Listen to the Rain

Some of these will be pretty similar to schoolpsychnerd's list, but you know, we're married. It kind of makes sense.

In no particular order:

• Family Vacations!: We took two trips last year that I've been wanting to take for a while--one to Oregon, where I've spent over a year of my life when you count all the summer trips I took as a child, and to Philadelphia, where I lived when I was at university. Both of those were obviously huge parts of my life, and I'm really happy that I got the chance to share them with schoolpsychnerd. Now, maybe it's her turn. I hear she really likes New Orleans...


• Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries: We did it. It was more like 60 weeks, counting the time that we had to take off and the few extra curries we threw in, which meant that it wasn't 50 curries either, but I was amazed by the response I got to my writing. Many people telling me that they looked forward to it every week, inviting themselves to dinner (jokingly or otherwise) and asking schoolpsychnerd to make a particular food, asking what the next food project was going to be... It was really surprising for me, since I never realize how many people read my writing. Maybe we will do another food project! Any suggestions?


• We Went to Alinea: That was something we were planning to do for years, but we never really made the time until a friend suggested it and we took her up on the offer. It lived up to the hype. If you can find a reason, go.


• Japanese Lessons: This is something I've been putting off for the longest time, for financial reasons and because I was nervous about the process of learning. But I finally bit the bullet, started going to classes, and I think it's helped a lot. I can get practice reading anywhere on the internet, I can practice listening by watching anime or JDramas, but I can't practice speaking without a speaking partner. This was gearing up to the trip we're planning to take in 2016, but I think I'll keep going after that. I will be able to speak conversational Japanese by the time I die.


• Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom: I worked on this, on and off, for about two years, from the initial idea to statting things up in Novus to switching to Exalted to really nailing everything down, and in 2015 I started running a brief test game to see if it all works. And it does! I have a bit of a difficult time balancing combat encounters, but my contention that mortal- or god-blooded level Exalted produces a fun game has some support now. My players actually asked for another game after the current one finishes, so I'll be running a longer game with different characters in the future. They may yet trample the jeweled thrones of Agarica under their sandaled feet!


• Saving Money: I did it! I had a goal of every month, putting some money into savings, some money into investments, and some money into our retirement accounts, and I managed to do that every single month in 2015. Sometimes I couldn't put in as much as I wanted in one of those categories, but I'd always make up for it in subsequent months.


• Writing: Throughout 2015, I wrote a review of every book I read and video game I beat, I kept up Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries, developed Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom into something workable and functional as a game, and wrote a bunch of other blog posts as well. Even though I didn't work more on The Lamplighters Guild, I still did a lot of writing work.


• Fashion: I finally realized that maybe I should get rid of some of those old clothes and that, now that we have money, I can afford to dress the way that I've always wanted to rather than wearing clothes forever until they fall apart. Thanks to PlastikWrap, Demobaza, Zolnar, H2H, and a couple other places I can't remember. Sadly, trawling thrift shops is usually not that helpful for me--it's hard enough for me to find clothes from clothes shops. I wrote more about this here.

Traditionally, I post the lyrics to "Long December" on New Year's to express my hope for a good new year, but this year I have something a bit different. While looking around for something for a friend's birthday, I found a poem from the 小倉百人一首 that I think fits pretty well:

ながらへば
またこの頃や
しのばれむ
憂しと見し世ぞ
今は恋しき

And here's my translation of it:

If I should live long
will these days again
Be brought to mind?
That world that I grieved to see,
Now, it is dear to me

明けましておめでとう！今年もよろしく！

Happy New Year, everyone.

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.

Happy New Year everyone!

(I would be at a party, but softlykarou has to work tomorrow and I didn't want to abandon her)

A good year in review, I think.

Obviously, the thing that shaped 2007 for me the most was getting married to softlykarou, though not getting into JET came second (this year!) otherwise I'd be posting this from Japan right now. I've let my Japanese studying slack off because of that--it's something I hope to pick back up again soon. And hopefully I'll have a use for it.

Being the only one up at the moment is a little depressing...but really, what do I have to complain about at the moment? Nothing.

And that's the sign of a good New Year.

(that's "Happy new year")

Now that I'm no longer puking my guts out, I can actually post! I had food poisoning (or something) on Tuesday and Wednesday. I'm not sure how it could have been food poisoning, since I've been on vacation with my family and have been eating all the same things they've been. It could have been the flu or something, but no one else got it. Oh well--at least I'm over it now, except for some latent stomach unsettledness that props up when eating. I was able to eat curry just fine a couple days ago, though, so I think I'm pretty close to normal.

It is perhaps a mark of my geekdom that I view the ability to read the note in this PA strip as evidence of my progress in Japanese.

And now, off to play Ōkami and FFXII.