I think there was a “blog boom”a few years ago, maybe like 2005-ish? A lot of my friends had blogs, I was posting a lot more on this blog, and blogs in general had, at least among my general circle of friends and acquaintances, become something a lot people did and made. Over the past few years this has gone down a lot: most people have stopped blogging as frequently, if they haven’t already closed up shop completely. I’ve definitely become guilty of not writing as much – not as if I do this blog for a big audience or anything. No, actually I mainly write this just for myself. But either way, somewhat often over the past few months I’ll be sitting at home relaxing on the computer when I think to myself that I should write a blog post. 9 times out of 10 I don’t.
OK enough babbling. To make a long story short, I blame Facebook, Twitter, and stuff like that for sucking people’s attention away from writing or reading long blog posts. The burst of the blog bubble, perhaps. This isn’t a bad thing really, but just a shift in internet habits. It’s a lot easier for most people to do all their updates, pictures, links to weird stuff, messages, etc. in a centralized place like Facebook. Everyone and their brother is on Facebook now so it’s convenient to keep track of friends’ updates, and for friends to keep track of you. It’s a lot more convenient than writing a blog on some other site that people aren’t going to check very often. Why write frequent updates or entries when you can write a quick status update on Facebook? The exception, of course, is if you have a blog with a purpose or a goal. TheLeong.com is not that kind of blog. Nor is it like a Xanga where I post short status update-appropriate messages on the blog.
I don’t really want to stop running this blog, especially after doing it for so long. Every now and then I go back and read past posts, which is great because blogging about stupid little things means I can recall those little things well past the time any normal person would remember them. I know there have been a lot of actual studies and insightful articles about how casual internet communications have moved away from e-mails and blogs to more interactive social networking like on FB, so feel free to go find those and read up. While you do that, I’m going to end this post with some pictures and short captions of stuff I’ve done over the past few weeks, in lieu of the usual multi-paragraph post describing my activities.
Japan Seafood Show at Tokyo Big Sight:
Giant 1:1 scale Gundam down in Odaiba:
Played park golf (kind of like mini-golf without the goofy stuff) in Shisui:
Went to Namja Town with Nick when he came up to Kanto last weekend. This is cheese fondue gyoza (with corn) and teriyaki mayonnaise gyoza. Both were actually way good.
Of course took Nick to Y’s. 伝説の参忍、再び集合！
(Thanks to Brian for the pic)
The end for now.
