stream-of-consciousness blogging

which i did! and that’s great. out of, uh, 31 digits i need to felt, i have 16ish now, where i had maybe 6 before. it took me like three hours and i have done all of the 1s (which make up the largest percentage of the digits). my fingers hurt and i am happy i can move on and never felt a 1 again if i don’t wanna

i don’t think i’m directly responsible for why people were mad, but i feel as if a lot of the mad people were directly misinterpreting my “it might be cool if this happened” into “this is what SHOULD happen and it would 100% be better this way”

the way it played out, the only solution for me was to just politely bow out of the convo. but it feels really shitty that explaining myself would have 100% led to more conflict no matter what, and i still am not sure if people are mad at me for it.

even though i mostly think i didn’t do anything more than idle speculation, people were heated about it. normally i would apologize or ask what happened, but i ALSO don’t think that would go well AND i’m not entirely sure what i would be apologizing for. which is partly why it would go bad, but also asking about why it pushed buttons would also go bad. thinking it might be interesting to explore how a character could be trans doesn’t seem like it should be that offensive, especially in a very queer space, and yet everyone got mad only right after my comment, so.

of course, streaming when it’s all released means my experience is different than week-by-week, but still.

compared to the quicker plots of the original, you get much more character development per episode. since they’re splitting up a con over two hours, they aren’t forced to focus on it as much in a given episode as the original (and redemption, for that matter).

especially since they only got one season for the korean version, this is a choice i really enjoy. these characters are similar in broad stokes to the original but they’re also quite different, and i love to see how the korean cast&crew makes the premise their own.

i will say i find it. mmm. minorly annoying that hardison’s marginalized status gets reduced to punk-bleached-hair in the korean show— but i have very little sense of what marginal identity politics look like in korea, so i could be missing context.

i just think that the aspect of hardison that has to deal with discrimination (using the anonymous nature of coding as a shield, how it informs his background and outlook, how the team works with it, around it, when they face it head-on) is one of THE most interesting and compelling parts of leverage. absolutely one of the most baller parts of the show. so to NOT have that feels so… idk. almost disrespectful? like a lost opportunity? i mean i wouldn’t want the korean actor to wear blackface or whatever. and i have no idea what race politics are like in korea, let alone what they’re like in korean media production and distribution. so if it was bleached hair was the best they could do, like, i have no idea.

any individual tweet is like… barely a sliver of a complete thought for me

i am not concise. for me the writing is a path to a thought but often the thought itself remains unformed and vague

so chopping it up into tweet sections— while doable— feels like a series of sticky notes compared to a small essay. like any one could fall to the ground and be picked up and taken for the whole

also in general just excited about art lately so that’s pretty nice

Partially I think my avoidance has been because dealing with the stuff I accumulated in mid-2019 brings back lots of painful memories— I’m pretty sure I was SSRI overdosed and made a lot of hopeful but ill-thought-out decisions.

-downloaded like twenty free-to-start japanese apps on my phone (specifically w/ a focus on writing hiragana and katakana, bc previously i’ve been using duolingo and duolingo isn’t designed to deal with teaching scripts)

-tested like 14 of those apps before i found one i really got into for like an hour and then it wanted me to physically write stuff

-my desk was messy and all my brush pens are in the messy storage room so i cleaned off my desk and braved the non-ac part of the house to get the brush pens and somehow got distracted and cleaned/rearranged some stuff out there

-came back into my room and setup to practice writing which involved a variety of miscellaneous prep and then spent another hour or so on the same app, then tired out a bit

-finished testing all the apps and now am vaguely tired and writing this

one thing i learned very quickly while looking at the apps is that there seems to be a division between teaching japanese language speaking/reading(hiragana and katakana) and teaching japanese writing(hiragana and katakana) and teaching japanese kanji. i say it like this because the first division seems to primarily exists because slotting japanese writing into a generic “language learning format” just doesn’t really work well. so you get a lot of apps that start with related western alphabets/languages that don’t bother teaching you how to write symbols you’re unfamiliar with. strangely there aren’t many apps that combine the first two categories, although you’d think it’d be useful in a japanese-focused app. and finally i can understand the last division, from a technical and resource standpoint— kanji are just... lots of them. easier to program/work with the smaller set of hiragana and katakana. it still sucks because i want to be learning the kanji at the same time i’m learning words for other concepts, so that i can RECOGNIZE BASIC WORDS if they ain’t there with furigana, but.... even were i to enroll in an actual language course for japanese, i couldn’t guarantee that they’d try to do that either, so.

also i tried getting back to lingtopia today but turns out it straight-up broke in the japanese version like.... Right after i stopped the other night. a couple scattered reports of the same thing on the steam page and it looks like the dev isn’t actively watching after the project anymore, so i don’t have much hope that that will be fixed. (though it seems to be only an issue in the japanese language version— so still possibly a good avenue for gamification of other language learning...)

i really appreciate that i can change from romanized japanese to native japanese script whenever i want, and i can also replay audio whenever i want (theoretically; it’s been a little buggy for me). i’ve always wanted something with both— well; i guess my ideal is japanese audio, native japanese with furigana, then romanized, then literal translation, THEN finally a localized translation.... but the point of this game is to slowly dole out literal translation and let your natural understanding grow from there, so that’s pretty good. (and anyway the chances of me getting all five of those for any media whatsoever is pretty close to nil anyway; there’s really only a large market for localized translation, no matter what languages you’re translating to or from, sadly.)

on the presentation side.... well, controlling feels awful and slow and awkward, the camera is really not fun to deal with, and selecting 3D bits is clear enough but there are some glitches. the art is simplistic but clear enough most of the time. conversation prompts are not uncommonly partially broken or else badly formatted (every so often the word background bugs out and i can’t read any of the text when it’s over dark elements in the image).

that all said... there’s something really intriguing about the gameplay loop. someone says something to you, the game asks you about a single word they said and what your best guess for it is, and if you guess it right, it’s added to your Words You Know list (which you can open, but more importantly you can hover over it in future dialogue to quick reference what you’ve already “unlocked”). you can also unlock words by clicking on highlighted object in the world around you. and a bunny person leads you from person to person for more dialogue prompts.

in fact it took me a while to find a place to stop— because my understanding of the plot(s?) is SO threadbare at this point, i wanted to get to a point where i could... understand enough to figure out a good stopping point. but then i realized that was not coming aaaannnytime soon so i just stopped at a random point. in fact the only plot i really understood was a person who asked if they should try to ask someone out— i told them yes, and later they told me they were rejected. or.... something along those lines, i think? there’s also a band and someone who is possibly afraid of books???

there are a lot of technical issues with this game, but from a trying-to-learn perspective, it’s a pretty cool activity. i’m not very far in, i don’t think, so i can’t say for certain how in-depth it is or to what degree it helps the learning process. i also already know some basics, so i wasn’t going in with no idea of japanese whatsoever. but the way it’s set up is very forgiving— every question gives you two attempts, and most are multiple-choice questions with only three answers. just from length of phrases you can guess which concepts are more likely to be longer or shorter... so even if you’re guessing wildly, you’re likely to get some right, and you can use the translations you unlock to reinforce the meaning of those bits while you’re trying to guess new words.

n like. i recognize there’s a bunch in my life i just gotta *do* to get it done... but i haven’t and i find myself anxious even thinking about it and since i don’t need to immediately i just... don’t

i know that going on as i have been is not ideal... and i dislike that i am not making progress towards my goals... and i just ignore that

i guess. maybe making a list of all the reasons things are hard (even the silly ones) is something i can do? so

1. my sleep schedule is way the fuck messed up

1a. that means most of my awake-hours are between 2pm and 6am right now

1b. i don’t really like doing things immediately after i wake up, and by the time i feel Ready to Do Anything it’s after 5 (which is like... office hours are over for almost everything and a couple other things are over)

1c. which is discouraging bc many of the things i need/want to do are mostly only available in those times... and once i feel like a day is wasted i am more likely to waste the day

1d. many of the things i’d like to do that aren’t necessarily time sensitive are kinda loud or at least not things i want to do when other people (roommates/neighbors) are asleep... so i can’t really work on those even though im up all night every night

2. i have a lot of anxiety about my Future and Finances and Health and those anxieties make it hard for me to think about the smaller steps i want to take to work on those things i guess

2a. the job i quit made me REALLY anxious (which i realized mostly in retrospect) but also specifically really anxious about how my health affects my ability to work and more importantly really kinda dunked on my ability to believe that i can find a work environment that is okayish about accommodating? they were really immensely shit about it (which is a problem i’ve had for a while but like, with a better environment/people it’s been manageable in the past... but that environment was very much not so in a way that eroded my faith in being able to find a job that can be chill about it going forward, i guess?)

2b. i guess my point is that my recent experiences have me scared and i haven’t been able to shake that which makes... each piece of the things i want to do more Fraught and like... more intertwined in my head?

3. me and luna try to make Times To Do Shit specifically but we usually let each other off the hook because we both often feel Bad and i am thinking that trying to rely on this method is not great for either of us... when it works it’s great! but when it doesn’t we both slide backwards and just let things Not Happen

4. i often plan to do things and just Feel Bad (migraines, vomiting, etc) and can’t

4a. so when i feel good after feeling bad I want to have some amount of fun instead of just feeling like shit and then having to do work that is frightening and anxiety-inducing and tough to start working on. so i do that and don’t do work things

5. things i want/need to do feel complicated and difficult and given my current often-incapable-of-work-or-fun life i am even worse at holding myself accountable than i normally am because i’m trying not to feel like shit for feeling like shit all the time ... because i will and do beat myself up about it but doing that doesn’t help me get things done. i’ve been struggling with holding myself accountable since my first depressive episode, not that i was ever particularly great at it but it’s been abysmal since then. it does vary depending on external things but that isn’t super consistent (mostly because i can’t control those external factors).

but somethin *really* hits different when i’m up five hours past my bedtime, reading the seventh in a series of r/nosleep, and i get a comment mocking and belittling my personal experience of racism on a several-month-old dead thread on reddit, though

for one i always forget reddit threads can even be open that long. and every time it feels like you’re talking to someone you met at a bar amicably and then a stranger jumps in to yell about how they HATE how you just used that word or some petty bullshit (and like, neg & hit on you at the same time)

i’ve had plenty of decent experiences on reddit (largely in the better-moderated and smaller spaces) but it’s always astounding to me how many people in the popular spaces are just so actively hostile in their general demeanor. i’ll be like, “cool, i don’t agree. hope your day gets better” and people just lose their minds because they can’t interpret that at face value; all they see is anger.

on the other hand, tying those two together and then adding in self-esteem issues feels terrible. especially when exacerbated by insta/twitter algorithms.

but i don’t think that doing more art only for myself would be enough to motivate me. i really enjoy making art for other people.

and i would like to be at a point where i could conceivably take commissions and people would buy commissions from me (which is two very different things put together, i know)

n i just... idk yanno? feeling bad about low like counts does shit all for me, but i do more art if i’m sharing it. and it’s the “doing more art” part that is most important right now, i think. just getting myself to make more shit.