Things That Happened in 2022

This post is part of a collection on Life.

2022 was a busy year. Here are some things that happened.

  • my broken arm healed
  • participated in Famicase
  • played Kirby Discovery
  • purchased an 8bitdo controller
  • went to Okutama again
  • went to the US for my brother's wedding
  • used microfilm for the first time
  • set up a fediverse account
  • went to Sarushima
  • went to Germany to meet up with the Explosion team
  • released a coref model for spaCy
  • worked on spaCy a lot
  • went to Utsunomiya and the Ooya Museum
  • climbed some mountains
  • maintained my personal projects: fugashi, mecab-python3, posuto, etc.
  • mostly finished the JANLP book
  • kept up weekly board game night
  • started a habit of printing photos each month
  • lost one umbrella, found another
  • added 6 posts on DK

My broken arm influenced the start of the year considerably. While I was fortunate that I never lost my ability to type, it resulted in the year starting out pretty slowly, as I was unable to enjoy going out much, and had regular checkups. Luckily it healed without surgery or complications, and since healing it's basically the same as it was before.

Tateishi ("Standing Rock") in Yokosuka.

I never would have guessed that I'd travel internationally twice during the pandemic, but it happened to work out that way. While things went as well as could be hoped for on the trips and I was able to enjoy them, Japan's strict rules made travel stressful, so I look forward to not having to worry about that next time I go somewhere. I also was able to travel a little domestically this year, which I hope to do more of in 2023.

I worked on spaCy full time throughout this year. The biggest single feature I worked on was the coref model, but I also contributed many FAQ posts and smaller quality of life features, in addition to lots of support on the forums. Compared to other libraries in the field, spaCy does a really good job of making it fast to set up a well-structured pipeline, and this year I'm working on some more features to make that even better that I'm excited about.

With the JANLP book, I had hoped to complete it in 2022, but it has ended up taking a little longer than expected. We're finishing up the last sections right now and should be focusing on translation and editing by the end of this month. I look forward to being able to point people to the finished product as a good introduction to the complicated and often confusing landscape of tools for Japanese NLP. It also has what I think is the most detailed usage example of spaCy's DependencyMatcher anywhere, so it'll be fun to see what people do with that.

I managed to go here again.

As long as I've been living in Japan, Twitter has been a valuable resource for me to connect with people and stay up to date on events. But with the recent change in ownership it's not fun anymore - the constant, nonsensical changes to rules and features are frustrating, and you can't ignore how the new idiot emperor feels any given day if you have any English speaking users in your feed. I'd love to move off it entirely, but Japanese Twitter (and therefore most of my feed) has largely ignored the ongoing changes. Maybe it'll just blow over, but for now I'm still not sure what's going to happen with that. I hope that feeds, RSS or otherwise, make a comeback, and I'll be trying to post more here in any case. I still use deltos every day, so it's just a matter of polishing things up for posts, or figuring out how to post them while still rough.

For the year's end, the imminent demolition of the nearby neighborhood has me pretty down. The Nakagin Tower was also dismantled this year. Construction and renewal never stops in Tokyo, but it's sad to see unique parts of the city be smoothed over.

Other than all that, this year has my number. I've been waiting for that a long time, and hope to make the best of it. Ψ