Meet Verbal and Taku, the greatest duo since bread and butter. Who are they? Japanese musicians. They work in a variety of styles with a number of other artists from BoA to Yoshika but mostly they just make rad beats and rap over them. So yeah, M-Flo are hip hop artists from Japan and they’re going to teach you how to speak Japanese. Maybe with a little gangster swagger, but hey, what did you expect from international playboys? Sure listening to Japanese music must be helpful, but why M-Flo in particular? Well, my dear friend and fellow Japanese language enthusiast, M-Flo is the perfect duo to help you hone your linguistic mastery. I’ve not just one, not two, but eight impressive reasons why you should put aside your differences and learn to embrace M-Flo for the sake of your fluency.

For starters, all Japanese music, not just M-Flo are ideal choices to improve your listening comprehension because they’re written by native Japanese speakers for native Japanese speakers. While listening to Japanese audio tapes or informative podcasts will help explain some things, real Japanese speakers don’t use the same vocabulary found in Genki Chapter 8, they use much more and they say things much faster. Listening to native-made materials targeted to a native audience will get you to functional fluency much faster than Tanaka-san and Junko-san from your JLPT textbook conversation ever will. So start listening to the organic Japanese being created out there now.

Another reason why M-Flo are lightyears more interesting to listen to than Tanaka-san and Junko-san, aside from vocabulary and Japanese slang a-plenty: it’s musical. It’s catchy. It’s got beats and hooks and choruses (that, thank goodness, repeat) with sound effects and basslines and even bridges that make you want to sing along in karaoke or at least dance. It’s not rocket science, it’s pop music. You don’t have to judge it against Wordsworth and Mozart, you just have to nod your head because the important bit is that it’s catchy, and catchy = memorable. Remember all those folk songs you learned as a wee one? Well, Verbal is your new Raffi.

So they’re catchy songs, yes (did I mention Loop in My Heart yet?) but even better, they’re short. M-Flo tracks may be filled with dense blocks of surprisingly clever rap, but they’re short and sweet. By the time your not-yet-fluent brain gets tired of hacking away at complex sentence fragments with your mental machete of diligence, the song will be over. Just as you’re about to pass out from the 8-G speed at which you have to read hiragana, the musical interlude will be here. It’s not easy material — a plus really, since it means you can spend hours working on it and still glean more every time — so the shorter chunk you can take it in, the better. I don’t know about you, but I find three minutes and thirty seconds of full on concentration to be a lot, enough to make me feel accomplished when I finish a song but easy enough to repeat the process.

I never seem to mind repeating the process either because it’s actually interesting. Like most, M-Flo songs are loosely narrative anyway, so I’m always pleasantly surprised when I realise that peppy track is actually about cheating or that sad-sounding ballad is about the first kiss. Plus the tune about a summer fling gives you all sorts of specific vocabulary for such an occasion, and how else would you ever know the word for “golddigger” if M-Flo wasn’t there to teach you the ropes? It’s like reading a book but simpler and with a better backbeat.

The narrative story of an M-Flo song becomes especially apparent in the music video, which you can easily look up on youtube. You may have never heard of them before this very moment, but M-Flo are Japanese hip hop royalty and completely prevalent all over the interwebs, thus they, their videos, and their music is readily accessible to anyone anywhere the web can be accessed. You don’t have to go to great lengths to hear Love Bug, you just have to google search the song title.

You want M-Flo to be popular. You want people to use their songs as ringtones and you want their videos to be copyright protected and all that jazz because it means you can find their lyrics really easily online. That’s the best part of learning Japanese through M-Flo: the actual words being spoken are already written out for your to follow along with so you can learn the kanji as you go (hint, hint, nudge, nudge) properly. You don’t have to rewind and pay the clip nineteen thousand times to hear if he’s saying きもち or きもじ because it’s right there for you. You can learn the word and its proper pronunciation easily and quickly. TV shows rarely publish transcripts and movie subtitles are almost always off, but an M-Flo song has its own accurate transcript ready for your consumption. Just search the song title and 歌詞(かし)

Now it may be pretty daunting to skim through those lyrics, especially if you can’t read it quickly or don’t recognise all the kanji. This is why M-Flo and Wise are much better to study to than, say, Rip Slyme or Silk Road (other awesome Japanese hip hop artists). Verbal and Taku (and Wise for that matter) are both fluent English speakers, so their songs are punctuated by English catch phrases that you can actually understand. You can use these as placekeepers to see if you’re on the right line or to adjust your reading speed to match their speaking speed.

That’s the whole beauty of using M-Flo to learn Japanese, you can self correct without having a teacher over your shoulder or a native speaker feed you hints. Taku sets the pace and Verbal feeds you the hints already. You can hear a word and because it’s a catchy, short story punctuated by English you can figure out the meaning from context pretty easily. If you’re already in Japan, you don’t have to feel silly listening to practice conversations or survival lessons from JapanesePod101 (a great resource, by the way), to everyone else you’re just rocking out to some M-Flo. People may even compliment you on your music taste, and if you aren’t familiar with the Japanese music scene, M-Flo tends to feature some of the biggest artists so you’ll know who to name drop when asked for your favourites. Seriously, don’t be afraid to let Mssrs Verbal and Taku from M-Flo school you in the fine art of street words, dangerously catchy loops, and native-level (if informal) Japanese.

With so much information floating around, readily available, it can become overwhelming fairly easily and, in the case of many naysayers, so easy to simply denounce. However, the accessibility of how-to information and new communicative mediums like social networks and forum communities can also give rise to some incredibly inspiring material. People are doing amazing work, and that work is making its way around the interwebs to incite change and invite other great derivative works. Because of these two facts, it makes it rather difficult to those of us well attuned to both society and technology, for we are constantly struggling with the balance between unnecessary information and life changing information.

Recently I set about purging my RSS feeds and social networks, and while I fully expected to unsubscribe from half of them, I ended up only choosing to filter out a few. My criteria has become quite clear, and yet the problem I faced was reading a large bookshop filled with authors who have great things to say. I just didn’t have the time to read all of it I wanted to, and yet I still wanted to be able to skip a few days of feed checking and not be overwhelmed by the backlog. After all, I find the writing of certain others a huge source of inspiration and advice, and the idea of missing out on the things these people have to say is a truly stressful prospect.

Yet, despite such an overwhelming amount of high-quality content, alas I had to trim down my 100+ blogroll. Generally I read up on many different subjects as varied as graphic design and typography to cooking and nutrition to lifestyle design and personal finance to asian culture and nomadic travellers. It wasn’t even the length of blog posts that forced me to unsubscribe. When Bread and Honey ends up ranting for several paragraphs about nothing related to food at all I still find myself reading every word, while sometimes Brooklyn Nomad’s 500 word posts are just too long for me to bother with. It’s a wide world out there: if Steve Pavlina has mastered the longform, Seth Godin is a ninja of the short, which just goes to show there’s no real formula. If you’re good enough, I’ll read it.

In spite of well-written posts and a decent topics, there are three major criteria that are nagging enough to make me unsubscribe to otherwise totally worthy blogs, and I thought perhaps not every blogger out there has spent a lot of time matching their format to their audience. This isn’t wholesale advice, it’s my personal opinion and a small insight into what I think can get in the way of your stellar content, despite your best intentions. You may not care that you’re one reader down, but then again you may take my complaints into account as I outline the top three reasons why I unsubscribed to your blog.

1. Truncated RSS Feeds
Now, I know there’s been a huge debate raging in the blog world about full vs. truncated RSS feeds, but in my opinion it’s a no brainer. The risk you run of getting your feed scraped is infinitely less important the risk you run of not connecting with your community. Not only is a shortened RSS entry more likely to get skipped over by me in comparison to the full-length posts flanking it, but I am incredibly unlikely to click your link. There’s no good excerpt length either. A few sentences is not enough to get me interested and tends to have the opposite effect, while a few passages is just enough to make me frustrated I have to open up my browser, wait for the page to load, and then reread the bits I’ve already read. I rarely bother. So if you have a truncated RSS feed, I urge you to try a full post feed and see if you convert better. See if your community grows stronger. It drives me nuts because I do want to read your entree posts, but I’ll settle for the appetiser version instead of consuming all your content. Stop with the truncation and let me use my feed reader as it was intended.

2. Updating Too Often
I hate this with a bitter passion. If you update more than twice a day, I will not read your blog. I’d rather you write amazing, in-depth posts once a week than tiny morsels every hour you think about it. That’s what twitter is for, not your blog. I suppose this reveals my preferences for actual people rather than aggregate sites because I value a single person’s opinion, even one I disagree with, infinitely more than several. Do I read the Gadgeteer? No. Do I read everything Julie from the Gadgeteer reviews? Yes. Because she only writes when it’s worth writing about and she’s has one of the only sensible female voices in the industry. I Love Typography only updates one a month but each post is incredibly information-rich, perfectly formatted, and thoughtful. Die-hard Man U fan though I may be, I don’t read a single news feed because it would be barmy to hear the same quote about Nani seventeen times a day. It’s easy for me to stay subscribed to you if you don’t update as often as I’d like, but it’s much harder for me to continue to put up with your excess posting if I only like part of what you offer. Don’t update 11.7 times a week. It means you aren’t spending enough time on your writing.

3. Unoriginal Content
I’m not just talking about stealing someone else’s material and not attributing it, though that is a scary-big deterrent for me. I’m talking about what happens when a blog stops writing anything original and instead just guest posts, hosts blog carnivals (link roundups), interviews people, and reposts. This is why I do not understand how most people use tumblr. If I know you personally, I totally care what you read and what you listen to and what you like. That’s what del.icio.us, goodreads, google buzz, retweeting, and youtube subscriptions are for. Not for your blog. If you’re going to share a video, please explain why you shared it. If you’re going to interview someone, you better say something no one else has said about them. If you’re going to host a carnival, it better be framed by generous commentary and you better have five times more original content before you even think of hitting the publish button. This is a blog for goodness sake. Make it personal already. Travel blogs make this mistake a lot. I can find good flight deals and reservations in wherever you’re travelling on my own, but I can’t see it as you do or meet the people you did. I can look up volcano whatever, but I can’t have a spiritual awakening during a night hike. You have to make me care beyond the norm. The best travel writers write about what they did and why it was worth reading instead of where they are and how they got there. Liz Learns Japanese utilises ideas from all over the place, but although the story is the same everyday (”I’m practicing Japanese!”) she manages to make it personal, tells you a victory or a struggle from her daily life or a neat trick she’s tried, noting common phenomena through a unique voice. And guess what, I freaking love it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to make it yourself.

I talked about my troubles with Japanese class a while back, when I was debating whether to continue with formal instruction because it was drop-dead boring. I never made it to my fourth class, instead I combed iTunes for Japanese language music and updated my Netflix queue to only include Japanese movies. I am so glad I stopped going.

Now that’s not to say that we don’t all need a little help now and again, or to suggest that classroom learning can’t be fun, but for me, rote textbook memorisation wasn’t enough. I’m still a beginner in Japanese, but in the few months since I beefed up my own studies, I’ve learned absolutely loads about how to make leaps and bounds in a language most of my mates still find baffling. The biggest question is the how. How do you start from scratch, how do you make significant progress when you’re facing linguistic Mount Everest? What do you need to do to get a foothold stable enough to build some momentum? I thought I might share some of my language learning best practices so that you too might find a way to conquer that intimidating foreign tongue.

1. Stop with the pretense
If you’re waiting until you learn X to do Y, or if you think you can’t do THIS because of THAT, you are constantly shooting yourself in the foot. It’s stupidly easy to put off things or to create qualifiers or to feed your energy to the wrong thing. I struggled with this quite a bit when I started my vlog but I can’t tell you how glad I am I made it over the pretenses I had put up to keep me from doing what I wanted to do. Having trouble quieting the lizard brain? Do what I did with vlog 1, make it bad on purpose. Not hard, but bad. Do it badly. Make it suck. Then the worst has happened and you can get on with the learning. You can put the pretense aside and start doing. Don’t wait until you know all the kanji to try and read manga. Don’t tell me you can’t speak Japanese because adult brains harden after a certain age. Don’t believe it’ll take years to become fluent. Don’t think there’s no good music. There is no reason in the world you cannot learn Japanese. No. Reason. Whatsoever. So stop with the pretense. Remember, it’s never a good time so you might as well get cracking.

2. There is no excuse for illiteracy
First of all, millions of people can read Japanese well enough, and millions more know triple the number of characters you have to know (Chinese has significantly more hanzi than Japanese has kanji). Second of all, the writing system is the best way to communicate in the language. Especially kanji, because drawing the kanji of a concept you don’t know how to say let alone pronounce it will get you much farther than any kind of gesturing, pantomiming, or poorly pronounced vocabulary ever will. Learn all three alphabets as you’re learning to speak. If you’re a Japanese school child, you’re surrounded by the writing every day of your life. You can ask your parents questions. You have to read it every waking hour of your school day. You would be laughed at for not knowing it. You are not a Japanese school child, so you need to learn hiragana and katakana immediately if not sooner. As for kanji, same thing goes. Japanese school children learn less than 200 characters a year until they graduate. Not you. You’re going to learn much faster because, unlike Japanese school children, you are not confronted by hundreds of characters every day. You can live your life happily without ever setting eyes on a single character. So you are going to have to shove kanji down your throat. Make it easier however you need to: by making up mnemonic stories, using pictographs, reading that textbook that uses examples from manga, using the Heisig method, eating an m&m for every kanji you get right, it doesn’t matter, just do what you have to do. I’ve learned more kanji in three months than my intermediate-level Japanese college buddies did in 3 years and as a result I can read what feels like 13 times the street signs, maps, and menus they can.

3. No, マジ(for real), learn the kanji.**
It’s intimidating I know, but far from impossible. Here’s how you do it: 1) ignore the way the Japanese government/most schools present it. You have to separate out your writing learning from your reading learning. Learn more kanji than you learn Japanese. In other words, learn the meanings of kanji you don’t even know the Japanese word for yet (e.g., learn 専門 means specialty even though you don’t yet know it’s pronounced せんもん and is translated as major/area of study). Learn the characters and stroke order along with their English meanings first (stroke order is important otherwise you can’t look them up). Then learn their readings and radicals and all that jazz. As you learn more about the spoken language, you’ll have a better chance at discerning when they’re used and how to pronounce them (which changes based on context) than you would by straight up drilling. 2) When you learn a Japanese word, learn it all at once. When you encounter a new word or phrase, learn how to say it, what it means, and how it’s written with kanji otherwise you’ll drive yourself mad trying to unlearn stuff later. Plus you’ll be literate a hell of a lot faster.

4. Pimp the vocab, drop the grammar
This was a most valuable lesson taught to me by Benny Lewis. When you are at square one and you know nothing, the most important thing you need to do is pimp your vocab. Beef it up. Cram it into your head. Learn everything in your basic phrasebook. Do not start with the first pages of a textbook. Textbooks like to teach you the most basic grammar and the most formal vocab. In Japanese they seem to start with “to be” structures, introductions and asking people what school they go to and how old they are. Besides being dry and dull, I find it harder to start with grammar. Too much is unfamiliar. And you still can’t talk about anything because you don’t know the words “I” “know” or “nothing.” So forget about grammar. You’ll learn it intuitively and remember it much better after you realise that “の” seems to denote possession than if someone had told you outright. The point of a language is not to write copy-perfect paragraphs. The point is to communicate, and what you need is to develop a base of vocabulary from which to communicate. Back when I was in Kyoto and knew zero Japanese, I could still ask someone where they were from by pointing and saying “anata” and then looking inquisitive. I didn’t have to know that -ka signifies a question, or that anata is understood, and when it isn’t must be followed by +wa, no screw all that. Now that I know enough vocabulary to order in a restaurant, I know I should have said “doko kara kimashta ka” or “watashi wa vegitarian des.” But you can bet I knew how to say “niku” (meat) and shake my head before I knew the rest of it. So don’t stress about grammar until you have a shedload more vocabulary in your arsenal first.

5. Avoid translations
Eschew anything with romaji. It will just make it harder for you. Don’t watch anime or movies with the subtitles on. Subtitles do a great job of making you focus on the story but a terrible job of making you concentrate on the language. Story is incidental. It’s the honey that makes greek yoghurt taste better. Watching subtitles is not eating yoghurt at all, thus not improving your Japanese. And like taking straight shots of honey, just focusing on the story is addictive but ultimately leaves you hungry and is not the best way to go about snacking. If you’re really fighting to read よつばと but can’t seem to get it right, the moment you turn to the English translation is the moment you have no reason to keep struggling. It’s basic logic. We’re hardwired to take the path of least resistance. So don’t offer yourself that option. Instead keep at the hard stuff and you’ll progress faster overall, despite how painfully slow your progress through a single page may be.

6. Be a tortoise, not a hare
Okay, this one I stole from Khatzumoto, but I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if it isn’t true. Sure your rate of improvement is directly proportional to how much time you but in, but it isn’t like filling a coin jar. Whether you put in two quarters every day or 60 quarters at the end of the month does matter. It’s like eating. Your body probably wants around 2,000 calories per day, and we tend to spread them around the the waking hours. If you eat 10,000 calories for breakfast on Monday, you may skip some meals but you will be hungry long before Friday rolls around. You haven’t thwarted the eating system by filling your coin jar for the month, you’ve gained weight and probably messed up your metabolism. Just like your body is good at processing calories, even excess ones, it’s really good at forgetting stuff that isn’t constantly reinforced. If you want to eat properly, you have to eat three meals a day every day, and if you want to learn Japanese you have to practice regularly and routinely. Read more about why tortoises are much better than hares over at Khatzumoto’s site.

7. Start with filler words
If we’re talking about basics in any language, I might add that one area you won’t be able to navigate by feel is the filler words. The particles, subject markers, indefinite articles and other such nonsense that appears a ton but seems to have no meaning. So if you only read up on one thing, read up on the particles and what they mean. Learn the conjunction words. Learn words like “anything” or “something” or “nothing.” More importantly learn your Ws (what, where, why, who, how, etc.) and your Ts (there, that, this, those, these, the others, etc.). Luckily you won’t have to learn possessives in Japanese but if your target language requires them, learn them too. Learn the prepositions. Learn how to stall in your language. How do you say “er…so…well…that’s right…” and the like? Having these filler words will not only make your Japanese sound more native and smoother, but will help you pick out new vocabulary amidst the words you don’t know. You can tell when わ is は and other semi confusing bits of grammar you are going to ignore until you’ve learned more vocab.

8. Practice numbers early
This is especially true with Japanese, where the word for three when talking about people is different than the word for three when talking about pieces of paper. Numbers are incredibly important. Can you image not being able to tell time? Not being able to write down a phone number? The problem with numbers is that you have to know them backwards and forwards, in other words so thoroughly that it appears intuitive to be able to use them. Just knowing how to count to 100 isn’t enough. Get really insanely good at dealing with numbers sooner rather than later. You’ll need the help, and if you get good at spouting off and picking up numbers you’ll be one whole huge step more functional. It will take much practice, so get started now with your numbers, and you can thank me by sending a 三百(さんびゃく) euro check to me later.

**I hear “but kanji is sooooo hard!” all the time and it drives me crazy. It’s one of my pet peeves when people claim writing systems are too difficult. I don’t care how difficult (or more accurately, different) they are, being illiterate but fluent is a travesty. Especially you expats, if you’re living somewhere for goodness sake take a few months to learn the language of the country you’re in. If you don’t know to read it, you don’t know the language.

5% Unassuming Bookworm

Because I read voraciously and I buy mostly nonfiction

Because I hold library cards to multiple counties

Because I am a member of a Young Adult Fiction book club

Because I still make book covers out of grocery bags for my most precious volumes

Because I prefer glasses to contacts

Because I would rather browse a bookshop than sightsee when I travel

5% Leet Superuser

Because I think shell commands are faster than GUI ones

Because I understand how RSA works, change all my passwords every three months, and monitor my RAM usage on my desktop

Because I find DIY projects relaxing and actually read MAKE:

Because I programmed my computer to talk to me when I log on

Because I am the master of keystrokes and custom shortcuts

Because I refuse to sell my tube telly so I can still play my original NES lightgun games

15% Loudmouth Texan

Because I am usually the loudest person in the room

Because I slip into a Southern accent when I’m angry

Because I own and wear a cowboy hat

Because I live in denim

Because I am elitist about BBQ, Soul Food, and Mexican fare despite being vegetarian

Because I could drive through West Texas on autopilot, including the detour to Buckee’s

30% Tiny Hipster

Because I wear skinny jeans and love plaid button downs

Because I don’t carry a purse

Because I own a wardrobe entirely from Vale-U-Village, my sister’s closet, or 8th grade

Because I have been to more Of Montreal concerts than you

Because I rock the short haircut (and it’s asymmetrical, too)

Because I journal in a Moleskine

45% Quirky Japanese

Because I have an unrelenting work ethic

Because I drink a scrillion cups of green tea daily

Because I take public transit everywhere and pay for it with my mobile

Because I actually enjoy reading in Kanji

Because I adore the onsen like a second living room

Because I am unnaturally obsessed with technology and totally unafraid of robots

Because I practice Soto Zen Buddhism

Because I may have Irish descendants, but my liver is not from them

Because I take quality design seriously

Because I like to Karaoke to Full of Harmony’s “Exclusive” so much it’s my ringtone

Other Bits and Bobs
I learned how to be a filmmaker from Anthony Leakey when I was 15 and haven’t stopped since. I’m an archivist at heart who loves to make lists and document everything. I may be small but I can eat a pound of pasta in one sitting. My lifelong ambitions are to become a polyglot and find the perfect cup of tea (I can already tell you it’s probably an oolong). I believe being a renaissance individual is the best way to approach life and tend to have my fingers in many different disciplinary pies simultaneously. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I know too much about information security not to be substantially paranoid. I am definitely a foodie whose kitchen equipment is worth more than her jewelry. I hope I never stop learning new things. I’m afflicted by terminal wanderlust and like to pack for weeklong trips in a single rucksack. I get up at 8:00 on Saturdays to watch Manchester United play, and I always cheer for Ji-Sung Park. I learned to beatbox when I lived in the ghetto. I am a polyphasic sleeper, a lucid dreamer, and a supersmeller, which means I sleep four hours a day, totally thought that piece of toast chasing me was real, and can smell the popcorn you ate yesterday.

Please look at this adorable stack of cute Valentine’s Day stuff my flatmates and friends got me!!

Rodger Swan was a young man who made videos and shared them on the internet. He uploaded over 130 videos before his death this January and in telling the story of his life in Japan, impacted far more people than his nearly 8,000 subscriber count indicates. This simple passion of Rodger’s turned out to be far more meaningful than probably anyone could have guessed, inspiring a global audience and reminding many of us to follow our dreams, whether they take us halfway across the world or involve staying home to read Goosebumps. The Japanese Vlogging community familiar with Rodger was understandably grief-stricken by the sudden news, but a glance through Rodger’s video comments reveals that he touched a much larger group of people worldwide. Many have posted tribute videos, some have shared their favourite Swan stories, others, like me, have written about Rodger’s life.

He was that normal guy that everyone watched grow up. We saw him turn from a boy into a man…And as we watched that Rodger grow, we fell more and more in love with him. We fell in love with his normality. We well in love with his selflessness. We fell in love with the hope there were still people like Rodger left in the world. (via Kevin O’Donnell)

It may seem a touch superficial, a bit overly dramatic perhaps that such a mass of people who barely even knew Rodger are mourning his passing, but I assure you the sentiments are sincere. Rodger was a small part of a niche that stood for something much larger and more real: for compassion and curiosity and unyielding courage in the face of the less-travelled path — the perfect example of why blogging is more than just unchecked journalism or uncensored ranting, but instead an important medium deeply rooted in human interest in a way no other format does justice. Rodger’s published videos really did resonate with people, so called strangers, and through his candid monologue and honest storytelling, Rodger managed to inspire, to change, to make a difference. He moved some of his audience to learn Japanese, he enabled some to make the sacrifice of the world they know for a world much greater, and he affected many, myself included, in ways still unknowable, just by spending a few minutes every week with his video camera.

I think it’s impossible to imagine or count or know just how many lives Rodger touched…It’s a funny thing, moving across the world, as Rodger did, because you wind up being intertwined with the lives of people you never in a million years would have expected meeting. (via Kevin Cooney).

It takes a man every bit as amazing as Rodger Swan to remind us of the kind of people we’d like to be, and his character remains strong to this day. His videos leave behind a legacy, proof that Rodger’s life was far more meaningful than his death could ever be. We could pin Rodger’s appeal first as Tokyo Swan and later as Iwate Swan to many things, from his prolific posting to his relaxed and endearing on-camera attitude, but perhaps the most influential aspect of Rodger was his sincerity. For all the skepticism vloggers face, it’s easy to forget that the youtube audience actually can make an authentic connection with people like Rodger, people who are too genuine not to bond with, and while the phenomenon is a rarity, it’s also one of the most comforting connections we can have. The appeal of a young man thousands of kilometers away with unusual interests may not be apparent at first glance, but from those first videos it’s easy to see why so many felt so close to Swan and found solace in his shared journey.

His death…serves as a powerful reminder that ultimately, what matters is loving, caring, sharing, and being true to yourself. And doing that today, not tomorrow. The honesty with which he shared his life was touching. I found his attitude inspiring, and comforting too – knowing that this good person was out there. (via Joseph Tame)

I don’t claim to have known Rodger personally, and I don’t count myself among his acquaintances, but I do know a number of us touched by his work are keeping him and his family in our thoughts. I will always remember the way his videos and words and views on horror movies left a lasting impression that may not have made us family, but made us far from strangers. So goodbye, Rodger, you will be missed.

It’s been a lot harder than I thought it would be, saying goodbye to the people, saying goodbye to the places, and what you’re used to, because you do, you make connections, you meet people, and you form bonds, and that can be a difficult thing to walk away from because you’re never going to get this again. It’s never going to be like this again. But there’s always hope. You never know, one day we might meet again, so in that sense, you always have to stay positive. (via Rodger Swan).

Back by popular demand, I’ve got another batch of words of wisdom to help you cultivate the right attitudes for change. Check out my first post on mantras to live by to get started on the subject.

1. What you do everyday is more important than what you do occasionally. (via Gretchen Rubin)
It’s so easy to burn out on change, whether it’s a lack of willpower or a commanding pace of life, so when all seems lost, remember that what you do every day is way more important than what you do every once in a while. The everyday actions are the things you’re really committed to, the things important enough to make it into your already crunched day. These are the things that stick with you. If you’re going to make a change, don’t focus on being able to deadlift 150kgs, focus on lifting every day. Change starts on a much smaller scale than we think, just as the small routines we complete have a much larger impact than we might have imagined.

2. Shoot for the stars, you may land on the moon. (via my dreamy nature)
I’ve always said this phrase to explain to people why I’m such a dreamer. I think big and you should too. Really big. Expect to get there. It will seem absurd to everyone else, but when you aim for the big fish, you inevitably end up somewhere cool, regardless of whether you catch the whopper in the pond or not. Don’t be afraid to overshoot or to aim high. How else do you wind up on top? Ask yourself what really makes you and the greats of the world different, and you’ll be surprised how often we scale ourselves back instead of letting ourselves be big picture thinkers.

3. Make no apologies. (via Ross Wells)
I’m not ashamed of who I am and what I do, and even someone as infallibly confident as myself often makes too many apologies. Ramit Sethi calls it the “Eeyore effect”, I call it “youtube syndrome,” but anyway you slice it, overapologising is no good. Creative people often fall into the trap of apologising when they miss a post or the sound is bad or the focus off. I do the same thing. I used to regularly kowtow a world of “sorry”s when I sent a newsletter out too close to the end of the month. Don’t. Just show up with what you got and make punctuality or presentation or production value or whatever your private area for improvement. Not only will most people never notice, but you end up putting your best foot forward. I did a documentary shot entirely in noisy, crowded, dark restaurants all over Los Angeles. Sure the picture was grainy, the noise floor was higher than heaven, and the subjects hard to understand, but what are you going to do when you know your shooting conditions suck? You go with your gut. You do your best. You make no apologies.

4. You can’t eat the meat until you kill the cow. (via Outlandish)
It sounds like something Dr. Phil would say, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You do have to walk before you can run if you don’t want bruises on your face, but the old adage is so much more than that. Once you’re ready for a steak, it’s really easy to start thinking about how you’re going to get it. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, if you want the meat you have to kill the cow first. So before you grow livid wondering where the steak life promised you is, pop in Bread and Barrels of Water until you remember that you haven’t killed the cow yet.

5. As in the beginning, so in the middle, so in the end. (via Danielle LaPorte)
It’s a Buddhist proverb I’ve heard before to describe infinite nature, but Danielle LaPorte gave it a whole new meaning for me. In her regular appearance with Mark Kelley on CBC, she spoke about trusting your intuition and your first impressions when it comes to business. While I do believe humans can change, I agree that most of us are unwilling to. If someone comes off as rude at first, they generally continue to be rude and are still rude when you decide to stop taking their rudeness. As it was at the start, in those first few seconds you thinsliced the situation, so it usually ends up being. Stop fighting the things that are unchangeable and changing what you can: in LaPorte’s case whether you work with them, in Buddha’s case how you look at the world, and in your case too.

A bit of a preview of coming attractions straight from the heart of my own creative lair and into yours via the interwebs. Get ready, unlikelysquiggle.com is about to get an overhaul.

Let me tell you about my views on the smartphone five years ago. Five years ago I was carrying around a rucksack everywhere I went that held my mobile, my palm pilot, my digital camera, my mp3 player, my TI-89 calculator, plus a paper agenda with my to-do lists, important documents, and maps, a 3.5″ hard drive and enclosure, a spindle of CDs for my car and a bundle of charging cables. Five years ago I toted around eight different objects on a daily basis with a combined weight of 8.5kg and still eschewed the idea of an all-in-one device.

Why? There were devices of that variety on the market, including the Blackberry and Palm Treo which dropped two years prior, many of which could have lightened my load, yet I was convinced none of them could do a series of combined tasks successfully. I required that the quality of my pictures, the features of my PDA, the speed of my data transfer, were maintained to the point that I ran the risk of back problems from a heavy bag in order to accommodate my digital needs.

It’s fairly insane to consider carrying around so many devices today, especially given my travel-heavy lifestyle, but at the time it was considered normal for tech-heads like me. It’s not because I was so gadget-lusty that I needed to try everything, and it’s not because I was so tight-fisted I wouldn’t go out and give the Treo a go, but it was that five years ago you couldn’t find a mobile device that did everything I needed it to. There was no device on the market that could give me cellular service, keep my calendar and contacts, take decent pictures, play most of my music, calculate differential equations, hold copies of my presentation, or store my data, let alone play videos, back itself up, or sync to my email account. Heck, there were hardly any internet-ready devices in the market at all five years ago.

Now there are numerous devices that perform multiple functions, and not only do them, but do them well. The camera on the Droid is better than my point and shoot camera was five years ago. 16GB of storage has never been so light or so sturdy as it is today. Cellular data coverage has become so popular you can use it as your primary source of the internet. These are equally insane times, but in a different way. People have finally jumped on the smartphone bandwagon, everyone keeps talking about digital convergence, and the projections that everything will move up to the cloud are in unanimous agreement.

Today, while rumours about the Apple tablet closing the gap into a single, everything device, I think people are too optimistic. It could be done, but the reality is that what I want in a device and what you want are going to be different, and both of us aren’t going to want a whole bunch of extras taking up system resources, adding bulk to the thing, and cluttering the interface. I still agree with my opinion five years ago: the all-in-one quality device will never exist. Just as you’ll never be able to grill steaks in a soup pot, the iPhone will never take pictures or videos as well a DSLR or an EX1 without ceasing to be an iPhone. The Nexus’s 3G coverage will not be as high-performing as a cable modem anytime soon. You still can’t watch TV on your phone on the bus. The Kindle can’t adequately display vivid National Geographic images. So yeah, devices are still specialised, but it’s okay. As much as I’d like it to be, my smartphone is not my computer, but it can do almost everything I need my computer for yet fits in my pocket and has a longer battery life. I can take pictures, edit them, and upload them to flickr. I can ad-hoc a live video broadcast that is automatically geotagged. I can ask this piece of metal for directions to “Roy’s Donut World” and it’ll get me there. I can play football with my mates or answer my work email from Amsterdam or write my own app for something that can fit in my pocket. That’s really incredible, and what’s more incredible is that none of it existed in a pretty, little, usable package five years ago.

The technology might have existed, but what’s really changed is the overlap between devices. Phones used to have atrocious calendar functions that didn’t sync to your desktop, but have you tried to get a PDA that doesn’t come with a network carrier contract? The old-school palm pilot of yesteryear has long since been swallowed up by more advanced smartphones. It’s not just smartphones that have evolved either. Canon’s new line of cameras can shoot full-size 1080p HD video and still function like the kind of quality still SLR camera you’d expect from the company. You can control your Sonos music system from your iPod touch and stream Netflix to your and your friend in a different city’s XBoxes.

It’s not just the devices that have evolved, but the way we use them. The ability to link up your social networks, to have the websites you read pushed to one location, to automate everything from file storage to television viewing is widely accessible. You can take a device that has great capability and customise it to meet your exact needs, without having to pull a linux and hand-code everything yourself. The idea isn’t to make one device to rule them all, because a gamer will never want the same things in a device that a business executive will. The idea is to increase the overlap and make everything play nice, so that instead of carrying around eight devices, you only need to carry one or two light, energy efficient, globally connected objects. If I’ve gone from a back-breaking rucksack to a single pocket’s worth of space and weight in five years, just think of where we’ll be in 2015.