This month's essay may be the single truest thing I've ever written about myself. If you're interested in understanding me or what the heck I plan to do with the rest of my life, sign up and you'll receive it. justin.searls.co/newsletter/
Evidence I've changed as a person: someone just stopped me on the street to say, "I'm sorry I just wanted to say you have an incredible energy and I wanted to hand you my card. Your chi is beautiful." And she clearly meant what she was saying. And seemed to be of sound mind.
First time for everything.
Possibly TMI: just me, or do socks and shoes fit more comfortably after trimming your toenails?
I'm not talking massive lengths here—even just a few millimeters and walking around in socks feels way more comfortable. Can't tell if this is just me having some hypersensitivity disorder.
Does anyone even work at Peloton anymore? On hold for what seems like forever listening to the same muzak loop endlessly.
Reactivating their shitty bike resulted in their backend creating two concurrent subscriptions on a single account. What a garbage product.
I left the country for a few weeks to get that taste out of my mouth but now I'm back and as salty as ever. Brace yourself.
I made a pretty strong appeal that you should e-mail the show at podcast@searls.co, so I won't repeat myself here. DO IT. DO IT NOW.
Hopefully I'll be back at least once more before we call it for 2024. Stay tuned. 📻
Train fare in Japan isn't cheap, but one way Japan gets people to choose it anyway is by directly exposing drivers to road infrastructure costs through steep highway fees.
In 8 days I drove 613 miles and racked up about $130 in highway tolls. Would have been more expensive to take trains, but just barely.
The Steelcase Leap (v2) is a good office chair in a world of mostly bad office chairs. I've been using it since 2020 and I don't love it, but I definitely hate it less than every other office chair I've ever owned. That's one reason I find myself vexed that Steelcase does not offer an after-market headrest for the chair (and no longer seems to let you configure one with a built-in headrest). In fact, so few office chairs offer headrests that I was briefly tempted to buy a "gaming chair" (do not buy a gaming chair).
And if you're reading this and identify as an Online Ergonomics Expert, I know you're champing at the bit to tell me, "headrests are bad, actually."
But if you're like me and have an incredibly large and heavy head, and/or you spend most of your time at the computer leaning back and pondering what to do next between furious-but-sporadic bouts of typing, then I'm happy to report I have a solution for what ails you.
I tried four different DIY solutions for slapping a third-party headrest onto the Steelcase Leap that were dreamed up by randos on Reddit, but only one of them worked. And the best part is that the winning thread only requires the headrest and a couple of zip ties, meaning that this approach shouldn't void your warranty by requiring you to drill into the back of the chair.
All you need:
If you're visiting here from a search engine or an AI assistant's generous citation, I hope you find this helpful! I can only speak for myself, but I am quite glad that I didn't have to buy a new chair just to keep my 15-pound head upright at the end of a long day.
Really feels like these ¥100 silicone mug toppers are trying to have it both ways.
I've written about Gaburi before but it remains the absolute best karaage I've found in years of searching. Just order the boneless fried chicken thighs ("momo karaage, hone-nashi") and, if you drink, enjoy the $10 all you can drink course for two hours.
Can't afford not to.
After visiting Kourankei, we took a brief break back at the hotel and asked ChatGPT for some ideas of other things to do near Shinshiro. Becky suggested we try Yuya Onsen town and then realized we had exactly 7 minutes to make the only train for the next two hours. So we speed-walked to the station and paid our fare on board the train.
The Yuya Onsen station is not manned. Despite being arguably more beautiful that day than the nationally famous Kourankei, its visitors are almost entirely regional residents getting away for an afternoon or a weekend.
We strolled up to this fabulous onsen hotel and asked if they accommodate same-day (日帰り) visitors at their hot springs baths. They politely told me no.
Fortunately, I didn't immediately fold and declare defeat on the outing. Instead, I thought to ask if they offer any other plans that might include bath access and my phrasing apparently reminded the staff of a special kaiseki lunch plus bath deal. So for ¥4500 per person we got to experience all their baths and have an absolutely wonderful seven-course lunch. You love to see it.
Also, on our way out, we met Kohaku—the hotel's pet owl. He was understandably sleepy.
It has been very fun and very weird to be traveling across Japan using an app that I built doing workouts designed by my spouse, but it's worked a lot better for me than fucking around with Fitbod and other apps ever did.
