emb

Was just recently trying to figure out how to browse my mbox backup, and wound up at the same solution.

I'm stunned that it's part of a plugin, and not a standard feature. Didn't see many other actively maintained programs that made it easy either.

Had a chance to visit a bigger public library a couple towns over. Found that they had some foreign language materials.

Read a couple Japanese children's books (translated from English), and some of a 10-minute Stories for 2nd Year Students. They were OK. Puts me off how much Kanji they don't use. Takes away valuable semantic clues. Also looked at a couple novels, which are just like, the most words everywhere. Nice to know they're there. Makes me appreciate the middle ground that Tadoku graded readers offer.

Working on building out an Anki deck for Thai alphabet. Found some on ankiWeb that seemed pretty good, but trying to add pictures and the example words. Also been doing Transparent Language Online, which is the learning app my library offers access to. Pretty good tool, especially for starting from scratch.

Cool, I dig it.

Attempted to put it into a template link: https://canvas.fediverse.events/#tu=https%3A%2F%2Fmidwest.social%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F40daa29c-0543-4442-a4f5-2848ea86d681.png&tw=30&tx=284&ty=-5&ts=ONE_TO_ONE&x=299&y=10&zoom=1

Offset doesn't quite match what you said due to the blanks in the image, and I couldn't get everything to line up exactly. But it should be enough to figure it out.

You can add "before:2023" to filter out a lot of it. Doesn't work for everything, obviously you won't find yesterday's news or info on the newest games that way, but I think it's good hygiene for very broad topics. Beyond that, if it recommends me some new channel, I check the account history and try to see if they were already uploading similar looking videos before the early 20s. If not, I mentally flag it as suspect.

Tho even before the recent AI boom, there was plenty of other low effort (via other means) slop out there.

Not sure what to add... maybe this frog?

https://canvas.fediverse.events/#tu=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.wikimg.net%2Fen%2Fchronowiki%2Fimages%2F9%2F99%2FFrog.gif&tw=16&tx=466&ty=248&ts=ONE_TO_ONE&x=474&y=256&zoom=1

Better version since the quickly grabbed template is kinda wonky: https://www.spriters-resource.com/snes/chronotrigger/asset/3570/

There's not a lot you or any one individual can do, but every little bit contributes. Do measure expectations tho - in many cases (eg, Sony) the backlash is very much expected and they're just planning to weather it.

Biggest thing is to cancel your PSN sub (or other subscriptions relevant to whatever issue), stop buying buying games that fuel whatever practice (eg in the Sony case, stop buying digital games on Playstation).

Tell your friends and family why you're doing it, especially if there are people you play games with. Try to widen the impact from losing you, to losing your whole social circle. (Note that it probably won't work - people are set in their ways and not everyone cares about every issue-, and may not be worth it if you don't have another way to connect with them.)

Bluesky has some companies like Playstation and Xbox on it, so that's one place to be vocal. Twitter and Reddit probably still get read a lot by these companies too, so if you're on those, sure add to the dissent. They probably also value engagement on Facebook, maybe Threads/Instagram. Tho that makes me think, not sure if it's better to even add activity to their posts - maybe best way to send a message is simply to unsubscribe/unfollow? Sometimes it's worse to be ignored than hated.

Don't sweat it if you don't remember syntax stuff right away.

The building blocks will repeat so much - your if statements, loops, variable initialization - that some will stick in your head eventually.

But even when you get it, every once in a while you'll get a brain blip and have to look it up. Don't hesitate to have the language manual readily available.

Most of the time in you won't even have to know it - in larger projects, you'll find a similar bit of code in an existing file and copy it, then make your modifications. Or depending on your dev environment, the IDE's intellisense stuff will act as a guide rail.

It's definitely a bigger undertaking than I initially thought! At first, having done mostly Japanese recently, I just saw that Thai had something like an alphabet and was relieved. But I'd really underestimated how confusing it'd be to have very different phonetics and resultingly confusing symbols.

Still, I feel like if I'm going to a place, I should know at least a little of the language. And trying to learn the basics doesn't feel very effective if I don't know any of the building blocks.

I've got some travel coming up later in the year, so I've been trying to get my head around the Thai alphabet. It's weird trying to learn some things about a language, without having a long term goal to really know it.

But on the flipside of that, still trying to maintain Japanese. Doing a different podcast approach, re-listening to episodes and reading/mining the transcripts. It's been kinda helpful.

Continuing on with my summer reading, I've picked up I, Robot (Asimov) and Professor and the Madman (Winchester) from the library.

I also checked out Hatchet (Paulsen). My niece is reading it, figured it'd be fun and quick to join in.

On the listening side, I've been going through Disrupting the Game by Reggie Fils-Aime since he reads the audiobook himself. It's very directed towards the business advice angle, but there's good biographical and Nintendo history info in there.

Was talking to a young adult relative the other day, and he was telling me about one of the new Call of Duty games.

I haven't played one lately, so I mentioned something I thought was neat in World at War or Black Ops 1. And he's like, "Wow, that's an old one. I don't think I was even born yet."

💀

My backlog gets daunting too. I'll get real motivated one week and add a bunch of cards, to then get busy another week and fall behind.

I just try to keep reminding myself the spaced-repetition system will work itself out.