#imsupercoolguys

Well, like, I am a weenie with a little bit of an ear for languages, so I have been picking away at Japanese on a purely casual level as a weeb since the mid to late 1990s…for real, I learned hiragana and katakana while trying to puzzle through FY or Kenshin or Sailor Moon manga. 

Back then (with very limited exceptions) you could only really get untranslated manga at your local Japanese bookstore or if a Japanese friend brought some back as a present, so I did a lot of consulting online dictionaries and friends and some textbooks. 

Back then online dictionaries (and regular paper ones) really require you to learn how to count strokes and recognize radicals (you would have to enter in a 4-digit code based on stroke count, certain radicals, etc), so that was actually valuable brute-force training. 

Now back around 2001 or 2002 of course I discovered Persona 2 and with my friends we played through that and also Innocent Sin (since we’d been doing the disc-swap/mod trick for japanese PSX games for years of course) so our small group put together our little translation team and put together that Tsumi script and website. My role was mostly proofing (since I worked in a publishing house for a year after college) but I did play through Tsumi about 4 times if not more to get the other routes. I also was able to help out with all the wretched German which can be really hard to figure out in kana! (I took five years of formal German, 1 year of Latin, 1 of Spanish and…a smattering of Sanskrit and so on). I stopped trying to parse Japanese for a few years because of school, then came back to in some years ago.

There are huge, gaping, inexcusable holes in my understanding of Japanese - receptive language and expressive language are two different things even on a brain level, so Japanese falls into the pile of languages where I can understand way way way more than I can produce. I can’t ask questions properly, but I can probably understand the answers reasonably well depending on the complexity. You have to speak a language to be able to speak it - and this passive sort of informal learning doesn’t lend itself to that! I think that is also where I may give the impression of being a little better at it than I am - because my receptive knowledge is so much better than my productive knowledge. Also, like, weeb sources are not great for learning formal grammar or social nuances - I’m a woman in her late 30s, so I would sound like a weirdo talking just like, idk, a teenage boy like Naruto or whoever.

This also means that my vocabulary is extremely skewed and hilarious; my friend who used to be a translator will run into things where I’m able to fill in the explanation due to the fact that I have learned that word or phrase or trope from various sources.

Sometimes I think it’d be nice to find time for formal classes where I get a chance to learn how to SPEAK, but…well, one of these days. 

Part of it may be that my parents are both ESL but for different languages (mutual language English), so I am well versed in (1) trying to understand languages without any real formal structure to the learning and (2) watching subbed things and trying to learn some words that way and (3) watching unsubbed things and being totally lost. Also everyone uses dictionaries at any level of fluency so don’t let anyone tell you that they don’t.

Talk about evil hidden in plain sight. Corgis have figured out the code, achieving a combination of gentle russet colouring, magnificent fluffy butts, large personable ears, excellent memeability and pathetic little tappy feet, and with these devious means they have worked their way into our media offices, our law enforcement, our social media feeds, our governments, and even other dogs.

PJ Harvey maybe?

🕹favorite spin-off game?

Digital Devil Saga 2!!!

‼️most overrated character?

if I included Persona it’s Akechi by a country mile, but sans Persona it’s... probably Walter? he’s alright

🌅best ending?

He’s looking strangely buff

SHORT ANSWER: Breeders

LONG ANSWER: I am a bird person, but I discovered after 20 years of owning birds that I actually had a terrible bird allergy and not asthma as I’d thought. Whoops! So my birds went to live with my parents and after a few years, I thought it’d be nice to have a dog. I was living in an apartment at the time with breed restrictions...and that eliminated a large chunk of shelter dogs I was looking at, unfortunately. (My city also has breed-specific laws...) So I thought, OK, what sort of dog would be OK living in an apartment? They would have to be pretty mellow, relatively low-energy, kind of dumb (intelligence breeds boredom), not destructive, etc...also I thought sight hounds were pretty healthy and reportedly not too difficult for a first-time owner. 

So I researched breeds and found silken windhounds. I found an 8 month old puppy that a breeder had which was pet quality and not show quality...her tail length is too long I think? The breed is a mix between borzoi and whippet, so oh my god when I went to pick her up at an AKC show (closer to where I lived...the breeder was 300 miles away and this show was 100 miles away), I got to see a SEA OF TWO-DIMENSIONAL “DOGS” STICKING THEIR FACES AT ME, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I have been really lucky with weaseldog, what a great first dog

As for the wrankle...they’re bred locally, and I was always like “lololol weird” and then I saw there were some kittens available and I decided to go look and see and...oh my god, tiny little bobble-headed goblin kittens climbing all over me

it was all over

9. The most aesthetically pleasing movie you’ve ever watched?

In my usual spirit of not actually answering questions properly, I guess I have to say that there are different aesthetics satisfied by different movies. 

I mean, I guess a lot of people would point to Tarsem Singh’s work as being aesthetically pleasing, and it sure is - like The Cell - but it also feels really, really forced. I actually dig Guillermo del Toro’s attempts at surreal referential creepiness better, like in Pan’s Labyrinth. 

I grew up watching a lot of movies from Hollywood’s Golden Era, so depending on the genre, you could go with a lot of them. I have always loved Weimar-era films in particular. 

For movies that make me want to redecorate my entire place with weird wallpapers, it’s pretty much always A Tale of Two Sisters.

For a movie that makes you feel it’d be glorious to have your face melted off, 2007′s Sunshine has such neato fire effects, including the timeshift from approaching the sun.

10. What’s your favourite movie director?

I don’t know if “favorite” is the right word, but there are a few directors where I always see their new stuff just to see what fucked-up thing they’ve attempted with varying degrees of success this time: David Lynch, Takashi Miike, and Lars von Trier. 

The first thing I saw of Lars von Trier’s was Europa in 1991; the first thing I saw of David Lynch’s was of course Twin Peaks, which later branched into the movies.  So I guess it was just being exposed to weird like that when I was 10 years old?? The first Miike film I saw was....actually, I bet it was Visitor Q or Ichi the Killer, not Audition. (Christ, if you can survive those as your introduction to a director, you can survive anything, lol)