Ramblings @joybirds - Tumblr Blog

my hips don't lie but they will exaggerate details, misrepresent the facts, and on occasion deceive via omission of crucial information

fiollaigean

how to cover letter:

polite greeting (it's me, boy)

introduction (i'm the ps5)

establish credentials (speaking to you inside your brain)

establish purpose (leave the girl, we don't need her)

describe what you can bring to the organization (cowboy times in space)

springsgreenleaves

Okay but you know what I hate

I legitimately had the "it's me boy I'm the PS5" cv letter post in my head writing my CV

And it freaking worked

huckleberrysigh

Edward Nygma gets pulled into a visitors room at Arkham and pauses when he sees Batman, looking wearier and more exhausted than ever. Jim Gordon sits beside the big bad Bat, baffled and amused.

Riddler: ...what's this?

Batman: *heavy sigh* I'm hiring you for a job

Riddler: I beg your finest pardon?

Batman: *even heavier sigh* Red Robin wants to do an escape room for his birthday

junkfoodcinemas

Tron (1982) dir. Steven Lisberger

saintofpride201

l8liex

burgeoning-ambition

I've created a masterlist of the Japanese lessons I've posted on my wordpress blog so far! Please feel free to check it out here, or feel free to use any of the following links to navigate to a certain lesson:

Reading and Writing Hiragana and Katakana

Reading and Writing Kanji

Parts of Speech in Japanese (Part One: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives)

Parts of Speech in Japanese (Part Two: Adverbs, Counters, Postpositions, Conjunctions)

An Introduction to Particles

The Copula (です)

I'll do my best to remember to update this post, but the main link on my wordpress will definitely stay up to date as I post!

polyglot-thought

[Japanese→English] @smallplasticgoose Japanese Duck Idiom — Color Coded Translation

Link to original post

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

鴨が葱を背負って来る

かもがねぎをしょってくる

A duck comes carrying leeks on its back

This is an idiom equivalent to “Along comes a fool begging to be departed from his money.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Please correct me if I made a mistake

easy-japan

JLPT N4 Vocabulary of the day 試験 (shiken) - Examination / Test

明日、日本語の試験があります。 Ashita, nihongo no shiken ga arimasu. I have a Japanese exam tomorrow.

試験は難しかったですが、頑張りました。 Shiken wa muzukashikatta desu ga, ganbarimashita. The exam was difficult, but I did my best.

次の試験のために、毎日勉強しています。 Tsugi no shiken no tame ni, mainichi benkyou shite imasu. I am studying every day for the next exam.

Can you try to make your own sentence with 試験? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New to Japanese? This one is for you: (KANANA) Best Free App to learn Hiragana Katakana

sammilearns

here are a few podcasts I listen to weekly for practice!

Japanese with Teppei and Noriko

short, concise episodes covering various topics! easy to follow along!

Let's Learn Japanese from Small Talk

longer more detailed episodes with very casual Japanese! they explain some of the vocab they use while speaking (especially slang) and have a vocab list at the end that they go over with a link to read along!

Japanese with Kanako

great for shadowing practice with a few listening exercises mixed in. perfect if you are using the genki series!

what are some podcasts you like to listen to? 教えてください！😊

clever-ludicrous

How to Actually Learn a Language (Without Wasting Time)

Polyglots will do anything to sell you something, so here’s the fastest and most basic technique based on my research.

—

Step 1 – Getting the Absolute Basics In

This is where most people already get lost. If you search social media for how to start, the advice isn’t necessarily bad, but it often makes you dependent on a single resource, usually an app that will eventually try to charge you. Duolingo, for example, has turned into a mega-corporation that perfected gamification to keep you on the app.

Remember: free apps make money by keeping you on their platform, not by helping you become fluent.

At this stage, the goal is not to gain conversational skills but to avoid overwhelming yourself and get a feel for what you’re actually getting into. All my recommended resources are free because I believe learning a language should be a basic right. I wouldn’t advise spending any money until you’re sure you’ll stick with it. Otherwise, it can turn into a toxic “but I paid for this, so I have to keep going” mindset that drains all the fun out of learning.

• Language Transfer – Highly recommended for Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, German, Greek, Italian, Swahili, and French.

• Textbooks – Simply search for [language] textbook PDF, or check LibGen and the Internet Archive. Don’t overthink which book to choose—it doesn’t matter much.

• Podcasts – Coffee Break is a solid choice for many languages.

• YouTube Channels – Join r/Learn[language] on Reddit and find recommendations.

—

Step 2 – The 20/80 Principle

The idea is that 20% of words make up 80% of everyday speech.

What you’re going to do:

Search “Most common words [language] PDF”.

This list is now your best friend

For flashcards, I highly recommend AnkiPro. It lets you import pre-made lists for Anki/Quizlet and has an archive where you’ll definitely find the most common words. But it lacks audio. The real Anki program has it, but only on PC (unless you’re willing to pay $30 for the mobile app). Use AnkiPro for now—we’ll come back to repeating phrases later. In the meantime, find a YouTube video with the most common words pronounced, or use Google Translate for audio.

(Knowt is a free alternative for Quizlet if you prefer that)

These lists will spare you from learning unnecessary vocabulary at this stage. Spaced repetition (which Anki uses) can take longer, but it’s worth it because you want these words to stick. Anki will only introduce a small number of new words per day. Once you start new words, write phrases using them. Doesn’t matter if they’re random just try to use them.

—

Step 3 – The First Breakup With the Language

This isn’t really a step, but I have to mention it. For me (and for other language learners I’ve talked to) this is where motivation crashes.

The dopamine rush is over. Your ego boost is gone. You’re stuck understanding just enough to notice how much you don’t understand, and topics are getting more complex. Everything feels overwhelming, and motivation drops.

This is normal. You have to push through it.

I’ll write a separate post on how I manage this phase, but for now:

• Take a step back and make sure you understand the basics.

• Find something that keeps you motivated.

• Consistency is key. Even if it’s just five minutes a day, do it. (Edit: You can search online for inspiration on scheduled plans. I found one that organizes language exercises into different categories based on how much time you have each day, which seems helpful. https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/s/sSGUtORurM

Personally, I used AI to create a weekly plan kind of as a last resort before giving up on the language, but try looking for pre-made ones first.)

I personally enjoyed story learning during this phase. And don’t forget the frequency lists are still your best friend. For story learning check out Olly Richards books!

—

Step 4 – Immersion

Your brain needs active and passive immersion. The earlier steps were mostly active, and now you’ll start the fun part.

How to Immerse Yourself:

1. Join some kind of community.

• I enjoy Reddit/ r/lean[Language]. Do this in your target language, but also in the language you already speak. Post that you’re looking for a chat partner in your target language. The most people are nice, and the mean ones will just ghost you anyway.

2. Watch shows.

• Subtitles only in your target language or drop English subtitles ASAP.

3. Listen to podcasts.

4. Read

I personally dislike media made for kids (except on low-energy days). For real immersion, pick something for adults.

5. Translate, write, and speak.

Before this, you wrote simple sentences using vocabulary. Now, put them to work:

• Translate texts.

• Keep a diary.

• Write short stories.

• Complain about the language in the language.

It doesn’t matter, just use it.

—

Step 5 – Speaking

Start speaking earlier than you think you’re ready. Trust me. This is probably where most people disagree with me. I do think you should start by focusing on input, but the importance of output isn’t talked about enough.

Now, the real Anki (or any program with phrases + audio) comes into play. At lower levels, it doesn’t make sense to just start talking, since you wouldn’t even be able to recognize your mistakes. Here’s what you’ll do:

1. Repeat phrases out loud.

2. Record yourself speaking.

3. Compare your recording to the original audio and adjust your pronunciation.

If it’s a tonal language (or if you struggle with accents), start this even earlier.

Other Speaking Strategies:

• Shadowing – Repeat after native speakers.

• Reading aloud – Your own texts, books, anything.

• Talking to yourself.

• Talking to natives (if you’re brave).

I’m not here to fix social anxiety, but I am here to help with language learning, so just speak.

—

Final Thoughts

• These steps overlap, and that’s fine.

• This is supposed to be fun. Learning just because you’re “too deep in” or because of school won’t cut it.

• If you’re lost, take a step back.

• I’m not a professional. I just think a straight answer is way too hard to find.

—

If you have anything to add, feel free to share.

flork-of-cows-official

isaacsapphire

You really can! I somehow had a couple unclaimed paychecks from years back that I found this way. Really saved my bacon in some lean times.

materialist-scumbag

on the Cascades — undated

So the thing about the Cascades, the actual mountain range running from like northern California up through Oregon and Washington and into BC, is that they're volcanoes — not "mountains that happen to include some volcanoes" but a volcanic arc, the same kind of geological structure as the Andes or the Aleutians or for that matter Japan, where you've got an oceanic plate (here the Juan de Fuca, what's left of the Farallon after most of it slid under North America over the last hundred million years) subducting beneath a continental plate and melting at depth and the melt rising up through the crust to produce a line of stratovolcanoes spaced more or less evenly along the arc — Lassen, Shasta, McLoughlin, Crater Lake (which is what's left of Mount Mazama after it blew its top off about 7,700 years ago in an eruption the Klamath people remember in oral tradition, which is wild — that's a story passed mouth to mouth for three hundred generations), Three Sisters, Jefferson, Hood, Adams, St. Helens, Rainier, Glacier Peak, Baker, and on into Garibaldi and Meager up in Canada.

And the thing nobody talks about in the lower 48 is that this is an active volcanic arc. Like, currently. St. Helens went off in 1980 and that's the one everybody knows but Lassen erupted in 1915 and Shasta's overdue and Rainier — Rainier is the genuinely terrifying one — Rainier is sitting there above Tacoma covered in like a cubic mile of ice and when (not if) it does anything significant the ice melts and you get lahars, basically rivers of liquid concrete moving at highway speeds down the valleys that are now full of subdivisions. The USGS has been quite clear about this for decades. The state of Washington has lahar warning sirens. They do drills in the schools.

But — and this is the part that's actually interesting — the volcanoes are also why the Pacific Northwest is the Pacific Northwest. The arc runs north-south parallel to the coast about a hundred miles inland, so when the wet Pacific air comes off the ocean and runs into this wall it dumps its moisture on the western slope and arrives on the eastern slope dry. Seattle gets 37 inches a year. Yakima, eighty miles east, gets 8. The entire western Washington/Oregon ecology — the temperate rainforest, the Doug fir, the salmon runs, the whole green wet thing the region sells itself as on tourism brochures — exists because of the rain shadow, which exists because of the volcanoes (well, the Cascade range as a whole, the volcanoes are the high points but the bulk uplift is the wall), which exists because of the subduction zone, which is also the thing that's going to produce the magnitude 9 Cascadia earthquake everyone's been waiting on since the paleoseismology in the 80s and 90s established that the last one was January 26th, 1700 (date known to within hours because the tsunami hit Japan and they wrote it down).

So you've got this situation where the same geological feature that makes the region beautiful and habitable and economically viable — the rain shadow that creates the timber economy, the rivers full of salmon, the volcanic soils that support the wine industry in eastern Washington and Oregon, the geothermal potential they barely use — is also the thing that periodically tries to kill everyone living there, on timescales (centuries to millennia) that are long enough that human institutions have a hard time taking them seriously and short enough that on any given day your odds aren't great.

And meanwhile the actual mountains, the peaks — Hood and Rainier and Baker — function in regional iconography the way the Alps function in Switzerland or Fuji functions in Japan, which is to say they're on every brewery logo and outdoor company logo and city seal, they're the visual shorthand for the whole region, the thing you see from the freeway on a clear day that makes you remember why you put up with the rain. Nobody puts the lahar inundation zone on the brewery logo.

Anyway the early settlers, the actual 1850s Oregon Trail Anglo settlers, basically didn't know any of this. They knew the mountains were there, they knew Hood from a distance, they had no idea they were standing on a subduction zone or that the indigenous people they were displacing remembered Mazama exploding. The science is all 20th century. The Cascadia earthquake hypothesis isn't established until like the late 80s. So the entire built environment of the region — Seattle, Portland, the freeway system, the bridges, the dams — gets constructed on geological assumptions that turn out to be wrong, and the retrofit problem is now enormous and nobody really wants to think about it because the timescales don't match the political ones, and Rainier just sits there above Tacoma being beautiful.

materialist-scumbag-og

Reminder the tumblr account has changed, though it's kept the same URL. Go follow it here https://www.tumblr.com/blog/materialist-scumbag

materialist-scumbag

Texas Monthly's 2025 Top 50 BBQ list

Right, so the thing about the canonical Texas BBQ joint — the Franklin's, the Snow's, the whole post-2009 prestige circuit — is that it is doing something almost completely unrelated to what Texas BBQ was for most of its history, namely Czech and German meat markets in central Texas selling whatever cuts didn't move that day, smoked because smoking was the preservation technology you had, served on butcher paper because plates were a fixed cost they didn't want to absorb and besides, you were supposed to be eating it standing up and leaving.

Lockhart, Luling, Taylor, the whole I-35 corridor between Austin and Waco — these were towns where the cotton economy collapsed, with no pretensions to being culinary destinations, and a bunch of central European immigrants who'd come over in the 1850s-80s to escape the Habsburg conscription and various failed revolutions ended up running general stores with meat counters in the back, and the meat counter outlasted the general store because Americans, even rural Americans, will pay for protein cooked by someone else.

(The German and Czech part matters because it explains the sausage — actual sausage, with casings, with technique, distinct from the smoked-tube-of-mystery you get in Memphis or KC — and it also explains the absence of sauce, which is the single most defamiliarizing thing about Texas BBQ to anyone whose mental model was formed by Kraft commercials and Famous Dave's.)

What happened in the late 2000s was that Aaron Franklin opened a trailer in Austin and applied a kind of obsessive-perfectionist single-cut focus — the brisket, prepared with a precision that nobody in Lockhart was bothering with because they were running a business, they had pork ribs and sausage and turkey and beans to also worry about — and the food media, which had just spent a decade canonizing the chef-as-auteur in fine dining, immediately recognized the structural template. Single product. Master practitioner. Cult of personality. Lines around the block as proof of authenticity. Texas Monthly had been ranking joints since the 90s but the rankings entered a genuinely inflationary spiral around then.

And the inflationary spiral did real things. Brisket prices tripled. The prestige joints started doing things — wagyu, dry-aging, custom-built smokers from Mill Scale Metalworks that cost more than a house — that nobody in 1962 would have recognized as continuous with the practice. The 2025 list (which I've now skimmed) has a place doing brisket-fat-washed cocktails, which, fine, but.

A further wrinkle is that the Texas BBQ canon now exists in two parallel universes that pretend to be the same universe. There's the prestige universe — Franklin, Goldee's, Interstellar, the new wave of Houston joints, places where the brisket is genuinely transcendent and you're paying $40/lb and waiting three hours and the proprietor has been profiled in the New Yorker. And there's the actual living tradition — Kreuz, Smitty's, City Market in Luling, places that haven't fundamentally changed their operation in 40 years, where the brisket is fine, sometimes excellent, sometimes mediocre, and the whole point is that you're eating it in a room that smells like it's been smoking meat continuously since the Eisenhower administration because it has.

The prestige universe absolutely depends on the existence of the living tradition for its mythology — the whole "central Texas style," the butcher paper, the no-sauce, the pickles-and-onions-and-white-bread, all of it is borrowed iconography from Lockhart — and the prestige universe is also slowly killing the living tradition by inflating customer expectations to a point where Kreuz Market on a weekday afternoon feels disappointing. Which it isn't, particularly. It is exactly what it has always been. You're the one who changed.

(The Black-owned East Texas tradition, which is older than the central Texas Czech-German thing and uses different woods and different cuts and actually does have sauce, is its own whole other story — it gets one or two slots on the Texas Monthly list as a kind of acknowledged exception, but the canonical "Texas BBQ" coverage is overwhelmingly about a specific German immigrant practice that got rebranded as the state's authentic folk cuisine sometime around 1985.)

Anyway the new list has Goldee's in Fort Worth at the top again, which, sure. The Burnt End in Kansas would object to several of the underlying premises but they're not on the list because they're in Kansas.

materialist-scumbag-og

Reminder the tumblr account has changed, though it's kept the same URL. Go follow it here https://www.tumblr.com/blog/materialist-scumbag