Just got back from Japan yesterday, and I’m exhausted from all the time traveling involved. I left Tokyo at 6PM Sunday, and arrived in San Francisco at 11AM… Sunday. Frickin’ weird. Luckily, I didn’t have a chance to meet and marry my own father, thus negating my very existence.

Here are my photos, and Ryan wrote up a good rundown of the trip on his blog too. Everything started off a little hectic with Tokyo Game Show, plus the obvious language barrier. I tried to cram using JapanesePod101 (a fantastic podcast, btw, along with Japancast) which would have worked wonders had I not started listening to it on the plane ride over there. Also, sitting in the middle of a five-person row for a 10-hour flight? No fun.

Overall, my favorite parts of the trip included drinking spring water from a waterfall at Kiyomizu, eating okonomiyaki, being chased by hungry deer in Nara, and shopping in Shibuya.

But a lot went down while I was away, obviously! I’m proud to report that my first (paper) magazine article has been published in this month’s PC Gamer Magazine! It’s a gaming preview for the next World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. I’m super excited about it, so check it out! Here’s a preview below, it’s on page 43:

Sorry, had to blur the text — don’t want to get sued before they pay me! And finally, I did a photo shoot with my friend Lan Bui while I was in Santa Monica, and he’s posted them on his Flickr page. I was really nervous, but we had a lot of fun and I’m psyched about how the pictures came out. OK, I have a ton of crap to catch up on before I pass out from exhaustion. Back to the grind!

The bags are packed, the gadgets are charged, and tomorrow morning we’ll be heading off for the 10-hour flight to Japan! The first few days will be spent shooting Mahalo Daily episodes (both at Tokyo Game Show and around the city), and then it’ll be vacation time! I’m not sure how much I’ll be online, so this will probably be the last post for the next ten days or so.

Some of you may be asking: “Mahalo Daily? Way to get that out on time, Veronica!” Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s actually the Japan trip that’s causing most of the delay! We wanted to have a good amount of episodes under our belts before I went away, so look for it soon.

Off to bed now, thanks again to everyone who gave me great travel advice! Arigato!

I’m going to Japan with Ryan at the end of September for Tokyo Game Show (as well as vacation) and I’m lucky to have been briefed on the nefarious Butt Biting Bug. Who knew this was such a problem in the streets of Japan?

Anyhow, what I’d really like are some recommendations on fun things do in in Tokyo, or places to visit in nearby areas. I’m going to be there for 10 days, so a bit of traveling isn’t out of the question, but I need to start making plans for places to stay. I’ve watched enough episodes of No Reservations to know that all the best places to visit are off the beaten path, but at the same time I don’t know any Japanese (time to start studying).

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the relationships that we form online, and how they affect our lives. We interact with hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of people online everyday, but rarely do you know more about a person than a first name, handle, or icon. Regardless, oftentimes an emotional attachment is made (for better or for worse) because you know someone through their opinions and words. I’ve been wanting to talk about this for some time, but I don’t know if I can find the right words to express how I feel on the matter, so stick with me.

This past month, two people whom I knew through online communities passed away. The first was Bruce Galloway, a member of my guild. He fell sick very suddenly, and the entire guild banded together to support him. It was a wonderful thing to see at the time, and when he passed away we shared in our grief together. Only a few of us had actually met him in person, but the feelings of sadness and loss were no less painful because of that.

The second person was Ben High, a listener and contributor to ExtraLife Radio, a podcast that I’ve listened to for a long time. He had a great segment that he would send in to those guys almost every week where he would showcase a new indie band. He was only 19, and he also died very suddenly and unexpectedly. When I learned about it, it broke my heart to think that someone so young and with so much potential was gone.

And when James Kim, my good friend and coworker at CNET, passed away this last December it was astonishing to see the outpouring of support from the online community. As the Internet becomes such so intertwined with our daily lives, it seems like we find new ways to share emotion about the loss of someone important to all of us. When someone dies in a community they come together for the wake, to grieve, to discuss the person’s life and accomplishment. Online we do the same thing, but we’re oftentimes separated from one another by thousands of miles.

I’m not really sure what the point of this post was. The internet is a wonderful way to meet new people, but at the same time the reality often hits that there are real people on the other side of the screen who can get sick, or have an accident, or die. Trying to understand how to deal with the feelings of losing someone you know but have never actually met is a task that we’re all going to have to become more familiar with as time goes on, and as we become ever more absorbed in the online world.