opened my rss reader today to find this blog post, a reply to a comment the author received on a post of his about the mathematics of heritability. i hadn’t #read the original article, but after reading the comment where the reader basically suggests that the author’s mention of r.a. fisher inventing the concept of variance to study genetics is a racist/eugenics dogwhistle, i had to go read the original. and i’m just like… does it ever get tiring. to read everything, even a short blog post explaining a singular mathematical concept, and try to sniff out the author’s political affiliations and ulterior motives, assuming that if they don’t loudly proclaim their beliefs that they’re on the “other” side. i mean i’ve been there too, and is part of why i left #social-media bc i feel like a lot of the spaces i was in and even the structure of the modern day social media platform encourage that sort of behavior. but not only did i find that i got nothing out of it, that sort of paranoia felt so damaging psychologically. like self-proclaimed anarchists will be explaining how to protect urself from the surveillance state one minute then getting their followers to dogpile someone for something they thought they said in some discord four years ago…. mf YOU are the surveillance state 😭 then u just start self-censoring ur own shitposts bc some idiot might decide to read what u said in the most bad faith way possible. and it kills me that a person’s words are still subject to that type of culture war brain rot scrutiny on their own personal website. will i ever be free from this nonsense…

#plants #played

the gladiolus flowers in my garden have been blooming all month long. i don't usually like to cut flowers since they don't last as long and keeping them uncut forces me to actually go outside and enjoy them, but these lazy mf plants keep falling over and taking a nap on the ground -_- i took the worst offenders inside with me for my 27th birthday this past sunday, and made some baklava and butterfly pea flower syrup to use for drinks. i still get surprised sometimes making it how vegetal the dried flowers smell in the bag, like i keep expecting it to be like making rose or hibiscus tea… no lmao. i complained about it to my mom once and she was like "oh that flower? that stuff grows like a weed on the front of your grandma's house in thailand, we used to eat it like a vegetable in salads and stuff, you're not planning on just drinking it plain right?" luckily as a syrup it doesn't really taste like anything, and can be used to make pretty drinks. for my birthday i added some to a pina colada to make it lavender, but my favorite way to use it is to mix it with coconut rum in a glass, fill the glass with ice, then squeeze lime juice on the top and watch the blue turn into purple and then pink as the drink turns more acidic.

this month i've been getting really into oblivion again. idek why, when the remaster came out in april i was like y'all could not pay me to install a 150gb unreal engine 5 game on my poor laptop that has already played the og to death… but here i am four months later turning the 6gb og game into an 80gb one with mods 😭 when the remaster released i wasn't all that keen on revisting oblivion again but idk, maybe all the screenshots and gifs i keep seeing made me miss cyrodiil. even nearly 20 years later i still think it's just gorgeous.

or maybe it was virtuos/bethesda deciding to make emperor uriel hot af in the remaster for NO REASON and i needed to hear him rizz me up again just to feel something. in any case, i've never done a heavily modded playthrough before but this time i've completely maxed out the plugin limit. one particular set of mods i've been enjoying is the hesu mod collection, a series of mods published by japanese author hesu and translated by mhahn123 that alters the landscape and adds new locations to cyrodiil. one location, shipton, is added just south down the hill from kvatch, so after starting my usual new game ritual of picking martin up as soon as possible then fucking around for 100 hours before accidentally returning to weynon priory, i decided to stop by and visit one of the many new locations i added to cyrodiil. well, after getting attacked by man eating sheep, breaking into a seemingly abandoned house, and going down a trap door next to the dead body of the mage who seemed to have caused the whole mess, i appear to have accidentally dragged a freshly terrorized martin from the jaws of one plane of oblivion into another one… but other than the spider daedra it's lowkey kinda chill here, he doesn't even seem to mind it that much.

oh and the level 30 boss fight at the end when i was like. level 3. at least the architecture goes hard.

#languagelearning #played #japanese

have any other language learners noticed just how much ai has infiltrated language learning spaces… i feel like i'm probably beating a dead horse here bc damn near everybody in this neighborhood of the internet doesn't agree with genAI, but i've gotten so used to others sharing my convictions that every time i wander outside this bubble i'm always shocked at how much some people use it. and not just use it — trust it! and not just for asking it to translate an idiom or slang not found in dictionaries here and there. i've seen people unironically suggesting others use chatgpt and other llms to:

• generate an entire anki deck
• generate short stories to read
• have written or spoken practice conversations
• translate and break down entire passages (before attempting to read it themselves and only asking for help on parts they don't understand)
• generate example sentences for a target word or phrase that they found in their immersion or in the wild to add to their anki deck (instead of just… adding the original native sentence they found the word in……)

and the damn apps… i swear every other day i see someone advertising their new language learning app that's basically just chatgpt/claude/gemini etc w a custom prompt. now i'm not a software dev so i may be misunderstanding something but… what's the point.

really, what's the point of using llms so extensively to learn a language. it all just seems so inefficient. like after spending 15 minutes setting up yomitan or goldendict i can look up a word or phrase in multiple different dictionaries before chatgpt even loads, then if i so choose add them to my anki deck with the original context and native audio in the time it would take to prompt chatgpt for a definition. on top of that llms love making shit up so u still need to fact check it, by checking a dictionary, asking a native speaker, etc. and it's like at that point why go through the bother of generating cards in the first place? but still i see people swear up and down that the text llms produce are correct and error free. well i'm happy ur so confident in ur own ability to assess bullshit in ur target language (not that they actually can), but the beginners u keep suggesting ur methods to aren't going to know how to. and even when it is technically correct, when i've tested llms in thai to see where these people are coming from, it just fails to produce the idiomatic, slang-filled, sometimes messy but still authentic speech.

and that's really my biggest issue with all this. i always thought the whole reason to learn a new language was to understand people. humans. who make art and write stories and fight and cry and laugh together. to connect to people who may be from a different culture but who still understand our shared humanity. the joy of learning a language is gaining access to the thoughts and feelings of a whole new group of people u couldn't before, to hear their stories… why waste what precious time we have on this earth reading the words of a mere facsimile? what's the point of learning a language if most of ur time with it is a version processed by a machine and not the version of it that lives and breathes in this world? i think these people are going to be in for a rude awakening call when they try to interact with their target language outside of the english-ified slop their favorite llm feeds them and the pleasantries exchanged with the waitress at their local cafe. if these people want to hinder their own ability to understand the authentic speech of their target language in the long run then so be it, but it kills me to think that a beginner might follow their advice or download an app that's just ai in disguise without really thinking about the implications of it.

rant aside… in other news i started my first otome game in japanese, ayakashi gohan. i've played a couple other, shorter visual novels in japanese but this is the first otome game and first what i would personally consider "full length" (30-40+ hrs native speed) VN. i was gonna wait to post my thoughts on it until after i finished but i had the biggest jump scare playing this game that i just HAD to post about: kuroda takaya voices one of the route antagonists.

y'all… when i tell you i DIED! the inhuman sound i made 😭 i knew he's done some BL work but i didn't know he worked on otomes before too. i checked vndb but unfortunately i didn't see any otomes where he voices a love interest :( still added the other otomes where he voices a minor character to my list of VNs i'd like to play one day lol. not only does he voice an antagonist in this game, he plays a tengu named guren who historically has had the right to wed a human woman from the local village. so the plot of yomi's (the actual LI) route is that guren wants to make the protagonist, rin, his wife, and keeps coming onto her despite her repeatedly telling him to get lost, and the challenge it brings to her already fraught relationship with her protector yomi. which means the route was filled with absolutely amazing lines like:

when i say this had me utterly gagged… i would never survive an otome game bc i would walk straight into a bad ending if the villian sounded like kiryu kazuma. like i literally spent the whole route being like yeah rin what's the hold up, forget yomi and let's go already! 😅 i'm not usually a kiryu simp (daigo has my heart, sorry king) but kuroda's work in this route even had me like 😳 the rest of this post are my favorite lines of his along with my rough translations (may not be the best but i promise they weren't written by ai 💖), in case there are any other yakuza fans out there who might want these recordings for… reasons… or just to get a kick out of it.

#plants #played #knitted #thrifted

it's the end of august which means my birthday was a couple of days ago 😇 my friends bought me this pinstripe calathea and a bunch of desserts from vegan east, plus i made pistachio + thai basil shortbread cookies so i think i have my sugar intake sorted for the next month or so ^^

i know i said in my last entry that i'd start raidou kuzunoha 2, but i ended up spending most of the month playing fields of mistria. it's only in early access but i've already played it for almost 50 hours, completing a whole year and finishing all the story + heart events released so far ^^; i love the vibe of the town and the sprite work is SO cute, i can't believe i have to wait a whole year to marry my girl reina 😩 i also hope the creators implement some sort of rival marriage or matchmaker system because i'm obsessed with whatever's going on between juniper and valen.

i also managed to finish piofiore 1926. (mild spoilers for fated memories + 1926 below) i think i liked this sequel a little more than the first game, if only for the alternative + henri route. i love when otome games that have a lot of death in them also have an "everyone lives" route afterwards, and with the alternative route in this game i liked seeing how the LIs interact with the MC when they spend a long period of time being her friend/acquaintance before trying to get with her. especially with dante and nicola, i ended up liking them way more on their alternative route vs. their original route in the first game. legit if dante ever gave lili shooting lessons in his OG route like he does in his alternative route he probably would've ended up being my fav 😪 also i loved seeing the LIs spend more time working together since it meant more time spent bullying yang instead of trying to kill him <3

this month i also worked a lot on my folklore cardigan. i started this in february and had it in storage for like… 5 months… but i finally decided to get it done and now i just have the back piece left. it's the first wearable i've ever knitted and i made a lot of modifications, so hopefully it comes together alright. the yarn is from a cardigan i bought at a thrift store and unraveled, and i was worried that i wouldn't have enough yarn but i think it'll be enough. i managed to thrift and unravel two more sweaters this summer, so i'm excited to get this done and start working on the projects i have in mind for them.

the mitsuba my friend gave me finally grew enough for me to try it! a couple weeks ago a rabbit ate most of the shoots (despite being in a 3ft tall planter -_-) so i was worried but it seemed to bounce back alright. it's more bitter than i expected, but it tastes pretty good in miso soup. apparently it gets more bitter when grown in full sun compared to part shade… probably should've checked that before putting it somewhere that gets like eight hours of direct sunlight ^^;

i also recently beat shin megami tensei: devil summoner raidou kuzunoha. i've read that a lot of people don't like this game (or at least the combat system) but i thought it was pretty fun. i loved that demons could be controlled directly and interact with npcs and the environment, it definitely gave the world some more charm and party formation some much needed depth. i emulated this game with this hd texture pack and it looks really nice. i haven't started the second game yet but i hope i have some time to this weekend. here are some of my favorite screenshots:

my mom bought a new laptop recently and gave me her old ones. they've been slow af and prone to crashes for years so she's been using her phone to watch youtube (so much that it's caused screen burn in -_-). i installed new operating systems on both of them and they seem to function better now (ubuntu server on the 2010 macbook pro and archcraft on the 2012 macbook air). i don't really have much of a use for them but it was fun trying to get them running again. i might mess around with them in the future... they both have surprisingly nice screens for decade old laptops and i feel kinda bad for turning the pro into a server ^^;

i'm not much of an apple fan; my current phone is an iphone xr and the only apple product i've ever bought new. throughout high school and most of college i had this one friend who would tease me, my brother, and another friend of ours for being the only people in our friend group who used android, therefore messing up imessage group chats. now that the three of us are on iphones.... honestly he had a point, imessage is really convenient when literally all your friends also have iphones. the battery on my phone is still good despite being almost five years old so i hope i can still get a couple years out of it before needing to replace it. probably with a used iphone... these days i really only use my phone to call, text, and listen to audiobooks so i don't see the benefits of buying new, and while i really dislike how much less access to FOSS software and easy control over my files the iphone has, ultimately a phone is a tool to communicate and currently an iphone provides me the least amount of friction to keeping in touch with my friends.

my current daily driver laptop is a thinkpad p52, but when i was in high school i had a couple different apple laptops. i still have the one on the left, a 17" 2007 macbook pro. about six months ago i ripped out the 1tb hard drive i had left languishing in there for nearly 10 years and put it in my current laptop's 2.5" drive bay when i started messing with dualbooting linux and needed more space on my ssds, so this laptop doesn't turn on anymore. i actually had another laptop that was a similar model that i harvested parts from to fix up the one pictured, including replacing the screen. when i was in high school my mom loved browsing craiglist to try to find good deals on used tech (especially macbooks... i still don't understand why she insists on paying a premium for apple computers when all she does is watch youtube), except she doesn't actually understand anything about technology so i was always the one who had to fix things and get them in working order. i guess it was good to learn how to do basic computer upgrades and repair, and even now i still use craiglist to buy used tech instead of buying new (i scored my current laptop for only $200!), but i could've done without the being forced on my mother's whim to spend the occasional evening setting up meetings with strangers who sometimes live an hour away just to come back and have to spend hours googling how to fix some random thing i didn't notice when inspecting it -_- the laptop i remember most fondly though that i don't have anymore was an apple ibook g3. it's THE quintessential frutiger aero piece of tech and every day i rue the fact that tech doesn't look like this anymore. the case on the macbook air i have now is translucent and the same shade of teal as the ibook i use to have (like the ad pictured below), so i guess it can be my old ibook's spiritual successor. honestly why does everything only come in like matte black or brushed aluminum these days... i was particularly fond of the charger, which is like a yo-yo since you wrap the wire around a disk.