Listen to the Rain

It's been eight years since the 東日本大震災 (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai, "The Tōhoku Earthquake"), and Asahi TV released a webpage with cameras showing current and 2011 footage from the same locations. The website is in English, if you want to see the progress they've made.

I wrote about the daishinsai in 2017, specifically about an ad that appeared in Ginza, and today I went back and cleaned up the translation.

The time change hit me pretty hard. I suffered on both ends--I went to bed an hour late and woke up an hour early. I'm okay right now, but if it happens again I'll be a mess tomorrow. At least I got some good coding practice done last night, and more translation on Wild Man Blues done on Saturday.


On Friday I went to go see Within Temptation at the House of Blues, the same place I saw them back in 2007 for their Heart of Everything tour. That was also the last album of theirs that I listened to, so I was worried that it'd be all songs I didn't know that I'd feel kind of lost. I needn't have worried--after a couple songs from their new album Resist, they launched into All I Need, and then played Stand Your Ground, and I felt right at home. Here were some songs I could sing along to.


I came in late after Smash in Pieces was done, but caught the full set from In Flames. After their growling metal vocals, Within Temptation sounded even better. I leaned back against the bar, tried to ignore the people who occasionally squeezed past me, and just bathed in the music. The last song they played was "What Have You Done," and I took a long recording of it because it's one of my favorite Within Temptation songs. It was one of schoolpsychnerd and my songs, and the best thing about all of our songs being tragic is that they're still applicable and I still love listening to them.

There was a woman who kept brushing into me while she was dancing, and I think trying to catch my eye. But I ignored her until she went away and turned her attention to someone else.

I played another session of Betrayal Legacy on Saturday and we got through three more scenarios. Without spoiling anything, I can say that I won one of the scenarios singlehandedly in a single turn! Thanks to an extremely-lucky series of events, my character had maxed Might and Knowledge, and the Haunt required Might and Knowledge rolls to solve, so I smashed my way through several monsters and crushed the source in a single blow on the first turn after the Haunt began. Vengeance for the time I was playing Betrayal at House on the Hill with six players and we drew the doppelgänger Haunt on player five, and they burst through the front door and murdered me before I even got to take a turn.

Saturday night I made fish curry, since I had set out tilapia--that most tasteless of fish--to thaw, and something someone said during the board game convinced me that I should have curry instead. It's been a while since my curry paste ran out, so I bought some (vegan, no shrimp) red curry paste from Whole Foods and a bunch of vegetables and tried my hand at it. It was...bland. I think I didn't put in enough curry paste, since there were instructions for how much to use and the serving size was "one teaspoon," which isn't near enough for two cans of coconut milk as a curry base. That meant that the broth was beautifully colored, but tepid, and the tilapia didn't add anything.

I shoveled it into my mouth and had some butterscotch frozen custard for dessert to make up for the lack of taste.

On Sunday, meowtima and I went to see lisekatevans in Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. I wasn't sure quite what to expect other than the titular events, and it turned out to be epistolary. Much of the dialogue was quotations from trial records, books, letters, or newspapers, delivered by the various actors and highlighted by information about the source. The lighting did an excellent job here, switching colors and focus to highlight the actor explaining the source before swapping over to the one delivering the lines, which helped with the first half covering the libel trial where sources and dialogue kept jumping rapidly from source to source and time period to time period. It calmed down in the second half, covering the first and second trials of Wilde himself for what was then called "gross indecency," where more of the action took place in the courtroom.

The actress (it was gender-blind casting) playing Oscar Wilde did a fantastic job, especially considering that Saturday's performance had to be cancelled since she had the flu. She did a lot to convince me that Oscar Wilde was a great aesthetic philosopher and writer but would have been infuriating to me if I had to interact with him. Because of that, I ended up with conflicting emotions during the scene in the first act where Wilde gets flustered and trips over his bon mottes as he's being cross-examined. The whole trial was grossly unjust, only forced by the government because, as one of the sources put it, plenty of men in the government had similar habits and didn't want them to come out. So seeing Wilde lose his cool was tragic because it set the stage for his ruin, imprisonment, and death. But on the other hand, it was good to see Wilde not just respond to something with a quip. Not everything in life is witty banter!

The costuming was...odd. The music for the show was all original, and the program described it as "Steamgoth," which makes me curious because Steampunk is already what happens when goths discover brown. That'd be a good description of the clothing too, which were mostly Victorian, but with random straps, safety pins, buckles, sewn-on patches, and so on. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe I should borrow from the World of Darkness and say the costuming was Gothic Punk.

I also appreciated the attention paid to accents, though I can't speak to how accurate they were. Since each actor other than the ones played Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas played multiple characters, it made it easier to distinguish between them.

It was great, and if you're in Chicago you should go see it! It runs through March 23rd.


My iPad started acting up this morning. I'm really hoping it's a temporary fluke caused by an app update, since I keep all my apps up to date, but the analytics section suggests it's kernel panic, which could be a sign of hardware failure. It's been fine since this morning, and if it acts up again I'll try restoring from backup, and if that fails...well, there's plenty of Apple stores in Chicago.

Hope everyone had a good weekend and isn't wiped out by the time change!