Listen to the Rain

A nerd symphony, of course.

A while back, I got an email that Distant Worlds was coming through town to do a concert specifically focused in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I last went to Final Fantasy music in January of 2020, right before the Plague Years, when I went to go see the chamber music version of that same concert series that had all the smaller hits that you don't need an 80 piece orchestra to perform. That got me excited for Distant Worlds again...and then, well, you know what happened. 🦠 So it wasn't until much later that I actually even had the opportunity to go again, and then I wouldn't have been interested in the material (and sashagee was still not feeling all that well). But more time passed, and sashagee's condition improved, and another version of Distant Worlds, this time focused on Final Fantasy XIV and XVI said they were coming to town. So that was the one we went to.

After the standard opening--the prologue, the victory fanfare, and so on--they did a few audience hit pieces like the Four Fiends theme from Final Fantasy IV and To Zanarkand from Final Fantasy X, and then go into the program. They started with Songs of Salt and Suffering, one of my favorite songs in all of the Stormblood expansion, and did Tomorrow and Tomorrow since they had Amanda Achen, the original singer, there to do the vocals. That meant they also did The Final Day and Flow from Endwalker, and both times sashagee specifically commented on how Achen's performance was amazing. They ended with a chocobo medley, and then went to intermission.

After the intermission and a couple more fan favorites like Dancing Mad and Aerith's Theme was the XVI portion of the show, and I don't have as much to say about that half because I still haven't played XVI so the only exposure to the music I have is the FFXIV collab, and that means I'm most familiar with Find the Flame because that's the song that plays when you ride the Torgal mount you get in FFXIV, and they did play that (apparently in the game it only plays once). They also played Ascension, which is another big bombastic choir song--when you have a full orchestra and a choir, you might as well take advantage of it--and a couple other songs that didn't really stick with me, then finally ended with the classic Sephiroth's Theme.

I've been to half-a-dozen of these by this point, so I had fun but it wasn't amazing because a lot of the songs are ones I've seen in concert before. Sephiroth's Theme is a classic encore, for example. But for sashagee, this was her first time, and she mentioned she got goosebumps during some of the songs. We'll definitely be going back, especially if I can find another performance of the A New World chamber series. The music there is less bombastic, but much more varied.

Bonus picture:



The concert finished not too long after 4 p.m., and since sashagee had forgotten to eat lunch, we went to a nearby restaurant that used to be my favorite to go to before the symphony: the Gage. The food is great and the problem I always used to have--that it would sometimes take up to forty-five minutes to get the check after we were fully finished with our food--wouldn't have mattered since it was after the concert and we didn't have anywhere else to be, so we walked in, immediately got a table over in the bar area, and checked the menu. I got the fish in the end, because even though I'm more often than not disappointed with fish I get at restaurants since they're mostly tasteless and put a sauce on it that provides all the flavor, which tastes like mush with sauce on it. Despite costing $40, this...wasn't really that different, to be honest. Halibut, cod, tilapia, all have that whitefish "we taste like nothing" thing going on that more usual fish I enjoy like salmon do not. I should have gotten the coconut curry with salmon or the pear salad, to be honest.

On the other hand, the fried pickles and curry fries were delicious, and sashagee was very happy with the burger she got, so at least we'll be going back next time we go to the symphony. And we got home at 7 p.m., like your standard tired parents, and went to bed not that long afterward.

I've been reading The Body Keeps the Score, about trauma and recovery from same. There's a lot in here that I wish I had known about earlier, though I don't know that it would have made a difference. I don't have the kind of deep-seated, serious trauma that this book is talking about. schoolpsychnerd does, but other people can't solve that for her. Still, it might have helped me understand better what she was going through.

This post isn't about that, though. One of the major points the books makes is that the ways traumatized people behave mark them as strange, cause them a lot of pain, and get them shunned or mocked by their peers, but those habits continue because they were protective against the source of their trauma. At one point, in a certain context, they were useful habits, even if in every other context they cause nothing but pain.

When I read that, I immediately thought of some of the habits I developed in my marriage to deal with schoolpsychnerd's behavior. I don't want to go into exhaustive detail (and it would be lashon hara anyway), but one simple example is how I'm often leery of offering a suggestion because there's a part of me that thinks it creates an obligation in the listener. schoolpsychnerd would often treat it that way, because she was a people-pleaser and always tried to accommodate herself to what other people wanted. I didn't want to run roughshod over her, so sometimes we'd end up in a stalemate where each of us tried to get the other to state their opinion first, me so I'd know that her opinion was purely her own and her so she could take my opinion into account when making a decision. That led to me being anxious about asking people to do things, including even inviting them to go out for pie or come to a party, because I've learned over years that merely suggesting something is often treated as a command. So in order to avoid applying undue pressure, I often avoided suggesting things. Most of what this did was isolate me from my friends, but maybe it made schoolpsychnerd feel better.

On Tuesday, though, I thought about hosting a party for Shavuot, since the "eating dairy foods" aspect of the holiday makes it easy to secularize for a gathering. And after about twenty minutes of thought, I made an event and invited sixty people. A Facebook event invite is not a binding contract. It's not pressure in any way. And hopefully people will come and eat delicious ice cream and cheese and have a lovely time.

And this is something I should be aware of in the future, and examine my own actions, and try to figure out what impulses I have that were once an adaptive response but no longer are.

Tod Douglas Megibow (z"l), 1951-2012. May his memory be a blessing.



I said kaddish for him last night, on the beginning of the first of Sivan, and lit the candle. This picture is from this morning. His obituary is still online here.

I did not get the chance to know him very well. We only interacted a handful of times, since he was very busy with practicing law and schoolpsychnerd and I lived in Japan for three years. He thought fast and talked fast, like he was trying to get just a few more words out than the flow of time would let him. I honestly found him a bit overwhelming, but as far as I know, he liked me. He liked my level head and my thriftiness. I wish I had gotten the chance to know him better, to hear more of his stories. I wish he had been able to visit us in Japan, or in Chicago. He wrote a book based partially on his life. I've never read it.

In the interview linked there, he said:

"In this business if you don't laugh, you cry."

He and my father built the chuppah together, for the wedding.

( Psalm 130 )

​Just when I thought I was out etc etc.

I was all done with Darker than Black, and after a visit to Christkindlmarket our apartment is loaded down with non-chocolate desserts, gingerbread and marzipan and cookies and caramels. We are set for sugar into the new year. But then, we got a letter from our friend 房野和寿 in response to a postcard we had sent around Thanksgiving, and in the letter she included this chocolate. With such thoughtful provenance, I knew I had to write about it.
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Sometimes, I feel like I'm running out of new things to say about chocolate. The problem with always looking for extremely-dark chocolate is that it starts to blend together, and how many times can I talk about the taste of food that, by design, tastes pretty similar? The nice thing about Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries was that the ingredients and flavors changed each week, so there was always something new to talk about. That's not the case here, and while sometimes the delay between weeks is because I'm busy and don't want to take the time to sit down and write about chocolate--I didn't write a post last weekend because I had to take the JLPT--sometimes it's because I can't think of what to say.

So I think the next week will be the last Darker than Black. Sixty is a good number to go out on. But don't worry, dear reader--if you enjoy my posts about food, I have two other food blogging projects on the backburner. But for now, let's talk about chocolate.
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​As an introvert, I treasure those weekends where I have nothing scheduled. Especially when the weather hits a sudden cold snap. The week-long Chicago fall has ended, and now temperatures are below 0°C and there's snow on top of fallen leaves. A perfect day to curl up with caramel apple tea and eat delicious food, because schoolpsychnerd took advantage of the day to cook up a storm. We had almond-encrusted chicken and matcha waffles for brunch, soft-boiled egg and salmon salad for dinner, and as I write this, she's prepping the dough for a croissant experiment. Tomorrow will also be delicious.

But this is not "Flakier than Croissants," so I'll talk about what we had for dessert.

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I love Japanese mushrooms. In Chiyoda, there's a farmer's market at the bus station where local farmers would drop off their products to sell. A lot of it was vegetables and fruit, of course, but there was a wider variety available than that. Sometimes there was wild boar, like at the last Tondo Festival we went to where a farmer who had shot a wild boar in his fields brought the meat in to the festival, or ducks, or eggs. There were baked goods and ready-made bentō. And, there were mushrooms.
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Two weeks ago, melishus_b came to visit--you can read all about that here. But relevant to this post is that she brought omiyage with her, chocolate from Seattle, since she knew we loved chocolate so much. One bar was milk chocolate, and we basically tore it straight open and ate it on the spot. The other was dark chocolate, and I took it and put it on top of the refrigerator among the rest of our chocolate collection so I can could use it for a future Darker than Black. And that moment has arrived.
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​Originally I was going to skip this week, because it's been a long day and I didn't think we had any chocolate in the queue other than Raaka, which I try not to do too much of in a row. But then I remembered that we'll be gone the next two weekends and found one extra chocolate bar buried under the others, so I changed my mind and here we are!

Nothing else to say this week. Let's talk about chocolate
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Enjoying a lazy Sunday on Labor Day weekend. Yesterday was busy, with a dentist appointment in the morning and Call of Cthulhu in the afternoon, but I have nothing scheduled for today. Next weekend is novafigura and hopefulrefrain's engagement party, the weekend after that melishus_b and her boyfriend are coming from Seattle to visit, the weekend after that schoolpsychnerd and I are going to Seattle for t3chnomag3's wedding, and the weekend after that is Yom Kippur. But for the moment, I have very little to do.

I signed up for the pedometer challenge at work. This isn't really anything out of the ordinary for me, since ever since I downloaded a pedometer app for my phone that changes color I've tried to get 10K steps a day (about 8.1 km for me), but the team I signed is full of exercise junkies so we decided to compete in the 12K band. I got in my steps without too much trouble yesterday since I was already planning on reading while schoolpsychnerd was out, so I just walked around a bit with my book. Today I'm at 3.3K right now and we still have to go grocery shopping and clean later, but I'll probably have to do an hour of walking. It keeps me from spending twelve hours in a row playing video games like I used to and helps me keep up on my RSS feeds, and I actually enjoy walking. I just wish that we had our own house or a ground floor apartment sometimes. I try to walk softly and our downstairs neighbors have never complained, but...

I've started a new RPG project, because that's my primary outlet for creativity other than writing. I keep trying to adapt the old TSR AD&D setting of Dark Sun to something that I'd rather run it in, and after almost two years of Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom, I'm comfortable trying to adapt it into a hybrid of Exalted and NWoD. I haven't gotten very far, but I made a few changes (ported over Composure and Resolve, dumped Manipulation and Appearance, split Dexterity into Dexterity and Agility) and have some more in mind. The Essence stat in Exalted being universal means it works perfectly as a way to determine psychic potential, since everyone and everything in Dark Sun is supposed to be psychic. The way sorcerous motes work in Exalted 3e, where the sorcerer has to roll and accumulate energy, simulates the way Dark Sun wizards draw in life energy from plants to power their spells and allows me to give defilers an advantage by making their accumulation faster. There are enough dials on the weapon statistics that I can easily replicate the way most weapons are inferior because they're made of stone or wood or bone by tweaking them. I think it can work, and it'll be fun to work on, even if I never run it.

I have three maps on the wall of the computer room from the three fantasy settings that have most influenced me. One is the map of Vvardenfell from the Morrowind Collector's Edition; one is Chrono Trigger's Kingdom of Zeal, where dreams come true; and the third is a map of the Tablelands from the Dark Sun boxed set.

schoolpsychnerd has promised to make a special dinner tonight, but hasn't said what she's going to make. I'm not sure it matters, because I can think of only three times she's made something that I haven't liked it, and one of those didn't count because the flour had gone rancid. I'm looking forward to it.

I might have a Darker than Black later in the weekend, and probably a post tomorrow about a long-term personal goal that I've reached. I hope everyone else is having a good weekend!

Tea time!

This came in the same shipment as the Genmaicha Crunch, but after the bland disappointment of that chocolate it took a while god is to get to this one. Hōjicha (ほうじ茶) means "roasted tea," and it adds a distinct smoky flavor to the normal slightly-bitter taste of green tea. It's the kind of thing that should compliment dark chocolate very well if they can pull it off.

Spoiler: they can't.
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​On Friday schoolpsychnerd and I took a trip out to the suburbs to visit my parents. We managed to get on the express train, shaving twenty minutes off the trip, and then had a delicious dinner of salmon and vegetables with my mother's homemade ice cream pie for dessert. We came back on Saturday, later than we usually do since I'm feeling less time-crunched than I normally would what with my upcoming week of vacation, and spent most of the rest of the day at home. But we went out to dinner and on the way, we bought some chocolate.
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Last weekend schoolpsychnerd and I took a vacation, sort of! We went out to Portland for faylynne and ntcomplete's wedding, and unlike the last time we were there in 2015, the weather cooperated. For Portland, anyway. It was cool and cloudy--just the way I liked it--and being next to the Willamette meant that sometimes there were passing boaters, though at least they cut the motor when they noticed that there was a ceremony happening. But everything else was lovely. I especially liked the sling that the maid of honor, faylynne's eldest sister, had rigged up to allow her new baby to participate in the ceremony.


I also loved how most of the wedding party entered to the main hobbit theme from The Fellowship of the Ring, while the bride and groom entered to an instrumental cover of the Legend of Zelda fairy fountain theme.

The ceremony was extremely short and to the point. After a brief opening, the couple gave their vows--almost inaudible to us sitting in the back, but from what I could tell a variation on the traditional ones--and then exchanged rings, soldiering through ntcomplete dropping them when the best man handed them to him and faylynne initially trying to put the ring on his right hand. Then they kissed, the ceremony was over, and the guests all went back to the hall for drinks and snacks before the reception. I drank red wine and gin, schoolpsychnerd drank white wine and cider, and our friend aaron.hosek does not drink, but we were all united in our love for the snacks. Caprese skewers and grilled cheese shooters, with a tiny bit of grilled-cheese sandwich stuck in the top of an ounce or so of tomato-basil soup in a shotglass. It was delicious and I'm amazed that I haven't seen it anywhere else.

Inside, we took our seat at the labeled tables, each themed after a specific fantasy setting. The three of us were seated at the Tortall table, which immediately made aaron.hosek text his girlfriend. She was unable to attend due to a family emergency, but despite not really being geeky at all, she's read the Song of the Lioness books and would have instantly recognized the table title.

Then was a buffet dinner and dancing. I was initially a bit worried that no dinner preference had been specified, but schoolpsychnerd correctly pointed out that it was almost certainly a buffet. And it was, with nothing that we can't eat. The salmon and asparagus were especially tasty.

We did not dance, at least for my part because none of the songs being played are the kind I like to dance to, but the dance floor wasn't particularly well attended. There were a lot of people chatting and eating, and then speeches and cake.


I don't like most cakes, but they did look wonderful. And they were made by the maid of honor. I heard a couple people asking faylynne if her sister was a chef, and her reply was that her sister had taken a pastry class one summer.

As we left, we got a bit of a chance to chat with both of them. ntcomplete tried to sell aaron.hosek on attending PAX and mostly succeeded and both of them told us about their honeymoon in Japan and how they wanted us all to go back in 2020 when the new Ghibli Theme Park will be opened. I mentioned that was also when the Nintendo Theme Park would be open and that's in Ōsaka, far away from the Tokyo crowds. aaron.hosek suggested making the Japan trip a biannual thing and you know, that sounds like a great idea.

faylynne also mentioned that she had been practicing Japanese on DuoLingo and how shocked she was when the writing suddenly changed and she realized she had to learn another syllabary. All I could do was nod, half sagely, half sympathetically. I've been there.

She wants to get to conversational Japanese in time for 2020. I wish her good luck. She will need it.

Other things I did in Portland!:

• Stayed with my sister, who kindly put us up in her apartment's spare room!
  
• Went to House of Ramen, which featured build-your-own ramen so schoolpsychnerd and I could have porkless ramen. We got a small size bowl, also known as "the size ramen is served in Japan." My sister and her boyfriend split a regular.
  
• Went to the farmer's market and bought a bunch of cheese and smoked salmon. They also had delicious macaroon cookies but we were too full to eat them.
  
• Bought some Edo Jidai-era lacquerware at the going-out-of-business sale at Shogun's Gallery.
  
• Went to Moonstruck chocolate, which I obliquely wrote about here.

It was a lovely way to spend a weekend.