Promiseland

[Fetian]

This Vael Victus guy is the person undertaking the recreation of Black Crown

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I'd been getting weird vibes from him for a while and now those vibes are justified. A bummer, I'd been keeping an eye on a couple of his projects and now I'm not comfortable supporting them, and I need to decide if I'm even comfortable continuing to look into the Black Crown fwen he releases it. Sucks!

Staying in this server made me feel gross, so I went ahead and left it.

[Fetian]

I was starting to expect the USPS to just not respond to my complaint, but they've forwarded it to a different department with an email that explicitly tells me to stop contacting them about it, and they've done it with the same form email sent to me three times (so far)

[knightofcups]

I will call again next week, because that remains ridiculous.

[Fetian]

One of Those Days

Makes sense I'd crash a little, I've been running high for a bit so now it's time to swing back toward depression brain. Taking it easy today, as a result

[Fetian]

I've just spent an hour trying to find an email provider that will let me set up a temporary address for Elsewhere to send emails to that I can then have forwarded to an address I actually use, and came up with nothing. Several won't let me sign up at all -- notably outlook hangs forever in firefox and sends me through infinite 'prove you're not a robot' tests in chrome. A couple require a phone number to sign up, which I refuse to give them. AOL sends emails from Elsewhere straight into spam (but it did let me sign in and it does receive them!). Protonmail and tutanota don't do automated forwarding, but also did let me make an account and do receive emails from Elsewhere.

The state of email these days is A Mess, how did we let the internet get like this.

[Fetian]

Oh wow, I just got activated on cohost

I had, completely forgotten about them

[Fetian]

Anyway, at the start of September I'm going to officially "open" the site and encourage people to ask their friends to come hang out here. I'd been waiting for the email issue to get resolved, but I'm tired of doing that

[Fetian]

So that package the USPS kept insisting was delivered on the 15th miraculously arrived today. What a coincidence it happened after pestering the USPS for over a week

It also is in fact only one of the two orders I made with that store and not both of them in one package, but I don't care enough to get that sorted. Bummer! I'd love to be able to support that store (they are that famously ACAB/anarchist/anti-capitalist store in Scotland that you have probably seen tweets about, they sell some stuff by an artist I really like) but my experiences with them suggest they are pretty disorganized, so I probably won't buy from them again and wouldn't really recommend anyone else do, either. No confirmation emails or any other communication after I made a purchase, took almost two weeks to respond to an email asking where my packages were and just got a tracking number in response, no response when I contacted them about the package being missing, and now who knows if I'll ever get the rest of my order or if they just never sent it.

Part of the issue is that after two months and nothing to refer to, I don't remember exactly what I purchased. And I don't want to send them an email like 'please send me objects, no I don't remember what objects I want you to send'.

(Just noticed the date on the Customs Declaration on the package is the same day I sent them an email asking them if they had sent my package, so yeah, in fact, only did just throw it together after I reminded them I had given them money)

I also don't have a way to tell the Postal Inspection Service that the package turned up, because they didn't give me one, so that's on them that they'll be inspecting a missing package that is no longer missing. I do want them to investigate our carrier, regardless of the current location of the package, but I feel like it's now very easy for said carrier to be like 'I don't know what to tell you, it's been delivered', which is probably a reason why it's shown up now.

I sound very down about the whole thing, and that's because I am in fact annoyed at how all of this has played out, but I do very like the things I got, and the package did contain all the things I remembered buying and was actually waiting for. Which are some zines by that artist I mentioned, a pin also designed by them which is what prompted me to buy things from the store in the first place, and another pin. And a handcuff key, because why not.

 
I have hunted down the first season of Digimon in Japanese (surprisingly hard! There were apparently licensing issues preventing it from being released outside of Japan, so you can only find fansubs of it, which makes uploads of the dub much more common). I figure watching some anime will be a good way to start trying to pick out words and phrases as I learn the language, and I figure Digimon will be geared enough toward kids that it will be easier to understand (eventually) than something geared toward teenagers or adults. And I don't know enough anime to be able to pinpoint target demographics for anything but the really obviously for-a-kid shows, like pokemon or yu-gi-oh. Or digimon.

Stuff definitely designed to sell you a toy.

Anyway, through this I have learned that the Japanese Digimon theme song is Very Different. And also pretty good, but nothing can beat the english theme for me.

 
I'm going to go resume being lazy for the rest of the night. Plans include reading and/or watching youtube and/or video games, as the mood strikes. じゃあね

[Fetian]

Ages ago, Lee got a fancy cat toy thing and asked me to put it together, and I have proceeded to fall into a pattern of forgetting it exists, moving it to a new location where I will hopefully notice it when I have time and energy to put it together, and going right back to forgetting it exists. ADHD! It's a hell of a drug.

[Fetian]

Teaching Japanese via a mass-produced one-size-fits-all course like duolingo is difficult, because for best results you need to not only pinpoint how a learner learns but also what their goals are in learning the language. Duolingo trips over itself here by trying to cater to every kind of goal at once, teaching how to read hiragana and then immediately giving you stock phrases you can use without explaining what they actually mean, or even what situations you should use them in. It's giving me "hello" and "good evening" and "nice to meet you" and "thank you" and so on, which are all very good to get into a learner's vocabulary as soon as possible, but Japanese is ... different. From English. In some very crucial ways that make it very difficult for learners to just dive in to.

And during all of this early stuff duolingo is also, with very little explanation, throwing in politeness registers.
"dōzoyoroshikuonegaishimasu"
"dōzoyoroshiku"
"yoroshiku"
All mean the same thing. Dōzo yoroshiku is a bit more polite than yoroshiku and dōzo yoroshiku onegaishimasu is a bit more deferential than dōzo yoroshiku. And what do they mean? Well! They're mostly translated as "nice to meet you", but this is because the actual translation of it is kind of weird to people not used to the language and the culture, because the translation is something like "please take care of me". So the discussion section on duolingo is full of people asking for help with this phrase and getting it explained repeatedly that it's not really "nice to meet you", that's just an equivalent that gets sort of the right meaning across. It's "good enough".

Anyway, if you're a learner who wants to visit Japan and be able to say hello and goodbye and please and thank you, this is fine. If you want to know the language, this is frustrating. I want to know that "dōzo" means "desire" with an emphasizing particle and so means "please" (or "go head" or "I want"), that "yoroshiku" is "good" ("yoroshi") turned into an adverb ("kindly", "nicely"), and that "onegaishimasu" marks a request ("onegai") humbly ("masu"), so throws another "please" on there to be extra polite. That "dōzoyoroshikuonegaishimasu" means "please treat me kindly please", and that it is used in contexts where it means "nice to meet you" or "I hope we work well together" (or &c). I want to know what it means and what it really means, and why it really means that.

But all of that information is going to frustrate a more casual learner. Still, I think duolingo would do better with a balance slightly more geared toward the serious learner side. But I'm continuing with it, and I've found a memrise course that I think pairs nicely with it and both eases into conversational phrases better and gives literal meanings for many of the entries. And I've got the internet for digging more into things until I have them grokked to my satisfaction.