crnahg_yhor

last week
○ figure out what to do
○ pre-process grammar deck

I figured out what to do for study, but I haven't done a great job doing it.

I monologued to the cohuman about it, and convinced myself that the thing I don't like doing (grammar) was, in fact, the correct thing to do: per unit effort it would teach me novel things; could be done with high effort only at startup and then forward motion could be maintained with much less energy.

( monologue )

The startup cost was moderate: it took about 8 hours of focus to get it ready to work with, which I somehow managed to do in one day (noon to 9, with an hour break to pick up and eat dinner, I think). Some code archeology was involved, but only took an hour. I'm willing to call that moderate because I knew what I needed to be doing the whole time, and I was able to get it done with one day's motivation.

The downside, of course, is that grammar/(words & collocations that are used in ways hard to convey in a short definition) is dull dull dull dull. There's a couple of things going on there - I think a surprisingly large one is that there's no audio with the example sentences.

The example sentences themselves are hella boring. The learner is expected to have a sorta limited vocabulary; the learner is expected to be unfamiliar with Japanese so the sentences are pretty grammatically simple as to not detract from the structures being explained; it's from the 80s and everything is about eating steak and playing tennis.

It would be _fine_ except I left the intervals really short by accident, and seeing the same example three times in three days sapped my desire to power through. I started going through them on Friday, and got through the initial phase for about 1/4th of them, but haven't made any forward progress since. I fixed the initial intervals, which will be helpful going through the remaining 1000 or so cards.

What am I doing with grammar study? What is my goal?
( navel gazing )

Anyway, moving on away from my half-assed philosophical thinking on grammar study...
An interesting (good/bad?) thing is that I had at least some familiarity with nearly every grammar entry that was left to cover in A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. There were 3 or 4 that I hadn't (consciously) encountered in some place or another. Good, because it means it shouldn't take too long for me to get through it; bad, because it's less than maximally new to me. I could've dealt with it earlier!

When I've finished with DoBJG, hopefully in the next few weeks, I'll have to decide whether I want to move on to DoIJG or if I want to use 日本語文型辞典. They should both be a bit more interesting than DoBJG, though I expect 辞典 will be more interesting than IJG. IJG might have already had some of the preprocessing done to it. IJG will probably have more explanation per point than 辞典, but 辞典 will probably have more examples per point.

"Obviously, the answer is to use both!" Well, maybe. They use different headwords for each structure, and compress them differently, so referencing both at once can be a bit of a pain.

Kanji
When I'm done with DoBJG, I might take a week or three to switch from grammar study back to kanji study for a little while. On top of the 2100ish 常用/Jouyou/General Use kanji, there's quite a few more that show up pretty regularly. There's 800 or so in the 人名用/jinmeiyou/Name Use list; +3k in the last level of the Kanji Kentei test for about 6k in total.

Vocabulary
It's fine. I'm leaving it alone for now, other than doing what's due.

This week
□ keep up in anki, more or less
□ progress with grammar deck

I would say that I don't need to write this much, that I'm procrastinating, but actually I'm surprised how much reading my old overly-verbose notes helped me remember what I was doing.

5+ years ago, I guess, I read a Deepness in the Sky (after reading a fire upon the deep which some friends had liked).

What really sticks with me after all this time is how jealous I was, and am, of the zipheads.

(right now, I'm procrastinating doing something desired but pointless.)

Pungency is not quality.

I know it has become fashionable in certain circles to marvel at flavour, any flavour.

Are high-ester rums for drinking?

lately, i'm eating a certain kind of food when bored: hot sauce, mustard, citrus wheels.

( there's been a post floating around about a studying involving people giving themselves shocks instead of sitting in a room by themselves )

A couple of years ago, probably around 2017 january, I played Machinarium with my housemates. "I played" is a strong phrasing; I think I mostly just watched and occasionally made a suggestion.

I was out of the room at the very start of the game - 2 minutes? 3 minutes? I'd gone to use the bathroom, or change shirts, or something. I came in The plot made no sense: the player-character wanders up to a town, is hassled by some poker-playing baddies, makes friends with a cook, etc, but I just accepted it. Towards the end, somehow I became aware of the missing something - there might've been a flashback to the starting sequence - and the random events that had happened suddenly fit together.

(... You know, looking at someone's full playthrough right now, the sequence in question maybe didn't even happen at the start? Maybe the game just wasn't supposed to make sense until later.)

Anyway, we've played through about half of Creaks so far; the plot here also doesn't make sense, though I guess maybe it will by the end. We've settled on "maybe this is how this person always leaves their apartment".

Cohuman described it as "chill": "Do you usually die this much in chill games?" I don't love it, but I'm willing to put up with anything if it's short, so I'll try to wait to form my opinion until it's over.

Also on Cocktail Codex: there's also a bit of Japanese-bar fetishism, which is common, and I think their analysis leaves out some really important point.

( I can talk about Japanese bars! I've been to them! ... a few, anyway )

I've gotten way away from my point, but I think my idea was: you can only have a perfection-focused bar (or restaurant) if you can afford to. In SF (and nearby), I've only been to a handful of businesses that weren't on the first floor of their building (outside of malls). I lived on top of a restaurant that was on the second floor for a while, but that's the only one I know about (Incidentally, the owner of the building was arrested for a lot of reasons).

I like my current neighborhood, a lot, but I'm a little weirded out by how non-dense the streets near the bart station are.

My description to my Pittsburgh area friends

it's just like Walnut Street in Shadyside, except there's a hardware store, too. Also it's four times as long! But maybe only twice as much stuff?

A friend wants to see me in person, and it's obvious that I'm going to say no, but it doesn't make it pleasant.

I want to talk to my friends, but it's so hard to keep a conversation going.

I want to talk to people who aren't my friends, but why should they care what I have to say?

row regularly for a few weeks. my elbow hurts, better take a break. stop for a few weeks; elbow gets worse, neck gets stiff, etc. shrug. row row row. elbow gets better, neck gets better.

now there's a length in my back that hurts like hell if I stretch whatever muscle it is - I can't bend over with both my legs on the ground, but if I balance carefully on one foot and pivot, it's fine.

wear and tear on my body is bullshit and i'd like a refund.

I meant to do this just as an addition to the other post, but then it got longer, though not very organized.

They seem to have been approved as kn-95s by those proper authorities, and ... I lack the vocabulary for their state in the US: they had for a period an EUA ?for medical use? in the US, and now don't, though there's no reason given for the specific ones we have, or the document I found might be out of date, or or or... Some body in (I forget) New Zealand or Australia approved them, for something, saying that they meet some criteria (that I can't find).

I'm a little put off by ... the whole graph/cycle/machine, I guess. I'm pretty sure the information exists that would allow me to make a judgement about what masks I should be buying and wearing, and yet, I can't find it.

I'm pretty sure they're probably better at filtering than the (aesthetically pleasant, comfortable, and reasonably well-fitting) fabric masks I've been using, but that's maybe only in part based off evidence (from authority; my personal sense experience is also present but i don't have enough knowledge to rely on it). They do fit very tightly to my face, which I understand can be a problem with the kn95s with earloops.

There's a lot of articles about how to know if you have a legitimate n95/kn95/kf94/whatever. There are a lot of people (in, say, a 10 mile radius of me) who say they're finding n95/kn95/kf94s in hardware stores, etc, though I don't know if they're finding good masks or less-good masks.

I don't know what scenario is happening: my local hardware store stocked one (relative) duds, but has other good ones; my local hardware store is stocking all duds, but other stores have good ones; all the stores in the area are stocking a mix at random of duds and good ones; everyone is stocking (relative) duds because all the good ones are going elsewhere (to medical workers, say). This is probably a nonexhaustive enumeration of possible cases.

---

( covid rates, crowds )

About a year ago, an artist I liked put out an art book, and I pre-ordered a copy.

roadbump the first: artist is Japanese and based in Japan roadbump the second: apparently their shipping system didn't want to have contact with the US because covid, so there was going to be a delay of unknown duration.

Well, whatever. I didn't mind waiting... except that the delay was so long that I moved inside of it, and put off updating my address with them because I didn't want to break out my shitty Japanese to navigate any kind of customer support... and then it shipped.

But that should've been fine! It shipped Japan Post, who hands off to USPS, so my change of address should apply.

Except USPS seems to have lost it. Cohuman has been handling the calls for me, because I couldn't even figure out the online contact thing, and I think they're gone through to call 5 now.

I say "lost it", and I was going to correct myself, but I guess that's not inaccurate. USPS believes they still have it: they seem to know that they haven't delivered it to the wrong place, nor have they tried to hand it back to Japan. But the last scan on it was last Thursday. Apparently because it's registered & insured, it should be in a safe, but they're not sure where: in SF? On a truck? In Sacramento?

The person who has been trying to handle the situation is doing their best to find it before it gets sent on a long loop, which I appreciate, but also... eh, I don't really care as long as it gets here. I've waited a year; I can wait another week.