crescent bolt

happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!

though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!

thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!

What if there was a ghost in the opera house that was killing people?

Requires you to accept the existence of ghosts, but otherwise is a straightforward story.

What if the chief contractor who built the opera house was a deformed circus freak who used his experience building palaces and torture chambers for sultans to keep building secret passageways and torture chambers in the basement when construction halted during the Franco-Prussian War, and then kept living down there working on an opera and killing and blackmailing people who crossed him and also training a pretty opera singer that he wants to marry?

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

Tofugu, particularly their kana guides + quiz

Tadoku readers (free, starts at reading level 0)

Tae Kim's free Japanese grammar course/textbook

Wanikani (GREAT kanji-learning system! A massive chunk is free - trust me, if you manage to make it through all the free content, it will be worth it to continue, and if you can't/don't then you still have a good foundation!)

Since this is gaining traction again, here are the final ones. These had been on separate posts but I suppose they'll be more likely to be noticed here.

Spooky season is upon us at last, and what better way to celebrate than by rewatching these ~scary~ episodes of the 90s Sailor Moon anime? These 10 picks touch on horror clichés and parodies as well as some genuine frights, and can be enjoyed individually without needing to remember the plot of the season. Remember, though; Sailor Moon is a light-hearted romcom for kids, so don’t expect anything that will keep you awake at night. Although this is a “Top 10″ list, the episodes are presented in chronological order, not by spoop factor.

Keep in ming that this is not me shaming you, I know you have your reasons, folks. This is just a guy who enjoys clean spaces asking that you start learning now.

Here’s what I suggest as an adult who has lived with other adults who didn’t have housekeeping skills:

First and foremost, learn about all the places in your house that need to be cleaned and understand how often they should be cleaned. the American Cleaning Institute (I guess that’s a thing) has a good article about basic cleaning info. Plus this video on cleaning tips is great!

Learn how to do your dishes. HOT water is the only way to clean your dishes.

Learn how to clean your shower head, especially if you live in a place with hard water. Same goes for your sinks.

Learn how to do your laundry correctly. Even without the whole “separating whites and colors” thing, there are things you need to learn about washing your clothes. Learn what the tags mean, too.

Also, you don’t have to use fabric softener and you shouldn’t use it on towels or any fabric meant to absorb. (Learn about laundromats) And please learn how to clean out your dryer vent, it’s a safety hazard!

Get a disinfecting cleaner for your high-touch areas, especially the gross ones like the bathroom. Just because it doesn’t look dirty, doesn’t mean it’s clean!

Learn how to sweep, mop, and vacuum effectively.

You’ll also want to make sure to change out your home’s air filters.

TL;DR, here are some cleaning videos.

How to Clean Everything in Your Bathroom

How to Clean Everything in Your Kitchen

Livingroom Cleaning Routine

How to Clean Everything in Your Bedroom

Favorite Cleaning Book: it helps you work through the emotional side of cleaning (and other care tasks)

Current Favorite Decluttering Method/Concept: it helps you know how much is too much to keep and how to get started when you’re overwhelmed. (having too much stuff makes it incredibly hard to clean/organize.)

Basic Cleaning Skills: this channel is amazing! this man has a special interest in cleaning and cleans people’s spaces who deal nurodivergence that make it hard to clean. he does this for free (or at a deficit because he pays for supplies and dumpsters and transport and such) and does it all with empathy and kindness working With the people as much as people can handle instead of just coming in to “fix” an issue. these videos are a bit different from his usual ones, (the last one’s most like his usual videos) but i find having the sped up cleaning videos with a voiceover can help fill in for body doubling when im too ashamed to bring people into my messy spaces.

ANHEDONIA REMEDIES!

GET YOUR ANHEDONIA REMEDIES HERE!

if you are lost in the rut, i am begging you to read this essay by Sasha Chapin suggesting what, essentially, my take, are potential jump-starts back into living life in real time. like actually experiencing experiences

horror aesthetic: the phantom of the opera (1925) directed by rupert julian

Shit used to be wild, and this is just what I could find that had decent sources, I've heard a lot more horror stories.