About Me

chairo¹ [cha'・ee・ro] [茶色] n. (Japanese) Light brown; tawny; lit., "tea color."

chairo² [chai'・ro] n. slang (Mexican Spanish) Someone who defends social and political causes against the ideologies of the right, but lacks true commitment to what they claim to defend.

chairo³ [khah'・ee・ro] [χαίρω] v. (Biblical Greek) To be cheerful, i.e., calmly happy or well-off; used as salutation on meeting or parting.

Nice to meet you! My name is Mashi. I began this blog Chairo+ in April 2020 as a repository for critical reflections as a brown man on the anime and games I love and grew up loving, and as a space for documenting lessons I had learned from scholars and activists fighting Empire and racism, with hopes of expanding the platform into a resource and refuge for like-minded individuals. But over the course of the pandemic, as my perspectives on labor, technology, health and my future evolved, I became overwhelmed by all that I wanted to do and say that didn't fit neatly within the categories I'd designed. I eventually remembered that this is indeed my website, and that I'm free to use it as I please, leading to this newest iteration of Chairo+: ideations on how we might make spaces more our own, as members of a population who, even as pixels, have been made peripheral.

As such, I'm planning on the following over the next year:

1. Thought experiments exploring new technologies or solutions to technologies that already exist.
2. Newsletters sharing my encounters with media, texts, people, and events and the insights made through them.
3. Conversations on what a better world could be.

Out of kindness to myself, I won't promise that all three of these projects will be realized anytime soon, but if you're someone excited about any of them, let's talk, and see what we can create together.

And of course, none of this means that my works from the past have become obsolete – on the contrary, I think they present a more honest depiction of me than any pithy self-introduction, and will always be accessible as the resource and food for thought that they were meant to be.

Finally, if you've made it here in the first place, thank you for stopping by! I hope you'll come visit me here again soon.

Chairo + Mashi
September 2021