MY BLOG

I moved!!!!

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Last week, I finally moved out of my old flat, and into a new place. I have different flatmates (thank god), a bigger room, and finally, a garden that I can tend to my heart's content. Words can barely describe my relief, as I was finding my previous flatmates (well, one in particular) to be absolutely unbearable. They're a smarmy person, with an inflated sense of importance and absolutely terrible taste in food and music. One time they served me a meal that was a suspiciously rectangular plate of mashed potato, which for some reason was green. I'm endlessly pleased to now be fully in charge of what I eat, even if it means I have to worry about it a bit more. They also had no sense of etiquette - if I invited my friends over, they would hang around, refusing to leave us alone for even a second, butting into conversation as much as possible. And then once insulted me for not bringing friends over. I wonder why...

Anyhow, it feels like I can finally start a new chapter in my life. My new flatmates who won't snicker when they pass by me enjoying my hobbies, or ever feed me oven-baked lamb chops - it's a dream come true.

Extremely bad food

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I move out in two weeks. I am extremely glad about this, because yesterday's dinner, made by my flatmate, consisted of:

  • One(1) oven-baked mutton chop that I managed to get three pieces of meat from (no sauces, spices or even pepper)
  • Three(3) pieces of raw capsicum
  • One(1) whole carrot, sliced lengthways, raw

Needless to say I was not pleased.

A very funny guestbook entry

le mercredi, vingt quatre janvier, deux mille vingt quatre

There is now a very funny entry in my guestbook. It reads:

"⚠️ EUROPEAN IDENTIFIED ⚠️ EUROPEAN IDENTIFIED ⚠️ YOU USE DD/MM/YYYY ⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️ yyyy/mm/dd is the most logical. and mm/dd/yyyy. the day is not the most important info and should not be first. The year of the month is. If you're looking through papers you dont really care about the date, why is it first. Fuck "ordering" from smallest to biggest (even though the number for day will be higher than the number for month most times)"

I find this funny for a few reasons: Firstly, I'm not European, and it is not only European countries that use DD/MM/YYYY. Some countries even use different notation for different languages. I also find it funny because this poor person thinks that language should be logical. Unfortunately, I am a neocities website owner, so I enjoy randomness, and thus today I will be writing the date in full in French.

The randomness of language, and indeed presentation of data such as time, is one of the most beautiful things about humanity. We are so split on how to convey information that there are conflicting calendars and year systems still in use today! We can't even agree on how old someone is when they're born, what day the week starts on, or what base we should use for counting. We frequently modify, adjust, wiggle around, or circumvent our own arbitrary systems just so they'll conform better to the reality of life, such as moving an hour around depending on the season. Wouldn't life be sad if everyone used yyyy/mm/dd? Wouldn't it be uninspiring?

Finally, I find it funny because they're super invigorated about this. In order to make them as angry as possible, I'm going to start using really weird time formatting from now on. If anybody has any suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Mmmm passive aggression yum

January 21, 2024

I'm very glad I'm moving out next month. That's because for some reason, yesterday night my flatmate decided to hide the tv remote from me instead of... talking to me like an adult. I was so baffled I didn't even say anything, just walked away. Their childishness and unwillingness to communicate has been getting on my nerves for a while, but this was seriously the end of my rope. Certainly, I watch movies often and they have every right to want a movie night. So why didn't they just talk to me during dinner or something? I was so upset over this I struggled to sleep. That's why I'm very happy I'm leaving.

Pink Lemonade Sour Belts

January 15, 2024

Feeling better :) It's been so hot recently that I fear I may just melt. I don't go out much anyway but I'm especially being forced inside recently - 27c at 70% humidity is no joke. I'm also starting to pack up my things. I move in a month and a day, and I'm really looking forward to it. The place I move to has a garden that I've been encouraged to garden in, and a beautiful lounge and kitchen. It's a lot further from my workplace, but the longer bus ride will be worth it. Plus, I'm kind of sick of my current roommates. One of them I love like a brother, but the other (his partner) is rude, irritating and just generally anathema to me. So it'll be an absolute breath of fresh air to live with different people.

Yesterday I finished paranormasight, a very fun visual novel. I've moved onto a new one - clannad. Is it just me, or do all the girls in this game act like they're lobotomised? They don't just look like they're melting, they act like it, too. I know the VN and anime are famous and defined the 2000s as far as visual novels go, but I'm seriously unimpressed so far. I'll keep going, and maybe it'll surprise me.

Blehhhhh

January 11, 2024

Lately, I've been feeling pretty anxious and down about not being very... useful. As in, there's nothing about me that puts me apart from others. If I was a dentist or a scuba diving instructor, I would have specialist knowledge about something, and the skills to back it up. Instead, my job is eminently replacable by anyone with admin experience. I don't feel very useful in my personal life either. If I was bilingual, or even had my full driver's license, I would be able to do something not everyone can do. Even if I was a great cook, or I could crochet, or was able to draw something people were actually interested in. Instead, I feel like a nothing-person. You could scoop me out of the world and not very much would change. I can't look backwards and see an impression I've made on the world around me. It bums me out.

All according to keikaku

January 10, 2024

Maaaaan, why is learning Japanese so hard? I've been studying for years now but it feels like my improvement is glacially slow. Obviously it's easy to give up hope - and I refuse to let myself despair - but it's pretty annoying. I've been reading yotsubato, which is incredibly simple as far as manga goes, and that can still be challenging. I'm currently also watching yuru camp with japanese subtitles, and sometimes I can only gather the gist of a conversation. This is leagues better than I would have been able to do a year ago, but it's still disappointing and frustrating that it's taking so long. My end goal is to be able to watch tokusatsu without subtitles, and possibly even to translate things myself, and that's definitely a far-off goal.

Like I said though, I won't give up. I use wanikani to learn kanji, and I've recently started on Quartet after finishing Genki 2. Hopefully now that I've also incorporated immersion learning into my study, I'll be able to see my accomplishments as milestones that can compel me forward.

My interest in Japanese actually started with my dad. He's a two-time first dan black belt (once in Ashihara Karate, once in (REDACTED) with me) and he went to Japan in the 90s. When I was a kid, he would tell us about his travels and teach us how to count to ten in Japanese. He also watched ghibli movies with me and shows a very mild interest in anime. I hope one day I can go to Hiroshima with him and ring the peace bell like he did those years ago.

New year, new me (lying)

January 8, 2024

I'm 23 now! I had a nice quiet birthday with my family, who live in a small coastal town. My favourite gift was a very cute set of earrings. As for this site, it looks like someone has added it to a list on cloudhiker, which is like StumbleUpon. I feel very honoured to have my website on something like that, since this was originally just a fun way to waste time. If you're reading this because you found me through cloudhiker, hi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you for looking at my website!!!!

Anyway, since it's 2024, I should have resolutions, but I kind of don't. To put it boringly, it feels like right now my whole existence is just about saving money for something nebulous in the future. That's not to say I'm having a bad time - quite the opposite - but I'd like a bit of action. I'm planning to go to Japan with either my sister or my dad this year, so maybe that will be the highlight of this year.

GETTEEEER CHAAAANGE!

December 3, 2023

It's been like four months since I last posted here... (crumbles into dust) Life is same old, although definitely looking up. I have a new place next year which is exciting cause im SICK of my current flatmates and their bullshit. I'm looking forward to my christmas break but work has honestly been going pretty well and I've been consistently overbudgeting so I feel pretty good about things. My Quartet Japanese textbook arrived yesterday and I'm immensely pleased with it; it's exactly at my level and it feels really great to be back in the saddle studying. I'd say I'm solidly in N4 territory, now struggling towards N3. My huge weak points are speaking and listening but I'm okay with being bad at speaking since I'm more interested in being able to translate text and audio. My writing is also pretty shit but the textbook is giving me plenty of practice. I'm actually okay-ish with kanji now after hours and hours of wanikani, although I only know about 450 by heart.

I'm hoping to go visit Japan next year, but my sister (who I'm planning to go with) is being really wishy-washy about getting permission from her boss. I'm considering just going by myself but I don't want to hurt her feelings. In other news, I'm single again, but I don't really mind and I feel happy to be single.

Japanese Ketchup Pasta Hamburgert

August 6, 2023

It's surprising how some experience and time can completely change one's ability to learn. I'm self studying Python right now for the game I want to make; in high school and university I learned C#, but I always had trouble with python. The way it handled for loops was especially confusing. Here's one for example:

cats = ['kitty', 'kitty2']

for cat in cats:

print('I'm a kitty cat')

In my brain, I could never understand where the variable 'cat' came from. It just seemed to appear out of nowhere. In contrast, nowadays it's immediately clear that it's just a placeholder word that refers to the current selection in the array as the program cycles through it - but I just couldn't get my head around that as a teen. It seems absurdly obvious now that I have more grey matter in there, but somehow it just never clicked. It makes me feel more hopeful for the things I still struggle with - maybe in a few years I won't have any trouble at all with something that feels impossible right now.

In other news, I recently read a really depressing essay someone wrote on their neocities. The theme was all about how some people 'shouldn't' make a neocities because they have nothing valuable to say. What an exclusionary, sad outlook on life. They really saw no value in people learning and having fun on neocities, instead deciding that websites had to be useful or interesting based on their own arbitrary opinions. I truly hope nobody who follows my website feels that way, because it's a massively limiting way of seeing the world. Self fulfilment and/or having fun is a reason in and of itself to create!

Press the back button for older blog posts

August 4, 2023

Okay, I finally did it and split this blog into two pages because it was getting massive. Feels nice to start fresh in a way! Anyhow, life is continuing on as it is wont to do. I made a game recently which you can play here, and I'm getting the itch to make another. This time I'm planning on making it more artistically cohesive so I'm learning how to animate 2d skeletons. Here's an example of one (the gif export option on DragonBones is scuffed as hell, I promise it's actually smooth and loops in reality):

An animation of a two-legged robot walking.

Yesterday I had nothing to do at work so I read most of a book about topophilia. It's a very interesting area of study; a lot of it seems very obvious until you really think about it and realise you're making a bunch of assumptions based on your own experience. For example, the fact that to us the stars are really far away in all directions. But to a medieval person, looking up at the stars would be more like staring directly up at the pitch-black roof of a cathedral. Our concepts of verticality and horizontal thinking are completely different. Isn't that beautiful in a way?