Eight years ago, Japanese music superstar Sheena Ringo quit her massively successful solo career to experiment with forming a band. When they were first formed as a backing band for her final tour, they were introduced as 東京事変 (Tokyo Jihen, translated as Incidents Tokyo). The band, albeit wildly creative and different from standard Japanese rock and pop outfits, consistently made it to the top 10 ORICON (Japanese Billboard) charts.

This past week, after an eight year run, Tokyo Jihen disbanded. It goes without saying that they are, without a question of a doubt, my favorite band of all time. Hands down. One of my life goals was to one day make it to Japan to see them live. Unfortunately, I'll never get to.

Tokyo Jihen was incredibly important to me because of what they stood for. They always experimented with new ways to create wild, crazy, eccentric music. As a whole, Tokyo Jihen represented the artists who create every day because that's what they love and believe in. They were wildly successful for it.

The band is filled with nice creative quirks that hardcore fans pick up on: Each band member is given a stage name by Sheena, each one using alternate Kanji for their real names to alter pronunciation. The albums are each named after types of television programs (Education, ADULT, VARIETY, SPORTS, Discovery, COLOR BARS). Each album features a symmetrical tracklist, meaning tracks are paired in terms of title length, particle placement, and type of character. I personally believe that each album is telling part of a larger story about the career of a musician, but I have no proof to back this.

The genius that is Sheena Ringo's songwriting is something I can't put to words. Even from the days of her solo career, translating her culturally-charged, cryptically poetic lyrics has proven extremely difficult for even the best translators. They're by no means the sugar-coated lyrics that you'd hear on the radio here in America, or even in Japan. Ringo eventually gave up the creative reins, and the band members began to contribute to albums equally. By the time of COLOR BARS, the final album, each member had contributed at least one song.

While many people might say that this is where the quality of the band really began to nosedive, it's also one of the more daring creative moves I've heard of from a music artist. I think that this is where Tokyo Jihen graduated from a mere "experiment" to a creative and cultural phenomenon. As a matter of fact, Sheena Ringo always noted that the nature of Tokyo Jihen was that it was always changing, and if you listen to each album sequentially, you can really begin to understand that.

There's so much candy-coated fat in the music world that it's easy to get addicted to. Tokyo Jihen was a band with substance. Their artsmanship is unparallaled. No other band can make me groove uncontrollably in my seat one second to sniffling and wiping my eyes the next. Even if you can't understand their lyrics, as complex as they can be, the emotion they portray truly knows no lingustic boundaries.

Ringo, Kameda, Izawa, Ukigumo, and Hata have had a great run. Their music has gotten me through incredibly great and incredibly bad times.

COLOR BARS represents a new high for the band. It's different, catchy, and explorative. I haven't been this excited about Tokyo Jihen since their second or third album, and it still manages to evoke the feeling of a new album coming later in the year. Even the band members want to know what comes next.

Unfortunately, with COLOR BARS, we've tuned into a frequency on which nothing is being broadcasted.

I have turned on the power now that you've died, and will resurrect you time and time again with my stereo. This is farewell, but to me, you will never die.

Thank you for everything, Tokyo Jihen. Encore.

Every year on New Years' Eve (this year was quite a bit later), I write a reflection of the year past, and some expectations for the year coming.

2011 was like a flash before my eyes.

This time last year, I was going through a rough time. I didn't feel I did very well at my internship at Facebook, my (ex-) girlfriend and I split, and my stepfather passed away in front of my eyes. I was admittedly depressed, excessively so, for six months or so after these events occured. But I soldiered on.

I said that 2010 was a lesson in modesty, and I have no doubts that 2011 was a lesson in putting yourself back together and standing up tall. Those things happened, but they are the past, and I can do nothing but learn from them. At some point, I finally learned to move on.

2011 was indeed an adventure, just as I hoped it would be. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, a huge milestone for both me and my family. I met someone new, and although we don't see each other often, she's lovely. I interviewed with twenty companies, from startups to consultancies to agencies across the country, until I found Pinterest, where I've been for six months now. Self-explanatorily, I moved across the country to San Francisco, where I had to couch surf for three months before finding my lovely apartment in a nook of the Mission.

With life back on track, what's upcoming for 2012?

There's a whole bunch of things to do and learn on my list, but the only one that really matters is becoming a really great, world-class product designer. The better I am at what I do, the better I'll be able to communicate and help people, which is the whole point of everything I do.

The first thing that I really need to learn that I've been putting off is learning how to ship. My core deficiency is not knowing when to stop polishing and just ship. I still haven't done it with Foundation. Hopefully, by pushing myself really hard to do so this year, I can push something to the actual world and see what comes back.

I've gotten decent at visual design in the past year, but I can still get better. I'll never resort to drawing pretty icons for imaginary products, but I do need to up the ante on the visual design I can touch for real things. Becoming a great visual design doesn't necessarily mean extreme skeueomorphism, it means excellence in layout, typography, and graphic representation of ideas. A layout could be flat and not represent something physical at all, but it can still be beautiful.

I really need to become better at talking to people. I know how to voice my opinion, but I'm not always confident in it and I get scared to the point of visibly shaking, even if its just me and another person. In crits, this can be really embarassing. Also, I need to get better at talking to people I don't know. I want to be more active in the design community and attend more events, but its hard when I don't know anyone to latch onto and piggyback on socially.

Lastly, I want to talk more about the design world, and design in the context of our world at large. That's why I've migrated this blog to a much simpler, lighter-weight system than Tumblr. All I have to do is drop a Markdown file in and it's published. Hopefully, by lowering the barrier to entry, I will think more about writing, think more about what to write, and consequently talk more about design. I'll still post every unrelated thought I have on Twitter though—don't worry.

I feel like 2012 is going to be a big year. It will have a lot of ups-and-downs and it will be very intense work-wise, but those are necessary for personal growth. It will be fun though, and I am sure that I'll enjoy every second of it.

I hope you do too.

Ten years ago, I woke up at my best friend Max's house. He lived in TriBeCa, about a ten minute walk from the World Trade Center. We'd known each other for two years then, and we were in 7th grade, although not in the same homeroom anymore. I was 11, he was 12.

I vaguely remember considering going to the World Trade Center that morning to buy something, but I didn't. That's likely a detail made up in my imagination over the years though. I remember the day being pretty normal. There were some people who kept saying things about two planes crashing, and I didn't know what they meant. I thought they meant two planes crashed above the towers, as odd a thought that was. I thought someone was pranking me.

Then they told us school was ending early. No one really told us what was happening. I tried to leave the building to go wait in Burger King for my mom like I always did, but they wouldn't let us outside the building alone. I thought of going home with Max and his mom, but they wouldn't let us leave with anyone but our parents. When my mom finally came and I went outside I just remember people running away from downtown. Then she told me what happened.

We picked up a few people who were trying to get to the Bronx. I remember we had to go really far north to even get out of the city. When we finally got home after what seemed like an eternity, we just laid in the room watching TV. I logged onto AIM and IRC and let my internet friends know that I was okay. I didn't really let off an aura of caring, but inside I was pretty frightened. I didn't understand what was going on then. I was 11.

We didn't go to school for what must have been a week after that. It felt like days that we watched CNN. I didn't get to see any of my friends—they all lived in the city. There wasn't much to do but browse the internet on my shitty 56k modem and play video games. Everyone was scared. It was a pretty unbelievable situation, even now. There are people that deal with these things on a regular basis though. We were lucky. That doesn't make any of it more right.

It's been 10 years since then.

About six weeks ago, after interviewing for almost two months with over twenty companies, I decided to take a position as a product designer at Pinterest in sunny Palo Alto, California. For those who don't know, Pinterest is a virtual pinboard where you can collect all the things that you like and showcase your tastes to the world. I spent several months stressing about where I'd be and how that would affect my trajectory, and while that's another story for another day, I can safely say that this was the best decision that I could have made. So six weeks ago, I packed the most essential 10% of my belongings and shipped out.

I have to admit that it's been rough. I still don't have a place to live. It's a huge hassle and it's preventing me from really being able to wind down and really adjust to my surroundings, but I don't think there's anywhere else in the world I'd rather be than in the Bay Area right now.

That being said, working at Pinterest is fantastic. I'm number eight of our team of nine people. We have three co-founders, four engineers, and a community manager. Especially after experiencing Facebook, a company relatively small for its status as a tech giant, it's really nice knowing everyone on the team. We all live and breathe the site, and like at school, it is the source of many sleepless nights, but that kind of atmosphere is okay, and as we grow it will probably go away, so I'd rather be around to experience it while I can.

One of the great things about joining Pinterest so early is that I can really be there to influence what becomes our company culture. In fact, that was probably one of the most compelling things about the opportunity for me. Being able to shape culture, be it physical or digital, is one of my favorite things about being a designer. It's also something that I always consciously try to address in any project that I do. At Pinterest, we're just settling in to our first real office after being in an apartment for a very long time. It's going to be weird at first, but I'm excited that I get to be a part of the team that makes our new place feel like home.

Lastly, the design problems are challenging and new enough to be exciting, but familiar enough for me to make informed decisions without a long warm-up phase. When I went to Facebook last summer, I had never designed anything in a professional environment, nor had I designed something at that scale. A large majority of my summer was spent getting to know the intricacies of Facebook as a design problem and the internal goals of the team. Especially without another designer in the same mental place as me and many of the other designers way too busy for me to feel comfortable interrupting, it was tough getting used to. It wasn't until my last few weeks that I really understood what I was working with. I feel like that's why that internship didn't go nearly as well as I'd hoped it would. Granted, I learned more than I did in any year of CMU during that summer.

That being said, Pinterest is very similar to visually—a large part of why Pinterest chose me and I them. Although nowhere as feature complete as Foundation in my mind, visually was a thought-through product with goals that stretched out at least a couple of years. Being able to bring some of those ideas and that insight back to a product with an engaged and supportive userbase is extremely valuable to me. It's actually irreplaceable. That's what Pinterest had that no one else did.

All in all, I'm really glad that I have this opportunity. I wouldn't trade it for the world.

By the way, we're hiring, so if you're a talented engineer or designer looking to join an awesome team, be sure to get in touch!

Now, I'm by no means a video game journalist, but Julius Tarng's post got me thinking a bit about Nintendo's new console and the future of gaming.

Let me start out by saying that if Nintendo can pull this off, I will be surprised. Nintendo alone has pretty openly stated that their competitor is no longer Sony or Microsoft, but Apple. Apple came out of nowhere and took not just the gaming industry, but the casual gaming industry by storm, arguably Nintendo's core market. They have every reason to be afraid. If you understand this and take one look at the Wii U, you begin to understand where Miyamoto & co. are aiming their guns.

The Wii U, however, is too little too late.

The Looming Threat

There's no denying that Apple's key advantage in every market it ventures into is iTunes. They have 200 million iTunes accounts, each with credit card information, ready to purchase anything Apple decides to sell. There's also the fact that a game on the App Store is often only 99 cents, and rarely price higher than $5. For casual consumers, this is huge. That's why iOS took off as a gaming platform without Apple ever needing to brand it as such. (Apple started acknowledging iOS as a gaming platform 4 years after the first iPhone was released with Game Center.) There's lots of other little things that contribute to Apple's success in a market they never meant to conquer, but that's the main point.

One of the things that Sony and Microsoft have gotten right is building an account system. While one of them seems to be better at holding on to accounts than the other, the main point here is that like Apple, they are building a database of their customer's financial information. Storing this information ultimately allows customers to frictionlessly purchase digital goods, just like on the App Store.

Like Nintendo's online strategy up until this week, any sort of long-term account system is non-existant. Moving from the DS eStore to the 3DS eStore, I've heard that you can move your Club Nintendo account and transfer your purchases, but as far as I know, you have to enter your credit card information for every purchase. That doesn't exactly encourage me as a consumer to buy stuff.

If we give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt now and assume that the Wii U will introduce some sort of sustainable account system that stores credit cards for downloadable purchases, they're still a generation too late. Keep in mind that it was over ten years ago that Apple launched iTunes and began harvesting the information that makes them so powerful today. Game Center on iOS is the most popular online gaming service in the world. Around the same time, Microsoft launched Xbox Live on the original Xbox. Xbox Live is probably the most successful online gaming service ever. See the trend here?

A Weakening Industry

Now let's take a look at the gaming industry as a whole. I've been out of the gaming world for a while, but as far as I can tell, the time of 3rd-party exclusives is long gone. Long live timed exclusivity.

Revenues from boxed video games are way down, and they aren't getting any better. Most of the titles that big 3rd-party studios like Electronic Arts crank out are multiplatform on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, and the closest we get to a "console exclusive" is a costume, or an item, or if we're lucky a whole character.

It's safe to say that the gaming industry is an industry where the well of creativity is almost dry—we don't get games like LittleBigPlanet every day. Instead, everything is just another Halo, Gears of War, or Modern Warfare rehash. To the 3rd-parties, there's not enough money in making things that are new.

Nintendo, however, is a company that thrives on innovation. The industry has always looked to them to determine what the next trend in gaming will be. The Wii U is nothing if not innovative. At the same time, its important to remember that innovation is expensive. Unless Nintendo is really going to throw it's back behind 3rd-parties, we're just going to see the same games on PS3 and 360 ported to Wii U, completing the trifecta.

I believe that the reason why the Wii became so unprofitable so quickly was because once the novelty wore off, it wasn't really a contender for ports. No one wanted to make games exclusively for Wii anymore and it wasn't powerful enough to port the latest and greatest without much work. Wii U changes that, but it doesn't change the fact that the novelty will, eventually, wear off.

Having a Plan

It's important that Nintendo has a plan, and a damn good one. Apple has the casual gamers, but it feels like they're lying to themselves when they say that the Wii U is their answer to "hardcore" gamers. It's a cool idea, and it's a different idea, but it's not what a hardcore gamer wants.

I'll be the first to admit that I could be wrong. Wii U could sell like hotcakes and take the next generation. I don't know. Keep in mind, though, that the last time an industry leader launched their next-gen console before everyone else, that industry leader dropped out of the hardware race and became a shell of its former self. (Ironically enough, that console also had a screen on the controller.) I'm not saying that this spells the end of Nintendo and that Zelda will be a launch title on the Playstation 4, but I don't think we'll be hearing about how the Wii U prints money. The 3DS surely doesn't.

Ultimately, I'm hard pressed to believe that with the Wii U anything will change—at least not in the way Nintendo is hoping. Nintendo will and always will be the best at making games for its consoles—by a large margin, at that—and so, history repeats itself in that way that only it can.

Clarification: The Xbox 360 launched first this generation and has done well, to say the least. It's important to note though that it leverages Xbox Live, which had an existing install base from the Xbox. Wii U is more like the Dreamcast in that there is no online service to rope existing customers in.