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Saturday was Emma and John’s undōkai. As an Australian, my natural inclination is to refer to them as athletics carnivals but they’re not really. When I was at primary school, an athletics carnival was more akin to the track and field events in the Olympics. You had running, jumping and throwing events. That’s not how it works in Japan (or at least not these days). Instead, each year does two events: one is a dance and the other is a 50m race. The dance is a choreographed routine that the children practise in the weeks leading up to the event while the race is a pure one-time sprint against four or five competitors. There’s no final and no prizes (which I always find a bit disappointing). It’s fine as it goes—and I’m sure much less stress for the less athletically gifted children—but as a person who enjoys watching any kind of competition, it always saddens me a little.
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I see that I forgot to write about last year’s event. I’m pleased to report that John was a more engaged participant this year than last year so I consider that a success.
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Speaking of the kids, I don’t think I wrote about how we decided a few weeks ago (maybe it was months? Who can keep track?) that we were going to limit YouTube watching to Wednesdays and Fridays. I worry this is creating a pathology around YouTube videos that will have adverse consequences later in their life but I was getting exhausted by the constant requests and/or constant disputes about whose turn it was. One of the lesson I feel I’ve learned as a parent is that while an arbitrary rule (YouTube on Wednesdays/Fridays only) may seem more objectionable (and the kids do object), the thing that creates real arguments is arbitrary application. You’re better off as the parent imposing a simple rule, even if it has no virtue other than its own simplicity, than trying to come up with a complex rule that has a clear, rational basis.
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Have I gone three bullet points and not mentioned Crossmate? Incredible. But it’s not because I don’t have anything to report. This week I finally caved and implemented a ‘server’. Two servers in fact! Incredible. The catch is that they’re not servers in the conventional sense but rather Cloudflare Workers. One worker is the proxy that shuttles push notifications from devices running Crossmate to Apple’s push notification servers. The other worker is an ‘engagement host’ that hosts rooms for multiplayer puzzles. Players that are simultaneously in a puzzle send their updates to the engagement host and that hosts fans the updates out to connected devices over WebSockets. I’ve tried out these ‘engagements’ with Eugenia and the difference in sync speed is dramatic.
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With all my focus on Crossmate, I neglected to mention a couple of weeks back that Scott Yoshinaga is using Listless! I do know Scott but I didn’t ask him to use it so I think this counts as a real user! The most delightful aspect of our exchange was hearing that the things he likes about it are the things I wanted it to offer.
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A few weeks ago I was trying to find the Onion article that was about the woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party being despondent when a leopard eats her face. I couldn’t find it and it turns out it’s because it’s not an Onion article. It’s a tweet from 2015.
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While the kids and I were walking past Tokyo Dome on Sunday they seemed to be playing OneRepublic’s ‘I Ain’t Worried’ on loop. I’ve linked to it before so how about something completely different? Thom Yorke’s ‘Harrowdown Hill’ (Apple Music).
