A Snowy Day in Tokyo

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In terms of climate, Tokyo is surprisingly warm! The closest analog to American weather would probably somewhere like Wilmington, North Carolina -- it's quite hot and humid in the summer, but rarely goes below freezing in the winter.

Thanks to the general lack of below-freezing weather, two things are true:

You will sometimes see palm trees
It very rarely snows

But rarely doesn't mean never! This past February, Tokyo finally got a nontrivial amount of snowfall, which was enough to make everything look like a veritable winter wonderland!

Naturally, I spent all day outside taking photos instead of whatever it was I was supposed to be doing (probably vacuuming?)

The Slideshow Begins

Let us journey through various snowy places in Tokyo and entirely too many trains! Some of the locations we'll see:

Rikugien Gardens, one of Tokyo's various Japanese style gardens.
The JR Yamanote Line, Tokyo's favorite loop line.
The Nippori-Toneri Liner, an automated guideway transit system which rides on rubber tires and was definitely struggling with the snowy weather
The Toden Arakawa Line, Tokyo's last remaining tram line!

A snowy view of Rikugien Gardens

A Yamanote Line E235 series train and Shonan–Shinjuku Line E233-3000 series train near Komagome Station

A Nippori-Toneri Liner 300 series automated guideway transit train

Toneri-Park Station on the Nippori-Toneri Liner

A Toden Arakawa Line 7700 series tram and a 9000 series tram meet at Kumanomae Station

Introducing Freakified.net, my new blog!

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Why a blog?

Long ago, the internet consisted of a wide variety of custom websites with bespoke layouts that people would post all sorts of content on. But, sadly, that has all been replaced by the tragic uniformity of social media, where every post lives in an identically structured world, and you are spoon fed engaging content via automatically generated "for you" pages.

I used to post all my photos on Instagram, and it worked pretty well for a while! But, in ~~Facebook~~ Meta's eternal quest for engagement, Instagram deprioritized posts in favor of stories. Why? Well...

Photos posted as stories disappear after 24 hours
Photos posted as posts just sit around until someone views them

With posts, you could check every other week and you wouldn't miss an update from a friend, provided that you scrolled far enough. With stories, however, you'd better log in every day, otherwise you might miss something! And if you did that, your friends would hate you! You don't hate your friends do you? Well then, you'd better log in more! Engage with the content! Also click ads maybe!

Eventually it got to the point where posts were sufficiently low-priority that most people no longer even look at them. If you try to, you'll find that the posts feed consists almost entirely of sponsored content and suggested content from random influencers.

Intended content focus

I thought it might be fun to post some of my photos, projects, and any other mildly interesting things I encounter onto the internet! Since I also currently live in Japan, I thought might make this blog even more interesting.

About the site itself

The content is generated using Astro, and contains such exciting features as a full screen photo viewing mode! The design is inspired by the appearance of late-90s educational software, most notably Microsoft Encarta and Microsoft Bookshelf. I have always had a bit of a soft spot for the warm tones used by those apps!