The beginning of the blog

I woke up this morning, made a cup of coffee, and started studying Japanese. Something I've been trying to learn for over a decade now with little progress. A thought occurred to me about my past success with learning Japanese Animation and drawing, and contrasted that against my struggles with language acquisition, hard science topics in college like Microbiology and Chemistry, and my inability to retain music theory basics. I've always had a passion for learning and doing new things and challenging myself, but the areas where I have been the most successful at gaining expertise was the topics where I was teaching as I learned.

I only was able to learn Japanese animation because of the efforts I put into projects like Striving for Animation, Sakuga Foundry, Tonari Animation, and the Anime Survival Kit. I also was only able to get better as an animator by teaching people in the community and company I had built.

It occurred to me that if I want to learn anything the only way I can do so if if i'm writing about it. The form it takes doesn't matter for the sake of learning, it could be a textbook, youtube series, X post, or a blog.

I think education has been a strong area of mine especially when topics are very interesting and difficult to figure out. This is where I came up with the idea for this blog.

In a similar way to my past work teaching Japanese animation as I was learning it, I will be posting to this blog about various topics as I am studying them to rephrase them in a way that is interesting and engaging for me, and hopefully it will be for the people who happen to come across this blog.

I'll be covering topics ranging from advanced Japanese animation techniques, to music theory (primarily focused on bass guitar), to Japanese language, to Japanese culture from the perspective of a foreigner living in Tokyo, and likely a lot more.

All of the educational content that I post will be free to view. I strongly believe that the world is a better place when educational materials is free. I've always been a strong advocate for this ever since I was a student.

Additionally, I'll also use this blog as a way to share some of my opinions or personal creative ideas, but these will be locked behind a subscriber wall for people who might be interested in getting to know me a bit more.

I have a lot of photos of my adventures over the past 7 years or so since I began the journey to join Japanese animation which I've never really shared, which I'll use as the cover images for many of the posts that I make.

This blog will never have AI generated content in text or image form, and I hope people can find that refreshing.

If you made it through this post, thank you for reading and I hope I can help others on their journey to Japan, create some valuable articles, and maybe inspire some people to turn their life into an adventure full of art, music, travel, challenge, and learning.