Monkey See, Monkey Do

So, in addition to my three main schools (of which one is even more main by being my base school), I have a once a month special needs school (a former blind school, but now includes other special needs students [also apparently Helen Keller visited once which is pretty cool {it's a 107 years old school}]). I went again today.

It's not a particularly fun place. Not that any of my schools except Minami is (though Tuesday, the Chuo kids would quiz me on One Piece whenever I walked past). However, today was some kind of assembly. I actually participated a bit. There was some kind of quiz game where you had to run to the true or false side. I decided to be the lone person standing on the wrong answer to "Is Doraemon a robot cat?" and got out immediately. It was funnier that way, not trying to be a slacker.

Then I joined in on the rock-paper-scissors tournament. We had a bit of difficulty deciding when to shoot. I ended up winning round one, and after a vicious battle of ties, lost round two. The loser had to join his chain of people behind an every growing chain of people following the last winner. The prize was a person in a box (well, actually the blanket she was holding, but I would have preferred the person).

Classes sizes are incredibly small. One is four students or so, and the other is two. I only teach two classes there and spend most of the rest of my time on my phone. This time I at least brought my Russian book to study. Today was the election, so it was especially fun watching Facebook posts. Sometimes one of the teachers tries to invade my room they throw me into because they have no desk for me and make conversation.

The classes are mostly just talking about whatever pops into my head. There are "lesson plans", but it's basically "talk about semi-relevant stuff". Usually the classes break down into Japanese anyway. At some point (albeit last time) I invented a new food concept - tako + okonomiyake = takonomiyake. I want to try to make this.

I was supppppppposed to go to Minami afterwards to protect my promise that I would show the second half of the movie last week to the ESS. So I left early after my last class and went straight to school. The ESS teacher had tried to talk me out of it (as she does most things she is afraid would be a bother to me) and mentioned how she wouldn't be there today - but neglected to mention today was a shortened schedule. By the time I had arrived, club activities had already gone on for 30 minutes. I searched the whole school, but the ESS members were already gone. This makes the third time I have missed an ESS event where I said I'd be there because of various miscommunications. Tsubura's going to kill me...

At least I have pecans for a potential pecan pie for Thanksgiving. Slowly converting the club into a baking club...

Hello, World

So, I started programming my new game, more or less. I have been writing out the design for over a week now. I'm reviving an old idea I had when I was running the game-making club at DePaul. I'm also reusing our studio name from my senior capstone.

That's not the exciting part. Well, it is, but even more exciting - I have a server. It seems Amazon has some kind of cloud server service which, to make things even better, will probably be free for me for the first year. All my files are already up on my very own Perforce server. It might not seem like a lot, especially for people already very familiar with the internet, but it gives me a warm feeling.

I've actually wanted my own server for many many years now, since I first started gaming online. I temporarily had some server space when I was playing Minecraft. That also made me feel warm and fuzzy. But this server, I am the admin. I control everything. It's kind of fun. And it's free so far.

I only have a few files up, and I haven't really programmed anything yet. Once I get the programming and design in a more final state, I'll enlist the help of artists, sound designers, and more programmers. But for now, I want something solid to start with.

The game is a tower defense, nothing too fancy. It's multiplayer with a single-player campaign (maybe it can be made into multiplayer). You can attack as well as defend. It'll be styled like a pop-up book. That's the jist of it right now. I plan to release it for free on XBox Live and maybe (hopefully) Steam. Then I'll make some DLC that adds more units and some bonus campaign missions. That'll probably also be free. Or maybe I'll charge a tiny amount and donate half of it to science.

Shibafu

So, you're probably wondering by now what's with the lawn? Well, you see, when I moved in my place needed a lot of cleaning. And then I realized outside my place also needed a lot of cleaning. The stairs were coated in leaves, bugs, and above all else - sand. It wasn't long after I cleaned it that I needed to clean it again. I was getting tired of sweeping up the sand and generally considered the front of the building to be terrible-looking. In front of the building was nothing but sand and weeds. I decided I wanted to put something done, even if not the whole thing, to prevent the sand. Not just my building, but all of Shimonoseki seems to have this neglectfulness about the land and plants, everything is weeds and sand. I decided I'd put down some grass.

I was unsure the landlord would be okay with me altering the property and there was a building meeting coming up, so I waited for that. I showed up late (the address was in kanji, I just figured the circled thing on the paper was the location of the meeting), but was able to interject during the "Anything else?" part at the end of the meeting. I struggled to explain in Japanese what I wanted to do. I learned an important word in the process:

芝生 (shibafu) - lawn

I went to the local hardware store and eventually decided on using sod instead of seed because seed requires both more effort and more skill (and some equipment). I also bought a bike (a rather flashy one, but I kind of felt bad having the clerk take it down from the shelf for me to look at), so I put the sod and dirt on the seat and walked it all home. The people are the store were pretty helpful and were probably a bit amused.

This is the result of laying down the bushel of grass I got. I definitely didn't seem like enough.

I went back and got more, this time carrying two bushels. I had a nice old lady try to help for like 20 minutes or so until we ended up doing exactly what I was going to do in the first place. Though at least I figured out I can get plastic rope stuff if I asked. The store people were somewhat amused to see I had come back to get more.

This seemed like a good place to stop, but I decided maybe a little further would look nicer.

At this point, I had spent a ton of time and effort. And watering was becoming a pain. I quickly decided that the other plots weren't getting any grass. Though at least they are coated in weeds so it didn't matter so much.

Eventually I decided it was worth bribing a friend into helping me. She had a car so we just loaded it with the remaining grass and dirt needed. We worked into the evening and finished up the lawn. Though we got a bit lazy, so there was quite a bit of rocks and weeds under the grass. Some old man tried explaining to me something presumably about the weeds, but in a difficult accent, so I didn't understand. He even seemed pretty mad.

The end farthest from my stairs was the worst part. The area by the pipe was actually almost all solid stone. The stone had been tunneled into by years of water. This area was also brimming with rocks. I decided not to try to wrap around the building or anything and make my lawn a rectangle.

To formalize my barrier, I added some bricks. I eventually relocated some of the grass at the ends and used up the extra two squares.

I also added seeds between the edges and throughout the lawn. I think they are the random extra tall blades that have been popping up, but the edges of every rectangle tended to do better already anyway. Which causes my lawn to retain lines of green which make it obvious it was patched together.

I actually got a lot of praise and encouragement from the other people in the building that walked by. I watered every evening, so a lot of the other teachers coming home would see my lawn. They were also at the meeting when I said I was going to grow a lawn, but I think most of them were surprised when I actually did. I even got visitors like this guy!

The gaps between the squares eventually started to fill, but the green lines between the spaces still remains.

Still, the lawn got greener and greener at time went on. The newer the grass though, the less green. So the initial grass, which was planted with a large gap between the next set was noticably greener, but everything except for a few squares started turning green. Hopefully the non-green squares heal.

I eventually added what I hope is fertilizer. I asked the store clerk if this was "lawn food" and she said yes, so it should be good at least. The picture is a bunch of grass, so it's probably right. Also it has a dog and a rainbow on it, so that's something.

Watering was a pain. I made many improvements to optimizing watering - leaving the door open, filling the tub and just dunking the can, using my old shoes like sandals, taking them off while facing backwards so I can just slip into them, and finally only yesterday I realized I could water three times as fast if I used a bucket to refill from downstairs. My life would have been so much easier if they hadn't removed the spigot over my lawn and paved over it. But now that it's November, I've stopped watering for the year. Hopefully my lawn makes it through the Winter.

Also, you can follow my lawn on twitter! https://twitter.com/CorbinsLawn

Halloween

Boring title, but get over it.

So the last few days have been full of candy and costumes. Also pie.

On Halloween, I decided to reward trick or treaters.

The teachers tried it out first, then started telling students that told other students. My desk became rather busy. Fortunately, I had a ton of candy. They all got to use their new "Trick or Treat!" phrase.

I decided early on that I wanted to have a Halloween party, but then one of the students told me they wanted to eat food at the party and that I should get some kind of Halloween food. The only thing I could think of was pumpkin pie.

Fortunately for me, that wasn't foreshadow of a terrible event. We arranged a day to bake the pie, and on that day, the ESS (English Speaking Society [I didn't come up with the name so don't blame me]) teacher and I went and bought pie ingredients during school, which was pretty fun. Then after school, we prepared the pie for baking the next day. Here are some preparation pictures. Enjoy. Or don't. I guess I don't care what you do.

A lot of pictures have to be omitted for boringness or because a student's face is visible. Japanese law and all that.

It's not a particularly exciting story.

I had been thinking for a while that not cooking the seeds would be a waste and it seemed simple. So I looked up the recipe while we cooked and I realized it was. So I ran to the store and got the only thing missing - butter. I decided to completely disregard measurements and poured a stick of butter over everything. We also severely compromised the temperature and baking time. The result was pretty awful. I tried to throw them away, but two students forced me to distribute them to the students and staff. Most of them managed to pretend they were delicious. Of course at this time, everyone was studying or in club activities. We somehow managed to get rid of them all.

The pies turned out much better. We had to cook them the next day, and they actually came out. We served the up, along with a ton of bags of candy I made.

It seems I don't have a picture of the result, but it was quite a few bags.

I wore my fugu hat in the office and to the third year's class. The teacher wore an orange witch hat we got at the 100 yen shop while looking for pie supplies. I also distributed some more candy.

We had as a warm up (which turned into homework), writing out ghost stories on the pumpkins I drew for the kid class.

At the ESS Halloween party, we ate pie and distributed candy. Then we were going to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas.

We couldn't seem to get the door open to the A/V room. I managed to break in using a secret technique a bit before the teacher showed up with the right keys. I can now no longer be contained by sliding doors, locked or otherwise. 

The movie went well (though I forgot speakers), but some students had to leave early, so there'll be a reshowing Wednesday. 

Other than that, Halloween is finally over.

Still need to get real pumpkin seeds to undo the damage I've caused...