Pre-Spring

It’s starting to get back into warmer temperatures here already. Which means getting sick from temperature jumps, but get to hear a group of guys sing Backstreet Boyss in the park.

We checked off another cafe off our list. This one had a lovely rounded high ceiling. All wood inside. Super cosy. The place had been in business for over 40 years. They have a roaster to cook up their beans in a window where you can watch. And probably smell. You can always smell them. Our favorite place you could smell from a street or two over if the wind was favoring you that day. The cafe’s prices were pretty good in terms of cost per 100g of beans, but do not know how recently they were roasted. We bought a bag for ourselves and my in-laws. Ate some cheesecake, and then did some house watching as we walked back to the station. The house watching in Japan is so much more interesting than in suburban Texas. More variety compared to entire neighborhoods that were basically designed by the same few builders with only a handful of variations. Here you can see houses that are brand new next to houses that are probably 40-60 years old and falling apart. But in between all that you get so much variety. Tokyo has felt a bit more and more boring in that more interesting plots of land are getting crushed up and divided into more and more apartments. What used to be a house with a beautiful garden somehow becomes multiple homes (with no garden).

We’ve been thinking on what kind of home we would like to have. What would that look like. What are our needs. We want a stinky garden. One with kinmokusei. We want a yuzu tree. We bought some yuzu this year and we’ve already consumed the jam we made and are already running low on the dried peel I made. It’s been fun tossing dried yuzu peel into random food and seeing how it goes. It’s a nice detour in the flavor. Unfortunately, our jobs will keep us Tokyo adjacent. I do not see that changing soon.

I started playing a little bit with Pico-8 which is a fun little fantasy-console. A fake game console that has built in restrictions similar to that of a retro game console. But the restrictions and apis are very well considered, so it makes it really fun to make things in it.

I’ll try to get some music into the game and then share it. After spending a bit of time struggling to make a game in a less-restricted setup in Zig, making a game in pico-8 feels both great, but then frustrates me that I could’ve been doing this the whole time. For my zig game-dev bits, I am going to try and simplify to much simpler building blocks. I was doing well in only adding things as I felt I needed them, but everytime I moved towards “ok time to make the game”, something new popped up. It started to feel like too much sophistication, but since I was building the pieces as I needed. It felt justified. I didn’t mind that making a game in zig was more work to get to the game making part compared to using a game engine like godot. But I do feel like I could’ve been making and exploring ideas earlier by trying to stay pico-8 level simple. Which includes the game itself. Pico-8 like prototyping seems much more in the vein of pantser writing. Don’t overly plan things out, just explore and make things.