No ACEN, not even as a treat

[dorchadas]

In any year but the Plague Year, I'd be waking up at ACEN right now. It's the first ACEN I've missed (so to speak) since 2013. The mixer that Anime Chicago usually would have held at Red Bar at the Hyatt Rosemont was instead held online, so I sat down at 7 p.m. tea in hand and chatted with people for a couple hours until I had to leave to go fiddle with my wifi again. spacedragon set it up so that we were randomly shuffled into rooms with a few other people, rotating every twenty minutes, so it simulated the way that a large group breaks into smaller conversations over the course of a gathering. It wasn't the same--it couldn't be--but it was still lovely. Video chatting with 3-5 people is much better than the same thing with a dozen.

Also I got my money back, so hooray!

The latest coronavirus local news is that Chicago qualifies to move into Phase 3 on June 1st, which is the latest the current stay home order extends to. I'm glad, because while I love working from home, and I like staying in and cooking, and I'm okay with going back to playing video games and watching anime as my primary way of passing time, I really miss having people over for dinner or to watch something together. That's the part of life I most want to come back. I won't have a Shavuot party this year, but maybe I can have one person over for cheesecake a couple days after.

Yesterday, smtemp put out a call on Facebook for anyone who might be able to translate the Animal Crossing Wooden Plank signs, which you can see collected here. I recognized it as seal script (篆書 tensho), which meant that I had very little chance of puzzling it out...but then meowtima chimed in and said that the character on the left in the red-and-gold first sign was 新 and posted a picture of a hanzi dictionary with the progression through the ages. I commented, we worked together combining Chinese and Japanese, and we eventually deciphered it--温故智新 (onkochishin, "Learning new things by studying old things"), written right-to-left on the sign in the traditional manner. Modern Japanese uses 知 instead of 智, but it's still a current yojijukugo. That means that the other ones also probably mean something...maybe I'll take some time this weekend and try to puzzle them out. The third and fourth one in that collection look like kana rather than kanji. I wonder.

Edit: Thanks to marjonesing's mother, the second one is the Chinese phrase 参观药局, which is 参観薬局 (sankan yakkyoku, "Visiting the pharmacy") in modern Japanese!

I'm sitting in my sun nook and the birds are singing and a diffuse light is coming through the clouds. There was a strong thunderstorm last night that really helped lull me to sleep, and this morning the ground is wet and the earth smells of petrichor. It's a lovely way to go into the weekend.