A Song in the Trees

Been keeping busy! My boss and I have been grinding away at a paper revision for our big project of the last few years. I spent a week and a half being very frustrated with the code to fine-tune one of our models in response to a reviewer comment... and it made no significant difference in the results in the end. Ah, well, it turns out like that sometimes. Also I learned that even our most technical person barely knows how to Git, so I now feel less bad that I can hardly muddle through anything more complicated than a basic commit.

In March, I went to skating Worlds with my mom and had a blast (at least with the skating - the organization was bad enough that I never want to go back to TD Garden again, and any events run by SKOB are on thin ice), will try to write up my impressions properly at some point. In terms of my personal skating, it turns out that I do need to get new boots AGAIN because I was right about being fit poorly, sigh, and probably at least semi-customs like I kept asking the fitter about. I've been putting off getting the process started because it's a lot of money, and at this point, it's hard not to worry that they are still not going to fit properly. But in better news, I just passed the Canasta Tango dance test and have signed up for my club's spring show. Several other people from my group lessons are going to be there, too, so we can cheer each other on :)

Z and I began house hunting because our lease is up soon and our landlord is putting where we live now up for sale, and we thought it would be nicer to have a place of our own if we could find one (and renting can start to feel like throwing money into a hole). After an intense few weeks of looking, we have found a place. It's close to where we live now! I can probably walk to the local library branch! The view from the front is amazing! We even got it under asking price when a few other places we looked at got bids way above the price and also way out of our budget! ...because we agreed to take on the expensive septic repairs in exchange for paying less. There's always something. We just had the inspection, and while it is a little depressing and nerve-wracking to hear all the things wrong with a house you're trying to buy given how much they cost, our inspector was very nice about explaining a lot of things for us.

During the trip to/from Boston and all the rides to houses (since Z was driving), I made it through a couple of library books. The first was the second book in Jonathon Stroud's latest series, The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne, which I quite enjoyed even though it's been ages since I read the first, and the other was Prairie Fires, an extremely detailed biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's very good if you are the kind of person who wants to read an extremely detailed biography of her, although at a certain point it becomes a biography of her daughter as well, and eventually I started to wish that the author would shut up about her because the hateboner was a lot. I also think that Lane sounds like a horrible person, but around the fifth time you're going after someone for her shitty writing practices or being terrible with money in a biography about her mother, I think you should maybe consider whether the comments need to be there. But there was a lot of information there; I liked the parts that gave greater context to her life, starting before she was born with the Dakota peoples and the families of her parents, and as a writer, I also found the discussion of how various events were treated differently in different manuscripts and drafts to be interesting.

And on the computer, I've gotten as far as Gongaga in FF7R - really lovely area, and I like how the music isn't the stereotypical 'jungle' music - but put that on pause because Oblivion Remaster came out of nowhere for the rest of this year's game budget 😅 Once I figured out the performance issues in the outdoor areas by getting the mod that force-disables the raytracing out there, it runs fine and looks beautiful. The autumnal area between Bruma and Chorrol in particular is gorgeous, especially when it's foggy and the sun is setting. I definitely have some things I would change further (let the women wear pants and men skirts, you cowards) but I appreciate the tweaks to the mini-game UIs and things like the Altmer being more golden-skinned rather than weirdly pink.

Might get one of the mods that evens out the level scaling, but I'm still pretty low-level and haven't felt the need yet. And judging by some of the comments on my Morrowind WIP, I think the release is making people think of the other TES games as well :) Need to keep hacking away at that... I expected that a small fandom wouldn't have a lot of people reading, but there's more enthusiasm for this ship than I had been hoping for! I'm hoping I can stick the landing on it since it's a slowburn fic, and I know those can sometimes get kind of frustrating if the burn stops going anywhere.

Hi, everyone! I've been a bit absent from DW (and other places like Discord) for a while - for some reason, for a few months there, I just lost any desire to start any social interactions. I did begin going to skating lessons again, so I was talking to people and leaving the house, but I didn't feel like going to board game nights or opening my Discord. Still not sure if anything in particular caused it - I also lost a lot of interest in writing at the same time - but I've been trying to start getting back into things and catching up on the comments I never replied to on AO3 and all that.

The skating lessons have been going well. I'm not going to the current session of group lessons, because right now they just start too early, but I'll probably start going again during summer when it shifts to a little later, and I'll be doing private lessons still. My spins are slowly getting less bad, and I can sometimes kind of sort of do the world's smallest waltz jump, something I've had a real mental block on. And I also finally figured out how to actually train my turnout muscles, so I can do a t-stop on my bad side now! I even had a hastily put-together solo in the local Christmas Holiday Skating Show after we learned I could have one a month ahead of time :D I didn't do perfectly, but I had fun. Just need to figure out how to cool down the adrenaline a little, because about two-thirds of the way through, I noticed that my hands were 100% pins and needles, so I couldn't feel them at all.

I visited my parents for Thanksgiving, and Z and I visited for Christmas as well. Z has now seen about all of the [local extremely rich family] houses that are now museums, so next time I promised we'd do something different xD I made some carrot jam with rosewater and cardamom for my parents and a folding double-sided organizer for Z, who has been on an organizing kick these last few months. Z got me a set of Avatar Nation-themed tea cups (they come with cute little bamboo covers to help keep your tea warm!), and we shared a lot of chocolate and other treats.

While we were there, I also got a new camera, spurred by my desire to take better photos at Worlds and a lot of very, very helpful advice from R, who is a professional photographer. I used it to take some photos at one of the museums, and while I still need to learn a lot about how to use it, I'm already pretty happy with it. My mom is now saying she needs me to bring it along to document her next field trip. She just needs to figures out where she wants to go now that China is no longer a very good option (I am personally rooting for Bhutan I get to tag along).

My mom and I also binged a lot of Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty over both of those visits and will probably watch some more when she comes over before we head to Worlds in Montreal. I definitely recommend what I've seen so far if 'mystery-solving officials in the Tang dynasty with good character development' sounds like a fun time.

Happy new year to everyone; I hope it's a good one. And happy public domain day as well, which Z and I celebrated by watching Steamboat Willie.

With a lot of help from Z, I have now built my first PC!

We did spend quite a while trying to figure out why it wouldn't turn on at first - thankfully, it was a simple fix (we plugged the GPU into the wrong power cable). It still needs a network card, but today we went and got a new monitor, and since they had a 4k one on sale for about the same price as an HD one, I decided to try it, and it's so pretty! So many pixels. Color balancing is better than whatever nonsense I have going on with the other monitor, too.

So far I have only really played around with the Sims 2 (it loads like lightning!) and Fallout 4, where I have been steadily loading up texture mods onto my save from a good five years ago. The keyboard on my laptop was slowly starting to go, so honestly, it's nice just to have a keyboard where I can use the numpad and consistently get equals signs, haha. It's been hanging out in the living room since we finished putting it together, which has made Z (who keeps his desktop there) very happy, but I will probably take it to my office this weekend while he's gone since sitting at a coffee table is kind of killing my knees. Really excited to use the heck out of this thing! I do owe an AMV for Sunshine Auction, and I'm feeling pretty motivated to work on it with my new setup :D

I will be getting away from it this weekend, though - I want to go to the local Christmas market, and I also finally got my skates to and from the fitter, so I'm going to see if the adjustments they did helped. I'm crossing my fingers... I miss skating!

So we finally learned that we were going to move on the first! ...except then it got delayed to the second! But then we finally got to spend the whole long weekend hauling boxes and struggling to move furniture! (The furniture was a real adventure - Z did noooot want to drive a U-haul, but it's impossible find last-minute movers in June or a friend with a car that can fit a mattress, so he very kindly sucked it up and we moved most of my furniture in it. After almost giving up because his hand started to give out from exhaustion, and after I had to literally run to our new place to get screwdrivers. One of his friends showed up at the end to help out, and a Good Samaritan helped us with the couch, too.) We finished in time to go watch fireworks from afar with some friends and unwind before going back to work.

There is still a lot of unpacking that needs to get done, of course - and cleaning, too, this place was not left in the neatest condition. We also have had to rearrange it a lot; we shifted two queen boxsprings and bedframes and a mattress and a metal futon into the basement to make room for my furniture, and today we had to shift the washer into storage too to make room for our portable clothes washer. (The machines already here are coin-operated. The landlord said he'd change them since it's just us, but judging by how long it took anything to happen in Z's old place, we figured that we'd like to be able to do laundry sometime in the next few months.) But we are making progress, and the kitchen is mostly in place, which is very important. We can make meals! We can run the blender any hour of the day we want if I feel like making mango lassi at 11pm!

We were without much internet for a couple of days - real fun trying to attend meetings on Zoom on a flickering mobile connection where I could hear one-third of what was said - but the tech they sent out was very kind and helpful. Last time I issues with our ISP, they told me to install their malware program to let them control my computer because that was absolutely the only way they could check my router settings and the problem could absolutely be nothing else (and I couldn't install it anyway because I had no internet to download with), so that was a nice change of pace.

I am thinking of what to plant for an autumn garden harvest and trying to figure out how much sunlight each part of the yard gets. We had to go to the hardware store today, so I picked up a lemon mint on sale to add to an empty container and go with my other contained mints. We are already enjoying the views on the yard because there's always a chipmunk or robin or cute bunny running around back there to watch.

Koro the cat was, of course, very upset to be moving, but he's calmed down considerably and is enjoying the basement. We'll let him explore the rest of the house when there's less trouble for him to get into by poking into everything not yet unpacked.

Also, a final strange update from the manager of my old place - she asked if I had any maintenance issues to report while we were doing the move-out survey, and I was like, 'uh, the furnace issues that you never fixed?'. And she went, 'wait, they never came to add insulation? Because we got billed for it'. Anyway, that's not my problem to deal with any longer! I hope they get my security deposit back to me quickly and I never again have to contact them.

(Oh, and my insurance got borked again. I could almost hear the scream of frustration from the HR person who is trying to help me. Fingers crossed that the update next week fixes it for real really.)

I had a good birthday! It was wonderful to celebrate with my parents this year in person rather than over Zoom. And this way, they got to share in the cake :) I actually went to the dentist that morning, so I felt a little bad that the first thing I ate after a cleaning was full of sugar... but not bad enough to not enjoy it.

My teeth gave me the gift of not having cavities. Someone I know is having two teeth pulled due to issues, and I don't have the best luck with my teeth in the first place, so it was a big worry! My parents gave me tea and books. Most of them were from a digital bundle of Japan-related books that they had already asked if I wanted, plus one in print, Tokyo Ueno Station, the name of which I think I have heard before but which I don't know anything about. My gift to myself to celebrate graduating was a new phone that isn't physically degrading. (That's not entirely me being whiny - my old model had a well-known physical issue with one of its chips. I had to send it in for repairs at one point because it stopped booting due to that, but it never acted quite right afterward, to the point where it struggled to open messages, made me difficult to hear on calls, regularly skipped notifications, and forget about doing anything in reasonable time while playing a podcast.)

I spent the trip home playing Harvest Moon on Z's 3DS (he let me permanently borrow it a while back) and reading one of the books from the bundle that my dad was interested in and had started reading for himself, Crazy For Kanji. And so far, I'm enjoying it - the author clearly loves kanji and playing with them, and I think the books has a good approach to trying to make the reader feel that way, too. It did, however, hit upon one of my pet peeves when it comes to kanji-learning materials: listing out how many kanji get you x% coverage of standard kanji usage, like 40% of kanji used are the most common 100, etc, and then bandying these numbers about to try to show how much you could understand without all the kanji. Maybe by knowing 100 kanji, you can just guess at the other 60%! Or play only games meant for small children that have only a few hundred kanji!

I say this as someone who forced myself through the first volume of Sailor Moon when I knew less than 200 kanji and maybe less than 100 (at that point it was great kana practice, though) - these statements are misleading and deceptive. They make it sound like you don't really need to learn all 2k+ of those scary, scary kanji - look how much you can understand without them! But the most frequent words are also those which are least contentful and often least important.

Here's an example of what trying to read normal, adult-level text with that approach looks like - I took a couple of the first paragraphs from an article I just read and removed everything except the 500 most frequent words of English, words like numbers and 'its' that any new learner is likely going to learn right away, and proper nouns:
"Google Talk, Google's first-ever [] [] [], [] on August 24, 2005. This [] has been in the [] business for 16 years, [] Google has been making [] [] for [] than some of its [] have []. But thanks to a [] and a half of [] [] [] [], [] [] [], and [] [], you can't say Google has a [] or even [] [] [] [] today.

[], you would probably [] Google's [] [] every other big [] []. A [] of any kind of [] [] [] at Google has [] to a [] and a half of [] [], with Google both [] to leave the [] [] and [] to [] to a [] []. While [] like Facebook and Salesforce [] tens of billions of dollars into a [] [] [], Google [] [] only to [] up an [] [] of under-[], [] [] [] [] by job-[] [] []. There have been [] when Google [] [] a good [] [], but the [] [], []-[], and [] of [] [] have [] Google from [] much of these [] [] —or [] []—[] into the [] day."

Can you guess what a few of those blanks are? Probably. Can you guess the whole rest of the text is? No. Now imagine it's in a different context where you don't even know what kinds of companies 'Google' and 'Facebook' are, taking away the hint that it's about a giant tech company and its complete failure to develop a messaging app. Does this ratio of words-you-know to words-you-don't sound like a good time? Probably not. Maybe if you're very highly motivated and equipped with a dictionary, you can muddle through, but most people are going to give up and look for something closer to their skill level.

And let's be real, plenty of people are going to pick up Japanese to play video games and read manga or whatever, but how many of them only ever want to interact with children's media and not even, like, light novels? Heck, I've run into obscure kanji in middle-grade manga that aren't in the daily-use list, because the author likes kanji and they're going to be sticking furigana on everything anyway, might as well throw in 躙.

Of course you should study more common stuff before the more obscure things, and if you stick to the same topics, the vocabulary will be more limited - but eventually, you do need to suck it up and learn more words. You need to know something like ~15k headwords to read at an eighth grade level in English - it just feel dishonest to try and soothe the poor scared baby learners with 'you don't neeeeeed to learn thaaaat many'. Lack of vocabulary is the main barrier to me enjoying more Japanese media at this point! I do need to learn that many!

My kanji reference book, Kanji in Context takes what feels like a much more reasonable approach: they recommend studying the first three or four levels, depending on your goals, of their six-level system, which covers the most common 1200 or 1420 kanji (this is pre-Jouyou expansion). This is supposed to teach you a broad general knowledge base of kanji and vocab, and then if you don't want to sit down and memorize the rest, you can learn through reading whatever is interesting or relevant to you and seeing what you encounter. (Though even then, I've run into their level 6 kanji in NHK Easy news articles about 滝 waterfalls, and 姫 princess shows up so much in fantasy manga that I knew what 'hime' meant before I started learning Japanese. Not to even mention ones like 呆, 嬉, and 嘘 that are relatively common, but not in jouyou for whatever reason.)

So, that one pet peeve that isn't unique to this author aside: I like how it takes a different and much more in-depth approach to kanji that any of my general textbooks ever have, and one of the sections covers something I only really learned much about recently. I wish any of my classes had talked more about kanji like this - it was pretty much just 'memorize them' and maybe some discussion of stroke order and radicals if you were in one of the classes with the calligraphy teacher. You had to figure out the 'how' on your own - I did okay with Mnemosyne, but a lot of my classmates complained about it constantly - and there was never any discussion of ateji or phonetic components or any of confusing exceptions to the on-kun rules. (Am I ever going to cognizantly memorize the phonetic lines instead of just kind of learning that some kanji that look the same are pronounced the same? Ehhhh. I am inspired to actually sit down and memorize the radicals and their meanings properly instead of half-assedly knowing them based on mnemonics I made up years ago, though.)

My favorite bit so far is the section on ateji. I haven't gotten to the kanji country names part yet, but I smiled when I saw that. I remember learning about them way back when I got into Hetalia! Suddenly I understood why 米国 meant 'America'! I had to learn them + a bunch of special pairing names to search for fanart, because the Japanese fans were trying to fly as far under the radar as possible.

I had a pretty busy week!

Saturday before last, Z and I went to the Habitat for Humanity Restore because he needed a new computer desk that wasn't a cheap folding table collapsing in on itself. After we helped a couple with a baby get their new desk onto a cart and after Z accidentally smashed his finger as we moved a random marble countertop sitting on a desk, we picked one out! ...and it was about four inches too long to fit into his tiny car.

Go inside and ask them for the phone numbers for movers, I suggested. When I was buying furniture for my apartment when I first moved, they had a whole list of them on the wall. Z comes back out with a single business card. They can't help; the people they suggest can't help; the other people I google don't pick up the phone. We contemplate taking the desk apart, but get stuck on the first screw as it won't unscrew more than a quarter turn, and anyway we aren't sure that it isn't glued together. Z has no bungee cords or anything else that can help. He puts out a call for help on his Discord and nobody responds. R answers his phone, but his dad's car is too small. Finally, I go, doesn't D still live here? because Z took me to catsit for him once. It turns out that D is free and has a car that isn't tiny, so he was finally able to save the day for us. Z bought him and his girlfriend ramen from our favorite place as thanks, and we had dinner together on the roof of their building.

Z's cat now loves sitting in the big drawer. All's well that ends well.

On Sunday, the university's website finally got back up, but only if you were using their VPN. Z got his working, so I was able to schedule a COVID test. Didn't get mine working for a few days after. It doesn't quit when you close it, so I am uninstalling it now :| More importantly, I did my taxes; after I finished, I went, that doesn't look right, and called my dad for help. He pointed out the very important detail that I hadn't included my fellowship income from the spring (because the university didn't put in on my W2 for reasons I don't understand). So that all got sorted. I still need to call the IRS about my last stimulus check because I never received it; maybe now's a better time....

My package from Russia finally left St. Petersburg after 45 days of sitting in the post office, and was supposed to arrive on Monday but got delayed until Tuesday. My Zhenya cosmonaut t-shirt!! The print looks good, and while I was worried about ordering an extra-small because I... am not an extra-small, the extremely loose fit on the website's measurements was correct. I wore it when I saw R, since he is also a Zhenya stan :D

On Wednesday, I got my first ever COVID test (sorry to the person who had to walk me through it!) and picked up my fancy dancy graduation regalia. And I received a request for an interview! The job is temporary (one year), but it looks really interesting and pays well!

R had also asked me to do a photoshoot for him - this time as the model, not as the shaky hands behind the camera. I was a little nervous because my make-up skills are very basic and limited to 'cosplaying a few days of the year' and R's dress-up clothes tend towards the low-cut, but it all worked out and he had multiple extra shirts and slips and stuff already set out just in case. His photos are amazing, so I'm excited to see the results - especially for what he called the 'Midsommar' outfit and what I called the 'hippy in a cult' outfit (it was all white and very loose and gave me a 70s vibe), which was not made for my shoulders but was otherwise very fun to pose in.

Friday was our hooding ceremony. I lugged my ceremonial regalia up the hill and got dressed when I got to the top. I am not a fan of the robe color, but I am glad that they included a pocket and a pocket access slit, and the hats are very cool and fancy. Because of social distancing, they made us hood ourselves. This did not make much sense to me because first we handed our hats to our advisors, and then afterward they had each pair of us take our masks off for a moment to take photos together, and I'm pretty sure most of us are vaccinated anyway, but oh, well. I liked the ceremony! It was inside, we were air-conditioned, it was cool to hear everyone's thesis topic, and I got to see my advisor and talk with him and his other graduating student, who is doing cool work!

Commencement itself was on Saturday. They provided a lot of free water, which is good, because it is already quite warm here, and wearing a very thick polyester robe on top of normal clothes made for a lot of sweating before I'd even gotten checked in. Thankfully, a thunderstorm started to roll in but never entirely materialized, so we had a good breeze for a while. Some of the speeches were nice! Though there were lots of sarcastic murmurs around me when one of the guest speakers urged us to donate when we were rich one day - alumni donations have been plummeting for years for a reason, dude.

Unlike my much larger undergrad, they actually handed out everyone's degrees and had us walk across the stage as the president tipped their hat at us. Afterward, my advisor surprised me by grabbing me for a hug :)

We were urged to stay through the whole ceremony, but 1/3 of the grads left immediately and the rest of us got thanked for staying. We were originally told the ceremony would be 2.5 to 3 hours, but at some point after it had been three, I checked the list and realized we weren't even halfway through the undergrads. More Ph.Ds and Masters grads had left, as had plenty of undergrads who had received their degrees. The sun was coming out again. I'd already read 20k of fanfic on my cracked phone screen because I'd run out of things to think about. The two people in front of me decided to leave. I ditched with them.

On the way out, we got free cookies! As we talked, I also found out that one of the two I'd left with was another nb person who was excited to be able to use the gender-neutral Dr title :) The ceremony ended up being well over four hours in the end. They didn't even give me an actual diploma lol, I guess since they'd already mailed mine to me - the folder I was handed just had a 'congratulations!' note inside. But it was nice to go for the first part. And now school is over for me, for real, for ever. It's sure been a ride.

After I dropped off my regalia, Z took me to pick up Greek food to celebrate (we saw a bald eagle on the way back!). Later, I watched gymnastics, although the coverage was absurdly terrible even by NBC standards. Like, showing 4 routines in the first 35 minutes, staring at an exhausted Simone pretending the camera isn't there as her ankle gets taped for at least five minutes straight, multiple reminders that Morgan was born in China!!! terrible. Anyway, that aside, it was nice to see Simone doing her vault and Morgan's new floor - much better than the one she had for five seconds last year.

Z and I had a quiet little dinner together for Thanksgiving. Not as good as one at home, sitting at the little coffee table and eating by ourselves. But we had fresh vegetables arranged nicely on a pretty plate, a spinach cheese pie (my mom gave me the recipe she always uses), and mashed potatoes in my new souffle dish with orange dogwoods on it (bought with some matching ramekins - I managed to freak out eBay with my VPN in the process of buying it, whoops). For dinner, homemade egg-white brownies and whipped cream. I had to direct, but Z did half the work and we managed to stay on top of all the dish-washing as we went along. And his cat Koro didn't eat any of it!

I am thankful that nobody I am very close to has gotten sick, and that my parents and friends are not COVID deniers.

Today, I went skating again; my edges are mostly back, I improved on spins today, and my waltz hop is more confident. Really, I'm at a place where I have enough back that I need lessons to improve again. But last I heard my coach was injured or something, plus I'm probably only going to go again once before Christmas. Z and I are thinking of visiting my parents for Christmas, so we'd be self-isolating for two weeks beforehand (no idea if it's required by law back home, but I like my parents not being dead, so). And who knows if I'll want to go again after we get back, or if the rink will even be open?

At least I can take the off-ice skates up to the nearby tennis court whenever. They still need to be adjusted a bit and edges are much trickier in them, but it's great skating with nobody else around and I can listen to podcasts if I want.

In happier news, ICE ADO TRAILER yes finally :D I'm not holding my breath on it coming out soon (maybe for 2022 Olympics??) but I want Victor backstory so much.

\o/\o/\o/

So there are a few concerns (of course) and I am waiting to hear back from one committee member I need to schedule an additional meeting with

but

I passed!!!!

Good news: My advisor... still has not read my proposal in full, but I sent him an updated version with a couple of changes he told me to make from skimming it, and he now says he's read enough of it to say it's good enough to schedule the actual proposal!!! This whole process feels glacial, but it's moving!

In more fun news: I can cross off one of my New Year's resolutions, because I can now do a very bad catchfoot spiral on my worse side :D Though on Saturday, my coach was more excited that we may have discovered the muscle I need to do back outside edges properly. I think it's the fourth or fifth muscle I've discovered through skating. Just a couple of minutes of practice made it hurt a lot a few hours later, so there's work to do there.

I would also like to thank the mother at the rink today who wasn't on the ice, but still at least tried to get her young kids to stop flopping and zooming across the center very close to where I was practicing because, as she told them, "the man might get upset". Yes, I'd be upset if I accidentally sliced a kid's face up with my skate coming out of a spin, or if they ran into me from a blind spot. I think they were young enough that they really needed more supervision, but hey, I've seen enough parents at public sessions not make any effort to corral their young kids when they're being reckless (or even bring them over to play in the center when multiple people are practicing there) so I appreciated it.

Another skating-related thing: I got bored while waiting for some code to finish running, and I started wondering how many Carmen programs there have been. One thing led to another, my analytical brain took over, and now I've got a folder full of them, a spreadsheet filled out, a Python program taking shape for some stats, and a Premiere project going. The answer (depending on how you count) is at least 93, 84 of which I could find on the internet. Having watched all of them, I think maybe there have been enough Carmen programs.