April was my first full month of being unemployed after I was laid off in March. With all this free time, I wasn’t sure if I maybe wouldn’t know what to do with myself. But the days seem to pass by much quicker than I expected.
What am I doing with all this extra time, you might ask? Basically it feels like I’m doing the same hobbies as when I had a job - hiking, writing on this blog and working on Hardcover - but everything just feels more stretched out and peaceful. I quite like this feeling.
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Enjoying some Fuji view hikes
This month I put up three hikes on the blog. The common theme in all of them was Mt Fuji. I’ll admit hiking the low-lying mountains around Tokyo isn’t always the most interesting if you just focus on the trail itself, but the Fuji views are what make them so worth it to climb.
Mt Iwadono, Mt Ono and Mt Ryugatake are all mountains I’ve climbed before, but I hadn’t written about any of them on my blog, so I thought they were worth the revisit. One perk of being unemployed is that I can check out the Mt Fuji visibility forecasts and just find the best visibility day to go and hike them, rather than being limited to the weekends.
Otherwise my activity on the blog was on the quiet side for me, relatively speaking. Ironically, I think I might have been posting more while I was still employed. I have been doing a little bit of behind-the-scenes stuff on the blog instead (fixing up some code, SEO tweaks and the like) which contributed to the quietness.
I also published a post on whether you should be scared of bears when hiking in Japan as it’s a question I’ve been asked a couple of times before. The short answer is not really! But you should be smart in choosing hiking trails where you know other people are going to be around.
Planting cherry tomatoes and baking
At the end of last year we moved into our current apartment. It’s my first time ever living in an apartment that’s south-facing and we get a pretty decent amount of sunlight each day (yay). I decided to live out my Stardew Valley dreams and give some gardening a go.
So this month we planted 2 cherry tomato plants in pots on our balcony. It’s surprising how quickly they grow, and hopefully I can keep them alive long enough to eat (quite literally) the fruits of our labour.
Another thing I wanted to give a go was doing a bit more cooking and baking. Cooking after I finished work for the day always felt a bit stressful (probably because I don’t consider myself to be very good at it) so I would just repeat the same recipes over and over so I didn’t have to think about it. But practice makes perfect, and no time like the present to learn new things.
First up was bagels. I messed this one up because I didn’t know the difference between active dry yeast and instant yeast (oops). I managed to salvage the recipe so it was edible though! I’ll give it a 5/10 considering the effort required, although I might try to make them again to redeem myself.
I also did focaccia, which I’ll give a 10/10 for because the recipe was idiot-proof and it tasted really good.
And finally I did a quiche - the bottom came out soggy so I wasn’t super happy with it (I think my Japanese oven is quite weak so I need to pre-bake it for longer than the traditional recipe calls for).
I’m not sure how I feel about quiches as a food in general. Like you look at the amount of butter, cheese and milk you put in and it tastes good. But not good enough to justify the calories in my opinion.
Tech meetups
In an attempt to network, I also attended two tech meetups this month. The first one was in English, and it wasn’t really in a domain I wasn’t that familiar with so I didn’t really vibe with it that much. But in a bit of a milestone for me, the second one I went to was in Japanese. I was always a bit too nervous to attend a tech meetup in my second language, especially considering I’ve never even talked about programming in Japanese before (my work has always been in English).
But surprisingly I found I quite enjoyed it. It sort of felt like I found “my people” which transcends language barriers, I guess. And/or I got lucky in the people I sat with because they were quite chatty, and generally everyone was really welcoming. I’ve always wanted to be a bit more connected to the Japanese programming community, so I think this is a good first step in that direction.
Creating more widgets on Hardcover
So I mentioned in my February newsletter that I’ve been working on Hardcover’s Dashboard feature, which is the customisable homepage you see when you open the app. After releasing the ability to add/remove the existing widgets we had in March, the next thing I’ve been working on is adding more widgets.
When you’re building an app’s UI, you have to think carefully about which features to add. If 100 people requested 100 different features, you can’t feasibly add all 100 of them - some will clash, and your UI will become this mish-mash of a million different settings and buttons that are just super-confusing to use. The fun thing about building widgets though is you can cater to a lot more people’s wishes, because each widget is an optional feature that you can choose to add to your dashboard (or not).
So one of the user-requested widgets was this Reading Activity widget, which shows you your reading timeline on a calendar:
And then two more I’ve got in progress are these Following Activity and Series Tracker widgets:
The Following Activity one is sort of like an activity feed, but it shows only 1 update per person you follow - as opposed to a traditional feed where one person reading a bunch of books might drown out everyone else in the feed. The Series Tracker widget lets you follow series and see their upcoming releases.
I haven’t released these two to our users yet, so it will be interesting to see what sort of feedback comes in once I do.
Personal productivity and finding a routine
When you’re unemployed (or self-employed too) you don’t have structure enforced upon you by your 9 - 5 day job. And so it’s quite easy to while the time away doing not much at all. To mitigate this, I could build out some super-charged productive routine - wake up at 7, exercise at 8, get started on Hardcover at 9 and so on - but personally I’ve found that sort of thing to never work for me. It might at first, but it inevitably crashes and burns.
I’ve decided to be a bit gentler and more realistic with myself (at least for now) and I’ve settled on two things:
- Exercise first thing in the morning.
- Do Mandarin flashcards every day.
If you think about the time required, surely I could be done with both by 9 or 10am. But realistically speaking I might get sidetracked with other things, and so in my head it’s a win if I can get both done by 12pm.
I’m aiming for 3 days of running plus 3 days of going to the gym a week, and that’s been going super well for me so far. Studying Mandarin is something I’ve been telling myself I should do for months now, and I’ll admit doing the flashcards (even just 10 minutes of it) still feels like pulling teeth, but I’m doing it, and I think that’s what matters for the moment.
The other thing I’ve found useful is I’ve vibe-coded this editable text page that shows up whenever I open a new tab in my browser:
I use it to track whether I’ve ticked off the two things for the day. I find it’s more useful than having to open another app to log things in.
I also set myself one more thing I want to do that day. You can see I got sidetracked and didn’t do the Thursday task which was to blog about some coffee places I went to lately. And then at the bottom I write a little mini-diary of what I did get up to. Sometimes I’ll finish a day and it feels like I did nothing at all - so this is a useful reminder that usually I did do something.
Watching a lot of anime
There’s been a bunch of new anime that have started in the spring season so I’ve been watching quite a few after work with my husband. In Australia I needed a separate subscription to watch anime on Crunchyroll, but it’s all very convenient here as most series air on Netflix.
Funnily, in my March newsletter last year I also had a section about some of the TV I’d been watching recently, so maybe this is just a really good time of year for it. I don’t tend to watch as much anime normally. If you’re looking for something new to pick up, here’s a speed-run of what we’ve been watching:
- MarriageToxin - the main character Gero is a poison master, yet inexperienced in the art of love. So he hires a cross-dressing guy, Mei, as his matchmaker. The general plot seems to be that he dates a new girl every couple of episodes, but not in a creepy harem way or anything. And then there’s a bunch of battle scenes from him fighting other “masters” which makes it a fun watch. We picked this up assuming it was going to be really bad, but if you roll with it, it’s quite sweet.
- Yomi no Tsugai - action/fantasy/shonen vibes, about a set of twins growing up in a village who have the ability to control demons. I’m not sure how I feel about this one - for reference I gave up on Demon Slayer partway through so I’m not generally a fan of traditional shonen action. Although I did love Naruto when I was younger so I’m not sure if it’s an age thing. Anyway, the first episode has a ridiculous plot twist which is funny in an absurd sort of way, which kept us going on it.
- Snowball Earth - similar to MarriageToxin, the main character is a dude with poor social skills. He fights monsters with a Baymax-esque robot in space (some strong Evangelion vibes here), and then returns to Earth to realise it’s suddenly entered into an ice age. There’s a good mix of comedy and action and like MarriageToxin it’s quite sweet. Really the guy just wants to make friends. I do think it’s better than the score of 6.63 it’s gotten on MyAnimeList, I suppose as long as you don’t take it too seriously.
- Ramparts of Ice - a classic high school romance anime. The main character has some trauma due to some unexplained bullying incident in the past, and I think will ~ open up ~ over the course of the season. It’s a little bit cringe, like why do all teenage students in anime gotta have this trauma 😭 but not the worst. I also tried to watch The Fragrant Flower which is a 2025 romance anime, and that was just too saccharine-sweet for me that I had to give up on it halfway. So maybe Ramparts is not as bad in that sense.
- Nippon Sangoku - this one feels a bit more “high-brow” for want of a better word, and it has an 8.46 on MyAnimeList which tracks. Basically Japan has been thrust back in time to a pre-tech era after an apocalypse, and the main character(s) are trying to figure out how to unify the country. So think like the Sengoku period but with the backdrop of the ruins of a modern Japan. Although I think maybe it’s supposed to be based on China’s Three Kingdoms. I don’t quite like how they treat the female characters so far but I’m only 3 episodes in, so I’m undecided on it at the moment.
- Dorohedoro - this one had its season two premiere this spring. We’d never heard of it before, so decided to pick it up from the beginning of season one which premiered back in 2020. Now Dorohedoro starts off really weird, but I find that as the series went on, it really started to grow on me. The main male character has a crocodile head and the main female character is strong and kicks ass, cooks gyoza for a living and is inexplicably always wearing a tank top which shows off her chest. Like it’s fan-service, but at least she’s muscular and strong so I’ll give the creator a pass on that one. If you’ve ever read China Miéville’s work (who self-describes his work as “weird fiction”) I feel like that is the most similar vibe to this anime.
If I had to pick three to recommend or keep watching, I’d go with Dorohedoro, Snowball Earth and MarriageToxin. Unfortunately all the action ones are quite violent, so that might deter you a bit (I just squint and go “oh nooo” a lot).
What’s next in May
I’m quite enjoying this unexpected sabbatical, so for the moment I’m planning on staying unemployed. This edition of the newsletter has turned out quite long and eventful, so it’ll be interesting to see if that trend continues into May, or if life settles down into something a bit more boring.
I’m hoping I can wrap up my work on the Dashboard for Hardcover, and I’d like to publish a bunch of things on my blog that are on the backlog to do but I haven’t gotten around to writing about. Maybe attend some more tech events too. And finally on the hiking front, I’d like to see if I can climb my first Hyakumeizan of the year, but we’ll have to see how the weather holds up.
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