I am Finally Listening

It feels embarrassing to note the gulf between every individual aspect of a language you have to learn. To have to study listening and reading and speaking seperately, as if none of them touch at all. But it feels that way, often. Being able to read just doesn't mean I can hear. It seems like a joke, knowing hundreds of words and missing even the simplest ones when you listen, but this incongruous sense of... the senses is constant in language-learning. It's frightening.

Quistis greets Squall. What is she saying?

So I've decided to finally force myself to do something I've been saying I should do for a really long time: do some dedicated listening in my target language, so that I might maybe understand it on some level. Okay cool, great idea. This is easy enough for French - there are French YouTube channels making hour long videos about the ins and outs of Nintendo history, and stuff like that. Done. Japanese however, has been more challenging for me.

Exactly the kind of video I need.

You'd think maybe I could just watch tons of anime and become a big anime freak, but it's weirdly hard to find Japanese subtitles. A lot of recommended Japanese learner-appropriate podcasts are either pretty boring to me, or have no transcript to follow along with. I realised that I really wanted a visual component. Rather than relying purely on text, seeing images just provides so much context alongside subtitles. But where French YouTube is pretty similar to its anglophone counterpart in terms of general available content style, Japanese YouTube seems very different.

There are plenty of vlogs, people taking trips and showing their day to an audience, but a lot of those are very quiet videos that use subtitles instead of talking. Where, I'm asking, are the quirky videos detailing all the glitches in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in this language? 

I don't know the answer, nor how to locate Japan's prickliest video essayist, but I think I've found what I need: A lengthy let's play series for Final Fantasy VIII. This is an 81-video series made by someone called "GAME COMMENTARY SISS", which will keep me occupied for at least a month. And then I'll just watch that sort of thing until I accumulate a thousand hours or something. And in theory, I'll start to understand better. We'll see. I'm not sure learning a language is a real thing that actually happens to people. I think it's made up.

Night Creatures

Here are some more recent journal spreads. I've started to go towards darker scenes with thicker, more dense areas of dark pencil. They create such a nice mood. I love to go for a sort of serene night time scene, glistening with stars. The perfect mysterious time.

Pages with a lot of empty white space don't really excite me in this journal, especially with the transparency. As soon as I add those dark zones, the transparent layering starts to look much cooler and have much more depth.

I still keep feeling like I should use both sides of each page, really commit to playing with the transparency more, but it's always weird when you must effectively destroy the previous image to do that. Although, my frog-stamping moment really felt right, felt like it added the perfect texture to the other side - so maybe I should try more stamping.

I have completely used up one mechanical pencil lead while working in this journal. I discovered that a mechanical pencil feels amazing in here, super smooth and sharp. But tragically, I don't currently have any refills, so I've had to return to the traditional pencil. It's amazing how fast a pencil dulls when you're filling in large spaces.

The variation in lines works perfectly well for those big segments of pencil, where all merge together, but it's just so satisfying to use the sharp, perfect, never-dull lead of a mechanical pencil.

Nevermind, I'm here to wear out as many pencils as possible. I cackle and the pencils quiver. 

Mysterious Frog

I made a little frog character - a mysterious gentleman - and stamped him upon a journal page. Is he not distinguished? Is he not gorgeous?

I made him with the PRIXEL stamp kit, which was very kindly sent to me by the PRIXEL man maybe around a year ago. I feel now that I have this kit in my life, I should probably make use of it. I haven't stamped much up until this point, but now that we have this little fella in our midst, I'm very happy. It's a joyful world in which this frog man resides.

He's made of many colourful little parts, when it comes to the stamp, which is really a beautiful object, a temporary creature of its own. It's pretty fun to assemble your own shape with all these little rubber pieces, and now I'm thinking about how he must be disassembled, how he's only with us for a short time. How he must be washed.

There's a nice slow routine to making a stamp, diligently stamping it on some paper, then cleaning it off and letting it dry before, finally, returning its components to their box. A time-consuming, pleasant thing to do. 

Now the frog will be reconstituted - into who knows what. As it should be. 

Fluffoids

I think I'm going to set myself a strict daily goal of completing ONE journal page a day for a while, because I keep neglecting my onion skin journal for other things, and I now simply passionately wish to fill it up and finish it. Here are some recent spreads.

Sometimes I get a little crazy and wacky and turn this thing sideways to draw something in landscape. I don't know what it is about a horizontal canvas, but it just feels good and right. We're abandoning vertical. We despise and shun vertical.

Well, not really, not truthfully. I think a lot of it is just the endless allure of something different. I'll do one sort of thing for a while and then think... wait a minute. What if I did the opposite of this? Wow. Sounds amazing. The simple pleasure of novelty and change is eternally welcome.

I have been, as you can see, incorporating some collage elements in here once again, but in really lazy, small ways. I pasted in a handful of wrappers from individually-wrapped teabags. I tore an envelope into pieces and stuck those down. I love rubbish.

I have also been trying to be loose with it, just really drawing whatever, but I keep finding wobbly drawings that take up the whole space and use a lot of vast dark pencil the most appealing. I like the high-contrast and the intriguing, soft shapes of various fluffy animal bodies (fluffoids, if you will). More of the same, I tell myself.

As always, more dogs emerge, and they must sniff the flowers and plunge themselves into serene night skies. 

Blossom

It's been a string of beautiful spring days. White blossoms are everywhere, stark and perfect against an untouched blue sky. I took these pictures of blossoms on my 3DS while I was taking a walk outside the other day, and I don't know, it's perfect. Somehow the black and white setting really does let the camera get past its limitations. I thought because the blossoms were pretty high above me that the depth of the 3D effect wouldn't look very good, but these are some of my favourite photos I've taken on the 3DS.

It really can't be overstated how good it feels to walk outside in the sun and see clumps of perfect little flowers everywhere. I think this joyful effect is also massively enhanced by mild weather. I'm not sweating and squinting, just feeling comfortable and normal - hooray!

Spring really does feel like a pleasantly magical time.

Reviewing J2ME Games: 1943 Escape to England

We must again look at a Java game, and this one is about shooting guys on boats.

My face when I escape to England.

Finally, I hear you cry, a game for my mobile phone about going to England! Yay! That's right, it's the second world war, and you're a ragtag team of guys who need to get back to Birmingham, or wherever. But the problem is: there's an endless stream of guys on boats trying to shoot and kill you. Uh oh!

That's okay, because you will... uh...

Hmm. Well, I probably didn't need to read whatever that said. All you need to do is shoot these guys as they pass in their boats. Easy. Except the controls are a bit awkward. You essentially have a cursor that you can freely move to anywhere on the screen, and getting your crosshair over each man is a bit tricky. There is a bit of timing required, and getting that timing right with a numpad is an immediate challenge.

It is very easy to fail.

Oops!

The level is over quickly, and you may see some... information.

I would call this a relatively low option when it comes to Java games. The game format perhaps doesn't lend itself that well to the restrictions of the Java world, but then again, I'm no sharpshooter. It does feel quite satisfying when you do manage to headshot members of the horde, but honestly, I don't know. I think I'd rather just let them get me.

Time to Run

I've decided to exercise again. After last week's Volleyball Experience, I thought about my steady descent into sedentarism (just looked this up and it IS a word). At the end of last year, I pretty much just stopped exercising. Too sleepy for that, I decided. I'm too busy drinking large glasses of red wine with my family, or something. But no more.

This is what I'll look like, when I run.

I will be walking and sweating and breathing heavily. And I will grow more powerful and intense thanks to this. I think I'm gonna make it an unshakeable goal to walk for thirty minutes, on or off the mysterious device known as the treadmill.

Me on the beautiful treadmill.

I like treadmills as opposed to just walking outside, because I can really just sink further into my own mind. There are no surroundings to be aware of, no pesky roads to cross. And, blissfully, I can jump into the shower the second I'm done.

Me experiencing the extreme pleasure of the post-run shower.

I also love exercise bikes. They're just really cool machines. Much more accessible than most gym equipment. Although I would love to have a bicep curl machine in the house. That would be beautiful.