Listen to the Rain

This weekend schoolpsychnerd and I are in Portland for a wedding! I'm sure I'll be writing all about that tomorrow when I have more time to write, but at the moment we're sitting in my sister's apartment, where she kindly offered to put us up for the weekend, and eating chocolate. We walked downtown yesterday to one of Portland's farmers' markets, and after buying smoked salmon and a load of spiced cheese curds, my sister said that she and her boyfriend were going to go to Moonstruck Chocolate for dessert, so we tagged along. schoolpsychnerd jokingly said that we should do a Darker than Black about the truffles we are, but then I noticed they had chocolate bars.
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​I will warn you now, dear reader, that this is my most biased review yet. How could it not be? I've been eating See's marzipan dark chocolates for almost as long as I can remember. My grandparents always gave boxes to me and my father at birthdays and holidays, and then my father continued the tradition whenever he went west to visit them, and I'm sure that should I have children they will also be receiving boxes of See's from me on appropriate events.

I mostly hate #brands and I follow See's on Facebook, such is the depth of my love.
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Apparently I'm starting some kind of sea salt-themed section in Darker than Black. We got a Raaka Pink Sea Salt in our latest chocolate shipment, but we already did that a year ago. There's another sea salt-themed bar waiting as well, but as I was looking through the pile of dark chocolate to see what there was to do, I decided on this one since it was a present. Thanks to topher.elderkin for providing it!
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I'm not really a comics fan. I have a comics tag, but the Japanese it's translated from says manga, and the only convention tag I have is explicitly anime conventions. So when schoolpsychnerd suggested I go to the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo with her this weekend, I was hesitant. Would I know anything that was going on? Would I find anything that interested me? Well, I do like cosplay, so I suggested characters that we both know:

Morgoth Bauglir and Sauron the Great.

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It's been a while! Various things came up, we had packed weekends, schoolpsychnerd was gone for a retreat, she made me a tasty olive oil cake with no chocolate whatsoever--yes, I do sometimes eat desserts that contain no chocolate at all!--we had a Call of Cthulhu game...you know, things. But this weekend we didn't have much to do other than one thing that I'll probably also write about tomorrow, and so I took down some chocolate from our supply, opened it up, and we tried it.

I should have skipped another week.
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Yesterday, schoolpsychnerd and I went with my parents to the orchid show at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The weather wasn't great for garden-viewing, but fortunately this was an orchid show, so all the flowers were indoors. When I was a child, I hated looking at flowers, hated being dragged along with my parents to flower shows, and didn't understand why they cared. There are a lot of things parents tell children that they'll understand when they're older only because they don't want to actually answer them, but sometimes, it is true.
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Last night, schoolpsychnerd and I finished watching Tamayura: Hitotose. I gave it a nine. It's not super popular. The animation is fuzzy and obviously not particularly high quality, it's a slow slice-of-life anime shows about cute anime girls doing cute anime things, and the hook is that the main character likes photography and moved back to Takehara, in Hiroshima Prefecture, after her father died.

And that, of course, is the in for me. We watched the intro OVA when it first came out, while we lived in Chiyoda, so everything was familiar. I recognized the view from Mt. Asahi. They went to a shrine in neighboring Onomichi that I knew because an old man complimented schoolpsychnerd on the boots she was wearing, saying that boots with kimono was popular during the Meiji era but had completely fallen out of fashion nowadays. And because it's Takehara, there was an episode set during the Bamboo Festival, and we spent the whole time looking at the scenery of all the places we had been and the sights we had seen, like this bamboo and lights sculpture. There's a quote that's relevant here, I think:

“It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.”
-Neil Gaiman, The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains

Our love for Tamayura comes maybe half from what it's actually about, and half from our memories of living in Hiroshima, going to local festivals, eating okonomiyaki, living in a house with tatami floors, and standing on a mountain over the Setonaikai, watching the sunlight on the waves.

ping816 has an anime club he runs, and one of the shows we watched was 5 Centimeters per Second. schoolpsychnerd and I loved it and everyone else hated it. Some of that is differing tastes, but I think part of it is because we lived in Japan and the other people watching did not. We had at least some of the culture context for appreciating what it was trying to say. That's what I seek out in anime now, rather than moeblobs or hot-blooded anime pilots. I can get those from video games, whereas getting an experience anything like living in a small Japanese town is pretty rare in games (though Stardew Valley comes close).

Now I want to go back to the Bamboo Festival. Someday...

Monday isn't the usual day, but I already skipped last week and I didn't want to skip another week.

Over the end of the year, we had a lot of candy and other desserts that wouldn't fit Darker than Black, so we stopped updating quite so much other than the marzipan, which only barely qualifies here. But now we've worked our way through everything except the giant bag of frozen Halloween candy that my parents gave me after they realized there was no way they could eat it, and due to the hiatus, we've built up our backlog again. Hopefully we can get through it before it goes rancid.
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schoolpsychnerd and I don't celebrate Christmas, but every year we go to Christkindlmarket in Chicago for the German food and crafts. A lot of it we can't eat because the Germans are fond of their pork, but the Döner Men have a booth there where they serve chicken kabobs that are wonderful with some spiced apple cider and a cold wind blowing around you. Though honestly, I could do without the last part.
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A while ago, we signed up for a service called Shoshbox that delivers a monthly shipment of Japanese candy. It's since merged with Tokyo Otaku Mode, and we've upgraded to a larger box size, but it's nice every month to get a shipment of candy even if a lot of it isn't to my taste. The gum goes to schoolpsychnerd, as do some of the more cracker-like snacks, and sometimes we get something amazing like the 菓実グミパイナップル (kajitsu gumi painappuru, "Real fruit gummy pineapple"), which actually does taste like it has real pineapple inside. And, very rarely, we get something that's suitable for Darker than Black.
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schoolpsychnerd doesn't like the dark. I do. That's the way of it. Left up to myself, I leave most if not all the lights in the apartment out, since the light filtering in from the alley outside through what few openings are left in the curtains we have up is enough for me to see by. Even at night, I usually don't bother to turn on the lights when I get up and move around. The apartment layout doesn't change, after all, and my night vision is pretty good. But sometimes, when I come home, the curtains are open and all the lights are on as schoolpsychnerd soaks up the light.

The last couple nights, I've been reading a Let's Play of a Japanese RPG Maker game called Corpse Party. You can probably tell what kind of game it is from the title, and even though the links to the music and sound had vanished into the internet ether--sadly, since they're the highlight--I still found it creepy enough that before I went to sleep last night, I left the living room light on.

It would have made more sense when we lived in Japan, since we basically lived in a J-Horror house. We literally had an abandoned house right next to ours, plus another abandoned compound just down the street. We had steep stairs with no railing that a spirit could easily have pushed us to our deaths down. But here, where three quarters of the apartment is always visible from any other point in it?

Well, it's the dark. schoolpsychnerd was worried that I would think less of her when she told me that she didn't like the dark, but I don't. The dark is scary! And who knows what could be out there. I can tell myself whatever I want, but my instincts are the instincts of a savannah-dwelling ape who stayed with the group or huddled by the fire and lived, while those who knew there was nothing out there were eaten by lions. So it took me a long time to fall asleep, and while I didn't have nightmares that I remember, I woke up an hour and a half before my alarm.

Maybe it's also that the game takes place in a school. I taught in a Japanese school, and I've been in other schools. They're all laid out pretty similarly, so it was easy for me to convert the minimal RPG Maker graphics in my mind into what a decayed, rotting school would actually look like. Maybe more effective than if the graphics had been more realistic.

Usually I'm fine in the dark, but it doesn't take much.

This is another one of the weeks where we go back through the bag and pick out one of the chocolate bars we've meant to do for a while and eat it before it comes completely bad. Only somewhat bad. I knew intellectually that chocolate could oxidize and get brittle and taste a bit off, but before I started buying chocolate specifically for Darker than Black, I hadn't actually seen it other than the one time that a chocolate bar got lost in the back of the pantry for a couple months before we realized it was there and I dug it out to eat after dinner. The lifespan of chocolate in our household is generally measured in days or weeks, but at one chocolate bar per week plus the occasional break, it can last a lot longer in the backlog bag.

We're nearly through the whole backlog, though, now that I have a better sense of how quickly we go through chocolate. And now that if it looks like it's taking too long, we start eating the backlog and not writing about it. Hey, we can always buy more chocolate, right? I don't see a problem here.
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This will be slightly shorter than the usual Darker than Black because I just wrote five and a half thousand words about video games. But I haven't done this in two weeks and wanted to get back into the the habit. Of writing, I mean. I never got out of the habit of eating chocolate.

The packaging claims that this company was started by former Peace Corps volunteers started the company in order to make chocolate "as a vehicle for social impact" in Madagascar. Going online, I found a whole page on their website here dedicated to the topic. I do not know enough about chocolate processing or about Madagascar's economic situation to comment on whether that is a worthwhile goal or a worthwhile way to go about it. But it's good chocolate.
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