite marbles, the fish tank exhibit, and the tea house!

Throughout the Borderless exhibition – there’s heaps of nooks and crannies, with hidden doorways that lead to other exhibits and more – it’s amazing, and a very clever use of the space they have. The exhibition in total took Annie and I about 4.5 hours of wandering around to explore – and through one particular single doorway, we ended up wandering into this…

What could only be described as a clash of The Song of the Spheres meets a giant Rube Goldberg machine in a hall of mirrors that REALLY gave off the infinite hallway effect.

There was just so much happening all at once, everyone that walked into this piece, immediately slowed down as it was so disorienting. It truly evoked a feeling of being a small spec in a space that just had…. the universe happening around you!

I was gobsmacked. The spheres that moved around on rails reacted to when people were focused on them, lighting up or dimming as they moved around these rails. Staff were careful, and delightfully unobtrusive as they watched us all completely speechlessly spend our time here. Annie and I spent probably a good 40 minutes in this exhibit just following the orbs and looking around. DEFINITELY the highlight of the exhibit for me.

Occasionally, the shifting colours would dim to a sudden pitch black, for about half a second. And honestly that void would accelerate my heart rate – I have thalassophobia, a fear of the great deep endless blue ocean. This inky blackness somehow made my hyperactive imagination picture that there was some sort of dark leviathan in the dark. I would definitely lose my marbles (heh) in space.

We eventually made our way out and wandered to where a large number of kids and other attendees were making some noise. It was a cute sort of fish tank exhibit that seemed to be some sort of digital animation across it – very Spongebob-esque and a great change from the mystique of the marble madness exhibit prior.

The fish tank exhibit was a large room that showed off artwork that attendees to the display had drawn and filled out.

The artwork then gets scanned and you can watch it float around the fish tank alongside everyone else’s creations from that day!

Annie made a cute drawing of us as a Squid!

It was fun hanging out in the fish tank looking at everyone’s art pieces – I’m glad I decided to take the plunge and wait and actually interact with the exhibit, instead of just “looking at it” and moving on, which I tend to usually do. A huge thank you to Annie for egging me on to do it, it’s a core memory on the trip.

The teahouse – was phenomenal. It was a little dear for some icecream and some tea (about $20 AUD per head) – but the food is placed along a large U shaped counter that everyone sat at. A set of light tracked projectors overhead would find the food, and show botanical effects around the food.

Scoops of ice cream became seeds for plants, and bowls of tea became ponds for lilies and other flowers to bloom, their petals scattering to the wind when you moved the bowls to take a drink.

I have a few more videos with the effects but I’ve held off posting them publicly as they have conversation in them and we weren’t the only ones in the tea house.

Going to Japan soon? Check out TeamLabs Borderless!

It’s an incredible experience. One of the most intriguing experiences I’ve ever had – it’s as much a core memory of mine as the Village Bizarre exhibitions that The Rocks in Sydney used to have (this eventually grew into the event we now know as Vivid Sydney).

It’s a much more intimate, intense, and expressive exhibition than the city-wide Vivid expo, and the wonder, expression and passion of the artists and developers behind Borderless truly shines.

It was such an amazing experience, that I even forgot that one of the exhibits wasn’t even available due to maintenance – so I’ve got something to look forward to again in November, 2025 when I am back in Japan again 😂

We ended up arriving at around 9am (peak hour) and dropped our bags off at the Hotel. Recalling back to my May 2023 trip, I was EXHAUSTED at this point from the flight; but my flight this time around had really given me some good rest for the trip.

We encountered our first real hiccup actually upon landing – the ANA flight had brought us to Terminal 2, which was essentially the Domestic Terminal for Japan (with some ANA international flights). We had to figure out how to get a Suica card for transport. After some back and forth wandering, we actually ended up needing to head to Terminal 3 (via a free shuttle bus) before being able to buy our Suica. Terminal 3 was far more familiar as that was where I originally landed in May (flying Qantas).

Once we got the Suica cards, we were good to go thankfully.

Annie was thrilled about Akihabara — “Nerd town” we affectionately called it. We promptly made a stop at RadioKaiKan a popular figurine, trading card and hobbyist store. There was plenty to see and do – even beyond the Hololive and Final Fantasy nerding out.

We were on the hunt for Hololive Merch – specifically, Ceres Fauna, one of my Oshis who is graduating soon (January 3rd, 2025). I’m not one to buy merchandise crazily (foreshadowing) – but Hololive Myth and Hololive Council (now Promise) were all that I could watch on YouTube when I was looking after my mother in her final weeks of life. For some reason the Wifi in the Hospital and 4G/5G reception was absolutely rubbish – and all that would load were these anime girls.

So nowadays, I catch the highlights of what they’re up to and have a chuckle every now and then at their shenanigans.

The store was a huge experience for Annie, who was pretty meticulous and dogged in how she did all the shopping for stuff. She checked every floor, and nearly every shelf in the place haha! It was exhausting 😱

We found a Hololive English section of shelves!

After a super long day of hunting though, we finally found a single little acrylic block stand of Fauna, that I could sit somewhere on my shelf to remind me of her soft spoken cheery times 👍

Final Fantasy Eorza Cafe

Shop Link: https://en.pasela.co.jp/paselabo_shop/ff_eorzea

Final Fantasy has been a near and dear game series to Annie, and Final Fantasy XIV is my MMO addiction that I had migrated to from WoW. It’sa pretty special game to me, and I’ve spent more than a decade playing it. Made a lot of friends from the game!

But whilst it’s significant to me sentimentally; I don’t think I was ready to spend so much time IRL with it. I like the merchandise and the memorabilia for sentimental reasons; but I was ok with just experiencing. I can now say “I’ve been there” haha…

I won’t spam the insane number of photos I took, but there’s a great 3D photo on Google Maps of the store interior without the faces of strangers clogging up the photo. I’ll attach some of the photos of the food and drinks (so MANY drinks all non-alcoholic) that Annie and I had. The Fat Cat and Fat Chocobo buns were actually amazingly delicious.

The drinks were INSANELY sweet – as is mostly everything in Japan that’s a snack or confection 😂but overall, the food wasn’t horrible. Even at “tourist” prices in Japan, it only came to something like $30 AUD for the stay!

The merchandise however…. I ended up picking up all the class pins, plus a few extras for friends, as well as the Endwalker soundtrack LP for a friend.

What a haul. That was an extra $70 AUD on top, I believe.

Dinner in the Hotel!

We finally made it to our Hotel for check-in with pretty good timing actually, at around 3:30pm Tokyo time. We were staying at Tokyu Stay Aoyama Premiere – a fantastic hotel we stayed in last May with the Snacks gang too; so I enjoyed staying here again.

We were both pretty weary after a big day of what was essentially a full day traveling + shopping so we decided to be a couple of oldies and grab dinner at the nearby Family Mart conbini so Annie could check out all the food there!

Dinner was hilarious, it set us back about $30 AUD and honestly, I enjoyed one of the best sandwiches of my life by combining a spicy famichiki (fried chicken) piece, with my egg sando.

😋and so ended day 1 in Japan 🙂

Annie and I are spending a week in Japan! Dec 1st, to Dec 8th – as of reading, I will of course, have returned to Sydney. But this is it! I was a little scruffy from looking after Panko at my sister’s apartment for a couple days leading up to our flights!

For this particular trip; I decided to try a Business Class seat on ANA – return from Sydney to Tokyo (ie, there and back again) – to see if I could enjoy the flight and get some rest from it. I have a huge problem with economy flights where I found it hard to regulate my body temperature and relax when in such close proximity to so many people with very little privacy.

Spoiler: It was fantastic, and future travel is all ruined for me as I now have to book business class for the flights.

Checking in our bags and passing through security was honestly about a 15 minute process – Sydney International has ABSOLUTELY nailed it with the process nowadays.

The Lounge (Sydney Side)…

As a Business Class passenger, for ANA – you get access to the Air New Zealand Lounge, and honestly it was…. “ok”. Maybe a solid 6/10 given the food and lounge ambience.

The lounge had a lot of weird seating that wasn’t really easy to sit in, and for some reason – it was incredibly busy.

I managed to grab a bunch of drinks – of which the Coke Zero post-mix was completely flat, and warm. From all the machines – it was quite disgusting to eat. Round two of the food was just some fruit, a chocolate mousse (that was alright) and some bread. The non-alcoholic Hills Cider was nice and cold, but again, the Coke i got from another machine was also completely tepid.

Definitely not a fun experience in the Air New Zealand Lounge – they really could’ve done better😔

All aboard…! (NH879 Boeing 787-9)

Eventually we boarded. I was in Seat 2E right up the front of the plane, in the central aisle. The 787-9 I was on had a 1-2-1 setup in Business Class. Sitting in Seat 2E (the first row of the central aisle) – if you’re travelling with a partner or friend, is ideal – because there’s an extra space available between the entertainment units that can be used as desk space for extra storage/comfort.

I was fortunate enough that no one was seated next to me for this flight! 😍

Once you’re in the seat – there’s a standard entertainment unit in front of you with what looked to be like a 22″ screen (approximately). To the side (depending on where you are) is your table, control unit and power (USB + universal socket).

There’s a side table, with a folding out table that will become your dining/work table for the flight too. Along the edge of the side table are your seat controls – quite intuitive and easy to use.

The fold out table is actually surprisingly generous, it’s capable of holding both a 14″ Macbook Air (M3, 2024) and gaming mouse; or a full dinner washoku set for your inflight meal 😅

The inflight meal was really tasty. As was the Ippudo Ramen – “plant based” (which I’d hope so, don’t really think stringy meat noodles would be ideal) of course, the broth is what they mean.

I was stunned at how well my Macbook Air played Satisfactory, actually. And it’s kind of an idea to write something up in the back of my mind about “CrossOver” and the compatibility of games it can play across the setup.

We had some technical issues before we could take off that delayed our flight by about 2 hours (in fact, we were the last flight out on the day) — the towing truck that helps pull the plane out of the gate, actually snapped somewhere on its towing aperture; they had to get a new truck out to try and subsequently all safety checks had to be re-done.

If I was in economy, I don’t think I’d be in a positive headspace at all. It got hot on the plane, until our pilot was allowed to turn on the engines and it took a while before cabin crew could serve us drinks or help us cool down.

After a couple hours, thankfully though, we were given an exception into the Sydney Airport curfew and allowed to take off after hours. Once the flight started, it was a good time 🙂

All in all I had a fantastic time flying from Sydney to Haneda. I made one little mistake though — they give you a seat topper to act as extra padding for a mattress if you sleep. I failed to use that even in a seated position. On my return flight, I used it – and it was LIFE CHANGING. The flight became EVEN MORE tolerable, but that’s for a later post 🙂

I managed to catch about 3 hours sleep on the flight – probably in due part to not using the seat topper and having a fitful sleep.

But 100% this Business Class flight saved the trip for me. It meant when I landed, I was more rested, in a better mindset about being in Japan, more tolerant, more relaxed and physically more ready to take on the 20,000 a day steps I was about to attack my body with during this vacation!

Previously, on JT’s bought some books…

I bought a custom leatherbound set of a favourite book series of mine, The Wheel of Time – and it’s something I’ve taken great joy in reading and keeping with me since 2022. Even around then, I was also looking at finding a set of books that were my other favourite mythos; The Discworld novels by the late Terry Pratchett.

Growing up, I had started reading Terry Pratchett’s novels in junior high school; but exams and life took a turn and I stopped reading them for a while. It wasn’t until I had started my career after university that I stumbled back across the books again, and found them far more poignant now that I was in that very same outlandish rat race that his books are a commentary on at times.

After a lot of umm’ing and aah’ing about and trying to justify buying the series of books and whether to see if I can get them custom made; I came across a few of the books in Dymocks one evening, and they were in a beautiful hard cover, gilded published release. It wasn’t the leatherbound stuff I wanted, but they were colourful, vibrant and nice to the touch and made me want to read them again. It was only a few books of the series however, so I decided to wait it out and see if more of the Discworld collection got released.

That was in 2022.

2 years later, it turns out the majority of the books have now been released, with a few more to come (one as soon as August 5th) and I was still on the fence about owning the series. It even sprung up during a date with my new girlfriend while we were having a post-meal stroll.

Well, that was a couple months ago, and now, I’ve pulled the trigger. More than $1000 AUD was spent on this, and it’s not the full collection, but it’s only missing 2 more books at present that have yet to be released (both are planned to be released in the next couple months).

The first shipment of the books arrived! 36 of the 45 novels are now occupying my dining table…!

They’re simply beautiful. And I was gushing about them to friends and family, and it occurs to me that these books bring me a lot of joy 😂

Maybe it’s something to be more retrospect about going forward 🙂

The branding & theme was named by my partner, Annie 🙂

I actually started this specific post as an addendum to my previous post; but realised that there’s enough in here that I want to talk about on both a personal and technical level that it should warrant its own entry.

Why “Minty Charmander”?

Well, Annie thought the colour scheme reminded her of a Charmander, and combined with the light green highlights – “Mint” 🙂

The colour scheme uses a number of my favourite colours in a limited palette – purposefully, as I recall from some old design course literally a couple decades ago now, that in UX a small number of colours that can be interchanged and not conflict with each other, was better than a large dynamic swatch of colour for getting information across.

I am using the ol’ trusty Bootstrap framework for the UI and layout of everything. I don’t have any real special rationale for using Bootstrap – it’s just what I’m most familiar with; I think as I ease myself back into coding from a long break, it’s nice to just crawl before I can walk, before I can run 😅

Planetscale?!

Laziness and the idea that I needed a stable service to run a DB for my little projects convinced me to continue with Planetscale – yes, it costs $47 USD a month, but it’s more stable, and more nicely managed than I could ever do with a random self hosted solution.

I decided to continue paying it for the time being, pending further efforts to make things self hosted down the track, but for the time being – it’s nice to have a DB that is:

• highly available;
• able to spawn itself into a main, and dev branch

I could probably implement this without a paid system – but I feel like the DB service works as a backend for multiple systems (as it would if I were to self-host) – and that’s a single point of failure that I couldn’t upkeep like a service that is designed to stay online professionally.

End of the day, it’s actually pretty easy to justify the cost of this database for myself; and I’ve spent more on dumber stuff in the past. At least this is a sensible subscription 😜

So, what’s next?

Well, the branding is mostly done, but there’s a few missing things like Search results statistics, and category browsing callouts, to name a couple of things. I’ll be taking my time fixing everything, and eventually hope to start using this blog a lot more to diary more things that I get up to on a more personal level, as opposed to just dumping whatever pseudo-technical stuff comes across my mind!

We have a new look for the blog! I hope you all like it 🙂

For those that are curious, below is how things used to look (not too long ago!)…

I’ve been using a theme called Independent Publisher now for about 7 years or so. And while I am indeed retired; I didn’t want to let my technical skills (as little as they are) go to waste nowadays. So I updated the look to both jtiong.dev, and jtiong.blog to match similarly in branding now 🙂

It’s been more than a moment since I last touched a WordPress Theme, and so I’ve no doubt that there’s bugs and issues with the new theme you see now (built from scratch lovingly over a day or so, as you’ll be able to see from the Commits on jtiong.dev!). But this change will give me plenty of things to do to fix and maintain for the future with this blog.

And now finally after most of a day’s work, my domains are starting to be a little bit more on-brand! ♥

I previously posted about jtiong.dev – keeping my commit logs going and making things presentable for future collaborators and colleagues, as well as my own little bit of self promotion on the internet.

With my recent break in work and taking the time to both sharpen and upskill myself – I thought I’d bring this into the new future with the site pulling from my Github account instead of a now defunct GitLab installation.

In the current “1.0” version:

• Commits are automatically fed through via CURL request
• There’s no censorship for any potentially sensitive information
• There’s no authentication for management of commits/repos
• There’s no filtering you can do
• The date/commit times are inconsistent

Not to mention it’s GitLab powered and as I’m currently working through some property changes – I’m bouncing between two properties and the server hardware hosting GitLab is currently turned off.

Queue, my move to using Planetscale as my core DB service for my personal online stuff, and moving my code to Github where possible (because it’s where everyone else is).

For version 1.1 which upgrades this, I’d like to add:

• A system with Auth that lets me hide a repo, or a given commit hash for any potentially sensitive info from being revealed
• A filtering system by repo so you can see, per repo, the commits to that repository
• More accurate representation of the commits/date/timeline

Implementation Logic

Just a couple of loops to go through Repos → Commits is all I really need for my personal scale. Below is a very simplified diagram:

This’ll all be included into some cron tasks that run maybe hourly or so to avoid spamming GitHub.

It’s just simple little pleasurable busywork to be honest, but after about 6 months of not really touching any code and taking my time with stuff, it’s nice to get back into the groove!

Annie and I checked out VIVID 2024 for Sydney — here’s a link to the album of photos

https://photos.jtiong.blog/share/OBiBXUG7SIFhx1IwlhRxBRaThtL0yZalU3ZC42wPP2W6GZ3Kao6DFOqikcR-VgC6Bxs

This post was from after the move to the new house, and at the start of 2024 – at this point I had not recovered the 2023 posts to the blog from the old server that was no longer plugged in. This has since been restored, but I’ve included the post here for full context anyway!

JT

So, I’ve been pretty crazy busy, even with the idea of “Retirement” being bandied about in my life.

I’ve added a couple more 2023 posts, and hope to increase/improve the amount of content I can restore, but it’s not looking all that promising to be honest…! To restore it all, I’ll have to pull out one of the old Dell R330 servers and spin ‘er up so I can extract all the info as needed, etc.

Easier said than done considering it’s in a storage crate under the house right now 🙁

It’s definitely sitting in the back of my mind though, as it’s a year of tech upgrades and updates where I had finally configured a lot of my server stuff to a level that I was really happy with…!

For now though, I just wanted to post here and make sure the site’s staying alive…!

Some technical challenges!

My site currently uses the hobby plan of Planetscale – my preferred sort of “cloud” hosted MySQL DB instance; unfortunately this is going away and they’re forcing everyone onto a minimum $47 USD/month plan. I can understand the need for sustainability though, and it’ll reduce the amount of “exploiters” that have taken advantage of such a free plan.

Sadly, it’s an expense I am not really willing to pay either, not for my small hobbyist needs. So it’s time to migrate back to the ol’ self hosted MySQL instance on my own VPS somewhere.