Nostalgia · 4:38am May 19th
More often than not, schools will have their sports day around now, and today, one of my schools did its practice ceremony for the day. Let's taco-bout it.
Before that, I was unaware that the above full song had come out. I believe I've glazed Orb: About the Movement of the Earth like a fresh doughnut, but to do it one more time, this shit also has one of the best Opening Songs of the year. Everything, and I mean everything about this show was awesome, and I cannot recommend it enough. I love Kaiju, so much that I nearly downloaded the TV cut just so I could justify shouting '何度でも' at every given opportunity. I believe I have other songs by Sakanaction as well, but this one is particularly special.
Anyways, Sports Day is a thing here in Japan like the US has Field Days(?) at least when I was a child, but this is much more of an event than field day was, at least as far as I can remember. Now that I try I can't seem to remember much. The vague memories involve seeing 105 on the thermometer, tug of war between several students, being on a big field right next to the baseball field across the street and getting free candy from the concession stand that was open for the field day. The thermometer thing may not have even been the same day, but it sticks out as something that was around the same time. All the same, there was wind and low humidity, so it didn't bother child me. (probably wouldn't bother adult me much either given the things I would do for the sake of it.) I'd been sitting on soft bright grass watching other kids run around eating green sour straws. I think my older brother had a baseball game at the field later that day. I also believe pokemon emerald had just come out so this might've been twenty years ago now.
Here in japan, it's almost like a ritual. They have these double sided hats that are used in ceremonies, one side is red, the other is white. The red team and the white team I believe are usually decided by how many classes there are, and if there are too many classes, we switch to red, blue, yellow, green and white because I've never seen a school so big it needed more than five teams. They make banners, they wear headbands (at big schools), there are competitions but of like, track and field type things and quiz games. Mostly, it's running, and dancing, and lining up to bow and the like. These usually take place on Saturdays for the sake of the parents to come watch, and because of that... I've never seen one.
So, when two of my classes were canceled to practice the ceremony, I got to go outside on that incredibly pleasant Thursday morning and watch. This particular school is almost due north of the mountain I climbed the other day which was pointed out to me when I went to visit another class to talk about Golden Week on Tuesday. Because of this, there's not much in the way of the wind blowing off the harbor, and one of my favorite things about this place, as noted in other blogs, is the sea breeze. I absolutely love it, and it always makes me feel like a dog when I can smell it because I just close my eyes and lean into the wind. If I could bottle this scent and put it in a candle or something, I'd burn it every day. If/when I have to move, I really hope I get to be near the shore again because of the things I'd hate to lose, the sea breeze is near the top of the list.
So, while the kids stood in lines and bowed for the most part, I was getting lost in the wind. This school in particular usually has the windows open, and there's a field of grass and trees and a park south of it, so it always smells fresh and floral. I wish it weren't so far away, but it's nice to be here when the weather is like this. I could have just laid down and fallen asleep.
The interesting relation between that day and that memory comes in the form of the story I'm working on which tries to capture that feeling. Similar to my time on the field day and this wonderful wind, I have another memory which might just be part memory, or several memories, of being on the sand by the sea. I think we went to Galveston beach two or three times during my childhood as a family, and there's a picture of me with my mother under an umbrella on the sand back at the house, and that image is infused with the smell of the sea breeze in my head. It makes me nostalgic in a way that nothing else really does and I’ve wanted to capture that feeling since I started on this story… back in August.
It was one of two I attempted to write last summer break and was of course inspired by my trips to the beach back then. The only thing Is, I couldn’t ever be consistent about writing it and I got stuck at one point. Now that I’ve come back to it with remembered memories, its going much more smoothly, but I highly doubt I’ll actually get it done by Sunday like I wanted to. I believe this Monday is my busiest day of the week, so maybe there’s a chance, but you never know if I’ll get some random assignment or something in my down time.
I have been broke AF for the past couple days, and man does it suck to be waiting on the government to start my part time job. Something was off with my application or something and now I’m waiting on a letter so I can respond with a letter so I can get a letter back so I can then go make an appointment, and oh my god, why was this not an email? Seriously. All of this could be solved if the system was digital, but since I live in 1980 land, we don’t get digital anything. All governments suck, but at least most governments allow you to answer questions online.
While that is working itself out, I’ve also managed to get a switch emulator running over the weekend. I wanted to replay Legends Arceus and didn’t feel like making a new profile or starting over my original save. So I made the task infinitely more difficult by spending hours working on downloading things for an emulator before finally getting it working kind of. I don’t know why this happened the way it did, but I simply couldn’t get the update patches to work no matter what I tried, so base game is what I’ve got. PLA doesn’t have any DLC or anything, so it’s fine, really, but this was particularly annoying.
Less annoying was getting Violet and starting a new game on that. Uncapping the framerate and letting my PC crunch through Pokemon like it was nothing was a beautiful sight. The game actually doesn’t look bad when it doesn’t: run like shit, glitch out all the time, or take ten years to load anything. The crazy part about it though is why it has such memory issues. Looking at it in the emulator, you’ll occasionally get this thing where the game on the spot builds out new shaders to be stored in ram. That means, every time you turn the game on, it has to rebuild the shaders, and it will only do so if you trigger an event that requires that shader, which means it will always bog down when you do something like, I don’t know, terastalize? I knew the game was made poorly, but like, holy shit. Even cheap chinese crap has the sense to load shaders before starting the game. It’s not even a hardware thing either, this is just pure and simple bad programming.
With the miserable price increase and anal fisting Nintendo is dead set on accomplishing with their new Switch 2, it’s very likely that I just get an emulator and use that to play new stuff. More than likely my emulator runs Switch 2 games better than the Switch 2 will anyways. Fuck Nintendo.
Still, I have been having a lot of fun replaying PLA and put a solid 8 hours into it over the weekend. I must’ve been really bad at it or didn’t pay attention to anything when it came out because I feel like it’s a lot easier than I remember. Maybe I’m just better at games these days, but I went through the first trial and did it flawlessly. I remember struggling with this crap a lot going through the game and the final Arceus trial I hated with all my hate. It was truly awful. I only ever beat it once and I never did go back and catch everything to get Arceus. Waiting for distortion zones to find magnemites and shit is pure cancer and I didn’t have the patience for it. Maybe I’ll actually do it all this time though.
Anyways, I am still open for art commissions if you’re interested in that, and otherwise, there should be a new story out sometime soon set in my Bright Future universe. Here’s hoping I can finish it by this weekend.
Until Next Time~
-KCZ
I rather liked the opening song to an anime from a couple years ago called Kaina of the Great Snow Sea, and the Orb theme sounded similar. Turns out they're by the same person. Check out that song and see if you like it.
Heh, I remember field day as well, but it was far less organized and far less mandatory than anything Japan does.
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Oh, definitely. Sometimes I wonder if that field day was a dream. It's such a vivid memory with smells and feelings attached to it, but it doesn't seem like something that actually happened.
Japanese school is very nearly military training more often than not. If capital punishment was still legal, it very much would be. I'm still not sold on it being the best way to teach, especially now in that children are really not punished at all in elementary school, but it also seems to work out by the time they get to middle school. It's very strange. About third term, January, is when they've kinda got it in their heads that things are getting serious and that's when they shape up the most, but until then, it's kind of a free for all.