Mahjong Life and Living

Lent had ended this year.  My pledge to abstain from online mahjong has ended yesterday with the celebration of Easter.  Despite the coronavirus , my church took religious services online; and it was a pleasure to be in observance of it. Looking at my online record, I have not played online mahjong since Feb 24 - the day my cat died .  Did I quit mahjong?  In fact, I played with some real tiles within two days after that day.  That session was my first with Northwestern University's AOTOMO automatic table.  It was a good day, and I needed it.  The laughs were good and contributing to my coping that week.  My last game session due to coronavirus was a month ago on March 14.  That was a good session to send ourselves off to comply with the "stay-at-home" orders. How enthusiastic am I in going back to online play?   Not all that much, but I will play.  After all, I signed up for the USMA  CV Riichi Online Tournament 2020 ....

November "officially" marks my tenth year of mahjong.  What does this mean?  Nothing really, other than I can compare riichi mahjong in 2009 vs 2019.  Ten is a round number; and we humans tend to point to things like that.  Here, I shall highlight some comparisons of then vs now.  Discord did not even exist, and the main chat communication was  IRC .  The old channel, #mahjong, is still there but very inactive.  We gathered here centered around the  Osamuko blog .  Naturally, Discord became rather popular, and a migration occurred.  As a side effect, numerous Discord servers exist for mahjong. The number of clubs across the North American continent was countable with one hand.  Now, a whole bunch of clubs have sprouted since then, each with their own collection of mahjong and non-mahjong related talent.  That talent pooled right into the riichi community.  In 2010, I was lucky enough to find Chicago Area Mahjong v...