2025-08-01 19:00:00
This is the 101st edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Emma Goto and her blog, emgoto.com
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Hi, I'm Emma! I'm half-Japanese and half-Australian, and was born and raised in Sydney before moving to Tokyo in 2022.
Growing up, I was a huge PC gamer. Spending so much time on my computer is what led me down the path to studying computer science at university, and then getting a job as a software engineer. I work remotely for an Australian software company and do a 4-day work week, which gives me more time to enjoy hobbies like my blog.
Although I grew up as a super introverted person who liked to stay indoors, I tried out hiking for the first time when I moved to Japan and was immediately hooked. My current goal is to complete the hyakumeizan, a list of Japan's 100 most famous mountains. After 3 years, I'm just over halfway at 55/100. I expect the remaining half to take a lot longer though, since a lot of the remaining mountains are far away and/or require hiking longer distances to complete.
Outside of hiking I also like to read and on the rare occassion, play airsoft. I'm trying to learn Mandarin so that I can speak to my partner's grandparents, but I'll admit that that's pretty slow-going at the moment.
Early on in my career, I didn't have much confidence in myself as a programmer. When I first started learning how to code at university, it felt like everyone around me already knew what they were doing, and I was playing catch-up. It took a couple of years for things to start to click, and as I settled into full-time work I knew I wanted to become a "better" programmer but at the same time I didn't really know where to start. I'd often heard the advice that you should start a blog to share what you learn, since being able to explain a topic to someone else requires you to know it really well. And so that's how I started blogging!
In 2020, I commited to writing a post every week which I managed to end up sticking with for the entire year. When I moved to Japan in 2022, programming outside of work took a backseat as I tried to find new hobbies and make friends, and so my blog fell by the wayside a bit as well. It was around this time that I got super into hiking.
At first I didn't feel like hiking was worth blogging about, but by 2024 I started to write up a post after each new mountain that I climbed, like when I climbed Mt Fuji. Although there's a lot of information on hiking in Japanese, there's not as much out there for English-speakers, so the more I wrote about hiking, the more I felt like I had something that was worth sharing.
Although I started emgoto.com off as a programming blog, it's been a really fun realization for me there's really no constraints on what I should write about. I own the blog, so I make the rules! I expect that one day I might start hiking less, or run out of mountains to blog about, in which case I'm sure I'll be able to find something new to start blogging about too.
I write all of my posts in a text editor called Obsidian. I try not to be too much of a perfectionist about things. I think that even if my writing isn't perfect, it being out there on the internet for someone to read is better than it lingering in my drafts forever. I don't have a specific writing process - generally I just start with a rough outline and add in random unfinished sentences or thoughts and then come back to it later to make it a little bit more coherent.
I'm also a big fan of the digital garden approach to blogging, and so I don't necessarily see publishing a post as the end of it. Probably 90% of the views I get on a post will come months after it's released as it starts to show up in Google searches. So I tend to keep an eye on my analytics and if I see the views are starting to trickle in on an older post, I take that as an opportunity to go back and see if there's anything I can improve about it.
To get out of a rut, I like going to a fancy cafe to help get me in the zone. I used to live near a Sarutahiko Coffee, which is a bit of a fancy coffee chain that I would recommend if you're ever visiting Japan. There's something motivating about having other people around you working on their laptops.
Other times an idea might come to me while I'm zoning out on a train ride, so I'll just word-vomit out my thoughts into a text file on my phone. The time I spend hiking is also another great source of inspiration. I find being disconnected from your phone for a full day gives your mind a lot of time to wander and just think which is generally rare for me when the internet is a quick phone swipe away.
I'm currently using Astro, after making the switch from Gatsby late last year. The build times are definitely an improvement, and the overall dev experience feels much nicer as well. I use React for the frontend, since that's what I use at my day job.
All my blog posts are organized as MDX posts (i.e. fancy Markdown that lets you insert components into your posts). I was previously using Markdown with my Gatsby blog as well, and so that made it really easy to port all of my content over.
You're all probably familiar with frontmatter, which lets you add metadata to your posts. At a minimum, each of my Markdown files will have a title, date and tags, but I do like to use this feature quite extensively with my hiking posts. For example, I have a map with all the mountains on my hyakumeizan page so inside of the frontmatter for my hiking posts I also note down the latitude and longitude, elevation and other relevant data for the mountain.
One fancy hack I have is scheduling when my posts are published. After I write a new post, I'll raise it as a pull request on my site's Github repo. I then have a Github action that automatically merges the pull request on a certain day of the week. And merging the code triggers a new deploy of my site, so it's a really handy way of staying consistent with my publishing schedule. I find it's a lot less stressful than rushing towards a deadline to try and get out a new post every week.
For hosting, I use Netlify. I also use Cloudflare CDN, which caches about half of the requests, and so thankfully I still have a fair bit of leeway on Netlify's free tier.
Since I cover very different topics on my blog (books, programming, and hiking), I have different designs and layouts for the 3 sections. Part of the fun of running a blog for me is the design aspect of it, so I spend a lot of time procrastinating on the actual writing by tinkering with the blog's code.
I wouldn't say I regret it too much, but I did have a full 2-year break on my blog when I first moved to Japan. At the time it was very programming-themed (it's still the same design you can see today on the programming section of my site) and so although I wanted to blog about Japan, it just felt weird to do that on my programming blog.
I was able to do a redesign to make the different sections of my site clearer, but in hindsight I wish I had continued to blog a bit during that time. I learned how to drive in Japan, actually, so even a post about the driving school experience would have been pretty interesting I think.
I'm definitely glad though that I named the blog after myself, since it did give me that flexibility to keep on writing about whatever I wanted to. As long as I'm the one doing the writing, anything goes! Maybe I would have gone with emmagoto.com instead of shortening it to emgoto.com - at the time I bought the domain I thought having less characters sounded cooler.
I pay 17 USD a year for my domain name using NameCheap. This is the only real expense for my blog since the hosting is free.
I don't generate any revenue. For a while, I did have Carbon ads on my programming posts as they are quite non-intrusive, but it was only bringing me in a couple of dollars a month and I felt I'd rather have no ads in that case, so I removed it.
Financially the blog has no benefit, but I do feel like it gives me a sense of purpose, and it's nice knowing that someone out there (even if it's just one person) has gotten value from the stuff that I've written. And even if no one reads some of my more niche hiking posts, I like being able to go back and read them for myself too.
If you're interested in reading more about hiking in Japan, I recommend ridgelineimages.com which is run by a fellow Aussie. And if you're looking to get super niche, One Hundred Mountains can provide a bit of an interesting deep-dive into the history of Japanese hiking as well.
I also love discovering new blog designs - some of my recent favourites have been Nic Chan, iamrobin, Anthony Fu and elle's homepage.
Come hike in Japan! If you're not sure where to start, I have a round-up post with some of my favourite hikes in Japan as well as some recommendations for day hikes from Tokyo. And of course feel free to reach out to me on Bluesky or Instagram if you have any questions.
I'd also like to plug Hardcover which is a book tracking app that is turning out to be a pretty good replacement for Goodreads. They have an API you can use to query on your books (which is I'm sure music to any dev's ears) and they're planning on going open-source too!
This was the 101st edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Emma. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with them if you have any questions.
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2025-07-31 02:45:00
After the experiments of June and July, I say it’s time to switch gears, do something a little bit different and take my ass away from the screen and up the mountains. As part of my year-long plan to get back into proper shape, I decided to take hiking seriously again and what better way to kickstart this than a fun challenge to myself during the month of August.
Back in 2022, I set myself the goal of walking at least 1000km—which I did—so this time, rather than focusing on distance, I’ll go for total gained elevation. But rather than having an all-or-nothing goal, I decided to set three targets in increasing order of difficulty.
The base target is gonna be 4810 meters, or a bit more than 52 American football fields for the non-metric friends across the ocean. That’s the height of Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in Europe. Spread across 31 days, it’s a bit more than 155 meters of elevation gained each day, which is super duper doable, if I get good weather.
After that, the next target is set at 6961 meters (roughly 75 statues of liberty), aka the Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the Americas.
The final target, unsurprisingly, is gonna be set at 8848 meters (4731 Obamas), which is the height of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on Earth (when measured at sea level).
Those are the three targets; we’ll see where I land after 31 days. Feel free to place your bets. No need to say that this whole challenge can be completely derailed by weather, but I’m confident I’ll make it at least to the top of Mont Blanc. I’m going to track all my hikes, and I’ll share progress along the way. My plan is to do daily short-ish hikes and then go for one big hike every weekend. We’ll see how long it's gonna take for the plan to go off the rails.
If you’re a hiker and want to join me in this challenge, that would be awesome! Ping me via email, and we can figure out how to do this or post on your site if you have one and send me the link.
And if you’re one of those super athletes who hikes 8000 meters just to go to work, feel free to set your target on Olympus Mons.
Since I’m gonna spend likely more time than usual outdoors, I decided to also try something else in August: my first pop-up newsletter! And since I like to do things my way, I decided to do this in collaboration with Cody, which means this is gonna be, quite possibly, the first four-hands-two-continents pop-up newsletter.
It’s called Natural Conversation and it’s gonna be loosely centred on the topic of nature. The goal is to send 1 photograph and about 500 words each day. You’ll hear from Cody on odd days and from me on even ones. Which means you’ll get awesome pictures and great writing on odd days and my usual ramblings on even ones.
As per the rules of pop-up newsletters, the entire list will get deleted at the end of the month, and there will be no archive. You have this chance and this chance alone to get this content so subscribe now, before it’s too late.
A few words on Cody. If you clicked on the link I included a few paragraphs above, you might have noticed that he doesn’t have a proper site, which is odd considering he’s a photographer and a writer. That is entirely my fault, not his. I’m working on a new site for him, and it’s taking me forever for reasons I’m not going to get into. But I promise that by the end of this challenge, he will have a new site up, and you’ll be able to follow his digital journey if you decide to do so. He does have a newsletter though, so maybe subscribe to that in the meantime?
See what I did Cody? I managed to public-shame myself into finishing your site, and you’re also now screwed because people will expect content from you if they sign up to your newsletter (go sign up to Cody’s newsletter).
Ok, enough with the ramblings, let me wrap this up. This is what you’ll get from me in August: lots of hiking, lots of nature. We’ll go up the mountains, hopefully gain a lot of elevation and lose some weight in the process (I need to get back to my ideal weight of 85kg, currently sitting at 88). And every other day, you’ll hear from me in your inbox if you decide to sign up for the pop-up newsletter.
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2025-07-28 15:10:00
With four weeks of July behind me, this second month-long summer experiment has come to an end. A lot less interesting than June’s experiment, but still worth doing. The data from this final week is a bit all over the place for a variety of reasons, but let me dump some numbers before going into details.
Monday : 1:45 (1:34)
Tuesday : 1:13 (0:56)
Wednesday : 3:26 (3:16)
Thursday : 4:09 (3:34)
Friday : 2:10 (1.56)
Saturday : 4:29 (5:03)
Sunday : 0:11 (0:06)What even is this data, you might be wondering? Saturday, again, no idea what happened because the sum of categories is higher than the total time reported by screen time. A few “normal” days, a couple of high spots and a very odd Sunday. There’s a simple explanation for all that. On Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, I had a bunch of conversations going, so the combined usage of Telegram, Messages and WhatsApp was unusually high. I also had to use my phone a bunch to test sites I’m coding for work, and those two together explain the unusually high usage.
As for Sunday, since it was the last day of the experiment, I decided to put some effort into this and see what happens if I try not to use my phone and put up just a bit of resistance. And it went exactly as I was expecting, meaning I never used my phone all day long.
All this tells me that the issue I was facing is long gone, and my phone usage is back under control. The automatic pulling the phone out of my pocket is gone, I don’t have to reach for it when I’m bored, and the muscles in my memory have been successfully retrained. I’m happy with that.
But enough with screens and digital life! August is going to be all about the body, nature, writing and taking pictures, but I’ll write about all that in detail in a few days.
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2025-07-27 01:05:00
The other day, I finished reading 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster. It was a Christmas gift from my dad, who apparently picked it without even knowing what the book was about. It sat there, in my bedroom, for more than 6 months because it’s a 950-page novel, and I was convinced that I was not going to make it till the end. In addition to that, I was also convinced that, given the momentum I built during the June experiment, starting such a book was not a smart move.
I thought all that because I allegedly know how my brain works. And I know that I have a hard time dealing with tasks that drag on for a long time, and prefer seeing short tasks being completed. That’s what I thought. And if there’s one thing we have learned with these weird experiments I’m doing is that, when it comes to the inner workings of my brain, I don’t know shit.
After finishing Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto, it was time to pick a new book. I almost decided to start 4 3 2 1, but decided to go for After Dark by Haruki Murakami. Murakami didn’t keep me occupied for long because I was done reading it 2 days later, and so the brick written by Auster was inexorably creeping upon me. On July 12th, I said to myself “Ok, enough is enough”, and I started reading it. But I had to make a plan because I was convinced that I needed a strategy to tackle that book. “Ok, so the book is structured in 7 sections. Each section is split into 4 parts, so that’s 28 parts. If I read one part a day, I can be done with this in a month”. That was the plan. I started reading the book that day, and 11 days later, I finished it. The strategy was abandoned by day 2.
The book itself is fine. It’s an interesting novel written in a clever way, and I loved the story. But the interesting part was seeing my brain evolving in real time in its approach to reading. That was genuinely surprising to the point where I’m now convinced I can tackle pretty much any book, no problem. And that is not something I would have thought about myself a few weeks ago.
Which brings me to a more interesting question: how many other things are that way in my life? How many other aspects of myself can be changed and flipped this easily? Do I even know myself?
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2025-07-25 19:00:00
It’s Friday, the 25th of July. Another normal day in another normal week. However, in this tiny corner of the vast digital space we call the web, there’s something I want to spend time both celebrating and reflecting upon: the 100th interview of the People and Blogs series went live. In the grand scheme of things, this is absolutely nothing. I’m well aware of that. But doing something for 100 weeks in a row, collaborating with 100 different human beings in the process, is something worth celebrating.
I knew this milestone was coming, and I started thinking about ways to celebrate it months ago. Should I try to get a special guest? Maybe one of the big names in the blogging world? Or maybe I should design and code a new site and celebrate with a new home for the P&B series. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the best way to celebrate this milestone was to let the series run its course, and by the time edition 90 was out, the decision was taken: guest 100 was gonna be whoever happened to send me back the 100th set of answers. I send invites in batches, so there were a dozen or so potential candidates, and Marisabel happened to be the lucky one.
As I wrote in the most recent post to the Ko-Fi supporters, we’re entering the 3 digits era of People and Blogs, and the next milestone is going to be the beginning of the 4 digits era, which will arrive in the year 2042. I’ll be 53 by then, and I’m not even sure if blogs will still be a thing by then.
The thing I wanted to spend some time reflecting on though, is not the significance of having done something every day for 100 weeks (something I honestly don’t care too much about) but why all this matters. Not the series nor the interviews. Why blogs matter and why the people behind them matter.
I vividly remember the day I had the idea for People and Blogs. I was taking a shower, and we all know that good ideas always materialise in the shower. I remember going upstairs to check if the domain name was free—which it was, to my surprise—and I registered it on August 8th. I wanted to make a series about people and their blogs, and I am a creative person, which is why I decided to call it People and Blogs (I’m available to do brand naming btw; hit me up if you need help). I thought it was a fun idea, something worth making, but I didn’t consider it something important or profound. I mean, in the broader context of life, this is just a weekly series of newsletters. I’m not curing cancer nor solving world hunger.
And yet, over time, my perspective on this has shifted. I still don’t think it’s as important as curing cancer—for obvious reasons, I’m not a fucking idiot—but I now think all this is important. Connecting people scattered across the world through this medium is important. Keeping alive this digital thread is important. And as the web evolves, it’s clear to me that this is becoming extremely important.
I was recently discussing the “The internet is kinda shit right now” topic. So many people feel that way. Hell, I went through that phase myself. But my perspective on this has shifted over the years. The internet is not kinda shit right now. Not even in the slightest. The internet was and still is a fucking awesome and magical place. It’s a place where you can browse thousands of blogs. It’s a place where you can press the button and get a useless website. It’s the place where you can admire rotating sandwiches or stare at a random park for a minute.
Many decry that “The web used to be awesome”. The web can still be awesome. But the web is a human artefact; it doesn’t exist on its own. It’s a product of our creativity and imagination. We create sites, we tend our digital gardens, we produce and share content, but what matters, the truly important part, is you. Because when you read a post that resonates with you, somewhere on one of the countless blogs that exist out there, you are implicitly connecting with another human being. And that connection has the potential to be transformative if you open yourself to the possibility of allowing it to exist and you act upon it.
Has the potential to transform into friendships, into love, into life-altering experiences. Has the potential to forever change the trajectory of your life. Because the web is nothing more than a reflection of the life that’s out there, outside the edges of the screen. If you live your life sitting in a corner, not doing anything, simply watching the world go by, chances are nothing interesting will happen to you. And that’s fine, but you can’t then cry and say that “life is kinda shit right now”.
If you think the web is boring, I both encourage and challenge you to approach it differently. Go click on every single one of the 100 blogs I featured on People and Blogs, go dial a number on the Internet Phone Book. Register a domain name and make yourself a blog. Write something profound for the Indieweb Carnival. Stop being a passive consumer and leave the big platforms behind. Share your dreams and hopes, share your struggles and inner demons. Do it publicly or anonymously. Do it often, or sporadically. But do something. Anything really. The reason why you feel the web is slowly dying is because we're collectively allowing this to happen.
And if you feel like you’re not someone who has anything worth sharing—I call bullshit on that—or don’t like the idea of having a site and participating actively to the web, at least go support the people whose content you’re enjoying. Send a coin their way, let them know you value their work. It matters more than you might think.
But more importantly, connect. Email the people whose content you appreciate, sign their guestbooks if they have one. Make the effort, say hi, let them know that what they made resonated with you. Because that’s the only thing we all have in common, the only thing we truly share: our humanity. We’re all here at this moment, all facing our ups and downs, all facing struggles, all smiling and crying and feeling everything in between.
I don’t know if I’ll manage to get to that 1000th edition of P&B, but what I do know is that I’ll try do my part to help people connect with each other. Because it matters. It matters to me, and I know it matters to many of you out there. Thank you for sticking around for 100 weeks. I appreciate you.
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2025-07-25 19:00:00
This is the 100th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Marisabel Munoz and her blog, marisabel.nl.
Earlier today I wrote a blog post to both celebrate and reflect on this milestone. Go give it a read once you're done reading the interview with the lovely Marisabel.
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My origin story is quite extensive, so I’ll try to summarize. My name is Marisabel—born in Illinois, raised in Puerto Rico. I moved to the Netherlands after completing my B.A. in Psychology and meeting my now partner-in-crime online through an old RPG game. First, I spent a year as an au pair in Amsterdam to test the waters and have a "normal" relationship before committing further. The country, my partner, and his family were all a perfect match, so after three years of long-distance, we finally moved in together in 2012.
Now, I’m a happy mother of two bright children and work as a metadata librarian at a prestigious university library. I’m fluent in Spanish, English, and Dutch. The finer details of this journey are scattered throughout my blog.
I love books, languages, drawing, writing, and above all, learning. I need to always be learning something—it’s what makes me feel fulfilled.
This particular blog (I’ve had dozens over 20+ years) began as a way to improve my programming skills, network, and land an IT job. The earliest posts chronicled my Java learning journey. But as I climbed from a support role to my current position, it gradually morphed into a fully personal blog. I’ve gathered all my surviving posts over the years (many are archived now, though my old Blogspot remnants linger if you know where to look).
I started on WordPress but slowly migrated everything to PHP for the sake of freedom—I wanted full control. Over time, I added sections and consolidated my entire online presence into this single domain. I adore tinkering with the design, but since my second child’s birth, I’ve tried to stay consistent—free time is scarcer now.
My process varies by the text. Short posts? I often vomit them out in 30 minutes. But I gravitate toward long-form, meticulously crafted pieces—the philomath in me revels in the labor. These can take days, weeks, or months. This interview, for example, has taken about a week as I draft and redraft responses.
Most first drafts begin by hand. I use Moleskines (I prefer it due to the lines) and fountain pens—the ink’s flow slows my thoughts, helping me process them. Then comes the sculpting: what stays, what expands, what’s cut. It’s like editing, but not quite… more of a second draft. That version gets OCR-scanned to my computer, where I treat it like a puzzle to recompose. Lately, though, I’ve enjoyed retyping it manually after learning touch-typing. (Even this response is the second write-out of a notebook draft.)
Handwriting first makes my words feel tangible. My notebook is always with me, so I can jot down a sentence and revisit it later. Most computer-started drafts end up abandoned. Some pieces stay too personal—left in the notebook for my eyes only.
For instance, Question #5 was drafted in Google Docs while my toddler played. It all hinges on time, day, and family needs. Inspiration sometimes strikes at work (surrounded by fascinating books), and I’ll dash off a draft before the idea flees. Later, I might revisit and publish it—or not. Sometimes it goes live immediately; other times, never.
Ideally, yes—I do have a creative environment, and I do believe physical space influences my creativity. I tend to lean toward the ADHD end of the spectrum (though I don’t consider myself to have it). I do, however, have traits that stem from my own way of processing information. I absorb my surroundings, so if I need to focus, I have to block them out. That’s why my favorite way to create is in the quiet of early morning (6 a.m.), with a fresh cup of coffee and a big, clean, empty table—just me, my pen, and my notebook.
Realistically, I haven’t had that kind of moment in seven years—since my eldest son was born. So now, I make do with what I can get: quiet mornings at work before others arrive, stolen moments while the kids watch TV (they’re only allowed 30 minutes at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.), or when my daughter naps in her stroller and I can finally catch my breath.
Maybe in the future, I’ll have my ideal space again. Maybe not. Maybe I’ve grown so used to chaos that a silent morning would stifle my creative flow instead. Who knows?
I went through a lot of services in the past until I decided there was too much I wanted to do that wasn’t covered by any of them. So I drafted my needs in a notebook and manually coded them, mostly in PHP. I was familiar with PHP from the 2000s, but it wasn’t until after completing my Java courses that I truly understood programming practice—not just the design part. That’s when I decided to do everything in scripts.
I found a Markdown parser because I just wanted to write and go, and from there, I built it little by little. It took me the better part of a month. Other sections, like snippets, took less time since they were standard SQL + PHP projects. The library section was the most labor-intensive—I worked on it from idea to completion over three years while learning to code. The actual coding took a year in Java, but then I got annoyed with deployment issues eating into my writing time, so I re-coded the whole thing in PHP.
Now, the entire website is 90% PHP, with some JS where necessary. I always try to find a CSS-only alternative before resorting to front-end JavaScript. There’s a more detailed explanation on my blog.
For side projects—like my Dutch blog—I use WordPress for simplicity’s sake. I started those after my time shrank with the birth of my second child.
Everything runs on an AlmaLinux 9 server, a switch I made about a year ago after gaining confidence with the terminal console.
I'd probably implement a better content logic system - maybe keeping everything in a single file for simplicity. Currently, due to my OOP background, each piece of content has multiple associated files that all need updating when I make changes. Everything else I'd keep exactly the same - I'm genuinely happy with what I've built.
My costs break down to about €2.50 monthly for the domain and email, plus €11 for the server (which gives me 300GB storage and 8GB RAM).
As for monetization, 0. This is my private space. I do not need to monetize it. I love working. I never saw myself as the entrepreneur type.
I haven't seen enough appreciation for the whimsical, personal blogs that inspired me - the kind I wish I still had time to create like I did in my youth. Some noteworthy examples include:
Also, other blogs I always read online and haven’t seen on the list:
I am currently working on a Dutch essay on reading and youth. I’ll probably translate it later, but I figure the gist is worth sharing.
In the past, literature was seen as elite, and in school, we are forced to read literature that doesn’t match our worldview. It never shows us how the world was for the not-so-elite kind, so of course, children hate being made to read such books. I only came to what people call “serious” literature in my 30s. Why do we force this on children when we ourselves didn’t enjoy it at their age? What got me reading was literature aimed at my age, circumstances, and life stages.
We shouldn’t teach literature in school—we should teach how to read, give students the tools, and make literature history a separate class. That way, we can bring the love for reading back into classrooms.
On that note, I’m sad about the situation in the States with libraries and book banning. For each book, its reader; for each reader, their book. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to these things—yes, the world is a mess, and I try to stay in my happy bubble—but we also shouldn’t deny what’s happening. Spread the love for reading. Spread the love for thoughts and expressions in all forms. And hopefully, future generations will be able to pick up the pieces of the mess we’ve made.
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