Listen to the Rain

For the first time in a long while, I actually added some icons into the pool I'm using!


I only had one Japan-related icon, and even that I only added after I moved back to America and then edited into some old posts. This provides more diversity I could have used then. The left one is a picture of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima City that says "Peace to the world," the middle one a picture I took of 壬生の花田植 (Mibu no Hanadaue), a 500-year-old rice planting festival in Chiyoda. The text there is the Japanese version of "When in Rome"--gō ni itte wa, gō ni shitagae, "When you go to your ancestral village, follow their rules." The icon on the right says "Land of Eight Million Gods." It's from a picture I took of a shrine to Inari we stumbled on while wandering through the hills of Kamakura.

There's one more icon I have that was sitting in my icons folder. I didn't make it, but I don't have the source anymore:


That should come in handy when I post about studying Japanese.

Well, the time has finally come.

I've had a Dreamwidth for years, ever since the initial migration, and I've always kept it updated with content from my Livejournal just it case. It turns out that case has arrived. I'm still waiting for the comments to import again, but a lot of the conversation on my posts has moved to Facebook and Twitter anyway. I'll be sad to lose some of those old comments if they don't import, but not too sad. And I'm not super interested in making sure that my blog follows the laws of the Russian Federation with respect to political or sexual diversity content.

I'm not looking forward to fixing all the internet links on my posts. Since I extensively link to things I've already written, there's a lot of Livejournal links buried in everything I write. I'll get to it eventually, probably starting with stuff like my video game reviews and my let's play of Baldur's Gate II, and move on from there. If you're someone who looks through my old posts, I ask for your patience.

Sigh. I used LJ for 14 years, but all things end. 永遠のものがない, after all.

Yesterday, softlykarou accidentally woke me up while she was looking for something in our bedroom before she left for work, and it took me a while to get back to sleep. Eventually, after some fitful tossing and turning, I gave up on sleeping, grabbed my phone from my bedside cube (we sleep on a futon, so I have a low-to-the-ground cube instead of a table), and started checking Twitter. When that was exhausted, I grabbed my iPad, popped myself up on my pillow, and started reading the internet. Then, all of a sudden, my iPad's screen went all jagged like in this Super Mario Brothers video. After some fruitless effort to fix it, I was about to get up to go check my computer for information on how to fix it-

-and then I opened my eyes onto a dark room. My phone and iPad were both on the cube where I left them. My phone alarm going off had woken me up, which I assume, dear reader, you already knew because the subject of this post has "dream" in it. But I'm a little annoyed that the first dream I can remember in months is a dream of what I do every morning anyway with an anxiety-inducing ending.

Like the question says, really. I originally had the tags only in Japanese, and then I added the English translations later so that it'd be useful for most of my blog's readers, who don't speak Japanese (or don't speak it well). But are they still useful? It makes it harder for other people to find the tags, they aren't in alphabetical order or even kana-based order--く comes before アfor some reason, for example--and a lot of the time when I'm writing, I'm in a hurry to find the tags so I just skip past the Japanese and read the English straightaway. Thus, a poll:

[Poll #1972984]

Yes, that song I'm "listening" to is a real song, and it's exactly as bad as you're probably imagining it to be.

For Labor Day weekend, schoolpsychnerd and I went out to visit my parents in the suburbs, prompted by them mentioning that they had tickets to go on a boat ride on the Fox River, which was pretty much exactly like I expected. It was only an hour and the boat wasn't that fast--and it wasn't a real steamboat, since the paddle is just for show--but it was still really relaxing. There was even an overcast sky, so I didn't have to worry about being sunburned.

That's not the main thing I thought was notable, though.While I was looking through the stuff that I told my parents to throw away that they never threw away, I managed to find one of the books I was looking for--the World of Warcraft RPG, about which I'll have another entry later--and didn't find my Warcraft III CDs and had to buy them again, but one of the things I did find down in the basement while rooting through the storage room were the journals I kept in high school.

For pretty much the entirety of my four years in high school, I kept a pen and paper journal. I wrote at least a page every day, and sometimes more. Thinking back on that now, I wonder what exactly I wrote about? The daily minutiae of life in high school, I assume, and all the ponderings that only an adolescent who doesn't realize that their amazing philosophical insights have already been better expressed by others can think are worth writing down. That's what I remember going into that journal, and while I was there, I didn't pull them out and read them again. Maybe I should have. I've often thought of taking them and transcribing the entries in them into LJ, which wouldn't be as bad as it sounds because I wrote them using allusion and obfuscation with the aim of making anyone else who read them have a difficult time figuring out what it going on. Unfortunately, that works for me too--schoolpsychnerd read them a few years ago, and I couldn't answer most of her questions about them because whatever the context for the references within had long sense passed from my mind.

I think the main thing that I want to keep is continuity. I started out on Ujournal, which just vanished out from under me one day (which is why I back everything up on Dreamwidth, just to be safe). A while later, the entries came back on AboutMyLife.net, and while I saved some entries (you can see them under my Ireland tag), I reasoned that I had changed enough that it didn't matter and let the rest go. I still regret that. I posted a lot of random stuff, and a lot of worthless stuff...or at least, that's what I remember. Even AboutMyLife.net is gone now, so there's basically no way to get the others back. At least if I wrote down the stuff from my high school journals, it'd be saved, and in re-reading them to transcribe them would probably be personally valuable. But it's the probably that stops me, and also how much work it would be. Typing in more than 1500 handwritten pages would take a very long time. But if I don't do that, it'll probably get lost somewhere, like the other book and my WCIII CDs did. Ugh.

I haven't looked at it in over a decade. Maybe it doesn't matter.

"All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return."

There we go. Fixed my background image for wider browsers. It's a bit darker now, though. Any thoughts?

Edit: I tend to run with my Firefox window at around 900 x 600 or so, do I didn't even realize that there was a ton of space around the old one for a while. (^^)''

...neither of which I'm particularly happy about.

My employeer does not offer matching contributions to a 401K. It does offer a lump sum as a percentage of yearly salary, though, but it's anywhere from 1-3%, which isn't that great.

Also, a Comcast guy finally showed up, but there's wasn't much he could do, since (according to him) Comcast are cheap assholes who need something shoved in their face before they stop blaming it on you. He did suggest that we record the signal levels when the modem goes down, as well as saying that sometimes Comcast's equipment needs a bit to adjust to the heat/cold during changes in the weather.

He also lives in our apartment complex, and we have his number and permission to call during business hours. That, at least, is something.

It's interesting how, as the people I have on my friends page slowly graduate college and move onto other things, the amount of posts has crashed. There used to be 10 posts a day or so on average. Now, it's more like 3.