2024-06-18 23:04:30
This is my ninth year participating in Famicase. For this year, I decided to do something a little different and refer back to my 2017 entry, Electric Cafe Hazikami.
The description:
最高のパフェを構築しよう！新鮮なフルーツを選び、 お客様のリクエストに応えて至福のスイーツの完成を 目指しましょう。
同時発売の「電気喫茶 薑」など「小山町商店街」シリーズのゲームと連携可能。
ジャンル：SRPG (スイーツレストランパティシエゲーム)
Or in English:
Build the best parfait you can! Pick fresh fruits according to your customers' requests and work to make the ultimate sweets.
Can connect with "Electric Cafe Hazikami" or other entries in the Koyamachou Arcade series.
Genre: SRPG (Sweets Restaurant Pâtissier Game)
I wanted to connect with an earlier entry - while the freedom to make something completely new is a lot of the fun of Famicase, it seemed fun to connect with older entries rather than just existing in isolation. And while I didn't give the title, I also looped in Mita Koyamachou and last year's entry, Koyamachou Watch Repair Shop, as well.
The photo was taken at a parfait shop on Jougashima, near Miura, where I've been going frequently the past few years. It was taken with the Olympux X-E4 that I picked up earlier this year and have been enjoying. The parfait was easily the most elaborate I've ever eaten, and included edible flowers and two kinds of oranges, in addition to all the other fruit. It was delicious. Ψ
2024-02-29 20:54:00
2023 was definitely a year. Here are some things that happened.
I managed not to break any bones or otherwise end up in the hospital this year, which is always a good start. One other change is that I accomplished my goal of travelling more domestically - while I mostly stuck to day trips, I also went farther afield a few times. I hope to continue that this year.
In particular, this is the first year I stayed overnight in Misaki in Miura. Staying late allowed me to spend more time in the town and get to know people in addition to exploring the area, and I'd like to visit it regularly. Luckily I already know it's easily accessible, as I've been going a few times a year for five years now, though previously only for short day trips.
Since I started printing photos regularly in 2022 I've been more conscious of how I take photographs, and after talking about cameras some in Okutama at the start of the year, I finally bought a dedicated camera in October. Learning about all the photographic settings that a phone just does for you and learning how to manipulate them to get pictures you can't get automatically was a lot of fun. This ultimately led to me getting an interchangeable lens camera in early 2024, but that's another story.
Separately, a disposable camera I took on a trip in December produced results beyond my wildest expectations, and so I've also gotten into film photography. The process of not quite knowing what you'll get and the character of the resulting images is very enjoyable, even if film has gotten a lot more expensive the past few years.
On work, I've continued to maintain my projects and work with NLP. I didn't have any big releases I was directly responsible for in 2023, but I've managed to contribute to a few good things behind the scenes.
In 2024 I'd like to spend more time making games, both analog and digital. I have ideas and just need to make time for it.
I still use deltos every day.
Here's to a good year. Ψ
2023-05-03 22:47:20
This is my eighth year participating in Famicase, and this year my submission was the very first one to arrive, which means it'll be at the very top of the list, just like I thought might happen last year. My entry this time is "小山町時計修理店" or "Koyamachou Watch Repair Shop".
The description:
古びた商店街の片隅に構える時計修理店。訳あって、 突然店を引き継いだあなたは、時計修理の技術を 覚えながら、客と商店街の人々との交流を深める。 前店主の記録を振り返ることで、店と地域の かつての姿も蘇る。
Or in English:
In the corner of an aging shopping arcade lies a watch repair shop. Suddenly thrust into taking over ownership of the shop, as you learn the craft of watch repair you'll deepen your relationship with the customers and people of the arcade. Going over the notes of the prior owner, the old days of the store and area will come back to life.
My entry this year is transparently a reference to the area I've been living in for over ten years, which is currently undergoing a long delayed redevelopment. While the demolition isn't happening as soon as I thought, it has gradually reached the area I walk through everyday, so it's only a matter of time before everything is gone. The photos used on the cart for this year are all from the real Koyamachou.
Despite having the idea for doing a cart about watch repair for Famicase last year, I only decided to incorporate Koyamachou pretty late, so I didn't have as much time to work on the visuals as I would have liked. But I'm glad that I can put a little of the neighborhood out there for more people to see.
Looking forward to next year. Ψ
Update 2023-08-30: This casette was made into a visual novel by Wondering Artist! Definitely give it a play.
2023-01-02 23:34:17
2022 was a busy year. Here are some things that happened.
My broken arm influenced the start of the year considerably. While I was fortunate that I never lost my ability to type, it resulted in the year starting out pretty slowly, as I was unable to enjoy going out much, and had regular checkups. Luckily it healed without surgery or complications, and since healing it's basically the same as it was before.
I never would have guessed that I'd travel internationally twice during the pandemic, but it happened to work out that way. While things went as well as could be hoped for on the trips and I was able to enjoy them, Japan's strict rules made travel stressful, so I look forward to not having to worry about that next time I go somewhere. I also was able to travel a little domestically this year, which I hope to do more of in 2023.
I worked on spaCy full time throughout this year. The biggest single feature I worked on was the coref model, but I also contributed many FAQ posts and smaller quality of life features, in addition to lots of support on the forums. Compared to other libraries in the field, spaCy does a really good job of making it fast to set up a well-structured pipeline, and this year I'm working on some more features to make that even better that I'm excited about.
With the JANLP book, I had hoped to complete it in 2022, but it has ended up taking a little longer than expected. We're finishing up the last sections right now and should be focusing on translation and editing by the end of this month. I look forward to being able to point people to the finished product as a good introduction to the complicated and often confusing landscape of tools for Japanese NLP. It also has what I think is the most detailed usage example of spaCy's DependencyMatcher anywhere, so it'll be fun to see what people do with that.
As long as I've been living in Japan, Twitter has been a valuable resource for me to connect with people and stay up to date on events. But with the recent change in ownership it's not fun anymore - the constant, nonsensical changes to rules and features are frustrating, and you can't ignore how the new idiot emperor feels any given day if you have any English speaking users in your feed. I'd love to move off it entirely, but Japanese Twitter (and therefore most of my feed) has largely ignored the ongoing changes. Maybe it'll just blow over, but for now I'm still not sure what's going to happen with that. I hope that feeds, RSS or otherwise, make a comeback, and I'll be trying to post more here in any case. I still use deltos every day, so it's just a matter of polishing things up for posts, or figuring out how to post them while still rough.
For the year's end, the imminent demolition of the nearby neighborhood has me pretty down. The Nakagin Tower was also dismantled this year. Construction and renewal never stops in Tokyo, but it's sad to see unique parts of the city be smoothed over.
Other than all that, this year has my number. I've been waiting for that a long time, and hope to make the best of it. Ψ
2022-12-31 00:31:30
Across the street from Azabu Juban there's a neighborhood called Mita Koyamachou. In the middle of Tokyo it's a few streets of small homes and pre-war buildings where it seems like time has stopped. Early in 2023 demolition begins.
As of December 2022 I've been living in the same apartment for eleven years, on the same city block as Koyamachou. On my way to the station I take the staircase that runs behind the Koyamayu bathhouse, built around 1920 and in business until 2007, and go through the small shopping street.
In 1973, Shigeki Torizuka released the song "Mita Koyamachou", about how it's a neighborhood where it feels like time stopped. Fifty years later, going by the name, his family still runs the cleaners in the middle of the street, which is the only business operating like nothing is amiss.
Looking online, redevelopment of the area has been seriously proposed for about as long as I've been alive. When I moved in, the neighborhood was full of banners reading 街こわし再開発反対 "Against Neighborhood Destroying Redevelopment!", and the website for the group that made the banners was actively updated until around 2017. The surrounding neighborhoods were demolished before I got here, replaced with giant apartment buildings. The next block to the east, a historic insurance-related office and formerly home to my closest postbox, has also been levelled in the past few years, and is currently the site of an extremely high end development, with speculation ongoing about which celebrities will move in before the foundation is even set. There are similar plans for Koyamachou.
Demolition has already started on some buildings that aren't in Koyamachou, but next to the nearby Azabu City Tower, that had somehow survived the development of the surrounding neighborhood. The next building to go is the Sanuki Club, a hotel made partly to serve as a base to visitors from Kagawa, and a relatively new (70s?) neighboring apartment complex somewhat higher up the hill than Koyamachou proper. The bathhouse and other wood buildings and old structures will go down in February for asbestos removal.
It may take a while until the whole neighborhood is gone, but most remaining businesses have closed and left over the past few months, and except for the cleaners and neighboring laundromat the rest have posted notices of closure or moving. There are exceptions - weird expensive restaurants, newly opened, that fill up reservations six months out and don't have windows - but the life has gone out of the neighborhood. The air has changed to that of a ghost town, full of windows without curtains. It's sad.
Technically, Koyamachou ceased to be the official name of the area in 1967, when it merged with other areas to form Mita Block 1 and was removed from use for formal addresses. But it's managed to keep its identity despite that. If the whole area is levelled the name will still live on at least in the bridge to the west that leads into the main street, which will likely survive even as the street itself disappears.
You can read more about the history of the neighborhood - the name Koyamachou goes back to 1869 - over at Deep Azabu.
Koyamachou will be missed. Ψ
