Listen to the Rain

It's been a long-time goal of mine to have hair long enough that I can put it back in a messy low ponytail, inspired (honestly) by Hotohori from Fushigi Yūgi. And just recently, thanks to a donation of all of thosesocks's old hair ties and the length of my hair, I can finally do it:

( Making anime real )

I can finally do something with my hair other than just having it hang loose. Took me long enough to figure it out.

Previously, the only non-anime con I've been to is C2E2 2017, so I really wasn't sure what to expect from CONvergence. But a bunch of my friends told me they went and had a great time, and I was going with a bunch of people I knew, so I was sure that it would be at least pleasant.

It was more than pleasant. It was amazing.

( Tuesday )

( Wednesday )

( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

( Monday )

I had such a wonderful time! As I said, I've only ever been to anime cons before, so I wasn't sure what I was getting into. The answer was "The Enchanted Forest!" But also a smaller con that's not blown up into a gigantic mess like ACEN is past the edge of becoming. I never had to wait in a huge line, I got into everything I wanted (as long as it didn't conflict with something else), and I didn't go to anything that wasn't worthwhile. Next year is a bit up in the air, since the con moved hotels this year and so CONvergence 2020 is in August rather than July, but if everyone goes I'll gladly come with them.

It was also nice to not feel like an ancient relic. At anime conventions, I always feel like I'm one of the oldest people there at 36. Admittedly, that does fit with anime--lisekatevans and I were pretty scornful when Cowboy Bebop revealed that grizzled, world-weary ex-cop Jet Black is 36--but it's still disorienting sometimes. At CONvergence I was right in the middle of the age range, which is about where I should be.

I used to make a con circuit, from 2005 to 2008, going to multiple cons every year. Maybe it's time to get back into that again.

Here’s one last picture of all the Bubbles and Baubles staff in their costumes:

( Welcome to the Enchanted Forest! )

Still sick, but I took today off to recover.

After ACEN, I got home, cleaned up a bit around the apartment, and then texted lisekatevans and asked her if she wanted to go to the Cowboy Bebop popup happening at the Whistler out in Logan Square. I got a text back a couple hours later saying she had been planning to invite me over for cocktails and co-working, so we split the difference--I ate dinner and cleaned a bit more while she wrote, and then I went to her place for an hour before we went out to the bar.

When we arrived, sassyfri and chad.smith.3158 were already there, dressed in Cowboy Bebop shirts, and we settled in and listened to the music, ordered $10 drinks--a miracle in Logan Square--and talked about what made Cowboy Bebop so amazing while we watched someone drawing fanart that was projected on the wall behind the DJs. I also had a nice conversation with chad.smith.3158 about the upcoming Tolkien TV series and how much we'd love to see a Silmarillion TV series, even if it was too high-concept for most people to accept:

Him: "Music? What? What is happening?"
Me: "You're telling me that the problem is the villain sings badly?"

The bar wasn't crowded at all, which I'm of two minds about. At the time it was great, since the volume level was low and we had an easy time talking and no need to push past people. But at the same time, if they didn't get as much business as they wanted, then they won't be of a mind to do an event like this again, and really it's exactly what I wanted from a Cowboy Bebop-themed event. Cowboy Bebop-inspired music, drinks that were delicious and not too expensive, good friends, great conversation, and a lovely end to an ACEN weekend. It reminded me of when greyselke and I used to go to Nocturne in Philadelphia, before either of us could drink, just to sit and listen to goth music and play Geas with my Tarot deck.

I could tell I was getting sick then, though, and I did. lisekatevans said she was impressed with my ability to hold my liquor and survive on little sleep, but it caught up with me this time. Still, it was a great end to a great weekend!

I spent much of this weekend talking about anime. I went to the Yorimoi discussion yesterday and on Saturday I went to the Anime Chicago spring Anime Sampler and saw a nice selection of upcoming shows. As has become my tradition, here's a brief blurb about each of them, ordered by how likely I am to watch them.

( Poetry and Music and Fruits Baskets )

I started on the next FreeCodeCamp project (based on React) and almost immediately got stuck. The answer turned out to be the IDE's fault--I had an unclosed comment at the end of the HTML section and, due to the way that CodePen separates out the parts of the page source, it was commenting out everything else without me actually knowing that was happening. Once I closed the comment, everything worked fine.

Computers.

But before I figured that out, I did a search for the error message I got about abbreviation nodes, typed up part of the message and let Google autocomplete and, well:


Unable to reach Ballmer Peak. Time to troubleshoot.

I also finished かぐや様は告らせたい ～天才たちの恋愛頭脳戦 / Kaguya-sama: Love is War today. A solid 8/10, with a story not based on stupid cliches, but rather based on the extremely-common modern desire to make the other person be vulnerable before you so you never have to risk any heartbreak. I've already bought the first volume of the manga, and while the sale of EbookJapan to Yahoo Japan means the old reader app I have no longer works--and thus, annoyingly, I need an active connection to read my books and can't download them all for reading on the L--I'm still going to make time to read it. A story about mind games borne out of insecurity but with a happy ending sounds like a treat.

But! The meme is actually based on a scene from the anime where they're in a taxi, trying to get to a fireworks performance before it ends. You can probably guess what it is from my Currently Listening section:

"Kaguya-sama time to drive fast 🅱" (Watch on YouTube)

I sent this to meowtima because I knew he would appreciate it, and now I share it with all of you in the hope that you will too.

Alright, back to Breath of the Wild while I put off chores for a bit longer.

Just like an hour ago finished watching Violet Evergarden, and now I'm off to an Anime Chicago discussion about it. But I took a bunch of notes and I want to preserve them, so I'm leaving them here. They might be interesting if you've seen the show, but otherwise they're probably incomprehensible, and that's leaving out that they're in a mix of English and Japanese. But:

( Violet Evergarden )

More later.

I first learned about Azure Striker Gunvolt not from any of his games, but rather from playing Blaster Master Zero. After the game came out, Inti Creates put out a bunch of DLC characters from other franchises they were connected to, and since all of them had a two-week period where they were available for free, I downloaded them all. Shantae, from the Metroidvania games that bear her name; Shovel Knight, from his own eponymous game; Ekoro, from some eroge rail shooter series called Gal*Gun; and Gunvolt. He's actually pretty well-realized for being in a complete different game. I beat the first level with him, back when I thought about playing through BMZ with the DLC characters (it's on the list... ), and I was intrigued by the way his weaponry worked. Tagging people with some kind of dart gun and then blasting them with lightning? Slowfalling when the lightning field is on? Who was this "Gunvolt"?

Not too much longer after Gunvolt came out as DLC, a game called Mighty Gunvolt Burst came out and I bought it immediately. And then I read that it was a sequel to Mighty Gunvolt, which was spun off from the original Azure Striker Gunvolt series. I tend to be pretty systematic about this sort of thing, so I waited until Azure Striker Gunvolt was on sale on Steam and now I've finally gotten around to playing it.

It's a good game, but it's not for me.


( Read more... )

This is the first time I've been on a computer since Thursday. Busy busy.

I finally got a reply from UCC about my transcript. As I expected, Penn sent out the physical copy the day I applied for it and I got it within a few days. UCC didn't do anything until three weeks after I made the initial request, when I wrote in to ask what was going on, and it turned out they hadn't redirected the request to the coordinator for international students. Once that happened, it was another week before I finally got the PDF copy, almost a month after I made the request. Literally every class I went to at UCC started late, and the Irish school year doesn't start until September, so I'm not surprised. But I'm glad I put in the request so early.

I went to another Anime Chicago Anime Sampler yesterday (and brought along a bunch of homemade shiozuke tsukemono). My list from last time ended up being pretty accurate--I'm watching Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight right now as I type this, and the only anime in the top five I listed there that I haven't seen is Sirius the Jaeger. I'm not going to list the anime I saw yesterday because there were fewer of them and I didn't care about as many of them, but I did find some I wanted to see. Even another isekai which looks like silly fluff (転生したらスライムだった件, Tensei Shitara Suraimu Datta Ken, "The Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime"). Sometimes fluff is good.

There was someone at the sampler who I chatted with for a bit but who had, well, poor social skills. He was constantly interrupting what I said with his own thoughts, or suddenly changing the subject. He later asked for my number, and I felt a little bad when I didn't give it out. But only a little. Part of the reason I don't talk much in large groups is that I don't want to interrupt anyone, and having someone do it to me repeatedly is probably the easiest way to make sure I never want to talk to you again.

Chicago finally has kaitenzushi restaurants, and on Friday night I went out to one with meowtima. Much like with Japanese festivals, I'm kind of an asshole about Japanese food in America--I used to go out for sushi all the time and nowadays, well, this is the only time I've gone out for sushi in a couple years, though maybe that's just living in the Midwest--but I was mollified when I got there and found out that there was a $21 all-you-can-eat option. We both took that, and in addition to the maki on the rotary belt, the all-you-can-eat option came with a supplementary menu with soup, salad, noodles, and nigiri. Which is good, because almost all of the maki were treif, with shrimp, crab, or eel on them. I got a bunch of nigiri, a couple of the maki I could eat (mango and cucumber and salmon), and I was pretty satisfied. The sushi was okay at best, but it was worth it at the all-you-can-eat price. We'll be back.

I guess one could even go there for all-you-can-eat ramen, too, since there was ramen on the menu. I saw a lot of bowls of ramen being taken out from the back. Why kaedama when you can get a whole new bowl?

And now I'm hungry. Lunchtime.

I've had an eventful week. I wrote about Friday's dinner here and Saturday's wedding here, and now it's time for the rest of it.

On Sunday my parents came into town and we went out to dinner at Francesca's, a local chain with one branch near my apartment and another one out in the far western suburbs. I'd eaten at the suburban one and it was fine, but this time it was pretty bland. Both my father's and my meals were unimpressive and tasteless, and it was only the free dessert we got because my father mentioned my birthday that really made the dinner worth eating. Fortunately, the cherry pie that they brought from home was delicious. We got some frozen custard from Lickity Split and ate it together.

Among the presents they gave me was a Japanese pickle press. I eat an enormous amount of pickles (every morning at breakfast), and I wanted a way to make refrigerator pickles that didn't need vinegar or twenty-four hours of drying. It worked! The pickles have a different flavor than the ones I make with apple-cider vinegar do, but that's not surprising. They're more clear, and they go better with rice and salted fish. I'm not sure even a three liter press is big enough to keep me in pickles without making apple cider vinegar pickles still, but now I have a choice.

After my parents left, I texted lisekatevans on Sunday night to see if she was free, and I ended up going over to her condo after she was finished with a voice recording session and we drank wine for a while and chatted. She gave me ice cream to help my stomach, which was twisting itself in knots, and then showed me several of Taylor Swift's latest videos because she knew I loved cyberpunk literature and fashion and wanted to know what I thought of them. Especially ...Ready For It?, where the love song lyrics contrast with a robot trying everything to break out from the cage it's been placed in. I mentioned the scene in Ghost in the Shell where the major looks up and sees someone else with her same model of cyberbody drinking in a cafe across the river, and also probably my favorite quote about using cyberpunk just as an aesthetic without actually having anything to say:

Cyberpunk is just Asian cities.

I've seen a lot of cyberpunk aesthetic tumblrs that just post photos of Shinjuku at night in the rain.

Monday, my actually birthday, I mostly did chores to prep for the week. I had taken it off but didn't have any plans and had to do laundry, vacuum, go shopping, make my lunches, and a bunch of other adulting. Tuesday was a normal day with Japanese tutoring where we talked about my weekend and about Japanese cooking.

Wednesday I left work and went to Ramen Wasabi in Logan Square for dinner, alone since no one else was free, where I learned that they could swap out the pork for chicken in the ramen so I could have meat, but cooked their eggs in pork fat so I couldn't get an egg. Then I went on to the movie theatre where Anime Chicago was getting together to watch 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 / The Night is Short, Walk on Girl. With stephen_poon, who wasn't signed up through the Meetup site but new several of the people coming and independently decided to go!

I was warned beforehand that Masaaki Yuasa's work was polarizing, but I loved the movie. I loved the dreamlike quality, the way the scenes flowed into each other and it often wasn't clear what was metaphor and what wasn't, the way things seem to get kind of unreal on a late night out on the town where one event blurs into the next and after leaving every place, the response is "where do we go next?!" Plus, I've been out at night in Pontochō, where the film opens, and I've walked along the Kamogawa. It turned out that stephen_poon even went to a wedding reception in Pontochō and the film's first scene is a wedding reception!

I recommend it if you can find it anywhere.

Thursday was mostly ordinary. Therapy went well--we talked a bit about my anxiety about spending money and when my therapist asked what it was that I was worried about, I said that I'm American and it would be trivially easy for me to develop a health condition or have an accident that requires extensive and expensive health care. I have good insurance, but what happens if I can't work? What happens if the American fascists* reinstitute pre-existing condition death panels? I've lived in countries that have real health care systems, so I know exactly what we're missing. She accepted that and then asked me how much money I would need to feel safe, and I had to admit that I didn't think any realistic amount would be enough. So I guess that's an area I can work on.

I went home, took a shower, sat down to work on coding practice, and then I get a text from lisekatevans inviting me out to a birthday party one of her friends was holding at Pearl's, so I threw on some clothes and went out on a work night to listen to actors swap stories about meeting famous people, plays they were in, Midwestern manners, Scotch distilling, and so on. I mostly listened, though lisekatevans valiantly tried to throw me a couple conversational ropes, but my areas of interest were pretty distant from most of the other people in attendance. The stories and the drinks were good, though, and the birthday girl was wearing a black dress and boots--from what lisekatevans said, her usual aesthetic--so I approve of her sartorial choices. I bought one of her drinks because there was a $10 minimum on card charges.

Early in August I invited worldbshiny out to Izakaya Mita to drink sake and eat Japanese food, and while her schedule has been pretty hectic, she finally had a free moment on Friday. She messaged both meowtima and me, but meowtima couldn't come due to making a million caramels for an event on Sunday. So after work, I went to Bucktown and walked up to Moth, bought a book called 日本茶 / Japanese Green Tea, a travel guide to tea shops in Tōkyō in both Japanese and English. I overpaid by quite a bit--the price on the back was ¥1500 and Moth charged me $33, which is almost 2.5 times the cover price--but I like supporting Moth because my Japanese tutor works there. Then I spent some time in a Starbucks reading Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver until 7 p.m., where I walked over to Izakaya Mita and met worldbshiny

It was nice! I didn't have a very good opinion of Izakaya Mita's food from previous visits, though the drinks are excellent, so I expecting to love the sake and tolerate the food. But we stuck to mostly kushiyaki and appetizers like pickles and gobō kinpira instead of going for the okonomiyaki--Kansai style, plus both varieties were treif--or ramen. The duck heart and duck liver kushiyaki were delicious! And the sake was good too, though the first one I tried was a bit sour for me and the second one was unmemorable, the other two, especially the nigori, were delicious. worldbshiny even got the Tedorigawa sake made at the Yoshida brewery featured in The Birth of Sake (which I wrote about here)! I had a much better culinary experience this time, and worldbshiny and I chatted about our lives because we haven't really had a chance to talk before now. After a few hours, worldbshiny was fading thanks to the effects of the sake, so we went out and caught the bus back to our respective apartments.

As I left, I snapped out ご馳走様でした as I left and after a startled pause, got back a hearty お疲れ様でした。

This weekend I don't have much to do, which is good. I could use the break.

On Saturday, Anime Chicago had a Summer Anime Sampler event, where a bunch of us piled into a room and watched the first episode of a lot of upcoming anime while we ate food. I made a big pile of tamagoyaki--a dozen eggs' worth--and paid the $12 for a year's membership to Anime Chicago so I could attend, and we watched anime for five hours.

Here's my thoughts, ordered by how likely I am to watch more of it:

( A long list )

Ghibli's great but I haven't actually seen most of their movies, especially not the older movies that came out before I cared about anime (so, before 2002 or so. I was not raised on DBZ or Sailor Moon). So when I heard that Anime Chicago was doing a group discussion about Porco Rosso, an anime I'd actually heard of, I signed up immediately. I watched the movie two days ago and went to the discussion yesterday.

I even took notes during the movie! ( I take a lot of notes. Spoilers, obviously )
I gave it 7/10, based mostly on how I like Ghibli movies like Spirited Away much more.

The discussion was held in a cafe, so we all gathered around a table and one person gave a quick intro about Miyazaki's mindset when making the movie, like how he had been a communist in his youth and Porco Rosso was originally supposed to be set in Yugoslavia, which Miyazaki admired for taking a variety of different ethnic groups and forming them into a single society. He was sharply disillusioned when Yugoslavia fell apart during production of the movie, so now it takes place in fascist Italy instead. It was also supposed to be a 45-minute short so that JAL could show it on their flights, but that obviously didn't happen.

We also talked about how the movie kind of takes place in a bubble. It's post World War I, so Porco is the cynical veteran who used to fight for glory and honor and the Fatherland only to have all his friends die and his country change so much due to creeping fascism that it now has government agents hunting him. The sky pirates and bounty hunters exist in a liminal space, only possible because countries haven't asserted full control over their airspace yet. I described it as like the late 90s internet in my closing statement.

It's a bit like a farce but with a serious background. The Mamma Aiuto gang is a bunch of buffoons, who fire off a huge amount of ordinance but never kill anyone, and who open the movie by kidnapping a bunch of children who run roughshod all over their plane and treat it like an adventure. Everyone accepts that this is a world with a pig who flies an airplane. But in the background, Gina's third husband died in a war, just like her previous two, and the fascist Italian government is growing more and more powerful. The world of sky pirates and flying pigs, like the cherry blossoms in spring, is transitory.

I hadn't considered that Porco might have died, but I guess the ending is ambiguous to leave that possibility open. I figured it was a happy ending, with the curse broken--Fio says she never sees Porco again, but maybe she sees Marco--but it could be bittersweet. As the floating world (so to speak) fades, Porco fades with it. And I mean, Porco Rosso does take place during the interwar period. How much happy ending is there, for anyone, in the face of that?

I should have mentioned that.

It was fun! I'll definitely go again, once they find another anime I want to watch.

Edit June 29: And the person who hosted this meeting was at stephen_poon's house last night when he had people over to watch Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven's Door. Fun!

I asked a few people if they wanted to watch 君の名は/Your Name with me and no one could come, but I had heard such good things about it (much like Black Panther) that I wasn't willing to wait, so I watched it myself.

What an amazing movie.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )