i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

The newest NYT crossword-- technically tomorrow's but available tonight -- included a clue/answer pair of "What Mary might have had if she were into Italian sports cars?" / ( technically a spoiler )...

...so naturally I had to rewrite the whole poem... 😂

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Another Encanto fic idea --
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I've been trying to work out when the movie takes place...

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Note to my cat:

This is just to say

I have yeeted
the spider
that was on
my leg

and which
you were probably saving
for a midnight snack

Forgive me
it was necessary
so leggy
and so AAAAAHFUCKNOGETITOFF

me: literally has several half-written things in progress -- email to dad about December aide hours, amazon review for a thing, client survey for service dog stuff, reply on twitter -- that I keep bouncing back and forth between even mid sentence

also me: I might be ADD but WHO KNOWS IT IS HARD TO TELL

also also me: pauses review mid-word to write this

...I laughed at myself a little.

(Am talking with my therapist about ::waves hand in vague gesture:: all this; she is v supportive so yay)

I've been watching The Librarians (started as a rewatch but then turns out I'd seen less than half

and here's an episode where they just figured out there are vampires

and one of the characters, Jacob Stone, kinda growls "I don't like vampires"

...he's played by Christian Kane, who was (Eliot on Leverage and also) Lindsey, an evil lawyer on Angel

My amusement at this is vaster than it probably deserves.

Hahahaha

Dark Crystal series: blah blah Crystal Desert

Brain: immediately demands crossover with Guild Wars

::facepalm::

Also: "Puppets! Yay!" ::dead::

At one point today I was relating an anecdote about badminton, but couldn’t remember the word. So I said "what's the thing that's not tennis?"

Scarily, my friend suggested badminton right away, which is good because I had forgotten "shuttlecock" also, but half remembered it, and I'm pretty sure "where you bat around a floaty rocket chicken" would have helped.

...

...yeah.

(I'm totally fascinated with both momentary-word-forgettery and the linguistic thing where "the thing that's *not* X" conveys "but is similar in some ways". Because technically everything other than tennis is "a thing that's not tennis" but only a few things can be relevantly described that way; badminton, ping pong, maybe volleyball?)

I have been productive, this weekend, at designing knitwear with a political bent.

( background )

You know the "Obama is the Ant Christ" meme?

Yeah, I designed a hat..

(Marked as mature for potential offense value, not because it contains naughty bits. I've still gotten a few outraged comments, but mostly they get deleted immediately.)

It occurred to me that the ant motif would make a good hat for any budding entomologist; I plan on designing/releasing that version, separate from the political version except in addition to "hat with ants marching around the brim" version, I want to do a more complicated design where the ante actually spiral around. (Which probably involves 8 segments each starting at a different chart row, though I'm going to have to do some jiggering so the end of round jog gets incorporated.). So basically easy mode and hard mode.

Ant hat will get tested, though. It's only smartass response-to-drama patterns that I post asap.

Four is shi, except when it's yon. "Four things" is yottsu (the n changes, because fun)
Eight is hachi, except when it's ya or some variant thereof. "eight things" is yattsu.

...fine, except. "Four days" is yokka (again, the n changes into "duplicate the next consonant") ... but "eight days" is yōka, not yaka or yakka.

Whyyyyyy.

(Rhetorical question.)

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Cuteness: the word/kanji for child is 子. The word/kanji for dog is 犬. The word for puppy? 子犬.

(Not everything makes this much sense. Though I am also amused that unskillful / bad at, 下手, visually "translates" as "below hand". I bet 上手, above hand, is skillful / good at. And volcano is, of course, 火山, fire mountain. ...I haven't figured out why entrance is 入り口 -- enter+"ri"+mouth -- whereas exit is just 出口 -- exit+mouth.)

(And I really really wish I could stop reading letters wrong. Hiragana, not kanji. I keep reading リ as い, confusing こ and に, and a few others trip me up... and I'm way more solid on hiragana than katakana, which has シ ツ ソ ン (shi, tsu, so, n). And kanji are just as bad; it took me a while to figure out the difference beteeen 右 and 石, which is kind of important since one means right (not-left) and the other means stone.)

Current status of learning Japanese: progress is being made! I have hiragana down pretty well; I have katakana somewhat down, but it's a lot slower ("this letter is ... re. This letter is ... ma? No, su" levels of slow) and more error-prone. But I do have a few sentences, and I can recognize a handful of kanji -- 私 and 名前 and 何 and 元気, though with the last I can never remember which order the two go in.

I'm using two main apps (not counting the ones for kana and for kanji), and they've both been cracking me up.

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Duolingo is mostly in "hiragana with occasional individual words" rather than sentences. Some words are sticking, mostly ones I was already familiar with (watashi, arigatō, sayōnara, and 1-10) or have something to hang them on (neko already had cat associations, inu has dog associations because shiba inu), but the rest just aren't sticking at all.

But, uh.

Occasionally it gives me super hard stuff, like manga, which translates to ... manga. And emoji translates as emoji. Who knew?!? ^_^

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Memrise seems to be sticking better, and also has sentences and stuff. (私の名前は……です! Watashi no namae wa ... desu. "My name is..." Except I don't know how I'd transcribe isabeau. イザボ maybe?) And it's mostly sticking, except for some of the kanji. I'm totally hopeless at, uhhh, *looks it up* 調子 "condition", which I can recognize but not generate, and can not remember the pronunciation, chōshi, to save my life; 乾杯 "cheers" I can reliably remember the second bit with the up arrows, but the first I just randomly flail at the available kanji options until it says I'm right. And for the kanji, they don't give the option of using hiragana instead -- 私 (watashi, I/me) is always 私 and never わたし, just like marina is always winter and never Christmas.

But I digress.

So, okay: with languages like Japanese that have different lettering systems, they have "translation" of letters, e.g. "き" to "ki (hiragana)". (And I am very glad for the (hiragana) even though sometimes I do things like stare at "me (hiragana)" and wonder why "私" isn't one of the options...)

Now, each item has three (sometimes four) associated objects: English written version, Japanese written version, and Japanese audio (sometimes also video). And there are lots of options for how they drill you: a) translate from English to Japanese; b) translate from Japanese to English; c) given Japanese audio/video, select or transcribe the correct Japanese text; d) given Japanese audio/video, select the correct English translation; e) given Japanese text, select the correct Japanese audio; f) given English text, select the correct Japanese audio. Basically, all permutations of English/Japanese/audio.

In the context of actual words, like いいえ "no", this is all very useful. Ditto sentences.

In the context of the letters, option f is *really fucking hilarious* to me.

I mean. Drilling that や is "yo" is useful. Drilling that "yo" is よ, also useful. Drilling that "yo" sounds like "yo" ... um ... not so much.