Challenges and Changes in 2025

January 31, 2025

January is often a difficult month, and rather than dwelling on the bad things happening in the United States, we're reading up on Japan and planning for our first visit in May. We're also thinking about the direction of our website and this newsletter. We toyed with the idea of moving to a subscription-based model (like Substack) with different paid tiers, while eventually phasing out the blog. This is the direction most independent bloggers seem to be moving in these days, especially with AI becoming increasingly dominant. But we're finding our website traffic growing exponentially, while the newsletter less so.

For the time being, we plan to continue with monthly emails, though these will mainly be for updates on the blog. Speaking of which, our newest posts include:

New subscribers can find previous newsletters on our beehiiv archive page. 

Happy new year!

Mary & Sarah