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On Sunday, I took John and Rowan to the Science Museum that’s located in Kitanomaru Park. There was a fair amount to see but the Japanese was difficult for me to understand (given it was pretty heavy on scientific terminology) so it was a little challenging to explain some of the exhibits to the boys. I’d like to go back again with Eri and Emma.
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Various news outlets in Japan (such as The Mainichi) reported that the Japanese Government plans to substantially raise the fees for visa applications next fiscal year (i.e. from April). I’ve been putting off getting permanent residency for years at this point but this might be the kick in the pants I finally need to get this done sometime in the next couple of months.
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I wish I could say I was bigger than this but I’ve been following the drama involving the journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza (if you want to catch up, The Ringer has an overview). Eugenia is the one person I know who understands the full context for this so she and I have been passing the proverbial popcorn back and forth.
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Jedi: Survivor was on sale and despite the fact it isn’t marked as being fully compatible with the Steam Deck (not to mention that I’ve finished the game on the Xbox), I picked it up. The game does run but the graphics aren’t as good as they are on the Xbox. Not a surprise of course but it did renew my disappointment that the Steam Deck’s manufacturer, Valve, didn’t announce a proper successor in their recent Steam hardware announcement (YouTube). It’s especially odd, I thought, given how many years ago the original Steam Deck was released. Then I looked it up (Wikipedia) and was extremely surprised to see it was 2022. I mean that’s not that recent but it’s much less than I thought it was.
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I continued to spend a decent amount of time using Claude to work on my programming projects. I don’t always find the code Claude generates to be what I need but I still enjoy using it. So often, merely having a tool I can use to ask questions about the codebase I’m working on has been extremely encouraging. This week, I finished adding the ‘enhance’ command I wrote about previously.
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My positive experience with Claude for coding has made me wonder if I should try using it as an aide to my Japanese study (which, er, is not going very well). The difficulty I have studying Japanese is not exactly the same as the difficulty I can have being motivated to write code but, if you squint, there are some similarities and maybe it would have similar results. Of course, there is the reliability problem. With software, you can create tests to make sure everything performs the way you expect it to; I’m not sure what the analogue would be (or even could be) for language learning.
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I watched Jumanji with the kids after finding the Japanese translation of the picture book in our local library. I looked it up on Letterboxd and I watched this back in 2022; Emma and John were alive then so maybe I watched it with them but neither remembered it when they started watching this time around. I stand by my review.
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I probably should link to something else from 2022 to cap this off but life isn’t so neat so forgive me for linking to the Wombats’ ‘Lemon to a Knife Fight’ from 2018 (Apple Music).
