Listen to the Rain

Part of parenting is flexibility and that means that Farmer's Market Dinner is on a Thursday this week.

We went to the farmers' market at the normal time and met aaron.hosek there! We were thinking of meeting him there last week but he had to go get his car cleaned, but we did meet his girlfriend there by happenstance! This week we walked over and met him there, he got to meet Laila, he bought dinner--pizza and donuts, but from the farmer's market so they're obviously much healthier--and we bought the ingredients for burgers because that's what sashagee wanted! I made curry last weekend and then a couple days ago I made fried rice using chicken hearts and livers that we also got from the farmer's market, and sashagee is still a bit sensitive to food, so I have a lot of leftovers to eat. But burgers? Those she can do.

( Burg )

That's all for today--I have a bunch of extra stuff to do so I need to get to it! I do have to go get a birth certificate tomorrow, though, so I may have more to write then (or after Shabbat), depending.

It took me years to realize that part of The Hosting of the Sidhe was about a redhead and not someone whose hair was literally on fire, though I suppose you can never tell with the Fair Folk.

My iPad seems pretty decisively broken. It started acting like it had updated to iOS 12.2, but when I plugged into my computer iTunes started downloading the 12.2 update, and then said the iPad wasn't capable of syncin. When I put it in recovery mode it said the iPad could not be recovered and gave me an error 35, which indicates a hardware problem. It's not a problem with the computer or the cable because my phone connected and synced just fine. That leaves the iPad, so I'm taking it in to the Apple Store today. Hopefully they'll fix it, and if not, I guess I'll be getting a new iPad. At least I have the money.

I'm annoyed about it, but that's all. Something like that would have caused panic or a huge anxiety spike even a year ago, but now I'm just determined to fix it. That's progress.

I went to therapy yesterday after dinner at Furious Spoon with lisekatevans to celebrate National Ramen Day, and we talked a bit about my hair, I think because I mentioned it being tangled. My therapist asked if I grew my hair out as a way of deliberately blurring gender lines, and I said no. My conception of gender is fluid, but not in that specific way. As I phrased it to her:

I am a man. Everything I do is masculine.

...but I did mention that literally as long as I could remember, ever since I was a young boy, I've always wanted long hair. I felt best right before my parents took me into the barber to get a haircut, and I always hated going to the barber. It's what led to kind of unhealthy hair--for a long time I'd only get a haircut once a year, and it's only recently that I've started going in for maintenance cuts every 3-4 months.

The conversation continued to how I hate interrupting people in conversations, and how I tend to have a hard time talking to people unprompted, and tend to allow other people to strike up a connection with me, and she suggested maybe my appearance leads to that. I have a lot of experiences that are alien to most men, like people telling me I'm pretty, or touching my hair, or catcalling me, or plopping down next to me and giving me their numbers, and having such an idiosyncratic (as I phrased it) appearance leads to that. Most men aren't over six feet tall, very thin, with waist-length wavy red hair, and dressed all in form-fitting black clothes, but that tends to be what I wear when I go out. And it has worked for me so far. I made all my friends at university because gurami abruptly sat across from me at lunch and introduced himself, saying that he was in three of my classes, and through him I met everyone else.

I remember one time at Dracula's Ball, there was a man with a stuffed animal plush on his shoulder. t3chnomag3 and greyselke went up to talk to him and it turned out he wore it because he was very shy and it got people to come up and talk to him, so it definitely worked out for him.

But as my therapist pointed out, this leaves me at the mercy of other people. And it's worked out for me so far, and may work out in the future, but there's no guarantee of that. It would be better to have the tools to make connections myself so that I can use them if I want rather than hoping for fate to work out. That's easier said than done, obviously, but one thing my therapist keeps bringing up and which I agree with her wholeheartedly is that flexibility is just better overall. It's better to be able to adapt to a wide variety of situations, to not require rigid routines or very specific forms of interaction, so that I'm not lost or out of place outside of those circumstances.

She also brought up that my complete hatred of interrupting people makes it harder for me to make an impression in group settings, because I usually sit in silence unless there's an obvious pause where I can speak, and that lack of impression means it's harder to carry on an interaction into a one-on-one conversation. She's right about that, too, but I'm less sure how to feel comfortable with inserting myself into an existing conversation. I hate being interrupted and I'm very conscious of how much other people hate being talked over too. Can I find a balance? Maybe? I can try.

Summary: I have a very different personal experience than average, and it's meant I haven't had to develop the social skills that some people do. And those skills would be useful for me to have, so I should think about working on them.

AIM is shutting down December 15th.

I'm not one of the people who still use AIM. For a while I kept it running through Pidgin for the last couple of people that I used to talk to on it, but they either drifted away or moved to other services. After a few months without a single message, I stopped loading it up, and never bothered installing it when I replaced my computer. Whatever chat logs I had are long since gone.

But so much of my life has been conducted through AIM. All the social planning when I was at university, talking to friends on weekday nights before text messages were free, people I met online or through my pre-MMO gaming days, like the first online freedom RP I ever participated in (check the character page and guess who I was!) or the Neverwinter Nights persistent server I joined for a while.

AIM was how I met schoolpsychnerd, and most of how we kept in contact when we weren't playing World of Warcraft.

I haven't even thought of it in months. I do all my chatting now through Facebook messenger, Gchat, or just iMessage because my phone is always with me. It's more convenient and I'm not tied to my computer. But this, added with Photobucket's self-inflicted demise or Livejournal's transformation, it's a reminder that even though people say the Internet is forever, that's not true. Especially when so much of the internet is corporate territory that they can shut down or change beyond recognition at any time, without any warning. The Internet already is the cyberpunk dystopia that we were promised, corporate fiefdoms and all.

I should get the AIM log-on and log-off sounds and put them on my phone.

Nearly every year since we moved back from Japan, schoolpsychnerd and I have made time to go out to visit my parents in October because in addition to seeing them and getting to eat my mother's delicious food, St. Charles's Scarecrow Festival is held that month. We last went two years ago, noting that the scarecrows were better than when we went three years ago, and last year we didn't go because I kickstarted tickets for the H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast live show and it turned out that was the same weekend. But this time we didn't have to worry about that and so after work on Friday, we took the train out to the suburbs.

We originally thought about going out to Kuiper Farms to go pick apples, where we went with uriany two years ago, but my mother mentioned that my father couldn't come because he was playing in the community band at Batavia Octoberfest. I asked her what else was going on there and she said that she had no idea, because it was the festival's first year, so we decided to go there instead. After walking from my parents' house to downtown and being disappointed that the leaves were mostly still green, lunch at East China Inn, the Chinese food that I grew up eating which I'm pretty sure hasn't updated the prices since I was a child either, we walked over to River Street just in time to see the band performance.

When we got there, I was in for a surprise:


That's Mr. Heath on the right, directing the community band. He was the band director at Batavia High School when I was a student there and played euphonium in the band, like my father before me. And speaking of that, my father is in the band, though out of the shot to the left, sitting next to my middle school band director Mr. Stiers who is playing the tuba.

They played several songs, most of which I didn't know because they were by a local composer, and then struck the set to clear it for the next performance. While they were cleaning, my father pointed me out to Mr. Heath, so I got to talk with him for a bit, introduce schoolpsychnerd, tell me about how we lived in Chicago and had taught English in Japan. And then on the way out, we had almost the same conversation with Mr. Stiers, who looks like he hasn't aged in the last twenty years, though my father later mentioned that he's had some health troubles. I only got to stay about twenty minutes at the Oktoberfest, but it was a great twenty minutes.

After a stop into a tea shop that had just opened called The Tea Tree where we bought some banana tea (which was delicious), we all piled into the car and drove to St. Charles to see the Scarecrow Festival. Unlike previous years, and unlike the weather forecast had suggested, it was cloudless and sunny, with little wind, so the relative temperature was probably around 25°C and it was much more crowded than I've ever seen it in the past.

There were some good scarecrows, though:


That was one of three Pokemon-themed scarecrows. My parents are of the opinion that the scarecrows' quality has been progressively going down over time, and while I sort of agree, I thought this year was pretty good. In addition to that one, there was a giant headless horseman, and a Calvin and Hobbes on a sled, and, in a major surprise to me, a R.O.B. scarecrow, which is a real deep nerd dive. I think I liked this year's scarecrows just because of that one, though the various Pokemon scarecrows showed me that pokemon translate very well to painted spherical objects.

Then we bought some fudge at the craft fair and before returning, we took a detour out to Gould Cider and Apple Pressing to get some apple cider. I've been drinking it for years, ever since my parents found out about it sometime when when I was in university, but this is the first time I've ever been to the actual location. I'm still a bit amazed how abruptly rural the countryside gets just by crossing Randall Road. Only a couple mintues of driving and it was farmhouses with barns and fields of corn, and then the cider farm with a goat wandering around outside. Inside was the operating cider press, a wooden frame with wooden boxes covered with cheesecloth and filled with apples being pressed. It probably violates any number of FDA regulations, but damn if it doesn't churn out some delicious cider.

Then we went back to my parents' house, ate their barbecue, and then took the train home to avoid the Chicago Marathon crowds.

Sea salt is one of my favorite dessert flavors, though I usually get it in caramel or toffee form. One of the highlights of trips to my grandparents' house in Oregon when I was a child were the bags of sea salt toffee that were in all the stores along the coast. That trip was the only time we would get it, too. It was during the summer, close to my sister and my birthdays, so it's not like we'd get any in the mail as presents. We would look forward to that trip for the whole year, anticipating going to the beach, swimming in the pool in my grandparents' retirement community, looking in tide pools, and eating sea salt toffee.

It's too sweet for me now, of course. Insert profound statement about how the delights of childhood turn to ash as you age here.
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I'm sure that comes as news to none of you.

I was going to write about this in my New Year's Retrospective, but since I forgot it gets its own post. One of the other changes I made in 2015 is that I started listening to new music again. I only listened to the radio for about two years during the 90s when I was mowing my parents' lawn and needed something to listen to, so that's the sum total of my exposure to pop music. Once I went away to university and found Napster, I developed a taste of goth and industrial spurred by buying a copy of "Music from the Succubus Club," probably after seeing an ad for it in a Vampire: the Masquerade supplement, and that's what I listened to for a while. That fell away over time, though, and by the time I was living in Japan I didn't really listen to any music at all other than the ambient zone music when we'd play World of Warcraft. Even on my two hour each-way commute, I mostly slept.

That changed when I started working at the AMA and learned I could use headphones. Not too long after that, I found 8bit Peoples, an online repository of free chiptunes albums, and that got me into chiptunes. And then I developed a podcast addiction, and a few of the podcasts I added were music ones. I currently listen to:

• The Irish and Celtic Music Podcast: I used to listen to a lot of Celtic music, but it fell almost completely out of favor in the last decade. This is still probably my least favorite of the music podcasts I listen to, but I've found quite a few gems.


• This Week in Chiptune: When I found this, I went back over the course of a couple months of commutes and listened to every single back episode. Love those bleeps and boops.


• Group Therapy with Above and Beyond: I think this showed up in the top podcasts category and I subscribed to it on a whim. There's a lot of stuff that's obvious way better to dance to than to listen to on the L, but I've found some surprisingly (to me) good songs, like this one or this one or this one. I skip past the four-on-the-floor stuff and don't miss it.


• Space Radio: This updates only irregularly and has a bit of a variable quality, but I like it when it comes out. However, it did inspire me to find:


• Communion After Dark: This one is amazing, and is probably another one that I'll go through the entire archives of. It's like being back at Dracula's Ball, and this podcast reminded me that bands like Diary of Dreams, Beborn Beton, Neuroticfish, Suicide Commando, et al still exist and are still making music. They have a relatively wide reach, though--this song showed up on the podcast and ended up being launched straight on to my cyberpunk playlist.


• Steampunk Radio: I have no idea how this is "streampunk" or if it's ever going to continue after the first few episodes, but what I found is pretty neat. Like, this song--how is that "steampunk"? I mean, it's really good, but does it fit the advertising? Not sure about that.

That gives me plenty of weekly new music exposure.

Also, Bandcamp. It's not actually any different than poking around any other digitial music service, but for some reason I've taken to it more. I've found great stuff like Halfont 2 by William Kage (guy composes music using the soundfonts of 16-bit games, so they sound like lost tracks), I Am the Night by Perturbator (another for the cyberpunk playlist), The Spoony Bards by The Spoony Bards (shoutout to stephen_poon!), Transmission Lost by Sjellos (I have a whole selection of albums that are basically low hums, groaning metal, and space noises set to music), Tome I by Erang (Bandcamp introduced me to Dungeon Synth as a genre)...I could go on. You can see everything I've bought here if you want an example of my modern musical taste.

I've also gotten heavily into Overclocked ReMix (edit:and its podcast) again now that they're posting more. They're a big chunk of what I listen to on my commute if I don't have any podcast updates, and I jumped on their Patreon as soon as they set it up--which also introduces me to new music, since one of the perks is that I get a free album every month from the selection on Overclocked Records, not all of which are video game related. Of what I've gotten, I can recommend the Tale of the Rat King OST by Tom Miller and Quixotica by .mpegasus. I admit, I haven't listened to as many of these as I should, but I just recently sorted them into their own playlist and once I put them on my phone, I can go through them.

This turned out longer than I thought. I guess it's a good thing I gave it its own post?

I tend to write pretty detailed posts about my vacations because even though they're mostly only of interest to me, I like to have a record for when I go back and reread old posts. But this time I was gone for two weeks and, taking into account how verbose my blog posts tend to be, a detailed account of everything I did would run for 10,000 words and be exhausting to write, so I'm going to do what I did when we first moved to Japan and didn't have any internet and write a series of smaller segments and put them all in one post.
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I just finished reading and reviewing Spock's World, which I've wanted to reread for a long while but which got pushed to the front of my queue by Leonard Nimoy's death. It made me remember the influence the book had on my as a child, and I figured I'd write about it. I'd love to make this a nice, pat causal relationship, but while it's that way in my memory, memory is so unreliable that I can't honestly say there's a direct connection. But in my mind, there is.

I first listened to Spock's World instead of reading it. I don't remember if I picked it out or if my father did, but it was the CD edition read by Leonard Nimoy and George Takei. I still remember the way some of the quotes sounded, and when I read the passages in the book I could hear, clear as day, George Takei saying:

"We give her remains to the night from which we arose," Sarek said, opening the porcelain container to the light wind that had sprung up. "Surely we know that this is not she; she and the Other know it well. And we wish her well in whatever may befall, til the Moon is no longer, and the Stars are no more."

The wind carried the dust away into the silence. T’Khut slipped upward in silence flooding the ocean of sand with light.

"Light with her always," he said, "and with us."

It was amazing.

I was not the most popular child. It probably comes as no surprise, and I was lucky in that by high school everything was fine and I had a great last four years of secondary education, but I had few friends before that. I also tended to feel things very strongly, such that I would occasionally overreact to attempts at camaraderie and treat them as insults (which I received a fair number of, to be fair). I sometimes think that strength of feeling is why I don't like watching movies at all anymore, and why even when I would go to the theatre I hated horror movies or any movies based on embarrassment comedy. But it meant that I spent a lot of time on the computer and most of middle school hating the time I spent there.

I never watched Star Trek, but I found the Vulcans fascinating, and especially their portrayal in Spock's World. A species that has incredibly strong emotions but developed a discipline in order to control their effects? That honestly sounded like something I needed, and so with all the unreasonably strong conviction a pre-teen can muster, I set out to burn all emotion out of my heart.

It didn't work. Of course it didn't work, because that's not how humanity works. But it worked well enough, and even my parents noticed the change and commented on how I was less moody and more pleasant to be around, which of course served as encouragement. I can't tell how much my parents themselves influenced me in this, as they're architypal reserved Midwesterners and I could have picked up plenty of my inspiration from them. But the end result is that I went from being sad almost all the time to not crying for close to a decade and generally being a lot calmer.

I later decided that this kind of iron control was unnecessary and it was preventing any kind of deeper connections forming with my friends--I used to take pride in being described as "mysterious"--but it's effected my emotions to this day. I generally don't feel very strongly about much, and one of the reasons softlykarou likes to listen to me talk about RPGs or old DOS games is that they're two things that I obviously get excited about. Even though I know that logical decision making is actually impossible, I still hold to logic as probably the important motivator in my reasoning. I can't directly attribute that to Spock's World, but I am reasonably sure that it's the source.

So while I didn't grow up watching Star Trek, I can still trace a lot of my personality to its influence.

Mene sakkhet ur-seveh. \\//_

Edit: I found that audiobook! It's up on Youtube:

The Aethra Chronicles is on Archive.org!

The Aethra Chronicles has the distinction of being one of two shareware games I ever mail-ordered the full version for. Or, more accurately, asked my father to mail order the full version for, the other being the excellent Castle of the Winds, an early graphical roguelike which is sadly a Windows 3.1 game and thus not likely to be included in archive.org's collection. It also doesn't run on 64-bit systems, so I installed Windows XP emulation entirely so I could play it, but that's a story for another post once I beat it and post a review.

It's also the second game that I've assembled a soundtrack for myself, the first being the top-down space shooter Solar Winds I: the Escape, and the only one where I manually recorded the audio from the game and assembled the mp3s by hand. Which admittedly wasn’t hard, because there’s only a handful of songs and most of them are 15-20 second long loops, but still.

Anyway, The Aethra Chronicles has the somewhat dubious distinction of being the only CRPG in existence to be based on Rolemaster. And similar to Rolemaster, it's extremely obtuse without pouring through the game's documentation, which of course I didn't get until I sent away for the full version after I had done everything possible in the shareware version. After doing that, learned that I should have maxed my main character's Wisdom instead of his Intelligence, since he was a Ranger and of course Rangers get their magic from Wisdom. Oops. No wonder he barely had enough spell points to turn into a bear.

Most of the Rolemaster heritage didn't matter, because as an early CRPG non-combat interaction was basically non-existent and there wasn't anything really approaching the Movement & Maneuver Tables. There definitely were critical hits, though, even though they were rolled behind the screen and most of the Rolemaster's color and flying limbs were lost. One of the skills you could put points was called Deadly Strike, and as near as I can tell it it gave you a massive boost on the critical hit severity. Later in the game, you get a chance to hire a thief named Chrissta, and the best course of action is to do that, max her Deadly Strike every level, use a wizard to cast Summon Shadow Guardian to duplicate her, and have two permanent cuisinarts murdering their way through everything. That could reasonably be considered to be breaking the game, but it's how I beat it so I have a soft spot for it regardless of its cheesiness.



There were some elements of the story that showed up in my imagination for a long while afterward, like the demon-slaying Grey Swords or the Oracle whose powers come from actually being from another dimension and wanting to get home. The game is also somewhat of a white whale for me, because while I did finish the game and beat all the bosses, including the optional Kahzreen Vader, I didn't beat him "legitimately," which is to say that I didn't solve the puzzle required to get to him, I just cast Pass Through Stone and walked through the wall to the room where he was hiding and fought him that way. I've been tempted to play again to see what I was missing the first time, since I've checked walkthroughs now that the internet is a thing and as near as I can tell I was doing everything right, but it has been twenty years.

I actually think that at least half of the interest I have in running a game of Rolemaster comes from this game, the other half being from Middle Earth Roleplaying. If you like old CRPGS, it's a great game.

Confession: I don't actually like pumpkin at all, much less the spiced variety. I don't like kabocha, or most squashes. Zucchini scrapes by as acceptable due to exposure.

I do love fall, though.


Temperatures in °C. Get with the program, Americans!
That was Thursday's weather. The day before, it was closer to 25°C, and then we woke up to cold winds and rainy skies. It was like those old cartoons where things are great and the sun is shining and then all the leaves suddenly fall at the same time.

I'm not exactly sure why fall is my favorite season. I suspect a lot of is the weather--I've always said when people ask that Ireland is the place I've lived with the best weather, because in Cork temperatures ranged from 5° to 30° with none of the awful extremes we get in Chicago--but the leaves play a part in it as well. Last year when I went to the Scarecrow Festival in Geneva I wrote a blog post about going down by the river to view the leaves and how disappointing it was. With the weather changing so early this year, maybe in a month when we go to the Scarecrow Festival again the leaves will actually be worth looking at.

I never would have thought I'd be the kind of person who'd like leaf-viewing. When I was younger and my parents would take us to gardens, my sister and I would usually find some place to hang out so we wouldn't have to look at the stupid flowers. When we'd go to Shore Acres State Park for a picnic and so they could look at the flowers, we'd always go to the "a Japanese-style garden with a lily pond" and watch the water striders and fish in the pond. And now, I willingly go on walks to to look at leaves.

See, this is why children think adults are boring and adults think children are dumb.

I went to visit the doctor today due to my foot injury, and now I have considerably more peace of mind. After the preliminary check-in bits, he felt along the heel and the ball of my foot, poked about the toes, and when none of that drew any pain from me, he took out a tuning fork, asked me to close my eyes, smacked it on the table, and touched it at various places on my foot.

The idea is that if any of the small bones in the foot were broken, the tuning fork's vibrations would causes said bones to vibrate, naturally causing pain and providing an easy way to know if something was broken with pretty high certainty. Since there was no pain at all no matter where he touched the tuning fork, and the only pain anywhere was when he poked the very center of the swelling on my foot, and even that was minimal, his opinion was that there probably wasn't anything broken and it was probably badly bruised. Wrap it in an ace bandage, keep it elevated, apply heat as needed, and come back in a month if any problems remain. I can do that. (^_^)v

I was reading Robert Silverberg's Nightwings a couple days ago (shameless plug: review here) and I was surprised how much nostalgia I got just from the physical existence of the book. Most of the stuff I read nowadays is on kindle or relatively new books from the library, but Nightwings was an old paperback with yellowing pages and that old book smell that all readers love.

It took me back to the days of visiting my grandparents in their retirement community, where one of the first things we would do when my family arrived was go down to the town library and get a giant handfull of books for me to take back and read. I'd always pillage the sci fi and fantasy section, and my grandparents' house is the place where I first read Robert Heinlein, Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gordon R. Dickson, Diane Duane, Katherine Kurtz, Robert Jordan, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. LeGuin, Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, and a bunch of other authors I can't remember.

The books were almost all yellowing paperbacks or those old hardcovers that didn't have plastic jackets, and the smell stuck with me. Smelling it again takes me back to days at the Real Beach (so-called because it was distinct from the beach along the river in their retirement community) building dikes and sandcastles with my grandfather's WWII army entrenching tools, going for picnics and paddleboats at a nearby lake, shopping in Coos Bay, picnics, seal-watching, and clambering over rocks at Cape Arago State Park...

Now I really want to go visit Oregon again.

When I was a boy, every summer and sometimes during the winter, my family would pack up our things into our car and drive west to visit my grandparents in Oregon. One of the first things I would do every time we arrived was borrow my grandmother's library card and head down to the local public library and check out a double handful of books. That's where I read a ton of classic sci-fi and fantasy--the Foundation and Robot books, the Rama books, a bunch of Heinlein's stuff, the Chronicles of Amber, the Riftwar books, nearly all the Valdemar books, and, relevant to this post, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books. She was personally a terrible human being, but I really took to the stories about politicking and personal relations in a feudal society with a psychic nobility. Maybe because the psychics were redheads.

Anyway, half a decade ago, I read Stephen King's The Mist and absolutely loved it. And based on the title of this post you can probably see where this is going. I had it that the Towers had figured out a way to extend the force fields they use to prevent experiments from blowing up to keeping the Mist out at long range, set the game during the Ages of Chaos so all kinds of crazy psychic insanity is on the table, and wrote the whole thing up in Unisystem.

I found it a few days ago and looked back on it, and there are some major flaws. For one, in a game that's supposed to have political intrigue and the players playing nobility who are members of the ruling families of various kingdoms, the utter lack of any real social systems beyond "roll some dice and make stuff us" is a major flaw. I also exhaustively detailed the way psychic powers work because I've always been one for systematizing my games, even though the way the powers work in the books is basically "i dunno lol" and constantly changes depending on the plot and when the book was written. It's ~50 pages long and I wouldn't run it at all nowadays.

I'm thinking of converting it over to post-GMC nWoD, though. A lot of work is already done, since GMC has a better social system and updated psychic powers in it that I can steal. I can finally adapt the Company rules from Reign to nWoD like I've been planning to do for months. I just need to add the Darkover-specific bits around the edges and convert the stats over.

I do like the idea of getting to use it. Darkover is a great setting to run an intrigue game in, with the competing demands of familial loyalty vs. personal ambition, the lure of the Towers as a source of power and a neutral ground to settle disputes, and the addition of the Mist adds a tragic aspect to the society where they might be able to solve the looming end of the world once and for all if they weren't too busy stabbing each other in the brain with mind-daggers all the time. Humanity in a nutshell.