ELSEWHERE

y i k e s @ all that

Aaaand homework done! Had to "interview" someone to practice some "X says Y about Z" constructions, and Erika volunteered to answer my deeply probing questions about what kinds of fruit she likes and whether she has a car. Took like half an hour to paraphrase the responses into Japanese, write everything out, and answer the other page of questions ("I don't think Mai likes Mayumi" "I think Professor Yamashita is good-looking"), even with using kanji everywhere, which is pretty speedy! Hopefully I didn't, uh, fuck up the whole thing but I'm pretty pleased with basically being able to write Japanese at pretty close to the speed I write in English, now, not counting having to look up stroke orders.

Other than that I played ESO with Erika for about three hours, we did a thieves' guild heist and a dark brotherhood contract, but mostly we did the Infinite Archive and got through like one-and-a-half, uh, loops? We got to the final boss once and then partway through getting to it a second time. And then we looked at each other's houses, though I am saving up to get a different, better-sized house because my current options are either extremely tiny (a single, prison-cell-sized room) or fucking huge. I also need to look into making furniture, because I think that's the main way to get that? I at least do not have any furniture laying around from regular play, it turns out, because I went to furnish my house last night and discovered that I have some plants and a rug but no, uh, chairs. Or beds. Or anything.

After that I went out to listen to the Arcadia finale youtube premiere with ash and Erik. No one else showed up, which is a bummer, but it was nice to listen to and to get occasionally little commentaries from ash. It is sad for the show to be over but it was fun while it lasted, and made a good show and good story.

ash and I made dinner, we watched Taskmaster (Very good episode this week!) and then a Dirty Laundry and then he went to bed. And I went to do my homework. And now I am done with my homework so I'm going to play some video games!

Also last night I learned -- appropriately enough, because it's Filipino American History Month -- that Tagalog has an extremely kickass script? It seems to have a few actually, both in historical and current use, which I didn't know! I've only ever seen it written in Latin script, but today's Lingule (spoilers, for another twenty-eight minutes) was Tagalog and the script was so:

 
I have the wikipedia article open for it to read more about it, it seems like it used to be used more, and then Latin script took over (for, uh, colonialist reasons), and now it's getting more use again? Don't quote me on that because I've only done some skimming so far but that's what I've gathered.

Anyway, it's very neat looking!

Ugh, got dinged half a point for putting 'Erika says that' instead of 'Erika said that' and for putting 'Erika drives an SUV' instead of 'Erika has an SUV' which I think is bullshit but half a point isn't enough for me to complain, it's barely touched my grade percentage. Going to push myself less and be more by the book though for future assignments

I did forget the だ in マンゴとオランジーが大好きだ (which is equivalent to saying "mangos and oranges enjoyable, Erika says"), which she did mark, and forgot the particle in 'Erika drives an SUV' which got marked insofar as the whole thing got marked for not saying 'has an SUV', so even if the rest of it was accepted it would not be bullshit to ding me for those mistakes. Which is why I'm not fighting it, but it does feel like bullshit to have the tense and the drives/has stuff corrected

I can only assume Japanese people don't say 'I drive this kind of car' the same way we do, but I'm not going to ask about it because I don't enjoy listening to her explanations very much

In better news, I did get enough pieces of the armor set I was farming in ESO to get the full set bonus, so now I've got an army of crow friends to fight for me. Need to look into what I want my second armor set to be and hunt that down

So I saw this post a few months ago:

 
And thought "...ah. Have I been doing that?" Because I think I had in fact been doing that

I've been putting conscious effort into not pulling my shoulders out of joint to sleep and it has been helping, I haven't had the debilitating shoulder/back pain I was getting pretty often since. It's a shame though because it is really comfortable to sleep like that

Turns out most people don't just fold their torso in half to sleep? Weird

So yesterday I wanted to dye my hair but I wasn't into any of the dyes I currently have, so I mixed together an orange and an indigo (and then some toner), expecting some kind of muted purple or something, and instead I got a grassy green. I'm not complaining, but it's very strange

Y'all remember about a year ago when I was fighting Carbonite to get my backed up files downloaded so I could cancel my plan with them, which was ultimately a failure in that I renewed my plan for one more year and then just stopped trying for a while? Well, I got an email from them today that my subscription is going to (try to) renew in 30 days, so The Adventure Continues

I had been gearing up to get back on that, I just thought I could do it a bit more leisurely because I thought it renewed at the end of December, but apparently not.

Anyway, you may recall the plan was as follows: get a fresh install of Windows 7 on that machine, get the Carbonite download to actually work without running out of space, cancel the subscription, download the files to an external hard drive, and install a more modern OS onto that computer. So today's task was getting a fresh install of Windows 7 running, a task I also failed at and ultimately had to ask Erik for help with. The images I was burning just weren't booting for some reason, but that's kind of a known issue with windows disks, not sure what's up with them. He did succeed where I'd failed, so I now have a minty fresh 2009-era OS, though I had to install it twice to get everything working. I also finally have Carbonite downloading all my files to it and -- touch wood and cross fingers -- I think it's going to work out this time. If it doesn't, I'm finally going to accept that I'm sunk-cost-ing my way through this and just give up on the files.

Aside from some more ESO, that's been my day. I do have some chores I should take care of -- cleaning up some trash around my room, changing the litter in the litterboxes -- and I should study for class tomorrow. Not excited to try to attend a zoom meeting while Carbonite is running but there's not much for that.