Japan - Late to the Quake Blogging

Yesterday was the anniversary of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.  As we humans are like to do, it was made a day of reflection of the entire last year.  The damage done that day will take a good deal longer to repair, at least the damage that can be repaired.

Many have, unsurprisingly, made it a point to blog or reblog their own reflective thoughts about the quake, so I figure I ought to take a crack at it myself.

There are few memories I have that are as crystal clear.  From the first few rumbles where I and my students smirked briefly, to the realization that it was something much larger than the usual earthquake, then the fear that right there could have been the end.  I remember looking up at the ceiling, the 2nd floor now looming ominously above us, hoping that the structural integrity of the building would hold up and hoping my wife would be somewhere safe, especially at that moment.  Maybe the first, largest quake lasted a minute.  It could have been more, but it felt like much longer.

We were pretty lucky, here.  With all the panic in our minds about aftershocks, tsunamis, and radiation, I can only count myself as extremely fortunate.  The damage to my area was minimal.  The worst of the effects we experienced was having to wait for a 30 minute window in the mornings and evenings when we could use water, and even outside those windows we at least had a fairly steady supply of well water, though none of it warm.  The aftershocks were seemingly unending.  There were roughly 500 of them in the week that followed, which made us all nervous wrecks.

Aside from that fear and some inconveniences, we came out of it extremely well.  We had food and water enough and while people were lining up for hours to get gas for their cars at the few gas stations still running we were allowed to fill up at a small station just down the street that seemingly no one else knew about.  Even the radiation, the creeping fear that continues to sweep around the country, failed to make it to us.  The maps of where the radiation has spread show that it, either due to mountains or wind trends or both, has been kind enough to simply skip over my area, as though on a detour to somewhere else.

Indeed, having had such good fortune I find myself in conversations feeling rather guilty when I say I experienced the event.  So many died that day and so many families continue to be displaced who have suffered so greatly that my experience almost seems insulting to theirs.

Today is graduation day for the junior high schools in my area.  Japan has a culture of extremely rigid ceremonies.  Stand up as the next speaker does, sit down once they are in position, and repeat as they step down. There were a lot of speeches made today.  Not one of them failed to mention last year’s earthquake and its effects.  Everyone here during it was given a lesson in remembering the importance of family and friends, and not one failed to reiterate that.

Beyond that, though, is a lesson of living our lives.  Without poetry or grace our lives might be swept away at any moment.  That should not instill fear so much as desire; a desire to do what you can while you’re still around to do it.  We often hear in song and speech that we should live every day as though it were our last, which sounds nice, but is probably unrealistic.  I think the goal should more or less be a general lack of regret, to try and be happy with what you’ve done up until today.  There will, of course, always be something more you want to do.  Part of our condition is to assume there is a future in which we can act.

In that moment when I was sure it was over I found myself, within the panic, oddly content.  Sure, I quickly imagined things that I wished I had time to do, but I found myself happy with where I had been and who I had become up until that point.  That feeling, apart from the panic, was pretty good.

So my advice is just that.  Do whatever you can to feel that way when it’s over.  Even if you didn’t get to do everything you wanted, and likely most of us won’t, try and be happy you got to do what you did.  Reach out your hand to those around you as often as your condition allows.  Enjoy the company of your comrades and do what you can to help those that survived worse than yourself. Get something done so you can know that you did, and try and bring along others for the ride.  I do not pray for the dead, but rather hope that we still living might all feel that way when our ends do come upon us.

At least, it seemed good enough for me at the time.

Testing a Blogger Function

Just seeing how this works. In the meantime, here's a picture of Lucy having a hard day.

Japan - My Front Yard

Coming home from work one Thursday I found this scene in the front yard. The farmers who rent the land out to, well, farm tend to cover it in this plastic casing.  When I first came here and knew nothing of farming this always looked like some sort of bizarre alternate future sort of thing, but I understand its purpose.

It had been a fairly grey winter, as winter tends to be, so this was a welcome change from the usual.  Snapped this shot with my Xperia Ray, a tiny smartphone with a strangely impressive camera, and hurried inside to stop being cold.

If you look close you can make out Mt. Fuji in the background just left of center.  It always impresses me that we can see it in spite of being 150 miles away.  That's probably not very far if you're from America, but in Japan that seems like quite the distance.

Android: Well That Certainly Took Long Enough

Over a year and a half ago I decided to jump on a shiny new Android device called the Xperia X10.  Part of this decision was due to my unfortunate attraction to Sony electronics, and though this was a Sony Ericsson product it was nonetheless attractive.

It's been a pretty bumpy road with this device.  The advertised smoothness and haste with which the device was to function was simply not present at launch, and officially isn't yet.  It shipped with extremely old firmware and its initial update to firmware that was only 6 months old took much longer than initially promised.  Even then, the firmware was still only a shadow of how good it could be, leaving one to question what it was the developers were spending their time on.  As it turns out, other than functioning, but poorly optimized driver ports from their newer software, not much effort was being put into supporting their original flagship device.  Even the Gingerbread (2.3) update studders and chokes at what should be fairly simple processes.

Their newer offerings seem to function much better than the X10, as well as getting a much better level of continued support after launch.  That doesn't, of course, do me a whole lot of good.

Fortunately there are people who like fiddling with these sorts of things and have a considerable amount of time on their hands.  The "FreeXperia Team" has been putting a lot of effort in making the popular Cyanogen mod function right on the device.  As a user, however, this has also been a pretty bumpy process.  Every release has included some sort of major fault in the software that made the phone, while still usable, restricted enough that the exchange of basic functions for fluidity of the OS just wasn't worth the trade.

Some builds the camera simply wouldn't work.  This was true for a helluva long time.  Then there were the countless random crashes.  Once that got worked out, suddenly the Marketplace where you get software stopped recognizing the phone right and some of the applications would simply be missing.  Finally there was the dreaded data bug, where the phone simply decided it didn't want anything to do with the Internet anymore.

Now, after some amount of tweaking after installing it, it's finally the phone I thought I was buying 19 months ago.  It's as fluid as an iPhone in most situations and does everything I want or expect the available hardware to do.  In the end, though, I have to say the experience has turned me off of Android as a whole.  For something to be called an "open" operating system it seems that there is simply too much annoyance for 3rd party hardware manufacturers to make the software work right with their devices.  They release the phone and generally want to leave it at that because of how apparently miserable it is to make the device play nice with the software.

If I do get another Android device it will most certainly be one of Google's "official" releases, which have thus far all been made by Samsung.  At least then one can expect timely updates and the comfort of knowing your phone is the first thing Google has in mind when making new software.

 As it is, though, my old phone is finally working right enough that I should be able to hold back on a new phone for quite some time, after which I'm also hoping some other contender might have their software available on some shiny pieces of hardware.

Games Rant: Dungeons and Dragons

If you're older than I am you probably know the name "Dungeons and Dragons" and have managed to attribute it to strange people in college going crazy, because gosh darn it that's what television told you.  The reality it far different.  I used to play it a great deal, but living in Japan, especially out in the sticks like this, one tends to come up short when looking for players.

That doesn't stop me from talking about it with my friends on both hemispheres, however.  The game is currently in its 4th edition, each edition bringing drastic rules changes to the game, generally for the better.

It's a game full of numbers and rules texts, each helping the player bend the rules to their advantage so they can fell greater and greater foes.  I am most familiar with 3rd (and 3.5th? 3rd.5?) edition, as that was when I had the most free time and availability of friends to play with.  I've browsed through the 4th edition books, however, and there's one thing that has been bugging me a lot about how the rules work.

Accuracy and the Power of 1

In D&D most of what you do has an element of random chance.  You roll a twenty-sided die and compare the result to a target number.  Did you roll high enough?  You succeed!  Did you roll too low?  Maybe next time.  If there is a next time.

Accuracy is a huge deal in the game, especially now that even spells have rolls for hitting or missing added to them.  Level-based accuracy improvement has been normalized, and that's fine since it simulates higher level characters being harder to hit than lower level characters.  The issue with this is that beyond standard level progression bonuses for accuracy, the player is also grabbing whatever feats and items they can to increase their rate of success with abilities.

Every +1 they can squeeze onto their character sheet is another 5% additional chance they have to succeed.  Supplementary books are written including even more feats and items to keep bringing this number up.  Damaging abilities and effects are also important to be sure, but if you need to pump that +attack score up because missing means doing half or 0 damage in most cases, a sad result if it was supposed to be your big bang for the round.

It feels as if the assumed accuracy of the game is around 50%.  Ever other round you'll probably get what you wanted done, overall, but such a large rate of failure can lead to some pretty long and frequent dry spells where you just sit there and roll dice, failing to act each time and feeling pretty useless.  Meanwhile the guy who hunted down his character build on a message board has managed to boost his accuracy up to +19 or something and he hits on 2s.

Making Actions Speak Louder than Addition

So beyond how many dice of damage you're rolling, the function of accuracy in the game means that when a combat-minded character is leveling, all he's looking for are plus +1s or better.  Does that feat increase my chance to hit?  Take it.  What's the best kind of magic weapon?  The one with the highest plus value, of course.  The side effects are nice, but beyond getting a +6 weapon everything else is gravy.  That's a full 30% increased chance to hit.

Were I to sit down and redesign the game, this would be the first thing I would work on cutting out.  Magic items should be magical and not simply stat sticks and clothes.  A cloak that gives you temporary immunity to an element or a pair of boots that let you jump tall buildings in a single bound sound pretty cool, but given the choice players will always go for the one that increases their attack and defenses by the highest integer value.  Magic items don't seem quite as magical when all they're doing is making you add more numbers to a d20.  Unless they let you fly, of course.  That's just broken.

4th edition has moved us to a sort of card-based play style, where you have a set of abilities available in your hand that you can use during a given combat, but if most character builds are just cheesing Twin Strike to its maximum potential, what's the point of the rest of it?  Focus more on the abilities as you might in a card game and the focus on strategy should take hold.

Base the game around a greater rate of success for the players, maybe 75%.  Remove or change every feat and item that exists only to increase the accuracy of its owner.  Then you can shift the focus from the choices the player makes when building a character to the choices they make when playing a character.

Somehow I think that would be a more satisfying play experience.

Japan: Amusements

September was a busy month.  I still haven't gotten myself to sit down and sift through my summer pictures to post about all that nonsense, but I'll see if I can't get around to it before it starts snowing.  I've spent a good deal of time dieting and trying not to eat the incredible amount of food of which I am historically capable. The results have been positive, but I'll go into more detail there in a later post.

September tends to feel like the longest month in Japan.  Work starts and Sports Day and its training days come and go.  Sports Day was on the 10th, but somehow the memories of it start to feel months old by the 20th.  Undoubtedly the change of season has something to do with this, going from desperately wanting to wear shorts and a T-shirt to desperately wanting to wear a jacket at all times.

It may be worth mentioning that at 6'4" tall, I probably shouldn't ever wear shorts.  My friend David has made the understandable observation that people our height in shorts look like giant 10-year-olds.  Let it be known.
 
There were a few random things that happened at work that have stuck in my mind that I figure I'll share here for the time being.

Eating lunch with some Elementary school 1st graders, they asked me if I liked a group called AKB48, one of the more popular pop culture... things of recent times here.  You may have heard of them, but hopefully your exposure has been minimal like my exposure to radiation.  I told them, "No, not really," a reply met with resounding approval from all of the boys in class, many of them giving me thumbs up and saying "Yes! Yes!"  The girls seemed less than understanding about my taste in music.  The next moment over the intercom (operated by the students themselves during lunchtime) it was announced that they would be playing an AKB48 song.  The girls roared with excitement while the boys in the lunch group I was in reacted by covering their ears with their hands, flailing their elbows about, and screaming "No! No! No!"  Probably the funniest thing I've seen first graders do in some time.  At least they were trying to use their minimal knowledge of English.

Second, I was walking out from the teacher's room at my junior high school and next to the library, under the window, obscured from view from within, was a student on all fours.  I looked at him for a moment and he looked at me.  My first impulse was to ask what I usually ask in these situations, "What are you doing?"  I halted, though, thinking I might be ruining some sort of cunning plan he had come up with.  Perhaps he was being hunted down by a rogue gang of students or maybe he had some kind of psychological problem with libraries.  A book could have fallen on him when he was four and he hasn't yet recovered from the trauma.  Whatever the case, my choke in reaction was met with a low, coarse whisper from the student who said, with considerable pride, one English word.  "SNEAKING!" 

I laughed and walked away.

Edit: I forgot I wanted to mention that my friend Dan has seen fit to make a new blog for himself called Low On XP.  It's probably safe to say he's not talking about the operating system.  Check that out.  There's games and words and stuff.

Japan: Sports!

That not just the title of three different albums from entertainers that I enjoy. That's what's happening at school right now... sort of.

I was going to spend some time today typing up the summer festival recap, but I forgot all of my pictures back at home and so I'll talk about the preparations for the upcoming school thing.  In the US we have "field day," which I am surprised to find originally meant something completely different from what I thought. Apparently "sports day" is or was the common term for the school event.  Huh.

I remember them mainly being running around and playing random games for fabulous prizes.  That was in elementary school, at least.  After that I pretty much retired from exercise, so I don't really remember what happened with field days in Jr./Sr. high school.

In Japan, sports day is called "undoukai," which translates as EXERCISE MEETING.  Usually things don't translate straight into italicized caps lock, but with a name like that you need to give it a little oomph.

"Sports day" is something of a misnomer, as the only officially recognized sport involved tends to be track and field. "Track and Field, Dancing, and Miscellaneous American Gladiator Style Games Day" is a bit too long for the title, though.  A bit.

There's lots of bowing and speeches during the opening ceremony. Standing out in the sun on that field of dirt doesn't exactly help them pass by with any expedience. Once that's over the fun begins and a regime of races and competative games takes place. There's also dancing. Lots and lots of choreographed dancing, mixed with some random human tower formations during the cheer group performances.

The students are broken up into three teams, mixing all the grades together for each, and their overall score is tracked. The score is hidden during the last hour or so in order to confuse anyone without proper short term memory retention. During the closing ceremony destinies are revealed and the winning team adds their ribbon to the grand cup, an ancient relic that has witnessed and chronicled the winners of sports days' past, capturing some momentary glory before the second semester of school truly begins and business gets serious.

My personal favorite part of the experience is the festival-like atmosphere of the event. Local vendors come in and put up their festival food stands. Lots of choco-bananas, shaved ice, and (my personal favorite) yakisoba to be consumed. The kids eat lunch with their friends and family that make it out to the event. This is where you will witness some of the largest onigiri you have ever seen. "Undoukai bentou" is crafted by parents to pack as many carbohydrates as possible into a single meal, since this is the day they'll be needing it most.

This year's sports day is this Saturday, followed by the elementary school version the following week. If you need me, I'll be trying to not get even more sunburned than I already am, cheering the kids on from under the tents, making the occasional yakisoba run.

That junk is tasty.