Monthly Log: 2025-02

A February Monthly Log published at the end of March

Post Structure

1. Input
   Learning: books/novels/good articles, videos/podcasts, any format, anything that feels rewarding after finishing
   Anime: new shows / old shows, TV season / movies, notes on what I watched
   Others: movies, TV series, etc., put here

2. Random Thoughts
   Maybe I will write down whatever I’m thinking

3. Output
   Maybe a blog, but I’m not good enough, so maybe I have no output for a whole month (lol)

4. Travel
   If I went somewhere, I’ll jot it down. If not, then whatever

5. Misc
   Small things that don’t fit in the categories above

Input

Learning

Phoenix Documents

This month I started looking at the Phoenix frontend framework based on Elixir.
Phoenix uses Postgres by default, so you have to install and configure the database first, but I got stuck for a full hour on a step that looks simple (and is actually very simple)…

Reference: Arch Wiki - PostgreSQL

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[postgres]$ initdb -D /var/lib/postgres/data --data-checksums
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Success. You can now start the database server using:
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      pg_ctl -D /var/lib/postgres/data -l logfile start

It looks successful. You just need to start the service with pg_ctl -D /var/lib/postgres/data -l logfile start.
But running that command gives a permission error:

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waiting for server to start..../bin/sh: line 1: logfile: Permission denied
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stopped waiting
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pg_ctl: could not start server

Read docs, searched forums, asked AI, tried all kinds of approaches, nothing worked.
Until I finally noticed a tiny line on the Arch Wiki: Finally, start and enable the postgresql.service.
I felt so stupid…
Turns out it’s managed by systemctl…

Eloquent JavaScript

I feel the asynchronous chapter in Eloquent JavaScript isn’t explained very clearly. I reread it several times but still didn’t really get Promise and async/await, so I’ll use MDN docs as supplementary material.

Anime

• Watching

  • 花は咲く、修羅の如く
    Great production.
  • 残業受付嬢
    It keeps getting worse, nothing new. Dropped.
  • 日本へようこそ、エルフさん
    A bit underfunded, but cozy slice-of-life is still nice.
  • Magic Maker
    Poor production. The story is… watchable, I guess.

• Started

  • 想星のアクエリオン
    The OP is famous. I watched a bit. The script probably has something going on.
  • 灰色：幻影扳机
    Clicked an episode randomly. Felt pretty good.
  • Ubel Blatt
    Basically no discussion in the Chinese-speaking community. I only noticed it after browsing Animate.
    The original is a dark revenge story. The plot looks like it has some depth, but the anime adaptation is sadly very underfunded.

    Would the author be happy seeing an adaptation at this level…

Others

Recent TV/movies. I try not to spoil.

劇場版　少女☆歌劇 レヴュースタァライト

Every few months, Shin Bungeiza re-screens the Revue Starlight Movie. The first time I watched Revue Starlight after coming to Japan was here.
About a year later, I went again. The film itself doesn’t need commentary. As always, it’s dazzling ✨

What I want to talk about this time is their WSBライティング上映.
In short: they hang RGB light strips all over the theater (a light-pollution PC case), and control the lights in real time based on what’s on screen to build atmosphere.
Before the screening, the host mentioned (as usual) that the lighting is manually controlled. The lighting operator watches the movie together with the audience (from the projection room) while controlling the lights, so the lighting effects won’t be exactly the same for every screening.
The host said this with great pride, but my first reaction was: “Manually controlling the lights? How do you guarantee quality? Doesn’t manual control introduce a lot of latency?”
Once the doubt took root, it wouldn’t go away. Throughout the movie, I kept unconsciously paying attention to the lighting: “Yeah, that’s delayed a bit”, “This effect is kind of… questionable…”, “This part is okay”, etc. It kept distracting me.
For example, the subway scene in 皆殺しのRevue was great: streetlights streamed through the theater as they flashed past the screen, simulating lights flying by outside the window. It really felt like the whole theater entered the stage. Immersion++
But in some other scenes, the searchlights swung around so much that I couldn’t keep my eyes open (literally dazzling).

In the end, I felt the lighting had more cons than pros. It distracted too much. I’d rather watch the film normally.
Also attaching this post: 『劇場版 少女☆歌劇レヴュースタァライト』 初見でWSBライティング上映を浴びた感想 - ①ライトアップ上映の感想. I really like the author’s explanation for why the theater insists on manual control. It’s an angle I never considered.

今思えば、態々こういった手間のかかる演出をして下さったのは「全く同じ舞台は二度と訪れない」という、スタァライトの秘めるメッセージ性を体現するためだったのかな……
Rough translation: looking back, perhaps the reason they intentionally chose such a time-consuming performance was to embody Starlight’s hidden message: “the exact same stage will never come again.”

Random Thoughts

I want to change jobs

My ideal dispatch job: experience different work, accumulate experience across industries and programming languages.
The reality: outsiders lecturing insiders, the lowest-level work, and you don’t need to think (and Japanese people also don’t want you to think). Pure grunt work.

If I do this job for another ten years, it’ll still just be repetition. There’s no way to improve technically.

At least, programming skills are hard to improve. The only thing that improves is Excel skills, because Japanese people are basically Excel immortals, doing Excel-driven programming every day (

It’s too boring. I want a job that can sharpen my skills.

Output

• GitHub - KassadinL/dungeon_crawl
  I retyped the final example from Learn Functional Programming with Elixir.
  It’s just a simple command-line mini game. When reading, it feels like “yeah yeah, I get it”, but when actually doing it, I still forgot stuff and missed details. My hands-on proficiency is basically zero.

  I’ve read so many books and docs. It’s time to build something, anything, and actually use Elixir.

Travel

Walk

Time for another Tama River walk to pad the monthly log (

Plum blossoms, maybe?

Put these two together: moon viewing on the branch.

Usually 止まれ signs are red (danger). I happened to see a rusty gray one. Especially with a colorful background, a completely colorless object suddenly appearing feels so out of place, like it was photoshopped in. Kind of interesting.

Pretty blue-pink clouds in the upper-left, mottled concrete building in the lower-right.
Fair-faced concrete walls are supposed to feel cold and premium, but once you add black stains, it just becomes a dirty rag.

Misc

Hay fever, incoming

It’s that season again.
Swollen eyes, runny nose, sore throat: the full combo. Every morning feels like the start of a nightmare.
Meds and masks barely help. My nose runs from the moment I wake up until I’m at my desk. During commute, if I don’t wipe my nose for a few minutes, it literally runs into my mouth.

Sometimes I genuinely worry whether too much runny nose can dehydrate you.

Trash job + nonstop runny nose, my weekday mental state is questionable 😇

Closing

New level of procrastination: I only finished February’s Monthly Log at the end of March.
If I think about it, there’s nothing especially hard about it. At first, it was just photo editing and the Revue Starlight comments that needed some time. But once I started delaying: memory of February gradually got blurry -> writing became hard because memory was blurry -> I kept delaying. An evil cycle like this. The more I delayed, the harder it got; the harder it got, the more I delayed…
For example, the anime comments. Some shows I was following in February already feel dull now and I’ve stopped watching. But since this is February’s Monthly Log, I still need to record how I felt at the time. So I ended up trying to recall long-gone February memories at the end of March, while carefully removing the influence of March memories.

Too hard. Can’t drag it out like this next time (flag