AAPI Heritage Month Celebration

If you're in the Vancouver/Portland area tomorrow, consider checking out Clark College's inaugural Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month Celebration!

Presented by the Clark College Korean Culture Club, the event will feature performances, a self-defense seminar, food and craft vendors, and...yes, yours truly.

From 5pm-6pm, I'll be giving a 20-minute-ish speech, followed by a screening of the Japanese-subtitled version of Hold My Beer. The entire event runs from 3pm-9pm and is free to attend (you'll have to pay for food and crafts, but if you're a Clark College student or faculty member, you'll get 15% off select vendors with your school ID).

Here are the full details:

Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month Celebration

Presented by Clark College Korean Culture Club

May 30, 2025

Clark College, Gaiser Student Center

1933 Fort Vancouver Way

Vancouver, WA 98663

3pm-9pm

Hope to see you there!

First AE-NCC Workshop!

The inaugural workshop of Autism Empowerment's Neurodivergent Creators Collective (AE-NCC) is this Saturday!

Program co-lead Gwyn LaRee and I will be presenting an introduction to filmmaking in which Gwyn will go over how films are made (as a professional actor, she has actual Hollywood experience), and then I will talk about Hold My Beer and how we did what usually takes a medium-size city's worth of people to do with just a relative handful of volunteer and tragicomically underpaid cast and crew members.

If you are in the Vancouver/Portland area, please join us in person at Stephen's Place (an assisted living facility that is gracious enough to allow us to use part of their space), 501 SE Ellsworth Rd, Vancouver WA, from 2:00-3:00pm Pacific Time. It's free (and I have been told there will be snacks)! You can RSVP in advance here.

If you're not in the area and/or can't/don't want to (I understand, trust me) attend in person, you can also join us virtually at this Zoom link. You will be on your own for snacks, however.

Hope to see you then!

Post #700!

This is blog post #700!

In the 12+ years since post #1 debuted back on July 12, 2012, this humble little blog has amassed a grand total of 206,552 views, all thanks to you, loyal readers (although I will admit that probably around a thousand or so of those views are from me, when I had to look up stuff for reference or I was just reading my own blog for fun).

It's been an amazing journey of random thoughts, shameless self-promotion, cat pictures, and much more. A big THANK YOU to all of you out there, whether you've been here since the beginning, or you just discovered this small corner of the internet last week, or somewhere in between. I'm so grateful that you're here.

Looking forward to the next 700!

Tying Up A Loose End

Some of you may remember this blog post from December 2022 when I announced that someone (not me, I swear) had created a page for the Joel Suzuki series on the TV Tropes wiki. I was, and am, honored and flattered by the inclusion of my humble set of novels in a database that consists largely of much bigger names in the world of fiction. And so, to whoever created the page, if you are out there reading this, I just want to say: thank you! I'm really grateful for your interest.

And also, I have one small request: do you think you could add Volume Seven?

I know that at the time the wiki page was made, Joel Suzuki, Volume Seven: Vision of the Virtuoso, had not been released yet. It came out the following year, in 2023. So it's been almost a couple of years now, and I, being a somewhat obsessive completionist*, have been occasionally checking back every so often to see if the final volume has been added.

* Which, now that I think about it, might be a sign of my neurodivergence? When I read books, I cannot stop until I reach the end of a chapter. I am mostly incapable of leaving a movie or TV show half-watched in my various streaming queues for too long. Joel is this way, as well.

Page creator, I will even send you a free electronic copy of Volume Seven, if that will help! Just email me at joelsuzukiseries@gmail.com. Please?

It's Official: I'm Neurodivergent!

If you read this previous post from last month, then you know that I had started on a journey of discovering if I, myself, am neurodivergent.

Well, the results are in!

Yup, that's right.

I'm really glad that the process of producing Hold My Beer not only resulted in a vehicle to showcase autistic and neurodivergent creators, but also in the revelation that I, myself, am a member of that group!

And probably the best part of all this is that my son, when I informed him of my assessment, said this:

"Welcome."