I was walking back to my hotel in Gero Onsen when I passed a vending machine selling frozen raw beef and stopped to take a photo. Okay, so Japan isn’t the only place where meat is sold from vending machines.

I was up bright and early on New Year's Day at Gero Hot Springs and stopped on my way to the open air baths to check out the scenery from the rooftop of the hotel. The air was crisp and clean, cold but

I saw in the New Year at Onsenji Temple in Gero Onsen, deep in the countryside of Gifu Prefecture and one of Japan’s most famous hot spring towns. The video accompanying this post captures the minutes

He he, who doesn't love a good mixed metaphor on New Year's Eve? Perhaps it would have been better to title this post "HBD - Back from the Brink of a Hot Bath" because I'm seeing in the New Year

I checked my hive stats for 2025 using the new hive-wrapped tool by @emrebeyler

Christmas Day in Japan. Just another working day. Not too bad for me, though, as I only had one class from 10am, just down the tram line from where I live. Nice and easy! This class takes place in a public

Thoughts arising from my visit to Malaysia's National Museum

We are well into the Japanese "bounenkai" drinking party season. Today, I'm spending a quiet day "home alone" after two consecutive nights of "bonenkai" parties... The literal

I didn't think the daughter would be coming back home for her birthday, but it turned out that she'd "forgotten" that she was supposed to meet a university friend who was visiting Hiroshima that

The ultimate traffic-exchange users guide for 2026

I was scrolling through the trending Hive blog posts when I came across this report by @louis88 who informs us that he has created a new version of the old "comment rewarder": He built the new

Layers of Time at Batu Caves On the third day of the Hive Fest in Kuala Lumpur in October, we hopped onto a coach and visited the Batu Caves. The Batu Caves are a limestone "mogote" (according

I can't remember when this "tradition" started, but every winter Peace Boulevard in Hiroshima is lit up with an ever increasing number of illuminations that draws in the crowds. Most of the

VSC: A Different Approach VSC, soon to be renamed Magi, is a cross-chain protocol that embeds Hive and HBD at its core, allowing a single wallet to send, receive, and manage assets across multiple blockchains.

A couple of years ago I came up with the idea of the "HBD Freedom Ladder," which is a series of targets - or "rungs" - on a ladder that take you all the way up to 120,000 HBD. When

One of the speakers on the first conference day was @macchiata who, like me, was one of the winners of a free HiveFest Pass ( ), so I was interested to hear what she had to say as a content creator and

I sidled crabwise into Splinterlands. I did not intend to become a player though I joined way back in 2020. Then I found out that staked SPS was paying out juicy interest rates and the only way to stake

Here's my first pic of me let loose on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, posing in front of "some random tall building" - rather, in front of a random hotel in front of a random tall building - while

I did a double take when I first saw today’s Japanese #BeerSaturday (week 435) ale in the beer fridge at my local Seven-Eleven convenience store. Emblazoned across the top of the dark orange cans was a

"No classes next week," I told my Japanese college students, "I'm going to Malaysia." "Bring us back a souvenir," they clamoured. So I picked up the ideal gift from Kuala