Introducing Tsundoku

I mentioned in Spring cleaning that I have some downtime between jobs. I decided to fly to Japan, buy a new camera, and spend a couple of weeks practicing photography.

This is my third trip to Japan. The first was for Almost Perfect, where I met Luis Mendo and his wife Yuka. I keep returning because Japan is accessible without cars, has great food and coffee, and lets me meet otaku for almost any niche interest.

Walking around with a manual camera has made me feel more present. I keep meeting people unexpectedly, and I find myself appreciating my surroundings more.

Normally, I share photos as cover art for essays here on the site. But after a couple of days, I already have more photos than essay ideas.

This reminded me of a Japanese concept I shared in my Postcard newsletter last August: tsundoku, acquiring books and letting them pile up unread. While I definitely do that with books, I felt like I am piling up a stack of photographs.

So, today I am introducing Tsundoku, a pop-up photography newsletter from this trip.

The format is inspired by Craig Mod's pop-up newsletters: a temporary publication with a clear beginning and end. Tsundoku will run until 2026-07-07, then stop when the trip is over.

Luis helped me with the logo, which is set in his proprietary and private typeface Mendo Titles Bold. (Check out his blog Mundo Mendo where he shares his own perspective on technology, gear, and craft as an illustrator.)

Current subscribers are not automatically added to Tsundoku. If you want to follow along, go to the Tsundoku page. There, you can optionally enter your email to subscribe to updates. Expect several photos per day until 2026-07-07, then no emails at all afterward. You can also ignore email and check the page for updates.

As I wrote in Spring cleaning, I am trying to move away from software-as-a-service projects and toward creative work I can build for myself. Tsundoku is both: a photography project and some new software to support that project.

I finished most of the infrastructure and UI today on the Shinkansen from Kanazawa to Tokyo, amid two typhoons. It was my first time using the Codex app for Mac, and I was impressed. I built a better photo viewer, including preloading, image-loading optimizations, and adopting Git LFS. AI made this possible. This is the kind of polish I would not have been able to achieve hand-coding on a side project.

I am already a couple of days into the trip, so I have a stack of photos I will be sharing soon: food, coffee, whiskey, and toast.

Follow Tsundoku →.