This is just a reblog sideblog that acts as a second main blog for stuff I don't want to annoy my followers with/stuff I want to save for later on. (Kiefer/23/He-They)
Hey just putting this here as a pinned but I changed my main account's url and stuck macabre-angst on this account to redirect anyone who got confused. I'm still on my main! But my url is now @doomednarrative there so if you're looking for me that's where you'll find me~
Japanese is an incredibly fun and rewarding language (if you’ve ever wanted to learn it for ANY reason, most importantly including the “silly” reasons) but the fearmongering and capitalist intervention involved in the language learning process have given it a reputation as an “impossible task” for English speakers, leading to confusion and dkn learners and weird pessimist attitudes about the whole thing. In this thread I will explain how to effectively learn and retain Japanese. This is a tried, tested and true method; probably 99% of all people who try to learn Japanese give up, but everyone I’ve met who has tried and stuck with this has been at or above N3-N4 after 6 months or less including me
You can teach yourself Japanese for free if you have a little free time every day and a computer
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.
Remember to consult yomitan and cure dolly where needed, that’s what it’s there for. As you can see I am quite normal about the Japanese language, so if you have any other questions or need help with anything else feel free to shoot me an ask and I will get back to you promptly. Japanese is not your enemy and it is not impossible. It is your friend
ILYA ROZANOV WEEK: DAY FOUR
FAVORITE TRAIT
↪ HIS EMPATHY AND KINDESS 🥺💕
“When our childhood homes are chaotic and dangerous, we learn that the way to stay safe is to always be on alert — hypervigilant. Our nervous system never calms down because it’s constantly on the lookout for the next bomb that is going to explode [...] As the show goes on, we will learn that underneath Ilya’s extremely hard shell is the heart of a squishy teddy bear wrapped in a warm blanket, but it takes YEARS for Shane to see it.
When we look at Ilya through the lens of what he learned as he grew up, it makes sense why he behaves the way he does. We can even have empathy for the level of hypervigilance and fear he lives with. I like to lay things out this way because it’s usually a hell of a lot harder to give ourselves that same grace. We have an idea of who we “should” be in our heads, and when we don’t live up to that we assume it’s because we’re a failure, a useless waste of space. None of that is true: we are behaving in ways that make complete sense when we understand how our nervous system was trained to respond to our environment.” — Reading Ilya Rozanov through the lens of trauma.
i am of the sincere belief that if ur on ur computer a lot you should visually customize it to high hell and back not just for funsies but also because it has literally made me less depressed before. its kind of like how rearranging your bedroom is good for your brain, yknow. i do stuff like this every few months
LIVE WALLPAPER: wallpaper engine. only thing on here that costs any money (its like 5 bucks on steam). im sure theres free alternatives but this one has a lot of presets and stuff so its less hassle and its what i use. might be a bad idea for lower end pcs tho
CUSTOM TASKBAR: retrobar on github (lots of different options)
CUSTOM CURSOR: theres a lot of places to find these, but rw-designer open cursor library is a good place to start
DISCORD: betterdiscord, im using the clearvision v7 theme with a custom background
EXTENSIONS (these are for firefox, might or might not exist on other browsers):
tabliss for the new tab theme
stylus for tumblr -> specifically the 'tumblr - custom dashboard pallette' theme for colors + bg, and this for the pre-twitterifcation layout
enhancer for youtube for custom youtube colors
the browser theme is just one i found on the firefox theme 'store'
for those like me who cannot install alternative android forks on their phone because the phone in question is thoroughly unrootable, I would recommend downloading anyapk on your phone while you still can. In their own words:
anyapk is a lightweight Android application installer that bypasses Google's developer verification requirements by using local ADB (Android Debug Bridge) connections. Smoothly install any APK file on your device without restrictions, gatekeepers, or corporate approval.
If you're reading this after Google's lockdown date and are unable to install anyapk the regular way, there is a method outlined on the github linked above which tells you how to install anyapk on your phone by plugging it into a computer with ADB installed on it. Once you have anyapk on your phone, you will not have to do that ever again (unless you delete anyapk off your phone)
[Description for the second image: a post from jrepin that reads:
"Sideloading" is the rentseeker word for "being able to run software of your choosing on a computing device you purchased". There is no reasonable case for an operating system developer having a say over what programs you run on your hardware.
--Eugen Rochko of Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115093185284473606]
Hi guys! I thought I should just share my whole mini little library of Project Hail Mary-related things so they're all in one place:
It includes:
A telesync of the movie (with English soft subtitles)
A digital copy of the movie (with occasional Russian hard subtitles)
My transcript of the movie (more on that here)
Audio recordings of the movie
A PDF of the book
An EPUB of the book (for e-readers)
The full audiobook
A copy of Andy Weir's doc on Eridians
A copy of Andy Weir's spreadsheet on Astrophage physics (among many other things!)
A draft of the screenplay for the film from 2022
An audio recording of the director's commentary
My transcript of the director's commentary
The telesync subtitle SRT file
The audiobook, audio recordings, and commentary all have their properties programmed so they (should) work just like songs with a track number, album cover, artist, and so on if you download them.
There are two audios of the movie, one is the entire film untouched and one is that same audio cut up and broken down into separate scenes for convenience.
Additionally, there are two versions of the movie transcript, one with time stamps that match the audio recording and one without. The time stamps (+ their titles from the audio) are outlined in that version, so if you double-click on that tab or click "show outline," they'll all show up and you can pick a specific scene.
Similiarly, there are two different versions of the director's commentary transcript. The first is made to listen along to the commentary, while the second is more intended to be read on its own. The first is a direct transcription of everything that's said (an attempt, at least), while the second is slightly cleaned up for easier reading, meaning things like jumbled sentences and stuttering were removed or reorganised, but nothing has been actually paraphrased. Both are broken down into different scenes based on how their conversation goes, and the listening version includes timestamps.
The first few seconds of the commentary are missing unfortunately as my US friend who was kind enough to record it for me had some technical difficulties at the start, but the commentary starts around the shot of the robot arms right before the shot of "good luck!" written on Grace's sleeping bag. It's also about 40-45-ish seconds behind the audio recording if you can only listen.
There's also a google doc with some instructions to follow if any of the files aren't working, which usually happens when too many people try to access or download something at the same time.
As always, if anything's not working right or you notice any mistakes in anything, please let me know and I'll fix it as soon as I can!
➸ “This is a sentence with a dialogue tag at the end,” she said.
➸ “This,” he said, “is a sentence split by a dialogue tag.”
➸ “This is a sentence,” she said. “This is a new sentence. New sentences are capitalized.”
➸ “This is a sentence followed by an action.” He stood. “They are separate sentences because he did not speak by standing.”
➸ She said, “Use a comma to introduce dialogue. The quote is capitalized when the dialogue tag is at the beginning.”
➸ “Use a comma when a dialogue tag follows a quote,” he said.
“Unless there is a question mark?” she asked.
“Or an exclamation point!” he answered. “The dialogue tag still remains uncapitalized because it’s not truly the end of the sentence.”
➸ “Periods and commas should be inside closing quotations.”
➸ “Hey!” she shouted, “Sometimes exclamation points are inside quotations.”
However, if it’s not dialogue exclamation points can also be “outside”!
➸ “Does this apply to question marks too?” he asked.
If it’s not dialogue, can question marks be “outside”? (Yes, they can.)
➸ “This applies to dashes too. Inside quotations dashes typically express—“
“Interruption” — but there are situations dashes may be outside.
➸ “You’ll notice that exclamation marks, question marks, and dashes do not have a comma after them. Ellipses don’t have a comma after them either…” she said.
➸ “My teacher said, ‘Use single quotation marks when quoting within dialogue.’”
➸ “Use paragraph breaks to indicate a new speaker,” he said.
“The readers will know it’s someone else speaking.”
➸ “If it’s the same speaker but different paragraph, keep the closing quotation off.
“This shows it’s the same character continuing to speak.”
do you want to play tomodachi life but don't have a switch, $60, or just don't want to pay nintendo $60?
here's an all-in-one site where you can download everything you need to emulate it!
Floralith beta — downloads and setup.
also, with an emulator, you can directly screenshot and record your game, and even mod it! add custom hair parts! import photos directly! remove region locks! emulate it!!
everything?
everything! this site will walk you through downloading the ryujinx switch emulator, the firmware and keys needed, and the nsp game file for tomodachi life ltd.
is this safe?
the files are all directly downloaded from this site, so there's no third party to worry about. i didn't make this site - it was created by PotentialAd943 on reddit, who claims they scanned their files clean before hosting. just to be sure, i scanned my pc after downloading too. it all came up clean! but it's good to be aware of pc safety, especially when pirating. it can't hurt to do a scan of your own to be sure!
how much pc knowledge do i need for this?
you should know how to download files, how to make and manage folders in file explorer, and how to navigate a program's settings menu.
any settings i should change in ryujinx?
here's some i recommend checking before starting the game:
for tomodachi life specifically, make sure you set a timezone in settings! you can have it match your pc's time for simplicity.
there are ostensibly keyboard controls, but they're a little wonky to figure out. if you can, plugging in any controller should work just fine. just make sure to select it in ryujinx's input settings! (you should also still be able to use your mouse for things like drawing facepaint!)
graphics settings will be on a per-pc basis, depending on your pc's strength. it's worth it to experiment with them and see what gives you the best performance. ryujinx will explain what each setting does if you hover over it!
the game crashed?
that's very likely to happen! on first time loading a scene, the emulator can sometimes struggle. it happened to me the first time i opened the mii editor, and the first time i opened the news station. you should be able to relaunch and everything will be fine. if it's happening super frequently, though, you may need to adjust your graphics or cpu settings!
a sixth thing i didn't think of?
feel free to leave a reblog with comment or send me an ask! if you need more specific guidance, i'll be happy to help! i'm not an expert on emulation, but if nothing else, i can try to point you towards a reddit thread that is more competent than i am
i hope you have fun playing the game! i did not create this site, but i found the creator in a single reddit thread asking people to spread the word, so i figured i'd do what i can and make this post. if it works for you, please help out and spread the word even further! thank you!!
Batman Vol. 3 Annual #3 - Father’s Day (December 12, 2018)
Written by: Tom Taylor
Artist by: Otto Schmidt
Lettered by: Troy Peteri of A Larger World
Edited by: Dave Wielgosz (assistant editor) and Dave Wielgosz (group editor)
Published by: DC Comics
some people think writers are so eloquent and good with words, but the reality is that we can sit there with our fingers on the keyboard going, “what’s the word for non-sunlight lighting? Like, fake lighting?” and for ten minutes, all our brain will supply is “unofficial”, and we know that’s not the right word, but it’s the only word we can come up with…until finally it’s like our face got smashed into a brick wall and we remember the word we want is “artificial”.