Listen to the Rain

Happy New Year! I drank too much last night and I haven't felt 100% today, but it was nice and relaxing. thosesocks invited me and some other people over for a quiet day listening to folk music and eating cheese. I made zenzai, traditional Japanese red bean New Year's soup, and thosesocks made tea for us all, and now I'm at home with a wood-wick candle burning and watching Reverse Angle's take on the 1998 Godzilla.

It's been a good year. On Facebook, I wrote:

I went into 2019, teeth barred and a knife behind my back, ready to immediately start stabbing the moment it looked like anything was threatening.

Three, maybe four months in, I put the knife down and kept walking, and I haven't felt the lack.

People repeatedly tell me how different I am. How I seem like an almost completely different person than I used to. They tell me that I'm more social than they could have imagined even for themselves, and ask me how I have the energy to do it. My *sister* told me that she was jealous of my social life and asked me for my secret, and let me tell you, that was the day that Hell froze over.

At my last party, people kept asking me "How do you know all these people!?"

The story of the last decade was, I suppose, of being a plant in a glass bottle. I had plenty of light and water, but when I hit the edge of the bottle I just stopped growing and I figured that was the limit of the world. When in 2018 the glass shattered, I thought that it was a world-ending disaster...but it actually let me grow in ways I hadn't thought were previously possible.

In 2019 I made a bunch of new friends. I started dating again. I put down the video games that have defined my life for thirty years because I *don't have time to play* because I'm too busy seeing people, going to theatre shows, watching movies at friends' houses, and going to museums. I am, in other words, a new man.

So, bring on the roaring 2020s. Give me neon noir, synthwave jazz, electric-blue cocktails in dingy speakeasies, black trenchcoats with collars turned up against climate-change-induced polar vortices, and, hopefully, a story I can start with "And then she walked in." I am more than ready

So there's a good summary of my year! It was a great year overall.

The song that defined my 2018 was "Dynasty," by Miia:

Watch on YouTube

But the song that defined 2019 was "Gorgeous" by Illenium:

Watch on YouTube

It was a good year.

Here's my answers for the traditional New Year's forty questions meme:

( Forty questions )

Might as well do a thing:



Colors changed because you know.

ironymaiden gave me three things that I may not know or care about, but it turns out that I do:

Cyberpunk

Go back through my clothing tag and you'll see that I love cyberpunk aesthetics. I love asymmetrical clothing, layering, lots of pockets, draping, black, hoods/face-concealing scarves, the works. I love neon, I love rain, I speak Japanese so I love signs with kanji on them, and it's thanks to all that that I can say:

Cyberpunk is just Asian cities.

Cyberpunk is the opposite of transhumanism--it's about how technology is insufficient to save us from the fundamental flaws of being human. The modern world is a cyberpunk dystopia, with universal surveillance, corporate control over most aspects of daily life, the global economy run for the benefit of about a hundred people, looming environmental collapse, and extreme wealth stratification, without even the benefits of being able to cut off your arm and put a gun there. So people focus on the aesthetic aspects of cyberpunk, rooted in a retro-future 80s of neon and chrome.

But that's just East Asia. I lived in rural Japan, but I've spent plenty of time in Tōkyō. Rain-slick neon streets, signs with Chinese characters on them, thousands of people all wearing the same dark suits with the occasional iconoclast wearing stand-out fashion, staying up until 4 a.m. on a street filled with buildings each of which is filled with bars, skyscrapers to the horizon in all directions mixed with remnants of ancient traditions trying to hang on...that's Tōkyō. To a lesser extent, it's Kyōto, it's Ōsaka, it's Singapore, and though I've never been, pictures I've seen of Beijing, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Chongqing, Seoul, and so on all fit the same theme. Take a look at Liam Wong's portfolio for an example of photos of Tōkyō turned into a cyberpunk wonderland with just a little color tweaking, but also check the cyberpunk tag on Tumblr. A lot of cyberpunk aesthetic Tumblrs just post photos of Tōkyō or Hong Kong at night and call it a day. And that isn't even getting into how a lot of Western cyberpunk media is just Asian cities mostly devoid of Asian people. Who are all those signs in kanji for, anyway?

Still, the aesthetics fascination provided lists like this one and let me develop an actual sense of style, so I can't complain too much.

Salmon

Is the best fish and I eat it every day.

Okay, not every day, but pretty close. One thing about living in rural Japan is that you have to adjust to food availability if you don't want to spend a fortune, and since I couldn't get my pre-Japan breakfast of hummus, melba toast, Greek yogurt, grape juice, and hard cheese in Japan--literally none of that was available in Chiyoda--I flailed around for a while before I adopted a Japanese breakfast of miso soup and rice. Originally I put kōyadōfu in the miso soup, but I can't get that in America (edit: I can, it's just extremely expensive), so I switched to salmon because fish is a traditional part of Japanese breakfast. Originally I ate it pan-fried, but I started salting it, letting it cure for a couple days, and then cooking it (called 塩鮭 shiozake, "salted salmon") and I wouldn't go back. It's delicious.

Salmon isn't my favorite sushi, though. That's fatty tuna.

Umbrellas

I've needed an umbrella a lot lately because thanks to climate change, Chicago's weather is getting wetter. Last summer it rained a lot, this May broke the record for wettest May ever, and after winter lasted straight through until mid-May, June is a cool, wet spring. Just this week it's already rained three days, it's supposed to rain all day tomorrow, and it's probably going to rain again on Sunday. I basically reflexively grab my umbrella as I walk out the door. Fortunately I'm used to this, since Japan had a rainy season in late June/early July, but I didn't expect it to come to Chicago.

My favorite Japanese word related to umbrellas is 傘傾げ kasakashige, referring to the practice of tilting one's umbrella away from other pedestrians when passing them in the street or stopping to chat with them to avoid dripping water on them. It's not in modern dictionaries because it's centuries old and I've even read questions by Japanese people asking other Japanese people what it means and the answerers having no idea, but it's such a great word.

---

I'd be happy to give anyone else who wants them three things.

Here's 2018's year-end survey meme:

( Read more... )

皆様、明けましておめでとうございます。ご健康とご多幸をお祈り申し上げます。新年も宜しくお願い致します

Happy New Year!
​

They spent a week rebuilding the database and index, checking the entries, and then it immediately broke when I opened it after they said they were done. The very first physician I checked had no data attached. For this we spent all that time and money.

Just got an email that they are still looking into it.

I saw an article on twitter about how Glyphosate (aka Roundup) is killing bees. There are previous studies that found no effects on bees' navigation skills or learning ability, but this new study checked bees' gut bacteria and suggests that exposure reduces bees' resistance to disease. So add that to the list of ways that humans are destroying the environment and didn't even realize it until decades later. (h/t to TwentySidedCat for the link)

I went to an Anime Chicago discussion on Sunday about 四月は君の嘘 / Your Lie in April, and it turned out that I was the lone dissenting voice. It was a fun discussion, but I felt a bit like a wet blanket talking about how all the slapstick humor with care taken to animate the blood in an anime about trauma due to past abuse turned me off, and how in a show almost entirely about how music allows us to form connections beyond words, they kept interrupting the musical performances with the audience's internal (and external) monologues. And the main female character is a manic pixie dream girl dying of mysterious anime disease. I gave it a 4/10 and I think the average excluding me was more like 7.75. Perhaps I am a hater.

Other than that I did a lot of nothing this weekend. I some coding practice and made a Roman numeral converter (only Arabic -> Roman, though it'd be easy to make it work the other way too). That took about an hour and a half of staring at the problem with no idea what to do, and once I figured out an approach, writing the function took maybe ten minutes. Then I kept getting NaN as the result, changed stuff, changed other stuff, changed it back to how it started and...it worked. I'm not sure what sorcery occurred, but I'll take it.

I'm sure I changed something somewhere that fixed a bug, but damned if I know what it was.

questionoftheday asks: If you were given the chance to be immortal, and to forever be the age of your choosing, what age would you be? Why?

My answer: 25. I mean, is there anyone who's going to answer differently? I guess some people would want to be younger than that, but given the choice would anyone want to be physically older assuming their mental experience came over unaltered? I don't see why.

Though if I were frozen at the age I am now I'd do okay. I'm 36, and I drank half a bottle of wine and stayed up to 1 a.m. last night talking with lisekatevans and I'm fine today. As long as I can keep doing that, I'm good.

Over on Facebook, I shared a "What music do you think I listen to?" meme and got a few of the expected responses from friends. Techno (True, I listen to Group Therapy), Symphonic Metal (True), Nightwish (True), "The sound of the wind in the leaves of a crisp fall dawn, and also the wailing of a thousand lost souls" (True and True), and video game music (Extremely True).

One person said "Elfcore," since I have a reputation among my friend as an elflord. And with a bit of searching, well, it exists:

Watch on YouTube

Rave in the Woodland Realm tonight. Follow the bonfires.

After being tagged by tropicanaomega, I finished the seven day black and white photo challenge, and now I'm going to go against the spirit of the meme and explain all my pictures. I didn't do it during the challenge, so that counts, right?

I wasn't sure I was going to participate at all until I looked on the internet to make sure I understood the rules and I found this article about how terrible the whole idea is, written in a very "how dare you have fun!" way. I mean:

Many people can’t leave the house without posting a photo on Facebook. So to frame this as a challenge is just asking for trouble. The prompt to eschew color, people, and explanatory text has given participants free rein to post cringe-worthy “arty” pictures they’d normally have the good sense to be embarrassed by: their shadow-dipped lattes, their brooding pets, their kids’ tilted-over toys, often framed diagonally to add that extra “I’m doing serious photography” edge. The leaves! The cars! The fences! I saw one photo of a faucet, for some reason. Is this Facebook, or are these the photos that come prepackaged with frames at Ikea?

Someone is Mad On the Internet. And so to make them even madder, I posted my own photos. Explanations follow.

( Read more... )

It's been a very long time since I actually answered one of these memes, so I'll try my hand at this and give the ネタ tag a workout.

( Read more... )

Youtube Rickrolling people was funny. ^_^

Normally, I'm not a huge fan of Internet Asshole Day, since most of the "jokes" aren't funny, and you can't trust any news you read (Sony to remake FFVII for PS3! No wait, it's April 1! HAHAHA!). Some people do a good job (Blizzard and Wizards of the Coast this year, I thought), but most don't. I suppose it's because I think that Rickrolling, much like This! Is! Sparta!, is one of those memes that may never get old.

To this day, the sound Lavos makes makes me twitch. I should really play Chrono Trigger again. Same with Homeworld and the third mission... "Kharak is burning." I think video games have had more emotional impact on me than any novel I've read yet or movie I've watched. Maybe it's the interactivity? For another classic example, "But...the future refused to change." I've explained them to schoolpsychnerd, and she doesn't feel strongly about them, probably because it's the identification through having interacted with the characters in an active fashion.

Two of my friends from college came to visit this weekend. It was all kinds of fun, though the weather was probably the worst March weather for a visit imaginable. Drinks were drink, karaoke was sung (though not by me, as I had to work), Smash was played (Sonic boom, sonic boom...) and for a few days, it was just like old times. It was a nice feeling.

Most of you, no doubt, have no idea where it comes from.

But I like it.

desu.

( I could instruct you... )

softlykarou and I almost had a heart attack when my e-mail to the person facilitating our move into our apartment bounced. I tried again, and it bounced again, but it was 11:30 at night, so I couldn't really do anything about it. I had softlykarou call again today, though, and it looked like it was a momentary fluke. He still worked there, and he didn't have any idea why our e-mail didn't get through. Incidentally, the e-mail was about what apartment number we were, since we were told the wrong one the first time. As it turns out, we are Number Six.

...

I AM NOT A NUMBER! I AM A FREE MAN!!

...

How reasonable is it for me to expect someone working in a modern office to understand basic computer functions? For me to expect them to know that, say, if there are two distinct locations to save stories to (on the network or on the hard drive), and I give a location which is on the hard drive, not to load up the network save option and stare at it with a dumbfounded look on their face before asking me what they're doing wrong. For me to expect them to know basic tricks like copy/paste to a new document when the current one isn't saving. For me to expect them not to constantly fuck up and save over their previous documents (something that, in several years, I have never done), requiring multiple redundant backups to keep my/their work safe from them. It's kind of weird how I'm the computer go-to guy for minor things, and yet I would describe myself as having "adequate" computer aptitude.

In further news, I ran into two of the most ridiculously named twins today I have ever seen--Destinee Mi’Amor and Charitee My’Amor [last name omitted]. Sometimes, I think we'd be better off if we had a board like Germany, where you were required to submit the name of a newborn and they checked it to make sure it wasn't stupid or likely to make your child want to kill you when they came of age.

Only a week and a half until we move into our apartment. Watching softlykarou's Sims game (which has sims of us living together) makes me itchy for it. As a note, we'll have a wireless adaptor, but with enough security (set up by my father) that random assholes can't come in and leech off our bandwidth. I figure that it's reasonable, considering how many of us have been that random asshole before.

Be seeing you.

Crush this person!
Get your own ThisCrush.com CrushTag!

According to the original page, each person with a tag has an average of 3.09 crushes. The statistic is meaningless without knowing anything else about it, but I'm bored and figured it out.

If anyone reading this is a subject of the Queen, Terry Pratchet is up for consideration for a knighthood.

That ys ynogh. I haue hadde it wyth thes cursed by Seynt George snakes on this cursed by Seynt George shippe! ^^

Also, yesterday was my birthday. It was nothing special. But thank you everyone who wished me a happy birthday