Listen to the Rain

Thursday we had xoDrVenture over to watch Revolutionary Girl Utena, and then after she left I got a bit overwhelmed by my upcoming schedule and the fact that the pants I ordered arrived and didn't fit, and I ended up lying down in a dark room for fifteen minutes while schoolpsychnerd did some work in the kitchen.

The next day I sent back the pants and the replacements are in the mail, and then I got home from work, devoured dinner, and immediately turned around and headed out to Call of Cthulhu, which you can read about here. Then we came back home and went to bed.

Saturday was LARP and shopping day, taking up a large portion of the afternoon and all of the evening, but also the day where I received an email from my father with the subject "$" and then checked my bank and noticed a pending transaction for a substantial sum of money. Enough to pay for our upcoming trip to Japan multiple times over. When we called my mother for Mother's Day the next day and asked about it, their reasoning was basically that they're not getting any younger and who knows what might happen. So if you wonder why I'm all #doom all the time, well...

Sunday was the aforementioned phone call and the Beach Party of Hope, scheduled in February. Fortunately the weather cooperated, but those again took up a big chunk of the day. We also wrote a letter to Kaminaka-san, one of our old students from Chiyoda, since we're planning to visit Chiyoda on our upcoming trip to Japan and wanted to let him know! That took a bit of time mostly because I had to hand-write Japanese, which I'm not very good at and which always makes me nervous.

Monday was session six of Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom, which i haven't written about yet because over half of it was Small-time Peddlers of the Mushroom Kingdom, so I'll do a combined six + seven post next week and edit in a link here when it's written.

Tuesday was Japanese class again, which actually went pretty well. 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ is getting better now that they're getting into more characterization, and at least with the most recent chapter, I went into class thinking I had a lot of trouble with the reading and it turned out that I actually understood almost all of it. Aya-sensei mentioned that it's easy to get caught up in a couple small things you don't understand and assume it means that you don't understand the larger picture and that's simply not the case, and that's definitely true. I think at this point I'd keep reading the book even if I didn't have class anymore.

Tonight, I have nothing scheduled and I'm going to play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and watch Aria with schoolpsychnerd, and the only thing I have scheduled that is of any importance is that we're going to write another card to one of our students in Japan. And this Friday we're going out to eat at Travelle and then I don't have anything scheduled for the rest of the weekend. Other than beating Symphony of the Night and finishing up my Ender-kun costume for ACEN. Just need to do the grass block!

The Grim Reaper was stalking our halls, as my father puts it. We had a bit of warning, and it turned out to be almost a year to the day since the last time this happened, but I managed to avoid it and am still gainfully employed. And that after spending some time taking the recommendations of The Antidote into account and meditating on the possibility of being laid off.

Our division wasn't hugely impacted--no one I specifically work with on a daily basis--but almost everyone hit was a manager. Apparently that was deliberate, and it's some kindness I wasn't expecting from American businesses (if that term even applies when I work for a nonprofit). I mean, "kindness" is a relative term here since people still lost their jobs, and it's easy for me to make that declaration from my desk where I listen to podcasts all day and no one talks to me, but the 課長 did say that they were taking the amount of work we have to do into account in not reducing our number too much. Small favors.

From my perspective, the other benefit is now I can plan for the future again. I was stuck between wanting to go into austerity mode--stop buying anything extraneous, don't go out for any food, bread and water diet, etc.--and realizing that I had no news and there's no point in acting like I am already dead. I mostly fell on the latter end, but it was a struggle.

As a present for myself, I bought a horror-themed dice bag to put those new dice thing. Smooth is the hand which makes the world, and steady is the mind which grasps it.

This weekend is ACEN. A few years ago, by this point I'd be frothing at the mouth excited, but I'm actually mostly just apprehensive and kind of second-guessing my decision to go at all. I think stephen_poon put it best recently when he said that he used to get a feeling of "These are my people!" when he'd go to a con, but he doesn't get that anymore and it reduces the draw. It's not just age--though part of it is definitely age--but also that I don't really feel like I'm part of the "community" as such. I spend much more time playing games now than watching much of anything, much less anime, and I really have no idea what's going on other that what I learn from listening to Mouthful of Toast.

I think some of it is just sadness that we aren't cosplaying this year. schoolpsychnerd and I had originally planned to do Creeper-tan and Ender-kun from Minecraft, but my skittishness about money--three years of grad school and not really being able to save anything ran my nerves ragged--meant that we put it off for this year. I was looking forward to dressing up as something I would have actually enjoyed, and now I won't get to. Even though it's my decision, it's still disappointing.

On the other hand, I get to see ping816, klenkers, redpikachu, and some other people I haven't seen in a long time. I remember years ago that I wondered about the people who sent to cons and seemed to spend a lot of it sitting in the hotel bar talking to people and wondering why they came, and then last ACEN I spent a big chunk of it in the hotel bar talking to people. Gaze long into the abyss...

Nonetheless, I'm writing a New Year's retrospective.

I'm very fortunate that 2014 was a pretty good year for me. A lot of my friends had major shakeups or active disasters, to say nothing of the national or world situation (which are admittedly mostly things that got greater exposure this year rather than being entirely new), but for my family, everything went very well. In honor of the listicle becoming a thing, I'll do this in a list format:

• Marriage: Still married, schoolpsychnerd is still the best wife ever. This alone helps brighten every year.


• RPGs: I finished off the Delta Green game I started years ago, played in (and wrote up an Actual Play of!) a short-run game run by my wife in a setting I wrote, am playing in her Princess: the Hopeful game, and am currently running two games, a WFRP 2e game and a Fallout ORE game set in Chicago. I'm also slowly working on Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom, and I have some other ideas in the pipeline when I have more gaming time. I'm set on this score.


• Work: I didn't get fired in the sudden layoffs a month ago at my job, my performance review was great, I still get to listen to podcasts for hours every day, and I still don't have to talk to anyone. The new managerial team means the future is uncertain, but for the last year, at least, everything was great.


• Writing: I write a lot nowadays. Between putting more RPG stuff here, Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries, my book reviews, and starting to write reviews of all the video games I beat...well, I'm not sure how many words a week that is, but it's easily in the thousands. I didn't do NaNoWriMo this year, but I don't need it to compel me to write. I'm doing fine on my own.


• Video games: I'm happiest that I finally beat Morrowind again, but most of the fond memories I have are of playing with my friends. Minecraft and a Secret of Mana with schoolpsychnerd and Terraria with her and another friend filled a lot of happy hours. I got some of the kickstarters I backed too (Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland II), but I can't speak to their quality, because I'm waiting for them to be patched up to play them. I even picked up my DS copy of Chrono Trigger and started to run through it again. And finally, I ended up sharing even some of my single-player gaming with my friends through the magic of streaming video. It is truly a Golden Age of gaming on all fronts.


• Exercise: Last year I was worried that I wasn't getting enough walking in, but I easily fixed that problem. My tracking program tells me that I'm getting an average of around 14K steps per day, which is more than enough and is also probably why I go through socks so fast and wore through the soles of my boots and had to replace them in November. On the other hand, I've maintained my weight and I'm very happy with the way I look and feel. The only disadvantage is the amount of money that goes down my throat with all the food I eat...but fortunately we can afford it. The only problem I ran into was smashing my toe on a doorframe, but while it hasn't healed back to the same way it was before I smashed it, it's not actually hindering me in any way, so I can count that a victory. I could have broken it, after all.


• Money: After years of living close to the bone, schoolpsychnerd graduated from grad school and got a job making over twice what I make at her first choice of school, so we're in good hands for the foreseeable future and I can return to my customary behavior of saving about a quarter of our pre-tax income. I also, through the incredible generosity of my parents during schoolpsychnerd's tenure in school, managed to pay off all of her student loans two days before she graduated, which puts us in an incredibly fortunate situation compared to the vast majority of our peers. We also finally finished off the saga of the Japanese Pension Office payment, receiving our payment roughly two and a half years after the average amount of time it's supposed to take. We are unbelievably lucky on all monetary fronts, and, b'ezrat haShem, hopefully that luck will continue.

To celebrate my good fortune, I made sure to accomplish a resolution I've had for a while--eat an entire bar of dark chocolate at once. The secret to achieving your dreams is to make sure they're petty and stupid.

As is my somewhat years tradition, here's some song lyrics which I've posted nearly every year since I was in university:
A long December and there's reason to believe

Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember the last thing that you said as you were leavin'
Now the days go by so fast

And it's one more day up in the canyons
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think that I could be forgiven...I wish you would

The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room
To see the way that light attaches to a girl

And it's one more day up in the canyons
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think you might come to California...I think you should

Drove up to Hillside Manor sometime after two a.m.
And talked a little while about the year
I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower,
Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her

And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass

And it's one more day up in the canyon
And it's one more night in Hollywood

It's been so long since I've seen the ocean...I guess I should

I honestly don't remember how I got in the habit of posting those. I think it was adolescent angst and the eternal hope that things would be better, and now I'm just continuing that tradition even though things have gotten better. A lot better. Here's to them continuing that way in 2015.

明けましておめでとうございます！皆さん、今年もよろしくお願いします！

I guess good things really can happen for those who wait.

I wrote here a while ago about how annoyed I was with the Japanese Pension Office’s continued inaction. Well...they finally acted. I checked Mint this morning, because it's payday and I wanted to check my credit card bill before I paid it, and I noticed that my checking account said there was a lot more money there than I remembered there being. Investigating revealed an "incoming wire transfer" currently waiting to clear, which left me super confused until I remembered that, in my research into why the Pension Office hadn't paid us yet, some people mentioned that they had received a letter letting them know their refund was coming and some people had just received a wire transfer out of nowhere.

Either there’s a bizarrely coincidental bank error, or the Pension Office finally paid us. Yay! High five!


Now we can apply for a refund of the taxes that they automatically deduct before they send you the remittance and wait three more years for that, but that's a much smaller amount of money, so my annoyance should proportionately be smaller. In the meantime, though, I will concentrate on my luck winning the day once again.

Insert appropriate sound effect here.

We got our yearly bonus checks today and the notice of how much our raises would be for the next fiscal year. My yearly review back in December was really good--4.1/5, on a "no one ever gets a 5" scale--so I’ve been looking forward to seeing what the amounts would be for a while. Well, my raise was stereotypical, but my boss told me that was basically a mandate from on high to keep raises standardized and not a reflection on my performance.

My extra bonus on top of that, though, made up for it. The AMA did better than we had expected on our various metrics, so the bonus amount was correspondingly raised, and then my boss's boss put all the extra weighting of my performance review onto the bonus, so it's double what it was last year. It's even higher than the group rating percentage that dictates bonus calculations, which is apparently really rare. And since the bonus is expressed as a fraction of my salary, I can deal with having a lower raise than I was expecting in exchange for getting it up front and being able to do what I want with it.

And with my newfound riches, I...bought iOS Final Fantasy Tactics for $13.99, and I'm probably saving most of the rest. Some things never change. (^_^;)

Let's talk about the last year!

I guess the biggest change from the perspective of this blog is that I started actually posting here again. I got inspired by RPGs--as is often the case, I admit--and started my Dungeons & Design series, and I think it was mostly the fact of posting those that got me into the habit of posting about other subjects. There are other factors too, like how I have enough down time here and there at work that I can write posts in notepad, send them home, and then post them. I also stopped friend-locking everything and started defaulting to public posts, even when they're about my life. It's essentially security through apathy--I can see how many people visit my blog, and on an average day it's a couple dozen. I post all these updates to Facebook and Twitter and the truth is that most people don't care. That may be a little sad, but it certainly tells me that the excessive care I was taking about talking about anything remotely personal is unwarranted. Whatever I say will mostly just get lost in the flow of the internet anyway, unless people are specifically looking to read it.

I was hoping that we'd be paid back by at least one of the people who owed us money this year, but it didn't happen. Aggressively didn't happen, in the case of the Japanese Pension Office. Or perhaps passive-aggressively? Regardless, it led to some tight moments at times, especially during the summer, though I do admit that some of that is because I refuse to touch the principal. Now that schoolpsychnerd has a steady paycheck from her internship everything is okay, though I admit my grasping miserliness does mean I'm less happy with our finances that their absolute quality should lead me to be, but overall it's been on an upward trend. And maybe someone will actually pay us this year. A man can dream.

Work continues much the same as it has been. I had my annual review and did better than I did last year, and my job's bureaucracy and policies means that I'll get an automatic raise and a yearly bonus commensurate with my performance. It's theoretically possible that we won't get the bonus, since the amount and whether it occurs at all is based on the AMA's overall performance during the year, but I haven't heard of anything that would indicate that it's not coming. Even if it doesn't, I'll still get the raise. The benefits of working for a non-profit with no shareholders!

In terms of personal improvement, I took up programming! I originally thought about doing it back in May and was given a lot of resources, and later took a Coursera course that I wrote all about. I've even seen found an implementation of Python for the iPad, and since I have my iPad with me all the time at work, I can get that and then have time to bash my head against programs at work as well as at home! Indeed, during my interview for the job I was asked if I knew anything about HTML or programming and I had to say that I did not, so if I can actually learn programming to a useful level I can hopefully get a promotion. The end project was an implementation of Asteroids, and I'd love to do a lot more to work on it than I had to do for the class to keep my hand in, but what I did accomplish is reasonably impressive, I think.

Also, studied Japanese, but on that subject I'm less confident. I maintained my ability, and that's about it.

Last year, I told myself that if I maintained the weight I had reached in August (~77 kg) for a whole year, I'd go get my wedding ring resized because it's rather large now and I'm kind of worried that it will slip off at some point. Well...I did maintain my weight, but I didn't actually get the ring resized--see the above-mentioned grasping miserliness. I also linked up my new iPhone's M7 chip with LoseIt and started tracking my steps and apparently my average number of steps per day is...5,218. Out of the 10K that's recommended. Exercise is healthy basically no matter what, and getting that number up is something I'd like to improve on in the future, but so far I'm doing pretty well on that front.

I made much more of an effort to be social in 2013. In 2012, I think I had the tendency to hermit a lot more, turning down people's invitations and not really inviting anyone over to schoolpsychnerd and my apartment. I'm not sure what exactly it was. It might have been some remaining difficulty with adjusting to the pace of social life in America vs. what it had been like in Japan, maybe some Anxiety Cat--there's a really old one that I thought fit me really well that said something like "too nervous to talk to people, come off as arrogant or standoffish"--maybe just my typical introverted personality, but this year I tried to avoid falling into the trap of staying home all the time. I like to think I succeeded, or at least reasonably well. And it turns out that traveling out to other places isn't really that bad, even on a work night. I tend to apply the maxim "past performance is no indication of future results" to social events if I'm not careful, in the sense that sure I had fun the last time I went to a party, and the time before that, and probably the time before that...but what about this time!?!? That's not a productive attitude to take, honestly. So this year, I made sure to try to shut that off at the pass. Once I get out of the house, then inertia takes over and I'm not exactly going to turn around halfway there. And it turns out that my friends are awesome people and fun to be around to an extent that far outweighs the annoyance of having to change my physical location. Who would have thought, right? Obviously, this has always been true, but it's convincing that little voice that's the trick, and in 2013 I beat it into submission. Or at least, I inflicted grevious wounds.

All in all, it's been a pretty fantastic year, and I'm looking forward to what 2014 will bring.

I realize that posting song lyrics is incredibly emo and so early-2000s as to be aggressively unhip, but it's pseudo-tradition for me, so:

A long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember the last thing that you said as you were leavin'
Now the days go by so fast
And it's one more day up in the canyons
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think that I could be forgiven...I wish you would
The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room
To see the way that light attaches to a girl
And it's one more day up in the canyons
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think you might come to California...I think you should
Drove up to Hillside Manor sometime after two a.m.
And talked a little while about the year
I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower,
Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her
And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass
And it's one more day up in the canyon
And it's one more night in Hollywood
It's been so long since I've seen the ocean...I guess I should...

schoolpsychnerd and I had a few people[1] over for New Years, avoiding our error in previous years by not traveling anywhere. Well, other than to one of the local shrines. I asked Kaminaka-san if he knew of any place doing anything for 初詣 (hatsumōde, the first shrine visit for the new year), and he told us a couple. One of them, the one in Mibu (the same place that has Mibu no Hanadaue in the summer), has a small event for the New Year, so we all watched Firefly until midnight and then went to Mibu-jinja. I slightly misunderstood the directions at first, but after seeing which way everyone else was walking, we managed to find the shrine (and as a bonus, I now know how to say "T intersection" in Japanese).

In addition to the typical hatsumōde events, there was a service going on inside the shrine. We stayed for a moment outside, unsure what to do, but after seeing that people were entering and leaving freely we went inside. There were musicians playing (a bit similar to kagura, actually), and after some chanting, they had everyone come up, take a branch tied with a white ribbon, and offer it at the shrine. We did (I stood up first, the others took a little urging from one of the people nearby), and then we left, along with half the people inside. It makes me wonder if they just ran the same thing over and over in a loop, and people would drift in and out as they came to the shrine. I'm not sure to ask who would know, however.

Unlike any of the previous six months, we're ending this month with more than ￥10,000 in our bank account. First we had the Singapore trip, then car trouble, then a number of other things kept cropping up. We're actually quite lucky that we never needed to request a pay advance to withdraw money using our credit cards or anything, but now we're mostly in the clear. It was a bit harrowing, and somewhat humbling, since I considered myself good at financial planning (our savings rate in America was around 30% of our post-tax income. A rate high enough that if everyone did it it would destroy the economy) but we still kept running into problems. I think I got a bit lazy--I never bothered to save receipts in America, since buying everything with a credit card left a record of our purchases that I could use to determine where our money went. That doesn't happen in a country where everything is done in cash, though, so now I keep records.

I've been playing a game called Winter Voices lately, which is quite an odd little game. The basic plot is that the main character's father has just died, and the game (so far) is about her dealing with his death. All of the RPG-style combat that takes place is a metaphorical representation of her coping with her grief. As such, combat isn't usually about defeating your opponents, since you can't really destroy your own memories. Instead, it's typically about surviving a certain amount of time or reaching a certain spot on the board.

One interesting consequence of this is that success and failure aren't binary. Being "defeated" in most battles just means that you weren't able to deal with the past, so instead of dying you lose a percentage of the xp you'd normally get and have the option to retry if you want.

The story is a little slow (I've played for a couple hours and I don't know much at all, except that while the men in the village my character is in seem to like me just fine, some of the women are cold or dismissive. Mysterious...), but it helps fit the mood. What doesn't really fit the mood is the walking speed, which makes it take forever to get anywhere, and the animations. Memories in combat with you get multiple attacks and have relatively slow animations (and I'm not sure how to speed them up, or if you can), which means large battles can take forever because of all the slow animations taking place. The other minor issue is that the game is by a French company and sometimes there are translation goofs or odd word choices which do a great job of snapping you out of the mood they're trying to create. These are pretty rare, though. It's interesting, but I'm not sure I'll have the patience to play through all of the seven episodes they have planned. I may also have been better off not picking the hard-mode class to play on my first go through, though even so I'm doing pretty well.

This is the most I've written here in a while that wasn't a story.

[1]: My blog is hampered here by my policy of avoiding real names, I think. Still, nothing much to be done.

So, Japan is a cash economy. Credit cards are only really accepted by some institutions in major cities and checks are what businesses write to pay each other. So how does one pay large bills without mailing sums of money? Why, the convenience store! Most monthly bills mailed in Japan have bar codes on them. When you get one, you can take it down to the conbini, where they scan it, stamp it and then return half of it to you as a receipt. It's not neceessarily more convenient (well, it wouldn't be, except we don't have a mailbox), but there's no worry about losing cash in the mail. If the company complains, you have proof you already paid.

Okay, it wasn't really that bad.

I got a letter from the Illinois Department of Revenue today, politely informing me that we owed $1000 in taxes on our income and could we please pay it as soon as possible. Once my heart started beating again, I grabbed last year's tax return and compared it with the letter. Fortunately, I saw it was a simple error (though it's still my fault)--I hadn't sent in copies of schoolpsychnerd and my W2 forms, so the government had no proof that we had paid any state taxes at all. We have, of course, so I'm mailing it out tomorrow. While I might still owe fees and penalties for forgetting this, I didn't make some kind of horrific mistake that will drain our savings. This is what comes of filing online for years and then having to go back to that medieval "paper" crap.

I've been playing a half-translated Japanese Roguelike called Elona lately. In the manner of most Roguelikes, it is fiendishly difficult and actively evil--the tutorial has you eat a piece of food to demonstrate you know how to...except the food is a human corpse, so eating it makes you go insane. Magical storms occasionally catch you when you're outside and mutate you into horrible things...the works. Most of the stuff is randomly generated, which can lead to hilarious results. For example:

"I want to give my kid a [rod of summon monsters] as a birthday present. If you can send me this item, I'll pay you 1222 gold pieces and ores in exchange."

Oh yeah, lady. That'll end well. The one below that wanted to give her kid a [dead fish] as a birthday present.

At least I have my pet little girl to keep me company.

I should have made that investment today instead of last week.

Or, more probably, next week instead of this week.

Hindsight, blah blah.

Found an interesting article about corn syrup today.

( Discussion snipped for those who don't care )

Getting married is complicated. We finally got softlykarou's replacement driver's license, and unified our bank accounts (which took a month, since it took that long for the marriage certificate to arrive) but we can't get our auto insurance sorted out until she has an Illinois driver's license. To do that, we need to get a county-certified copy of her birth certificate, her passport, and proof of residence. Two of those are easy, but her parents have been waiting for the county to send it, and it's taking forever. Then she needs to go to the DMV, and get the license, then we go talk to the insurance people...blarg. Hopefully we get that birth certificate soon.

Making budgets is scary. Hopefully I'm overbudgeting for things... Admittedly, I probably am for food. Making meals ourselves is dirt cheap, especially since I'm a rice fanatic. My current year budget is massively skewed anyway, since it treats the wedding as a "Fun" expense and...oh, hey, look, an "exclude from budget" option. ^^;;;

Speaking of cooking, I've discovered something odd. Consistently cooking for myself has made me less hungry. At least, I assume that's what it is. Unless it's that living on my own has made me less hungry, which has to have less of an immediately obvious connection. I eat three meals a day (I used to eat 3 + 2 snacks, usually) and I always eat less at those meals. It's not just the concept of poverty that has made me fear to eat food, either. I'm genuinely less hungry. Maybe it's trying to cut all the HFCS out of my diet.