Listen to the Rain

Twenty years of ACEN! Not all of them, of course--I didn't go from 2009-2011 because I was living in Japan, I didn't go in 2013 because I had a bit of a sour experience in 2012 and that was the point where schoolpsychnerd was deep in the throes of grad school and we had very little money, I didn't go in 2020-2021 because thanks to the Plague Years it didn't happen, and I didn't go in 2022-2023 because 2022 required full masks at all times (which I have no moral objection to, it just didn't sound very fun) and because sashagee was too sick to go and I didn't want to go by myself. But last year I went, and now here we are again.

It's been a while since I stayed at a hotel other than the Hyatt. This year, however, my luck finally ran out--when the hotel lottery happened I failed to get a room at the Hyatt, and then I failed to get rooms at the other hotels I tried. Fortunately, Anime Chicago as a community prepares for this. Several people grabbed extra rooms in the knowledge that there would definitely be people who missed out, and I was able to get one at the Embassy Suites. I've never stayed here before--I've stayed at the Doubletree, and at the Hilton, but this was a first...and honestly I'd go back. The rooms are huge and, more importantly for a couple with a four-year-old, they're suites. There's a front room with a couch, an armchair, a table with more chairs, and a little bar area, then a door between the two connecting rooms, so we don't need to turn all the lights out and immediately go to bed when it's time for Laila to go to sleep. I would say "You can't buy that kind of peace for money" but we obviously did.

And now, the daily accounting.

( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

And now we're home. We're tired. We're sore. sashagee took a five-hour nap just after lunch. But, she's already decided that Uzaki Hana is going to be the cosplay she sticks with--she's going to work on it a bit, get screen-accurate brown boots, get a tighter shirt (she has lost weight since I got the original for her), and maybe get a wig. She expected to wear it a bit and have some fun and was very surprised when multiple people came up to ask her for her picture.

She did say she was a bit suspicious, though. Uzaki-chan is a romantic comedy, but the shirt specifically says "Super huge!" (sugoi dekai), so whenever someone asked for her picture she was like "Hmm..."

The only downside were all the things we couldn't get to. We didn't get to see the Conbini panel and couldn't get into the Oregon Trail panel. We didn't go to the dance on Friday, which it sounds like might have had more music to sashagee's taste. We didn't get to go back to see lightninglychee and stephen_poon again. We didn't try any of the board games at all. We didn't get to see the AMV contest, which as I've repeatedly mentioned, used to be a central event that I always went to. There's always soon much to do and not enough time to do it.

Laila is going to come back with infinite energy and run both of us over. But we had a lovely time with all our friends. Looking forward to ACEN next year!

It ended in the best possible way it could, honestly.

I brought my phone in to the Apple Store and left it there for a couple hours--they said they would take it "downstairs" even though the building only seemed to have a single floor and no backroom, so I guess they were bringing it down to secret chambers where the dwarves might work their spells on it to the sound of pounding hammers--and when I came back at the appointed time, they said it was done. They brought it up, I logged into my iCloud account and, after a bit of difficulty, got my phone number back. Most systems seemed to be designed for copying everything from one phone to a physically distinct phone, which I didn't have, so I had to use my iPad, go into the carrier app, and told them to send a new eSIM to my phone. I downloaded it, my father called to verify the number worked, and off I went.

Since the internals were failing and this was Apple, they decided to just use a hammer instead of a scalpel to solve the problem. They tore out everything that wasn't the screen, camera, or casing and just replaced it all. I have a new motherboard, new battery, new everything. They even fixed the USB hookup, which was being pretty twitchy, so now the physical headphones I use only at work (since I listen to podcasts for eight hours a day and my AirPods won't last that long) have no trouble and I don't have to jiggle the plug back and forth six times to get an audio connection. My phone, which I had been thinking of replacing this year when the new iPhones come out because I was having so many performance problems, is now running exactly like a new phone, because it basically is a new phone. And thanks to AppleCare I paid $0 instead of the $650 on the bill that entirely new internals would have cost, so I'm very satisfied.

Now I just need to do something about my device storage. I have 800 gb out of 1000 gb and 700 gb of it is podcasts. Need to do more podcast listening!

I had a lovely (from my perspective, anyway) interaction with the person who checked me in, too. She noticed that my phone was in Japanese and asked me I spoke Japanese, so I told her that I used to live in Japan. It turned out she was a Korean adoptee in America who had taken several trips to Japan and Korea for tourism reasons and to visit birth family relatives, so we had a nice conversation about language-learning and traveling in Japan while we were trying to get my phone booted up and successfully primed for work by the dwarf-smiths downstairs. It was actually a very pleasant way to spend the afternoon, considering I was there because my exocortex broke.

So over the past few years, I played through every mainline Legend of Zelda game, in order of release, in Japanese, and wrote a review of every one after I beat it. Here they are:

1. ゼルダの伝説: the Hyrule Fantasy / The Legend of Zelda


2. ゼルダの伝説：リンクの冒険 / Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link


3. ゼルダの伝説：神々のトライフォース / The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past


4. ゼルダの伝説：夢をみる島 DX / The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX


5. ゼルダの伝説：時のオカリナGC裏 / The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time Master Quest


6. ゼルダの伝説：ムジュラの仮面 / The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask


7. ゼルダの伝説：ふしぎの木の実 -大地の章- / The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons


8. ゼルダの伝説：ふしぎの木の実 -時空の章- / The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages


9. ゼルダの伝説：風のタクト / The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker


10. ゼルダの伝説：４つの剣+ / The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures


11. ゼルダの伝説：ふしぎのぼうし / The Legend of Zelda: the Minish Cap


12. ゼルダの伝説：トワイライトプリンセス / The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess


13. ゼルダの伝説：夢幻の砂時計 / The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass


14. ゼルダの伝説：大地の汽笛 / The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks


15. ゼルダの伝説：スカイウォードソード / The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword


16. ゼルダの伝説：神々のトライフォース 2 / The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds


17. ゼルダの伝説：トライフォース３銃士 / The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes


18. ゼルダの伝説：ブレス オブ ザ ワイルド / The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Remakes:

• ゼルダの伝説：夢を見る島 Switch版 / Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Switch Version

Non-canon entries:

• Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition
• ケイデンス・オブ・ハイラル: クリプト・オブ・ネクロダンサー feat. ゼルダの伝説 / Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda

More later as I get to them.

I wasn't a huge Zelda fan before I started this, but I certainly am now. What a great series.

Laila last week went into the hospital for an overnight EEG, just as a way to check up on her seizures. We got the results back yesterday, and they indicate no change and even a bit of improvement from her last EEG, and as it still says, we don't know what caused her infantile spasms (the best results--it means there's no obvious underlying condition that will continue to cause problems).

And so, here's a video of Laila being cute:

Spent time reading the news yesterday and it was depressing, as always (and especially lately). As I was reading, Laila came over and climbed into my lap and I gave her a big squeezing hug. When I was done, she looked up at me and said, "Better?" and then stretched up and said "mwah" as she gave me a kiss.

It did make me feel better.

As part of Laila's state-funded (in America! Gasp!) intervention. I'm in the office today, so I wasn't there, but I asked sashagee what she had to say about it and I was told:

"She said not to tell the behavioral therapist but she is not worried about Laila at all. She said she's been doing this since '97 and Laila is fast to learn and adjust and likes to be engaged and said some sentences while with her. And she said she's doing really well. I told her the evaluation was through Zoom and she held back an eye roll haha

I've basically always assumed the "she has the language skills of a 14-month-old" as given during the Zoom evaluation (at 25 months) was complete nonsense, but it's nice to see an actual professional confirm it.

A while ago, I wrote about our attempt to get a house for our Free Company in Final Fantasy XIV. At that time, the system for getting housing was terrible and encouraged standing and clicking on an object for literal hours at a time, hoping you'd be the first person to get the "buy house?" dialogue. People literally made themselves sick doing it, or exacerbated their stress injuries. aaron.hosek to this day hates going to the housing areas because hearing the music brings back memories of clicking for 17 hours.

But! To their credit, they realized that the system was bad and in Endwalker they implemented a new system--a lottery. You buy a ticket and there's a drawing, and this also makes it easier for Free Companies to win the larger houses since each member can buy their own ticket. When they released housing in Ishgard, that's how we won a large that we turned into a haunted library. When they put in more houses a few months ago, sashagee and I both bid on mediums near each other in the Lavender Beds (the magical forest kingdom area), each with one other bid, and she won and I lost. I was pretty annoyed for a while and eventually got over it, but basically every cycle a new medium would come up for sale, I'd bid and lose, and that's the way it was. The last time, there were two mediums, one with 167 bids and one with 39. I bid on the one with 39 and when I saw that it was still unclaimed during the results period, I assumed it was like several other times and the real winner just hadn't logged on to claim it, so I was very surprised to click and see "The winning number is...40"!

I've already decorated the house, because I just mostly copied my old themes. I wrote about my old housing layout here, though that was before I did a major revamp, and the new house is basically the same. Since it's twice as big, I added a separate dining room with table and chairs, a small cloakroom in the front with a bench, a sitting area with books and drinks, an upstairs lounging area with triple triad board, expanded the library, added a washroom with flushable toilet, and put a meditation area in the bedroom. And after all that, I'm at 299/300 slots used for decorations, so I need them to add the new expanded housing slots so I can keep putting in more decor. If we get 100 more slots, I might even actually put in an upstairs as a trophy area--right now it's walled off.

I don't want a large because I don't like the layout, so unless another house opens in a location I like better, I've found my dream house (in a video game). The music is gentle, it overlooks a lake with giant trees, and glowing flowers wave softly in the breeze at night. Now to wait for the new slots that should come sometime in 2024.

On Friday, which I took off because it was the first day of Shavuot, we went to the Field Museum with my parents for a couple hours so I could check out the First Kings of Europe exhibit and my mother and sashagee could wander around the animal exhibits with Laila, and then then took Laila with them back out to the suburbs so that they could have some time with their cute granddaughter and sashagee and I could have a weekend to ourselves!

Unfortunately, sashagee was sick for part of the weekend, so we didn't actually do that much and she spent a large chunk of it resting. But we still managed to do some things. On Friday we went out to dinner at Uvae:


We originally had seats outside but it was weirdly cold for even the end of Chicago May--wind gusting at like 13°C, far too cold to just sit outside. We saw another couple move indoors after just a few minutes outside and then we asked if we could do the same, which the waitress was happy to arrange.

I was a little worried that we would suffer the Parent Problem where on a night out without the kids we'd struggle to think of what to talk about, but we didn't. Other than sashagee worrying about Laila being away from us, we had a lovely conversation, ate our salad and meals and drank our drinks, and wrapped up around 6:30 p.m.


We paid and left and I said goodbye to head to my next event--I went to Friday night Shabbat services because it was Rabbi Deena's last day. Since she had a special blessing for Laila's mikvah visit I wanted to see her off and leave a note for her, and after services ended I walked up to some of the people I knew. yoni-labow-5693413a, once he had completed the traditional telling me his name again because for some reason he always assumes I don't remember him--maybe I give off "Who is this guy?" vibes?--invited me out to a bar with his wife whoolia45 (the OneTable sponsor of the dinner I went to at Milt's pre-Plague Years) and some friends. I said I had to talk to sashagee about and by yoni-labow-5693413a's reaction I knew it was fine if she came, so I told her where we were going and she hopped in a Lyft and met us there. It was more of a bar and grill so it had live music, children playing pool, and closed at 10 p.m. so we had our one drink--I had an Old Fashioned as is my custom, sashagee got a Lunacy beer--everyone met sashagee finally, we got an invite to aaronhparker's outdoor Shabbat in two weeks, and everyone got to see photos of Laila. yoni-labow-5693413a invited us to a Shabbat dinner too, though I don't remember when it is.

Man, my posts are always filled with tons of referential links to my friends' online presence. I'd say this is a Sign of the Times but mostly it's because I don't want to use people's names unless they already put their names out there on the internet. Regardless, it's not going to get any better in the rest of this post.

Saturday we did mostly nothing while sashagee rested and napped and I caught up a bit in Genshin Impact, but in the evening we had an invite to lisekatevans's house for afschifler's birthday! sashagee was all dressed in a cute sundress and was planning to wear heels since heels are half her shoe collection but she hasn't gotten to wear them in years, but since the weather was 20°C and sunny I suggested walking. We had Some Brief Discourse™ on my suggestion but in the end we left with sashagee in flats and walked through side streets filled with flowering trees for thirty minutes until we arrived at the party, lisekatevans handed us some drinks, and we spent a while chatting with people and eating tavern-style pizza and tres leches cake.

Me: "Tres leches. That's Spanish for 'three leches.' "
sashagee: 🤣🤣🤣

The benefit of having a fiancée who is not Too Online is that this is the first time she's heard these jokes.

Sunday we once again mostly rested and played games, and then Laila came back in the evening and was happy enough to see us but it was clear that she had an extremely fun time at Papa and Nana's--after they left, she grabbed her toy bag and walked over to the front door while waving bye-bye at us! I can see many more grandparents' weekends in the future--Laila and my parents both are getting older and need as much time together as they can get. And I think it was really helpful for sashagee and me too.

As the saying goes, the only real parenting hack is having grandparents who live nearby.

Laila's actual twenty-month birthday was Friday, but thanks to work and Shabbat (sundown is at around 4:30 nowadays, which means that there is no "Meh, I'll update after work") I didn't get to it then, and thanks to sashagee not feeling well on Saturday I didn't get to it then either--plus I'll admit, I was distracted by modding for Cataclysm: Darker Days ahead. But now it's Sunday and I've already worked a bit on my mods, so it's time for an update!

Last time at eighteen months, the most exciting update was that Laila started walking! She's still doing that--which would normally be obvious but in babies with infantile spasms is not always guaranteed--and nowadays she's talking! Only a few words, of course, simple things like "abba" and "mama," but she's expanding her vocabulary. Her favorite word is probably "Wow," which she uses all the time when she finds something interesting. But it's not an excited baby wow, all full of squeals and giggles. No, when Laila says "wow," she whispers it, either with a serious face or with a small smile. It's like she's spending her energy to take it all in rather than use it on jumping around and shouting.

There are other words she uses too. Just today, she poked sashagee in the chest and said "Boob." Sometimes she'll say "oh no" when something bad happens, and while usually she does it the same way as wow, there was one time she was upset and collapsed on the floor wailing, and in between her sobs she interspersed "Ohhh nooo!" She also knows a bit of sign language--she'll currently use "more" and "all done"--and she knows what they mean, too. sashagee introduced both of them in the context of food, but Laila has expanded her usage. When she's ready to get out of the bath, she'll sign "all done," and just yesterday I picked her up and lifted her above my head. She made the "more" sign and then started laughing and giggling when I lifted her as high as my arms could reach and she was almost on the ceiling.

Here's a video with her saying "wow," at around the 0:31 mark:

There's still so much about the world she has to discover.

She really loves reading, too. One of her favorite pastimes now is to bring a book over to sashagee or me and then plop down in our laps and wait for us to read it. She still has a baby attention span, though, so we'll get partway through the book and then she'll start flipping back and forth between the pages trying to find something interesting. Then she'll get bored of that book, stand up, go get another book, bring it back, and the process starts over again. Once she's older she'll have more patience and be able to handle an entire book at once, but that day is still a ways away.

When she goes down for a nap, or goes to sleep, she'll kiss sashagee and me good night.

How else will she grow and change?

A few years ago, lisekatevans, worldbshiny, meowtima, and I were out at a restaurant--Margie's Candies, I think--and over conversation I mentioned that I was always confused by the name praline for food since it sounded to me like it was referring to some kind of fish. lisekatevans thought it was hilarious and talked about "saltwater pralines" and "freshwater pralines," and when we said we should do this dinner thing again, we named our group chat "Saltwater Pralines" and met up at least once every month-to-month-and-a-half for dinner until the Plague Years began and ruined all meetups.

I looked through my archives to try to find if I'd written about it, but surprisingly I can't find anything.

Anyway, sometime in late 2019 we went to a tiki bar called Three Dots and a Dash and had a lovely time, and it was suggested that we get back together there on Talk Like a Pirate Day, in September 2020, to buy the $350 Port Royale, a giant pirate ship filled with rum, and drink it all. Well, you know what happened in 2020, and in 2021 (plus Laila), but now that meowtima has accepted a new job and is moving away from our fair city, we didn't have any more time to wait until September 2019, so yesterday we assembled once again.

After walking down the pedestrianized Clark Street, filled with pop-out tables set up on the street, and turned two corners to enter the alleyway leading down to to the bar. When I got to the table, it was dominated by a giant bowl in the middle with five straws poked into it, so I took a few sips and ordered an Old Fashioned, the signature drink of Chicago. But at a tiki bar, well:


Those are peanut-dusted banana chips in the background. I had a papaya salad and spring rolls to go with them.

The giant drink ran out shortly after I arrived, so we decided to order another one. We briefly discussed getting the pirate ship, but it was instead decided to unleash the kraken--the "Shotstapus," with five shots of 151 demerara rum mixed with fijian rum and fruit juice. Shot is a misnomer since each glass was maybe 2.5 shot's worth of drink and we all sipped them because we didn't want to die, but honestly they were better for sipping anyway. The point of a shot is to get drunk faster and at this point it was only 8:30 p.m., so we sipped our drinks, sipped our shots, talked about Pittsburgh, I talked about Laila, worldbshiny talked about her job, and we had a lovely time. At the end of the night, the discussion turned to dessert, and meowtima cast the (weighted) deciding vote for Portillo's so that was our next destination. Most people got milkshakes but I just got fries, since I didn't really want to overload my stomach. At this point it was only 9 p.m., and lisekatevans suggested we go to a place she knew called the Drifter. We walked a few blocks, leaving the heavily-populated Clark Street area and walking through a couple empty streets, before we found a place called the Green Door Tavern. lisekatevans led us through the bar, down the back stairs to the restrooms, and opened a hidden panel in the wall to lead us into the Drifter, a genuine speakeasy still in operation today.

The menu is printed on Tarot cards:


That was the drink I got, and I sat and drank it in the dim light while the bar slowly filled up, the waitress snuck behind me to open the curtains, and a burlesque performer came out and began her act. I have no comment on it, since my back was to her, other than that the music drowned out her singing, which was a shame since it was "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" which sticks in my memory thanks to playing Fallout: New Vegas.

When she was done, the waitress closed the curtain--manually--and at that point it was about 10:30 p.m., so we closed our tab, walked up to the L, and went home. I don't know if this will happen again, since even though I know meowtima will come back to visit we'll all have to have free schedules during that time, but I'm glad we can end the Saltwater Pralines on a bang.

I got a 10% raise out of nowhere yesterday!

My boss asked me to submit my timecard early, which was very odd--she's never done that before, but I thought she might be going on vacation and didn't think much of it. And then I got an email from my old boss (now boss's boss) congratulating me on my new raise given based on my hard work, proven track record, etc.

I suspect that being a man with a baby also has something to do with it, since the assumption is that men with families need that money to support them. In my case though that's actually true since sashagee is still too sick to work even if she wanted to, which she doesn't until Laila goes to school. So I'll gladly take that money and put it to good use.

We had a steak dinner yesterday to celebrate, but the truth is we already had the steak and I had planned to make it. The raise just provided a retroactive excuse. It sure was delicious, though!

As a one-year-old, Laila is no longer a little baby and so the nomenclature must change.

On Friday night, sashagee and I drove out to her parents' place in the suburbs to spend the night so that we could properly get everything ready for the party. The suburban location meant that most of my friends couldn't come--a lot of live the true city existence and so don't own cars--but weather was going to be so lovely that the backyard was certainly the best place to hold it, so we did. On Saturday sashagee and I blew up balloons, her parents hung up the "🍓 HAPPY 🍓 BIRTHDAY 🍓" banner, and sashagee baked the cake that Laila would be eating.

I had never heard of the whole smash cake thing and neither had my parents--when I asked if my father knew about it, his answer was just "No" and when I explained it, he elaborated, "...why?"--and Laila didn't really do any fun kind of smashing. She saw some food in front of her and she immediately set about doing what babies do to food--eating it. No extra movements, no fuss, pure predatory efficiency. She ate the whole thing and then spent a while crawling around the yard, with no apparent effect from all the sugar (though sashagee picked a mostly cream frosting so it wouldn't be incredibly sugary). She did stay up until almost 4:15 p.m. but the excitement from a lot of people probably led to that.

There are plenty of photos up on sashagee's instagram but here are a couple more!:

( Two pics of Laila )

Here's to many more happy birthdays in the future!

We went to the theatre.


Thirteen Days was the last show that I was going to go to before all theatre was cancelled last year, and at the time they vowed that when the Plague Year ended they'd put on the same show again. Well, the Plague Year hasn't quite ended yet but it's ended enough that they were able to put on a show, so I bought theatre tickets for the first time in a year and a half, my parents agreed to come visit and babysit Laila, and sashagee and I went for a Sunday matinee.

Thirteen Days is about the Cuban Missile crisis, like the movie of the same name, both adapted from Robert Kennedy's memoirs, though the play obtained special permission from the estate to adapt dialogue from recently-declassified transcripts of the meetings. lisekatevans played Bobby Kennedy--the play has an entirely-female cast--and did most of the narration. If I have a criticism about the play, it's that a lot of the action was told, not shown. Maybe it's because there wasn't enough recorded dialogue to come up with a satisfying script for those meetings, or maybe it's because they weren't as exciting as the meetings that we did see. I would have liked to see some of the meetings that President Kennedy wasn't present for where EXCOMM hammered out their recommendations, though.

That said, the atmosphere of the play was terrific. There was a real sense of danger in the air, at the possibility of global thermonuclear war, and even though I already knew all the historical events I was still in suspense about what would happen next. I already knew about Stanislav Petrov, and a couple years ago I read Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War and learned how close I was to dying in atomic fire before my first birthday, and the common thread of all of these is (pessimistically) how many times humanity came to the brink of a nuclear war or (optimistically) how we always pulled back from the brink. I had that in mind the whole time I was watching, especially since we only got the American perspective. As in the Able Archer incident, the Soviets had no way of knowing what was going through the Americans' minds. That applies to everyone, actually--the most memorable moment for me was after multiple discussions about a quid pro quo removal of missiles in Turkey, how the Americans wanted to remove the Turkish missiles anyway, how they'd have to talk to NATO, how they can't remove the missiles in response to the Soviets' actions because that looks like bowing to a thread, President Kennedy shouts, "We've been talking about this for a WEEK and no one has told [the Turks]?!" The flow of information was definitely much slower in the days where you'd have to wait for news to come in over the wire, and those scenes where the stress breaks through stand above the various "Mr. President, we recommend invading" ones.

The play is definitely in the "America, Fuck Yeah" mode. Since it's based on Robert Kennedy's memoir, it's about how in the face of unwarranted Soviet aggression, America's steady head and firm resolve forced the Soviets to back down and prevented war. But any changes would make it a completely different play, and it's worthwhile to present America's perspective--that's certainly what the people in those meetings believed they were doing. And with already having to cut out a lot of meetings, adding in a Soviet or Cuban perspective as well would have required changing everything and presenting an entirely different play.

It's currently getting great reviews and runs through the end of the month.