Listen to the Rain

ae were originally planning to go visit sashagee's family in January, but her wisdom teeth removal took a lot out of her so she was down for almost a month. Recently she's recovered enough to actually travel, though, so we borrowed her parents' car and on Friday, after I finished work, I met her at a train station (she and Laila having already gone to her parents' house the previous day) and we drove down to Muncie.

We were there through Sunday and we didn't really do anything touristy or exciting. We were there to see sashagee's grandmother and mother, and that's what we did. Laila ran around her great-grandmother's house, grabbing pens and wanting to draw, playing with teacups, asking to watch Ghibli movies, while we played with her, ate some cheesecake that sashagee and her mother made, relaxed, and slept on the incredibly uncomfortable beds in the hotel room. The second day we were there, Laila was so wound up from having a fun time playing with everyone all day that she couldn't fall asleep until past 11 p.m.! And this after her first words when we got to the hotel room were "Go home" and trying to put her shoes back on.

She was definitely still glad to be home, though. Traveling is nice, but it's also nice to be home.

The most interesting thing to write about--having a three-year-old drag you away so she can make you "egg tea" is a lot of fun in the moment but about all I can write about it is what's in that sentence--was during Laila's nap on Saturday, when sashagee and I went to the nearby Minnetrista Museum to see the Bob Ross Experience.

( Happy little trees )

It's been a long time since I had enough stuff happening to write a full post about it, but this last weekend I did! sashagee asked me to take Wednesday off because Laila had a doctor's appointment where she would get her first round of vaccines, and she was worried that Laila would have a bad reaction to it. And since my boss had called me on Monday and basically said "Hey, you have six weeks of vacation, please take them," I took Thursday and Friday off too so I had a full long weekend filled with events!

( Just like old times )

It was a little rough on me--this used to be every weekend for me but it's been a long while since that was true--but it was a lot of fun! Next weekend will be lower-key, but I still do have a lot of vacation to use. Let's see what I can do with it before the Delta variant wreaks its vengeance upon us.

Every weekend should be a three-day weekend.

( Do all of the things )

So, uh, am I an extrovert now? Even beyond everything I've done, I was all set up to do something tonight, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I wrote about this and some of my friends said they got tired just reading it. I've living that city boy life, as I told fiendishfanfares.

What a lovely weekend.

So, you might have seen a tweet going around with a bunch of art of the Avengers from Avengers: Endgame done in traditional ukiyo-e art style. And if you haven't, here it is:

エンドゲームのキャラクター達を浮世絵スタイルで描かせていただきまし
た。#アベンジャーズ #ENDGAME #AvengersEndgame #0426逆襲へ pic.twitter.com/zeoAHReW57

— TAKUMI™ (@takumitoxin) April 23, 2019

Well, I took the liberty of translating all the Japanese titles of the various characters, so here they are:

( Translations! )

Has anyone ever made a movie in ukiyo-e style? I'm not sure how it would look in motion, but I'd want to see it.

(The title of this post is "Avengers, assemble!")

I found this fanart on Twitter and it really got me thinking.


So, Hyrule in a modern setting.

Link is a provincial from a farming town, come to Hyrule City to make his fortune at the urging of one of his childhood friends. After being the victim of a crime and having the police take a statement and then do nothing, he becomes a private detective, determined to work outside the system and right as many wrongs as he can. He teams up with

"Princess" Zelda is the daughter of the chancellor of Hyrule, who defied her father and went into law enforcement rather than politics or philanthropy. She worked her way up through the ranks to sergeant, but she's getting tired of the bureaucracy and yearns to return to solving crimes herself. Hyrule City needs someone to clean it up who cares, who won't be corrupted by all the dirty money flowing through the streets.

Link and Zelda meet at a (milk) bar and strike up a friendship over drinks. When Link finds a trail that runs all the way to the very top, he tells his friend "Princess" about it, and she immediately sees a chance to make a difference. With Link working outside the system and Zelda working inside it, they follow the trail until it implicates

"Demon King" Ganondorf, the President of the Black Desert Group, Hyrule's largest corporation. He gives generously to charity and supports dozens of initiatives designed to improve the lives of the citizens, but there are persistent rumors about him. That he's a terrible man to cross, that those who too-vocally oppose him suffer mysterious accidents or personal misfortune. Ganondorf smiles when asked and says that the Goddesses must favor him, and then changes the subject to his latest corporate philanthropic venture.

Link and Zelda know he's dirty, but they have to find some way to prove it. The game would be gathering evidence, dealing with Black Desert Group thugs sent to stop them, and meeting the quirky characters of Hyrule City. Of course at some point, they learn that the legends about the "Master Sword" are real, and that they need it to stop the Demon King from getting his hands on the legendary Triforce. End with Link, gun in his right hand and Master Sword in his left, side by side with Zelda, fighting their way up the Black Desert Group skyscraper headquarters in downtown Hyrule City on their way to the president's room on the top floor.

Here's the themesong.

...you know, maybe I should write a fanfic of this.

Last night it got down to 8°C at night, and when I woke up this morning it was 15°C in my apartment. But that's fine because I own a bunch of blankets. Burrowing under blankets is the superior way to sleep anyway.

Yesterday I finally went to an exhibition at the VGA Gallery, yet another of those things in Chicago I’ve known about for years but have never been to before now. For a while it’s because they didn’t have a permanent exhibit space, but last year they finally settled in a location in Wicker Park and this year they’re holding an exhibit called “Backlog: Five Years Building the VGA Print Collection,” which seemed like the perfect chance to go see what it was like. Last night was the opening reception, so I went.

Here are some examples of the art:

( ”Vidya” )

I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, and “are video games art?” has a lot of baggage attached to it, but I was happy with the mix of traditional art and interactive art. There were even a couple exhibits that I wish I could have played. There was a large one about Sword and Sworcery that looked interesting, but I elected to play a bit of The Shape of the World instead since I thought it looked like Proteus. There was another interactive display of a game whose name I don’t remember that seemed to mostly involve looking out the window of a bus as it drove through night streets, but there was a button to request a stop, so maybe it was possible to change the route.

I was only there for an hour and ran out of time. There’s always more art than you have time to see.

Before I went to the VGA Gallery I ate Thai food and passed by a tea shop, and being me, I looked in to see if they had any matcha. They had a lot of matcha-derived products the same as most places nowadays, lattes and so on, but they had a “Matcha Experience” for $12. When I asked what this was, I got an explanation back of matcha, so even though it was almost three times the price of the “tea and sweet” available so many places in Japan, I ordered it. Here’s the result:


The matcha wasn’t as bitter as I like, though it was smoother because the barista took the time to sift the powder (something you’re supposed to do but I usually don’t). The sweets that came with it were Japanese candy but they were both matcha-flavored, which seemed a bit like overkill to me. I woud have greatly preferred more traditional wagashi, like manjū or monaka, but I’m willing to be lenient because real wagashi goes bad extremely quickly. But maybe chocolate? Vanilla? Something that’s not something I’m already drinking.

It was good, but definitely not $12 worth of good. I’ve gotten a bowl of matcha for ¥200 (~$1.80) before. $12? Hah.

On the way home, I walked along the 606 for a while, which was extremely peaceful. Just me alone except for the occasional runner going the other way. I wish there were something like that further north.

And now, off to the Japanese Matsuri. It was supposed to be during the summer originally and now it’s on a cold and rainy day , but it’ll still have yatai with karaage and really, that’s the important part.

As part of an effort to get more practice with CSS, and after seeing this amazing portrait done with just CSS and HTML, I decided to try to make CSS art. Obviously, starting with something quite a bit simpler, though. Somewhere where you begin by drawing a circle.

Behold the Kirb.

I'm especially happy about the shading to give a 3D effect. It's not perfect, though--the border around the body cuts off the limbs, and I'd like to find a way to remove that if I can. That'll take a bit more effort, though, especially if I want to preserve the shading.

I'd also like to have a few buttons to press to make Kirby smile or move his arms. That'll be harder, but I don't think it'll be impossible.

Yesterday I was reading マナティさん's blog and she linked to pictures posted on likechicago of the recent cold that hit Chicago. Sure, our heater was out and going outside was painful, but at least we were given sights like this:



It's 10°C colder than yesterday and I was half an hour late to work because of a 人身事故, so it's nice to remember the better things about winter.

I made a dumb Utena meme on the tumblr I share with schoolpsychnerd. You might like it.

On Tuesday, before Japanese class, we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, an exhibit of Murakami Takashi (村上隆)'s art. I didn't know anything about it before we went and modern art isn't usually to my taste, but I was surprised by how much I exjoyed the exhibit. Not the pictures where DOB, Murakami's cute Mickey-Mouse-esque character, is unfolded and stretched across a campus in a nightmare of teeth and eyes, but the works that are more traditional.

Examples:
( Click for art )

Yesterday, both schoolpsychnerd and I went to the farmer's market together, which meant that I had some input on the contents of the meal! I originally thought about having duck and pita bread, but there were no bakers selling any pita at the market, so we settled on something different and made sandwiches instead. Ingredients are mostly my idea with schoolpsychnerd's input, schoolpsychnerd was the one who put them all together into the final meal.

( Farmer's Market food pictures )

I have a dentist appointment in two hours to reapply a sealant on my teeth, so of course I'm very nervous. I'm going to schoolpsychnerd's dentist, because he's within walking distance and she recommended him to me, and I know that sealants are an easy procedure and it shouldn't take more than half an hour, if that. But any number of things could go wrong, and even though I know they won't, what if they did?

But there's not much point in worrying about that now. Back to playing Wind Waker.

For how long I've kept this blog--over a decade at this point--and how much time I spent playing World of Warcraft, I wrote surprisingly little about it. The last time I remember checking the /played on Manaan, my balance druid and the subject of the user picture on this entry, it was something like 410 days. Over six years, that's over four hours a day on average. I played a lot of World of Warcraft. If you check the blog tag, there's one post about the RPG campaign I want to run, two posts about my memories of playing, and two posts from the very beginning of my playing time. Almost nothing else. I guess when I was playing all the time, I didn't feel like I needed to write about it? The fish does not see the water, and so on.

Well, eventually I grew disenchanted and drifted away, and nothing I've seen since has ever convinced me to go back. Not even finally adding a real travel form. I spent six years turning into a cheetah by clicking on a hoof icon, but the pull is not strong enough.

I still really like the Warcraft setting, though. I want to run that game, I've bought the art books that I didn't get in the collector's sets that I own, and last night, I received something else I've been after for a while:


With art book for a backdrop.
Here's a dirty secret--I actually never liked Moonkin Form. I thought it was silly and didn't like the idea that druids needed to transform to accomplish anything. I do think moonkin are cute, though, and I spent years staring at feathery moonkin butt, so I have a big soft spot for them. I can see them now in my mind, wandering around Winterspring.

I set this guy up on my computer desk, where I keep most of my computer gaming memorabilia. I don't have much there, and don't usually want much there, but this was worth getting.

We woke up at 7:10 today, and so hopefully this is the last time I have to make note of our wake up time. Maybe it's because we're in Hiroshima, and like I said, it feels like home. Maybe it's the drinks we had before we went to bed calming us down enough that we were able to sleep through. Maybe it's just that all that walking and travel tired us out--I know that schoolpsychnerd basically fell asleep the instant her head hit the pillow, before I had gotten more than a few words into the last writing session on yesterday's blog post.

Or maybe it's because Hotel Active has the most effective blackout curtains I've ever seen. Seriously, it's like being in an oubliette.

Sakura Hotel was a good price, especially for Tokyo lodgings, and double especially after we got that discount. ¥9300 a night. And ¥350 for all-you-can-eat coffee, tea, toast, and soup is nice too. But, Hotel Active cost us ¥8900 a night, breakfast is also all you can eat, it's included in the price, and it's a buffet that looks like this:



This is actually my second plate of food. They have a full buffet with Western and Japanese breakfast, so I absolutely loaded myself to take advantage of it. schoolpsychnerd and I still hadn't showered, so we went back to do that and everyone lounged around for an hour or so until we were all ready to face the day.

We headed out toward the Peace Park, walking down the covered Hondōri for all of its length and watching the shops start to prepare to open. When we got to the Peace Park, the sun was shining brightly and it was incredibly hot and humid, with absolutely no sign of the storms that were supposed to show up later. Just another Japanese summer.

I don't really like visiting the Peace Memorial Museum. It's not the sort of thing that one likes. I keep going because it's important, and because the museum does a great job of focusing on the horrors of the bombing while not falling to the Japanese tendency to cast themselves as the victims who always suffer at others' hands. The displays admit that Japan invaded Manchuria, for example, which is more than some of their history books do. But of course, there were innocent victims:



We went through the museum in silence, and when we were done and people had bought souvenirs, mostly made of recycled paper from the cranes sent in from around the world, we headed out to lunch. Our original choice had a line waiting in the sun, so we walked back down Hondōri to Okonomimura, a multi-story bundling stuffed full of okonomiyaki restaurants. It's not somewhere we often went when we lived here, but that's because our neighborhood had an okonomiyaki restaurant run out of someone's house, so we wanted different food when we came into the city. Here, though, I figured that there'd be at least one restaurant in there that didn't have a line, and I was right. We went to Chichan and stuffed ourselves with okonomiyaki (I got negiyaki, which leaves out the noodles), and then split apart.

One friend went off to Hiroshima-jō to look at the grounds and castle, and tropicanaomega went back to the hotel. xoDrVenture, tastee_wheat, and I wanted dessert, so we walked over to the Polar Bear Cafe for gelato. ¥380 for a double, murasaki imo and rum raisin. tastee_wheat ordered a double after we did but before the workers put any ice cream on ours, so she got a giant stack of matcha and mango. We all ate our gelato together, I surprised a pair of obāchans with how huge I am, and then we went our separate ways.

schoolpsychnerd and I headed back out to Hondōri, now looking more like I remember:



...and did some shopping. Now that I overhauled my personal style and would actually wear some of the clothes here, I figured that I should look and see if I found anything I liked. And I did. A black button-down shirt with wine-red cuffs but a black collar, so I don't look like a total asshole, and an incredibly pretentious shirt with white birds and vines and swirls of mist that says: "We are born, so to speak, twice. Once into existence, and once into life." It's perfect for me.

We went up and down Hondōri, into Parco and Sunmall, up to the new Andersen's location and down to Bookoff, where I got another Neko Atsume souvenir and schoolpsychnerd got a Sailor Moon brooch charm. This was a three hours of shopping, and by this point it was 5:30 and we needed to use the laundry machines at Hotel Active, so as it started to rain, we walked back to the hotel.

Unfortunately, all the laundry machines were full, so we took showers to wash the Japanese humidity off while we waited. Eventually schoolpsychnerd went down to physically wait at the machines while I headed over to the cultural center to check and see if the kagura performance we had gotten a flier for was still on, since it said that it might be canceled due to storms and there was a thunderstorm outside. When I got there, though, the rain had basically died, there were red banners placed all outside the building, and:



Kagura is one of schoolpsychnerd's and my favorite memories of Hiroshima. It's an old art form that's not super common in the rest of the country anymore, though it used to be a thousand years ago when kagura was a ritual form used at shrines--it literally means "god music." Nowadays it's mostly for entertainment (though it still occurs in its original capacity in the Imperial household), and in Hiroshima especially there are kagura performances at most major festivals.

In another bit of serendipity, the specific show they performed tonight was Akkoden, which along with its sequel Sesshoseki was performed almost every time there was an event with kagura in Chiyoda. To happen to be here on a Wednesday, the night of the kagura performances, and then to have the specific performance be this one...

Also, at the end, they invited people up to the stage to take picture with the actors and, well:



One other person came with us, and after the performance let out and we had gone out to dinner at an Indian restaurant, we took stock of the situation. It turned out most people wanted to stay in for the night, so our friend went back to the hotel and schoolpsychnerd and I went to check out a bar we knew. Unfortunately, it had closed in the meantime and been replaced by one with a ¥500 table charge, so we headed back up Nakimi-dōri toward the hotel and stopped in at a sake bar called いいお酒 一彩 (ii osake issai).

That turned out to be a great idea. It was small, seating maybe a dozen people, with smooth jazz playing on a low volume, and other than us there was no one in there but a single salaryman in the corner. The bartender asked us if we knew Japanese, and then handed us a menu and asked if we wanted oolong tea or beer as our free drink. We both picked tea and looked at the menu before asking the bartender for his recommendation--I couldn't read most of it, and even what I could read didn't mean anything to me because while I like sake a lot, I don't know that much about it.

He gave us a very dry sake that wasn't super strong, at least in taste. It got a bit much toward the end of the glass, but it was delightful before then, and schoolpsychnerd and I drank our sake, ate our complementary fried tofu, listened to the music, and chatted. When our glass was done, we went back to the hotel, waited for our laundry to finish--it took close to five hours for a single load; good thing it was free--and then went to bed.

Steps taken: 21042

I was really tempted to make a custom icon for this entry, probably something like this with "We're watching you...scum" written on it, but in the end I went with something a bit more generic.

Over the Fourth of July, I was rooting around through my parents' basement and I found the map from the Collector's Edition of Morrowind. Until I found that, I didn't even remember that I had the Collector's Edition. I knew I had the soundtrack, and I found the art book the most recent trip to their house I took, but I still haven't found the Ordinator figure that came with it. I bought it over a decade ago, and I'm amazed I've managed to find the pieces of it that I have.

Anyway, once I found that, I started to get an image in my head. I wanted to get it framed and put it up on the wall when we moved, and since we had kept talking about having a dedicated computer room and I figured putting gaming decorations in there would be a neat decor style. I looked up framing places nearby, went to the nearest one that had a good Yelp rating, and...



Those of you who know how much I love Morrowind can probably guess what my reaction was when I picked it up a week later. Even with the water damage to the map from the times my parents' basement has leaked during one of our midwestern storms, it flattened out pretty well. You can tell it's crinkled if the light is directly on it, but, well, you play the hand you're dealt.

It's not the best picture, but that's because I realized after I picked it up that I didn't want to hang it until I had all the pictures that I wanted all framed. I'm next planning on framing the map from the Dark Sun boxed set and one more and setting them up in a V pattern, but I'm not sure if the third map is going to be a video game map or a TTRPG map. I have the Hollow World boxed set map, the 2e Forgotten Realms map, the Council of Wyrms map, the Ravenloft 2e maps (Core and Islands), the Red Steel 2e map, the Might and Magic VI map, the Ultima IX map, the Baldur's Gate II map...but none of those really connect with me the way either Dark Sun or Morrowind do. I kicked in for the Exalted 3e map, but that's going above our couch in the living room.

I'll have to think about it.