Naturally, the day arrives and there is rain. This isn’t just any rain, though: it’s a downpour. Torrential in volume, ferocious in intensity, seemingly endless in duration. This has led to some amusing scenes.

The BN HQ parking lot, for example, is filled to capacity. At its only entrance, a large sign warns “Parking Lot Subject to Flooding. NO OVERNIGHT PARKING.” An inch of water is streaming down the tarmac at the entrance.

In front of the community center, in the normal parking lot, there’s a raised stage and some enormous speakers connected to what looks like a pile of very expensive audio equipment. In front of this are about a hundred folding metal chairs. It’s all deserted, with the electronics entarped in plastic wrap.

Surrounding that are a dozen or so small awnings for the various services, groups, and businesses that want to make a good impression on the soldiers here. Most are simply deserted. Others are manned by one or two lonely-looking but dedicated people. The only one with any customers at all is selling $1 beers, $1 hotdogs, and free popcorn. There’s an air of mirth around that one, as though everyone suspects that they are being ridiculous. Periodically someone pokes the awning, pushing a solid sheet of water off the edge.

I like the rain, and I don’t like crowds. I probably should feel bad that this is how the summerfest is turning out, but honestly it is just amusing.

Shogun, James Clavell. It’s not a bad story, really; it’s extremely detailed, and he does a good idea of giving an impression of 16th century Japan. I just couldn’t get past the fact that he absolutely butchered the Japanese language, which he scattered throughout for a well-intentioned but disastrous attempt at verisimilitude. If you’ve never studied Japanese, you probably won’t even notice. If you have, though, the errors are of the sort that even a month actually studying the language should have cured. It bothered me, perhaps disproportionately much, that his only linguistic research seems to have been to pick up an old Japanese-English dictionary and translate English word by word.

Stranger Things Happen and Magic For Beginners, Kelly Link. Books like these are dangerous: I get sucked into their world and barely notice when things start happening in the stories which are quite impossible in real life. For a few hours after finishing, I found myself walking carefully and avoiding the use of heavy machinery while I re-established from scratch the premises of reality.

The Star Beast, Robert Heinlein. This one’s an old favorite from my youth. These days, I find myself wincing at certain characterizations, but it’s fairly clear that Heinlein meant well at least. If you can get past that and the unfortunate fact that he completely failed to predict modern electronics in any form, this remains a fun work of juvenile science fiction.

An Island to Oneself, Tom Neale. Every so often I find myself drawn to books with the theme of isolation. This one is a true story of a man who, just after World War II, voluntarily went to live alone on a small atoll in the Pacific. His mindset and way of life seem utterly foreign to me, but it is through outliers like his that it is possible to better understand the human condition.

The Dark Side, Jane Mayer. A look into the American use of “black tactics,” particularly torture and indefinite incarceration, since 2001. I can’t help but be outraged that we as a society have condoned these things, and this book looks carefully through the public records and pieces together the facts in a particularly damning manner. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to change any minds; the discussions at work suggest that people who think such tactics are necessary have already decided that no matter what the US does, no matter its efficacy or effect, it cannot be wrong so long as the intent was pure.

The Scar, China Mieville. I read this book because it was recommended as a prime example of world-building. As such, this book is a feat: its world is thorough, self-consistent, well-developed, diversified, and nearly plausible. Most importantly, it avoids getting in the way of the story. The downside is that we see far too little of some of the most interesting bits, some characters are never fully explained, and the single most important difference between the story-world and ours gets less and less credible the more fully it is explained.

A Brief History of Time, Steven Hawking. I figured it was long past time I got that book out of the way; it’s been assumed background knowledge for my demographic group for ages but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. I was surprised at the level of detail Hawking was willing to go into, but also somewhat dismayed: this most recent edition was updated a decade ago, and there’s no obvious path from the book itself to the current understandings of physicists. With the Large Hadron Collider coming online soon, it would have been wonderful for Hawking to explain exactly what the experiments they will carry out there intend to prove.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler. These books are simultaneously astonishingly dark and chillingly prescient. They depict an altogether too plausible dystopia in a crumbling United States–and, at the very end, brilliant hope that no calamity lasts forever. They also include the only type of religion that I’d consider joining.

Saturn’s Children, Charlie Stross. This really feels more like a spy novel than science fiction; at first it’s almost incidental that the characters are all AIs living in robot bodies after the accidental extinction of humanity (and subsequently all macroscopic biological life on Earth). Then again, it’s not incidental at all: these robots are formed in the image of humanity, and know it. This is a fascinating book, and I haven’t even touched the matter of its plot.

That’s what I’ve been reading for the last month or so. I expect the pace of novel consumption to drop fairly significantly in the upcoming few months as I focus on Japanese, but I’ve still got a few on hold for the moment. We’ll see how quickly those end up being read.

• Is it possible for a mathematical point, a singularity, to rotate? My opinion: no. Reasoning: Rotation requires an axis to rotate about, and a distance from that axis. A point on the axis of rotation remains stationary. Thus, while a point can be rotated about an external axis, it cannot rotate in place.
• As soon as the sun comes out, I should take some more pictures. The light quality through these clouds makes everything look washed out, as if the saturation knob on reality had been turned down. It’s easy on the eyes, but it makes boring photography.
• I am probably going to end up abandoning a fair amount of stuff in Japan–I haven’t yet decided the best way to get things to the US. The airlines charge a very decent rate per piece of excess baggage, and on the way here I just put a bunch of stuff into a very large cardboard box. My enthusiasm for that mode of packing was dampened when, on arrival, the cardboard box full of expensive electronics was actually spherical. Also worth noting is that I shipped the majority of my stuff from the airport directly to this apartment; I’m not sure exactly how I will go about arranging the reverse.
• My Japanese is significantly better than it was when I arrived, but I have to attribute at least as much of the improvement to immersion as to the lessons. I will miss being in an environment in which my skills improve with no effort on my part.

In all other aspects of my life, the status quo has been maintained since my last update.

It’s an important partially. There are bare patches of floor which are minutely higher than other patches of floor; on one of those patches, by luck, sits the transformer which lets my computer run on Japan’s current. If the water were to have hit that before I woke up, I suspect that I would have been woken up by my computer exploding, then died when I put my feet in the puddle that was the floor.

As it is, I came out of this relatively unscathed. I’m fine, all my expensive electronics are fine, and so forth. The rack with my dress clothes was immediately adjacent to the washing machine, and the faucet is (for some reason) angled toward that rack. Some of my dress clothes are soaked. It could have been worse, though; had I hung things in the other direction, the faucet would have been spraying any number of dry-clean-only sweaters and jackets.

Still, I can’t take a step in my apartment without making a splash, and I suspect that the tatami mats will need to be replaced. At least, I can’t imagine hanging them out to dry.

This is going to be a miserable night, though. Thanks to the Japanese custom of using futons, which sit on the floor, I have nothing dry to sleep on or in right now.

At least I finally got around to unpacking the bulk of my clothing last night; if I hadn’t, they would all still be sitting in the duffels on the floor. The chances of something getting irreparibly damaged would have been significantly higher…

Still, I kind of wish this had happened in a country where I could find a 24-hour plumber in a phone book and have them remove the standing water from the floor. I made some attempts at baling it out with a dust bucket, which was the only remotely suitable implement available, and it just wasn’t working. I have no idea when this will get back to normal.

So I go to my public library, and cruise around, picking books that look interesting by authors I’ve never heard about. I do this because I’ve already read the library’s entire stock of books by authors I have heard about, because I’ve been frequenting this library since before I was 7 and therefore had to be escorted by an adult at all times.

The only problem with this strategy is that the authors I haven’t heard of aren’t famous, which means that they are rarely as good as the authors who are. In the case of the science fiction I like to read, this usually means they don’t check their facts.

What’s the difference between a closed tube rocket launcher all of whose fuel is used before it exits the barrel, and a cannon of equivalent chamber size?

Answer: The rocket launcher is less efficient, which means a shorter range and less damage dealt. The recoil will be almost as high, though.

… when you know a lot of trivia, elementary physics, and some electronics, it’s a lot harder to suspend disbelief than it used to be.

Funny how these things work.

This year, I got home from school, and it was all set up, with only a string of white lights as decoration. I really like it that way; especially compared with the way we traditionally decorate it: 20 pounds of ornaments, tinsel, and electronics, so that you have to search for a bare branch. This way is more austere, and a whole lot cooler.

Turns out my mom just didn’t want to decorate the tree before I got home, so that I could participate in the decoration. When I mentioned that I like the way the tree is, without the ornaments and whatnot, she countered by saying that it’s just my laziness talking.

So, down I go to decorate.