Listen to the Rain

Re: the listening entry in my last post, I was listening to their episodes on Dracula and they brought up a point I hadn't thought about, relating to the very beginning of the book. We know that the coachman that comes to pick up Harker is Dracula in disguise, and that Dracula lives alone in his castle except for his vampire brides. He carries in Harker's luggage himself as well. And soon after arriving, he offers Harker dinner:

The light and warmth and the Count’s courteous welcome seemed to have dissipated all my doubts and fears. Having then reached my normal state, I discovered that I was half famished with hunger; so making a hasty toilet, I went into the other room.

I found supper already laid out. My host, who stood on one side of the great fireplace, leaning against the stonework, made a graceful wave of his hand to the table, and said:—

“I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup.”

[…]

The Count himself came forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I fell to at once on an excellent roast chicken. This, with some cheese and a salad and a bottle of old Tokay, of which I had two glasses, was my supper. During the time I was eating it the Count asked me many questions as to my journey, and I told him by degrees all I had experienced.
-Bram Stoker, Dracula

So, with no servants, who cooked the chicken?

…

Dracula cooked the chicken.

I'm trying to tell myself that winter hasn't really begun if I haven't had to button my coat yet, even though it was -6°C when I left the apartment this morning and I had to wash my hair last night so it wouldn't freeze. The weather report says we'll have snow tomorrow. I guess I should be thankful we actually had a Chicago fall instead of going straight from summer to winter like last year.

My favorite zone in old World of Warcraft was Azshara and more than half of it was because it was eternally late fall there. 🍁🍂

You'd think after years of listening to podcasts and playing all the Legend of Zelda games in order I would have combined the two, and before last week you would have been wrong. But after a seeing a tweet from Zelda Universe about their own podcast, I did some searching for Zelda podcasts and subscribed to three: ZU's podcast; Another Zelda Podcast, which has themed episodes like one about forest temples and one about Breath of the Wild's ending; and Tandem Legends, which is two people playing through the whole series except they're doing it in timeline order instead of game release order. I've only listened to a couple episodes of AZP, but I'm halfway through the Skyward Sword part of Tandem Legends and I really enjoy it. Both of them have played the games before, but not all of them and not the same games, so they have differing perspectives and don't just gush about how amazing everything is.

There's also a section in each podcast about the music, which is amazing.

My nightmares seem to have gone away, other than a dream a few days ago about vampires that woke me up an hour before my alarm. That might have been caused by nuVampire's problems, though, since I have vampires on the brain.

questionoftheday asks: Is your hair its natural color? Or do you regularly dye it? Is it a naturally occurring color, or a wild one? What's your hair story?

My answer: My hair is naturally already a wild color--it's "copper blonde," according to the marketing copy on drugstore hair dye products. It's also almost waist-long, so I figure it's eye-catching enough. I've dyed my hair only once--black, to cosplay Kaji from Neon Genesis Evangelion. I used temporary dye so it washed out over a few days. I checked a few months ago and sadly there are no pictures.

Alright, back to work.

I did not accomplish nearly as much as I wanted to this weekend, but isn't that always the case?

Friday was Starlight Radio Dreams, so I showed up, sat with meowtima, and ate fish and chips while we watched the show. At intermission, lisekatevans arrived fresh from her other show in time to perform in the second act, and worldbshiny joined us at the table. The others left immediately after the performance ended, but lisekatevans had brought friends visiting from Ohio, so she invited me to stay for a drink and chat with them afterwards. It was lovely, even when I got out after eleven and it was faster to walk four miles home than to wait for the bus. At least it was a lovely night for a walk, and I'm a fast walker.

Once again, I loved the episode of NPC, which this time dealt with a trap-filled maze dungeon. I've dealt with enough of those in the games I've played over the years.

Saturday I lost the whole day to playing Stellaris and was pretty disappointed with myself because of it. That hasn't happened for years and I had so many other things I wanted to accomplish--work more on the next coding challenge, read the first issue of Dill, clean the bathtub, finish up Hibike! Euphonium--and none of it got done. And in the end, I didn't even win! The ReapersContingency showed up as I was in the middle of building a stargate network and one of their Forge-Worlds was in the middle of Ayleid space on a crucial hyperlane chokepoint, so they wiped out my scattered fleets and started advancing on the homeworld. I gave up after that.

Sunday I started a new game, this time as a different kind of space elves, and again played longer than I wanted to, but I got presentable and headed out the door in time to make the performance of Prometheus Bound at the City Lit despite a bit of trouble finding the theatre. lisekatevans had warned me that as Greek tragedy, the show would be a bit different than theatre I'm used to and that's not even counting that most of the characters were puppets. A lot of it was characters proclaiming to the audience rather than interacting, even in scenes where they were together on stage, which admittedly my love of kagura had conditioned me to expect. The puppet dancing as the chorus sang was less expected. I thought the person playing Prometheus and lisekatevans (playing Io) did a very good job, especially considering they were the only humans on stage other than ninjas holding the puppets, and lisekatevans said that the director told her that she should be concerned with the gadfly stinging Io and to stop looking at Prometheus. That must make it hard.

Kratos: "No one is absolutely free except for Zeus."
Hephaestus: "That is true."
Kratos: "Then get on with it!"

I had not previously realized that the main character of God of War was named after an actual Greek deity.

Afterwards, lisekatevans invited me out to Ethiopian for dinner with some other people who had come to see the show. When dinner was done, two of the people peeled off to make the trpi back to Hyde Park past the Cubs game, but lisekatevans, one other person, and me went to ice cream. But when we arrived, lisekatevans looked at the time and realized her boyfriend would be in town earlier than she thought, so she excused herself. The other person and I ended up talking for two hours, and when she left to go to the beach she invited me along. We walked north to the terminus of the lakefront trail, then she went off to the beach and I went back to my apartment and stayed up too late reading.

Monday I set a hard limit on Stellaris playing and so actually got a lot done! The whole apartment is clean (except the bathtub...), sheets washed and laundry done, lunches made, food shopped for, and I thought of a way to rewrite part of my weather project so as not to have two separate methods of displaying the temperature depending on whether the page is first loaded or the temperature is toggled between C and F. If only I could have been that productive the whole weekend.

Short week ahead and nothing on the schedule unless that OneTable dinner I signed up for approves me (I have no idea why that one requires approval). Hopefully I can get more done this week, like figuring how to format a fetch() request...

Introvert memes no longer apply to me, apparently.

Friday I came home from work, noticed that the clock on the stove wasn't working--this would be important later--and, to pass the time, worked a bit more on my latest coding project, a random quotes page. So far this weekend i've gotten the functionality mostly working, in that it displays random quotes and clicking the bottom calls up a new quote. I haven't yet put in the social media buttons, the fadeout isn't timed right, and it's extremely ugly, so those are the problems to solve next. But it works!

Anyway, after an hour or so I left to catch the bus down to Ms. Murphy and Sons to go to the Starlight Radio Dreams show, the next one after the show I went to in February. I didn't get a picture this time because I was sitting in the back corner of the room, but I did get dinner to go with the performance! Fish and chips and an almond cake for dessert, which I ate while watching the show. The premise this time was that an ordinary suburbanite had won an appearance on the show, much to the surprise and annoyance of the cast, and they had to put up with her while trying to get a show together. Serials this time were NPC, mocking sidequests and NPCs in the town, and one I hadn't seen called Olympic Shore, which was Jersey Shore starring the ​Dodekatheon. I didn't like it as much as NPC, but it did have the person playing the suburbanite as the show's producer who sung a parody of "Part of Your World" about how rich and morally upright she was. That was enough to carry it by itself, honestly.

meowtima was there, as was a friend of his that I hadn't met before who was going through some misfortune. When the show ended we briefly talked about doing something else, but tiredness quickly caught up with everyone and meowtima's friend went home. He did as well after a few minutes of standing and chatting at an intersection where the buses we needed to catch both passed, so when they arrived, we caught our respective buses and went home.

Saturday I woke up early, lay in bed for a couple hours, then coded again until lunch time. That's when disaster struck--when I went make miso soup, the oven burners wouldn't spark. Then I checked the oven lights, and they wouldn't turn on. Apparently the electrical work on Friday had done something very unfortunately to the apartment's wiring, since while I made do and ate a good lunch, when I went to do the washing the washing machine wouldn't turn on either.

The fridge, the rice cooker, and the dishwasher all still work and the fuses downstairs are all fine. I have enough clothes clean to last the week and there's a laundromat a block away if it comes to that. But, I'm not looking forward to the food costs...

After fiddling with things and getting nowhere, I left to go to the Japanese Cultural Center's kimono exhibition. I arrived at 4 p.m., not long before it closed, so it was basically empty and I was able to freely look at the kimono. They were all pretty small, some of them seemingly sized for a child or a very petite woman, but beautiful:


That one has 鴛鴦 (oshidori, "mandarin ducks") on it, a symbol of eternal love, but the sleeves are long in the style of an unmarried woman. The accompanying text indicated it might have been for a family event celebrating a relative's anniversary.

The JCC isn't particularly large, so I was only there for a half-hour or so, including the time I spent talking to one of the staff/volunteers/? about the tea ceremony classes they offer. Apparently new ones start in August because the JCC isn't air conditioned and people don't want to sweat sitting in seiza for an hour, which is fair enough. I mentioned that I had been to tea ceremonies before, but only as a participant, not a host, and they suggested the beginner class since it goes into some of the basics. It starts in August, on Saturdays. Maybe I'll take them up on it.

I had put out a call for dinner since I couldn't cook at home and got a response from a friend who was up in Roger's Park with her boyfriend to pick up a board game. So we went to Indie Cafe, ate sushi/poke, and then briefly went back to my apartment to play RoboRally, which I've never heard of but is apparently 24 years old? It involves robots trying to navigate their way around a factory floor filled with obstacles and conveyor belts with all actions needing to be set ahead of time and then playing out sequentially. We didn't have much chaos on our playthrough, since there were three players and we picked an easy board, though there was nearly a situation where someone was shoved off the edge to their doom. After one game taking about an hour, the others were tired and left, and I watched some Hoshi no Kaabi and then went to bed.

This morning I ate a TV dinner for lunch and otherwise have done nothing. Have to go shopping now and maybe go out to dinner, since the oven still doesn't work. Hopefully it's fixed tomorrow and I can make lunches for the rest of the week, otherwise this week will be pretty expensive...

I just got out of a meeting because it turns out I wasn't supposed to be there at all. The person handling the invites just picked the first person off the list with my first name, and rather than the guy from the legal team, I got the invite. So now I'm back at my desk and not listening to something I didn't care about at all.

I do have another meeting in forty-five minutes, though, and I had a five-hour-long all-department meeting yesterday, so I haven't entirely won. The upcoming meeting is about another database suite to replace the current one which replaced the previous one, so maybe the problems that I've run into using our current software will be solved. Wouldn't that be nice? Hey, a Democrat won an Alabama senatorial election, so anything is possible.

I did well in my yearly review. We had it a month early because it's due in early January and I'm going to be gone the first week of January to coincide with the schoolpsychnerd's time off between semesters at school. That means that I got it out of the way before my vacation and can go into my two weeks off without anything weighing down on my mind, which is great! But it means that I have to wait another week after this one before my vacation starts, which is less great but still tolerable. We have a half-day this Friday and next Friday off, though, so the shortened weeks will be nice.

Tonight I'm going to a live recording of the final first(?) season episode of tropicanaomega's podcast She-Ra: Progressive of Power, since schoolpsychnerd is going to be a panelist! I've never been to a live podcast recording despite having listened to a bunch of them, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the sausage is made and maybe learning something along the way.

Alright, back to work.

While nowadays I listen mostly to synthwave, chiptunes, and video game soundtracks, my playlists used to almost entirely consist of goth music. I picked Philadelphia for university without realizing that it was the headquarters for Dancing Ferret Discs, the record label for a lot of the bands I listened to--and probably named after the Dancing Ferret in the Borderlands series, something I didn't realize until recently--so I spent a good portion of time at places like Dracula's Ball. Then I got older, my tastes changed. It happens.

However, on the way to work I listen to music-based podcasts because I don't want to try to pay attention to a talk podcast over the noise of the L, and one of the podcasts I listen to is Communion After Dark, which is goth music, of course. A couple weeks ago they had a song that kept making me rewind to listen to it again, and when I got home I looked up the song and found the music video, and it may be the single most profound encapsulation of the goth scene in one video I've ever seen:

Watch on YouTube

It starts off with the band making soulful gestures with profound gazes, on a black background, from the shoulders up. The lyrics are pure "you don't understand us, we are too deep for you":

We're nothing like you
A wall in black
We're nothing like you
And you don't get who we are

We're nothing like you
We dare the flow
We're nothing like you
And you don't know who we are

In a land of seals and sorrow
We kept waiting for the spark
So hail your kings and hail your queens
We're different, we're the children of the dark!

And then when the woman's voice cuts in, it's all people dressed up at concerts, smiling or making silly faces at the camera, and clearly having a great time dressing up and listening to music.

And that's it, isn't it? There is something kind of silly about dressing up in black lace and Victorian coats or strappy leather and vinyl. And who am I to comment? I dress like a mixture of a William Gibson character and a post-apocalyptic citadel denizen. But it's fun. That's why we do it. And sure, the beauty of the night and the emergent mono no aware inherent in decay, but sometimes I just like dressing up like the protagonist of Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines and listening to music like Another World or Deception or Burning Heretic or Ghost Love Score or Night of the Wolf.

I don't demand that everything I do justify itself on some cosmic scale anymore. There are other things I can devote my emotional energy to. Like enjoying ridiculous music.

I dreamed that my wife and I were in the Allied army during the invasion of Germany during World War II. It was a dream WWII, with pristine fields and a lot of people wearing civilian clothes everywhere, but in that dream way I knew where it was and what was going on.

Everyone was wearing civilian clothes and I don't think anyone had any weaponry, but we were advancing through the bocage in groups. My platoon was lead by...my parents, again in civilian clothes, just strolling around. schoolpsychnerd was with me too, plus a bunch of dream people whose faces didn't stick with me.

About the only indication that it was wartime was when we were securing an abandoned farm and we found a pile of dead animals behind the barn. A few farm animals, but mostly pets, like all the pets in the town had been taken to one place. Just flies buzzing around and the smell of decay in the air, but I haven't actually seen a pile of dead animals so it was more like a video game-style textured static object. It was just a bit unreal.

I kept expecting zombies or something to attack, because me dreaming about zombies is definitely a recurring theme, but no enemies of any kind, Wehrmacht or otherwise, ever showed up. It was just my parents leading the platoon through sunny fields and cutting through hedges while seeing no one and hearing no sounds of battle anywhere. Eventually, we found a farm that was occupied, and it's a good thing my father knew German (he spent his senior year of high school in Germany), because the farmer and his wife invited us in for breakfast. They were cooking eggs and frying up bacon in a surprisingly modern-looking kitchen when my alarm went off and I woke up. I'm positive the bacon was being cooked in a panini-style grill, which I'd bet money that few Germany families used during WWII.

I remember being worried what the family would think when I turned down the bacon, but I woke up before the dream got to that point.

I suspect this was all spurred by finally downloading episodes of the History of World War II podcast to listen to. I've had that on my queue for two years now, but I haven't gotten around to it until now, so maybe my brain thought it was momentous enough for it to show up in my dreams.

So yesterday, schoolpsychnerd, chronicluscious, and I watched the X-Files, which I have never seen before.


That always catches people by surprise when I tell them about it (chronicluscious's roommate and tastee_wheat were both astonished), which I think it's a reasonable reaction. I mean, look at the way I dress. Look at how I love conspiracy theories. Look at the music I listen to and how I have whole albums of what's basically X-Files background spooky music (I recommend Cryobiosis, Sabled Sun, or Atrium Carceri). Look at how I ran a three-year-long game of Delta Green, which I always describe as "X-Files crossed with Call of Cthulhu" even though technically, the very first game of what would become Delta Green ran at a convention in March of 1993, six months before the X-Files pilot aired.

And as it turned out, a good quarter of the backchat was schoolpsychnerd and I throwing Delta Green references back and forth that meant nothing to chronicluscious.

I've picked up a lot of things about X-Fies over the years just through geek osmosis, like the black oil, the alien bounty hunters, the flukeman, and so on, but I've mostly managed to remain unspoiled about the actual episodes. And then the first episode we watched was Post-Modern Prometheus, which is probably the least representative way to go into the show. But once that was done, we went back to the beginning and started in and...yeah. Why haven't I watched this already?


Part of the answer to that can probably be found in how I had to make a 'television' tag for this post, because I've apparently never written about it before.

I can see why there's so much internet love for Scully, though I have some reservations since I know that Mulder's always right and it is always a werewolf or aliens or vampires or witches or mutants or ghosts (are there ghosts? Not actually sure about that one). It's a bit like Kirk and Spock--it's hard to have a proxy debate about reason vs. emotion when one side is always right. But that's me bringing in outside knowledge, and I'm going to try to avoid doing that as much as I can.

In a moment of , I just started listening to Kumail Nanjiani's The X-Files Files a couple weeks ago, figuring that I'd probably never make time to actually sit down and watch the show so I might as well pick it up second hand. And, well, it turns out I was wrong and now we're planning to watch the whole run, or at least up to the point where it goes to shit. Wherever that is. I'm sure I'll find out!