Monthly Log: 2025-02

February’s Monthly Log, finally published at the end of March

Post Structure

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
Random Thoughts
Maybe I will write down whatever I’m thinking
Output
Maybe a blog, but I’m not good enough, so maybe I have no output for a whole month (lol)
Travel
If I went somewhere, I’ll jot it down. If not, then whatever
Misc
Small things that don’t fit in the categories above

This month I started reading the docs for Phoenix, the web framework built on Elixir.
Phoenix uses Postgres by default, so I had to install and configure the database first. Somehow I still managed to burn an hour on a step that looked trivial and, in fact, was trivial.

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 looked successful. Seemed like all I had to do next was start the service with pg_ctl -D /var/lib/postgres/data -l logfile start.
Instead, that command immediately threw 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

I read docs, searched forums, asked AI, tried a bunch of things, and got nowhere.
Then I finally noticed one tiny line at the bottom of the Arch Wiki entry: Finally, start and enable the postgresql.service.
That was enough to make me feel spectacularly stupid.
Turns out the thing was supposed to be managed through systemctl all along.

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 all this very proudly, but my first reaction was, “Manual control? How do you guarantee consistency? Doesn’t that introduce a ton 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).

By the end, I felt the lighting hurt more than it helped. It pulled too much attention away from the film, and I’d rather just watch the movie 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 a New Job

My ideal dispatch-job scenario was: try different kinds of work and build experience across industries and languages.
The reality is: non-experts directing experts, work at the very bottom of the chain, and tasks that don’t require thinking at all. In fact, nobody wants you to think. You’re just there to move bricks.

If I stay in this job for another ten years, it will still just be the same repetition. There is no technical growth here.

At least my programming skills aren’t improving. The only thing going up is my Excel skill, because Japanese people are basically Excel immortals, doing Excel-driven programming every day (

It’s too boring. I want a job that actually sharpens 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

A Walk

Time for another Tama River walk to pad out the Monthly Log (

Plum blossoms, maybe?

Put these two together and it becomes moon-viewing among the branches.

Usually 止まれ signs are red, the kind of color that screams danger. This time I happened to see a rusty gray one. Against such a colorful background, a totally colorless object suddenly appearing felt bizarre, like it had been photoshopped in. Kind of fun.

Pretty blue-pink clouds in the upper-left, mottled concrete building in the lower-right.
Fair-faced concrete is supposed to look cold and expensive, but once black stains get on it, it just turns into a ~~dirty rag~~.

Misc

Hay Fever Arrives

That season is here 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 nonstop from the moment I wake up until I reach my desk. On the commute, if I don’t wipe it 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, and my weekday mental state is looking questionable 😇

Closing

New procrastination record: I didn’t finish February’s Monthly Log until the end of March.
Thinking about it, there wasn’t even any truly difficult part. At first it was just the photo edits and the Revue Starlight notes that needed a bit of time. But once I started delaying, it turned into a vicious cycle: February memories faded -> faded memories made writing harder -> harder writing made me delay even more.
The more I delayed, the harder it got; the harder it got, the more I delayed.

Take the anime notes, for example. Some of the shows I was following in February already feel dull now, and I’ve dropped them. But since this is February’s Monthly Log, I still need to record how I felt back then. So at the end of March I was digging up long-faded February memories while trying to scrub out the influence of March.

Rough. I can’t keep dragging them out like this next time (~~flag~~

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