I  was born in Washington D.C., but grew up in Norway, Australia, and Japan. Now I live in the Bay Area of California. It has the comforts of civilization, a nice transportation system, a mind-boggling diversity of culture and language and thought, vast natural parks, mountains a ocean, good food, and good weather. It's a lovely place. Here's a map:

 A lthough I physically live in the Bay Area, in my mind I live in lots of places, partly because I grew up in multiple countries around the world and have spent a lot of time doing work related to Japan and traveling there. There was a period when most people communicated over long distances by writing letters.

There were no cel phones, only landlines, and young people living far away from their parents, for example, only called home in true emergencies. They never called just to see which box of cereal (out of scores) they should buy when standing confused in the supermarket aisle. When I lived in Japan long ago, even phones were terribly expensive and international phone calls usually required going to a special place to make them. Like many people, I even lived without a phone for a while. Some people in Tokyo in those days even sent local telegrams across town to contact friends or relatives. And mail delivery was very reliable! It's hard to believe now, but even in the United States, mail used to be delivered twice a day in many places; I used to go to check the mailboxes at university in Santa Barbara twice a day in my freshman year, hoping my far-away girlfriend from high school would send me something, anything.

Mail is not so reliable now, but it's still nice to get a hand-written letter once in a while, and not just junk mail. If you need to contact me, you can always try a hand-written letter! You can send it to an earth address of 428-B Carl St., San Francisco, CA 94117 USA, and maybe I'll get it.  I frankly don't expect to receive physical mail much anymore. Most people can't take the time to write by hand, address a letter, and, especially in the United States, walk it to one of the few mailboxes we have left. Good exercise, but who wants to do that anymore? Still, if you're inclined, send me a postcard!  I like postcards!  Especially handmade or handdrawn ones! If it's good, I might even answer it!

Which brings us to the real subject of this page: a more immediate way of contacting me. I'm listed in the phone book in San Francisco, but to be honest I'm not even sure there is a phone book anymore. I can certainly be contacted through various social media sites, such as X, Facebook, and LinkedIn, etc., etc. And on my contact page on my website (before I updated it to this one), I used to have a special routine for the (mostly) kind people who wanted to reach me. It attempted to filter out spammers by asking people to identify themselves as humans, etc., and answer a few simple questions, such as why they wanted to contact me, and then ask them to add 2 + 2, that sort of thing. Sure enough, though, around 2024, I noticed that I was getting a lot of spam mail sent to me through this page. Lots of it was from overseas, advertising things that are of no interest to me and a waste of time of the advertisers. Stuff like industrial valves made in Shenzhen, and so forth. With the advent of Gen AI, I also noticed that the  spammers were all starting to use impeccable English. Very Native-sounding. I could identify their goals in the email they sent because they would also start out by saying that they were contacting me in regards to "books" or "public speaking" or specific things like that, even if they were trying to sell industrial drill bits. This was because the filters on my Contact page asked them to choose specific categories to indicate their interests. One recent email said, "We have been trusted by over 100 customers in the US and Europe, producing 20,000 tons of castings annually. When do you have 15 minutes this week to discuss how our valve castings can benefit Welcome to the World of Frederik L. Schodt (AKA Fred)!?"  Kind of a cute message to send someone in my line of work!

So now, I'm thinking that I will not list my email on this page any more. However, if you really want to contact me through email, hey, you still can!  I will just try to make it a little harder for the robots. First, you take the first four letters of my first name, Frederik (don't forget it, it has no "c" in it), then you place what is used as an "at" sign for addresses in the Internet, then you follow that immediately with the letters "j", "a", "i", and the number "two" (not the word), followed by a period and then the letters "c", "o", and "m".  I should then be able to receive the email!  Hopefully this is easy for a human and hard for a GenAi bot!  At least for a short while...  😁