Calculated in burritos

schoolpsychnerd and I did our taxes over the weekend and we're once more getting a refund! Initially, it was enough to get dinner burritos, but as we were double-checking all the numbers schoolpsychnerd spotted an error in one of our calculations. That reduced our refund from a full set of burritos to a single burrito, so I guess in a few weeks we'll be splitting a burrito. But it's better than owing very large amounts of money like we did a couple years ago, so I will gladly eat that burrito. 🌯

After beating Spirit Tracks yesterday, I did some preliminary work in setting up Skyward Sword. Emulating all the other Zelda games has been pretty easy--the DS games are entirely stylus-controlled so clicking on the screen works just fine, and I have a webcam with microphone thanks to my bookgroup so I didn't have the problems a lot of people have where the mic emulation doesn't work for the Legend of Zelda games. Twilight Princess has a GameCube version that doesn't require the WiiMote. Skyward Sword, however, is one of the few games that requires a physical WiiMote even in emulation because of the "swing to swing the sword" mechanic, so I had to resort to additional measures. I borrowed a motion plus WiiMote from aaron.hosek and bought a Dolphin Bar, which has the Wii's infrared sensors as well as a bluetooth passthrough connector specifically for hooking up WiiMotes to a PC. And it worked! I didn't play long enough to get to flying or swordplay, but running around and using menus worked fine after a bit of initial trouble passing the "please connect the nunchuck" screen. I'll start to play in ernest today. We'll see if it holds up once I start using a Loftbird.

Also on Friday, we went to a Shabbat dinner about police accountability! It was a joint even with Mishkan Chicago and the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs that was partially a presentation and partially about building awareness (and partially about welcoming the Sabbath bride and eating delicious food). We talked about the police union contract provisions and how they seemed designed for abuse--allowing police to change their official statements with no reprecussions after reviewing video or audio evidence, for example--and about groups that are gearing up to try to prevent these provisions in the union contract negotiations that are occurring soon. There were also copies of a legit zine called "How to be a Shabbes Queen: Supporting Shabbat practice in your community" that we took a copy of and I read on the train to work. There are some really good points in there about the importance of self-care. From a religious perspective, if G-d was willing to take a day off after creating the world, then you should not feel bad taking some time to yourself. From a secular perspective, it's very important to push back against the voices that say that anything that's not directly involved in activist work is a waste of time. Time to recover isn't just worthwhile, it's required.

Two-day weekends are still good, though.