David Chart's Blog

David Chart’s Blog

Latest News

  • Ars Magica Crowdfundings

    My first professional publication for Ars Magica came out in 1993, in White Wolf Magazine. Things rather grew from there, and I spent over a decade as the Line Developer. When I retired from that position, I ended up taking a break for a few years, but now I’m back.

    First, I prepared the text for the upcoming Definitive Edition. The text is now done and is being laid out, and the crowdfunding launches in a few days.

    Second, part of the crowdfunding is the release of Ars Magica under an open license (CC BY-SA), and I have a Patreon at which I am writing for that license. The licensing has not happened yet, but I have permission from Atlas to do that. When you have been working with them on the line for years, you can do that.

    I am looking forward to writing for the game again!

News Archive

My Writing

Fiction

I have written some fiction.

Academic

I have published a few peer-reviewed academic works, on philosophy and Japanese history.

Roleplaying Games

I have written for roleplaying games.

Mimusubi

Mimusubi is my project for non-fiction writing about Shinto. It has its own website.

Recent Blog Posts

  • Happy New Year

    Happy new year, everyone. I hope you all have a really good one. Even though I was the only one to make it to the shrine at midnight, Yuriko and Mayuki are still asleep as I type this. Maybe next year Mayuki will be excited enough to remain awake until midnight.

  • Shichi-Go-San

    Shichi-Go-San,or Shichigosan, which means “Seven-Five-Three”, is the name for the traditional Japanese ceremonies performed to mark the maturation of young children. The name comes from the ages at which the ceremonies are performed: three years old for both boys and girls, again at five years for boys, and at seven years for girls. The origins…

  • Open Meeting

    The Kawasaki Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents holds an Open Meeting every year, and this year’s meeting was held on Sunday. Anyone may attend any meeting of the Assembly, so the Open Meeting isn’t particularly open in that sense. The difference is that, at the normal meetings, only the representatives are allowed to speak, whereas…

  • Pictures of Mayuki

    We held Mayuki’s Shichigosan a couple of weeks ago, and hired Yuriko’s friend Sonoe to take photographs. She’s now put some of the photographs up on her blog, so you can go to see them. The text is all in Japanese, of course.

  • Libraries, Scholarships, and the Open Meeting

    This entry has been very delayed, because my parents were over for Mayuki’s 7-5-3, and I didn’t have much time for writing the blog. I’ve not written about the 7-5-3 yet, because I’m waiting for Sonoe’s photographs, but I do plan to. I also plan to write something about our visit to Nara. Today, however,…

  • Shinto Traditions Course — Hachiman

    This year’s Shinto course at Kokugakuin University came to an end this week, with a discussion of the Hachiman shrines. By one measure, this tradition boasts the highest number of shrines, and unlike most other traditions those shrines are spread evenly across the whole country (apart from Okinawa, which is a special case). The count,…

  • Email Address Change

    Thanks to ridiculous amounts of spam coming to my david@davidchart.com address, I will be retiring it in the very near future. If you are using it to contact me and I haven’t already told you the new one, you can use the contact link in the left column to find out. Oddly, I’m having the…

  • Shinto Traditions Course — Ise

    As the Shinto Traditions course at Kokugakuin University approaches its end, it has been covering the really big traditions within Shinto, the ones that it is hard to miss. This week’s lecture was about the shrines connected to Ise. The Grand Shrines of Ise enshrine Amaterasu Ohmikami, the kami of the sun and the legendary…

  • Sitting on Trains

    As I have mentioned before, there is a rumour on the internet that Japanese people will refuse to sit next to obvious foreigners on trains, even when the train is very crowded. As I have also mentioned before, I see no evidence that this is true. Today, I wish to report further evidence. Japanese people…

  • Nyotai Daijin and Wakamiya Hachimangu

    Yesterday we had another meeting of the various chairpeople of the Representative Assembly, and afterwards I took advantage of being in southern Kawasaki to visit a couple of the shrines there. One of them, Wakamiya Hachimangu, is a little notorious, due to the nature of a second shrine found in the grounds, so the pictures…