Listen to the Rain

Today was the parental information session for new families at Laila's new school, and while I couldn't go, I watched Laila while sashagee went. It ran over the hour they had set and sashagee didn't get to grab any coffee before she came home, but she took copious notes. Among those notes:

• It's an International Baccalaureate school, so it follows a standardized curriculum through all of its instruction (preschool through middle school).
• The school has a whole system of communications that goes through tiers, from emails and website announcements and fliers home and so on.
• There are a bunch of parent groups you can join, including some Facebook groups she said I should join.
• Breakfast and lunch are offered but optional, important because sashagee wants to make meals for Laila.
• There will be a "welcome back" day where we can take a tour of the school.

Something else that stuck out in her memory was overhearing a conversation about the condo to the south of us that was just on sale. A month or so ago, we were walking out on the sidewalk and I heard some people outside the condo showing say they already had twenty offers. Today, sashagee said she heard other people talking about wanting to move into the neighborhood to secure their kid a spot at the local school for kindergarten since if you're already in the school you don't have to change mid-year and it's possible that you'll get to stay in future years (depending on the school administration, how many students the school has, their admissions policies, the phases of the moon, and so on), and that the same condo had closed with over thirty offers and gone for 120K over asking price! Once again, me being very lucky has worked out in my favor--just a few blocks over and we'd be in another school district, none of which are as good as our local one.

sashagee and Laila spent last night in the hospital for a routine EEG checkup. They haven't told us the results but as far as I know they didn't see anything--the next one is scheduled for January and they let them go early, so that tells me they think there's nothing to worry about.

Speaking of which, we went to another two-year-old's party last Saturday. There were a bunch of two-year-olds there, playing in the pool set up the birthday girl's back yard, and one of the things that really helped sashagee feel better was that Laila wasn't acting any different than any of the other children her age there. She said a few words but mostly was quiet or made baby babbling noises, she was excited about the water, she played a bit with the other toddlers but in that way that toddlers play with each other, where they're kind of playing in the same space but not really playing together in any particular way. It's very cute and the interaction let us as the parents actually talk with each other. The people who complain about going to two-year-olds' birthday parties clearly don't have actual two-year-olds who will be distracted by the party. I spent some time talking with the birthday girl's father about Crusader Kings II! How is that not a good time?

I also took out a big whack of money and paid off sashagee's student loans ahead of the upcoming restarting of payments. I say a big whack, but it honestly wasn't that much--she payed off over 90% of it herself, which is why she doesn't really have any savings. I already put some money toward her loans when we first met after she got pregnant and these are the last of time. I wanted to get them all paid off so we wouldn't have to worry about more outflows, especially since I'm pretty sure the American economy will suffer as Americans suddenly have to come up with $18 billion per month that they previously could use on other things. Some people used that money to pay off the loans while payments were paused, but a lot of people did not.

Alright, work is done. Time to take the L home.

I've got some discussion of money including some exact dollar amounts, so I've put this behind a cut:

( Read more... )

This continues sashagee's pattern of getting me into interminable online games.

On the one hand, Mihoyo obviously took the lessons of Breath of the Wild to heart. The game is an open-world RPG with a stamina bar and climbing mechanics, with gathering ingredients for healing and buff foods a vital part of the experience. There are camps of goblin-like monsters containing treasure chests. Early on there's a quest to get a gliding license. There are fourseven elementally-themed lands to explore. There are ancient ruins inhabited by robots that look like stone statues. There are environmental puzzles to solve with treasure chests as the reward. It's not post-apocalyptic but it has the same peaceful, Ghibli air, with cel-shaded art, anime designs, and beautiful orchestral music. And honestly, it looks fantastic:


I like the tactics involved in putting teams together and using their combined elemental abilities to overcome new challenges, taking advantage of combo bonuses and swapping characters mid-fight to stack up the damage. I love elemental magic systems, and this particular combination is one I haven't seen before--seven elements: Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Wood, Lightning, and Ice. There are seven countries, each worshipping a particular god and each based on an element, devoted to an ideal, and themed after a real-world culture:

• Mondstadt: Air, Freedom, Germany
  
• Liyue: Earth, Contracts, China.
  
• Inazuma: Lightning, Eternity, Japan.
  
• Sumeru: Wood, Wisdom, Middle-East/South Asia(??).
  
• Fontaine: Water, Justice, France.
  
• Natlan: Fire, War, pre-Columbian Central America(??)
  
• Snezhnaya: Ice, [Unknown], Russia.

The nations are so one-dimensional because they're directly ruled by meddling gods with strong ideas about how things should work. The plot, at least the minimal part I've gotten through in the air country, seems pretty interesting.

Now, the bad parts.

Genshin Impact is a predatory gacha game that does its absolute best to squeeze money out of you. As with every gacha game, you get a few characters through the story but there are dozens of other optional characters that can only be obtained through gambling. You get some of the currency (called Primogems) needed to buy chances (called Wishes) through the game, but enough to make one wish every day or two--definitely not enough to be sure of getting a character that's available for only a limited time. And furthermore, there's a mechanic that seems like it's designed to reduce the heartbreak of getting duplicate characters called Constellations, where getting dupes provides bonuses to those characters, except that some of those bonuses are so powerful they take characters from average to amazing all by themselves. "To Be Cleaned," Noelle's fourth constellation makes her shield a bomb when enemies breach it, and "Must Be Spotless," her sixth constellation (of six), increases her burst attack's power by 50% and adds one second to its duration for every enemy defeated during it.

It's evil genius, in a way, that Mihoyo found a way to turn duplicate characters from a disheartening experience to another chance for grinding and thus, for money.

There are daily and weekly missions to get primogems. Achievements award primogens, as do story quests, but the fastest way to get them is just to pay, and with a 0.6% chance to roll any given five-star character, it'll take a lot of wishes to get one you want. There is a mechanically literally called Pity that guarantees a five-star character after 90 wishes without one, but of course it's not necessarily the five-star character you want. For that, you have to wish another 90 times. And then wish another thousand times or so to max out their constellation at a price of around $1100. Getting your full waifu collection is going to cost you a pretty penny or a lot of grinding. And this is just characters--of course they need weapons and accessories as well, which have to be rolled for as well.

Just yesterday I went to go fight a boss because the list of possible loot included some five-star items. I didn't get any, obviously, so out of curiosity I went to look up the drop chance and it turns out the drop chance is 0%--I need to raise my level a lot if I want to fight the version of the boss that drops those. Despite that, the game still tells me they're possible drops.

On top of all this, boss fights and dungeons are also time-gated. You need to use "resin" to claim the rewards and only get a certain amount of it per day. Unless, of course, you pay to get more.

I do like the exploration gameplay and the plot, and I'm playing because sashagee wants to play together. But I'm casting several side-eyes at the game at the moment, and I doubt I'll be doing a lot of grinding once I finish the story. I'm not here to collect the waifus, I'm here for the plot and the worldbuilding.

Maybe I'll run a TTRPG in the setting when there's more information out about the game.

Wednesday morning I woke up with a sore stomach, which if you've known me for a while you know is my usual state of affairs. This was worse than normal, but I figured that I was nervous over the aftereffects of the election and because sashagee had her anatomy scan for our daughter that morning. I went to work, she came back from her anatomy scan with no issues reported, and we went on with our day. Around mid-afternoon, though, out of nowhere I felt...wrong. I started sweating and felt like I had to use the bathroom, and then having done so I threw myself on the tile floor to cool down. sashagee came in and helped me get onto the couch and looked up my symptoms--I only had half the symptoms of appendicitis, since my pain was in the center of my stomach, I didn't really have any nausea, and it didn't hurt any more when she pressed on my stomach, but the second time I was lying on the cold tile and feeling feverish, she convinced me that we needed to go to the hospital. One CT scan later, the doctors confirmed they'd be operating.

Thanks to the Plague Year, everything was abnormal. sashagee dropped me off and saw me through talking to the receptionist but couldn't come any further. Once they realized I'd need an operation they admitted me, and then I had my own room. I couldn't eat or drinking anything before the operation, so they kept me on saline through an IV and mostly left me alone. I spent 1 a.m. to around 2 p.m. Thursday sleeping or dozing until they were finally ready for my operation, then they walked me through the various dangers, put me to sleep, and when I woke up I was minus one appendix. Then I waited in the recovery room for an hour and a half for someone from Transport to come get me, proved that I could keep food down--they brought me a delicious-looking chicken and green beans and mashed potatoes dish that definitely had mixed dairy and meat because no one asked for my food restrictions, so I had a children's cheese sandwich dinner--and that I could walk the length of the hall, and having done that they discharged me and sashagee came to pick me up, and here I am at home with my guts glued together.

Forefront in my mind the entire time was cost, becuase America has the worst healthcare in the developed world. I'm very lucky with my insurance, because working for an organization run by doctors means that the AMA never denies a claim. I won't have to deal with them deciding that some procedure I had with medically unnecessary or fighting me over coverage. But, they might still claim some things are out of network--American insurance is notorious for claiming that the anesthesiologist is out of network and trying to charge extra for it, even though anyone demanding to know their anesthesiologist's insurance status before the operation would be considered a lunatic--and them paying doesn't solve the problem that American healthcare is too expensive. We pay far too much for mediocre results. It's a bad deal. I feel sorry for the Americans who think that healthcare costs what we pay for it and that's why we can't have anything better.

But, I do at least have the money to cover it, and I have a loving girlfriend who can take care of me while I recover. I'm just glad this didn't happen last month when she was in much worse shape--that would have been a nightmare. Now to rest and recover.

I logged on to work this morning to an email from my boss's boss scheduling a meeting entitled "quick chat." That's the "We need to talk" of the business world, so I spent the morning a bit worried about what was going to happen--they just ordered me a laptop, but did they actually order it for me or were they just covering while they put in the paperwork to let me go? My brain spun up a bunch of terrible scenarios, and I did a bit of meditation before the meeting so I could calm down before going in.

...and then it turned out that I was getting a surprise raise because market analysis had revealed my salary wasn't in line with market rates. So this special dinner is celebratory even though it wasn't originally meant to be.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might remember the old series of Farmer's Market Dinners that I wrote about that was a summer tradition. I didn't do it in 2018 or 2019, but I wanted to bring it back for 2020 now that I'm settled into a new place that's closer to the market location. Normally I'd go to the market in person, browse around among the offerings, and then pick some things out and decide what to get based on what I saw, but thanks to coronavirus that's not possible this year--all market offerings are available online, you shop through them, and then reserve a time slot and pick up the food in person. So, that's what I did.

I only ordered a couple hours before the deadline, and since I didn't have much time to decide, what I picked this time didn't require as much cooking effort as it might otherwise would. That'll change in future weeks.

( Food pictures )

Now that Chicago is getting back into Phase 3, my schedule is getting a bit more active again. There's no theatre, obviously, and though restaurants and so on are open I really don't want to go to them. But I've been seeing a small group of friends, one at a time, with a few days in between each event--if any one of us is sick, we should be able to catch it before it spreads. And I'm not in contact with anyone at risk unless I'm wearing a mask--a stylish mask, since I just bought one that says 危 ("danger") on it. At least in Chicago, people are still wearing masks in public. But I'm certainly not going to sit at home, alone, until I get a dose of vaccine administered to me. Even if the Oxford trials have zero problems at all, I'm not in any risk groups, so I probably won't be eligible for anything until late next year at the earliest.

And now, book group! We read The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee. It was very predictable, but still a fun read.

I'm back online now, but at 8:30 a.m. the power went out, and it came back and everything was fine for about ten minutes, and then the internet went out for two-and-a-half hours. I got on the line to the ISP, and they said it was a hub outage and all I could do was wait, so that's what I did. It's not even noon and all my chores for today are already done--I vacuumed and mopped the whole house, I did my laundry, and I cleaned the kitchen. Lunch is waiting for me when I'm ready for it, and now my entire evening is open because everything I had to do then, I've already done. It feels amazing, honestly. I hope that I learn from this and realize that sometimes it's better to accomplish pressing tasks earlier rather than putting them off until later while I play video games or whatever, and by writing down how I feel about it now, I'm doing a bit to bring forth that change in myself.

Will it actually happen? Who knows. But I'll try.

After I finally get onto the work network, there was a message saying that the current work-from-home order is being extended until the end of May. That's fine with me, since I've gotten used to my extremely short commute--and thanks to writing this, I remembered to go cancel my commuter pass for June. I've got two passes saved up that I haven't used, and I have $98 in Ventra credit because apparently Ventra refunded almost my entire March pass instead of just the unused portion, so I'm set for months of riding the L once I actually start doing it again. That'll save me hundreds of dollars, so I won't complain, but I do worry a bit about the health of the L what with all the lost ridership. Just another financial aspect we'll need to worry about as we try to sort through the fallout of the coronavirus.

On Sunday, I had my first class with my Japanese tutor in a month. Over FaceTime, obviously, and I did a bunch of reading in 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ / Socrates in Love, and then since it had been so long since we met, we just talked the whole time (but in Japanese!). We talked a lot about coronavirus, obviously, and I had to look up some vocab and talk a bit circuitously to explain that current infection rates reflect public behavior as of two weeks ago due to the incubation period, and that while the number of cases in Illinois was still climbing, it wasn't climbing as fast--that the rate of increase (増加率 zōkaritsu) was lowering, but not the absolute numbers. We talked about how we're both lucky to be able to work from home, and how we have a lot of friends who are out of work, and how I've reverted back to the me in the past. A few months ago, I was going out all the time, maybe five nights a week, and had almost stopped playing video games. Now, I'm back to watching anime, playing video games, and reading, with the very occasional video chat or in-person seeing of someone else. At least I have a solid foundation I can fall back on, but it's still not great. She's an introvert and lives with her boyfriend, so she's doing pretty well, but living alone is pretty lonely.

Speaking of which, thosesocks invited me out on a walk on Saturday, when the weather turned back to warm, so after lunch I left my home for the first time in a couple days and met her outside. She walked on the sidewalk and I walked on the street, close enough to have a conversation but far enough (and both masked) to keep each other safe. We went to Lickity Split for frozen custard and ate it sitting in the library parking lot while we talked about how we're dealing with things. The answer is "mostly well, but", and I feel like that's a pretty universal experience. I should see if anyone else would like to do something similar.

With my government stimulus money, I ordered a bunch of clothes I've been eyeing for a while. It's always difficult for me to buy clothes, becusae I'm 6'5" and very thin, so anything with the right waist size has legs that are too short, and similar for shirts with sleeves. But I asked the people at MDNT45--the ones behind this post about the cloak-coat I own--about whether they could make these pants with a small waist but a much longer inseam, and they said they'd do it for no extra cost! So I ordered that, I ordered some fitted dress pants and fitted t-shirts from Amazon, and all of them actually fit! I was especially surprised by the pants, since slim-fit 31/36 pants (in inches, waist/inseam American sizing) had the potential to fit terribly, but they were exactly what I was looking for, so I immediately ordered another pair. It's so rare that I find store-bought pants that fit well that I have to seize the chance as soon as I can.

The t-shirts had prominent logos on them, so I took a seam-ripper to them and removed them. Like Cayce Pollard, I am sensitive to #Brands.

That was about the extent of my stimulus usage. I dumped a bunch of it into savings, since I have a mortgage to pay, and invested some of it since the market is down and now is the time, or at least a more advantageous time than a couple months ago. I also ordered takeout after Passover ended, since I wanted to eat bread to celebrate but obviously didn't have any in the house. Tomato bisque and a grilled cheese sandwich, with dark chocolate chip cookies for desert. Delicious.

Alright, now that I can work, I probably should get back to it. I hope everyone had a good weekend!

▶️One, I got my first property tax bill, so now of course I have to become an anarchist. Who are these people to want all this money? ZOMG teh gubmint, etc, etc. It's actually less than I expected it to be so it's not a problem, but it still stings a bit to pay thousands of dollars after the already thousands of dollars I paid when I bought the place.

It helps me remember that mostly, the rich are evil due to environmental factors, not due to innate immorality.

▶️Two, Northern Ballad has shown up a couple times in my Listening To section, and I mixed in Sailing Icy Seas and Parting Icy Skies from the Wrath of the Lich King soundtrack, so I put out a call for similar music, and then thosesocks sent me the song that's currently in there. So I guess I'm on a hurdy-gurdy kick? "One by One" isn't anything like the other songs that's linked above--I can't imagine it playing over a shot of the protagonist coming back to the burned ruins of their childhood home, or a group of soldiers drinking together the night before a battle knowing most of them won't be back the next night--but it's good in its own right! I should look up more of her music.

Also, listening to "Sailing Icy Seas" is reminding me of Wrath of the Lich King, which was the most fun I ever had playing WoW. Partially because balance druids were finally good, but also because I finally got to see the part of WoW Lore I cared about through. One major reason I trailed off hard and then stopped playing in Cataclysm is that I didn't care about why I was doing anything. I played Warcraft III, and then I played WoW, and when I killed the Lich King in June of 2010, that was the last boss I cared about fighting. I stuck around through Firelands, but when I realized I was only logging on to raid and otherwise never playing, I figured my time was done, and nowadays I don't have time for an MMO.

But raiding Ulduar was up there with very-late-night drunk Karazhan raids with some of most fun I've ever had in a video game. I don't actually want to play WoW again, but I miss those experiences and the person I was then who had them.

Well, maybe if they had classic Burning Crusade or Wrath servers I'd dip back in...

▶️Three, I've been eating vegetarian meals for dinner every night this week, after I bought some ice cream on Sunday and then due to בשר בחלב basar bechalav decided to make egg curry instead of chicken curry so that I could have naan (made with butter) with it and it's been delicious. Tonight I'm having pita, vegetables, hummus, and feta cheese--I was going to have falafel, but the Middle Eastern Grocery store was out--and when I had it on Tuesday it was delicious. I mean, spicy hummus is amazing on anything, but I was surprised at how much I liked it.

Long meeting this morning and nothing tonight. Back to work.

One of my favorite designers is Demobaza, ever since I redid my entire wardrobe back in 2015 and googled "cyberpunk clothing" not knowing what I would find. I found a lot of very expensive techwear that I wasn't interested in because who wants to go outside, some cybergoth stuff that wasn't really my thing because I didn't want to invest in a gas mask, Zolnar (from whom I bought a sweater), and Demobaza. There was a thread somewhere of people discussing it and someone saying, "Who wants to go out looking like a Metal Gear Solid villain?", I immediately answered "me" and went to their website, and it's been compliments on my fashion ever since. Just yesterday when I was shopping at Whole Foods, the woman checking me out told me that she always thought I "layered very well." I'm glad she noticed.

That said, all of my Demobaza pieces are from earlier collections like FW13 or SS15. After that, they moved in a direction I can only describe as "Fremen couture."


But what I'm writing about actually isn't Demobaza, it's about saving money by not buying Demobaza.

( A tale of thrift )

schoolpsychnerd and I did our taxes over the weekend and we're once more getting a refund! Initially, it was enough to get dinner burritos, but as we were double-checking all the numbers schoolpsychnerd spotted an error in one of our calculations. That reduced our refund from a full set of burritos to a single burrito, so I guess in a few weeks we'll be splitting a burrito. But it's better than owing very large amounts of money like we did a couple years ago, so I will gladly eat that burrito. 🌯

After beating Spirit Tracks yesterday, I did some preliminary work in setting up Skyward Sword. Emulating all the other Zelda games has been pretty easy--the DS games are entirely stylus-controlled so clicking on the screen works just fine, and I have a webcam with microphone thanks to my bookgroup so I didn't have the problems a lot of people have where the mic emulation doesn't work for the Legend of Zelda games. Twilight Princess has a GameCube version that doesn't require the WiiMote. Skyward Sword, however, is one of the few games that requires a physical WiiMote even in emulation because of the "swing to swing the sword" mechanic, so I had to resort to additional measures. I borrowed a motion plus WiiMote from aaron.hosek and bought a Dolphin Bar, which has the Wii's infrared sensors as well as a bluetooth passthrough connector specifically for hooking up WiiMotes to a PC. And it worked! I didn't play long enough to get to flying or swordplay, but running around and using menus worked fine after a bit of initial trouble passing the "please connect the nunchuck" screen. I'll start to play in ernest today. We'll see if it holds up once I start using a Loftbird.

Also on Friday, we went to a Shabbat dinner about police accountability! It was a joint even with Mishkan Chicago and the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs that was partially a presentation and partially about building awareness (and partially about welcoming the Sabbath bride and eating delicious food). We talked about the police union contract provisions and how they seemed designed for abuse--allowing police to change their official statements with no reprecussions after reviewing video or audio evidence, for example--and about groups that are gearing up to try to prevent these provisions in the union contract negotiations that are occurring soon. There were also copies of a legit zine called "How to be a Shabbes Queen: Supporting Shabbat practice in your community" that we took a copy of and I read on the train to work. There are some really good points in there about the importance of self-care. From a religious perspective, if G-d was willing to take a day off after creating the world, then you should not feel bad taking some time to yourself. From a secular perspective, it's very important to push back against the voices that say that anything that's not directly involved in activist work is a waste of time. Time to recover isn't just worthwhile, it's required.

Two-day weekends are still good, though.

This Sunday is the JLTP, and I am...prepared? I haven't studied explicitly for it, but I've kept up studying Japanese. Two years of tutoring at this point, I read a daily blog written in Japanese, I play Japanese games, I follow some Japanese people in Twitter, I listen to Japanese podcasts, I do vocab flashcards...I don't study as hard as I could, but that's because I have other hobbies. Playing games in Japanese is a way to combine them. I've taken a couple practice tests, and I did badly on one and well on another, so I'm going into the test with the assumption that I'll have a bad day and it'll go terribly, which is the recipe for a self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess all I can do is my best.

I've upped our savings again, to the point where our savings rate is something like 33%. The tax bill coming up for a vote has reminded me of the conclusion that Piketty came to in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that the twentieth century was an anomaly and the future would be a regression to the mean that humanity has held for the overwhelming majority of world history, where a tiny minority of people have all the wealth, there's a small class of people below them who support them, and everyone else lives in abject poverty. Most of my financial decisions are driven by the fear of that happening. And the fortune over time that has led to the ability to save that much.

That said, I just agreed to a friend's suggestion we try for the ticket lottery at Next and I'm probably going to get tickets for schoolpsychnerd and I to see the CSO's performance of the score accompanying a screening of Star Wars. I try not to be too much of a miser, and sometimes I even succeed.

Just a grab-bag of things that have been happening lately.

I got my yearly bonus and annual raise this week. Higher than average on both, because we managed to exceed our department goals by a respectable amount and I did pretty well. There also wasn't as much pressure to hold down salary increases this year, so I got more of a salary increase and less of a bonus. And I put it all into tax withholding and 401K contributions. Well...that's responsibility.

Yesterday was also the last day that we're using the old database system, and over the weekend they'll be switching over to the new system that they've spent the last two years working on. And true to software project form, it was a complete mess until the last week, where it was pulled into at least semi-reasonable condition. That also meant that I couldn't do anything involving the database on Friday, and since my work almost entirely involves editing database entries, I had to make work for myself. On a co-worker's suggestion, I did some prep work so that when the new database is up and able to accept new entries, I can go add in all the disciplinary actions to the appropriate physician records without having to scan through state board orders for what the doctors did wrong. Unless the database upgrade doesn't go well, in which case everything will be on fire. Hopefully it all goes smoothly, but these are computers we're talking about.

Today was the first session of schoolpsychnerd's 7th Sea 2e game! I read the book through to make sure I knew the system and I had some misgivings--it's much more loose and narrative-styled than the systems I tend to prefer--but in play it worked out really well! And doing a silly Russian accent and coughing at the republican and revolutionary talk for my Ussuran nobleman was a lot of fun. He's not that great in a fight, but he has magical powers. He's also really rich, which is kind of like a magical power! The star moment was when I called a raven to our jail cell where, we had been treacherously imprisoned for a crime we didn't commit, and asked it to fetch the keys in exchange for a bauble from my nobleman's clothing. I then let everyone out, locked the cells behind us, and left. The legend grows.

I paid our 2016 taxes. Last year we owned an enormous amount because I forgot to take into account schoolpsychnerd's new job and thus that our salary was commensurately larger. This year I spent more time modeling our income vs. taxes paid and I came a lot closer--we owed 4% of what we owed last year, in terms of additional payments beyond our normal withholding. I'm not sure how much we'll owe on state taxes, but the state is usually much better at figuring out how much we owe than the federal government is and we rarely get a large refund or have a large deficit, so I'm not that worried. Edit: We owed more on state taxes than federal taxes. Looks like I spoke too soon!

We're going to see Hamilton on Thursday. I've successfully avoided most news about it, so while of course I know the subject matter and the characters, I haven't listened to a single song all the way through, nor do I know what parts of history the musical covers. I'll probably write about it after I go, but until then, it's a mystery!

I would have had this up earlier today, but first there was a power outage that took up forty minutes of our time and then I went out to a three-hour-long dinner. Add in some other things I was doing, and there was a short delay. But it's still the first, so it's still a retrospective on the New Year!

I don't bother with New Year's resolutions. But I did find this tweet that I like:

The biggest change I made this year is that I got serious about Japanese. Technically I've been taking lessons since August of last year, but this is the year where Aya-sensei suggested that we read 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ and where I've worked my way through a fifth of a Japanese novel. I also played multiple games in Japanese and read a manga volume in Japanese as well! I never really sought out opportunities to use and practice my Japanese other than through flash cards and listening to podcasts occasionally, and that's why I was stagnant for so long. Now I'm getting better because I'm making a space for myself to do so and moving into that space.

This is also the year that we went back to Japan! And with friends! It was a whirlwind tour, and there were several places I wish we could have spent more time at, but it was a fantastic experience. And I wrote something about it every day for a total of over 50,000 words under the Japan (日本) tag, so I'll say no more about that.

I was not more social than last year, and if anything, I was even more of a hermit. A regular game night on Mondays, Japanese lessons on Tuesdays, and book group on Wednesdays along with schoolpsychnerd having a standing commitment on Wednesdays meant that time for the two of us was in shorter supply than previous, so I valued it more highly and make extra time for it, pushing other things to the side. This isn't actually something I mean to change either way. It's not something that bothers me. But I would like to play more board games in 2017, like Kingdom Death and Android and Chaos in the Old World and our old copy of HeroQuest with the cannibalized DragonStrike parts, and that means I need to reach out and not just retreat into single-player video games. We'll see.

Also, maybe I should have a minis assembling session for Kingdom Death. Still in the box.

I managed to keep saving money even with going to Japan and the bulk of replacing my wardrobe! Discovering Orimono and Guylook and similar sites, to say nothing of the designers I already knew of, gave me a pretty wide selection of clothes I loved, but fortunately my closet is only so big and is basically full now. There's a few more pieces I want to acquire, but my wardrobe is basically complete for now. And I put a good chunk of our salary into savings every month, aided by our lack of student loans. It'll be worthless after the Last War when the only currencies will be bullets and the heaped skulls of the dead, but maybe I'll be able to trade with some feral hedge fund managers for toilet paper and beef jerky.

We were supposed to switch to the new data management system at work, but the project is behind schedule, so no news on that front.

I usually post pretty hopeful quotes at the end of the year, but I'm not feeling that hopeful now. The quote I think is the most apt is a bit more pessimistic:

"There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hopefully 2017 will not be as bad as we fear, for me, or for any of you.


明けましておめでとう。皆様のご健康をお祈り申し上げます！