The Tales of the Ninja Coder

 
[This is going to be a weird mish-mash of ninja-speak and modern tech parlance. Sorry. I haven't got a lot of spare time, and it's hard to figure out how to say some of this stuff, so I'm just typing it up and posting it as fast as I can.]

I have finished taking care of all three of my targets in Nagoya, where only skilled ninjas succeed, and Jīya says I'm on schedule with my assassinations. On Sunday, Jimon checked in some changes that broke everything, and he had to spend all of Monday (and I think part of today) fixing it.

I need to tell myself that I am not messing up.

I feel bad because nearly all of my code winds up getting rewritten into some other format and style. I'm sure the other ninjas' code gets similarly rewritten, but since I'm not one of the ones doing the rewriting, I feel like it's just "No, your code sucks and needs to be changed. All the time."

I wish I knew if I get to rewrite their stuff or not... (Not today. I have way too much catch-up to do.)

 
Today, I was at Castle Nettobuku for nine hours. Seven of those hours, I spent in meetings to discuss the successes and failures of our most recent campaign, and to plan the upcoming campaign.

One other hour, I spent simply reading scrolls of possible battle plans.

Last night, when I realized that I had to return to the castle this morning, I started drowning my worries in sake. Today, when I got home, I immediately started drowning my accumulated stress in shōchū.

I think I am growing weary of Clan Nettobuku.

I became a ninja to creep across rooftops and kill people, not to spend all my time in meetings. But I left Clan Iwinaga and joined Clan Nettobuku in order to rise in rank and duties.

I am not unaware of the conflicts between these things.

 
While I've been working in Fujiwara-kyō, my fellow-ninja Bunmei has been quite busy in the modern city of Hikone. Now that I've gotten things fairly squared away Fujiwara-kyō, I'm off to Hikone to help out Bunmei with the situation...

...only to find that his recent efforts have so transformed the political and tactical situation there that I need to take some time just to learn my way around again. His work is quite impressive; there are dead bodies everywhere. I realize he is partly trying to make up for lost time from last week (when much of his time was taken up by caring for his girlfriend, whose foot had been hurt in an accident), but now I feel like I have fallen behind, and must catch up.

I will study his work, and catch up on my own tasks.

 
[Figured this out last week, but haven't gotten around to posting it until now.]

I am beginning to understand why I have felt uncomfortable in Clan Nettobuku's high-level planning meetings: Much of this planning has to do with the terrain of Izumi Province. I don't really know my way around Izumi. Indeed, they didn't hire me to know my way around Izumi; they hired me for my knowledge of Ōmi Province, since Nettobuku's plans will require them to conquer territory in both of those provinces.

The Nichiren priestesses who guide our path are all very familiar with Izumi, as are Binya the Sōtō Zen monk and Tomo, the mercenary captain. When we're discussing strategy, the others can all describe which locations are of strategic importance, and which trails and paths people tend to move along, and where there are impassable cliffs or uncrossable rivers. I don't know any of these things.

I know large parts of Ōmi Province like the back of my hand, and can (and do!) give useful input when we talk about our operations there. For a while, I'd been a bit worried: At my last clan, I felt that I didn't get to give any input in strategy meetings... "and now at Nettobuku, I keep my mouth shut when we talk about strategy? What's wrong with me? Do I not even know what I want?"

I feel better now, having realized why I've been so out-of-sorts in these high-level meetings. Binya says it was much the same for him when he first arrived (and he says he's learned far more about the terrain of Izumi than he ever expected to).