Happy New Year 2025!

Dear readers,

I’m a couple of days late, but I wanted to wish you all a very

Happy New Year 2025!

 

 

Of course, I don’t know what the year has in store for me on a personal level, but it promises to be a busy year in the Setouchi art islands with the Setouchi Triennale 2025, which promises to be very busy.

It’s just an assumption on my part, but seeing the number of foreign tourists coming to Japan these days, coupled with the fact that they couldn’t come in 2022, I expect the number of foreign visitors to break all records this coming year.

That means I have to be on top of things with this site this year.
And here I’m faced with a conundrum.
I’m not sure if I want to be on top of things.
Let me explain.

I love making this site. It has been a lot of fun writing it over the years. I’ve met a lot of great people through it, and don’t get me wrong, I have no intention of stopping writing it anytime soon. However…

However, in recent years, it has sometimes felt more like work than a fun hobby. Work with few rewards.
In the past, the rewards were mostly in the form of meeting great people, having some doors opened for me thanks to the blog, and also knowing that I was helping people who were coming here for the first time.
Sadly, a lot of those rewards seem to have more or less disappeared for all sorts of reasons. I know these strange last few years have played a big part in this lack of rewarding opportunities, and everyday life has also changed in these last few years; I have less time and energy to devote to the blog, and also sadly, less motivation.

I think this loss of motivation comes from two main things.
Locally, I feel like I don’t really need to be on top of things anymore, for reasons that go beyond the scope of this post.
Meanwhile, online, I sometimes wonder if this blog still serves a purpose when the Setouchi Triennale and its islands are slowly becoming more and more famous in the English-speaking world, and when countless websites with a much larger audience than mine regularly mention it.

Which brings us to another reason why my motivation has taken a big hit lately. The people who write for these big sites have to find the information they need to write their articles. And more often than not, they find it online. And yes, that means they sometimes find information on my site. Except that I am almost never get credited as a source – worse, the bigger the site, the less likely they are to credit small, unknown sources. I know it’s common practice on the web, but it’s a pretty bad common practice. Citing your source is the least you can do when writing.
The other issue is the rise of so-called AIs in recent years. These things are wrong and unethical in so many ways, not the least of which is that they get their content by plundering all the content they can find online. I’ve tried to install a few things to prevent AI scrapers from stealing from my site, but their effectiveness is very limited, and it’s a game of whack-a-mole that I’m bound to lose unless “AIs” are strictly regulated. And it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon.

And to top it all off, the sorry state of the yen is becoming a bigger problem every day. While foreign tourists are thrilled that traveling to Japan is cheaper than ever, living here is more expensive than ever. One reason I haven’t been to the islands much lately is also financial. Because Japan imports so many things, especially its energy sources (most of which are still fossil fuels) and food, we’re getting poorer every day. Even hosting this blog costs more and more (as it’s hosted in the EU).
And this year being a Triennale year, it means that my “island budget” will explode again, and all the Triennale prices, fees and fares have also gone up (because everyone in the country is under the same financial stress at the moment).

So, my willingness to do a lot of hard work for free, only to see it stolen later by AI scrapers or unethical web writers, is not very high.

So what should I do?

Honestly, I don’t know.

One is simply to continue posting at the same current slow rate I am doing now, even during the Setouchi Triennale.
Another is to simply change the way I post things? I have offered many ways for readers to pay me for the help I provide, but very few do. I’m not judging, of course, not everyone can do it, but one goal I had was for the blog to at least pay for itself, and it doesn’t.

I would hate to have to put some posts behind a paywall (which might also help against scrapers). That is really not the way I see the internet.

Another option is to create a newsletter with unique content, or post new content there first and in a timely manner, and have that newsletter be for subscribers only? Maybe?

Honestly, I don’t know. I wish I could just write as much as possible and have readers donate enough to pay for the blog and some trips to the islands, but that hasn’t worked out so far and I doubt it will. Worse, it seems that the more my readership grows – and it does, thank you very much for this – the fewer donations I get.

If you have any experience or suggestions on this subject, I’m all ears.

Sorry, I didn’t mean for this New Year’s post to be a bit of a downer. My original goal was to give an overview of my blogging plans for this year, but all in all, those plans for this year are “how to find motivation to write here more often” and “how to make the blog at least pay for itself”.

Thank you for reading and best wishes to you all.

 

If you want to support the blog and my work, you can

Donation buttons are also on the page linked above as well as on the sidebar.

Thanks in advance.