I wrote much of this post (these first few paragraphs obviously excluded) almost six weeks ago, and then, when it was nearly complete, decided not to finish it and post it because it may give too many hints as to my real identity. But on further consideration... that's silly. Sure, I do kind of want to keep my real identity a secret, and yes, to that end I have tried not to mention anything that would allow readers to narrow it down too much^[1], but I don't think I really ought to be too obsessive about avoiding anything that could possibly provide a lead. First, even if I do accidentally drop some unintended clues, nobody is going to care about my identity enough to bother putting the clues together and figure it out, even if it is in principle possible. As much as it may appeal to me to keep some kind of aura of mystery, it is not a mystery anyone will ever be interested in solving. And second, if for some reason somebody does care, it probably won't be hard for them to find out because I don't know anything about cybersecurity^[2] or covering my traces online and have probably already left a telltale trail that can easily be followed by a determined hacker. So, fine, a month and a half after I first started writing it and almost finished it, I'll go ahead and complete and upload this blog post after all.

(Also, come to think of it, I guess this blog post... really doesn't have much to do with the Wongery? But that didn't really occur to me until I was about to post it, so I guess I'll go ahead and post it anyway.)

So why haven't I posted anything else to the Wongery during those last six weeks? Well, it has been a heck of a month (and a half, I guess). For one thing, I've been unusually busy with work, which (as I think I've remarked before in a similar situation) is good from a financial perspective, but not so good from a having-free-time perspective. For another thing... well, I've had quite a few things go wrong lately that were time-consuming to deal with. An external hard drive failed that had terabytes of data on it I didn't want to lose (not files related to the Wongery, though; I have all of those backed up to the cloud), and I found myself frantically trying to use various data recovery programs to somehow salvage the data... with, fortunately, eventual success^[3], but not without incurring a lot of stress and expending a lot of time^[4]. There was a plumbing issue with my apartment that ended up cascading into other consequences that also took a lot of time to deal with. Then, too, I had other activities in the last few weeks that also took up considerable time, but in a more positive way. The first weekend of October was, as it has been for the last thirteen years, 24-Hour Comics Day, an event that I have participated in every year for more than thirteen years, and I didn't want this year to be an exception^[5]—and sure, that's only one weekend (well, plus maybe another day or so for preparation and recovery), but it's still something. And then there was... well, there was the trip this blog post will be mainly about. Eventually. Once I get through these prelusive parecbases.

That's not to say I didn't get anything done on the Wongery in that time, though. I didn't get nearly as much done on it as I would have liked, but I have put in some work on it. Mainly, I've been working on a badly-needed rewrite of the old article on the Free Republic of Avelax. I'm expending particular effort on this one because, well, as mentioned in a previous blog post, I've decided to make the Free Republic the focal region for the world of Dadauar, which means I want to make sure it's especially well developed. To that end, not only have I been rewriting and expanding the article, but I've been detailing the map, too. I've now mapped out and named all forty-five of the Republic's provinces, as well as naming the mountain ranges within the Republic, several rivers, and a few other terrain features. This in turn had required me to develop some of the languages these placenames would be derived from, as well as further detailing the Republic's history (I would have had to develop more about the Republic's history for the article rewrite anyway, but some of the details I worked out for the province names aren't necessarily important enough to make it into the main article for the Free Republic but will come up when I eventually get to writing articles on the individual provinces). Of course, none of this has actually been posted to the Wongery yet, but... I should get that rewrite done soon, and hope to have the revised article up within the next few days.

Although honestly... as busy as the last six weeks or so have been, I've still kind of got a lot to deal with over the next week or so. It is, after all, almost November, which is the time of the Event Formerly Known as Nanowrimo (but no longer, as the organization by that name has now officially kicked the bucket), which I again plan to participate in this year despite... uh, still not actually having finished my novel from last year. (I mean, I did hit fifty thousand words and so meet the threshold for succeeding in the challenge, but the full novel's probably going to end up about twice that long, and I still haven't finished the rest.) I'm... nowhere near as prepared as I should be for my novel this year (largely because of how busy I've been lately), but at least I still have almost a week to go before November so I may still have a chance to be... well, at least more prepared than I was last year. Although this year I've decided to set my novel on the world of Curcalen, the main article on which is also due for a heavy rewrite soon, but I haven't done that rewrite yet and frankly the world of Curcalen in general isn't as developed as it should be, so... I've been spending some time on that, and in particularly focusing on the specific (so far unnamed but that should change soon) continent on which the novel will be set. But, eh, that's really grist for a whole separate article that I may write in the next few days... and planning for my November novel is by no means the only thing I've got to do over the last week. If World Anvil is hosting another event similar to last year's Spooktober (I don't know whether it is or not; I haven't checked; I haven't even logged in to World Anvil for many months), I kind of want to participate in that again—although if the schedule is the same as last year's I only have a day or so to do so. (That should be... difficult, but doable.) And then it's also near the end of October that the renewal date comes up for my Microsoft 365 subscription, which means before then I want to settle on a OneDrive alternative so I can go ahead and cancel that subscription. I want to, but realistically I'm not going to be able to, since I kind of put it off too long and I'm working out of town the next few days and won't be back home where I can more easily deal with this until after the renewal date. I thought of changing from an annual to a monthly plan to buy myself just one more month without paying for a full year, but the subscription page doesn't seem to give me that option—even though elsewhere their site does verify that a monthly payment plan is an option—ah, okay, apparently I can renew through that page, but that page doesn't give the Copilot-free "Classic" options, and I absolutely do not want to pay for Copilot even for only a month and even for the equivalent of only a few dollars. It's possible maybe I can cancel my annual subscription and then immediately buy a monthly "Classic" subscription, but it occurs to me there may be another solution. When I didn't have the money to renew my Microsoft 365 subscription back in September 2023, I got period nagging emails from Microsoft about the unsuccessful renewal, but the subscription wasn't actually canceled until almost a month and a half later^[6]. Assuming Microsoft's cancellation policies haven't changed since then, that means that as long as I have my payment method set to a card that doesn't have enough available credit to pay for the plan (which shouldn't be difficult; while I've been gradually paying down my credit card debt I still have several cards that are near their credit limits), I should have till mid-December to get my file-hosting ducks in a row before my subscription is canceled. So that's all right then.

Anyway (and here, or more specifically after this parenthetical, begins the part that I wrote almost six weeks ago), more than twenty years ago, I went to a World Expo (better known in the Wikipedia:United States of America, if not elsewhere, as a World's Fair). I was only able to go for one day, but I still found what little I had time to see of it fascinating; I wished I'd been able to see more of it, and kind of wanted to go another in the future.

Years later, I still wanted to visit another World Expo, but never had the time and money to spare. But my desire to do so, if anything, may have increased over time. As I've said before, I haven't traveled much, due, again, to not having the time and money to spare, but I'd certainly like to, and I'm definitely interested in learning about other cultures. And visiting a World Expo is sort of like visiting a lot of countries in a short period of time. Anyway, it was something I wanted to experience.

It's only in the last few years, though, that this sort of vague wish to attend a World Expo firmed into a vague intent to actually do so. I still didn't have a concrete plan to do so, but I at least started looking into upcoming World Expos so that instead of just fantasizing ineffectually about someday going to a World Expo, I could fantasize ineffectually about going to specific World Expos. There was supposed to be a World Expo in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2023, and I hoped to go to that, but it ended up being canceled due to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic... though honestly, if it hadn't been canceled, I'm pretty sure there's no way I would have been able to afford to go anyway; my own finances were pretty dire at the time due mostly to a general slowdown in the industry I work in. Anyway, the next World Expo would be Expo 2025 in Ōsaka, Japan, so I hoped maybe I would be able to go to that one. It didn't seem likely that I'd be able to afford to go to that one either unless there was a major change in my finances before then, but, well, I hoped there would be a major change in my finances by then. I hoped that maybe by 2025 one of my many creative projects would have taken off and put me in a more financially comfortable position, one where I wasn't living paycheck to paycheck and the occasional international trip wouldn't be a huge strain on my budget.

Well, it hasn't; I continue to be a horrible procrastinator who never finishes anything, and so, well, I haven't really finished anything. My finances are, indeed, better than they were around this time in 2023, partly because the industry slowdown that was happening at the time is over (well, the worst of it is, anyway, but the industry still hasn't entirely recovered), and partly because of some rather desperate but helpful measures I took a few months ago to get the money to pay off most of my high-interested debt. But I'm still feeling financially strained; I'm still living paycheck to paycheck; I'm better off than I was two years ago, but I'm still far from financially comfortable.

So I was pretty sure there was no way I'd be able to go to the 2025 World Expo. Oh, the tickets to the Expo itself would be affordable enough; it's the airfare and hotel costs that I figured would be the dealbreakers. I had, of course, relatively recently paid for airfare and a hotel stay for my trip to Gen Con in Indianapolis, U.S.A., but that had already stretched my finances a bit and I was pretty sure a trip to Ōsaka, Japan would be even more expensive. I had never been to Ōsaka, Japan. I had never been within six thousand kilometers of Ōsaka, Japan. But I doubted traveling to Ōsaka, Japan would be cheap.

Still, with the end date of the World Expo approaching, I figured I may as well at least check how much the trip would cost, out of curiosity if nothing else. I fully expected that it would be far beyond anything I could possibly afford, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to take a look.

And to my surprise it turned out that a trip to Expo 2025 in Ōsaka, Japan—including airfare, the hotel stay, and tickets to the World Expo for four days—would cost less than my trip to Indianapolis, U.S.A. for Gen Con^[7]. Though it probably helps that I'm not renting a car in Ōsaka, since I'm pretty sure it has a better public transportaiton system than Indianapolis—the car rental wasn't of course the majority of the cost of my Gen Con trip, but it was a big chunk of it. No, it wouldn't be cheap... but it wouldn't be as expensive as I expected. With the amount of work I've been getting lately, and with my current financial situation... I could actually afford the trip. Sure, it would be a bit of a strain, but I'd been wanting to go to a World Expo for a long time, and they only happened every few years—I decided to go ahead and go for it. I've said before that Gen Con was "my one big annual excursion"; I guess this year I'll have two.

(And then because I am an idiot I made the flight and hotel reservations for the wrong days and had to go through a bit of a hassle getting them changed, but let's not get into that.)

Now, one consequence of my finishing this blog post almost six weeks after I started it is that, while I initially intended to pot this blog entry before my trip to Japan, it's instead going up after I returned from said trip. Which means I can write something about how the trip went. So, before I get back to the part of the post I wrote almost six weeks ago, let me digress a bit to... to do that. To write about how the trip went. That. I won't get into a lot of detail, but I figure I could still lay out some broad strokes.

So, in general, I had a good experience, and I'm glad I went. I would have had a better experience, however, if I understood Japanese. Oh, some of the text in the pavilions included English translations, but not all of it, and certainly most of the Expo staff didn't speak English. I have, in fact, been for some time attempting to learn Japanese, but evidently I have not actually learned very much. When the Expo personnel gave directions through megaphones, I didn't understand most of what they were saying, but I did understand that it ended in "下さい" (kudasai, "please") or "お願いします" (onegaishimasu, also meaning "please"), so while I didn't know what they were telling me to do, I did know that they were telling me politely. I did know enough Japanese to able to say a simple sentence like "地図はどこにありますか" (chizu wa doko ni arimasu ka^[8], "where are there maps")... but not enough to understand the answer I was given. Or at least, not the verbal answer; I did at least understand the accompanying gesture. Or no, actually I guess I didn't quite understand that either, because I went to the official store but it turns out the maps were in a different building across the street, which in retrospect I surmised was where my interlocutor had actually been pointing. Oh well. I guess I would have wanted to go to the official store too anyway.

Japanese is not the only language I've been trying to learn; I've always been interested in languages, and I've been studying several dozen different languages, and failing to make much headway with any of them. At least I feel like I'm slightly more capable in Japanese than in Korean, which is another of the languages I've been trying to learn. I flew to and from Japan on a South Korean airline, and the announcements and much of the signage and documents on the planes were in Korean (though they did repeat the announcements in Japanese and English)... and as little as I understood of what Japanese I saw and heard at the Expo, of the Korean I saw and heard on the airplanes I understood even less. Perhaps (probably (almost certainly)) I'd do better in my language-learning if I focused on one language instead of trying to learn thirty-three of them at once, but even so I think I'm just... bad at learning languages. I have aspirations of polyglottery, but I am at best sesquilingual; aside from my native tongue, there is one other language in which I am more or less capable of basic communication, although much more so in writing than in speech, since reading or writing gives me more time to process and think about the syntax and inflections and gives me a chance to look up words I don't know or don't remember, which is invariably a lot of them. Aside from that, I know bits and pieces of grammar and vocabulary of many languages, but not enough in any other language to actually carry on a meaningful conversation, unless perhaps that conversation happens to be about certain very specific subjects and use only very simple and basic grammatical constructions. ("An bhfuil madra agat?" "Tá, tá madra beag agam.") As much as I would like to be fluent in multiple languages, I'm afraid language learning just doesn't come easily to me... but then, I'm not sure much really does.

(Given the number of projects I've been bouncing between working on without actually finishing any of them (and this is, alas, something I've been doing for pretty much all my adult life and quite possibly at least some of my preadult life as well), I've occasionally thought to myself in jest that maybe if I keep working on them all at once I'll finish all those projects simultaneously around 2050 or so. Maybe the same goes for languages. Maybe in twenty or thirty years' time, if I live that long, I'll all at once achieve fluency in all the languages I'm trying to learn, and I'll suddenly be a masterful multilinguist.)

(This is obviously not really going to happen.)

Anyway, getting back to the Expo, I had planned for four days there because I had done some web searching as to how many days it generally took to experience a World Expo, and several sites had recommended three or four days. As it turns out, those sites were really lowballing it; I felt like in the four days I was there I was able to experience only a small fraction of what the Expo had to offer... although it didn't help that I had gone there in the Expo's final week and it was extremely crowded, and there were long lines for nearly everything. With fewer people there and shorter lines I'd probably have been able to see more, though I'm pretty sure four days still wouldn't have been enough. So yes, I wish I'd gone earlier, and I wish I'd gone for more days (not that I would have been able to afford a much longer trip; as I said, my budget was stretched as it was). But I'd still rather have gone for too short a time when it was overbusy than not having gone at all. Sure, I'm disappointed at all the things I didn't get to see... but if I hadn't gone, I wouldn't have gotten to see anything, so I mean I feel like it was still a net positive, just not as positive as it could have been. Honestly the thing I most regret is that I didn't get my picture taken with Myaku-Myaku, the Expo mascot. I didn't notice on the map until near the end of my second-to-last day there that there was a location called "Myaku-Myaku's house", and by the time I checked it out on the last day and found out that people could get their picture taken with the mascot there it was too late and the last line was already closed. Now, yes, I know the mascot at the house was just a guy in a suit, and I know there's no good reason I really should have wanted to get my picture taken with the mascot in the first place and there's no reason I should care that I didn't, but I never claimed to be a fully rational person. In fact, I'm pretty sure I have explicitly claimed the contrary.

Returning now to what I'd been writing a month and a half ago, shortly after booking my trip to Ōsaka I happened to run across a post on Tumblr asserting that the ability to travel was a mark of privilege. (I spent way too much time trying to find that Tumblr post again so I could link it here, but was unable to do so, but maybe that's for the best.) Now, I know not everyone on Tumblr really has a fully-formed understanding of social and economic realities and you can't believe everything you read there, but still... the fact was that despite having frequently complained about my financial difficulties, here I'd just booked an international trip more or less on a whim, which is something not everyone can do. Has all my lamenting of my financial straits been unfounded?

In particular, I'd said in a previous post that "[e]ven when the industry isn't in a slump... I typically make less than the median income in my country". But even shortly after posting that, I had some misgivings, because, well, that didn't seem right. I worked a highly specialized job in an area with a high cost of living; surely it didn't make sense that my income was so comparatively low. I'd been meaning to go back and double-check the numbers and see if maybe I'd made a miscalculation, but I hadn't gotten around to it. Well, I just reran the data for my income in 2024, and it turns out that for that year, at least, the statement was... at least not entirely inaccurate. My total income last year from my job was indeed less than the median household income in my country^[9]. But that's the household income, not individual income; that includes households with multiple wage-earners. Which of course my "household" doesn't have; I live alone; it's just me. And compared to the median individual income for full-time workers in my country in 2024, my income that year is actually higher.

Hold on, wait, I just realized as I was working on finishing this post with the intent of finally posting it a month and a half after it was largely written as described in the initial paragraph that I hadn't accounted for overtime pay. I don't get overtime every day, or even most days, but I do get it occasionally, and the source I used to calculate my total earnings didn't include it. Was my overtime enough to push my income in 2024 over the median household income in my country? Well... I don't actually have an accessible record of exactly how many days I received overtime pay, but in order to exceed the median household income I would have had to get an hour of overtime about 90% of my workdays, which I certainly didn't, so no. Even taking overtime into account, the previous paragraph still stands.

So, if I am doing (slightly) better financially than the median worker in my country, why am I not doing better financially? It's not like I'm too spendthrift with my money, I don't think. Yes, I maybe do buy a lot of books, and I have a lot of domain registrations I'm paying for (not to mention my hosting plans). But on the other hand, I rarely eat out, and I never get food delivered, nor do I spend money on the latest video games or other expensive entertainment. Still, I do have some expenses that are eating into my available funds. My debts are a big one; as I've mentioned before, I accrued in the past an unfortunate amount of credit card and loan debt, and a significant amount of money each month goes toward paying them off. And I am paying them off; my debt is decreasing, and I just completely paid off another credit card last month^[10]; but I've got a ways to go before they're fully paid, and in the meantime they're sucking up a lot of money each month.

Then too, I'm... well, I kind of hate to admit it, but I think it's fair to say I'm a hoarder. And I don't mean that in a lighthearted "Oh, ha ha, I have so many books; I am such a hoarder" way. I mean that in the sense that I am pretty sure I have a serious psychological issue. Or rather that hoarding is among my serious psychological issues; I don't mean to imply it's the only one. And while my apartment is clean and presentable (now; this wasn't always the case), this is because I have a lot of stuff—much of which I know by almost anyone's criteria is literal garbage, but I still can't bring myself to throw it out like I should—stashed away in storage units. Yes, storage units, plural; I have several. In fact, I just this month rented two more storage units due to the repercussions of the aforementioned plumbing issue. (Why would a plumbing issue in my apartment lead to my renting two more storage units? Eh... I'd rather not get into it.) And the rent for those storage units adds up. Sure, it still comes out to less than the rent for my apartment, but... not that much less. It's another significant expense.

Still... maybe I'm not doing as badly financially as I thought. Or maybe more accurately, maybe I was doing as badly financially as I thought back in 2023, but I'm doing significantly better now, partly due to the industry I work in being in a (slightly) better place and partly due to the progress I've been making paying off my debts. Anyway, I don't have the money to do a lot of traveling... but even with my finances as they are now, barring another major industry slump I can probably afford at least one more big trip besides Gen Con each year. There is no World Expo next year, of course, but there are plenty of places I'd like to visit... plus I mentioned in another recent post a list of conventions and conferences I'd like to go to... maybe I should actually seriously consider going to some.

In fact, since two of the conventions on that list, Worldcon and the World Fantasy Convention, rotate between different countries, I decided to check to see where they were going to be held next year to see if one or both of them might give me an excuse to visit a place I haven't been to. Unfortunately, it turns out next year both Worldcon and the World Science Fiction Convention will be held in the United States of America, which is a country I have indeed spent time in^[11]—and moreover they're both in California, which is a state I've been to before, so I can't even use them as an excuse to visit a new-to-me state within the United States of America, not that that would be as appealing as visiting a new country anyway. So... hm. (Are there other potentially interesting conventions that rotate locations like that? I don't know of any.) Heck, maybe next year I'll go to DinoCon, which is in the United Kingdom. I have... sort of visited the United Kingdom before, and when I said in one of the posts linked previously that I had been to a total of five countries I was counting the United Kingdom as one of the five, but that was because I spent some time in one of the British Overseas Territories. But I've never been to Great Britain itself, except for a few hours in an airport for a layover, but I don't think that really counts (although admittedly had I not spent time in the aforementioned British Overseas Territory, the fact that I had had that layover in the English airport would have made me conflicted as to whether or not to count the U.K. as a country I had been to when making that earlier post—but^[12] fortunately the fact that I had spent time in the aforementioned British Overseas Territory made that a nonissue; there were no countries that I had been to for an airport stopover that I had not actually spent time in outside the airport^[13]).

Or hey, if I have the money next April, there's an RPG convention in Sweden called Knutpunkt that sounds interesting^[14]. Sweden is one of many (very many) countries I haven't visited but have been kind of wanting to visit anyway... let's see how my finances are looking next February or March... hmm... that's very tempting... although, uh, if I am going to go there maybe I should focus on trying to learn Swedish. (It is another of the languages I've been studying, for what it's worth, but, as with all the others, I don't think I'm to a point with it where I'd actually be able to easily communicate.)

So anyway... I think maybe there's going to be more traveling in my future. I'd always kind of wanted to do more traveling, and I guess I've realized that it's not as out of reach as I thought it was.

But in the more immediate future... yeah, I've got to finish that rewrite of the Free Republic of Avelax. And write more new articles, and finish preparing to write a novel set on Curcalen in November, and see what events are currently going on in World Anvil, and... okay, well, anyway, expect a few more blog posts in the next few days, because I kind of feel like I may have a lot more to blog about.