Expansion

I spent the last month in Tokyo trying to figure out how to make a German blog matter to people who don’t speak German. The ambition was stupid and straightforward: world domination, or at least a cheap cheesecake subscription. The reality was that you can’t impose yourself in your native language anymore—you need English, you need the translations to be less bad, you need to sound like you know what you’re doing when you don’t.

Sitting in Tokyo, surrounded by cats I didn’t own and people far too tall and beautiful, I basically made the decision that I was going to make this work. I found people on the internet—through friends, through connections I didn’t know I had—who actually seemed willing to help. Which was the only way any of this was going to happen, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to translate the whole thing by myself.

The current version is shit. The translations are bad. There are broken things everywhere. But it exists now in English across multiple places. The Japanese version is supposedly in the works. Other languages if we get around to it.

There’s something absurd about trying to make something that matters to you matter to strangers around the world. You can’t control how it lands. You can’t make anyone care. All you can do is put it out there, broken and half-baked, and see if anyone shows up. And then, somehow, some people do.

I don’t know if this was worth doing. Probably not. But there’s something about impossible projects that keeps you interested—not because you think you’ll succeed, but because you get to meet people weird enough to want to help you try.