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
Hey here's some free Sims games. Don't pay for digital media in this economy.
Sims 1
Sims 2
Sims 3 or this link
Sims 4
Sims Medieval
You'll have to scroll down to each game :] Hopefully the archive stays up.
Here is also all non-PC sims games. As well as links to a variety of emulators:
PS2
PS3
XBOX
XBOX 360
PSP
DS
Wii
GameCube
Game Boy Advance/Other emulator
EDIT (2/11/25) I completely forgot that Vimm's Lair got a lot of games nuked recently, here is a link to the 🏴☠️ games megathread.
EDIT (10/28/25) Sorry for not updating the links for a while.
Reminder that these kind of links tend to get taken down every so often, so please make sure to click back to the original post when reblogging ! Two of the most popular reblogs contain dead links !!
Hi! I just watched Frankenstein and read your very thought provoking piece.
I don’t have anyone else to talk to about this so I just want to pick up a point that I thought was going to be fantastically subtle foreshadowing and was so let down when it wasn’t
When Creature was lightly touching Elizabeth’s neck and she was explaining that’s where the sound comes from I genuinely thought that was setting him up to strangle her later in the film and I thought it was going to be a great juxtaposition, and it made me really disappointed when it didn’t happen!
YES!! That would have been great foreshadowing—if only the film hadn't been trying to recreate a The Shape of Water-lite by doing the bare minimum.🙃*cough*
Seriously though, the amount of missed opportunities the film had with their own version of Elizabeth is astounding to me. It really felt like they were setting her up to be revealed as a morally ambiguous character; her wanting to trap the butterfly, her contradictory nature, her obvious romantic interest in The Creature despite him being… well, essentially a child.
And yet...
(Oh boy, you're in for it now cupidskissx!🤣)
It's such a shame, because I really think film-Elizabeth as an almost-villain could've been so interesting, especially considering how they were already representing her.
For example, take the moment with the butterfly—an insect she supposedly loves and yet chose to trap. Now, imagine if this had been a foreshadowing decision, and the film had wanted to use it as a way to demonstrate her belief that 'trapping' is how love is expressed; after all, that's what was always done to her, right?
Now, imagine if her love for the Creature mirrored this moment. If she had fallen for the Creature and wanted him in chains... because she knows what's best for him, of course! She would never take advantage of him, she's a good person, you see. She just wants him safe... by being trapped... just like the butterfly... just like her...
If the film had done something like that, trapping the butterfly would've then been a framing device that actually made sense. However, as it stands in the film's canon, the trapped butterfly metaphor falls flat because it would have only worked as a metaphor if Elizabeth had chosen to free it after she found the Creature in chains... But she didn't bloody do that, did she?! 😤And because of that narrative neglect, the whole butterfly bullshit is now a contradiction of her character! AHHH—
Mate, they could've even gone one step further—if they really wanted to be brave—and made a strong, controversial, conversation-sparking statement about abuse by framing her romantic interest in the Creature as deliberately predatory, not as just accidentally coming off that way. It could've represented an abusive carer dynamic and given the film's infantilisation of the Creature some deeper reason. It would've even dug deeper into that whole “hurt people hurt people” cycle-of-abuse shit that they loved so much.
...BUT NO!!😫
They couldn't have actually done any of that or made film-Elizabeth morally ambiguous/bad—not only because of marketability, but because they wanted her to function as a trope: the "odd", oppressed woman without agency. The problem though, however, is that the film constantly shows us that she does have agency! She has total freedom to pursue her "peculiar" hobbies; she wanders off to visit The Creature without having to fear repercussions; she says “turn the carriage around” and they do! The woman has a lot of choice!
The issue is that the film makers seem to just assume we'll see her as an oppressed character simply because they 'coded' her like the cliche of one, and assumed that would be good enough. As if we'd feel sympathise with her just because of knowing in meta that she’s a woman in Victorian society—therefore no actual development necessary.😩
To me, that reads as either lazy (if they meant to do this) or careless (if it happened by accident). Either way, neither interpretation is a good thing. And what’s even crazier is that, while they half-arsed this insinuation of an oppression narrative with Elizabeth, THE CREATURE! WAS! RIGHT! THERE!!😭😭😭 The Creature! The symbol of oppression in the novel! Why did they not UTILISE HIM?!?!
Oh man, and it doesn't stop there either. Their reliance on cliches for Elizabeth bleeds directly into the (implied?) romantic connection between her and the Creature. I really don't know how they expected us to be invested in them, or feel like Elizabeth's death held any weight, when their characters barely shared maybe five minutes of screen time.
Tbh, even if you wanted to argue and say the connection was maternalistic and not romantic, my point still stands. A maternal connection would at least have a little bit more credibility, but I personally thing it was the romantic angle Del Toro was going for. But why, Guillermo? 😢 because they resemble the beauty/beast, monster/maiden tope? It's not enough! I do not care about these two randos! If you weren't going to actually give me another monster romance, Del Toro, then don't tease me!—I'll just go watch The Shape of Water instead, okay?!😭😭
….Umm anyway. I'm done ranting (for now), lol. But fr though, the only actual "connection" between Elizabeth and The Creature in Frankenstein (2025) is that the film was too scared to make either of them actually complex—
not to continue beating the dead horse (reanimated horse?) of frankenstein (2025) but I do find how resolutely unwilling the movie was to actually presenting a narrative where victor was justified kinda irritating. like. this is the central structure of the movie, right? that victor tells his story and then the creature tells his and you go: oh I really sympathise with the creature. that is assumedly why the creature in the beginning is such a horror monster character, to make the reveal of his actual character more impactful. the thing is this doesn't really happen though, because victor's pov still displays him as a complete fucking weirdo freak who is abusive towards his creaturemonsterson. it's like the desire to have sympathy for the monster so overpowers the movie to the point of harming its structure. there isn't really any change in what we see between victor's side and the creature's side of things, it's less that the narrative shifts and more that our main character does. I'm reminded of the last duel, which has a similar structural premise (conflicting accounts) but isn't a fucking coward about making the accounts given by the characters actually conflict in both big and small ways.
the avatar movies are crazy bc "what if colonizers literally inhabited and puppeteered the bodies of indigenous peoples in order to exploit their homeland" sounds like the premise of some sort of anticolonial horror film, like specifically the kind of thing that would be commenting on self-indigenization among white settlers, but because it's James Cameron his whole takeaway from that premise is "it would be preddy cool"
actually sorry. the takeaway is also "the white settler possessing an indigenous body would actually be extremely good, perhaps even The Best, at being indigenous, and he would become their Leader"
The thing is, even if you were lucky and your parents taught you how to clean, they probably didn't teach you how to clean the stuff you clean stuff with, like brushes, mops, sponges, rags, and so on. Or how to clean your cleaning appliances, like a dish washer, clothes washing machine, and clothes dryer and its ducts (if you have a ducted dryer), or a carpet cleaner, vacuum, Or how to clean up clean messes, like spilled bleach or detergent.
My parents threw away all of these things (even the vacuum cleaners and the dryer) when they got too dirty to function, because no one even told them THAT they could be cleaned. Cost them thousands of dollars over the years.
All I'm saying is that cleaning is not intuitive, and not knowing how to clean is not a moral failing, but it is something you can learn.
I'm going to reblog this post with resources for learning how to clean things and how to clean cleaning things (I'm not at my desk at the moment). If you have any favorites, please feel free to add them in too!
I like this video because it does a great job of introducing the basic foundations of house cleaning (and because he doesn't use bleach, which is a common allergy in addition to being awful to inhale). He also talks a little about how to clean a vacuum. And why you shouldn't put grease from your pots and pans down the sink drain. I also love that he mentions that different houses and different people have different needs and different versions of what clean and cleaning looks like.
He doesn't mention though that the toilet seat comes off. I take my toilet seat off to clean under the hinges and clean the seat more thoroughly once a quarter.
This is another video from the same guy about cleaning and depression. This advice, especially at the beginning, can feel really really difficult and oppressive to hear. However, I find that it's generally pretty solid. But I'm autistic and so is he, so that gets a massive Your Mileage May Vary stamp on it.
I have a favorite part of this video. It's from 10:52 to 12:36. I think we could all use to hear that. There's a HEFTY pause after that one. I promise the narration does come back.
I'm also going to recommend KC Davis' book "How To Keep House While Drowning"
This is a pair of videos about how to correctly load and use a dish washer.
The first one is a quick 1 minute 30 second overview on loading. I can't find the exact video I'm looking for, so consider this a substitute for that. If I can find the one I'm looking for, I'll swap it in.
The second is a half hour deep dive on dishwashers and detergents. The short form of that is you shouldn't need to pre-rinse anything, detergent pods are overpriced and can cause problems, some dishwashers have a filter in the bottom that needs to be cleaned (but most don't), run your sink until the water is HOT before starting your dish washer, and put a little detergent in the pre-rinse dispenser when you're washing extra dirty dishes (or on the inside of the door if your dishwasher doesn't have a pre-rinse dispenser).
How to clean a front load washer (with bleach). This should be done monthly or every time you wash really soiled clothes.
With expert tips and tricks for all types of washers.
How to clean a top loader (without the removable agitator thing). This should be done every 1-3 months depending on you unit, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.
Regular cleaning of a top-load washing machine will prolong the life of the appliance and leave your laundry cleaner and brighter.
How to clean a top loader (with the removable agitator thing). This should be done every month, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.
These carpet brushes are a LIFE SAVER if you have dogs. This thing allows me to go from vacuuming about 4 square feet before my vacuum is full to vacuuming half the living room (I don't vacuum often enough. You should vacuum weekly, and I just can't.). I have to unclog the vacuum less often. It fluffs up some of the flat spots in the carpet. And I also use the brush to shampoo my rugs in the spring.
A spot cleaner (or a carpet cleaner with a spot cleaner attachment) is another life saver, ESPECIALLY if you can afford to splurge on a heated one. I see them at Goodwill or at yard sales occasionally, and they're worth picking up. The shark one in the video is great too.
This channel is gold. There's tutorials for cleaning EVERYTHING on there. Just go subscribe!
.mp3 is very small, but uses lossy compression which means it's lower quality
.flac is smaller than .wav, but uses lossless compression so it's high quality
.m4a is an audio file format that apple uses. that's all i really know
downloading the music
doubledouble.top is a life saver. you can download from a variety of services including but not limited to apple music, spotify, soundcloud, tidal, deezer, etc.
i'd recommend ripping your music from tidal or apple music since they're the best quality (i think apple music gives you lossless audio anyway. .m4a can be both lossy and lossless, but from the text on doubledouble i assume they're ripping HQ files off apple music)
i also love love love cobalt.tools for ripping audio/video from youtube (they support a lot of other platforms too!)
of course, many artists have their music on bandcamp — purchase or download directly from them if you can. bandcamp offers a variety of file formats for download
file conversion
if you're downloading from apple music with doubledouble, it spits out an .m4a file.
.m4a is ok for some people but if you prefer .flac, you may wanna convert it. ffmpeg is a CLI (terminal) tool to help with media conversion
if you're on linux or macOS, you can use parameter expansion to batch convert all files in a folder. put the files in one place first, then with your terminal, cd into the directory and run:
for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.flac"; done
this converts from .m4a to .flac — change the file extensions if needed.
soulseek
another way to get music is through soulseek. soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network which is mainly used for music. nicotine+ is a pretty intuitive (and open-source) client if you don't like the official one.
you can probably find a better tutorial on soulseek somewhere else. just wanted to make this option known
it's bad etiquette to download from people without sharing files of your own, so make sure you've got something shared. also try to avoid queuing up more than 1-2 albums from one person in a row
tagging & organizing your music
tagging: adding metadata to a music file (eg. song name, artist name, album) that music players can recognize and display
if you've ripped music from a streaming platform, chances are it's already tagged. i've gotten files with slightly incorrect tags from doubledouble though, so if you care about that then you might wanna look into it
i use musicbrainz picard for my tagging. they've got pretty extensive documentation, which will probably be more useful than me
basically, you can look up album data from an online database into the program, and then match each track with its file. the program will tag each file correctly for you (there's also options for renaming the file according to a certain structure if you're into that!)
there's also beets, which is a CLI tool for... a lot of music collection management stuff. i haven't really used it myself, but if you feel up to it then they've got extensive documentation too. for most people, though, it's not really a necessity
how you wanna organize your music is completely up to you. my preferred filestructure is:
artist > album > track # track
using a music player
the options for this are pretty expansive. commonly used players i see include VLC, foobar2000, clementine (or a fork of it called strawberry), and cmus (for the terminal)
you can also totally use iTunes or something. i don't know what audio players other systems come with
i personally use dopamine. it's a little bit slow, but it's got a nice UI and is themeable plus has last.fm support (!!!)
don't let the github page fool you, you don't have to build from source. you can find the releases here
click the "assets" dropdown on the most recent release, and download whichever one is compatible with your OS
syncing
if you're fine with your files just being on one device (perhaps your computer, but perhaps also an USB drive or an mp3 player), you don't have to do this
you can sync with something like google drive, but i hate google more than i hate spotify
you can get a free nextcloud account from one of their providers with 2GB of free storage. you can use webDAV to access your files from an app on your phone or other device (documents by readdle has webDAV support, which is what i use)
disroot and blahaj.land are a couple providers i know that offer other services as well as nextcloud (so you get more with your account), but accounts are manually approved. do give them a look though!!
if you're tech-savvy and have an unused machine lying around, look into self-hosting your own nextcloud, or better yet, your own media server. i've heard that navidrome is a pretty good audio server. i unfortunately don't have experience with self-hosting at the moment so i have like zero advice to give here. yunohost seems to be a really easy way to manage a server
afterword
i don't know if any of this is helpful, but i just wanted to consolidate my personal advice in one place. fuck big tech. own your media, they could take it away from you at any moment
charlie kirk did deserve to die. he deserved the way in which he died. he died wearing a shirt that said freedom, and his last word was "violence". he believed that the 2nd amendment required the sacrifice of lives. he loved the weapon that killed him more than the safety of his own young children. i hope it wasn't an instant death. i hope that just for a second he understood what was happening, and i hope he died scared.
gummygunk
pixelskylines
dededos
izzy806
jacobvanloon
ellievsbear
jbbartram-illu
