Listen to the Rain

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 schoolpsychnerd. But for now, I have to keep working.

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.

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.

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 elast, 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."

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.

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.

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 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.

When 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... )

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... )

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.

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.

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)

Watch on YouTube

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:

Watch on YouTube

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:

Watch on YouTube

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.

Or am I? Do multiple places count as home? I know I had a tendency to use "home" to interchangeably refer to our house in Chiyoda and to Chicago, depending on the exact circumstances of the conversation. Home for different reasons, I guess.

I've had few moments of serious culture shock, but there have been a lot of little things. The way money looks. The trains into and out of Chicago (once every 2 hours? Seriously?). Women's fashion. People having different hair colors. And then, it's hard to tell how much is culture shock and how much is just the standard malaise you get when you move away from a place you've lived a while, leaving your friends and the places you love behind. It hasn't been as difficult to adjust, but the fact that I speak the language fluently here is probably a lot of the reason for that.

Waiting on news on an apartment. If we're turned down, it's back into the city to look again.

I'm probably going to make this song my ringtone back in America.

So, first, the sad part--I did not make it all the way to the top, because I got altitude sickness after (somewhat foolishly, obviously) not bringing oxygen along. I got up to one of the 8th stations (there were 4 or 5 of them), started to feel nauseous and hyperventilate a bit, and decided to climb back down to the last of the 7th stations where I had left my climbing partner--after the 5th or 6th climb between stations that was just scrambling over rocks in the dark at a 45 degree angle, she decided that she had had enough.

Yeah, that's another thing. The lower parts of the climb, below the 7th station, are a kind of switchback inclining trail. It's mostly volcanic ash with bits of uneven stones, so it's not really easy climbing, but it's still about what you'd expect. Once you get to the first 7th station (the "7th station" is 5 or 6 separate buildings spread out across maybe 150 meters of vertical distance), everything after that is basically a trail in name only. There's a bunch of rocks, and there are helpful iron spikes about a meter long driven into the rock, placed maybe 2-5 meters apart depending on where you are on the trail. Climbing consists of making your way up the rocks (so, it is actual mountain climbing by the dictionary definition). If you're doing it at night, hopefully you have a good enough flashlight, because otherwise you'll probably slip and break something or nearly fall and kill yourself (which almost happened to me at least a dozen times).

Also, a hint--nuts and beef jerky are excellent ways to get protein back, but they are also usually very salty and water is heavy and/or expensive on the mountain. (-_-)


Sunrise from the place we ended up staying for the night (outside, in the cold).
Was it fun? No, not really. As I said in response to a few other people's comments: "Having climbed Mt. Fuji is really amazing. Climbing Mt. Fuji is awful." Would I go again with better preparation and try to make it all the way up? I might, though I'd probably do it differently--start in the late afternoon, climb up to one of the higher rest stations and sleep there until 1-2 a.m., then keep going and make it up in time for sunrise. I'd also make sure to be in better shape than I am now. schoolpsychnerd wants to try climbing together when we come back to Japan, and that might be nice.

So, about a week ago, Kaminaka-san asked my help in performing a trick (well, loosely-defined) on his neighborhood. I was to impersonate a US ambassadorial aide with a message from President Obama.

Now, I've lived here for almost two and a half years. I'm pretty sure everyone knows who schoolpsychnerd and I are, even if they might not know anything else about us, so I knew that they wouldn't actually believe the ruse. Nonetheless, I dressed up in a suit to keep the illusion at least partially intact and, it being a party, they played along with the speech. Here it is, if you want to read it:

( In Japanese and English )

The speech went pretty much as I expected it would (I ended up getting complimented on my pronunciation, actually), and then I was given a seat and a bentō and chatted with people for a bit. The most interesting chat was with the 79-year-old man who told me about his daughter living in New Orleans when Katrina hit and how he had skied as a hobby for the past 70 years. He even mentioned one of the teachers who used to work at Chiyoda high school as a good person to go to if I ever wanted to learn how to ski (since I had told him I had never been).

He also asked me if liked living in Japan. Well, literally he asked me how was the Japanese lifestyle, but I knew what he meant. And I said yes, I really liked it, and that schoolpsychnerd and I planned to return when she was done with grad school. And as I said that, I thought: "you know, that's right. I really do like living here." In fact, I'd say that in terms of places I've lived (not people who live there necessarily--I miss you all dearly), Japan is my favorite. I'm not sure I can point to any single reason why, but I can definitely say that on the balance, it's true.

Anyway, moving back is a long-term goal. We'll see how well it works out.

I was also invited to a middle-school children's class at the community center on Saturdays, but I wasn't able to understand exactly what kind of class it was. I wouldn't really feel comfortable going until I knew that. I can ask Kaminaka-san, I guess.

About an hour after I arrived at the party, I judged that I had spent sufficient time at the Itsukaichi New Year's party and told them that I had to get going, since the Yaenishi Tondo festival was the same day. I walked a couple of kilometers over to the festival and arrived late (that's three years in a row I've missed them lighting the bonfire (T_T) ), and was promptly loaded down with food and sake.

The most memorable part was when one of the Tondo organizers gave a brief speech, and then asked schoolpsychnerd and I to give a speech as well. So I gave a brief line about how everyone was incredibly kind to us, and schoolpsychnerd did the same, and then we saw that Santa Miki was crying, and that made schoolpsychnerd cry, and everyone said aww when I gave her a hug.

But, the bigger thing is the reaction in general--someone cried because we're leaving. I know we've been here for years, but we keep a lot to ourselves and don't speak Japanese as well as we should. While we live here, I don't really know that people actually view us as part of the community. Or, at least, I didn't know until today. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised: schoolpsychnerd is the teacher at the local high school (and two others beyond that), and both of us teach English lessons to children and adults. We spend a lot of time in Chiyoda because we're both here--unlike a lot of JETs or other ALTs, we don't need to go elsewhere to avoid loneliness to maintain a support network, so people see us around a lot (well, they see schoolpsychnerd a lot. I'm kind of a cave-dwelling troll). That's going to make leaving even harder than it already was.

It doesn't really have anything to do with living in Japan, per se, it's more living in a rural area. My friends in Hiroshima proper don't get their neighbors bringing them excess vegetables or rice or treats when they're sick, and I know those sorts of things happen in rural American areas. When we lived in an apartment building in America, we didn't know the names of any of our neighbors. We assumed one family was Indian, because we could frequently smell them cooking curry, but they might have just really liked curry. We knew one family had young children, because schoolpsychnerd saw them coming home. But that's it. Here, though, people know us. Even if we're members of a different culture, and sometimes have problems communicating, this is our home.

That's a nice feeling.