dorchadas: (Legend of Zelda Toon Link Feels bad man)
Today we had a bit of a war.

We do time outs for Laila, and she'll usually take them seriously but sometimes she won't. But today, Laila--in a fit of overflowing emotions, we think--kicked [instagram.com profile] sashagee when she was trying to tell Laila not to wear her new princess shoes on the hardwood floor, and then when [instagram.com profile] sashagee asked for an apology, Laila hit her. So she went to the corner and I went over to sit with her and make sure she would properly apologize. Meaning, that she says what she's apologizing for, because while we understand her and we know she didn't mean it, other people, especially other kids, don't understand her and are not going to understand that.

And we were there for four hours.

We think the big problem is that she didn't want to admit that she hurt mama. She would easily say "I'm sorry mama!" and then when we asked "for what?" she would say "for... for... for..." and get increasingly more panicked and emotional each iteration until she started crying. When we first went into the corner, she was like "Oh I'll just say I'm sorry and get out" and was laughing and trying to stand up and she got quieter and quieter as she realized that I was treating this very seriously and she would not be allowed to stand up (except for potty trips) and would have to sit here until she apologized properly. And after she first time she stalled out when going over to apologize to [instagram.com profile] sashagee, I told her that she would have to tell me what her apology was going to be first before she went over to mama and she wasn't happy about that at all.

In the end, we got there. She never did say "I'm sorry for kicking you" but she did say "I'm sorry I won't hurt mama I promise," which helps confirm our opinion that she was hesitating because she felt so guilty. And while I wasn't there in the evening because I had another event, [instagram.com profile] sashagee told me that Laila spent the rest of the evening giving her hugs and kisses.

Is this going to be a magical breakthrough? Of course not, Laila is three. But teaching her that hitting and kicking is not a valid way to express frustration is very, very important, especially since she's starting preschool in the fall. If that means I have to sit with her for hours and hours, I will.

ご愁傷様です

2021-May-05, Wednesday 10:34
dorchadas: (Judaism Yahrzeit Candle)
My Japanese tutor's grandmother died unexpectedly yesterday so class was cancelled. She was in her 90s, but we had just been talking a couple weeks ago about how she had all her living grandparents and I didn't have any of mine even though we're the same age (we were the same year at Penn).

I asked her if she wanted me to put her grandmother's name during Kaddish and she said yes. The way prayer has been weaponized by proselytizing American Christians makes me leery of asking that for people, but I've known her for years. I figured she wouldn't misunderstand what I meant.

(goshūshō-sama desu, "I'm sorry for your loss")
dorchadas: (Judaism Magen David)
I didn't go to the farmer's market this week, because I decided to take a break for the High Holy Days.

Speaking of, last weekend was Rosh Hashanah and things were much different than in previous years. Mishkan's services were all online, so on Friday night [instagram.com profile] sashagee and I went over to [instagram.com profile] britshlez's place for Rosh Hashanah dinner, and while we ate the chicken and vegetables and challah and hummus and beets, we watched the mostly pre-recorded service. It just wasn't the same--the real joy of High Holy Days services is being there, in hearing the singing all around you, in feeling the connection with everyone as you sing the Unetaneh Tokef. You can't get that when it's all on the screen. There's no joy in the Torah being brought out of the ark when it's not physically present, regardless of the rabbi's call to reach out and touch the screen. It's not the same, and while I watched the morning service the next day, I didn't watch it on Sunday. It was better with a small group, but even there, we didn't sing along.

I had a pomegranate as my new fruit, along with the apples and honey from our apple-picking excursion. [instagram.com profile] sashagee made apple bread and some apple tarts, and while the latter was delicious, I didn't get to try the former since it had dairy in it. We forgot to pick up any of it before we left, and I'm not sure anyone else had any, so I don't know how it tasted.

No fish heads. Maybe next year. Emoji goldfish

What was really nice was on saturday when [twitter.com profile] arsduo and I went to Horner Park to hear the shofar being blown. Unfortunately, I underestimated how long it would take me to walk there, and while I met [twitter.com profile] arsduo and his friend in time, we walked up to the park right in time for me to catch the last תקיעה גדולה tekiah gedolah and when we arrived on the hill where people were gathered, they were already dispersing. There was some talk of a second shofar blowing for the benefit of people who arrived late, but it didn't materialize, and after waiting around for ten minutes or so we walked down to the river to do תשליך tashlich.

2020-09-19 - Chicago River Horner Park

We spent an hour there, watching the ducks eat the bread and swim up and down the river, before the setting sun started to make it pretty chilly, and then [twitter.com profile] arsduo and I took the bus back and his friend rode her bike back home. It was a great way to celebrate the holiday in a year not full of much celebration.

The Ninth of Av

2019-Aug-11, Sunday 20:09
dorchadas: (Judaism Yahrzeit Candle)
Past sunset was the end of the Tisha B'Av, so now I'm back to the internet.
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
-Maggie Smith, Good Bones
That was a poem that we read last night, when I went to Mishkan's Erev Tisha B'Av event. We ate and chatted a bit before sundown, since it was still Shabbat--the ninth of Av was actually Saturday, but Shabbat postponed the holiday one day--and then prayed Ma'ariv and lit the candle for havdalah. Only the candle, so as not to break the fast by drinking wine or take joy from smelling the spices. And then, we went into a separate room and listened to Eicha being read, by candlelight, with candles we had lit from the havdalah candle.

There were tissues around, and I saw a few people crying, but I was not one of them. Even though this year I've taken the fast further than I have in the past few years.

I wrote in my Tisha B'Av post from two years ago about a modern rabbinic opinion I found that suggested fasting from sunset until noon, to mourn the destruction of the Temple (both times), the scattering of the Diaspora, and all the other tragedies that have befallen us through the ages, and then breaking the fast at noon to celebrate the diversity that the Diaspora brought to the Children of Israel and how Jewish life flourished even in the midst of tragedy. And that's what I've done in years past. But I feel like since the last Tisha B'Av, there's been so much tragedy both for me and for the world that I couldn't do that with a clear conscience, so I fasted for the whole time.

Some people from Mishkan and other organizations went down to an immigrant detention center in Kankakee to hold a vigil, joined by organizations across the US. I wonder now if I should have joined them instead of sitting at home all day, and if it would have been more meaningful. But, I can't change even the recent past.
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
my highest joy.
-Psalm 137:5-6
I hope you all had a good weekend!

大雨

2018-Jul-08, Sunday 11:35
dorchadas: (Genbaku Park)
For the last few days, it’s been raining in Hiroshima and the surrounding prefectures. And when I say rain, I’m not just talking about the usual way the rainy season in Japan turns out, where you don’t want to leave your house without an umbrella no matter what the sky looks like and where two foreigners new to the country can get caught in the rain until a kind convenience store owner takes pity on them and gives them an umbrella for free. No, I’m talking about this:


Eighty (Edit: 150) dead, at least. Dozens missing. Millions under an evacuation order. Some places doubled or tripled the average rainfall for the whole month in less than a week. The city of Kure, where I never quite made it to Sushi Tatsu for kaitenzushi, had large parts ordered evacuated (Edit: and is currently mostly cut off from the outside world by landslide debris). The first of the dead, washed away in an overflowing river, was found in Akitakata, a few miles from Chiyoda where I lived. Takehara, where we went three times to the Bamboo Festival and where the anime Tamayura is set, full of muddy water. The Kamogawa in Kyōto, the river that runs through the eastern part of the city and of which I have wonderful memories of strolling along its banks at twilight, has overflowed to the point where the walking paths next to it are completely inundated. Someone I know was nearly killed by a landslide and forced to take shelter in a hospital, after which he went out with emergency crews and rescued twenty people before finally being able to go home thirty hours later.

Chiyoda is in the mountains, so it’s not likely to have much flooding there, but that means landslides are even more of a worry. I went to the Kitahiroshima Town homepage, to the disaster prevention section, and found this as the most recent announcement:
7月7日午後4時に、北広島町全域に発令していた避難勧告を解除しました。

なお、大雨警報は継続しており、河川が増水し、土砂災害の恐れのある状態が続いていますので、引き続き注意してください。
Which reads:
"At 4 p.m. July 7th, the evacuation order for the Kitahiroshima area was rescinded. Still, as alerts of heavy rain continue, the rivers keep rising, and there is great danger of landslides, exercise caution."
So that’s good, relatively! They’re not in as much danger as I feared, and one of our old students posted a picture from her backyard and the only problem visible is the creek slightly risen. Another person I know marked himself safe, which is good, and one of the teachers wrote a post about how her condo is fine and the roads are clear, but the nearby grocery store is closed and everything smells of mud. A couple people I still haven’t heard from, but for the moment I’m assuming that it’s because they don’t post on Facebook very much or aren’t on it at all. I hope so, anyway. Emoji Oh dear

If things had turned out differently, I would have landed in Japan today as part of a two-week vacation, focusing specifically on Hiroshima and western Japan where we lived, and obviously the entire vacation would have been ruined. We wouldn’t want to be in the area drawing on extra resources when there are ongoing rescue efforts and who knows how accessible anywhere we would have wanted to go would be. Not much of a chance of Sandankyō being open and accessible after all that rain, I think, and who knows if the train from Hiroshima to Izumo is running. The Kamogawa is flooded, Arashiyama is under an evacuation order. The coast of the Setonaikai is covered in mud from landslides and standing water. We would have just gotten in the way.

All of this is just awful.

Edit: Looks like even getting to Hiroshima would have been hard:
"No bullet trains were running west of Shin-Osaka Station, about 17 minutes away, and West Japan Railway Co. officials said they had no idea when they might start up again."
Source: Tourists visiting western Japan stranded amid flood warnings and canceled trains.
Edit Edit: As I thought, Sandankyō is closed until the 11th. The water isn't on in Onomichi, and the city website is filled with notices about where to go to get water, like this one in easy Japanese. Hiroshima City is closer to back to normal, but there's still not much extra food in the groceries and convenience stores. I guess it's better that I'm still in America.
dorchadas: (Darker than Black)
Normally I don't like doing Raaka twice in a row, but I've been sitting on this green-tea-flavored bar for a while and this weekend was the perfect time to eat it. Yesterday, I went along to [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd's school to help her with the Sports Day even that she was helping to organize. [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd is the sponsor of the Anime Club, and she got together with the sponsor of the Japanese Club to put together a competition between the two groups including some traditional Sports Day events--the relay race, the clothing relay (where each relay-racer has to add an additional item of clothing before running), the three-legged race, the ōdama race (rolling a giant ball), the samurai battle (several students pick up another student, and each riding student tries to snatch a headband from the head of the other team's samurai), a tug-of-war, and so on. They couldn't do the tire retrieval game (pile of tires, the team that gets the most wins), or the centipede race (a group of students holding onto each other that can only advance by the student at the back crawling over the backs of the others to the front) due to safety concerns and Americans being much more likely to sue than Japanese people.
Read more... )
dorchadas: (Genbaku Park)
At 8:15 a.m., August 6th, 1945, the first atomic weapon exploded in the skies over Hiroshima.

This year is the 72nd anniversary, but the effects still remain. Our Japanese tutor had a black-and-white photo on her kamidana of a young man, maybe in his early teens, and when we asked who he was she said that he was her brother. I met a man in Heiwa Kōen who had seen the bombing with his own eyes, though from the comfortable distance of his parents' house miles outside the city. The mayor of Hiroshima is the president of Mayors for Peace, who work for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

There's a ceremony in the morning with speeches, but what I remember is the evening. People write messages on thousands of paper lanterns and set them adrift in the Otagawa, bearing their hopes and fears down to the sea.

Genbaku Dome ceremony

There are more pictures of this year's ceremony here.

戦争が恐ろしすぎるから、世界に平和が広がるように。佐々木禎子さんとか鉄谷伸一さんとかのような子供が誰もいないように。世界は核兵器が二度と使われない場所になるように。俺は希望だ。

תשעה באב

2017-Aug-01, Tuesday 14:30
dorchadas: (Judaism Yahrzeit Candle)
By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down, yea, we wept,
When we remembered Zion.
Upon the willows in the midst thereof
We hanged up our harps.
For there they that led us captive asked of us words of song,
And our tormentors asked of us mirth:
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’
How shall we sing the LORD’S song
In a foreign land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget her cunning.
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
If I remember thee not;
If I set not Jerusalem
Above my chiefest joy.
-Psalm 137:1-6
Today is Tisha b'Av, the commemoration of the destruction of both Temples and several other disasters which have befallen the Children of Israel over the millennia, as well as many disasters which almost certainly didn't happen on the Ninth of Av but which get folded into it because it's poetically satisfying. Traditionally, we do not eat or drink from sundown to sundown, do not shave or get haircuts, do not conduct business, do not shower or wash, do not wear leather shoes, and avoid activities that are joyous or hopeful like studying Torah or saying hello.

I'm posting this from work, so I'm only doing middling on following halakhah there. I did fast for much of the day, but I found a group of rabbinic opinions that I really like that suggest fasting until halakhic noon (chatzot, the exact midpoint between sunrise and sunset), and then breaking the fast, thus both mourning the Temples and the loss of their centrality in Jewish life while celebrating the rabbinic sages and the diversity and vivacity of the diaspora. This is a little unusual, as fasts are generally sunrise to sundown, or sundown to sundown for Tisha b'Av and Yom Kippur, but there is some precedent--some people fast on Erev Rosh Hashannah but only until halakhic noon.

Tonight, I'll come home from work and read Eicha together with [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd. But for now, I have to keep working.
dorchadas: (Cherry Blossoms)
Has it already been six years?

I wasn't affected at all by the Tōhoku earthquake, and neither really was anyone I knew personally. The worst that happened was an acquaintance in Tokyo at the time had to walk the twenty kilometers home in heels after the trains stopped running. In the western part of Japan, we weren't even affected by the power disruptions, because the different halves of Japan use different power standards due to buying equipment from different countries during the modernization of the Meiji Era.

I remember how others were affected, though. I still remember the Japanese word for "buried alive."

On Twitter earlier, I saw this photo of an advertisement of the Sony Building in Ginza.


It's all over Japanese news now, which gave me a clearer transcription of the Japanese, so now I can translate what it says:
3/11, every time that day comes, we think back on the things of that time. Six years have quickly passed since the Great Tōhoku Earthquake. Another such disaster must not happen again. We may hope that every year, but at some point, it is the unfortunate truth that another such disaster will certainly occur.

On that day, in Iwate Prefecture, Ōfunato City, the tsunami was observed at 16.7 meters (55.3 feet). If it came here, to the center of Ginza, it would be as high as this. Higher even than you had imagined. But now that you know this height, the actions we can take may change.

We, now, can prepare. We will keep the victims of the disaster in our memories, and we can store up their wisdom. We will not forget that day. That is the greatest disaster prevention.
The last line is because it's a Yahoo advertisement, but it works best without that, I think.

頑張れ、日本。
dorchadas: (Office Space)
So, I think my motherboard is going bad.

Background--I noticed on Tuesday and Wednesday when I went to use my computer after work that it had restarted sometime in the middle of the night. That's not normal behavior, and at first I thought it might be something weird due to the new mouse I bought and the software to configure it, so on Wednesday I uninstalled that, did some basic tests--sfc, chkdsk, and so on--and all of them came back with no problems. Alright, I thought, let's try to hibernate the computer and see what happens.

Disaster, that's what happened.  photo emot-byodood.gif

The computer hibernated. Then it shut down. Then when I booted it up again and logged into my account, Firefox crashed with an out of memory error as soon as it opened. Then the comptuer froze. Then trying to log in gave me a "something went wrong" message and it dumped me into a temporary profile. I ran MemTest and stopped the testing when it passed 5000 errors because even one was too many. This...was bad.

After removing RAM sticks, swapping them around, and testing with MemTest again, I have one 8 gb stick in slot 2 that works fine and returns no errors. But so far I've tested two sticks in slot 4 and each time I got 7 errors, all of which showed up after hours of testing. I'm going to test another stick tonight, and if it also returns 7 errors, either there are hidden errors in the stick in slot 2 that I thought was safe that only show up when the RAM is running in dual channel mode, or slot 4 is bad. Either of those is not good. My computer is fortunately still under warranty, but if I have to ship the whole thing in, especially over the holidays, it'll probably take three or four weeks to get back to me and I have two weeks of vacation coming up soon.  photo emot-nyoron.gif

My computer current works fine, though it does run noticeably slower with 8 gb of RAM rather than 32 gb. Fortunately, everything I want to do with the computer can easily be accomplished with 8 gb. Editing LiberOffice documents, putting dialogue in my BGII Let's Play, and playing pixel-art games like Stardew Valley and Pokemon Fire Red do not take a lot of RAM. But it is having serious problems, it is under warranty, and if I can't isolate the problem to the RAM, I'll have to send it in eventually. Just hopefully after the New Year.

I have everything backed up now, both in the cloud and locally, so I haven't lost any data other than my browser tabs. My saved games and screenshots are still around. My RPG work is still fine. I nearly had a panic attack for the entire day on Thursday--at least, it felt like it--but I'm doing better now that my computer is working, even if in a crippled state.

I'm going to update the BIOS today and run another MemTest with the last stick I haven't tried tonight. Hopefully that comes up clean, but if not... Well, I'll deal with that if it happens.

Also, I asked my father to give me some advice, and we had this exchange when I managed to make a new user account and move my old data over after the last one got corrupted:
Me: "I think I got it working thanks to legacy workarounds."
My father: "Good. Now go and sin no more."
dorchadas: (Broken Dream)
My paternal grandfather joined the Army Air Force during World War II. He flew bombing missions in Europe, mostly focused on infrastructure--destroying roads, bridges, railway lines, and other things the nazis needed to conduct their war effort. When the war was over and he came back home and married my grandmother, he used the G.I. Bill to go to university and study engineering. He worked for Eastman Oil Well Survey Company, then retired on a generous union pension. Generous enough that for a short time, he had a summer house in Oregon and a winter house in California.

My parents have a display in their house dedicated to him:

Howard Pitt recognition award certificate

He died nearly ten years ago, but I'm almost glad that he didn't live to see what's happened since then. The death of unions, already pretty far advanced by the time he died. Wholesale abandonment of the notion of expertise. Electing a fascist to the presidency. Literal nazis marching in support of the president.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Fall of Night

2016-Nov-09, Wednesday 09:30
dorchadas: (Nyarlathotep)
Well.

I went to bed at eleven, since I knew that staying up and refreshing Twitter would just ruin my mood without actually affecting anything. And though I didn't get much sleep, partially through worry and partially because that dastardly baby is at it again, I did get enough that I didn't hear the results until I woke up at 6 a.m.

Hindsight bias will inevitably corrupt our memories in the future, but I think it's important to remember that while the polls were wrong, they were consistent. They almost all showed Clinton winning, to a greater or lesser degree. Including the internal polling by both candidates. This was legitimately an upset, because for once there actually was a silent majority of white rural voters who turned to support Trump's platform.

I don't see how the Republican Party doesn't become an explicitly white supremacist party after this. After 2012, they had those roundtables and discussions and decided that they needed to appeal more to Latinos, Asians, and other growing minority groups. Then they picked a candidate that said we should build a wall, ban Muslim immigration, consistently insulted women, mocked the disabled...and won probably the greatest coup the Republican Party has had in a hundred years. They will conclude that covert racial appeals are no longer necessary and overt racism works, and they are almost certainly right. White women went for Trump by ten points, white men at 2 to 1.

And they also learned that voter suppression works too, and that whether they explicitly say they want to prevent black people from voting or not, as long as they get they keep their majority, well.  photo cripes.001.gif

Assuming Trump has any intention of keeping his course, this is the end of the post-war economic order. I expect we'll default on our debt now, which will almost certainly kick off Great Depression 2.0, Now With Social Media. It's setting us on the course for the end of industrial civilization. And it has far more immediate effects on anyone who relies on Obamacare for their insurance, or on the marriage equality ruling for their marriage, or what little federal trans rights protections there are.

I saw this on Twitter earlier. It made me laugh, for a moment:



The Chinese government is already saying that this is the problem with democracy, and in despairing moments it's easy to agree. But there's no alternative, is there? And Clinton won the popular vote, so perhaps the problem is with American democracy. Enough brake points that a determined group can seize the levers of power and keep them despite the actually population of the demos. Or maybe a reminder that demos doesn't mean "the people," it means "the body of citizens" and quite a lot of Americans have a less-expansive view of what that should contain.

At the moment, that's all I have.
dorchadas: (Broken Dream)
Current mood:



I've been having a pretty bad week, and I've said so before, and people have been very kind when I have. And then, my brain immediately leaps to one of three possible options:

People Who Didn't Say Anything: It's because they didn't care at all, and probably wish they had never met me in the first place so my whining wouldn't assault their ears.
People Who Said Something In Public: They're grandstanding, making sure to demonstrate their compassion publically. It's all performative.
People Who Said Something In Private: They have an ulterior motive, either not wanting to break their friendship with [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd, not wanting to cause any other rifts among our mutual friends, or it's pity without any actual care behind it.

You can probably see how literally anything anyone says to me can get shunted into one of these three boxes, which makes it pretty difficult for me to hear what's being said. It's like conspiratorial thinking, where evidence proves the conspiracy, unrelated evidence is bent to fit the conspiracy, and lack of evidence just shows how effective the conspiracy is.

I'd like off the conspiracy train, please.
it's that old recurring dream where you're drowning
flailing your arms out, fearful and frantic
and black waves are curling and pounding
down onto your head somewhere in the Atlantic
through the fathoms below you a shadow
is gliding up towards you with singular purpose
and hundreds of thousands of gallons
of ocean froth and foam as it breaks the surface

its black eyes find you almost at once
you can't hide, swim away or take air into your lungs
to scream for help that won't come
dorchadas: (Broken Dream)
Something a friend posted on Facebook yesterday made me think a bit about my mental modeling. My view of myself is basically a Cartesian homunculus--there's "me," whatever that means, and then a series of impulses, urges, desires, and other messy emotional stuff produced by the gross matter of my body that "I" have to react to. It's part of why I'm so reserved, because my first response to any strong emotion is generally, "What are you doing to me? Go away!"

But what I realized today is that I think it makes me more vulnerable to depression. Now, as depression goes, I don't have it badly at all. But when it shows up, my self-conception always leads part of me to think that I'm in a more "pure" state. I don't know how it is for other people, but for a long time I didn't think of the episodes I went through as depression, because "depression" is just being sad, right? And I didn't feel sad, I felt hollow. And now I know better, but I end up with the following chain of reasoning:
  1. Emotions are an external influence on my mind.
  2. Depression ends up removing most of my emotions.
  3. In those moments, I'm some kind of bodhisattva undergoing inverted enlightenment
Therefore, that's when I'm truly rational.

This is obviously stupid. Emotion is not actually an external influence--it is literally impossible for humans to make decisions without emotions--and when I'm depressed I have extra cognitive load because I have to run an additional "how would I react to this under other circumstances?" filter. When [livejournal.com profile] softlykarou talks to me at those times, I have to evaluate all my statements before I say anything so I don't come across like an uncaring machine (Edit: As another example of my mindset, I had to stop myself from writing "perfect, immortal machine"). It's usually not much of a problem otherwise because why should I talk to these other people, which obviously isn't an accurate representation of how I feel about my friends. If I think about for longer than a moment, it clearly just makes everything terrible.

That's not how I feel, though. And it makes it hard to remember sometimes.

物の哀れ

2015-Jun-28, Sunday 21:59
dorchadas: (Broken Dream)
I'm not sure I've talked about it here--I know I've talked about it before in the book reviews I do--but one of the things that most annoys me about coverage of Japanese culture is the almost worshippful attention paid to the concepts of wabi sabi and mono no aware. Sure, let's talk about the value of wabi sabi while Japanese construction companies seeking fat government contracts cover every mountain, riverbed, and beach they can with concrete, and let's talk about mono no aware in a world of Twitter and Line and Mixi. I've gone on plenty of rants about it before and I won't do so now, but this post was prompted by [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and I watching 秒速5センチメーター/5 Centimeters Per Second, which is one of the best examples of mono no aware I've seen in a long time.

I'm not going to recap the plot, since the Wikipedia article does a pretty good job of it. Takaki spends most of the movie fixated on a single event in his past and unable to see what's in front of him, and as a result, he lets life mostly just pass him by while he doesn't really engage with it. He has no close friends, he misses out on romance, all because he's stuck at a single moment without being able to move forward.

Mono no aware is the idea that some things are valuable because they're transitory. Cherry blossoms are so lovely because they bloom and fall in the space of weeks, and the same with our life experiences. Takaki and Akari's relationship was no less valuable for ending as it did, with letters slowly growing less and less frequent until they died out altogether, but Takaki's mistake was dwelling on it to the exclusion of the rest of his life. He always worried about being someone that Akari would be proud of, but he didn't realize that it was holding him back from living. If you're always gazing at the horizon, you'll probably trip and fall.

It's kind of easy to look at this and draw "lol kids" from it, and G-d knows that I've been prone to that myself, but I think the intensity that children and teenagers feel emotions is worth recognizing. I remember those adolescent relationships, where every motion and moment of silence was pregnant with meaning, and every word was written on the sky in fire. We told each other that we'd be together forever, but of course we weren't. Most people aren't. As I wrote in my review of the manga:
We get older, and our hearts fade, just a little, and we call it growing up.
There's something valuable in that kind of fire that's worth recognizing, because even if misguided or silly or outright destructive, those emotions exist and have to be dealt with as any other emotions do. But in the end, eternity isn't attainable for humans and only sorrow comes from not realizing that[1].

(Brief note: If you want a fantasy version of that same concept, read Nightfall in the Scent Garden. It's really good.)

I think that's why I loved 5 Centimeters Per Second so much, because so often media is devoted to the idea of happily ever after or everything turning out for the best, or, if not that, then the polar opposite of tragedy that still allows for happy memories. But life isn't like that. So many things don't end, they just slowly taper off over time. We all have people we've fallen out of contact with, and sometimes we wonder how they're doing, but life gets in the way. It's not neat, and it's not a story for the ages, but it's, well, life. That's just how it is. This movie is one of the only ones I've seen that takes that as its plot rather than one of the tidy endings that's more mainstream, and you might say that I haven't watched many movies and you'd be right, but it's no less good because of that. It's messy, and distasteful, and cringeworthy because you recognize part of yourself in it. Sometimes there is no ending, and there's a part of yourself that's always stuck in a moment, waiting, and all you can do is keep walking and hope it catches up to you.

I really feel like I'm not expressing this very well, but I can't find the words to say what I mean properly, so I'll leave it at that.

[1]: There's probably an entire separate post I could do to tie this in to Utena's desire to find "something eternal," but I haven't seen Shoujo Kakumei Utena recently enough to do so.
dorchadas: (Zombies together!)
When [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd told me about this week's curry, she described it as "Chicken & Onions," and I thought that sounded pretty nice. I used to hate onions, but that's been wrong for half a decade now. I haven't cared about onion content since about halfway through the time we lived in Japan. So I didn't think much of it until Friday, when she told me that it took nine onions. We went shopping as we usually did, bought nine onions, and ended up devoting one of our usual grocery bags in order to contain the onion overflow.
Read more... )
dorchadas: (Dreams are older)
Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy dies at 83.

I never watched Star Trek when I was younger, nor did I really watch it when I got older. I've seen a few of the movies (I, IV, and whatever Nemesis was), a few scattered episodes here and there, and part of the first season of Enterprise back in university before we just mutually decided it wasn't worth watching.

Despite that, I still ended up as a second-order Star Trek fan, mostly through library books when we'd go visit my grandmother. I've read dozens of Star Trek novels in addition to spending hours pouring through Memory Alpha and Beta, and my favorite novels were always those of the original series. And of those, my favorite novel is Spock's World. I've been planning to reread it for a while now, but I think I need to push that up to next on my list.

His last tweet seems even more poignant now, in context:


LLAP indeed. ברוך דיין האמת \\//
dorchadas: (Zombies together!)
I had some misgivings about this from the moment I looked at it. I know that's incredibly shallow, but it really didn't look very appetizing. Nonetheless, I recognize that the senses can deceive you, as last week's smell vs. taste discrepancy showed, so I sat down and dug in. Unfortunately, it turned out that my initial impression was the correct one.
Read more... )
dorchadas: (Do Not Want)
I admit, the main reason I'm taking this in stride is because I have an incredibly low opinion of the average person--I mean, the American electorate apparently decided that it wanted minimum wage increases, continued abortion protections, legalized marijuana, and that the Republicans were the best people to provide these things--and I'm already convinced that civilization is doomed from a variety of angles: climate change, water shortages, resource depletion, ocean acidification, the end of the antibiotic window, etc. And this isn't likely to accelerate any of that any more than the Reagan presidency, the 1994 elections, or the Bush years already did, though if the Democrats run screaming from any sort of liberalism again in 2016 I'll be wrong.

I expect two years of BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI, internationally embarrassing impeachment proceedings, and a whole lot of nothing. Though the worst-case scenario on the national level is probably the Democrats deciding they need to "move foward" and "work with the opposition" and getting a bunch of totally-shit bills turned into not-quite-totally-shit bills in the Senate and then passed in the spirit of reconciliation, and our uninterrupted 40-year-long slide into cyberpunk dystopian neo-feudalism will continue apace.

But on the local front, at least we got marriage equality passed already before a bigot got into power. And on the personal front, I only had to wait thirty minutes to vote. It helped that I went literally right as the polls opened and I didn't run into any of the problems that afflicted the judges in some precincts of the city. Not everyone I know was so lucky.
dorchadas: (Awake in the Night)
A week or so ago, I was bored at work and checked in at The Night Land, and I saw a link there to the Night Land blog, which had been updated since in the months since the last time I visited. Curious, I clicked on it, and the first article I saw was this one.

I didn't know Andy Robertson at all. I never spoke with him nor interacted with him in any other fashion, but I found that website in while I was in Japan and I absolutely devoured all the stories on there. Red Giant's Race, The Guild of the Last Migration, The Wreck of the Aetherwing, and An Exhalation of Butterflies caught my imagination and set it on fire with images of the Last Redoubt at the end of history, after the sun has gone out and the powers of Night hold dominion over almost all the earth.

After finding these homages, I read the original story and found it to be incredibly evocative but nearly unreadable with its purposefully archaic language and eschewing of common literary tropes like dialogue (I suggest the rewritten version, which I reviewed here). It's a story about love that survives the ages and endures even in a hostile world, and how love fundamentally has power even against the night, which is an attractive theme even to someone as pessimistic and cynical as me. I can see what Hodgson was trying to do even if I can also recognize that it was a clumsy attempt marred with a bunch of cringe-worthy problems.

But damn, when I scroll down to the bottom of the Night Lands Timeline and see, after the end of history, "All lovers are reunited"...that pulls at my heartstrings. There, love as a force is strong enough to outlast the universe, even with all the perils laid in its way.

The Night Land website is what brought this all to my attention, and it was all started by Andy Robertson, who also wrote two compilations--Eternal Love and Nightmares of the Fall--based on story submissions he received. Some of them are also on the website in full, but others are only in part. I keep being tempted to buy them, but I've been waiting for digital versions to come out. The blog seems to indicate that there's new stuff coming out in the future, and I'd love to actually give some money to the people who contributed so much to my imagination.

Rest in peace, Andy Robertson. Hopefully, your work on Hodgson's legacy will continue for many years to come.

Edit: I almost forgot: I originally heard of this from the Delta Green mailing list, where he was a contributor for many years, early on before I joined. So there's another debt of inspiration I owe to him.

頑張れ、日本

2014-Mar-11, Tuesday 18:12
dorchadas: (Cherry Blossoms)
Three years ago, I posted a short blog entry just saying that I was okay. Living in Hiroshima, we didn't know know anything had happened for a while--I learned through the Internet, and [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd learned from people at her school. We got a lot of messages from family and friends, too, which led to some confusion until everything was sorted out.

I also posted the following two links:
Fire.

Water.
That water one might be disturbing if you pay attention to the details, but it's not as bad as the cell phone video I remember watching. That one was taken by someone who had gotten to high ground and was looking down the hill at the people climbing after him, and then the water hits and half a dozen people are just...gone.

We were completely unaffected by the whole thing, other than being glued to NHK, where I learned the Japanese word for "to be buried alive." Obviously the people in Tōhoku were affected, but even in Tokyo they had hoarding leading to empty store shelves and people having to queue up for toilet paper or bottled water, as well as rolling blackouts and a lot of voluntary power conservation. As an example, here's Shinjuku before and after 3/11:


(picture originally from Danny Choo, found here)


When my parents and sister came to visit two months later, my father wanted to go visit Ginza to see the lights since he had heard that it was a pretty impressive display. And I imagine that usually, it is, but when we went it looked basically like that post 3/11 picture of Shinjuku. When [personal profile] fiendishfanfares, her husband, and some friends came to visit before that, a month after the accident, basically everywhere we went in Tokyo was half-deserted. We went Tsukiji market for sushi and while [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and I had to wait for almost two hours the first time we ever went, that time we walked right up to the door and got seated right away.

In the west, though, we didn't get any of that. Due to Meiji-era shennanigans, the east and west parts of the country run on two different power voltages and frequencies, so all of the power shortages and blackouts in the east didn't affect the west at all. Similarly, the various hoardings and panics never took hold in Hiroshima, so about the only connection we had was the people we saw who were collecting money for relief efforts or in watching TV.

Or the aftershocks when we went to Tokyo, but even then, they're hardly worth mentioning. We didn't have to walk kilometers to get home because the trains stopped or stand in line for hours to buy basic necessities.

Putting this here for posterity, since it only ran for the length of the day in Japan (until 9 a.m. Central), but Yahoo Japan donated for every person who searched for 3.11. Tokyodesu has a list of a few ways to help, though it's a bit focused on volunteering, which you obviously won't be able to do if you don't live in Japan. There's also the Japan Society's Earthquake Fund.

Actually, I think I'm going to go donate right now.
dorchadas: (Teh sex)
So, I had a student named Moeko when I taught at Suzugamine. She was kind of attentive, and at least listened when people talked and tried at her work, but she hung out with a lot of people who absolutely weren't interested in learning English at all.

Well, apparently things changed a lot after I left. She got herself into the special English-focused class, went on a trip to England and stayed with a family for a few weeks, and found me on Facebook where she likes all my photos of food.

Anyway, I wished her a happy birthday a couple days ago, and we started a conversation, and after I told her I was taking a programming class, she said:
勉強以外は、本当に楽しいですっヾ(@⌒ー⌒@)ノ
うぉおおおおおおお!!ブラピ凄いことをしているのですねっ!日本語を教えたりしないのですか??
Which, if I had to translate into English, I would render as:
Except for studying, [university] is really fun!
Wooooow!! You're doing amazing things! But aren't you teaching Japanese along with that?!
...I only wish.

When people ask me if I know Japanese, my response is never "yes," it's always, "I get by," because, well, that's a lot more accurate. I'm pretty good at reading and writing, but my vocabulary is still lower than I want it to be and I have a lot of trouble speaking because of that. When I'm writing, it's easy enough to look up words, but that's obviously not something I can reasonably do when I'm in the middle of talking to someone without completely breaking the flow of conversation.

I think the big problem is that I'm bad enough at conversation in English, much less in Japanese. I'm happy to sit in silence a lot of the time, and tend to let conversation threads drop, or go to a corner at parties and sit and watch the action--there's a reason I picked a job where I don't have to talk to anyone. :p Add in another language, and even if you take out the worry of making mistakes or looking stupid while searching for the right word, it's still difficult enough for me to find the words to keep the conversation flowing. Unless I were to learn the vocab for talking about RPGs or video games in Japanese, I guess...

The thing is, I'm not sure how she got that impression. We've talked on Facebook, in Japanese or in English, but when I was actually teaching her I'm pretty sure I never spoke Japanese to her ever. She could tell that I understood it somewhat, because when the students asked me questions I'd answer in English whether they asked me in Japanese or English, but was that enough? Maybe she just thought that since I came to Japan to teach English, I'd go back to America and teach Japanese. If I wanted to be a teacher, I suppose it would be a reasonable assumption.

Really, this is just another of the incidents that renews my desire to keep studying Japanese.
dorchadas: (Drop Bear)
There was a forum thread (link provided even though it might be inaccessible) where one of the people in the class mentioned that a lot of the code they were reading was pretty inelegant and clunky, specifically citing the example of using a boolean global variable instead of using the timer.is_running() function to determine whether to award points in the stopwatch game, and that they had provided suggestions of how to improve the person's code while still only grading them on what was in the grading rubric.

Since I already wrote about timer.is_running I won't repeat myself, but I was kind of surprised at the reception the poster got. Even though they specifically said that they didn't take points off for inelegant code, they got downvoted like crazy and some kind of hostile comments, mostly about how this is an introductory course etc. etc. And that's true, but there's no reason to teach bad habits that people will just have to unlearn later. It's easier to learn than it is to unlearn and then learn something different.

I guess it's like the quote goes:
The trouble with most of us is that we'd rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
-Norman Vincent Peale
Huh. Re-reading the thread, things are better now. When I first looked, the OP's posts were all getting downrated quite heavily. Perhaps I was too quick to judge.
dorchadas: (Ping Kills)
One of the best NES games is called Blaster Master[1]. Jason's pet frog jumps down a hole in the ground after being mutated to enormous size, and he follows it and finds a big metal tank hidden down there, which he immediately gets in and starts driving around because plot (although hey, big metal tank with the keys in the ignition, teenager...). Seeing the giant horde of mutants that live within the bowels of the earth, he decides the logical thing to do is fight them all to get his pet frog back. Of such elements were the stories of NES games made.

Note that the story of the Japanese version was totally different, with nary a frog to be seen.

It was hard. Not because the moment-to-moment gameplay was hard--it was a fairly standard Metroidvania[2] platformer, though with the addition of top-down dungeon segments when Jason left the tank and walked around and shot things--but because the bosses were brutal and there were limited continues and no way to save. A few of the bosses had a special cheaty way to beat them, whereby you could throw a grenade and pause the game and the grenade would continue exploding and doing damage even while the game was paused. The game even looped the hurt sound effect during the pause screen, so I'm not sure how this bug made it into the final game, but nonetheless it did. Not all of the bosses were vulnerable to it either, and one of the bosses that wasn't was the boss of Stage 3.

That boss was a square that teleported around and moved between various avatars while shooting you. As you shot him, he a) started moving faster b) started teleporting at more frequent intervals. That took me a lot of practice before I could reliably beat him, and there were several playthroughs that ended at that boss or not long after due to how many lives I lost trying to kill him.

(Skip forward to 2:00)


Yeah. It's like that.

Okay, now put on this music to set the mood, because it's fantastic and is also relevant to the story:



Stage 5 mostly took place underwater, and when you first get there the tank can't navigate. It can jump higher underwater but can't swim, so the stage is mostly just a continuous process of descending to the bottom of a gigantic underwater trench and fighting the boss at the bottom, who gives you a module to install into the tank that lets it swim, thus allowing you to make the climb all the way back up to the top. On the way down, you have to destroy a barrier using your tank's gun to descend to further depths. This will become important later.

The boss of Stage 5 was a Giant Crab Thing that shot bubbles at you. That sounds ridiculous, but it was actually quite difficult:



Note the "zero gun" challenge bit there. That probably needs some context, so let me explain. You could power up your tank only by killing bosses and getting the enhancements they dropped, but you could power up your character by finding powerups in the dungeons. Obviously there were health replenishing powers, but there were also gun powerups that would power-up your main gun, so it went from shooting tiny bullets about 30 feet to shooting bullets across the screen to shooting bullets that moved in a wave pattern to shooting bullets that moved in a wave pattern and went through walls. If you got hit, your gun lost power, and the scaling was unequal--it depowered faster per increment than it powered up. I'd usually power my gun to max in an early dungeon[3] and try to avoid getting hit for most of the rest of the game, because a fully-powered gun makes the game vastly easier.

Well, it turns out that filling the whole area in front of you with bubbles while having your only weak point being the mouth from which the bubbles are actively shooting out of is a pretty effective counterpoint to a gun that shoots wave bullets through walls. Even assuming that I had managed to maintain my gun level, it was hard. And if I hadn't, or if I died? Forget it. Any game that managed to make it past Stage 3 died at the boss of Stage 5.

Except for one. One game, I was dodging bubbles and throwing grenades and fighting and all of a sudden, the crab started exploding. I think I kept shooting for a couple seconds because I couldn't believe it. I mean, the boss of Stage 5 was unbeatable, right? Well, apparently not. And I grabbed the tank powerup that allows the tank to swim and left the dungeon.

When I got out, I started swimming. See, this time I had left the tank farther behind than I usually did, just to see if I could make it all the way down to the bottom of the chasm without it. I mean, I wasn't going to beat the boss anyway, so I was setting other challenges. But then when Giant Mutant Crab was dead, I had to swim up back to the tank, so I did. I swam up and up and up, halfway up the trench, and that's when I found the wall. I had left the tank on the other side of the barrier that you had to shoot through to progress, and when I went into the boss dungeon, it had regenerated. The tank was there, mere feet away, but may as well have been as far away as the moon. I had one life left, but if I tried to die to restart with my tank, the game would end and I'd lose all my progress.

I stared at the TV for a few moments, turned the game off, and never played it again.

[1]: Though with a much better Japanese title. "Super Planetary War Records: Metafight"? Awesome. It's like how Crystalis is "Godslayer: Sonata of the Far-Away Sky" in Japan.
[2]: Pre-dating the term! It has the same "get powerups, backtrack, now you can go new places" mechanic, though.
[3]: That dungeon had enough powerups to take your gun to max and the enemies were so weak you were highly unlikely to be hit; a combination that was rare to nonexistent in any other dungeon.
dorchadas: (Angst)
So I was on the White Wolf forums, poking around the classic WoD forum they have there, and someone posted a link to The Streets of Necropolis

For anyone who doesn't know what that is, it's White Wolf's old chat-based RP area from the classic World of Darkness era, before the turn of the millennium. I used to spend time there (rarely more than 30 minutes at a time, since we had a 30-hour-a-month internet plan then) when I was in high school. I met a few people I ended up talking to in other contexts for months or years, and though I lost contact with all of them over time, I still remember them.

When I saw the front page, I was hit with a nostalgia hard. I can honestly say that I did not know what nostalgia meant until I clicked that link. I can remember all the time I spent playing there, just chatting and RP with people. It was wildly imbalanced and full of Mary Sues and people who made no sense--4th generation abominations, child mages, child elder vampires, furry superfriends, etc.--but it was a lot of fun. It, along with the Vampire: the Masquerade: Redemption IC forum, are where I got to play the only vampire character I played for any length of time and what really solidified the Salubri as my favorite Clan, even if no one would ever let me play them[1].

I spent a while just wandering around, reading the room descriptions. Shadows Bar, which people frequently referred to as "Shadows Bar and Grill" due to all the childling changelings, 13-year-old archmages, and various other ridiculous characters in there. The State Fairground. The Alleyway, where I spent most of my time. The Necropolis Arms Hotel, where you entered any of the rooms at your own risk due to the possibility of dropped PMs from people cybering.

Most of the rooms have a few statements here and there from random passersby, but occasionally you find something like this:

"You are the only one here. The most recent statement was made forever ago."

Yeah. It's kind of like that. (T^T)

[1]: That was a problem when I did the LARP at Knox college. My favorite Clans are, in order, 1) Salubri 2) Assamite (sorcerer caste) 3) Tzimisce. Not really suitable for a generic Camarilla game.

Profile

dorchadas: (Default)
dorchadas

July 2025

M T W T F S S
 12 3456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031   

Syndicate

RSS Atom