Listen to the Rain

So, sashagee is a big K-pop fan. She listens to it a lot at home, she's gotten Laila into it--Laila will random run around singing "Drama-ma-ma, drama-ma-ma, girls in back, drama-ma-ma" or ask for "Blue hair" or for "pretty dresses." She took me to see Sun-mi back in 2022. And it's nice to listen to and I don't have having it on in the background, but if I were picking out music for myself, I'd never think of K-pop. Until yesterday, when I came out of the bathroom and sashagee had a song on and I said "æspa did a cover of 'Korobeiniki'?" and sashagee said that she had another song on and Laila had seen another thumbnail on Youtube and demanded that song next, and:

Watch on YouTube

While listening to it, I realized two things that makes this different than most of the K-pop sashagee plays around the house. The first is that it's all in English The second is that it's very synthwavy, especially the chorus--you could easily see an instrumental version of the song as a "Tetris Theme (Synthwave Remix)" somewhere on Youtube, and indeed apparently said instrumental version does appear over the credits of the recent Tetris.

Just looked up a couple synthwave remixes and this song sounds better than them, actually.

I have a confession to make--I have never seen the hit movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Rickman, but I have played the NES game based on it.

I was going to say "I don't remember how I originally found this game," but on a hunch I went to look up whether it was in Nintendo Power and, would you look at that, it got a cover on issue 26. I am not immune to advertising and was much less immune as a Nintendo-loving child. Wikipedia says:

However, this issue was notorious for the fact that the game was not released until 4 months after the issue was released

but I don't remember having to deal with that. I remember getting the game and playing through it probably a dozen times, as you did back in the day when games were limited, both how many you had and how many there were in the world, and you had to stretch your enjoyment of a given game out over months because you didn't have a backlog of hundreds of games waiting that would haunt you until the day you died. And it's not like this game is particularly hard or stretchable. It's no Final Fantasy where the Marsh Cave punched me in the face until I really buckled down and ground in the swamps and won through to the rest of the game. It's about an hour and a half. This playthrough took me about that long, not counting time grinding where I put down the controller with my kindle on a button.

Hey, it's still a video game.


( Read more... )

Gurney Halleck never once plays the baliset, 0/10 stars, worst movie ever.

A couple weeks ago I got a Facebook invite from cillic informing me that he had rented out a movie theatre with a ᑐᑌᑎᑕ showing last Sunday. I hadn't seen him or heather.eisele in almost two years, since New Year's Eve 2019, so sashagee asked her parents if they could watch Laila, we drove over to Rosemont where the theatre is, ordered food when we got there, and arrived just in time to watch the trailer for the new Batman movie they're coming out with and then ᑐᑌᑎᑕ began.

( Spoilers within )

Finally went to bed on Tuesday night early and yet I still rolled out of bed at the last minute to make it to Wednesday morning prayers on time. I guess that means I need even more sleep. And the last night I stayed until 4 a.m. and woke up this morning at 11 a.m., so I'm not doing so hot on getting that sleep.

sashagee was here for most of last weekend but in the days since I haven't done that much, by design. I cleaned my home on Monday and Tuesday, vacuuming and mopping and cleaning the bathrooms and the oven and the kitchen, and just read some webcomics because I have a thousand articles sitting in my RSS waiting to be read and I need to get to them. Last night I watched more of 3月のライオン / March Comes in Like a Lion, which I've been watching slowly but steadily. It has an excellent depiction of mental illness and far less anime bullshit than 四月は君の嘘 / Your Lie in April, but that means that it's much harder to watch sometimes. Just last episode, after Rei suffered a major setback, he said:

落ち込みまで下手だって
ochikomi made heta datte
"I'm even bad at being depressed."

I've felt like that before--that not only am I so awful that I can't even get my life right, I'm not "really" depressed because I can still go to work, or get out of bed, or cook myself food--so I know what that's like. I'm really glad that I don't feel like that now. At the moment, I'm bad at being depressed in a good way.

I'm still annoyed at work, though, because I've spent most of today churning through records that don't exist. Were they already resolved somewhere else? Do we not have information on the physician other than the license I'm looking at? Who knows!

( Farmer's Market Dinner )

Last night, sashagee and I went over to britshlez's place to watch The Last Unicorn cartoon, which I hadn't seen even though I had read the book. I remember that greyselke loved the movie so much, but back when we were university students it was a lot harder to get a hold of. Nowadays multiple versions are on streaming services, so I got to hear Schmendrick call himself the "last of the red-hot swamis," Molly Grue scream at the unicorn for finally coming to her too late, and Christopher Lee Christopher Lee-ing it up as King Haggard. The animation took a bit to get used to, since it's been a long time since I've seen a Rankin/Bass film, but they did an excellent job with the otherworldly nature of the unicorn and Lady Amalthea's ethereal presence. And I had forgotten the best line in the film:

" I am no longer like the others, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I now I do. I regret."

What a good movie.

We drank wine and chatted until it became a Youtube party, and when we realized it, sashagee and I said our goodbyes and went home, finally falling asleep at 4 a.m. The next morning, we woke up multiple times but finally got out of bed at 11 a.m. so we could meet maptekar for lunch at Sea Ranch up in Evanston. maptekar has been talking up Sea Ranch to me for close to a month, even despite my skepticism of Midwestern sushi, and since she was so adamant that it was good I decided to trust her. My trust was well-placed--the food was delicious. sashagee and I split a spicy salmon roll, tornado roll, and zarusoba while we sat at one table all by itself on the sidewalk and it was just They even had a small grocery section inside, so I got some hontsuyu and muscat gummies, and then after we stopped for gelato, we all walked over the lakefront. The beaches in Evanston are mostly paid--something fortunately illegal in Chicago--so once we hit the lake we turned around and went back home, but we passed a bunch of huge houses in a variety of architectural styles, including one Spanish villa looking house and several early-American red-brick buildings. After a stop at the actual Bennison's Bakery, who repeatedly shows up at the Andersonville Farmer's Market and which apparently dates back to 1938, maptekar drove us back and told us she'd have us over for dinner, since she promised to make borscht for me.

Now sashagee is taking a nap out in the living room and I'm in the office, but daniella.titone invited us to the beach with karolina.gabriele, and we're probably going to eat a big salad and some ochazuke for dinner later. Then, well, we'll see.

I'm just going to cover a few things here:

( Contains moments of life )

I'm incredibly tired today due to screwing up the laundry timing last night and not being able to put all the blankets back on the bed until 11:30 p.m., and even having done that I woke up during the night due to being too cold and needing to pull more blankets on. And then I woke up before my alarm, so while I wasn't completely exhausted, I still feel like there's a wall of cotton between the world and me. The last night I had to myself was the Sunday before last, so I'm looking forward to just doing nothing and going to bed earlier tonight.

Well, nothing other than chores, anyway. Let me tell you, it's garbage that you dust and things are clean and then more dust is there next time you look. Who made that legal?

A brief post about two events I went to last week.

On Thursday, I had originally invited worldbshiny to come see A Midwinter Mummer's Tale, a paganish British Folk take on Dickens's A Christmas Carol. She waffled a bit and eventually came back with a few other plays that she'd rather see as well as one movie. I was kind of interested in seeing the stage adaptation of It's a Wonderful Life at Stage 773, but 1) it was expensive and 2) worldbshiny said that she'd end up watching it at some point during its run anyway, so we settled on our second-most-popular choice--Knives Out.

I liked it a lot! With a name like that, I was worried that there'd be a lot of gore (which I really can't handle), but it was much more like a less-overly-comedic version of Clue, based on one family's numerous dysfunctions instead. The film wasn't even particular tense to me, because it kept cutting back and forth between the events in the past and the investigation in the present, so we always knew what was going on--at least, what specific characters said was going on. More was revealed over the course of the movie, of course. I highly recommend it.

( More specific discussion here )

But I still wanted to go see A Midwinter Mummer's Tale. I was originally going to go see it on Friday before strip dreidel, but it was sold out, so instead I went to it on Saturday afternoon before I went to my two evening parties. I got there a bit late and the seats facing the stage were almost all occupied, so I sat in a seat on the side, which might have affected my opinion.

Here's a shot of the program, as a capsule of how they changed the story:


Overall I liked it and will probably go again next year, but it was a bit uneven. The actress playing Esmerelda Pennywise wavered occasionally, and while the Cunning Man was fantastic, even hanging around a bit in character outside before the show, he spent most of the run-time off in the corner being spooky and was only visible to me due I had a side seat. That also meant that some of the action was obscured, and characters would be talking to each other but all I'd see was the back of one actor's head.

I loved the music, though. There was one song where they were singing in Welsh--don't ask me anything about it, I don't speak Welsh and the program doesn't list the song names--and leading a wassailer's parade with Mari Lwyd from door to door that I thought was fantastic, and the actress playing the Trickster had a beautiful soprano voice that she'd use occasionally when she was showing Pennywise scenes from her past.

The British Folk element was very strong, what with wassailing and mummers and the cunning man and so on, but the pagan element was less so. Scratch-replace "Christmas" with "Yule," have the final line be "Goddess bless us, everyone," and so on. The strongest element was, of course, changing the spirits of Christmas to the Trickster, the Holly King, and the Dark Mother, with a bit of a maiden/mother/crone thing going on. But the other events were all the same, for good or for ill.

It was a fun production, but A Muppet Christmas Carol is, of course, better.

So after a whole weekend of partying and staying up late, I came back to Chicago and...immediately decided to to go to a late-night showing of Blade Runner. I mean, now it's an alternate history movie (as of just under a week ago)! I had to see it while it was still on the bleeding edge of the future.

Also, the whole audience laughed when this came on the screen:


This showing was the Final Cut, which I've never seen before. The last time I saw Blade Runner was as a university student, when jdcohen and jmenda were astonished that I'd never seen it, so we piled into a disused conference room in Stouffer House along with t3chnomag3, meistert, and some other people I've fallen out of contact with and watched the theatrical release on a projector. As soon as the voice over started, jmenda audibly groaned. I didn't know what I was missing, but I thought it was pretty good.

This was all before I started describing my aesthetic as "cyberpunk elf" or "an extra from Blade Runner."

So that was my half-remembered experience when I went into Blade Runner this time, and I was surprised how much was the same and how much was different. For one, it's not all just Japanese in the background! There's a lot of Chinese too, and occasionally Russian and Spanish. Los Angeles of 2019 is more diverse than the derivative material gives it credit for. This time I did understand the brief bit of Japanese, when the noodle vendor welcomes Deckard and then tells him that two is plenty (二つで充分ですよ！) when he tries to order four fish. There's a Japanese comic about it here that answers the question "What is Deckard ordering and why are they arguing about numbers?"

I forgot how weirdly disjointed the movie was. I can kind of see why the studio execs wanted to add a voice over, though the movie is clearly better without it. There's a lot of confusing shots of rain-slick streets, empty buildings, crowds who almost completely ignore everything going on around them, and scenes with no dialogue and barely any action. It does a lot to immerse you in a world of future shock, where everything is weird and strange and what does it mean to be human--or as my brain insists on search-replacing that with, "What is a man?"--but I was sometimes relying on my memory of what the movie was about rather than what was actually happening on the screen.

I also love all the design aesthetics. The use of chiaroscuro, with the darkness everywhere occasionally lit by flashes of bright light, and the way there are a lot of "unnecessary" details on everything. Deckard's dingy apartment has a bunch of large blocks set together like bricks and almost bas-relief-like murals all throughout. And all the asymmetricality! The apartment is laid out strangely, the clothes have extra curlicues on them, and even the whiskey glasses Deckard drinks out of are strangely designed, as is the bottle of whiskey. A bunch of my clothes are asymmetrical like that now, because apparently that's the cyberpunk aesthetic, I assume entirely due to this movie.

I also completely forgot the middle section, much like when I reread Neuromancer a couple years ago, but I'm not sure if there were any scenes added to it for the Final Cut. And I appreciate how the Final Cut also hints slightly more strongly that Deckard is a replicant, but still leaves everything up in the air.

(I know about Blade Runner 2049, but I haven't seen it)

I'm really glad I went to see it again, since it had been so long and now I'm in a much better mindset to appreciate it, and at the perfect time to do so, too! Now I just need to wait thirty years and then go see Blade Runner 2049 before I die in the Water Wars.

Every weekend should be a three-day weekend.

( Do all of the things )

So, uh, am I an extrovert now? Even beyond everything I've done, I was all set up to do something tonight, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I wrote about this and some of my friends said they got tired just reading it. I've living that city boy life, as I told fiendishfanfares.

What a lovely weekend.

Definitely Appearance 0. 🎲

Yesterday, I went to go see Nosferatu with liszante at the Davis Theatre with live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren. The theater even had remnant organ pipes still up on the walls from when there was an organ installed in it, though the actual performance was done using samples.

It's been a very long time since I'd seen a silent movie--not since Metropolis back when I was a university student--and I had forgotten how exaggerated the style of acting was. I couldn't help but think of miming, especially with Hutter and Knock's performances. The film is much less horror for modern audiences than it would have been a century ago due to that. Often, when Count Orlok was looming and Hutter would reel back with an expression of horror, frantically looking around the room, the audience laughed. Admittedly, I did too. To modern sensibilities it was ridiculous, but it certainly did an effective job of conveying their emotions, especially accompanied with Warren's music.

People also laughed at the scene of Count Orlok just...casually strolling through the streets with a coffin full of grave earth under one arm. I really want to know how that played to 1920s audiences.

The movie was pretty effective at selling the mood of creeping doom, especially later, with the scenes of the town officials marking the doors of the "plague"-stricken houses and the procession of coffins being carried through the streets. liszante also told me there was a long scene of the ship sailing into Wisborg cut with scenes of Hutter riding back to town but, uh, I was asleep for that. Live music, no matter the context, no matter the genre, makes me sleepy. Even when I went to a Within Temptation concert back in March, I ended up getting sleepy by the end. But I rallied for the final act.

I hadn't realized that Nosferatu was literally Dracula with the serial numbers filed off either. But once Knock the property agent showed up, I figured it out.

And...antisemitism. I don't think it's Nazi propaganda or anything, but I couldn't help but notice that it's the property agent specifically who falls under Count Orlok's sway and, indeed, the way that an Eastern European man who looks ugly and distinctive is literally sucking the blood of good German women. That rendered some of the scenes later on the movie more uncomfortable for me than they might have been for most of the audience, because regardless of Murnau's intentions, the imagery was definitely there.

He was a brilliant director, though. I've seen plenty of stills of Count Orlok's shadow climbing the staircase and the count vanishing when hit by the rays of the sun, but in the theater, accompanied by the organ, they were still effective.

In summary, I'm saddened that Der Totenvogel isn't the name of a metal band. And I can see why Nosferatu survived down through the ages and is regarded as a cinematic classic.

I haven't played World of Warcraft in years, but I still occasionally keep tabs on the game because I spent so much of my life playing the game. I was recently watching Safe Haven, the latest cinematic where Varok Saurfang tracks down Thrall because it turns out that Sylvanas, the evil undead monster who has been a genocidal megalomaniac for her entire existence, is not a good choice to lead the Horde. It was extremely good, like Blizzard cinematics always are. Regardless of what you can say about their games, their cutscenes are top notch.

In the comments was a link to another series, though, someone using machinima to retell the plot of Warcraft III. And I watched it, and it's fantastic:

"WARCRAFT | Reign of Chaos - Season 1 (EN)" (Watch on YouTube)

It's all quotes from the game, so the voice acting is already all done, and though sometimes it sounds weird, at least it's a familiar weird. The music and models come from World of Warcraft. It means that sometimes the action is a little stiff and the battle scenes have a bunch of shakycam to hide the rigidity of the models, but it's amazing how much the creator did with the ingredients.

Also, I forgot that the human campaign started out against orcs, not against the Scourge, and that Thrall had to rescue Grom. I guess the last time I played it was over a decade ago.

Nostalgia means it's hard for me to say what someone who didn't play Warcraft, or video games at all, would think of it, but I love it. I can't wait to see where it goes from here.

Ereyesterday meowtima invited me to go see Alita: Battle Angel with him and someone else he knows with the same name as me. I went after work, I established dominance over the other me by being one month older than him and unseating his usual place as the oldest in any group, and then we went in to the movie. These are my thoughts.

( The face of an angel and a body built for battle )

I've had an eventful week. I wrote about Friday's dinner here and Saturday's wedding here, and now it's time for the rest of it.

On Sunday my parents came into town and we went out to dinner at Francesca's, a local chain with one branch near my apartment and another one out in the far western suburbs. I'd eaten at the suburban one and it was fine, but this time it was pretty bland. Both my father's and my meals were unimpressive and tasteless, and it was only the free dessert we got because my father mentioned my birthday that really made the dinner worth eating. Fortunately, the cherry pie that they brought from home was delicious. We got some frozen custard from Lickity Split and ate it together.

Among the presents they gave me was a Japanese pickle press. I eat an enormous amount of pickles (every morning at breakfast), and I wanted a way to make refrigerator pickles that didn't need vinegar or twenty-four hours of drying. It worked! The pickles have a different flavor than the ones I make with apple-cider vinegar do, but that's not surprising. They're more clear, and they go better with rice and salted fish. I'm not sure even a three liter press is big enough to keep me in pickles without making apple cider vinegar pickles still, but now I have a choice.

After my parents left, I texted lisekatevans on Sunday night to see if she was free, and I ended up going over to her condo after she was finished with a voice recording session and we drank wine for a while and chatted. She gave me ice cream to help my stomach, which was twisting itself in knots, and then showed me several of Taylor Swift's latest videos because she knew I loved cyberpunk literature and fashion and wanted to know what I thought of them. Especially ...Ready For It?, where the love song lyrics contrast with a robot trying everything to break out from the cage it's been placed in. I mentioned the scene in Ghost in the Shell where the major looks up and sees someone else with her same model of cyberbody drinking in a cafe across the river, and also probably my favorite quote about using cyberpunk just as an aesthetic without actually having anything to say:

Cyberpunk is just Asian cities.

I've seen a lot of cyberpunk aesthetic tumblrs that just post photos of Shinjuku at night in the rain.

Monday, my actually birthday, I mostly did chores to prep for the week. I had taken it off but didn't have any plans and had to do laundry, vacuum, go shopping, make my lunches, and a bunch of other adulting. Tuesday was a normal day with Japanese tutoring where we talked about my weekend and about Japanese cooking.

Wednesday I left work and went to Ramen Wasabi in Logan Square for dinner, alone since no one else was free, where I learned that they could swap out the pork for chicken in the ramen so I could have meat, but cooked their eggs in pork fat so I couldn't get an egg. Then I went on to the movie theatre where Anime Chicago was getting together to watch 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 / The Night is Short, Walk on Girl. With stephen_poon, who wasn't signed up through the Meetup site but new several of the people coming and independently decided to go!

I was warned beforehand that Masaaki Yuasa's work was polarizing, but I loved the movie. I loved the dreamlike quality, the way the scenes flowed into each other and it often wasn't clear what was metaphor and what wasn't, the way things seem to get kind of unreal on a late night out on the town where one event blurs into the next and after leaving every place, the response is "where do we go next?!" Plus, I've been out at night in Pontochō, where the film opens, and I've walked along the Kamogawa. It turned out that stephen_poon even went to a wedding reception in Pontochō and the film's first scene is a wedding reception!

I recommend it if you can find it anywhere.

Thursday was mostly ordinary. Therapy went well--we talked a bit about my anxiety about spending money and when my therapist asked what it was that I was worried about, I said that I'm American and it would be trivially easy for me to develop a health condition or have an accident that requires extensive and expensive health care. I have good insurance, but what happens if I can't work? What happens if the American fascists* reinstitute pre-existing condition death panels? I've lived in countries that have real health care systems, so I know exactly what we're missing. She accepted that and then asked me how much money I would need to feel safe, and I had to admit that I didn't think any realistic amount would be enough. So I guess that's an area I can work on.

I went home, took a shower, sat down to work on coding practice, and then I get a text from lisekatevans inviting me out to a birthday party one of her friends was holding at Pearl's, so I threw on some clothes and went out on a work night to listen to actors swap stories about meeting famous people, plays they were in, Midwestern manners, Scotch distilling, and so on. I mostly listened, though lisekatevans valiantly tried to throw me a couple conversational ropes, but my areas of interest were pretty distant from most of the other people in attendance. The stories and the drinks were good, though, and the birthday girl was wearing a black dress and boots--from what lisekatevans said, her usual aesthetic--so I approve of her sartorial choices. I bought one of her drinks because there was a $10 minimum on card charges.

Early in August I invited worldbshiny out to Izakaya Mita to drink sake and eat Japanese food, and while her schedule has been pretty hectic, she finally had a free moment on Friday. She messaged both meowtima and me, but meowtima couldn't come due to making a million caramels for an event on Sunday. So after work, I went to Bucktown and walked up to Moth, bought a book called 日本茶 / Japanese Green Tea, a travel guide to tea shops in Tōkyō in both Japanese and English. I overpaid by quite a bit--the price on the back was ¥1500 and Moth charged me $33, which is almost 2.5 times the cover price--but I like supporting Moth because my Japanese tutor works there. Then I spent some time in a Starbucks reading Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver until 7 p.m., where I walked over to Izakaya Mita and met worldbshiny

It was nice! I didn't have a very good opinion of Izakaya Mita's food from previous visits, though the drinks are excellent, so I expecting to love the sake and tolerate the food. But we stuck to mostly kushiyaki and appetizers like pickles and gobō kinpira instead of going for the okonomiyaki--Kansai style, plus both varieties were treif--or ramen. The duck heart and duck liver kushiyaki were delicious! And the sake was good too, though the first one I tried was a bit sour for me and the second one was unmemorable, the other two, especially the nigori, were delicious. worldbshiny even got the Tedorigawa sake made at the Yoshida brewery featured in The Birth of Sake (which I wrote about here)! I had a much better culinary experience this time, and worldbshiny and I chatted about our lives because we haven't really had a chance to talk before now. After a few hours, worldbshiny was fading thanks to the effects of the sake, so we went out and caught the bus back to our respective apartments.

As I left, I snapped out ご馳走様でした as I left and after a startled pause, got back a hearty お疲れ様でした。

This weekend I don't have much to do, which is good. I could use the break.