#tech #my-site

as part of my ongoing project to set up a home lab, i’ve started self-hosting yamtrack, a media tracker that can track all sorts of media – video games, books, movies, manga, etc. up until now i’ve been using various online services like anilist for anime/manga and infinitebacklog for video games for basic tracking, plus offline tools like obsidian and anytype for noting down my personal thoughts and organizing things i’ve watched by language. it’s never really bothered me, using multiple services for all the types of media i like, but after finally getting everything imported, i gotta say… it’s pretty nice being able to just see everything i’m watching/reading/playing at the moment, all in one place, and being able to create lists including all forms of media. also, after the ordeal of actually getting everything imported, including from services that don’t have an official export option (looking at you, mydramalist) i can safely say i’m never going back to a service that doesn’t offer simple csv exports lol. not even json – i love json, but i shouldn’t have to brush up on my jq skills just to see the start and end date of when i watched something. thankfully yamtrack does, so once i was done i exported my data just to see what the csv file looked like… and after filtering out the things that were marked to watch/read/play, i still had nearly 600 entries 😐 i really don’t feel like i consume THAT much media, especially since the last two or three years a lot of the time i used to spend watching anime or gaming i now spend watching thai and japanese youtube (which i only track as time spent watching, not number of videos watched) or sometimes tv/movies/games (which takes much longer to finish than in english)… guess i was wrong 😅 and here i was thinking that i was going to use it to build a page on my site with my complete media log, but once i actually scripted a bare bones version of the page, it was just… too much. once i really thought about it, i realized i get more value out of reading smaller, curated lists of media people love or want to share than just a huge list of everything they’ve ever laid their eyes upon, especially if there’s no reviews or ratings system. so i think i’ll rework the code a bit and post just the subset of my favorite things… eventually….

a lot of the services i’ve set up in my home lab use third party APIs to fetch metadata about media on the server, including yamtrack. for books, it uses hardcover, so i’ve been trying to migrate my own data on storygraph to hardcover too to find what’s missing in hardcover’s database, filling out the missing data myself and hopefully making the data yamtrack pulls more accurate. but i swear, it’s like hardcover actively doesn’t want me to help make its database more accurate. more than half the time i try to add a new edition to an already existing book, when i submit the isbn of the alternate edition it says it’s auto-fetching the information for it, just to go back to the original edition -_- does hardcover have beef with people who listen to audiobooks or something…

even though i’ve been trying to move as much of my data as i can to my new server, i’m realizing now just how hard it is to break free from Big Tech’s grasp. for example, even though i’ve mainly relied on sites like storygraph and worldcat to get book info, amazon-owned goodreads is still the only place i’ve been able to reliably get edition information on thai translations of books. so even if i keep all my book notes in plain markdown on my computer or try to contribute to an independent database like hardcover, i’ll inevitably rely on some tech giant’s database or infrastructure. now i’m not a FOSS+decentralized-or-bust kinda girlie – while i’m probably more privacy conscious than most people (based off the confused looks i get from most people irl when i mention trying to avoid using services by companies like google or meta when i can), i’m not above using these services when i feel like i get more out of it than i risk or when i have no other alternative. but sometimes it makes me wonder what’s the point in spending so much time and mental bandwidth on trying to minimize my reliance on them if i already know i’m not going to go 100% of the way in removing them from my life. then there are times i feel like i’ve learned so much in the process of prioritizing software not owned by the Big Five the last 2-3 years – from learning basic programming to more easily organize and process local text and media files, to now trying to run my own server teaching me about networking and system administration – that, even if its futile and google already knows my social security number or someone at apple’s already made deepfake nudes of me or whatever, the effort i’ve made hasn’t been entirely for nothing.

#tech

recently i’ve been messing around with self-hosting. i think i mentioned that last year i installed ubuntu 24 server edition on an old 2010 macbook pro with the intention of turning it into a home server, but that ended up going nowhere. at the time i was very new to linux, having only used it on my main computer for about two months, and couldn’t figure why the wifi worked but was prone to random bouts of slowness and disconnecting, which basically meant it was useless at being a server.

fast forward to two months ago, when i was looking for an alternative to feedbro, a browser extension for subscribing to and reading rss/atom feeds. as much as i liked it, i wanted something that i could access from my phone. after looking for alternatives, i couldn’t find a service that seemed to fit my needs that was free, and i wasn’t convinced that i use my rss reader enough to justify paying for a subscription. what i did find though were numerous self-hostable rss aggregators – freshrss, miniflux, tiny tiny rss, commafeed, nextcloud news – which i decided to try installing on my primary computer. after figuring out how the whole installing stuff with docker thing worked and trying some containers, it got me thinking about my old macbook again. i hoped maybe an extra year and a half of linux experience would help me troubleshoot my issue more easily.… well low and behold all i had to do was install a single package, edit one file, reboot the computer and connect to the wifi again 🙃. so now that i’ve finally got the wifi working on it then set up tailscale on all my devices so i can connect to my server when i’m not at home, this fifteen year old laptop is finally getting a second chance at life.

one of the most commonly recommended self hosted apps is immich, a photo/video backup and organizer commonly used as a FOSS alternative to google or apple photos. like those services, it has an automatic facial recognition feature, but unlike those services it can be disabled, and you can choose to host the machine learning algorithm on the same computer or connect it to another, more powerful one. i’ve always liked that feature on my phone despite knowing how much of a privacy concern it poses, even if apple says it all happens locally and doesn’t connect to apple’s servers…. needless to say i was very eager to set immich up and see how well it works. after uploading all my phone’s photos to the server and letting it process overnight, i opened immich up the next morning to see how well it worked. it never dawned on me that it would work on all the faces in my photos, since apple photos usually only shows me people i know irl, but when i opened the “people” section this is what i was greeted with:

somebody explain to me why i have more photos of goro majima on my phone than i do of my own mother 😭

my inane, probably incomprehensible ramblings on the yakuza kiwami 3 + dark ties announcement. vulgar language and spoilers for the entirety of yakuza 3 below

kiwami 3

• okay green hawaiian shirt kiryu… idk why rgg changed this up but it looks p good tbh
• MY SWEET DAUGHTER HARUKA… i still think she and the other kids look a bit uncanny in dragon engine (like i know she’s a kid but even kids don’t have plasticky smooth skin, can i get like. seven pores) but it’s haruka. always excited to see my daughter :)
• RIKIYA???????? i’m supposed to go to a love hotel w this mf?! bestie where did ur perm go 😭

• nakahara looks… different but not too bad, i can live with this change
• FUCK daigo looks soooooooo so so good… my husband…… gonna miss that goofy ass face he makes at kiryu when he visits the orphanage though

• wait that’s hamazaki? omg i didn’t even realize that was supposed to be him in the opening shot of the trailer, damn everyone’s getting recast ok. why does he look like some generic forgettable mid story level boss and not basically the only character in the entire series to get a sliver of a redemption arc
• everybody congratulate majima on overcoming his cold
• love that kanda looks exactly the same, can’t wait for his 4k backshots with kiryu scene 💖
• can’t place my finger on what it is exactly but mine looks… babygirl-ified somehow
• why did they change the dub to use “san” here when you can clearly hear majima calling him kiryu-chan… line still goes hard tho

• i love that andre still says kiryu’s name the same way as the original
• the new “ryukyu style” looks pretty fun, excited to have some more weapon-based combat (esp w tonfas). hopefully it’s better balanced than what pirates gave us
• the direct mentions that “some scenes have been changed drastically” with a screenshot of the helicopter/millennium tower scene; now obviously that scene specifically needs to be rewritten to match the current canon but since andre is also alive, will the end scene also be rewritten? really… don’t know if i like the possibility of mine surviving. i mean on one hand i would love to see him alive and well but on the other hand i feel like rgg has really written themselves into a corner with all the death retcons. like andre surviving but mine not surviving makes no sense, but also mine surviving would retroactively make 4-6’s plots make less sense knowing mine was alive, but for some reason not daigo’s sugar daddy, helping him consolidate his power over the tojo. honestly andre’s death retcon didn’t really bother me in 8, but if we’re going back to revisit and rewrite old games, those changes will likely need to be addressed, which just creates more inconsistencies, and the gap between the original timeline and the post-0 timeline just keeps getting bigger…

dark ties

• did ANYONE have mine gaiden on their rgg summit bingo card bc holy fuck. rgg really saw our “yakuza kiwami 3 will have a 6 hour sex scene between mine and daigo on the roof” meme and said how about a whole ass game complete w dinner and foreplay (please god (rgg studio) give us a kaito files+ sized storyline and not a majima saga sized one…)
• ok but honestly out of all the antagonists in the series i think mine getting one makes the most sense bc he’s popular like nishiki and ryuji but honestly doesn’t get much screen time in 3 nor a satisfying enough buildup to his villain speech/betrayal justification imo. but what we do know of his background just has so much potential, like you’ve got his history as a finance bro, which we’ve seen throughout the series that more and more of the yakuza are like that, there for the business and it’s overtaking what people like kiryu think of as the old, “honorable” and “loyal” sort of yakuza. but mine joins not looking to make a buck but to understand how someone could be so loyal to someone else that they die to protect them. ugh the role reversal juiciness… and of course there’s so much room to see more of the tojo’s inner workings. i understand that rgg wants to take ichi’s storyline away from the tojo and the yakuza in general to fit the current world, and i honestly think such a change is both a breath of fresh air for the series and has potential to fit ichiban better as a person, but i’m glad rgg is still finding ways to feed those of us who are still enamored with the world of the tojo. on top of that i think this is the perfect opportunity to expand upon daigo’s character. for such an important character i feel like we know very little about him other than he respects kiryu and wants to protect those with nowhere to turn to but the yakuza. praying on my hands and knees we’ll see another side of him with mine

• since what we’ve seen so far seems to line up with mine’s rggo story, i wonder if this canonizes other rggo stories? i know it’s unrealistic to think all of them could be playable one day but if i could cast my vote for one that story w ryuji and joongi would go crazy
• mine looks so uncomfortable when kanda touches him lmaooooo

• so glad they aren’t shying away from but in fact doubling down on the minedai bait. too bad it took sacrificing barefoot coma!daigo 😔 what about my 4k daigo feet pics…

• it is so fucking funny to me that his version of heat is called “dark awakening” okay emo ass lmao
• i can see the lost judgment dna in mine’s moveset… happy we’ll still get the gameplay but it hurts to see another year with another loss for the j3 nation
• okay i think i finally got all the brain worms out… if u actually read all this ily :’)

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.