Sliding Doors and Blazing Flames
One week into my Japan trip and I have not done much at all — lots of cleaning, spending time with family, eating and drinking — which is pretty much how I planned to spend the first week.
Shoji – work in progress
Probably the biggest home task I took care of was renewing all the shoji paper for our sliding doors and windows. It’s a fairly time consuming task that involves removing all the old paper, cleaning the frames then gluing new paper to them. I messed up the first one by getting the paper alignment wrong, but soon got in the swing of things. It’s not fun exactly but it is quietly satisfying.
We live in walking distance of Ishikiri Shrine, one of the major shrines in Osaka and our usual destination for our new year visit. Unfortunately, thousands of other people also head there. This year we gave it a miss on new year’s eve and went to a much smaller shrine closer to home. It was cool and laidback and the blazing fires were nicer to watch than anything at the big shrine.
Locational Connections
I used to be very into audiobooks. I mostly listened to them while taking walks around the neighbourhood. It has been yonks since I listened to an audiobook. Not for any particular reason — just a thing that happened. Same thing for podcasts.
I have very clear locational connections between certain places in my neighbourhood and books I listened to well over a decade ago. Whenever I pass them, the voices of the narrators bubble up in my head. A corner I used to round on my way to work still puts me in mind of Dune. A temple a little up the mountain reminds me of Ender’s Game. And then there’s the park in the pictures here. This is totally the Pattern Recognition park. Walking there today, so much came came back to me — the Footage, Cayce’s Buzz Rickson jacket and the filed-down buttons on her Levis.
Fast Tracks and Face Masks
The other day I arrived back in Japan after three years away. After having closed its doors to foreign tourists for so long Japan is really keen to get people back here. You still have to show you’ve been triple vaccinated or have passed a recent PCR test but it seems like they’ve tried to make the process as easy as possible. Before you fly out you can upload your vaccination and PCR test information online so you only need to show a QR code when you get to Japan.
It’s a good idea to take screenshots of the three QR codes you need before leaving so you don’t have to mess about with the web app when you arrive. If you do that, though, make sure to include your name in the screenshot. Mine was cut out of the vaccination screenshot so I ended up having to show a paper copy of my vaccination certificate anyway. It didn’t take more than a minute, but I was on a flight that arrives to fairly early in the morning so didn’t have to wait at all. Your milage may vary.
To make things even smoother, they now let you fill in your disembarkation cards and quarantine questionnaires at the same time. So instead of scribbling answers on a terribly spaced Little form on a wobbly aeroplane table you can do it all beforehand and just show them the QR code. I really hope other countries, Australia especially, adopt some kind of online quarantine questionnaire. Having to fill out those forms while I’m in the air is one of the things I least like about travelling abroad.
Masks! Everyone is masked all the time. That wasn’t unexpected but still a bit of a shock at first, having come from Perth, where people mostly stopped wearing them when the mandates were lifted. It’s not just inside either. People wear masks even outside walking down the street by themselves. In just two days I’ve seen many people driving cars by themselves but still wearing a mask. Aside from the protection, both to yourself and others, masks have the benefit of helping to keep your face a little bit warmer in the chilly winter.
Tricky Cake
It was over ten years ago, but I still clearly remember the night I came home from work and was offered this delicious looking coffee spongecake. I spent a good long while trying to cut off a piece with my chopsticks. It was only when I saw the chopsticks bend that I realised that this was no ordinary cake or, in fact, a cake at all. Top marks to my wife and daughters for keeping a straight face throughout my struggles.
Ghost of Tsushima – Welcome to Iki Island
I’ve started playing Ghost of Tsushima’s Iki Island expansion. I’m playing it differently than I did the main Tsushima campaign. This time, whenever I see a golden bird flutter overhead, I follow it and find out where it leads instead of just rushing on to the next objective in the story. Ignoring them previously let me to miss many shrines, hot springs and chances to compose haiku. Following the birds, and exploring the question marks that pop up on the map has led to a much richer experience.
I love that Iki Island is a lush and colourful place. So much of the second part of ghost of Tsushima took place in its wintry north, which was decidedly less attractive than the autumnal hues of the first part.
I’m still battling through on medium level difficulty even though it quite often ends up with me dead. It’s character building, I suppose.
Blue Badges
Continuing my tradition of absolutely not seeing what was coming — I remember thinking that the word “blog” would never catch on and that nobody would put up with seeing ads in their Instagram feed — I am baffled to see Twitter’s blue badge being positioned as the cornerstone of their subscription efforts. I could easily see paying to avoid ads or being able to make edits to tweets, but to get a badge next to your username? Not so much.
Salt & Fat’s Butter Tomato Sauce
The day ten years ago this recipe for tomato-butter sauce was posted on Salt & Fat was the day I started to cook. Until then I had prepared plenty of food and certainly thought that I had been cooking, but all I had really been doing was warming a few disparate ingredients enough to be edible and adding a bunch of salt at the end.
This, however, was the first time I had taken a few ingredients — tomatoes, an onion, salt and butter — and created something that tasted entirely different. I still remember the jolt I got from my first taste of this sweet, salty, jammy sauce. It was like alchemy.
Salt & Fat is a blog by Neven Mrgan and Jim Ray that ran from 2010 to 2014. It’s been on hiatus for a few years, but its archives are a treasure trove of ideas that massively expanded my food world. Food is food, after all, so it’s not as though any of this is going to go out of date anytime soon. A few highlights off the top of my head are —
- 707 Fried Chicken
- A treatise on salads and the vinaigrette
- Roasting a chicken
- Quinoa
- Turkey, Brie, and Cucumber Sandwich
- Patate Lesse
That last one is for boiled potatoes, and is a particular favourite. Nothing could be simpler, but few things are as tasty in their simplicity. I no longer make any of these exactly as described, but I use the techniques described every single day.
Missing Japanese Input Sources
I ran into an unusual Mac OS bug this morning. I hit the kana key to type an address in Japanese, but it came out in romaji. I hit it again — same thing. When I looked in the input menu, I saw that all the Japanese and Korean input options had disappeared. I attempted to add them again in system preferences but they didn’t appear as choices. The Chinese options were also missing. Oddly, when I logged into another user account on the same machine, everything was where it should be. Multiple restarts did nothing, nor did changing my main language to Japanese.
I finally found a mention of something similar relating to High Sierra in a blog post that recommended doing a safe boot to set things right.
I tried it and it worked. Phew! I have no idea what triggered it, though.
Not Quite My Own C64
My first computer was a Commodore 64. Way before I had my own though, I had access to one at the local public computer lab—aka, K-Mart. The local library had a few C64 magazines full of BASIC programs ready to be typed out, but magazines, for some reason, could not be loaned. I can’t clearly remember, but I think there was also a rule against them being photocopied. Otherwise why would I, as I clearly remember, have spent hours copying these programs by hand into an exercise book? Maybe I just didn’t have enough money.
After I’d got one down and more or less checked, I rode my embarrassingly non-BMX bike to K-Mart, where I stood for hours typing away on the display machine. It seems strange now, but I don’t remember anyone ever asking me to move on or stop what I was doing. The majority of the programs I tried out threw up a SYNTAX ERROR, caused either by my hunt-and-bash typing, poor copying, or the frequent flaws in the magazine text.
Sometimes, though, they worked, and when they did it was like hitting a home run. I had no way to save these programs, though, so when I was done I had no choice but to just walk away, leaving them to be wiped when the power was shut off for the night.
Exhalation
Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is one of my favourite short stories. Its centrepiece is a meticulous description of the protagonist’s self-dissection of his own brain. It’s a mechanical being (although the word mechanical seems too crude) so rather than blood and bone, it’s an assemblage of intricate mechanisms. Reading it takes some concentration — you really have to pay attention to each word and try to hold the image in your head as each detail is added — but it’s well worth the the effort.
When I was done, my brain looked like an explosion frozen an infinitesimal fraction of a second after the detonation, and again I felt dizzy when I thought about it. But at last the cognition engine itself was exposed, supported on a pillar of hoses and actuating rods leading down into my torso. I now also had room to rotate my microscope around a full three hundred and sixty degrees and pass my gaze across the inner faces of the subassemblies I had moved. What I saw was a microcosm of auric machinery, a landscape of tiny spinning rotors and miniature reciprocating cylinders.
You can find the story online at the Night Shade Books site, or in Chiang’s recent collection, also called Exhalation.