Listen to the Rain

New Year's meme time.

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Happy New Year to everyone!

Here are all the games I beat in 2023, in chronological order:

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In a striking change to most years, the weather has not plunged like 30 degrees after the new year and the weather report even shows that it's above freezing for the next week! On the one hand it's nice to be walking to work and not have to button my coat--the universal sign that winter has arrived--but on the other hand a warm Chicago winter is not exactly an encouraging sign for the global temperature mean. Nonetheless, it's supposed to be 5°C today so maybe I'll take a walk along the river at lunch.

We finished all of our 年賀状 (nengajō, "New Year's Cards") this week--we were waiting on a few addresses. In Japan, 年賀状 are strictly formal without much personalization at all. They have a few set phrases offering good wishes for the new year, you stamp your personal seal on them by the dozen, and drop them in the mail. The mail carriers pick them up and hold them during the month of December and then deliver them in a blizzard--something like two billion 年賀状--on New Year's Day. They're premade and all you need to do was address them, and in past years that's mostly what I did, though I did translate the Japanese on them for the benefit of the mostly non-Japanese-speaking recipients. This year, sashagee wanted the absolutely cutest 年賀状 out there, so I presented her with a few candidates and she went with this one:


The year of the rabbit! It doesn't include the rest of the standard text, usually something like 旧年中は大変お世話になりました。今年も宜しくお願い致します。 ("You have been of great assistance to me in the last year and I look forward to our continued good relations in the new year"), but I suggested that we modify the tradition a bit and put photos on our family on it. I'm certainly never going to send anyone a Christmas card but there is social value in updating your friends on how your family looks, so I put a photo on there from our trip to the arboretum and sashagee wrote a simple good wishes standard message (shades of the standard 年賀状). I ordered fifty of them and that's usually more than enough for my purposes but this year we ran out! Next year we'll have to order a hundred since we're sending 年賀状 to sashagee's family and friends now which expands the circle of recipients by a lot. Next year, I'll be writing 年賀状 for a while at the end of December. At least two people working on them makes it faster.

I'm still working on my psychic powers mod for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and last night I spent two hours trying to solve a problem. I decided to make the starting Teleporter profession an "Imperial Terran Navy Liaison," a psychic from an alternate dimension where Earth has an interstellar empire who got dumped on post-apocalyptic Cataclysm Earth after a jump drive accident, so I thought I would give them a hypertech gun that was standard issue in their home reality, balanced by virtue of never being able to reload it. Easy, I thought. Cue hours of "invalid ammo type" errors and me frantically scrolling through documentation, loading up a Teleporter and finding the ammo type was "0 Null", reading existing documentation and examples of guns and trying to figure out what was wrong, searching through the Discord and Reddit, the classic woes of computer programming. And sure, JSON doesn't involve math or formal logic, but it does involve proper semantics being extremely important, and something was missing.

In the end, I solved it by writing these four lines:
{
"type": "ammunition_type",
"id": "mom_fusion_ammo",
"name": "B47 fusion shot",
"default": "mom_fusion_ammo"
}
The problem was while I had defined the ITN B47 Fusion Pistol, and the magazine that goes in that pistol, and the physical ammo that's placed in that magazine, I hadn't made the definition of that physical ammo as an ammunition type--it was just an item with type AMMO, not an ammunition_type. As soon as I put in that extra definition, all the errors went away. At least for the other error I got (teleporter's "attune to location" ability not working) it was because I had assigned the same id to two different things. That ammo problem...ugh.

As my father often says, the more you know about computers, the more surprised you are they ever work.

I am 300 entries behind on my reading page. I really need to get on that.

In the meantime, here is the traditional New Year's retrospective meme, one day later than I originally planned because yesterday was Asarah b'Tevet and I didn't have much concentration to hand.

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Happy New Year to everyone!

Happy 5783! 🍎🍯

Took Laila to the park and met the husband of the director of programs who told me there's going to be a petting zoo at the Rosh Hashanah street fest tomorrow. I knew they were trying to get a goat (re: Leviticus 16:21-22) but a zoo implies more than one animal! That makes me really curious what else is going to be there.

Laila loved her first taste of apples and honey.

Backdating this a bit because time got away from me, but here's, the traditional new year's meme:

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Happy New Year to everyone!

Here are all the games I beat in 2020, in chronological order:

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I didn't go to the farmer's market this week, because I decided to take a break for the High Holy Days.

Speaking of, last weekend was Rosh Hashanah and things were much different than in previous years. Mishkan's services were all online, so on Friday night sashagee and I went over to britshlez's place for Rosh Hashanah dinner, and while we ate the chicken and vegetables and challah and hummus and beets, we watched the mostly pre-recorded service. It just wasn't the same--the real joy of High Holy Days services is being there, in hearing the singing all around you, in feeling the connection with everyone as you sing the Unetaneh Tokef. You can't get that when it's all on the screen. There's no joy in the Torah being brought out of the ark when it's not physically present, regardless of the rabbi's call to reach out and touch the screen. It's not the same, and while I watched the morning service the next day, I didn't watch it on Sunday. It was better with a small group, but even there, we didn't sing along.

I had a pomegranate as my new fruit, along with the apples and honey from our apple-picking excursion. sashagee made apple bread and some apple tarts, and while the latter was delicious, I didn't get to try the former since it had dairy in it. We forgot to pick up any of it before we left, and I'm not sure anyone else had any, so I don't know how it tasted.

No fish heads. Maybe next year.

What was really nice was on saturday when arsduo and I went to Horner Park to hear the shofar being blown. Unfortunately, I underestimated how long it would take me to walk there, and while I met arsduo and his friend in time, we walked up to the park right in time for me to catch the last תקיעה גדולה tekiah gedolah and when we arrived on the hill where people were gathered, they were already dispersing. There was some talk of a second shofar blowing for the benefit of people who arrived late, but it didn't materialize, and after waiting around for ten minutes or so we walked down to the river to do תשליך tashlich.


We spent an hour there, watching the ducks eat the bread and swim up and down the river, before the setting sun started to make it pretty chilly, and then arsduo and I took the bus back and his friend rode her bike back home. It was a great way to celebrate the holiday in a year not full of much celebration.

Happy New Year! I drank too much last night and I haven't felt 100% today, but it was nice and relaxing. thosesocks invited me and some other people over for a quiet day listening to folk music and eating cheese. I made zenzai, traditional Japanese red bean New Year's soup, and thosesocks made tea for us all, and now I'm at home with a wood-wick candle burning and watching Reverse Angle's take on the 1998 Godzilla.

It's been a good year. On Facebook, I wrote:

I went into 2019, teeth barred and a knife behind my back, ready to immediately start stabbing the moment it looked like anything was threatening.

Three, maybe four months in, I put the knife down and kept walking, and I haven't felt the lack.

People repeatedly tell me how different I am. How I seem like an almost completely different person than I used to. They tell me that I'm more social than they could have imagined even for themselves, and ask me how I have the energy to do it. My *sister* told me that she was jealous of my social life and asked me for my secret, and let me tell you, that was the day that Hell froze over.

At my last party, people kept asking me "How do you know all these people!?"

The story of the last decade was, I suppose, of being a plant in a glass bottle. I had plenty of light and water, but when I hit the edge of the bottle I just stopped growing and I figured that was the limit of the world. When in 2018 the glass shattered, I thought that it was a world-ending disaster...but it actually let me grow in ways I hadn't thought were previously possible.

In 2019 I made a bunch of new friends. I started dating again. I put down the video games that have defined my life for thirty years because I *don't have time to play* because I'm too busy seeing people, going to theatre shows, watching movies at friends' houses, and going to museums. I am, in other words, a new man.

So, bring on the roaring 2020s. Give me neon noir, synthwave jazz, electric-blue cocktails in dingy speakeasies, black trenchcoats with collars turned up against climate-change-induced polar vortices, and, hopefully, a story I can start with "And then she walked in." I am more than ready

So there's a good summary of my year! It was a great year overall.

The song that defined my 2018 was "Dynasty," by Miia:

Watch on YouTube

But the song that defined 2019 was "Gorgeous" by Illenium:

Watch on YouTube

It was a good year.

Here's my answers for the traditional New Year's forty questions meme:

( Forty questions )

I meant to write this a week ago, but you know, things happen.

I originally didn't have any plans on New Year's Eve, but I mentioned that on Facebook and almost immediately smtemp told me about a party at emojimjitsu's house out in the suburbs. I hesitated over it for a bit before realizing that if I had bought tickets to any event in the city, it'd cost the same or less than a Lyft out there and back, so I got dolled up (it's me, so read "gothed up") for the party I headed out.

I was congratulated on my Metal Gear Solid aesthetic as soon as I stepped into the house, so

It was great! Lacking a car, the suburbs seem almost like an entire world away sometimes, so I don't often get the chance to hang out with my friends who live outside the city. I'm definitely glad I took smtemp up on her invitation rather than spending NYE alone. And the annual Space Dragon dinner that ping816 throws is next Friday, so I'll get to see people again. Just need to figure out how to get out there...

I read the first volume of Death Note in Japanese and understood (almost) everything! worldbshiny recommended it to me back when when all went to see lisekatevans's show (the one I wrote about here, though this time with worldbshiny and meowtima rather than by myself). I found a website called Ebook Japan that sells digital manga and light novels and doesn't care if you live overseas, and while they have some weird DRM scheme because it's Japan, I'm willing to suffer through that for ￥450 manga. I didn't realize how much of the story was a cat-and-mouse criminal and detective game between Light and L. I figured it was just about a snotty teenager being a jerk. And there was definitely some of that--I liked how Light assumed he was qualified for supreme moral judgement over humanity due to being an honors student--but it was mostly about mysteries. As a man in his thirties, that's a lot more interesting to read.

Last weekend I mostly did nothing, though worldbshiny invited a bunch of people out to brunch and it turned out I was the only one who could go. And then when we arrived, it turned out that the charity donations were only going to the organization based on drinks purchased, not food. We got just food and she kindly drove me home.

Yesterday was the beginning of mutantur's next Call of Cthulhu game, so we got together (with two new players!) and played Pulp Cthulhu. No longer merely ordinary men and women called together to fight monsters from beyond the stars, now we are heroes. ...or will be, once the plot gets rolling. We got started late and didn't make it to the main part of the scenario, so that comes in two weeks.

Today I'm doing chores and relaxing, and next week is pretty light. And after I typed that, I realized that for me of a year ago, saying that having events on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday was "pretty light" would be unthinkable. How quickly the tide turns.

Here's 2018's year-end survey meme:

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皆様、明けましておめでとうございます。ご健康とご多幸をお祈り申し上げます。新年も宜しくお願い致します

Happy New Year!
​

Well, that was a year!

Last year, schoolpsychnerd and I went to resaamnesia's New Year's Eve party, along with a giant bottle of お屠蘇 (otoso), like we did the year before. It was good! At least, I thought so. I don't think many other people drank much of it, other than when chronicluscious mixed it with rose water and made a mixed drink that even oddsboy wouldn't drink, which is an accomplishment in itself. I'm told it smelled really good but tasted like soap. I'm glad I missed it. I stuck with plain お屠蘇 like I did last year. It was delicious.

Looking at last year's retrospective, I did accomplish some of my goals. I was a bit more social, and I was much more serious about Japanese. Playing all those video games in Japanese and reading 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ with my Japanese tutor meant that I'm reading substantial lengths of Japanese every week, if not necessarily every day, and still getting plenty of speaking practice. I did play Android this year with drydem and damaskrosechicago, and won again even though I was Floyd the bioroid this time instead of Raymond the P.I. I still haven't played Kingdom Death, and have all the minis unassembled in boxes around our apartment.

We saved an enormous amount of money coupled with a stock market completely detatched from how the economy is performing for anyone of median income, so on paper we made a bunch of money but our lifestyle hasn't changed at all, and seems to have hit a nice equilibrium where we can put money into both short-term and long-term savings sufficient to have enough to cover emergencies and to save for trips or anything we'd like to buy. We did switch to the new data management system at work and it's , but we're probably switching to another system pretty soon. At the moment, I have to deal with the enormous amount of data that the system can't handle, but that's actually job security for me--my entire job is based around computers not being good enough to handle everything themselves yet, so more incompetent computers means more work for me, which means more reason for me to work. I will not complain.

My Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom game is still going strong, to my happiness. It's not the longest-running game I've ever been in, but it's almost at two years now (it'll hit two years the second week of March). That's really good, since the average game lasts less than a year (around one academic year, in fact).

There's a traditional new year's meme that's going around Dreamwidth and, before it, went around LJ. I've never answered it before, but it provides a nice structure to my retrospective. Here:
( Forty questions )

皆様、明けましておめでとうございます。ご健康とご多幸をお祈り申し上げます。新年も宜しくお願い致します。

Happy New Year!