Promiseland

[Fetian]

Tonight ash and I went to the drive-in to watch the Barbie movie! It was fun -- the visuals, acting, and humour were all great, the plot was meh. Trying to do too much, a little confused, felt like there were too many hands in the writing pot (given that it was a mattel movie about a mattel product featuring a mattel ceo character (and cfo, coo, etc etc), it seems inevitable that mattel had some input in how the story went). Nevertheless worth watching, but I could definitely have done with it doing less and just tackling one political issue of the day instead of three of them. Also felt like mattel was trying to address certain critiques people have of Barbie™, except that no one has unironically held those criticisms in about twenty or thirty years. Also the PC Leftist Teen Lingo was a little annoying, but what can you do, and there wasn't that much of it

Would love to see a video essay from someone super into Barbie history lay out all the easter eggs and references and everything, hope someone makes that

[Fetian]

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I fucking did it. It was an enormous pain in the ass and #2 there was neck-and-neck with me for the last forty minutes before it ended so I had to sit there frantically doing tests as fast as I could until the hour was up -- but I did it and now I never have to pay any attention to the tournaments or XP or any of it ever again

Unless they add a new achievement for 'staying at #1 in diamond league for five weeks!' or something.

And how did I do it? I reset all my progress in the language, so I'd only get the easy questions in the timed quizzes; I didn't open app until thursday so I'd get into a latecomer league where there'd be less competition (unless someone else was doing the same thing I did, cough, cough, #2, cough); and I spent hours reviewing basic colours and numbers and fucking more katakana again. I learned nothing! Made zero progress! Specifically didn't even touch duolingo for five days, except to re-up my streak freezes! What an awful thing they've done, I hope whoever designed all of this (including and especially the achievement) breaks their pinkie toe.

Anyway, now I test back up to where I was in the language and actually learn some dang Japanese again.

[erikavonkaiser]

omg is this a thing you need to do now??? I haven't been keeping up with language-learning at all for a bit because I ran out of brain room

[Fetian]

If you're not a completionist you can completely ignore it, and in fact can disable leagues entirely through web settings (but it requires setting your profile private, I think). Ignoring it is the better and wiser option, but I wanted that achievement while I was still low enough level that it was moderately easy to get

[Fetian]

I started playing Boyfriend Dungeon a few days ago, and got pretty far into it. It's alright, cute little dating sim, the dungeon crawling isn't great but it's okay enough to tolerate between dates. I do have some very specific thoughts about the cat you can befriend, which is mostly 'why on earth did you do that that way??'

Spoilers follow, obviously

But okay so, this is a completely ordinary cat (except that it can turn into a pair of "brass knuckle" claws you can fight with, but that's pretty ordinary for the setting) whose owner keeps letting out to explore the city, which is fucked up since very explicitly you are taking the cat into dungeons to fight with him, and the owner has no idea this is happening. And like! I can handwave a lot of fucked up cat ownership things in fiction, people are gonna let their fictional cats roam their fictional cities, otherwise the plot couldn't happen -- except that in this case, you're able to call the owner out on it! After the cat gets into a fight with another cat (this other cat is a stray who is clearly living an extremely hard life, hold on, let me just,

So this is the stray the cat you're befriending keeps getting into fights with, and you just kind of ignore that it's probably going to die within a year given how it looks and that it's a stray, and just keep following the befriendable cat around like 'oh what wacky hijinks you get up to', texting the owner to be like 'can you let your cat out to play please', and meanwhile the owner is getting progressively more upset about the condition the cat keeps coming home in, except that at one point you're given the option of being like 'Maybe you shouldn't keep letting your cat outside?' and the owner is like 'can't cage a lion! lol oh well'

So the game knows this is all fucked up and uncool but doesn't let me do anything about that, doesn't have the owner do anything about it, just shrugs and goes 'but that's cats for you, am I right'

No! It is not cats for you! It's shitty owners for you!!

The end of that storyline has the cat take you on a dream journey to a magical cat land where the stray cat and every other cat in the city accept you as one of their own and it's just so, 'see, it's okay that they're strays and spend time outdoors drastically shortening their lifespans, because they're actually magic and living a super awesome life in cat paradise'

Go fuck yourself

Just really confusing messaging happening there, like they want to acknowledge the reality of it while still getting to pretend that reality doesn't matter

[Fetian]

How come no one's made an escape room management simulator yet

[Fetian]

Okay! I am just about back to where I was in duolingo before I reset everything -- honestly a little behind, because some stuff got rusty while I was reviewing the basics over and over again. Most importantly, I'm past the first time-telling unit again, which is really hard for me even though I know all the discrete parts of it. Because of the difference in word order and how Japanese treats numbers (honestly very logically, but like, it's different from how I know numbers so it requires brainpower to get right), my brain considers it just like being asked to do a bunch of math problems. It is the #1 reason I struggled with the timed trials, because whenever a time unit came up in it it slowed me way down with all of the, 'okay, 'it's exactly 12:02 right now', so I need to start the sentence with 'now it is' and then the time, twelve is ten plus two so 'ten two hour' plus 'two minute', oh it says 'exactly' so now I need that after all this, and then 'is', and it's not a question so that's the end of the sentence,'

(今は十二時二分ちょうどです)

It's just a lot of ways that Japanese is different from English all happening at once. It'll get simpler as I get used to it, but for now it's just hard for me. And definitely takes me a second to make sure I have all the parts required included and in the right order

I'm onto "routines" now, which is still going to include a lot of time-based translations ('I wake up at 6 AM every morning'), but it'll also include other stuff to break that up ('I don't go to school'). I believe I'd completed this unit before, but as said I don't remember it super well, so I'll redo it. And then on to household objects and yet more introduction stuff.

[Fetian]

Yesterday, ash and I played Clue -- him for the first time (that he remembers, anyway) and me for the first time in a long while. I used to play a lot of two-player Clue with my dad when I was younger, because I had no friends, but ash and I are both adults and it seemed likely that trying that now would lead to a subpar gaming experience, so I looked up rule modifications and found one that looked like it could be fun. It was! We played two games, by amazing coincidence I was the murderer in the first game and he was the murderer in the second.

The modification we used has you set up play normally until dealing out cards, at which point you deal five to each player and then set aside the rest into a draw pile. When you make a guess (who, what, where), if your opponent doesn't have a card to show you, you discard one of your cards to the bottom of the pile and then draw a new one. In this way, players don't have 50% of all available cards, but both players also slowly work their way through the rest of the clues. It worked really well for the first game, but the second game went on long enough that the pile started cycling, which is an element that I want in the game but not forever, so we're going to introduce a shuffling mechanic -- ideas had were separate draw and discard and shuffle the discard when you run out of draw pile (which eliminates the cycling entirely), designate a space on the board that you go to to voluntarily shuffle the draw pile (introduces strategy to sacrificing turn(s) to refresh the pile), and shuffle whenever a certain number comes up on the dice (leaves it random, so maybe it'll happen when you want it to and maybe it won't). We're going to try the last one next time we play

But yeah, a good time, and I'm glad it was!

Later, while eating dinner, we watched Murder By Death, which I hadn't seen in many years but remembered being really funny. I'm happy to report that it is in fact really funny, though includes Peter Sellers as a chinese man which is less racist than it could be but still very racist. It does also include an actual japanese man playing a japanese man, and some of that kind of homophobia that was homophobic at the time but comes across as actual representation now? Like, the era where "person is gay" is in and of itself a joke, so they don't have to be any more cruel to make a joke out of it? So now the "joke" is "person is gay" and so it just ends up being that, like, there's a gay person. Yay?

All of that aside it was fun to see the ways that this movie clearly influenced some movies that came after, namely Clue and Glass Onion, and also to compare the ways pacing has changed in movies between the 70s and now. Also Peter Falk is adorable

 
Today I have done some yard work and I plan to shower later in the day, but I'm also quite tired and plan on otherwise taking it easy. I do have some deadline stuff I need to do, but unless my energy levels improve I'm going to get them done tomorrow instead. I'd hoped on yesterday but that was a bit out of my hands.

Didn't go to church today due to aforementioned energy levels, which is a bit of a bummer because it's a sermon I was kind of looking forward to, but I'll catch it on youtube when it gets uploaded.

A game I really like has a new beta dropping next week, so I want to finish achievement hunting the current version of it before that happens, so will probably zone out to that for a while today. There might also be a nap in my future if I can't shake this off any. For now, I'm going to ingest a caffeine and stare at a computer screen for a while.

[Fetian]

"Person is gay" jokes also rely on the ""gay"" person being just, normal, up until the ""punchline"" reveal that they're gay, so they actually end up being better representation than some current rep where gay characters have to behave like stereotypes to be allowed to be gay. Yikes

[Fetian]

Wow, apparently I needed to just not exist for a while yesterday. Just, nothing, gone. I also was in a fair amount of pain and I'm in more today, so I predict I will do some more not existing

Coincidentally it's pretty humid and windy today

I think I will drug myself and let myself rest