Listen to the Rain

Mentioned before I had some things planned for the weekend and I did get to do most of them!

Saturday morning I woke up early and went out to the park to meet up for another dive into the Siddur with Mishkan. Last time we looked at the Aleinu, and this time we looked at Kaddish, the prayer now currently most associated with mourning that famously never actually mentions death or grief. The two lines are:

יִתְגַּדַּל וְיִתְקַדַּשׁ שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא. בְּעָלְמָא דִּי בְרָא כִרְעוּתֵהּ וְיַמְלִיךְ מַלְכוּתֵהּ בְּחַיֵּיכון וּבְיומֵיכון וּבְחַיֵּי דְכָל בֵּית יִשרָאֵל בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב, וְאִמְרוּ

Glorified and sanctified be G-d’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will.

May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.

The rest of it continues in that pattern. It turns out (I did not know this), Kaddish was originally said after what we would now call a "sermon" as a way of praise G-d for the knowledge learned, and then it was said after the deaths of those who gave those sermons as a way of remembering the people who gave them, and then that expanded out to everyone who died. So we talked about the place of a text that doesn't mention death and why it might be comforting= and about how the requirement of a minyan forces you into community at a time where you most want to isolate yourself. There was also a Baby Shabbat happening about fifty feet away, but since Laila is out with the grandparents, I just went home afterwards.

Around 3:30 p.m. after spending some time with sashagee, who really wasn't feeling well, I left again and went down to XMarket Food Hall where tom.hen.12 had invited me to a board game night, and when I got there, they had the board set up for Wingspan:


When I came in I was very confused, but it turned out to be a lot of fun with a lot of moving parts.

As you can see from the image, there are three "tracks" where you can place birds. Different birds have different habitats and every bird has a special ability, and you can either place bird (at a cost of food) or activate a track. My vulture got me extra food whenever anyone used a bird with a hunting ability, my barn swallow let me trade unwanted birds for points (though less points than the birds were worth, indicated by the feather on the card), and my loggerhead shrike let me stockpile points if anyone took a mouse from the food stockpile. There are also secret randomized goals each player has--you start with one and can gain more if you play the right birds--as well as public randomized goals everyone knows about. That's why I had so many eggs played on my water bird, because the first round goal was based on how many eggs you had played on a water bird.

Despite my initial confusion it was a lot of fun! When I initially saw the vulture I was worried there was going to be PVP--use a predatory bird special ability to eat other people's birds, for example--but while it was competitive, we were all just doing our own thing and trying to win. I got a great horned owl in my hand within the first round, but I never played it because there were no mice to draw, which incidentally meant I never got any points from my shrike. Instead, I played a crow that gave me extra food whenever I activated its special ability and, because it was on the central track, I spent most of the game doing the 'lay eggs' activity repeatedly, using that to get food, and using that food to get more birds. Sadly, tom.hen.12 let me down--he was the only one with a hunting bird and out of the dozen or so times he tried to hunt, he only succeeded once, so that strategy didn't pay off. I also didn't get to use my shrike, as I mentioned, so I had to kind of scramble for points at the end of the game. And I got pretty close, but I couldn't manage to win. I lost to tom.hen.12 by 1 point, with classicvintagedetail two points behind me. eafeder came in last, almost twenty points behind classicvintagedetail even though she had a giant stack of food on one of her birds. I would say "we shouldn't have assumed she was a threat" but it wouldn't have mattered, since there's very little ways to affect each other's progress. The only obvious way was that people kept rerolling food so they wouldn't have to pick mice and give me points, but they also were in situations where they didn't need the mice anyway. It was a minor sacrifice.

A ton of fun, I'd be glad to play it again. tom.hen.12's wife also came even though she didn't play, so I invited sashagee, but she was taking a nap and didn't see it. Alas.

On Sunday I was originally going to go to an art meetup with friends but sashagee was feeling awful, so while the original plan was for both of us to go, in the end, neither of us went. We stayed home and I helped sashagee recover and today she's feeling much better, so it did work! If only it had happened a day earlier.

The last night of class and I'm kind of sad about it. I'll be at Mishkan for meditation on Wednesday nights anyway, and I really liked having the chance to learn with everyone. I hope they do more of these.

This class was either going to be about prayer, or about Rabbi Akiva, and the rabbi chose Rabbi Akiva.

( One of the greatest rabbis who ever lived )

Notes from my second week of class:

( Week Two: Suffering )

I've been trying to find a way to buy ebooks in Japanese for a while. At first I was using Ebookjapan.com, but they were bought out by Yahoo and their new reading app is only available on the Japanese iTunes store. It's possible to read purchases online, but that requires an internet connection and means that my usual way of reading ebook manga--on my iPad, on the train--wouldn't work unless I tethered my phone to it. And there's no way to download it using the internet.

Alright, lesson learned. Don't buy anything that's defective by design. But, I can't buy Japanese kindle books from outside Japan. What to do? Well:

1. Make a Japanese Amazon account.
   
2. Attach a US credit card. This works just fine--they'll take your money no matter where it's from.
   
3. Activate a VPN. I use the one run by the University of Tsukuba.
   
4. Buy a Kindle manga. This would have been impossible from overseas, but the VPN turns the "We cannot sell you this content" notice into the option to buy.
   
5. Download the manga after logging into Kindle with the Amazon.jp account. I did this on a separate computer from my main Amazon account, in a separate Firefox container, so there's no association.
   
6. Using Calibre and DeDRM Tools, unlock the manga.
   
7. In Calibre, convert it to PDF, the better to take notes on it for words I don't know.
   
8. Enjoy ebook manga that I now truly own.

I bought the first volume of Fruits Basket yesterday using this method, so tonight I'm going to try again and see if it still works. If it does--and I don't see why wouldn't--I'll buy more Fruits Basket, Peach Girl, Death Note, and BLAME! to practice my Japanese. And I can lend them out to other people, if they want.

Maybe they'll cut off my account at some point for whatever reason, but who cares? I own my purchases. It's mine and they can't take it from me. It's on my iPad in PDF right now.

Now to just get good enough at Japanese to read it without constantly looking things up.

Last night, after a period of struggle, I finally finished all of the JavaScript exercises on Free Code Camp post-revamp. I did a few before they changed the entire curriculum around, like the ROT13 cipher that I posted about here, but post-revamp there are five major projects to complete the certification. Here's the last one that took me the longest: a cash register.

( Here's the code )

I ran into two major problems while I was writing the code. The first was the While loop, where it kept quitting out without advancing the counter, and thus not checking every cash denomination in the register, and I couldn't figure out why. Eventually I added a second Else to advance the counter if either If statement was false, and then I remembered you can check for multiple conditions and only execute the If all of them are true. That took me like four hours to remember and when I added the &&, everything worked and I had my answer in the final form.

The second was with the last test case in the original problem. The answer was formatted strangely, with money returned from smallest denomination to largest rather than just the change given to the customer. This really confused me--did I need to add some kind of special condition to handle just this case? Why was it so different? What was I missing?

It turns out I didn't read the problem. The problem specifically specifies that if the change is all of the remaining contents of the register, return the entire register pre-transaction, which will probably have most drawers empty. Once I realized that, and reformatted the early part of the problem to function on a copy of the cid variable rather than on cid itself, it all worked out. And just now writing this I realized I don't need cidRemaining, which is a relic from before I added the workingCID variable. And there's a console.log still in there I should get rid of.

There. Did that. 💮

I managed to solve this without looking up any other solutions or checking forums for other people asking questions. Neither of those are bad, and in fact they are essential to a programmer's work (see this classic video for an succinct explanation), but I'm still proud I came up with this solution all on my own. The one thing I did have to look up was how to use map() on multidimensional arrays, which led to the understanding that I can map() on each instance of another map(), and that was the final puzzle bit I needed to finish off the function.

Next up on the curriculum is the section on libraries (Bootstrap, jQuery, React, etc), but tonight I'm going to take a break. Maybe I won't even study Japanese!

Well, I won't get ahead of myself.

I just realized that I still have a Megatokyo icon in there. That demonstrates how long I've been posting on DW/LJ.

Post-Skyward Sword, I've returned to working more on the freeCodeCamp curriculum. Just today I finished the basic algorithms section, after many hours of banging my head against the wall. It's all simple stuff like adding multiple numbers, changing every element of an array, sorting a list numerically or alphabetically, splitting an array into piece (that one took a while), and so on.
Here's the code for my ROT13 encryption solution with comments removed:
function rot13(str) {
var answerStr = "";
for (var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
if (/[A-Z]/.test(str.charAt(i))) {
answerStr += String.fromCharCode((str.charCodeAt(i) % 26) + 65);
}
else {
answerStr += str.charAt(i);
}
}
return answerStr;
}
Here's how it works:

1. takes in an uppercase string. It won't work for lowercase, for reasons I'll get to.
   
2. Checks the string character by character. If it's not an alphabetic character--if it's a number, a space, punctuation, etc.--it just adds it to the answer.
   
3. If it is an alphabetic character, it gets its HTML character code. For uppercase, this is between 65 and 90.
   
4. It then modulos the answer by 26, which leaves a result between 0 and 25. This also converts it to the ROT13 equivalent. The character code for A is 65, but 65 % 26 is 13.
   
5. Add 65 to the result of the previous equation, again giving each character a result of between 65 and 90. This is also why only uppercase works, since lowercase has character codes in a different range.
   
6. Convert those character codes to the alphabet equivalent and add it to the answer.
   
7. Repeat until the input is all processed.

I used to have a second If statement, where I'd add 13 to the character code unless it went over 90, in which case I'd subtract 13, but this implementation is cleaner.

And there are other ways to do it. When I finished I checked the thread for other solutions and saw a lot of people converted the string into an array and used the .map function to process each character and then .join to make an answer at the end. Some people wrote out an index, like var abc = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ", and then used that to make the substitutions. One guy wrote a long multidimensinal array (var data = [["A", "N"], ["B", "O"], etc) and just swapped characters, which does technically work. One person wrote a 27-case switch statement.

Maybe that's what makes me interested in programming. In some ways it's like translation, taking a specific meaning and rendering into an understandable text, it's just that the text has to be understandable to computers. And much like learning a new human language, it requires creating a ton of garbage before anything worthwhile comes out.

Next up is JSON and APIs, and then more dev projects. A random quote machine, the local weather (though the example for that project thinks I'm in Shuzenji in Shizuoka...), and a wikipedia viewer. I forsee a lot more banging my head against the wall.

And I don't think I did very well.

I was doing fine until the listening section. But the JLPT listening section never repeats anything and has all dialogue at faster-than-native speed (I'm listening to an interview with composer Hiyamuta Takushi literally right now and he's speaking about half as fast because it's not a rehearsed script), so you have to pay laser-sharp attention for forty minutes straight and if you ever lose focus even for a second, you've probably gotten the question wrong. That happened to me more than once because maintaining focus that long is extremely difficult and also my listening is just not that good.

Well, it's possible that I did better than I thought. When we were passing up answer sheets, I noticed that the person behind me and the person in front of me had answers that were broadly similar to mine. I'll find out in February. Until then, I'll keep practicing.

Prepping for the JLPT and I'm trying to read a lot of Japanese in the wild, so to speak, so I'm keeping up on that blog I posted about. The writer just took a trip to Germany and on one of her recent entries, I noticed an example of something that I often have trouble with when speaking.

Japanese is a strong head-final language, meaning that the main part of a phrase comes at the end (as opposed to English, which is a strong head-first language), and the first part of that entry demonstrates that pretty well:

パリでの自由行動日、前日のウェディングパーティーで夜更かしした後、たっぷり寝てお腹ペコペコで目覚めた私

Which in English reads

I, who on a free day in Paris after the day I stayed up late at a wedding party had slept a lot and woke up hungry, [...]

The [...] is because everything there is a modifier to 私 (watashi, "I"). A stilted but more literal translation would be, "The me who on a free day [etc]."

When speaking Japanese, I still have a hard time sometimes swapping my processing around and have to stop in the middle of a sentence and start over when I realize that I should have already said what I'm about to say.

I made the first change in my lunch in five years, though it hasn't quite taken effect. Every day at work I have a steak salad with goat cheese and two vegetables chosen from tomatoes, carrots, cucumber, celery, zucchini, and mushrooms; a hard-boiled egg; and some dark chocolate. I decided to swap out the steak for roasted chicken and see if I like it, and if so, I'll switch over permanently. Enjoying the same food over and over saves me a lot of money--I've eaten the same breakfast for the last six years--but sometimes, a change is nice.

To my boundless surprise after my last post about it, the database upgrades apparently worked and it now runs as smooth as butter. Not a single crash or error yesterday or today. The real test is if it works through Friday. If so, I might be finally in the clear.

Might. I'm sure it'll be terrible in a couple months again.

I'm back to reading 世界の中心で while Aya-sensei is on vacation, and the protagonist is currently at a friend's house whose parents have a mussel farm. It means that there's a lot of animal-related terms that I have to keep stopping to look up. Sometimes I feel bad about about my animal-related Japanese vocabulary, and then I look up カワハギ and I realize I don't know what a thread-sail filefish is either. I at least know the common animals I'm likely to have to talk about in country living, like crows (烏), cranes (鶴), frogs (蛙), wild boar (猪), deer (鹿), cicadas (蝉), etc. You can just talk about fish by color, anyway, because that's all you can tell in a restaurant.

Exciting times.

This is normally a day when I'd be writing up a summary of our Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom game last night, but it was called off at the last minute when one of the players came home to find their apartment had been broken into! The thiev(es) didn't take much, fortunately--they even left the WiiU behind, which seems like a joke itself--but that's not that much compensation. And they are moving in a month...

So instead, I spent most of last night playing Majora's Mask doing the Woodfall Temple. I'm not sure how I feel about Majora's Mask's yet--I've already lost about an hour of time due to freezing and the save system only allowing saving by restarting the three-day cycle, but I love the focus on a small city and the people who live there. I can definitely see a continuation of Link's Awakening, with its weird characters doing strange things and Link stumbling into the middle of it all and trying to sort everything out. I just wish I had a better sense of what's going on.

It's the problem with trying to learn a language. I don't want to read children's books or play games with little dialogue, because then I'm not actually getting any practice in. Studying requires pushing into areas I don't know. But that means that I'm never quite sure I understand the plot. I've got a walkthrough open in the background because of these issues, and I've already made a couple major errors that confused me until I went to check, like thinking that the monkeys in the swamp had captured someone instead of being captured by someone (Xに捕まえられています). The broad strokes I understand just fine, but in a game where it's very important that I'm in particular places at specific time, I need to understand the nuances to be able to play.

I redid the background image on my Dreamwidth page so it's locally hosted and shows up in 1080p. I tried a couple images of Tokyo in the rain, but they didn't display up well--with everything else on the page, it was just a blur of neon barely visible in the background. Which I suppose is accurate to some nights I've spent in Tokyo, but it doesn't make for a good aesthetic.

Looking forward to a low-key weekend and hopefully being able to finish Majora's Mask!

As part of the LARP I'm taking part in, I'm playing a descendant of Izanagi, and since I already know some Japanese, I took it on myself to translate some important game speeches into Japanese for my character to recite. One of them I wrote myself, in a mishmash of modern and classical Japanese that would probably look awful to anyone who knows either version of the language, but another I translated from text provided to me and it brought to mind some of the choices translators have to make.

The whole text might be spoilers (for any other participants who read this), but here's a line where I had to make some decisions:

Should I break this oath may all my victories become as ashes in my mouth

And here is the Japanese I came up with:

宣誓を破ると勝利が遺骨になるようにで
Sensei wo yaburu to shouri ga ikotsu ni naru you ni de

The first part is fairly straightfoward--"To break an oath," but the と there after the statement indicates a natural consequence. Like, 雨が降ると濡れる--"If it rains, [you'll] get wet." It's a situation where the second part is an obvious result of the first part with no question. If you turn off the light, it gets dark. If I break an oath, my victories will become as ashes.

The second part I took a couple liberties. I'm not entirely sure how to express hopes and wishes in Japanese. " といいです" is the way in normal conversation--the same と as above, implying that if X happens it will be good--but that just a set phrase that's the equivalent of "I hope that [something positive]" and doesn't apply here. I ended up choosing a phrase from the wishes offered at shrines. "ように" is the way that ema usually end with, and so here it's implying the speaker's own desire. Not only is this a natural consequence, it's what the speaker wants as part of their devotion to fulfilling the oath.

Also, the usual word for ash is just 灰 (hai), meaning ash from a fire or cigarette or something similar, but I went with a different nuance. 遺骨 are specifically the ashes of the dead after the body has been cremated, so I wanted to imply here that breaking the oath would have a cost in lives. The victories turning to ash is literally others dying because of the oathbreaker.

I'm taking this to my Japanese tutor later today, so we'll see what she thinks of it. But I'm pretty proud of at least that part!

So, I had a student named Moeko when I taught at Suzugamine. She was kind of attentive, and at least listened when people talked and tried at her work, but she hung out with a lot of people who absolutely weren't interested in learning English at all.

Well, apparently things changed a lot after I left. She got herself into the special English-focused class, went on a trip to England and stayed with a family for a few weeks, and found me on Facebook where she likes all my photos of food.

Anyway, I wished her a happy birthday a couple days ago, and we started a conversation, and after I told her I was taking a programming class, she said:

勉強以外は、本当に楽しいですっヾ(＠⌒ー⌒＠)ノ
うぉおおおおおおお！！ブラピ凄いことをしているのですねっ！日本語を教えたりしないのですか？？

Which, if I had to translate into English, I would render as:

Except for studying, [university] is really fun!
Wooooow!! You're doing amazing things! But aren't you teaching Japanese along with that?!

...I only wish.

When people ask me if I know Japanese, my response is never "yes," it's always, "I get by," because, well, that's a lot more accurate. I'm pretty good at reading and writing, but my vocabulary is still lower than I want it to be and I have a lot of trouble speaking because of that. When I'm writing, it's easy enough to look up words, but that's obviously not something I can reasonably do when I'm in the middle of talking to someone without completely breaking the flow of conversation.

I think the big problem is that I'm bad enough at conversation in English, much less in Japanese. I'm happy to sit in silence a lot of the time, and tend to let conversation threads drop, or go to a corner at parties and sit and watch the action--there's a reason I picked a job where I don't have to talk to anyone. :p Add in another language, and even if you take out the worry of making mistakes or looking stupid while searching for the right word, it's still difficult enough for me to find the words to keep the conversation flowing. Unless I were to learn the vocab for talking about RPGs or video games in Japanese, I guess...

The thing is, I'm not sure how she got that impression. We've talked on Facebook, in Japanese or in English, but when I was actually teaching her I'm pretty sure I never spoke Japanese to her ever. She could tell that I understood it somewhat, because when the students asked me questions I'd answer in English whether they asked me in Japanese or English, but was that enough? Maybe she just thought that since I came to Japan to teach English, I'd go back to America and teach Japanese. If I wanted to be a teacher, I suppose it would be a reasonable assumption.

Really, this is just another of the incidents that renews my desire to keep studying Japanese.

I've decided to offer simple Japanese lessons here--partially for anyone who's interested, but mostly because I think writing everything I know (which isn't much...) out in a format for explaining to other people will help me remember it better. I'll do them every "when I get around to it," but I'll make sure to tag them all "benkyō" so they're easy to find. And now:

( Lesson 1: Kanji and kana )